God’s Whimsy

Wiker and Witt suggest that God created pandas as “comic relief” in a blessed fit of “divine whimsy.” The suggestion is troubling even for Christians who defend creation, because, being engineers, they have swallowed the reductive notion that creation must be functional. Wiker and Witt offer this rejoinder:

“To spurn the notion as if it were patently ridiculous, as beneath consideration, is merely to expose one’s utilitarian presuppositions. Why, after all, should the designer’s world read like a dreary high school science textbook, its style humorless, homogenous and suffocating under the dead weight of a supposedly detached passive voice? Why should not the designer’s world entertain, amuse and fascinate as well as ‘work’? Why, in short, shouldn’t we expect it to have the richness of variety and tone we find in a world of art like Hamlet ?”