I screenshot this photo a few days ago from Snapchat, where someone I followed was visiting Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery. I’m not sure what this was called (and a cursory search of the gallery’s website didn’t produce an obvious result), but it was so arresting that I wanted to share it here.

When I saw this, I looked at it for a few minutes on end. I was totally captivated by it, not simply for its excellent craftsmanship, but more for how perfectly it embodies the story that all creation has come from nothing—ex nihilo.

If a human being can create something like that arm and hand, with its delicate features and subtleties, from that wooden block, it seems so clear that the sometimes-whispers-of-the-heart that our silent God is simply a fiction have to be themselves the fiction.

It’s too much to say that art like this can be proof of God, but it is proof of transcendence.