Only God Could Have Planned a Man

Said a woman physician, “I came into an anatomy room to study. The dead body meant nothing at all to me. I could not visualize the man or woman it might have been. Life left few records on those immobile faces. For weeks I worked, and each day the wonder grew; and then, one day, I was working on an arm and hand, studying the perfect mechanical arrangements of the muscles and tendons—how the sheaths of certain muscles are split to let tendons of certain muscles through, that the hand may be delicate and small and yet powerful. I was all alone in the laboratory when the overwhelming belief came: a thing like this is not just chance, but a part of a plan, a plan so big that only God could have conceived it. Religion had been a matter of form, a thing without convictions and now everything was an evidence of God; the tendons of the hand, the patterns of the little blue butterfly’s wings—it was all part of a purpose.”