Earth Day and Origins: Why Celebrate Accidents?

Well, it's time for Earth Day, when New Age and pagan Earth worship takes center stage, and many theists go along for the ride. I'm all for conserving God's creation, but I recognize that the creation is wearing out, even with the best conservation efforts. Only a resurrection will redeem it. [This is bumped up from past years.]

I prefer to worship the Creator, and admire the creation.

Speaking of that, from letters to the editor printed in the Los Angeles Times around Earth Day 2008, inspired by a commentary by Richard Dawkins:

Ken Savage or Palm Desert chimed in:

Everyone has faith in something that is beyond science to prove.

That is true. Even a statement such as "Science discovers all truth" is a philosophical statement outside of science itself, and thus can't be true.

Dawkins has a similar problem to those who cannot explain where a complex God came from. Where did the Big Bang come from, and what existed before?

As I understand it, one of the explanations is "nothing". If the entire universe could come from nothing without a cause outside itself, how can we trust any lab results? How do we know matter/energy is not emerging in the middle of such experiments, thus skewing the results? Another answer I've been told is "We don't know, but we know it wasn't God!"  Uh, okay.

James McDermott of Pasadena:

It is not logically contradictory to hold both that God is the author of all that exists and that the Big Bang and evolution are the ways God created and continues to create everything that exists.

This is true. It is philosophical naturalism that can't accept creationism, intelligent design, directed evolution, or any involvement by God.

William S. LaSor of Apple Valley, California:

Dawkins argues that "intelligent design" is not science.

It is a framework for understanding the data. We also know that human beings perform intelligent design, including in biology, so we've seen that a being can engage in intelligent design.

In the end, he, like everyone else, must confront one of two choices: Either the universe has always existed, or it was created by someone who has always existed.

If anything now exists, either something is eternal, or something not eternal came from nothing.

Elaine Fleeman of Bakersfield:

How could natural selection create the first living cell? There is no advantage to non-living material becoming a living cell, so the process had to be pure chance, a result of random atoms forming thousands of extremely complex molecules within a few micrometers of each other at the same time. It is statistically a highly improbable probable event, and it bears all the earmarks of design.

Yes, the dominant scientific elite would have us believe that all of the life on Earth is the result of a series of extremely improbable accidents, and that we are nothing more than molecules reacting to each other. Yet, here is everyone celebrating Earth Day. If the materialists are right – why celebrate?  Where does a moral imperative to conserve the environment come from?