January 5: "Argument from Design," Higher Powers, Fractals

Billy Collins speaks in fractals . . . 

Argument from Design

by:  Billy Collins

Six petals on each iris,

every other one

with a small yellow streak,

which resembles a tiny vase,

holding a few flowers of its own.

Collins has called himself a "recovering Catholic."  Until he hit graduate school, he attended only Catholic educational institutions.  He still employs Catholic iconography a great deal in his work--the imagery and Biblical narratives--but he doesn't attend weekend Masses or partake in sacraments.  Poetry has become his church, if you will.

In some respects, I'm a lot like Collins when it comes to religion.  I feel closest to a higher power when I have a pen in my hand and am writing in my journal.  Most of the time, I have very little recollection how ideas or images appear on the page.  They just materialize--metaphorically or physically--and I wrestle them to paper.  Explaining the creative process further would be akin to shooting at a flock of angels.

I've experienced too many unexplainable coincidences in my life to reject the idea of some divine hand at work.  For example, one afternoon I dropped my credit card on the sidewalk as I was walking to my library office.  A half hour later, I realized it was missing.  I said a quick prayer to Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things.  As I was retracing my steps to my car, I noticed a priest walking toward me.  It turned out to be my former pastor who,  without slowing his stride, held out my credit card and said, "Here you are, Marty.  I believe you dropped this."

So, I do believe in an intelligent designer.  The universe is full of amazingly complex wonders, starting with all of the nearly impossible accidents that made life possible on this planet.  You can spout all the scientific explanations you want at me, but I will always fall back on one question:  who or what made that first electron or proton or neutron?  Until that question can be answered with credible proof, it's all a matter of faith in the unknown and unknowable.

Think of those irises that Collins writes about, each one with six petals, every other of those petals containing the image of a tiny vase with more flowers.  My scientist friends would probably use natural selection and genetic mutation to account for this fractal design.  Flowers within flowers.  Collins, on the other hand, uses poetry.

Me?  I think that natural selection and genetic mutation provide the start of a gospel of explanation.  But the iris design is too perfect to be mere happenstance.  That would be like putting a typewriter in a room with a chimpanzee and discovering, three days later, that the chimpanzee has written The Grapes of Wrath or Romeo and Juliet.  Statistically possible, but incredibly unlikely without the help of some kind of higher intelligence.  (By the way, I'm employing the infinite monkey theorem here which states that a monkey, hitting typewriter keys randomly for an infinite amount of time, will eventually type any given text, from The Lord of the Rings trilogy to the Bible.)

This morning, I parked my car by Lake Superior and watched the sunrise.  It wasn't a sunrise to write home about.  It was a gray kind of dawning, without color or flash.  Yet, I was staring at a body of water that contains three quadrillion gallons of water--that's 3 followed by 15 zeros.  And underneath all that water is another underground water system:  Lake Inferior.  That's a lake within a lake--another fractal.

This world is full of miracles within miracles within miracles.

Sure, there are natural laws that govern all of these miracles, but they are still miracles beyond human understanding, no matter how sophisticated the telescope or microscope being used to examine them.

And when Saint Marty or Billy Collins pick up pens to write a poem, they are attempting to touch the face of something miraculous.