WHO CAN ESPLAIN THE WARTHOG?

Aug/Sep, 2001 -- here are a few things I find hard to understand in this life. Take the warthog, for example. I am a subscriber to the theory of creation, but I couldn't, if I tried for a hundred years, imagine why God created the warthog.

They told me in Sunday school that God is the sum total of goodness, the pinnacle of beauty - indeed, that God is the height of everything estimable. I believed them - until I saw a warthog; then I got confused, very confused.

By all standards, the warthog is not a beautiful creature. Scientifically, a beautiful object has all the lines of symmetry falling in the right places. A beautiful thing has balance drawn between every pair of its parts. In a beautiful artifact, every kind of equilibrium is struck. But look at the warthog. It has a head the size of a building block carelessly slumped on a disproportionately smaller body. There are awkward, large, curved, little tusks protruding out of that head. On the face are ugly lumps that have been spread without the slightest attempt to conceal them. Its jaws are the shape of a trapezium, a quadrilateral with no two sides parallel. In those jaws are teeth that are arranged like barbed wire. Its behind looks like a brick wall. And when it runs, one is reminded of an old country bus with a broken centre bolt.

Perhaps God was joking. That could explain the warthog. But, no, the warthog is real.

On the other hand, perhaps God was trying to make an ecological point. Ecologically, the idea of good and bad co-existing in the right proportion makes sense. Rabbits are beautiful creatures to behold and are delicious at the dining table. But if the world was full of rabbits, it would be a gross disproportion; the reason there are snakes to bite them and lions to prey on them, just so they are kept in the right balance, etc. That kind of rationalization, however warped, could equally justify the place of the warthog, could it not? But somehow, this doesn't sound right either.

So why, I ask again, would God bother with the creation of an animal that is such a complete eyesore? I have nothing against the warthog, but whichever way I look at it, the poor animal simply doesn't get counted among creatures to behold.

All this, however, is nothing compared to another thought I have.

If I can't understand the reason for the existence of ugly creatures, I find it harder to understand why God allowed the existence of 'evil' people alongside 'good' people. I am thinking of Adolf Hitler, Idi Amin, Slobodan Milosevic, and Osama bin Laden.
Rationalizing over the existence of a warthog could merely be the subject for academic speculation, but such is not the case when we enter the ream of human beings. It's much harder explaining God's permission for the existence of 'evil' persons.

The nearest I can get to explaining it is by referring to the teachings of a man called Jesus, and the wisdom of the sages.

One day, Jesus of Nazareth told a flabbergasted audience about the parable of the wheat and the darnel. He emphasized the wisdom in letting the darnel (weed) grow side by side with the wheat, till harvest time, when the farmer can clearly sort them out. With that simple story, the man from Nazareth sent a loaded message into a world that generalizes and categorizes.

Which brings us to the wisdom of the sages, alias philosophers. Philosophy teaches that we must go beyond appearances. The warthog may appear ugly, the reason it dissuades the casual observer from investigating any intrinsic potential it might have.

The lesson: Human judgment risks throwing away what is potentially good. On the other hand, the power that commanded things into being, be it the power of a god or evolution or whatever, that power can make sense out of the warthog -- and those people society has decided don't fit in. more clips

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