How time flies when you are busy. These past weeks have been busy in unexpected ways. First there were three promiscuous ewes who managed to get pregnant despite our not putting a tup in with them. The second unexpected event happened as I repositioned stillages of logs, prior to moving one down the hill closer to the cottage.
The tractor pallet forks slid slowly under the stillage at the back of a barn, and my mind was fully engrossed, until the Big Bang. This was supposed to have created Matter and brought the Universe into existence, but suddenly it happened again.
Flashes of lightening, followed by a torrential downpour of bright shiny cut diamonds, heralded an existential struggle for dominance between my ‘open tractor door’ and one of the pillars supporting the roof of the barn. The pillar won and the two and a half metre glass door was instantaneously transformed into a 250000 piece translucent Jigsaw Puzzle.
“Look on the bright side,” I said to a startled Marie, “I can now use less diesel as there is no need for the tractor’s climate control.”
It took me two days to pick the glass out of the wet grass in front of the building, and to thoroughly clean bits out of the fourteen feet of rubber seal into which a new glass door will be fitted.
But talking of life’s vagaries reminds me, that previous advice to readers to sever climbing ivy when its main stem is more than ¾ inches in diameter, is not being as widely observed as I had hoped.
Ivy is not parasitic but; when it covers the crown of a tree, it prevents the trees leaves photosynthesizing sunshine into sugars, something the roots cannot do. Without sunshine, the tree will die years before its full life span. As ivy cannot be altruistic to the tree: We ‘Stewards of the earth,’ as the Bible calls us, must keep a balance between forces competing to sustaining their own lives. Also because, a near average of eight people are killed every year in the UK by falling roadside trees.
Mention of jigsaws, however, reminds me of political cartoons produced by the cartoonist Patrick Blower. Each Christmas, I get a gift of a one-thousand-piece composite puzzle of his work for the year. I consult the picture on the box as I go along. But, and here is an interesting thought: even without the picture, I have sufficient information to allow me to complete the puzzle without knowing what the picture is.
The dimensions are on the box and I can see that individual pieces have one plain side and one coloured. The pieces are various shapes, but their number is fixed. It is also observable that the individual pieces comprise a picture/pattern of sorts, and that there is a mismatch between the cut shapes and the part picture/pattern on the coloured side of the piece. It is also clear that the colouring on some pieces invites a matching colour or shape on another piece. Thus, to put just two pieces together would increase the likelihood of finding other matches, whilst also reducing the magnitude of the complexity of the puzzle as a picture emerges.
By now, readers may be thinking that the jigsaw has already given us sufficient information for us to know that it was created by an intelligent ‘Mind.’
Human brains have always been good at spotting patterns and, between 1400-1700 as Bibles became more available, many wanted to know more of The Mind behind the complexity, order and awesome beauty of the natural world. Their motivations were summed up in an oratorio by Haydn in the scriptural words. “The Heavens are telling the glory of God; the wonder of his work displays the firmament.”
Isaac Newton 1643 –1727 the physicist, mathematician and culminating figure of the 17th century Scientific Revolution, was one of those who created the methodological, observational and verification processes we now call Science. Newton saw ‘The Mind’ behind science, and wrote of his own work that,
“Gravity may put the planets into motion, but without the divine Power, it could never put them into such a circulating motion as they have about the Sun; and therefore, for this as well as other reasons, I am compelled to ascribe the frame of this System to an intelligent Agent.
Readers who want the new evidence of a designing mind behind creation, will find it during YouTube interviews by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institute. Here, leading scientists explain the evidence for the Mind behind creation.
They certainly helped me to sever the ivy overshadowing my own intellect, and so exposed it to the sunshine.
View from the Pew 