It’s not difficult to see evidence of intelligent design in nature. Blue sky, fluffy clouds, warm sun, flowers, birdsong, bees going about their business, the wonderful and complex mechanics of evolution: I’m sitting outside in the garden just now, happily drinking all of this in. (Albeit – I have to confess – on opium-derived painkillers.) Surely none of this could have come about by chance? There must, surely, be a benevolent God of some kind.

But then we come on to human and political affairs. Imperfection all around, wars, my broken ankle, other horrors scarcely imaginable, disease, stupidity, selfishness, Trump, even ‘God’s chosen people’ (some of them) turning into monsters, people everywhere with none of the cravings for ‘freedom’ or ‘justice’ that are often attributed to them by liberals, but who just want to be fed and led; and the most dreadful – I nearly wrote ‘un-Christian’: see my previous post – immorality governing them.

I suppose that what reconciles this with a wise and benevolent God is the idea of free thought. After all, it wouldn’t really be much credit to us, would it, or to God, if we had no other choice than to be good. That at any rate was what I was taught in ‘RE’ (Religious Education) at school, and in church. I can see that. But still….

All this reminds me of a poem I discovered while I was doing research on the ‘Boer War’ (1899-1902), in a little book issued to (British) soldiers to boost their morale. I can’t remember it completely now, or even Google it (it will be in my notes back in Hull); so I’ve made some of it up. But it finishes like this (roughly):

And when I see how nobly natures form

Under the war’s red rain; I [wonder]

That He who made [the flowers and the birds],

Perchance made battles too.

That must have gee’d the Tommies up. Almost as much as Vitai Lampada. (Look it up.)

Anyway: so much for my cod theology. It’s not really my subject.