Hot Line to Heaven: Dialing for Answers to Eternal Queries

I was envious of my colleague Al Martinez the other day when I read in his column that he had talked to God on the telephone. (Martinez got the number from the ACLU.)

I have always wanted to talk to him, but I wouldn’t dare call unless I knew what I wanted to ask. I doubt that I could get through to him twice.

Martinez concerned himself with such temporal matters as Cardinal Mahony’s quarrel with KCET over the controversial documentary, “Stop the Church.”

I would like to ask him straight out how he went about creating the species. Mind you, I’m not sure that he did. I tend to lean toward the evolutionary theory of creation.

Scientists insist that evolution is a fact, but for the layman there is no proof either way. I don’t see how the creationists and the evolutionists can even debate the question across the chasm that lies between them.

What got me into my present dilemma is a paragraph I wrote after visiting the San Diego Wild Animal Park: “A ‘creation scientist’ and an evolutionist would find themselves hard-pressed to justify either of their theories in the face of such variety and adaptability in species. I can’t believe, for example, that the same inventor could have produced both the flamingo and the wart hog. There must be some other explanation.”

I’m afraid my spiritual adviser, Rabbi Alfred Wolf, momentarily mistook this for a chink in my armor. “If I did not know you and if I had not read today’s column very carefully I might have thought that, with your birthday signaling your advancing age, you had finally decided to believe in God.

“Once you realized that ‘a creation scientist’ and an (atheistic) evolutionist would find themselves hard-pressed to justify either of their theories’ you did not reject God as the Creator.

“You only wondered what God had ‘in mind when he designed Tyrannosaurus rex’ and other horrible creatures. Of course you did not know what God had in mind when he designed a perfect rose or the nightingale’s song or the mind that can compose a Bach fugue.

“The human mind, through the natural sciences, has answered the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of countless questions, which were unanswered in the days when the Bible was written. To accept that we cannot know the answer to the ‘why’ and ‘wherefore’ and still to entrust our lives to God--that is the test of real faith.”

Meanwhile, Steven Morris of the Harbor College physics department takes the other side: “The adaptability of species is the heart and soul of evolution; as the environment changes at some locality, a species will change to fit into it, and if enough changes occur, a new species will form that cannot successfully breed with the old species. This has been going on for billions of years, resulting in the great variety of species that we now see.”

Henry J. Shames of Santa Barbara points out that if God created every living thing, as we are asked to believe, then he is responsible for the yellow fever viruses and the mosquito that carries them, and numerous other deadly parasites.

Evolution obviously is not in the least interested in the way species look. That is how it happened to evolve the platypus and Madonna from the same cell. One would expect God, if it were in his hands, to be more discriminating.

Meanwhile, I am being urged by J. Darryl Nyznyk, a Redondo Beach attorney, to visit the Yugoslav village of Medjugorje, where the Virgin Mary and other phenomena are said to appear daily. Mr. Nyznyk graciously offered to pay my way.

I was obliged to decline, in keeping with The Times’ policy; also I pointed out that a visit to Yugoslavia seems ill-advised at present. I asked Mr. Nyznyk why God chose a remote village in Yugoslavia for Mary’s epiphany--why not Rockefeller Center, where more people could see her?

“I too wondered why God chose such an out-of-the-way place through which to convey his message,” he says. “The Rockefeller Center certainly seems like a more viable forum.

“I have since realized that because God wishes man to exercise his own free will to choose his own path, God will not force anyone to do anything. A spectacular appearance at Rockefeller Center would remove the choice of all save the most hardened cynics. I don’t believe that is God’s intent.”

Well, you see, that’s why I want to talk to God. I want to know why he created deadly parasites as well as the nightingale and woman, and why he chose Medjugorje for Mary to appear.

But now that Martinez has let it out that God answers his phone, I suppose his line will always be busy.