Nature Love Is Designed, Not Evolved
Evolutionists cannot claim love of nature as an
evolved human trait when our first home was a garden
A researcher at West Virginia University found something both surprising and intuitive: people can navigate through confusing hospital corridors when there are windows to gardens here and there. It also improves their mood. The WVU press release (21 Feb 2022) announces, “Seeing ‘green’ can ease confusion, anger in navigating hospitals, WVU researcher says.”
Who hasn’t experienced the frustration of walking through long hallways trying to move from one doctor’s office to another in a large hospital? It’s obvious that if you had some natural landmarks to go by, you would navigate quicker and enjoy the hike more. Why is that? Is it because we evolved, or because we were created with that inclination? Researcher Shan Jiang lets the reader pick from a few options except for creation.
“You may explain such therapeutic effects from multiple perspectives: people’s color/hue preferences tend to range from blue to green, nature and plants are positive distractions that could restore people’s attentional fatigue, and human beings could have developed genetic preference of greenery from evolutionary perspectives,” Jiang said. “All mechanisms together contribute to the positive experience when looking at gardens and nature views.”
Jiang concludes that hospitals can better serve their patients by introducing nature into building designs and layouts: garden spots here and there, with windows to see some greenery. A happy patient is a patient patient.
“In terms of spatial orientation and wayfinding, window views of nature and small gardens can effectively break down the tedious interiors of large hospital blocks,” Jiang said, “and serve as landmarks to aid people’s wayfinding and improve their spatial experience.”
The study also revealed that participants’ mood states, particularly anger and confusion, were “significantly relieved” in the greenspace group.
The research agrees with many other studies that find health benefits to patients when they can see natural scenes. Even virtual scenes of nature improve their moods and contribute to faster healing.
The “evolutionary perspective” for this trait is poppycock. Jiang says humans “could have developed genetic preference of greenery from evolutionary perspectives.” OK, so did they do so by intelligent design? Did a man on a hunt find that a green plant gave him a clue to his favorite prey site, and say, “That makes me feel good. I think I will tell my genes to store the information in my gametes so my children can benefit from it. Now all I have to do is find a woman with the same genes.” That’s ridiculous, but Jiang said, “humans could have developed” this trait. No; in Darwinland, humans have nothing to do with it. Stuff Happens; that’s all. A mistake occurred, and it worked by sheer dumb luck. And if it just happened that one pair got this trait, every other lineage of humans had to die for it to persist in the gene pool. That’s the “cost of selection.” What an ugly, senseless way to think about a garden.
How much better to realize that our love of nature, and our eyes that center on green wavelengths, were designed by a loving God. He put our first ancestors into a garden with lots of green and other colors that were not just perceived as beautiful, but really were beautiful, so that we could see His glory through what He made. Some of that beauty was lost in the Fall, when sin and death entered the world, but enough of it remains so that every person is without excuse to know that an all-wise, all-powerful and good Creator made the world and us. That is why whenever we see a garden through a hospital window, a bit of our ‘image of God’ says to us, ‘That’s good.’