In Defense of Nature

PART ONE

Prologue: How I Came to Write This Treatise

ALL TEXT AND PHOTOS ©  2024 Marlene A. Condon

The author’s documentation of natural events in her own yard over the course of decades led first to her deep understanding of nature, and then to her nature revelation that God exists.

The title of this work might make you think I’m a religious person. I’m not.

 

Truth be told, I’ve always wondered if God truly exists, mainly because I feel that animals should not ever suffer excruciating physical or emotional pain. I would have hoped that an all-powerful God could have somehow prevented such suffering among creatures that have done nothing wrong and are only living their lives as they are meant to do.

 

But I have also never felt a need to know for a fact that God exists because, as far as I am concerned, everyone should simply lead a moral life, whether there is a God, or not.

 

I do not own a Bible, a holy book that I never got to know personally while I was growing up. My family was Catholic, and Catholics—in my experience—did not learn about the Bible. My childhood memories of Catholicism revolve around the memorization of prayers, especially so you could recite them silently as penance for sins that you revealed to a priest during confession.

 

It is odd to me that the church never taught us about the Bible, but perhaps the Pope felt the laity did not need to know about this Holy Book. After all, the priest spoke the Mass in Latin every Sunday, which meant none of us even knew what he was communicating to us about our religion.

 

Yet despite my lack of connection to Catholicism, I had an epiphany one day as I was discussing the natural world with my husband, as I often do. I realized that there are aspects of man’s presence on the Earth that are so out of sync with nature that it presents a natural paradox that can only be explained away by invoking the hand of God. In other words, man’s relationship with the natural world provides actual evidence of God’s existence!

 

I knew that if I were right, the Bible—if it truly is the Word of God—should support my realization. In fact, I was so confident regarding my epiphany that I was not at all surprised to find that it did. Thanks to my husband, who owns a Bible, I was able to investigate, and, sure enough, the Bible confirmed everything I had personally come to know about the natural world via my lifelong observation of and fascination with it. Even more, it confirmed that the only way to discern God’s existence is to use your mind to obtain knowledge and understanding of the natural world:

 

“For those things of him [sic] which are invisible, are seen—By the eye of the mind. Being understood—They are seen by them, and them only, who use their understanding.” [emphasis mine, Romans I, 1:20-21]

[http://www.biblestudytools.com/commentaries/wesleys-explanatory-notes/romans/romans-1.html]

 

According to the Book of Job, 12:5, “Wisdom is with the aged, and understanding in length of days.” This statement certainly applied to my epiphany.

 

Although I had long understood how to garden in agreement with nature by following “Mother Nature’s” examples all around me, it took half a century for me to acquire the wisdom of the aged, in large part thanks to giving nature talks in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia.

  

After nearly every talk, I fielded questions about gardening problems and how they could be eliminated. As someone who had never personally encountered these obstacles to successfully growing food and beautifying my yard with a variety of flowers and greenery, I was puzzled by the profusion of difficulties other gardeners seemed to face. Ever the scientist who wants to understand the unexplained, I began to ponder why there had been such a huge difference between my decades of gardening and the widespread negative experiences of other gardeners.

 

The answer was that other people disregarded the natural laws that govern the proper functioning of the environment and their gardens located within it. Just as we get into trouble when we ignore human laws, such as speeding through stop signs or red lights, we get into trouble when we try to garden the way we want, instead of the way Mother Nature demands.

 

But where did folks get the idea that they could possibly grow plants successfully by disregarding how the natural world works? I had already stumbled upon the answer to this question decades before when, as a young gardener, I’d discovered the plethora of discrepancies between what I read in gardening books and magazines and what I saw happening in the natural world. I realized the horticultural advice was mainly wrong, but I didn’t think about why that was the case; I just stopped reading gardening literature.

 

When so many years later I pondered the reason for so much ill-advised horticultural advice, I discerned the problem. Horticulturists work in labs or artificially contrived field conditions; they don’t work in, and tend not to possess knowledge of, the real (natural) world. With this determination, I had my “ultimate understanding as a result of my length of days”. It was now clear to me why no one (until now) has ever recognized that the validation of God is in full view of mankind.

 

The testament for the nature revelation that God exists is the natural world itself—although not because it is beautiful or complex or unexplainable. Rather, once you recognize how logically and sensibly the natural world functions, and how you must live within it, the nature revelation readily manifests itself.

 

I was fifty when I was asked to give talks in Shenandoah National Park. I had learned so much about nature—mostly by way of my own garden and my time spent roaming outdoors, beginning when I was a child—that I was able to comprehend how the natural world works.

 

I had been taking notes and photographs for decades, and although I did not have a Ph.D. certifying my status as a researcher, I had been doing exactly what researchers do (except I had never been given money to do it). Within a few years of being hired to give my park presentations, I had also considered how everything I had witnessed fit together.

 

No one has noticed the clues for God’s existence because no one looks at the natural world properly. For example, people (including scientists) generally tend to view some organisms and weather events as “bad” because they may negatively impact the lives of humans. What they don’t recognize is that these creatures and events are vital to the continuing perpetuation of all life on Earth—a unique frame of reference only obvious to those who are able to view the natural world critically and logically rather than in terms of human existence.

 

In other words, when you don’t grasp the complete picture of the natural world by figuring out exactly why things happen as they do, but instead focus mainly upon how humans are affected by organisms or weather events, etc., the absolute proof of God’s existence is overlooked.

 

The laws governing how the natural world works are the same, no matter where on Earth you are.

TOMORROW, PART TWO:

 Introduction: Importance of Nature to Human Existence

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