The Logic of the Cashew

“No matter how hard I try

I will never create anything as beautiful as this

ripple of water

cupped in a purple cabbage leaf.”

—Campbell McGrath[1]

Though the text “Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Cor. 10:12) has been long smelted into my soul, after 46 years as a believer I can unabashedly declare that the reality not just of God but of a loving God is the most obvious truth that I know.

Aside from the miracle of our rippled existence on a planet spinning and orbiting at supersonic speeds through a cosmos toxic a mere few miles up, or from the neuron-knotting complexity of a dust mite or of the medulla oblongata in a hagfish—God’s love so dramatically pours out from nature it’s frightening that not everyone sees it.

For example, according to my wife, the bowl of breakfast cereal cupped before me contained (in various manifestations) soy, almonds, oats, cashews, blueberries, goji berries, flaxseed, dates, apples, pumpkin seeds, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

And all these (what?) supposedly arose from tiny pellets (blueberry seeds are about 0.06 inches or 1.5 millimeters long) that grow out of dirt (dirt?) and expand into plants or bushes or trees brimming with herbs and nuts and fruit so beautiful and so tasty and so healthy for humans? Are you kidding me? If people didn’t see plants and trees and bushes—each bearing their own seeds—grow out of dirt, there is no reason they should believe it. But because they do see it, and so often too, they’re hardened to the over-the-top extravaganza of love that each life form from the dirt represents—a hardening varnished over by the scientific worldview, which teaches that “nature is nothing but shifting spatiotemporal arrangements of fundamental physical entities.”[2]

I can unabashedly declare that the reality not just of God but of a loving God is the most obvious truth that I know.

To believe that cashews, oats, dates, apples, cinnamon (or broccoli, or asparagus, or plums, or avocados, or melons, or whatever) resulted from the mindless shifting of “fundamental physical entities”—when it is screechingly obvious that these were created by a loving Creator for our good—is blindness, willful blindness, and inexcusable, too (and if you don’t believe me, believe Paul [Rom. 1:20]). 

“Oh, how thankful I am,” explained Goethe’s young Werther, “that my heart can feel the simple, harmless joys of the man who brings to the table a head of cabbage he has grown himself, and in a single moment enjoys, not only the vegetable, but all the fine days and fresh mornings since he planted it, the mild evenings when he watered it, and the pleasure he felt while watching it grow.”[3]

A bit over the top for a head of cabbage, yes. But still, I so get his point.

I asked ChatGPT, “How many different kinds of edible fruit, grains, nuts, and vegetables are there?” And it answered: “The number of distinct edible fruits, edible nuts, edible grains/seed-crops, and edible vegetables is in the thousands to tens of thousands collectively.” Even if 1,000 only (only?), nothing is believable about any of it. The dogma that a tomato plant or a cashew tree or a grapevine or a cabbage grows by chance, by natural selection, or by luck, out of dirt into what’s so lovely, tasty, and healthy for us, is a tragic commentary on how ideology can turn the obvious into the absurd.

What is logical and sensible is that thousands of “edible fruits, edible nuts, edible grains/seed-crops, and edible vegetables” sing, like C-flats and arias, about the love revealed at the cross.

My bowl of cereal does not, of course, prove that Jesus died on the cross, but unmistakably echoes the love that led Him to it.

[1] Campbell McGrath, Fever of Unknown Origin: Poems, p. 9. (Function). Kindle Edition.

[2] Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience, p. ix. (Function). Kindle Edition.

[3] Johann Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (New York: Signet Classic, 1962), p. 43.