Iain Strachan

Here's a poem I wrote some time back. In the post God's Flute I wrote about Elgar hearing his music in nature. This is about the music I hear in nature. On writing the previous post, I realised that it resonated very much with this poem & much the same thoughts must have given rise to it. Order out of chaos again? Ambient Music As if God Had assembled A random orchestra And placed me in the empty hall, I hear music .. In the woodwind of birdsong The distant dissonance of a sheep bleat The cadence of rain coming down, The drone of a van going up hill Briefly broken By the leisurely fermata of a gear change. And deep rest comes Not in sleep But in deeply awake ... When the boring voices inside Churning the same questions About life and stuff Have laid off, The answers are all here

I wrote a while back of Darwin's letter to Asa Gray, where he said he considered the marvellous universe we live in to be the result of designed laws, with the minor details, whether good or bad, left to what we may call chance. Darwin, as is well-known was an agnostic, but I'd like to develop these ideas a little from my point of view as a Christian. One thing many of my Christian friends have a problem with is evolution. Much of this may be due to the increasingly hostile attitudes of prominent evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins. But I suspect also part of the problem is the idea that all this complexity can come about from random, chaotic processes. However, this does not imply the absence of a designer, or a creative intelligence, and evidently Darwin didn't think so either. The fact is that systems that obey physical laws can often pick out what they need from random processes - and turn randomness into order. Consider what happens when you draw a bow across a ...