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Writer's pictureBible Brian

The sycamore smiley


I want you to imagine you stumbled across this tree stump with the smiley face made of sycamore seeds on the top. How would you assume the smile originated? Did the seeds fall from the tree and land in this arrangement, or did someone design the face?

If you answered the latter, you would be correct. I am the creator of the smiley face. I was inspired to do so when I stumbled across the stump myself, and spotted just three sycamore seeds on the stump. I tied my dog to the bench and asked my brother to sit there with him while I gathered more seeds from the path. As I did so, an elderly lady came past with her own dog. After I had ensured the two dogs would not fight, I resumed making the smiley face, took this picture and moved on. All of this took less than 5 minutes. That is the story of the day I went to the park.

The above story shares a lot in common with the Genesis account of creation. You, as the reader, cannot verify any of it. But you have good reason to believe it.

Firstly, although it is unrealistic, there is a chance the sycamore seeds could randomly fall from the tree onto the stump in such an arrangement. Even if they didn't land like that, I can confirm the wind was strong enough to blow the seeds, because it did. I actually had to re-create the smiley before taking a photo, because the wind messed it up the first time. In fact, the seed I used as the nose was pointing the other direction, and I liked it more than when it was pointing to the right. Yet, because of the specified complexity of the arrangement of the seeds, no one would call you a superstitious bigot for believing my story about how the smiley face came to be. You would even be quite within your rights to doubt the sanity of anyone who claims I didn't make the smiley face. The world around us, however, is much more obviously designed. You simply cannot look at the world around you and assume it is the product of random chance.


Once we've established that there is a designer, we have another problem: who is the designer? I can't prove it was me. For all you know, I could have merely stumbled upon someone else's design and claimed it as my own. I could call upon my witness. My brother was there when I made the smiley face. I could ask him to type a testimony for you. I'm not going to, but in theory, I could. In the same way, even once we've established that there is a designer of the heavens and the earth, we can't prove it was God. Not from just looking at it, at least. We must rely on witness testimony.

I also included a number of details in my story which cannot be verified. You can see a white dog in the bottom right corner, but you can't see that he is tied to a bench (and may even doubt it, since he was close enough to be able to photobomb), nor can you verify he belongs to me. You can't see the woman and her dog who passed me by. I can't prove I moved on after taking the photo, or that the wind blew the face apart once. You could not determine a single one of those details from the photo. It has even been such a long time since the face was made that the dog has sadly died, so even if you could go to the very spot where I took the photo, you could verify almost nothing. In the same way, there are details in the creation account that can neither be proven nor disproven. Was the sun really created on day 4? Was Eve really created from Adam's ribs? Did God really wait until He had created man to send rain? We can't prove or disprove any of these facts.

Some of you may have noticed the sloppy ending of the story when I said "All of this took less than 5 minutes. That is the story of the day I went to the park." This was quite deliberate. I wanted to highlight the problem with allegorising God's word. Throughout history, there has persisted a view that God actually only took one day to create the heavens and the earth, even though He clearly says He took 6. Today, we have the opposite problem: Christians want to make it sound like He took millions of years! Both situations arose from a failure to let the text say what it says. As I said the face took me 5 minutes, so also did God say creation took Him 6 days, even citing this as the reason for the Sabbath. And as God uses the word "day" in a non-literal sense in the Bible, but this does not mean the 6 days of creation are not literal, so also did I use the word "day" in a non-literal sense, but this does not invalidate my claim that it took less than 5 minutes to make the face.

I didn't originally intend a Noah's ark allegory here, but I might as well remind you that the wind did initially change the face. When you look at the picture, you are not looking at the way the face looked originally. In the same way, when you look at the earth, you are looking at a planet that has radically changed twice. The first time it was changed was at the fall, when Adam and Eve sinned, and so God cursed the ground. Whereas once the earth was "very good", it is now stained with sin. Death and suffering now plague our world, but they didn't when it was first created. The second time it was changed was at the flood. 2 Peter 3:5-6 says the world which existed at the time was completely destroyed. Even the Garden of Eden did not survive. You are looking at a very different world than what Adam or Noah knew.


My story about the origins of the smiley face and the Genesis account of creation bear many similarities, all of which ultimately show the futility of the origins debate. It isn't a battle of faith vs. science, but of faith vs. faith, with a little science mixed in. Origins is a matter of history, and like all history, only a reliable eye-witness can be trusted. Since Darwin has none of those, I feel much safer putting my faith in Jesus. I strongly recommend you do that too.

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