God. Real. Right.

A good friend from San Angelo cut a cross-section of bell pepper and sent out a picture of it. There it is, randomly appearing from completely unrelated circumstances–the shape of Texas! She only sent the picture out for fun. But…
What could this astonishing concomitance of events mean? Oddly, there is a reason to ask that otherwise ridiculous question.
There are two common errors related to interpreting such circumstances, each derived from an extreme position.
The first error is the one that leads people to line up around the block to see the image of Mary in a window pane or to bid thousands of dollars for a piece of toast with “The Last Supper” etched into it. Whether it is good (like a sign from heaven), bad (like an ominous shadow in a dark room), or contrived (like laser-engraving an image in bread), people commonly intend significance on mundane objects. Some see that tendency as evidence that faith is absurd. They are wrong.
Because the other mistake people make is not seeing meaning in anything whatsoever. People making this mistake not only overlook legitimately suspicious “accidents”, but also ignore what simply does not make sense without appeal to the intent of an author or actor. Certainly, when the word “red” shows up in a bowl of alpha-bits it would be silly to think it a sign to buy the red car rather than the black one, or to vote Republican instead of Democrat. But by the same token, when the indicators of nature, both cosmological and biological, indicate that an intelligence must have been behind the way the universe formed, to ignore that there is intent behind the creation is to ignore too much for justification.
(Warning, the following section is too brief to be thorough, and too abstract to be enjoyed by any but the most ardent student of hermeneutics, and perhaps not even then since it is too brief to be thorough…)
In fact, people make the case against seeing meaning in natural features from two completely different positions. The first position is about the object in which meaning might be perceived, simply claiming that there really is nothing there. These arguments can credibly appeal to examples like the mountain face on Mars. But the second position is about the subject who intends meaning onto something. In that argument, seeing meaning where there is none is a feature of evolutionary development. To them, the ability to see vague appearances as real developed in order to avoid being eaten by whatever entity might be provoking the vague appearance!
But those two positions are incompatible, being based on competing claims–that seeing meaning is wrong in the former argument, but that seeing meaning is “right” (at least useful–the only right to a total naturalist) in the latter. Of course, the naturalist can always say that seeing “meaning” is simply an accidental byproduct of predator awareness, and is itself not useful. As this story from Reuters points out, for instance, even though it is fallacious to do so, employers do attach job performance expectations to the aesthetic appearance of employees. But that example reveals the weakness of the argument (that “meaning” is a byproduct of evolution) since meaning’s most developed expression, the aesthetic experience, has no credible (really, not even a theoretically potential) connection to survival and in fact can even tend against it. But those are arguments for another day.
The point here is that there is as much value in seeing that there is meaningfulness in everything around people as there is value in admitting that the specific meaning of most natural occurrences is either unknown or unknowable. In other words, to see meaningfulness everywhere is simply to acknowledge there is an intelligent actor behind everything–that there is a God. Denying or at least doubting specific meanings but acknowledging that there is meaningfulness recognizes the weakness of human interpretation while still acknowledging God’s activity. But pretending there is no meaning at all is just that, a pretense in order to avoid the one message present everywhere, from stars and cells to family structure and economics. That message is what Romans 1:20 makes crystal clear: a claim about general revelation not given with arguable signs in general form, but with clear language in specific form. There is an active, personal, moral power far greater than man (God, to be specific), and He is not hiding.