One of my first posts had to do with Seurat. For those unfamiliar with that artist, he creates his wonderful paintings by placing single dots on the canvas, mixing his colors to create beauty. It struck me that I do something similar with my crocheting.
Well, the “beauty” part is arguable.
I create images in my afghans by swapping out one strand of yarn for another, stitch by stitch, building up my “painting” one row at a time. When it’s finished there’s an image there which can’t be seen in one or two stitches. If you’re familiar with Minecraft, it’s sort of like that. The concept is pixelization.
Back when I first started writing they had what were called dot matrix printers. A person could tell a good one from a bad one by the DPI - Dots Per Inch. I had one with what was called “Near Letter Quality” available. When agents began demanding higher and higher quality paper submissions I had to get a new printer because NLQ wasn’t good enough. I bought a laser printer with enough resolution to make the NLQ printer embarrassed to be called a “printer.”
Similar things happened with televisions before the “small screen” became so popular. Still, gamers want a huge screen with high resolution and fast refresh rates. The quality of the screen people want depends on its purpose.
Reality is like that, too. Back in the day when atoms were first discovered they were thought to be the tiniest things possible. The term “atom” means (essentially) “stuff can’t get smaller than that.” We’ve since been able to find fundamental particles so tiny they aren’t really particles. Quantum Theory seems to say all matter is fluctuation in the various quantum fields.
In other words, dots.
God created the universe on a super high quality dot matrix printer.
Why do I mention all this? A lot of people aren’t convinced about His existence because there’s no one, single, provable fact about God. To them I say, “Is there one, single, artistic dot in Seurat’s painting?” Can you look at even a hundred dots and say, “That’s a great painting!” Are there a dozen stitches in my afghan where you can tell what the image is?
In short, can you dispute the existence of God based on saying “this” bit or “that” bit is simply coincidence? Sure. But once you step back and look at all the dots there’s such an overwhelming preponderance of dots that it’s indisputable.
Have you looked at all the dots, or are you focused on only a few here, a few there, and dismiss the concept simply because the overall picture isn’t perceived?
Take a look at all those dots.
Then step back and see the whole.
