Please bear with me if you see some repetition of theme in my recent entries. I’m thinking around this one theme, and want to capture each step.

 You’ll occasionally hear on the radio that a singer was ‘blessed with a God given voice’, and it was their duty to make the most of it. There is something fundamentally appealing about this kind of declaration, and in a moral sense, there is. I have been gifted with drawing skills that I seldom use, and feel appropriately guilty. It is indeed a waste not to use them more.

But what does a ‘God given voice’ actually mean? There are many ways that a supernatural being might achieve this. He might have endowed you with this voice in your childhood. Or it might have been there from birth.

This makes me wonder whether God did indeed actually make me. But what exactly does that mean?

One of the reasons many theists believe in God is because the sheer magnificance of live on this planet cries out to our senses that it was designed rather than evolved. Even to me this is true. The World just feels too organised, too wonderful, too rich to have simply mechanically evolved without any coordinating party. But I have sufficient understanding of the theory of evolution to rationalise my feelings as simply that.

The crucial aspect of these feelings is that life on the planet feels designed. I emphasise this because there is an enormous difference between design and manufacture. Manufacture is often much less glamorous than design – the construction of my body, one cell at a time would be a highly protracted process.

If God made me, then he presumably constructed my cells and got them working together. But exactly when did he do this? You see, ‘me’ is not just the me that I am today, but it is the me that I was 10 years ago, and will be in 10 years time (if I last that long). I am a constantly changing ‘work in progress’. So either God made me at egg fertilisation time, and let nature take its course, or God is somewhat more involved, working on me as I evolve from an egg to an embryo to a baby and so on.

I want to ask a Christian this question for two reasons. One, to see if they had pondered the subject at all. And two, to see what their answer would be.

You see, the ‘God given voice’ was only operable some years after conception. Did God set the embryonic development in the right direction to result in this voice, or was He more involved? God cannot take too much credit for the former, since embryonic evolution does the work for Him.

If God is involved with us during our own life, working on every cell in our body on a second by second basis, where does He fit in with the mechanical aspect of cellular life, where genetic code governs cellular behaviour? And if He is that involved, then He is actively involved in creating cancerous cells and all manner of other problematic biological shortcomings.