For a long time, I have erroneously referred to the book and movies, derived from the late Swedish author Stieg Larssons, as The Girl with the Butterfly Tattoo. Of course, everyone knows it is Dragon, instead of Butterfly. If I had butterflies on the brain then, I think my whole body must be permeated with them after viewing Lad Allen’s DVD Metamorphosis: The Beauty & Design of Butterflies a few years ago.
No, it wasn’t a sudden interest in entomology. I had to review it for an interview with a guest for Phyllis Schlafly‘s hour-long syndicated radio program years ago. It was always an honor for me to sit in for this prominent woman, conservative author and political activist whenever she had a speaking somewhere around the country.
The video was marvelous but I had to admit it was a tough sell for a radio program. From the outset, I thought this would be a challenging interview because one has to the pure natural beauty of the Monarch has to fully appreciate it.
How can I show pictures on the radio? I think that’s why God gave us our imaginations—or, as some would say the Catholic Imagination, which can take the human intellect to divine heights. I was deeply impressed by the deep and varied complexity of the flittering creature. But, of course, Allen did not appear on our program just to discuss the butterfly by itself. He wanted to talk about it in terms of its scientific and metaphysical relationship with an Intelligent Designer.
I asked him why the Monarch? He said there were lots of different species to choose from but they had to choose one that they could videotape easily and could track through all of its habits and routines. They would never have attempted this with a species I think is an even better choice than the Monarch and that is the Bengal Tiger. Allen quipped that they did not want to be eaten by their subject before finishing their documentary.
For such a tiny being, such as the Monarch, to have so much detail, both inside and outside, is visible proof of the invisible God that 1000s of scientists have so much trouble in accepting. For example, the navigational system of the Monarch’s eyes allows them to traverse 2500 miles during their annual migration from the warm climates of the Unites States to the milkweed plants, which they need for breeding in temperate Mexico.
This alone is enough to make me wonder aloud how supposedly learned and highly educated scientists fail to see the handiwork of God or at least some Intelligent Designer present in creation! For anyone to say or argue that the Monarch butterfly just evolved randomly is so silly an idea one would be tempted to laugh in the collective face of this highly educated but hoodwinked, cajoled or bribed scientific elite.
The whole notion of Darwinian evolutionary is an insult to our human intelligence. Yet millions of students fail to question it in school or when they are free of the propaganda shackles of our schools and the power of the grade, they don’t renounce it. This is way beyond my understanding. Big Government and bureaucracies like conditioned consent and intellectual apathy. It is what perpetuates their pernicious existence.
I told Allen during the program that according to my historical understanding, until the Renaissance, the idea of God, as the Creator of the world and the center of the universe, was the central feature in Western Civilization. It was the Humanism of the Renaissance that relegated God to the periphery of intellectual and cultural pursuits.
This picked up even greater steam during the French Revolution and its aftermath.
The Deism of that period preached a passive or indifferent God who did not seem very interested in His creatures’ lives. Like some sort of sadistic voyeur, He just watches. As the intellectual elite grew more godlike in its own self-estimation, they conspired to get rid of God on earth by killing His servants—His priests and nuns and destroying His houses of worship. But still, He persisted to hound their empty souls.
One divine faculty they never could explain away was His creative powers.
His creation was their last stumbling block. In what might be called supply side biology, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution provided the elite with a quasi-scientific lever with which they could remove the creation boulder. He published his theory with compelling albeit specious evidence for evolution in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, overcoming scientific rejection of earlier concepts of transmutation of species.
By the 1870s, the scientific community and much of the general public accepted evolution as a given fact. Even though it was and is still a mere theory, and violated the scientific method that includes observation and experimentation, it is accepted as Science’s absolute gospel truth. As a result, it has fast become the false idol that 1000s of scientists genuflect before. Likened to a geometric theorem it served as the beginning point, which was a given and did not need to be proven.
God was finally, after many centuries, banished to perfect irrelevancy. A godlike Science declared the eternal God a non-Person, who need not apply on Christmas, Easter, or any of a myriad of feast days that have slowly slipped from the American cultural consciousness. This attitude was reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s propensity to rewrite leaders who had fallen out of favor right out of their history. God had been relegated to the Pantheon of revolutionary demons, such as Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky. Atheistic Science had rewritten God out of His own Cosmology…the supreme blasphemy.
All scientists admit that nature abhors a vacuum. As a result millions of their egos are lining up to audition as the new god of the universe. The boundless ego of man is ready and willing to be worshiped and deified. Millions will bow before them in the public arena and will never question their Heterodoxy. I can hear their Big Amen resounding in college and university classrooms all over America, while God’s statues, relics and icons are being removed like those of a fallen dictator after a revolution.
To me, it is nothing more than a discordant choir, clamoring the empty verses of a decaying philosophical hymn that signifies nothing and has been composed with the unforgiving notes of God-deniers throughout history. When they have all passed from the earth, God will still be sitting in His architect’s seat and taking joy in those who still love Him.
