THE WITNESS OF NATURE

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First off tonight, I would like to turn your attention to the evidence of God as found in light, color, motion, shape, and perspective.

There’s much more to vision than meets the eye. Every time we open our eyes, we must translate an incredibly complicated mass of information into images that make sense. We see with our brains. And what we see can even help our minds to believe.

Isn’t it interesting that all these concrete, physical objects become real to us only because of something as insubstantial as light, something as spiritual, perhaps, as light. Plants take on a definite shape in the light. Wood shows its texture and form, in the light. The walls define the size of the room in the light.

When we turn on all the lights, everything seems real. Now we can believe. Without light, we can’t see to believe. Did you ever stop to wonder why? And did you ever wonder just how the human eye does see? Is it a camera, snapping away and sending pictures to the brain? Does it record scenes electrically? Let’s look at just how light and our eyes work together.

When light strikes our eyes, it first hits the transparent cornea. The iris, located behind the cornea, controls the amount of light entering the eye by changing the size of the pupil, the hole in its center that appears black.

Once the proper amount of light has been admitted into the eye, it must be bent in order to focus. The cornea, because of its bulging surface, bends light sharply toward the center of the eye. The light then reaches the tiny lens, which is about the size and shape of a small bean. The lens consists of over 2,000 infinitely fine layers of transparent fiber.

This lens, unlike the lens in a camera, is pliable and can bulge slightly or flatten out. This changes the way light is bent and thus helps the eye to focus very sharply. Human vision is extraordinarily flexible. We can focus on objects a few inches from our nose and then switch instantly to a clear, sharp view of a distant star.

After being focused by the lens, light passes through the clear jelly-like substance that fills most of the interior of our eyes. This vitreous humor is matched to the lens in such a way that it keeps light traveling in the same focused path.

Finally light hits the retina, a pink coating that covers the back of the eye. The retina corresponds roughly to film in a camera. Packed into the retina lie what are called rods and cones. These photoreceptors contain light-sensitive pigments.

The rods and cones are a bit like having two kinds of film in a camera. Plump cones are most active in bright light. They give us full colored, sharp vision. The slender rods are for dim light. Like highly sensitive black-and-white film, they create a monochromatic picture when little light is available. That is why color seems to disappear at night and we see basically different shades of gray.

About 130 million of these rods and cones are mixed together throughout the retina, occupying an area the size of a postage stamp. This enables us to switch with relative ease from vision in bright sunlight to vision in very dim light.

Our photoreceptors, the rods and cones, also perform another vital function. They transform the light they receive into signals, partly electrical and partly chemical. These coded signals are what will reach the brain.

To carry those signals, retinal nerve fibers are required. These fibers create a complex interconnected network that fans out over the retina. This data collection system brings all signals together at one point. The nerve fibers are bunched together like a cable and pass out the back of the eye as the optic nerve. Now things are just beginning to get complicated. The optic nerves from each eye crisscross in the brain. They somehow exchange information so that the images from two eyes can be coordinated into one stereoscopic field of vision. Then a new set of specialized nerve fibers picks up the signals and carries them to the visual cortex in the back of the brain. In this small mass of gray matter, the actual phenomenon of ‘seeing’ takes place.

The billions of cells in our visual cortex are arranged in a number of layers. All these cells have highly specialized functions. Some send projections to other areas of the brain where memory and association occur. Most add, combine, exchange, and organize visual data in some mysterious way yet to be fathomed. The result is perception, a picture in the mind.

Clearly, seeing is no simple matter. The organs that produce sight are a marvel. Scientists tell us that the delicate engineering of the eye’s cornea and lens makes the most advanced camera seem like a child’s toy by comparison. The tiny rods and cones in the retina transform light into electricity and chemistry through processes the most sophisticated laboratory cannot reproduce. And finally, brain cells in our visual cortex synthesize countless bits of data into the miracle of perception something no high-tech computer can come close to doing. Engineering, chemistry, information processing all are involved every time we open our eyes. All suggest that our eyes are marvelously designed. In fact, the more we learn about vision, the harder it is to ascribe all this ingenuity to chance.

The eye all but demands a Creator. We have to ask, Could the human eye have simply evolved from something simple to its present complexity? Let me tell you what Charles Darwin said about that. Darwin, you recall, is the man who first proposed the theory of evolution. But at one point he stated that the thought of how the eye could possibly be produced by natural selection made him ill.

There’s a very good reason why the human eye is so distressing to the evolutionist and why it presents such a stumbling block to developing a consistent model of natural selection. The theory of evolution states that organisms change through natural selection. That means, for example, that strong, healthy animals are naturally selected to survive over weaker ones because they are better adapted to their environment. And slowly animals become better and better adapted. Beneficial changes are preserved; harmful changes are weeded out. All this, however, must happen over millions of years as a result of millions of tiny genetic changes. These mutations, it is believed, gradually accumulate and result in more complex living things.

Now here’s the problem. The human eye is absolutely useless unless complete. It simply can’t gradually evolve. There is no way that part of an eye could be beneficial to an animal. Natural selection would eliminate, not preserve, any partially developed eye organs.

The lens, which focuses light, would be useless without the retina, which senses light. All the light received would serve no purpose without the nerve fibers that carry signals to the brain. And these signals would be useless without the visual cortex, which interprets them.

Vision involves a complex interaction of nerves, muscles, fluids, glands, and brain cells. All must be perfectly integrated and balanced in order for us to see. Everything must be functioning or nothing functions. So you see it is very, very difficult to imagine how something like the eye could develop gradually.

Thinking about it made Darwin ill. But it need not make us ill. The eye isn’t just a baffling mystery. It is a wonderful work of art if we understand it as the work of an Almighty Creator.

If we will only open our eyes to the wonder of vision, seeing can help us see the Creator God.

We can see how vision and the eye point to a Designer or Creator. The Bible also tells us that light itself can point to Him. God is light. He illuminates. He warms. He makes things real. The symbol is pretty clear. But, you know, scientific discoveries about light have shown more about why it is an especially fitting symbol.

At first, light seems pretty simple. Look at any light source and you see just a flood of white. But if you pass a ray of light through a prism, you see something quite different. The glass of the prism refracts or bends light and spreads the ray into its different wavelengths, causing the whole spectrum of color to appear.

It was through experiments like this that scientists long ago discovered that light actually contains all colors. The light we call white combines every color in the rainbow. In fact, color itself exists only through light.

Normally we think of an object’s color as something it possesses, something painted on it. The redness of an apple seems a part of it, period. The color orange seems inescapably a property of an orange. But, in fact, the light falling on such objects is what gives them their color. When the colors in white light reach an apple, it reflects back to our eyes only one part of the spectrum, red light. The surface of an orange reflects back to our eyes only orange light."

PLANT PRODIGIES

Exploring the local park or forest, most of us see only a mass of green, an assortment of nondescript leaves and branches spread before us. Little do we dream, on our Sunday afternoon strolls, that we are unwitting witnesses to architectural feats, chemical marvels, innovative aviation, and complex data processing. It’s right here, if only we look closely enough.

Most of us use plants simply to grace our living rooms, add color to our porches, freshen up our offices. They’re nice to have around, of course. Nice to have in the background. We don’t notice them that much. We don’t notice, for example, how much is involved in what appears to be a simple, common thing: a plant turning toward the light. We just kind of expect them to do it. They turn toward the light naturally; they’re attracted to it. Plants need sunlight to stay healthy, to grow. But how do they do it? And how do they manage that technological feat of turning light directly into energy?

Much of the information shared in this chapter is based on a study of plants by science writer Felix Paturi. He called his work, "Nature, Mother of Invention." In this chapter we’re going to see just how incredibly inventive Mother Nature is by looking at plant prodigies.

Plants are masters of what is called ‘phototropism,’ the movements of plants when stimulated by light. They pack all the necessary mechanics—the means of measuring, interpreting, and moving—into one compact unit. And it’s incredibly sensitive. A plant kept in a dark room for a day will react to a single flash of light two-thousandths of a second long. In a tree or bush, individual leaves bend and turn so that as few as possible are overshadowed and all take in adequate radiation. Plants have solved an energy problem that still plagues our industrialized world, and they’ve done it on a large scale. They use energy efficiently and without hazardous wastes. Think about it. Plants have been producing refuse for thousands of years, far longer than factories. But they dispose of wastes without pollution. Their wastes are broken down in the soil to become food again. Production and decomposition cancel each other out. Everything is recycled. Such a well-balanced system can go on functioning indefinitely.

Sun power makes roses red, violets blue, and ferns green. Is it any wonder the psalmist was moved to write in praise of Jehovah: ‘He makes grass grow for the cattle, and plants for man to cultivate, bringing forth food from the earth’ (Psalm 104:14, NIV)!

The psalmist saw a wise Creator in the wonder of growing things. How much more should we see that now. Sunlight is a vital part of the miracle. And so is water. Let’s look at how plants absorb it.

Say you live in an apartment on the sixth floor, about sixty feet from the ground. And let’s say you and your family use forty gallons of water a day. It takes an extensive pipe system and a lot of pressure to pump those forty gallons, sixty feet up in the air. That’s one reason you get those nice little bills every month.

But did you realize that a full grown birch tree does that much work on a hot summer day? It gets forty gallons up to its branches and leaves every day, without electricity or gas or power pump. In fact, the tree itself needs to supply no energy to do this. Everything is automatic.

When water evaporates from the leaves, it creates a constant compensating suction of water below. The suction continues through twigs, branches, and trunk down to the roots.

This happens because the tree’s ‘water pipes’ are actually many, many microscopic tubes. No man-made suction pump has ever managed to pull water up more than thirty feet. Columns of water suctioned higher than this in ordinary pipes inevitably collapse. But the tallest of trees are able to suction up water to their uppermost branches because of their ‘capillaries’ tiny tubes a few thousandths of a millimeter in diameter.

How true these words ring from Psalm 104:16: ‘The trees of the Lord are well watered, the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.’

The trees that He planted, indeed, how ingeniously they are watered. But there’s much more to plant technology and engineering. Did you know that plants are also extraordinary architects?

In the 1850s, architect Sir Joseph Paxton entered a competition to design the building that would house London’s world exhibition. He longed to outdo his rivals with an epoch-making design. Paxton conjured up a building of gigantic dimensions, which would have nothing heavy or clumsy about it; he imagined a structure that would produce the effect of lightness, even weightlessness. But the problem was, there was no way to construct such a building at the time. Large structures required massive walls to support them. There seemed no way to create the graceful, airy building Paxton had in mind.

But then he remembered a certain plant he’d worked with as a gardener in his youth: the royal water lily. The floating leaves of this lily are huge, up to six feet in diameter, and very thin. But in spite of this, they’re quite stable. They achieve this stability by a complicated strutting on the underside. Ribs radiate from the center of the leaf outward, splitting up into many branches.

The royal water lily gave Paxton the key to making his architectural dream come true. He used a few main struts connected by many small ribs in his design. And he won the competition. The result? The Crystal Palace of the world exhibition, a smashing success. It proved to be a great turning point in architecture. The bold skyscrapers of steel and glass we see all around us today actually date back to that graceful, airy Crystal Palace, and, yes, back to the remarkable design of the royal water lily.

Plants have also mastered the art and science of aviation. And they did it long before Orville and Wilbur Wright propelled their frail craft into the air. We see this most often in the way seeds navigate to suitable soil. If a tree dropped its seeds straight down, the seedlings would have to try to grow in the shade of the parent tree and would soon choke each other out. Seeds need to be transported away from the parent tree or plant, and this is accomplished in a variety of ways.

The common dandelion sends its seeds aloft by means of tiny parachutes. First the plant actually measures relative humidity, temperature, and velocity. "It will release its seeds only when conditions are just right. A steady wind must be blowing, not just a brief gust; the air must be warm and dry indicating that rising wind currents will prevail. Only then do the flying seeds let go and venture on their all-important journey. And these dandelion seeds, hanging under their parachutes like so many paratroopers, are able to travel remarkable distances.

Several other plants also transport seeds by means of parachutes. And what’s very interesting is that these plants come from widely different botanical families. They are not confined to one species or genus; they are not one type of plant. Now this presents a real problem for the theory of evolution. Its one thing to assume that one plant group managed to evolve this ingenious parachute solution to the problem of seed transportation. That, in it self, takes a lot of faith. But to believe that a whole range of different plant types all developed this same amazing solution to a common challenge, takes more faith than I could ever muster.

I hope you are beginning to see that behind all the ingenuity of plants solving technical problems lies one common denominator, one common source: an ingenious Creator.

From parachutes we move to gliders. The most interesting example is probably the winged seed of the tropical liana. It grows high up in the branches of its parent tree amid beautiful, shining green leaves. The liana seed develops two curved wings, transparent, gleaming, and very elastic. When the seed releases from the tree, it glides away in the breeze.

Coldly objective scientists grow eloquent when observing this bit of plant aeronautics. One professor described the liana glider in this way: ‘Circling widely, and gracefully rocking to and fro, the seed sinks slowly, almost unwillingly, to the earth. It needs only a breath of wind to make it rival the butterflies in flight.’

Early aviation pioneers were also impressed with the perfect flight of the liana seed. In building craft light enough to soar in the wind, stability was the key. Early flying machines kept falling apart. But the liana glider’s gossamer winds were remarkably stable. And so two flying pioneers, Etrich and Wels, made use of the liana seed in designing a tailless glider. The craft that resulted in 1904 proved to be a milestone in aviation history, gliding for about 900 meters. Another technological marvel pointing to nature as the mother of invention.

Well, we’ve seen parachutes and gliders in the plant world; how about helicopters? The Norway maple seed is one example. It comes equipped with tiny curving wings. When the seed falls from the tree, air friction causes it to rotate quickly. It spins in a spiral path around the nut at its base. The effect is exactly the same as that produced by spinning helicopter blades. The rotation creates a complete circular surface, which the wind can grip. And so, of course, the seed falls much more slowly, and the tiniest bit of wind can push it more than 100 yards. Aeronautics! Who would have thought that trees would lead the way? Who can fathom the creative Mind behind it all?

Think for a moment of a mainframe computer, one of the truly great feats of modern technology. Its ability to store and retrieve data, and to compute and sort and list is mind-boggling. Computers perform functions in a split second that would take mathematicians weeks or even months. These machines are real problem solvers.

And electronic computers are getting smaller and faster almost every day. Micro-electronics continues to develop tinier and more efficient chips and circuits. "But as impressive as computer number crunching is, there’s something even more impressive that I can hold in the palm of my hand--a tiny marvel that rivals all the information processing that a room full of computers can do. What is it? A common, ordinary seed.

Now some of you may be saying, ‘Wait a minute. I know seeds grow into flowers and trees, but doing the work of a computer? Isn’t that taking it a bit far?’

Well, let’s think about it. A single plant seed must contain all the plant specifications; all the information about its appearance and behavior has to be stored right in one seed. The size and shape and color of the plant, its reactions in heat and cold, light and shade, in drought or downpour, all must be determined beforehand in the seed. Now how many megabytes would be taken up in a computer just to program the color of a plant’s flower? Or, say, to mathematically encode just the outward form of a tree? Think about programming in the exact geometric shape of leaves, buds, blossoms, fruit, bark, stems. We’re getting into millions and millions of digital notations. Think about trying to program the chemical qualities of the cell sap, the disposition of various types of tissue. And then try to figure out how to instruct the plant about survival techniques in various environments. How would you program in, the remarkable range of adaptations we’ve talked about today?

Well, science writer Felix Paturi, for one, concluded that the storage capacity of a large modern computer would scarcely suffice for all this data. But it’s all here, all that information and more is stored in each tiny seed.

Incredible computer. Do you want to look at the far horizon of high technology? You don’t have to go to Silicon Valley. You don’t have to go to MIT. Just dig up a seed burrowing into the ground. Here’s information processing that is most mind-boggling.

Here is solid evidence for an infinitely wise Creator. I can’t believe a seed is the product of natural selection or genetic mutation. Weak animals can be weeded out by natural selection. Genetic mutation can produce a few freaks now and then. But those blind processes don’t invent computers this size. I’m sorry. That just isn’t done.

If we can’t see an incredibly ingenious God behind plant aviation and architecture and chemistry and the seed computer, then something’s wrong with our eyesight. Our Creator has solved a vast array of technical problems. He’s created solutions that have inspired our greatest inventions.

WHO TOLD THE HONEYBEE?

Computers and rockets and dictionaries and planes are the product of genius and hard work. But the men who design them are the product of accident and chance. So we are told.

But did you know that the common honeybee, without even trying, can upset the conclusions of brilliant minds?

Just how much are you willing to attribute to the unlikely magic of the ages? If evolution happened, how did it happen? Would it be unreasonable to ask some specific questions in one small area?

Come with me as we watch the fascinating activities of the common honeybee. I promise there will be some surprises and a rather formidable dilemma for those who credit all creation to the supposed power of time to do in the past what it cannot do now!

Have you ever noticed that bees are incredible architects? The hive is a masterpiece of engineering, with rows and rows of six-sided rooms with walls of wax. The marble palace that we call the comb is built by young bees under seventeen days old. Yet each little room is the same size, six-sided, with each of three pairs of walls facing the other. The walls of the rooms are only 1/350^th of an inch thick, yet so strong that one pound of comb will support at least twenty-five pounds of honey.

How do these young bees know that the hexagon has the smallest circumference, therefore requiring the smallest amount of building material? How do they know that hexagon cells are the best and most economical plan? Who told them? Yet they do it all without blueprints or drawing boards or protractors. And every cell is perfect just the size to fit a bee!

How do they do it? They hang themselves up like a festoon from the roof of the hive. Or it may be in the hollow of a tree. One bee hooks onto the roof, and another bee hooks onto his dangling legs, and so on. These chains of bees grow longer and longer, and as they sway back and forth, they hook onto bees on the right and left until they form a living curtain.

They hang themselves up like this to produce wax. You see, there are four wax pockets on each side of the bee’s abdomen. And after about twenty-four hours of hanging, wax begins to appear from these pockets. When a bee feels its wax is ready, it climbs up over the other bees, takes the wax out of its pockets, chews it, and pats it onto the comb. At first they just pile on wax. Then they form rough cups, climb into them, and push. And apparently all this pushing sets up vibrations which enable the bees to judge the elasticity and thickness of the walls. The result is the perfect shape and the incredibly thin walls. And that’s the way the comb is built. The bees perform their tasks in perfect cooperation, as if their assignments were posted on a bulletin board!

It must be a marvel of organization, you say. Yes. But who directs it? "It is true that no honeybee lives to itself. They all live for the hive. There may be forty to seventy five thousand bees in a hive, or more, all working in perfect harmony, as a unit.

But who is the leader? Is it the queen? You might say she exerts leadership at the time of swarming. But even then the worker bees play the key role in locating a new nest site. The queen, of course, is an egg-laying machine. In a single day she can lay two thousand eggs. And evidently she does produce chemical signals that in some way enable the colony to function smoothly. For we are told that it takes less than a hundred worker bees to build a comb if the queen is present, but thousands of them if there is no queen. But is she the leader of the hive? Certainly not.

And the drones are not the leaders. These male bees are completely indolent. They spend their lifetime waiting, just waiting for a chance to chase after a queen on her mating flight. The worker bees are unquestionably the real marvels of the hive. But they have no leader. Yet somehow they get all the right things done!

Bees need two things, pollen and nectar. Both are found in flowers. And as they fly off to the fields of flowers, they go marvelously equipped. In the first place, a honeybee is a fantastically engineered flying machine. Man made freight planes can carry a payload of about 25 percent of their weight. But bees can carry almost 100 percent of their weight. The bee needs no propeller or jet. Its short, wide wings both lift and drive it. It can move straight up or down, or it can hover in midair. Its stubby wings fold in a split second when it dives into a flower. Or it can use its wings as a fan to cool the beehive.

The bee has three places for storing cargo. One is a tank inside its body in which it stores nectar. Then, on its hind legs, it has two storage baskets for carrying pollen. --Imagine a freight plane with its load dangling underneath!

Are these pollen baskets something that evolved because of a need? Well, man first wrote about the bee in the year 3000 BC It had the pollen baskets then. And it hasn’t changed since!

A bee can suck up a load of nectar in a minute. It takes three minutes for it to build up two bulging loads of pollen in the baskets on its hind legs.

"How does it do it? Well, the bee dives into a flower, its body picking up pollen by brushing past the pollen boxes. It splashes about in the flower, and the yellow powder clings to the hairs on its body.

But now it isn’t so simple. How does it get the pollen into the baskets? And how does it keep the pollen from blowing away in flight? The load must be moistened, pressed together, tamped down, and evenly balanced on each leg. But believe it or not, the bee does it and all the while hovering in midair or hanging by one claw!

And now the little honeybee, acting as a scout, has discovered a field of flowers and is ready to return to the hive with a sample of the nectar and the pollen. How will it find its way back? Keep in mind that it may be several miles away, and that its search may have led it in several directions before it made its discovery. Yet now it will fly straight back to the hive!

Who told it how to do it? What sort of navigational equipment does it possess? And once back in the hive, how will it communicate to its thousands of fellow bees the location of the treasure it has found?

It is true that bees are able to distinguish odors with great skill. If a bee returns to the hive with nectar from flowers nearby, the other bees will leave the hive and fly directly to the source. And they also act as if they have an internal clock. If they discover that food is available at a particular time of day, they return for more at the same hour the next day.

But what if the flowers are several miles distant? Surely there must be some limitation to the tiny creatures’ sense of smell. What then? How can the little bee get across to its fellow bees the location of the treasure it has found? Well, you haven’t heard anything yet. Let me tell you about the "waggle dance"!

Sometimes a bee returning with nectar and pollen goes through a peculiar performance that many scientists believe is its way of communicating the location of the source of nectar. It gives samples of the nectar to the other bees and gets them all excited. Then, as they watch, it does a fancy dance before them called the waggle dance because of the way it waggles its abdomen. It goes through a figure eight across the face of the comb. And the astonishing thing is that the angle of the dance down the vertical comb represents the horizontal direction of the food source with respect to the direction of the sun.

And not only that. The number of dances per minute indicates the distance to the field. But surprisingly, the number is in reverse ratio to the distance. That is, the farther away the field, the smaller the number. In other words, if the bee goes through ten rounds in fifteen seconds, the field of flowers is three hundred feet away. But if the bee moves in slow motion, say two rounds in fifteen seconds, the flowers are almost four miles away. And listen to this. A little calculation will show that this relationship to distance is not one of simple arithmetic, but is logarithmic! What do you think of that?

What kind of brain does the little honeybee have? Who taught it to do all this? How did this tiny creature learn to relate sun angles and distances to dance step routines? And how is it that millions of bees understand the language?

Now I am aware that some scientists are not convinced that bees do understand the language. They are not convinced that this strange dance really does communicate to other bees the location of a field of flowers. I am aware of the controversy over this matter.

But if by any chance you are inclined to doubt, then consider this. A bee, by means of this dance, can communicate the location to human beings. Men can understand it. Men can watch the dance and find the field of flowers. Is that any less striking? Is it any less a miracle to communicate that information to human beings, in logarithmic terms, than to get it across to other bees? I think not!

I say again, What kind of brain does the little honeybee have? Is it an accident?

One writer suggests that if you wished to duplicate the internal circuitry of the honeybee, if you wished to match its navigational and guidance system, this is what you would need to start with: ‘Internal clock. Polarized-light sensor. Sun-angle azimuth computer. Instrument for measuring true vertical. Dead reckoning equipment. Wind speed and direction indicator. Trigonometric calculator and tables. Air and ground speed indicators.’

It sounds a little extravagant. But is it really; after what we have already seen of the honeybee’s accomplishments?

And I wonder if you realize just how necessary the honeybee is even to life itself. Bees, of course, could not exist without plants and flowers, with their pollen and their nectar. But it works both ways. Many kinds of plants and flowers could not exist without the bees to pollinate them. In fact, many of the most beautiful or most fruitful plants would disappear. And what a loss that would be!

Now tell me. Let’s reason again. Did the honeybee, with all its fantastic equipment for its job, just happen? Through long ages? A little bit at a time?

What if the bee started out with no pollen baskets on its hind legs? What if it had the pollen baskets, but not the knee joints to press the pollen into the baskets, or the sense to know how to do it? What if it had no hairs on its body to collect the pollen or the hairs but no way to comb off the pollen? What if it hadn’t developed a nectar tank yet? What if it had no wax making equipment or didn’t know it was supposed to hang up in a festoon for twenty-four hours to make the wax come out? What if the wax would not withstand the high temperatures of the hive, as few waxes could? What if the bees didn’t know how to make royal jelly to feed the queen and the queen died? What if a bee couldn’t find its way back to the hive or back to a field of flowers?

The questions fairly tumble out. They are endless. I think you can see that any one piece of the bee’s physical equipment might be useless without the others. To be of use, the bee’s equipment and know-how would have to have developed simultaneously, not little by little! Or if evolution happened- consider this. That very first bee, away back there, sitting on a limb of a tree. What kind of bee was it? Was it a queen? But a queen could not reproduce without a drone with which to mate.

Was it a drone? Drones can’t reproduce themselves without a queen. "A worker bee then? Hardly. For worker bees are creatures that can’t possibly reproduce themselves.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the whole colony would have to evolve at once, simultaneously with every individual bee’s physical equipment and know-how fully developed, ready for business!

And, of course, with the honeybee as with the birds, it isn’t evolution at all. It's creation!

Isn’t it easier to believe the simple, uncomplicated, straight-forward statement that you find on the first page of your Bible? ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.’

What we believe about our origin affects what we believe about ourselves; it affects our sense of self-worth. For if we just evolved from some lowly cell in the sea, we would not have the dignity of being formed in the image of God. And if the human race did not fall from that high position, if Adam didn’t sin, then why did we need a Saviour for the human race? The mission of Jesus becomes pointless and the cross only a meaningless drama!

We could go on and on. I think you can see that what we believe about our beginnings could well determine our eternal destiny. Is it any wonder that the devil, fighting against our souls, aims his sharpest arrows at the first seven chapters of Genesis? Why is this generation, obsessed with piecing together our beginnings, looking everywhere but in God’s Word?

There can be only one answer. It wants to find Adam, but not in Genesis! Yet all the while the simple statement of Scripture stands firm, quietly inviting our faith: ‘In the beginning God created.’ Could it be that the evidence collected by Bob Gentry and many others was left by the Creator to help establish faith in the Genesis account? After all, the Bible itself says: ‘Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’ (Hebrews 11:1). Though the Genesis account will never be proven beyond question, God has given us all the evidence we need for strong confidence in His creation.

Doubt is in the air. But so are the birds, who fly above us better equipped for navigation than the latest air force fighter jets, able to traverse unmapped oceans with their built in instruments.

Controversy swirls around us. But so do the bats, who effortlessly operate their ultrasonic radar, reminding us that neither technology nor wisdom are exclusive with the human mind.

Skepticism encircles the earth. But so do the stars, speeding along in their unerring orbits, keeping their appointment with a precision that boggles the mind. Book after book insists authoritatively that this earth evolved over millions of years. Evolutionists talk confidently about the magic of the ages, of happy accidents that exploded us ever upward with never a need for intelligent direction, never a need for God. "But all the while birds and bats and the stars eloquently challenge their entrenched beliefs. Long ago David proclaimed, ‘The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, and night unto night reveals knowledge. There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard.’ (Ps. 19:1-3)

Nobody can escape the grand harmony as all nature joins in the unmistakable chorus, ‘There is a Creator!’ But the One who made this world also let His creatures nail Him to a rough, splintery cross outside Jerusalem so that lost sinners might find eternal life in Him. And even the evidence of the birds and the bats, of suns and racing constellations, convincing as it is, pales before the mighty argument of Calvary."

I hope I have given you much food for thought as you consider our blessed Creator and His handiwork. God bless you as you search for truth.