...In Your Eye!

Once upon a time there was no mud on the Earth.

Or there was, but it didn't stay in one place very long. Any excess of water flow or some other disaster rinsed it right out into the sea, where it would eventually sink to the bottom of the ocean after smothering a bunch of fish near the shore.

Then plants started taking hold on the land and spreading out everywhere, and the mud stayed put because the plants kept it from sluicing along with any old rainstorm that happened by.

And everything changed.

At least, that's what geologists like Neil Davies have figured out happened by studying things like the fossil record and the shapes of ancient and current rivers and seashores. When mud sticks around it alters the flow channels that water makes and gives rivers shapes more like the ones we know. Bends create new environments as water finds places that are still rather than rushing, and new life develops. Most current theories suggest plants began to spread out and establish themselves on dry land between 450 and 350 million years ago -- about the same time that Davies and other geologists see an an increase in the levels of mud that stays on the land instead of washing out to sea. If you try to imagine a world without as much mud on the land, Davies says in the above-linked  article at Knowable magazine, Earth "becomes a very different kind of planet."

The new environments -- both of the mud itself and of the new conditions it creates -- lead to different forms of life succeeding where they might have died out before or barely clung to a niche corner of their world. That alters the environment even more as the new forms use its conditions to thrive and reproduce.

Genesis 2 suggests that God created plant and animal life, including human beings, "out of the ground," and while the fossil record shows life existed before plants started keeping mud out of the ocean, the muddy change allowed life to take new directions, one of which apparently led to us. So it would seem that whether you prefer to read Genesis 2 literally or you blend its understandings with those uncovered through scientific observation, God has done some amazing things with mud.

Which is kind of sobering when a look at the modern world suggests that what we do with it most of the time is sling it at each other in the months before elections.