“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” C. S. Lewis
One day last fall, during mushroom season, I decided to research the Amanita muscaria mushroom, the red ones with white raised spots, which grow so abundantly in our area. What makes such a pretty little thing so poisonous? This led me down an interesting path I call a “Thought Trek”. They are never boring journeys, rambling maybe, but never boring.
Arsenic. That’s why Amanitas are deadly, they draw up arsenic from the soil. Something called Amatoxins form and that is what makes people sick, even die when Amanitas are eaten. I began to wonder what the arsenic levels in my soil might be with the large number of Amanitas which grow each year. What about our well water? Is it safe? Why do slugs eat them and don’t seem to die?
I also noticed that these types of mushrooms seem to be part of an ecosystem which includes spruce, birch, lichens, and mosses. Is there a bio-chemical relationship between all these plants? That required more research but for the sake of the reader, the short answer is yes. Each one plays a vital role in keeping each other healthy and happy and non-poisonous to each other. Where arsenic exists, mushrooms pull it up out of the soil, chemically transmute it so that it becomes inert (less harmful to humans and slugs apparently). Still, eating them in too large of a dose can still sicken or kill the consumer.
It is the interconnectedness of this particular mini-ecosystem in my back yard which led me to ponder on how this all happened. There seemed to be only two ultimate questions to consider. Question 1: did this system evolve over thousands if not millions of years? Question 2: did an Organizing Intelligence engineer the natural laws we see in operation around us today?
I stood on my second story deck, surveying and pondering the options every day for about a month. If my ecosystem evolved, how did any of the independent species survive long enough to pass on descendants if there were no magic mushrooms to absorb arsenic? How did each know what another would need bio-chemically in order to evolve a mechanism to meet that need without dying out during the vulnerable millennia of existence? I tried to imagine the concept of Evolution, Natural Selection, and millions of years. It’s quite a leap of faith to think that all the imperfect stages of each tree, or moss, or mushroom somehow survived until they reached the balance we see before us in our modern world.
I decided to take another leap of Faith. Is there some Organizing Intelligence responsible for all this? It is human nature to organize various pieces of things and concepts into a civilization with all its art, engineering, books, computers, and more. If we just threw the basic elements of clay or metal or amino acids into a shallow pond of water, would they eventually combine and grow into magnificent cities? Logic and reason tell us this would never happen in a million years or a trillion years. Why do we think that the basic building blocks of atoms and molecules would magically organize themselves into complicated biological organisms and systems without a triggering force? The fact that we can even think about these things implies an organized intelligence.
Back to C. S. Lewis statement “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” My month-long pursuit of trying to figure out the connectedness of my little birch-spruce-mushroom-moss-lichen forest from an evolutionary standpoint was a failure in terms of the godless world view of the modern world. I found that, like C.S. Lewis, I can only interpret the world through the lens of Christianity, a basic tenet of which is that there is a God, by whatever name you call Him, or whatever you conceive the Organizing Intelligence to be. Nature itself testifies of this, as do we as human beings, created in His image – organized in our complex human biology, organized in our complicated thought world, and organized in relationship to ourselves and our environments.
I find the testimony of mushrooms to be a powerful one. It is my Faith and I’m sticking with it.
Photo by Ygraine of Aspenglow Hollow
Liberty Principia 