How Can One Not Say “Thank You?”

March 5, 2025

This week, along with a few thoughts on an intelligent designer behind creation, I wanted to share with you an essay I wrote entitled, How Can One Not Say, “Thank You?”

This essay won the Grand Prize in the 2022 National Parks Share Your Story competition.

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After months of sheltering-in-place, breathing through masks, and being inundated with Covid deaths sweeping the globe, the mountains called to us. “Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you,” echoed in our hearts, giving us no choice but to once more visit her children with names like Bearfence, Hawksbill, Old Rag, and Little Stoney Man.

It was the latter we now hiked. Over the past twenty-five years, our two families had failed to climb Little Stoney Man together only once; that was the first year of the pandemic. Our annual journey together to Shenandoah National Park was as necessary to us as breathing; our time in the Blue Ridge Mountains could not be missed again.

We arrived at the trailhead, milepost 39.1, and began the 1.6 miles to the Little Stoney Man summit. Our six grown children, with spouses, future spouses, and first grandchild carried snugly on her daddy’s chest, led the way. Moms and dads followed behind.

The first year our two families came together to Shenandoah National Park, there were eight of us; this year there were fifteen. Our families had been melded together over the last two-and-a-half decades by the winds and trails, sunsets and meadows, snow and wildlife and campfires along Skyline Drive, Virginia. These unforgettable moments had forged our two families into one.

As we hiked upwards toward the summit, memories flooded over us. We remembered a black bear, standing on the trail, magnificent and terrifying. The many recollections of deer, skunks, turkeys, snakes, and the rare sighting of a coyote, kept us scanning the woods as we ascended. I saw my son hiking ahead and I smiled as I thought back to backpacking Little Devil Stairs, my son shivering from cold as we settled into our sleeping bags. That night, I held him close.

My memories went further back than the twenty-five years our two families had been hiking these trails together. I pictured my mom and dad hiking the same trail with my brother and I, and how my late parents taught me to love these mountains, to care for them, to find God in the violence of the passing storms, as well as in the quiet early mornings as a mother deer and her fawns fed in the meadow.

We could hear our children ahead, sharing their own memories of rock-climbing Little Stoney Man with harnesses and carabiners and ropes, hiking up Black Rock at night to watch for shooting stars, exploring the meadow, or singing the Unicorn Song and Dunderbeck’s Machine with Charlie Maddox in the Big Meadow Lodge taproom.

Personally, I have hiked the Carpathian Mountains in Romania and roamed the Scottish Highlands along Loch Ness, but nowhere calls to me, feels like home, as Shenandoah National Park. I have been blessed to have my children experience these mountains, and they will be blessed to bring their children. Four generations have driven through the gates at Thornton Gap and driven the thirty miles to Big Meadows, leaving the busyness of the world behind.

We reach the summit overlooking the vast Shenandoah Valley, the landscape dotted with farms, rivers, lakes, and towns. How could anyone stand on the face of Little Stoney Man and not whisper, “Thank You?” We owe these mountains a debt we can never repay.

After spending time at the top of the mountain, we begin our hike downward and back to our campsite. Tonight, we will sit around the campfire, sharing memories and smores. We will fall asleep with grateful hearts for the mountains' calling and the blessings she provides.

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For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

-Romans 1:20

Throughout my life, I have been traveling to the Shenandoah Mountains of Virginia. I have stood and looked out across the valley from the top of Old Rag Mountain, Hawksbill, and Little Stoney Man. I have laid on top Black Rock at night to see the night sky open before me, stars shooting across the expanse. Often, I find myself crying out without thinking, “Thank you,” to the Creator behind it all.

One of the lessons I have learned through twenty-seven years of ministry is that the more I read about science, the more evidence I find for God’s existence. The precision of the universe is amazing and miraculous. The human body with its intricacies is beyond comprehension. Consider the million tiny things that must go right for a baby to be born healthy and to grow into an adult, an adult with a mind that creates great works of literature, paints beautiful pieces of art, builds complex skyscrapers and MRI machines and computers that fit in your hand, researches the world of cells and molecules and atoms, discovers cures for cancer, composes symphonies, and solves complex mathematical equations that help explain our universe.

How can one believe such an elaborate being does not have an intelligent designer behind its brilliance?

Below are three famous arguments I have shared throughout my ministry for an intelligent designer behind our creation.

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(1) William Paley - Watchmaker Argument from his work, Natural Theology (1802)

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. ... There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction and designed its use. ... Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.

(2) Stephen Meyer - “Welcome to Victoria” Flowerbed Argument

Since information requires an intelligent source, the flowers spelling “Welcome to Victoria” in the gardens of Victoria harbor in Canada lead visitors to infer the activity of intelligent agents even if they did not see the flowers planted and arranged.

The sculptures of Michelangelo, the software of the Microsoft corporation, the inscribed steles of Assyrian kings—each bespeaks the prior action of an intelligent agent. Indeed, everywhere in our high-tech environment we observe complex events, artifacts, and systems that impel our minds to recognize the activity of other minds—minds that communicate, plan, and design.

Similarly, the “sequence specificity” or “specificity and complexity” or “information content” of DNA suggests a prior intelligent cause, again because “specificity and complexity” or “high information content” constitutes a distinctive hallmark (or signature) of intelligence.

(3) George Schlesinger - Winning the Lottery Argument

If John wins a 1-in-1,000,000,000 lottery game, you would not immediately be tempted to think that John (or someone acting on his behalf) cheated. If, however, John won three consecutive 1-in-1,000 lotteries, you would immediately be tempted to think that John (or someone acting on his behalf) cheated. Schlesinger believes that the intuitive reaction to these two scenarios is epistemically justified. The structure of the latter event is such that it justifies a belief that intelligent design is the cause: the fact that John got lucky in three consecutive lotteries is a reliable indicator that his winning was the intended result of someone’s intelligent agency. Despite the fact that the probability of winning three consecutive 1-in-1,000 games is exactly the same as the probability of winning one 1-in-1,000,000,000 game, the former event is of a kind that is surprising in a way that warrants an inference of intelligent design.

…it is not just that we got lucky with respect to one property-lottery game; we got lucky with respect to two dozen property-lottery games—lotteries that we had to win in order for there to be life in the universe. Given that we are justified in inferring intelligent design in the case of John’s winning three consecutive lotteries, we are even more justified in inferring intelligent design in the case of our winning two dozen much more improbable property lotteries. The most probable explanation for the remarkable fact that the universe has exactly the right properties to sustain life is that an intelligent Deity intentionally created the universe such as to sustain life.

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Perhaps Lee Strobel, investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune, atheist turned Christian, sums it up best:

To continue in atheism, I would need to believe that nothing produces everything, non-life produces life, randomness produces fine-tuning, chaos produces information, unconsciousness produces consciousness, and non-reason produces reason. I simply didn't have that much faith.

Seriously, how can we not say, “Thank you?”