Cuckoo in the Nest
Growing up in Scotland I used to love hearing the cuckoo which always seemed to be far off in the woods somewhere. The bird, of course, gets its name from the sound it makes, yes, that’s an onomatopoeia. If you are the musical type, it is the male that makes the cuc-koo sound during the breeding season. He makes his musical cuc-koo song in streams of ten to twenty with short breaks between bursts. I began writing songs after learning only three major chords on the guitar. The male cuckoo is not far behind. He needs only one more note! His two-note arrangement begins in April as a descending minor third, progressing to a major third through a forth as time goes by with the sweet song fading away in June.
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| Photo from Internet |
I watched
a bunch of videos showing cuckoos in the nest. If the cuckoo egg hatches first,
the blind baby cuckoo attempts to heave all the other eggs out of the nest! It
even has a hollow indent in its back that helps facilitate this “survival of
the fittest” endeavour! It’ll shove all the other babies over the edge of the
nest if they’ve managed to hatch before it. How does this cuckoo hatchling even
know there is an edge at the top of the nest? It’s blind. Where did this weird
instinct come from?
The mother and father of this wee parasite sometimes work their evil in tandem. The father distracts the nest’s parent birds so that the mother cuckoo can sneak in and quickly lay the already incubating egg in the host’s nest! They visit many nests. This process is called “brood parasitism.”[1] The cuckoo’s egg, though usually slightly larger, often very much resembles the batch of eggs laid by the host bird.
It was due to his observations of this sort of “cruelty” in nature that helped serve to further harden the father of Darwinism Charles Darwin himself against the God who has revealed Himself in Scripture and creation. “How can a good God allow such cruelty and evil in the world?”
I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae [wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.[2]
And so Darwin became the “messiah” of the Evolutionists. He would lead them into their “promised land”, a place where God would not get so much as a foot in their door, a place where they could develop theories such a multiverse instead of a universe, a place where there can be multiple alternative realities happening at the same time, yes, a place where everything everywhere happens all at once! Remove God and you remove the Absolute, the Objective, and then everything, including truth, becomes subjective. Your truth and my truth are permitted to blatantly contradict each other, unless, of course, you are trying to state the claims of Jesus Christ. Then you will immediately be ousted from the cosy nest of the blind Postmodernist.
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| Photo from Internet |
Nature, as they say, is “red in tooth and claw.” Yes, it’s a jungle out there! But how come? If God is so good, then why does He allow evil to exist? Their reasoning goes something like this: God is good. Evil is not good. Therefore, because evil exists God does not exist. In other words, what they are saying is that if they were God, they wouldn’t allow cruelty and evil to exist.
If God created His creation and then declared it to be a “very good” creation, then how did cruelty enter in the world? Or does this mean that God created creation with cruelty and evil in it? Well, let’s start by answering that God did call His creation very good, and that Charles Darwin and his fans (and the fans of his teachings) call it very evil, or do they? I once read a book whose title interested me as a Christian, in which its author said,
In a
universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are
going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any
rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely
the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose,
no evil and no other good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. As that
unhappy poet A.E. Houseman put it:
‘For
Nature, heartless, witless Nature
Will
neither care nor know.’
DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.[3]
So, we move from Darwin’s cruelty in nature, to Neo-Darwinism’s cruelty in our genes. However, notice that in this universe, this “promised land” of the Neo-Darwinist, “there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no other good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” That blind infant cuckoo in the nest exemplifies this “pitiless indifference” for me. How about for you? Let’s forget about God then, and look for a universe, a multiverse, in which cruelty and evil do not exist. However, as we have already seen, there is nowhere that we can go to escape God the Creator.
“Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.” Psalm 139:7-10. The Christian, of course, finds comfort in these words. However, the Darwinist and Neo-Darwinist don’t, because it means that, even if they try to escape God in their bunker of genes full of DNA, even there God will find them!
So, where does good and evil come from? Let’s state the obvious as we try to answer this question. According to contemporary thought, i.e., Postmodernist philosophy (of which Neo-Darwinism and Everything-Everywhere-All-At-Once-ism are branches and fruit of the same tree, there is no such thing as good or evil. There is only “pitiless indifference.” So, the answer to our question about where does good and evil come from, is that good and evil come from the Bible. These are purely Christian concepts that non-Christians in the West need to borrow to describe what they see around them. Yes, there may be other religions (such as Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism etc., and all their various sub-branches) that people in the West can borrow from to describe cruelty, but Western jurisprudence (law) was originally and ultimately Bible based. There is good and there is evil. The Bible is the standard of truth, and in courts of law it is decided who is telling the truth – the person who allegedly inflicted the evil deed or the person who allegedly was the recipient the same evil, assault, robbery, rape etc.
So, evil entered into the world when that great originator of cruelty and evil itself, that great father of lies, that great murderer from the beginning, yes, Satan, who hatched his diabolical plan in God’s Garden of Eden. Yes, it was the Lord God Himself who ousted Adam and Eve from His Edenic nest. However, it was on account of the Serpent deceiving Eve, and through her, enticing Adam to eat the forbidden fruit, that he managed to tip Adam and Eve over the edge as it were.
“And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.” He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” The man said, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.” Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” Genesis 3:8-13.
So, we see that Adam and Eve were unable to hide from God, and even if like that cruel and evil Hitler, they had hidden themselves in some bunker, God would still have found them! Though usually attributed to the American boxer Joe Louis, the saying, “You can run, but you can’t hide!” is the major theme of Amos 9:1-10. Here’s a couple of verses as an example, “If they dig into Sheol, from there shall my hand take them; if they climb up to heaven, from there I will bring them down. If they hide themselves on the top of Carmel, from there I will search them out and take them; and if they hide from my sight at the bottom of the sea, there I will command the serpent, and it shall bite them.” Amos 9:2-3.
There is nowhere we can hide from God, not even in death. “Sheol” means the grave. So, Satan is that great cruel and evil cuckoo in the nest who set about destroying the occupants of Eden. (We’ll look at it later, but this particular “cuckoo” has more than a dent in his back, he now has a crushed head! Thank You Jesus!)
So, you may view the whole world as being cuckoo, but now you know where it all comes from. It was through Satan that cruelty and evil entered God’s creation. And Jesus refers to those who, instead of following God, follow Satan’s rebellion against Him, as “You brood of vipers!” Matthew 3:7. Yes, he started in God’s Garden of Eden, but Satan has been laying parasitical eggs all over the world and the blind hatchlings are trying to oust Christ and His followers out of their dystopian world. But “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein.” Psalm 24:1. Well, at least the Bible doesn’t leave you wondering who is going to win in the end! All non-Christian religion, which includes Neo-Darwinism, Postmodernism etc., like Satan himself, is parasitical. It lays its eggs in God’s world. And now that Postmodernism has flown in, it can lay an egg in the many nests of the multiverse. However, because God owns His creation, it has to borrow from Christianity and be fed by it if it is to survive. The concept of good and evil (with its attendant cruelty) is an example of this.
We should note that, according to the Bible, only humans and angels are moral agents, i.e., will be judged by Jesus on Judgment Day. Animals just do what animals do, and if any of it looks good or cruel and evil to you, it is because you are morally judging what you are seeing around you, e.g., the cuckoo. You, not the animals and not the others around you, but you will be judged by God because you are not living up to your own set of morals, the morals by which you judge the good and evil you see around you. You don’t live up to these morals. Neither do I. We are cruel at times. God doesn’t want our cruelty in His world. He will punish it. That is why He sent His Son into the world. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” John 3:16-17.
So, do cuckoos belong to Darwin’s alternate universe or are they simply creatures that have well-adapted themselves for survival in a fallen creation? Surely the latter is the way Occam’s razor would slice it? Why go to all the trouble of inventing theories and searching for missing links to fill in the gaps and billions of years to accommodate your postulations, when “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” will do? Yes, something happened to God’s good creation. We call it the fall. It happened when Adam and Eve colluded with the Serpent and joined in his rebellion against God.
So, what did God do about it? Well, ultimately, He sent His Son into the world to redeem it, i.e., to fix it. This will all be finalised on Judgment Day. But immediately after the fall, here’s what God did: “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Genesis 3:17-19.
Here's
the place where Darwin went wrong in his thinking. He thought that the cruelty
and evil he was seeing in nature was the way that God had designed His creation
to be, and not the result of mankind’s rebellion, including Darwin’s
continuation of that rebellion. Before the fall, there was only good. After the
fall, i.e., after Adam and Eve had eaten the fruit of the tree of good and evil,
all human beings know good and evil and would have to be “cuckoo” not to see it
when it is around you and even in you.
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| Photo from Internet |
Meanwhile back at the Garden of Eden,
“Then the Lord God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—’ therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.” Genesis 3:24.
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