Creation: Beauty of Biology

So my first response to the previous talk is to take a gander at God from the point of view of biology. What does biology tell us about this God that created the organisms of this planet? And I want to consider a A couple things I saw in the last couple of weeks, I observed a couple things as we've been driving back and forth to our home. There is a residence that's been on the market for as many years as I've been in Cleveland, Georgia. It's been on the market for at least five years and it was finally purchased. And we've noticed activity over there and people that are going in and out and repairing things and all sorts of contractors are visiting in and out. And very lately we have noticed a woman and her maybe granddaughter out there at the mailbox. They've spent considerable time at the mailbox. And the older lady is sitting in a chair, and the younger one is slaving, it seems, over the mailbox. Trip after trip, I'm wondering, what in the world are they doing to the mailbox? And the last time we went by, I noticed that there was now a number painted on the mailbox. And, I mean, that only takes a certain amount of time, right? But there were now flourishes on the mailbox. There were these pretty fancy colors and all of this sort of thing. They were detailing the mailbox. That was interesting. Now, my response to this is, you know, I can look at a mailbox, like the one that was already there before they started detailing it, And the form and the shape of the mailbox indicates to me, or I can interpret it as indicating that somebody designed it. It's actually a rather clever little thing, the mailbox is. It just happens to be just the right height for that mail person to reach up and put the mail in and take the mail out, and all that sort of thing. So that seems to be an interesting coincidence that it would just happen to be just the right height if it wasn't designed. And it's got that funny shape to it. which is such that it sheds off the water, but at the same time it's only one piece of metal, so it's a really inexpensive way to keep the weather off of the things inside the mailbox. It's painted on the outside, which is further protection, keeping the metal from decaying and this sort of thing. And it's got a door that seals, keeps the weather out, at the same time it allows easy in-outs of stuff. And then there's just a whole bunch of things about the mailbox that indicate would indicate that this is designed. It didn't happen by a natural process, such as trees growing or anything like that. Somebody put some thought into making this mailbox. So, you know, the mailbox seems to indicate that something had designed it. But there's something more about this detailing. This detailing, I realized as I watched it, transformed my understanding of the mailbox. Because I could look at the mailbox and see the intelligent designer behind it, but I was really intrigued with what I deduced when I saw the mailbox with its detailing. I'm thinking, what if I was to, and I probably should, but what if I was to interrogate the person who had put this silly stuff on the mailbox? This isn't necessary for for giving and receiving mail, right? It's not going to make the mailbox any better than it was before. Besides the numbers, the numbers say I can see function in the numbers, helping people find that particular location. Although, who needs that with GPS now? But anyway, beyond the numbers, these funny little flourishes and colors, completely unnecessary. There is no function in this. It doesn't indicate any intelligent design. but it seems to indicate something else more interesting. Another example is in my biology class, I ask the students to write a journal and to hand their journal entries in every other chapter. And there's one young lady in my class who puts all of her journal entries into one notebook. Few students put it into one notebook and stick it in there. I return it before the next journal entry is due so that they continue and put everything into one journal. That's reasonable. She's got a notebook with a front cover. This is college now. This is college. She's got a front cover that's got Disney princesses on it. Very colorful. And if I was to, and I did, if I was to interrogate her as to why in the world she would submit to a biology professor at a college such an embarrassing notebook as that, I didn't say embarrassing, she would say, isn't it cool? I realized in her response that she could do nothing else, could she? She could do nothing. I mean, she's the one that bounces into the room. She's the one who, no matter where I am on campus, and no matter how far away she is, if she sees me, she says, Hi, Dr. Weiss! Hi, Dr. Weiss! She's in a car, driving down out of the campus. She leans out the window, nearly gets hit by the car going by. Hi, Dr. Weiss! She's outside my classroom while I'm teaching. She looks through the window of the classroom. Actually, you can hear her. So, I realized she could do nothing else but submit a journal with that kind of cover. Right? I mean, that's her. And now look at it the other way. The journal's cover tells me something about her. If I had never known her, if I had never heard her, if I'd never seen her, I would be able to infer something, in fact, something really interesting about her. It's not a design issue. It's giving me insight into something far more interesting than her ability to figure out mathematical equations or design things that work efficiently. The designs in the mailbox, it occurred to me, were probably things that couldn't not be done by the inhabitants of that house. It tells me something about those people that live there. It's not necessary for the design of the mailbox, but it gives us, I would argue, even more interesting insight Into the people who did this it's not necessary for the function, but it's a necessary consequence of the creators personality Personality of the creator interesting so turn to biology a border colleague Some of you know what I'm talking about. It's a dog that's black and white, kind of medium-sized dog, somewhat long-haired. There's one of these that sits outside of our church. It's waiting for people when they come to church. You pull in. I pull in to drop off my wife at the front door, and the dog is crouched right there in tent. watching the car as it comes in. And as soon as my wife gets out. And I start the car up to move the dog immediately goes up and circles the car at least four times before I can park. OK, when you come out of church, the the dog is sitting there crouched, watching your feet. and circles you as you go to the car. Now, some of you know what this dog is doing, because you know what a border collie does. A border collie is a herder, likes to herd things. This dog herds cars. It herds the people of our church. It's a wonderful thing out in the playground, by the way. It herds the children. You know, there's no danger of any kids getting hit by a car or anything. That dog herds everything. Doesn't nip. Doesn't do it. And it doesn't say a thing. But it seems to be like the person who puts the detailing on the mailbox. It seems to be that that dog has to do that. Seems to be designed to herd. That's weird. Okay. It's really cool. It's fun to watch. But it seems to be just built into, hardwired into that dog. And if you know anything about Border Collies, you know what I mean. They're just hardwired. You don't have to train them to herd anything. They herd it. Whatever it is. And think about this. A dog that herds. Where did that come from? Why is it herding things? What's the natural world use of a dog that herds? I have no idea. It's like, what is the utility of this? It seems to have a perfect function with human beings who heard. It's a wonderful, it just fits right in. It's almost like it was made for hurting. And it really fits that very beautifully, and there's no natural function that actually, natural world function that it seems to fulfill at all. But there's a couple other things we need to observe about it. If you go back to the origin of border collies, they were bred. At one time we didn't have border collies. And the humans bred dogs, breeding, crossing dogs, and discovered the border collie design in dogs. They didn't make border collies. They discovered them. This is the cool thing about breeding. breeding of plants and animals. Humans don't create these things. They actually discover something that seems to already be in there, but hidden. So humans didn't make it. It seems to be created for human use, seems to be designed for human use, yet humans didn't make it. And, if you go back, there's some recent research on the origin of dogs and all this sort of thing, genetic research that suggests that these dogs go back further than humans. That the border collie, this hidden design of border collie, has been there longer than humans have been around. So, humans didn't make it and it's preceding humans. So, where does this border collie theme come from? And, note also, You can't explain it from evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory says that, at least the modern theory of evolution, has natural selection that's operating on things, choosing, when it's got some variety out there, it chooses that form that survives better. Well, you can't choose a hidden thing. The border collie was there, but hidden. Natural selection can't work on something that's hidden. And it's even worse than that, because if in fact you breed the border collie, and now you've got a border collie, and you release him, he starts interacting with other dogs, doesn't seem to care what kind of dog it is, and pretty soon there ain't no border collie. Subsequent generations, the border collie is gone. So under natural circumstances, none of these breeds persist. So there's no time for evolution to ever work on it. It didn't come about by evolution. It can't. It's impossible. So where does the border collie come from? Very interesting. It's hidden and it disappears under wild conditions, so it can't be made by evolution. It wasn't made by humans and it precedes humans, but it looks like it was made for humans. As if Border collies, the need for a herding animal was anticipated by some designer and hidden for human discovery. After all, humans are going to use it, right? So it would be appropriate you would hide it in such a way that humans would be the ones that discover it. This seems to me to be a little bit like the appliques on a mailbox. This seems to be something more interesting than the design of the border collie itself. And it is extremely, it's amazingly designed. It's got special, you can't do that. Tendons in the in the back that connect the shoulder blades in such a way It's a really cool dog to watch as it can walk it runs in a completely different way than any other dog It's like it's creeping all the time, and it's it's and it just makes it possible to do what it does It's specially designed to be a herding animal besides this this desire to herd Where's that come from? In the book of Job, at the end of that book, when God has had enough of the three, four friends of Job, he pushes them aside and he says, OK, Job, stand up and act like a man. Well, that's not actually what it says. It says, Job, gird up your loins and be a man. Well, that is what it says. It is. Pull up your pants and act like a man. And then he proceeds to ask him a whole series of questions. Where were you when I created this veracity of the earth? Where were you? And you know more than half of those questions have to do with behavior of animals. Where did that come from? Where did the behavior of a border collie come from? Where did that evolve from? Who put the design of the border collie into a border collie? Not just the form of the animal, but the behavior of the animal. Oh, that's weird. And it's as if it was put there, somebody had it in mind what humans would need and put it there, hid it there for humans to find. That's really cool. I suggest that fits the biblical description of God, who knows ahead of time everything we're going to need and supplies those needs even before we ask. And he hid inside dogs, border collies, so that we could herd animals. But it was just border collies. It's wild. They're all over the place. Sled dogs, dogs that just, I want, put me on that sled. Let me go. This is cool. This is fun. I love cold. I love being next to another dog. I love being strapped to another dog. I love pulling this sled across Alaska, the biggest state in the United States of America. I mean, are you kidding? And they do. If you know anything about these dogs, they just love it. Try to put that smile in there because they have a smile too, don't they? They do. When you put them where they want to be, where they seem to have been designed to be, and they've got an amazing design. Yikes! How far they can go without eating, how the level of oxygen that they can survive on, and how they can breathe in 60 below zero temperatures and not freeze their lungs. Extraordinary designs, all seemingly to pull sleds in the snow. But again, hidden. We discovered these things. We didn't find a sled dog species. We bred these things. They were hidden as if God anticipated a need and fulfilled it before we'd ever use it and hid it so that we would find it. Pointers? Wow, it's so fun to watch pointers. I watched one one day, the kid, got himself into the bushes and was playing in the bushes. The mom comes out and calls for the kid. Can't see the kid, can't hear the kid, anything else. She looks over, there's the pointer, pointing. It's a bad thing to be a kid and have a pointer, isn't it? You just can't get away with anything. I mean, it's wild. The dog does that automatically. You take him for a walk and he points. I mean, what in the world? That's crazy. Again, hidden, seemingly designed for a function long before it's needed, and hidden so that humans could find it. Wow. Workhorse. Wow, we had horses, but we, by breeding, found this amazing draft horse. It can pull awesome, awesome loads. Wow, where did this come from? It's as if it was designed for human use, but again, hidden until humans could find it. What kind of a creator do we have creating domestic breeds of animals that are designed for human use, but hidden until humans need them? It goes beyond that. Think of the camels. In the fossil record, the camels that we're... When I say camel, you probably think of the desert camel. There's a couple of camels. The camel family includes the llamas, but we'll ignore the llamas for the moment and focus on the desert camels. extraordinary designs. Oh my word, that's so cool. I love going to the zoo and pointing out the designs of the camel. I mean, a foot that expands like a snowshoe on the sand. It's got What do you call them? Calluses that are built in. They're not calluses you get. Our calluses are produced when we do things with things. We get calluses. It's born with calluses that protect its legs from burning in the snow. In the sand. Okay, it must be getting late or something. I don't know. It's awesome of all the mammals. It can allow the greatest dehydration of any mammal. It can actually lose 25% of its body weight in water and still flow its blood. We lose 10% and we're catastrophically dead. You can't pump the blood because there's not enough water in it, okay? 25% and they can recover that. And they can recover 10% of their body weight in water every 10 minutes. They can drink 10 minutes. In 10 minutes, they can drink 10% of their body weight. And then they wait one hour, and they can drink another 20%, 10%. And then they can wait another hour for the last 5% if they're really dehydrated. In three hours, well, actually four, technically, four hours, they can be fully rehydrated. Humans can lose 5% of their body weight in water, and it takes 72 hours to rehydrate after that. Whoa, these guys seem to be designed for the deserts. But if we look at the fossil record of camels, here's an interesting coincidence. Camels come into the fossil record only after the first deserts come into the fossil record. The first camels in the fossil record are not designed for the desert. They don't live in the desert. They don't eat the things of the desert. Very first thing after the flood was a very, here's a profound, it's one of my favorite, I've discovered a few profound statements. And I love them. When I find a profound statement, I really love it. So I like sharing it. So here's a, beware. Be warned, here's a profound statement. I think the most, the wettest period of earth history was the flood. You're laughing at my profound statement, I don't understand. And the earth took a long time to dry off after being covered in water for a year and a week, 10 days. It took a long time. There weren't deserts immediately after the flood. There weren't, as far as we can tell, deserts for a couple hundred years. So, guess what? God didn't put a desert-designed camel onto the ark. He put another kind of camel onto the ark that lives in the world without deserts. It's a smaller animal, much happier in warmer environments. It's one that eats actually broad leaves in forests because that dominated in the world after the flood. And there were no desert camels on the ark, unlike all of the pictures on the ark. OK. Pictures of the Ark are ridiculous, okay? In fact, I don't think there's a single organism they picture going onto the Ark, which actually went on the Ark, okay? This is all wrong, but the camel would have been, in one sense, his body form would have reminded you of a camel, and you may have classified him as a camel, but significantly smaller, and it just wouldn't have been the desert camel. A desert camel comes in as a species, not a breed. Humans didn't breed them. But it arrived, it appeared on this planet as a species, a wild species, which actually is domesticatable at the same time that deserts appeared on the world after the flood. Oh, that's cool. He hid within camels a design for a desert animal hundreds of years before deserts even came to be. That's cool. In fact, I suggest that it was actually done in the creation, thousands of years before deserts would be needed. And it's not just camels, it's every desert organism was not created as a desert organism. That design was hidden inside organisms, plants, and animals in the creation and would be revealed as actual species, not by breeding by humans, but actual species would arrive on the earth a camel would give rise to a desert camel at the time that deserts appeared. Also, riding horses. Likewise, there weren't no horses on the Ark, at least not these big ones that we're talking about today. The nine species of horse that live today, three species of horse, three species of ass, and three species of zebras, for nine total species, none of them were on the Ark. All of them were actually very recent organisms on this planet. As a matter of fact, once again, coincidentally, in the fossil record, they appear in North America at the time grasslands spread across North America. Before that, soon after the flood, we didn't have grasslands. Grasslands are, they're not as dry as deserts, but they're But they're dry, they're drier than is necessary for trees. Basically what happens in really dry environments, forest fires can destroy, can move across places and that'll kill the trees. And plants are designed to put most of their energy into the roots and so they can be burned off, they can be cropped, you can eat them all the way down to the ground and you still haven't gotten rid of most of the energy. The energy is below the surface. And so grasses can thrive in places that are, there's more rain than a desert, more than 10 inches of rain a year, but there's not enough rain to put out forest fires or prevent them from occurring. So grasslands appeared on the earth just before deserts first appeared on the earth after the flood. So the first horses were three foot tall, had three and four toes, front and back legs. They did not eat grass. They ate, again, broadleaf plants of the forest. They could not trot or all of those special little, those special motions that humans, that humans like, that horses do, that are unique to horses. Camel also has a unique gait that is not found in the non-desert camels. The horses that came off the ark were a very different critter. Designed, interestingly enough, God put on the ark the kind of horses that would be needed for the world just after the flood. And it took hundreds of years, perhaps about 200 years, for grasslands to spread across the earth. And at that moment, we then have not only horses appearing at that time, but all sorts of other organisms that can live on the grasslands of the earth. And it takes a very different kind of tooth If there's a silica, pieces of silica in that grass that'll wear down your teeth and destroy them. So you've got to have very special teeth called hypsodont teeth. And in, at the time that grasslands appear on North America, 16 different groups of mammals produce, appear with hypsodont teeth. Rabbits, elephants, camels, horses, they all developed hypsodont teeth at the same time that grasslands appeared. As if somebody knew that this was going to happen, that they knew enough about the history of the earth over hundreds and thousands of years to anticipate what was needed and hid the information for that species so that it would appear at the right time. Is this something that could be explained by evolution? No, not at all. It's hard enough to create this extraordinary design of a desert camel by such a process, a random process of evolution, but to actually have, at one time, have 16 different groups of animals producing hypsodonti, which is a very special design, and 14 different groups of plants producing C4 photosynthesis, which is appropriate for the grassland environments. Whoa, this is awesome. All at the same time. You can't do it once, but to do it 14 times, 16 times, all at the right time? No, evolution cannot explain this. And again, it's hidden, seems to be hidden information, designed. These are not just breeds designed for human use later, but species design. and hidden until the environments appear. It keeps going. We're discovering viruses that attack cancers. This is really cool. Viruses, one of the major characteristics of viruses is they are what we call species specific. They go after very specific cells. They are capable of identifying a particular type of cell. and will attack no other cell. They are very good at that. Even something like HIV virus goes after the helper T cells in our body. That's it. No other cell in our body. Only one kind of cell out of hundreds of types of cells in our body and only one species on this planet. Except possibly a rhesus monkey. There's a possibility that one other species can be infected with the virus. Aside from a mouse that we genetically engineered with the human immune system so that we could do experiments on it. Okay, there are three species that can be infected, but in those three species, only one cell out of the hundreds of different kinds of cells in the body are attacked by that virus, are dealt with by that virus. Viruses in general have this ability to pick one type of cell, typically in one type of organism. Very, very specific. And we've known that about viruses for some time, and we've begun to discover viruses that actually go after cancer cells. A normal cell that becomes cancerous becomes susceptible to this virus. The virus is so specific that it doesn't go after the cell when it's not cancerous. It only goes after the cell when it becomes cancerous. Whoa, that's special design. And we're, you know, the secular folks, the people who believe in evolution and all this are wondering where did this come from? How do you do that? How do you evolve something that can go after one particular type of cancer that might appear in, how often? One human being on a continent? How's that going to spread? How's that going to be? It doesn't make any sense. There's no evolutionary way to explain a cancer attacking virus. It's almost as if somebody knew about cancers before they would ever come to be and created special viruses to go after the cancers that would later come to be. Now, actually, from what we've been doing so far, this is not sounding so crazy. It's as if something knows ahead of time what's going to be needed and creates those things. Here's another example. Camouflage. I love it. The organisms that... You look at this picture. Find the frog. I can't find a frog. He looks like everything around him. Okay. Find the lizard. Find the whatever. Amazing. Camouflage. I mean, my personal favorite are the organisms that can actually change their camouflage. Like the, I mean the chameleon is sort of boring, he can only change. I subletted an apartment at the University of Chicago once. It was normally occupied during the year by three guys. Guess what the color of the apartment was? Come on, what do you think? No, it wasn't pink. It might have been pink originally, but what was it when I got there? No, no, you're not thinking guys. You're not thinking disgusting. You're not thinking rotting. You're not thinking beer on the walls. What would grow on the beer on the walls? OK, green. Yes, yes, green. That's the color of everything. Color of the drapes, the color of the carpet, the color of the the the this. And I scraped sometimes finding the original color. There were other colors in that room and in that apartment before, but everything was green. in that apartment. And there were a few things the guys didn't tell me besides that. You looked down the walls, you know, you saw the drip lines for the beer on the walls and this sort of thing. It was disgusting. But about two weeks after I started in there, I was startled to find a chameleon. Guess what color he was? Green, yes, yes, he was always green. He never changed his color. I had to introduce him to other things to see if, in fact, he really was a chameleon. Maybe he was just designed to be green. No, he really was a chameleon, always green. And they're kind of boring, though. They're just all green. There's a few of them that can kind of turn ones, but an octopus can turn the color to a pixel size of about a quarter of an inch, whatever the pattern is. they're on, they can reproduce it. Oh, that's so cool. You put them on a striped pattern and they get stripes. And they disappear right before your eyes. You put them on a pastel pattern and they get pastel. That's pretty cool. It's wild. But think about this. Camouflage, in the original creation, There was no death of animals. There was no death of plants. There was no animals eating other animals. There's no reason to hide. No reason to hide. So, I'd suggest there was no camouflage in the original creation. So, where did camouflage come from? We got some amazing camouflage that goes on in this world to protect organisms. And I would suggest all of those things must have appeared after the fall. That would be the first time they would be needed. They were created with the ability to be camouflaged, but not camouflaged until after they were needed. Predation. We've got organisms that seem on this planet to be designed to kill. It's kind of disturbing in a way. I've seen many Aquaria, where the sign is designed to kill sharks. Everyone likes sharks, right? They like nasty things with big teeth and scary things that eat people. They really like those kinds of things. That's what we tend to put in zoos. People get excited about that for some reason. And some people even like those predation videos. Got this cute little white furry seal there. It's got the big black eyes and everything. Boom! Up comes from a orca whale. It grabs him in his mouth and drags him down beneath the ice. Some people like to watch that. I don't like to watch that. It just seems wrong. I was about eight or nine years old. We had a dog, Alex, Alexander the Great. And one day I saw Alex across the way. He was doing something funny. He was sticking his head into the ground and then throwing his head straight back. And dogs don't look up, so that was kind of weird. And then he'd go down and do that again. So what in the world is Alex doing? So they go over there to see what Alex is doing. And there he was. There was a rabbit nest, a bunch of baby rabbits in there. And one by one, he was picking them up. And I was traumatized. Okay, I mean, I'm really bothered by this. I know a dog is a carnivore. He's supposed to be doing things like that. Still didn't seem right. That just seemed wrong. Just deeply wrong. But according to the Bible, that is wrong. That's not the original design. Animals were created with plants as their food. There were no predators in the original creation. And we're told in the new heaven and the new earth that there won't be that predation, that predation will be gone again. The lion will lie down with the, the lamb will lie down with a lion and so on and so forth. That's wonderful. In the meantime, we have predators, organisms that seem designed to kill. and designed to digest the food of animals. Wow, where did that come from? If the earth wasn't created with them at the beginning, how do you explain these amazingly designed? They look to be designed organisms. Same thing. God anticipated the fall of man. He anticipated a time when he would have to curse the creation that man was given rule over. With things like disease. would spread through his his animals, those things he'd created, the animals and plants he'd created, and they would be destroyed by disease. But he didn't want them destroyed by disease. They're cursed, but not destroyed. So he put in the creation other organisms designed to take out the diseased individuals in the population so that disease didn't completely obliterate organisms. And the predators are designed by God to take out the weak ones, the diseased ones, so that the populations will survive. Cursed, but the evil minimized in the world. And those are designs by God. Hidden in the original creation not revealed until the time of the fall Knowing that they would be needed. It's at that time So we have functions of organisms designed in organisms and hidden until the fall occurs Got other things weird. We've discovered bacteria that break down plastic and Think about this. Humans have created molecules that never existed before in the history of this planet. Plastic doesn't exist naturally. So God created this world with decomposers to break things down, return the nutrients, the components of those things, to the soil so that organisms could use them. And there'd be this continuous cycle, and you don't have dead bodies accumulating on the earth. You have the earth continually clean, and you have continual production of nutrients. What a beautiful, wonderful design. And the humans come around and create things that there are no decomposers for. We create nylon. 1935, create nylon. So we fill our landfills with nylon. It can't decompose. We got Teflon. And we're really proud of the fact that we're creating things that didn't exist before. And I guess we have reason to be proud of the intelligence, but the intelligence was given by God. It wasn't supposed to be used for that. So what about these plastic? Now, what do we do with the plastic? Well, either we recycle them or we just pile them in the landfills and they don't decompose. And then we find a plastic decomposing bacterium. That's cool. Where did that come from? How did that evolve? How did an animal or an organism evolve to decompose plastic when plastic didn't exist? We didn't create this organism. We discovered it. The organism didn't change to... didn't evolve to decompose plastic. When we found it in the jungles of South America, it was capable of decomposing plastic. But it never encountered plastic before. That's cool! Don't you think that's cool? I mean, that's amazing! It's as if somebody anticipated that we would make these crazy molecules and he sprinkled the creation with organisms that could decompose them so that he could clean the environment that we keep messing up. And, believe it or not, we got nylon decomposing bacteria as well that we discovered. We got, remember the DDT for the older folks in the, sorry, the The elders among you, the gray-haired folks among you, you might remember the DDT phenomenon. DDT, I won't say the whole name, that's an abbreviation of the di-chloro-whatever. It was something invented by humans, never existed before. It was used to kill mosquitoes. to control for malaria in World War II and post-World War II times. Price saved millions and millions and millions of lives of malaria. But alas, we realized in time that the DDT was a substance that, because it had never been created before, there was nothing that could decompose it And so organisms would eat the DDT, and some organisms would accumulate it and couldn't get rid of it, and it would accumulate in their bodies. Then other organisms would eat them that also accumulated, and ultimately the highest predators, the ospreys and the eagles, would have such a high concentration of it that their eggs weren't developed thick enough to stay together, and they would fall apart. And we were losing our osprey and eagle populations near bodies of water where DDT was used. And so the world basically outlawed DDT and took it out, which led to millions and millions and millions of people dying of malaria. What we've discovered in the last few years is we have found organisms that can actually decompose DDT. And DDE, which is one of the derivatives of DDT, that is actually what causes the problem with the ospreys and the eagles. So now they're considering when they spread the DDT, they include, they actually spray the area with the bacterium that decomposes it. And it allows the DDT to do its job because mosquitoes have a 24-hour lifespan. So, you know, I mean, you get rid of the mosquitoes quickly and then decompose the DDT with these organisms specially designed to do so. And perhaps we can go back to saving people from malaria. Really cool. Where did these critters come from? How did these organisms decompose DDT? How did they evolve? They didn't evolve. They couldn't. It's impossible. It's as if somebody knew that humans would do stupid things like create molecules that couldn't decompose, and he created those things necessary to deal with them. Functions designed and unused until human inventions would come much later. This is a creator who anticipates needs. It's getting a little bit like the appliques on the mailbox, but there's more. Back to our border collie. The other thing about that little guy, he's sitting outside that door at night when the evening service is over, and he's looking at the feet. He loves to chase shadows. And especially if we had things like this, if I could see, oh yeah, these little, yeah, Yeah, a dog goes wild, okay? You probably have dogs that do this, okay? This dog absolutely loves to chase shadows. Now, question for you, what's the use of chasing shadows? Near his none. Where in the world does this come from? Ah, a playful creator. There's no explanation. There's no use for that dog. It's kind of stupid as a matter of fact, you know. You take the little thing and you run it up against the wall. Boom! It's really fun, but you know. Alex used to do that. Alex used to chase things like that. He chased sparks. We'd get this campfire going and disturb the campfire. Sparks would go up and he'd jump up in the air and grab the sparks in his mouth. He also liked hot dogs, and if somebody was eating a hot dog at the fire, he'd sit down right at their feet, you know, just looking at them. His tail would be in the fire. And we'd wait to see, when's the dog going to realize He ultimately decides that he isn't going to get a hot dog, so he gets up and wanders into the night. You can see the spark going off into the distance. Anyway, it appears that the chasing of shadows thing is perhaps, we'll say, I'm going to suggest, due to the playfulness of a creator. Cats that chase yarn. Kind of the same kind of thing. When I was in the Grand Canyon, we were rafting down the Grand Canyon, pulled into a place to camp, and typically when you do that, you're in a place, in a canyon, because otherwise there's not any room to camp. But the canyons are also the places where erosion brings down rocks and dumps them in the river. So those are places where there's rapids. So we usually, when we're camping along the river, We get lulled to sleep by the river running over the rapids all night long. Very irritating. But anyway, one time we stopped and put up the tents and I went out to the rapids there and I noticed that there were some birds, some clover-like birds with the long legs and that sort of thing. And they were running down the rapids and so I watched them carefully one at a time. And they would float down the rapids. They never dipped in the water. They never were getting any insects. Not a single one of them. They'd get down to the bottom of the rapids. They'd fly and go up to the top of the rapids and float down the rapids. Hours. Hours. And a number of us stood up there and we challenged ourselves to see if there was any bird that ever looked down, pecked for anything in the water. Nothing. They seemed to be running the rapids. Which is what we were there for, so duh! Ravens that fly up way high and then two of them will lock talons and plummet and then let go. What in the world are they doing that for? Doesn't seem like a good design for survival value. Seem to be having fun. Otters slide down slopes, well they do lots of things that are like this. I saw a video the other day on YouTube of a bird at the top of a building that hauled up a piece of bark to the tip of the roof and laid it down and jumped on it and slid down the roof. In snow, a snowy roof. And then he picks up the piece of bark and he brings it up to the top and he does it again. And he keeps doing that. What? They seem to just be playing. Not very much survival value, I'm thinking in this. We used to raise raccoons as a kid. We had raccoons a lot. Every raccoon was characterized by his own private practical joke that he played on everything else. No coon ever had the same practical joke as any other coon. We had one coon, for example, we had a well in the backyard, there was a pipe that came up out of the ground that had attachments that made it come up and go back up again, and there was an on-off switch and that was our water fountain. You could turn it on, water bubbled out, and we could drink water from it. It's what I remember as my water fountain when I was growing up. Coons love playing in water, so every coon we ever had always liked to play underneath it, and play in the water. But one coon, just one, he figured out he wanted to approach this differently. He'd start all the way at the edge of the yard, as far as he could get away from that thing, and he'd run. Well, coons don't run, they waddle. He waddled as fast as he could waddle, and he got about five feet away from it, and he'd throw himself up in the air. to see if he could get on top of that pipe. The first five or six times, you know what happened. It went, whew, crash, bang, smash. And he'd do it again, and again, and again, until finally he was able to catch himself on top of that thing and then hang with two legs on one side, two legs on the other, the way they do over a branch naturally. And then he played in the water. If we had the water on, he'd do this. If we didn't have the water on, he wouldn't. He wouldn't do a thing, he wouldn't go to it. But if we turn the water on and walked away, he'd jump up there and he'd play in it. And the thing about raccoons, if you know anything about raccoons, they do three things at once and never do they look at what they do. One thing is happening with this hand, another thing is happening with this hand and they're looking somewhere else. So if they're sitting on your shoulder, you know, they're checking out your ear with one hand, and they're checking out the inside of your collar with the second hand, and they're looking. I'm innocent. I didn't do anything. They always, that's always the way they are. So he's on top of that thing, and he's playing around in this water, and he's looking at it. I'm not doing anything. I'm not playing with the water. And one day he was playing with the water there, and he stuck his finger in there, and it squirted him. Okay? And he went, and he falls off that thing, and he stiffens up. He bends his back. And he's angry at that thing for it. But he goes to the edge of the woods and he jumps up on top of there and he plays around. It wasn't very long before he squirted himself again. Falls off again. Really angry at the thing. Gets up a third time. Third time he plays in it and he's very quick at squirting. But he squirts it somewhere else. He's squirting it all over the place there. I'm completely innocent. I'm not doing a thing. And the dog walks by. Squirt. Dog goes. And dog goes a little further. Squirt. Where'd that come from? He got really good at squirting. We'd get people to visit and we'd turn on that thing and wait for him to get up there And then we'd bring the people out and show them something in the woods, put their back to the fountain there, and pretty soon he'd squirt them in the back. And then, of course, they'd see a coon there, scream, and all that. It was really fun. But every coon we had had a practical jug. Now, what is the survival value of that? I'm just wondering what in the world is the use of that. Our neighbor had one, old jugs. He'd sleep during the day, of course. He was actually a very old coon. He slept in the log cabin next to his house, and he had an inordinate fondness for nylons. Somebody would visit, and Frank would run out there and get the attention of these people distracted with their backs towards the log cabin. And if it was a woman with a dress and nylons, perfect, he'd have them looking down the field at whatever was down there. And old Juggs, I don't know how in the world he knew, he slept during the day, but if a woman showed up with nylons, he was out of that cabin. He'd come out of it and he'd look around and his eyes get excited and then he'd start running, waddling as fast as he could go. Now he's a full grown sixty-pound coon, okay? About five feet away from her, he'd lift himself and fly through the air, grabbing her around the thighs, and then these claws would just go into the nylons and just rip the nylons all the way down, as the woman is falling, of course, and screaming at the top of her lungs. The wildest thing to me, besides that, I mean that's just bizarre, is as soon as that was done, old Juggs would just turn around and he'd waddle slowly back into the, and disappear and you'd never see him again. That's what he did. I don't understand the survival value, that doesn't seem, and it's unique for every single Kuhn. It's as if everyone has a sense of humor. How does this be explained? It's as if God is a playful creator. He loves and delights to play, and he puts playing into organisms. God has created all things, and for thy pleasure are they created. It's as if he puts pleasure into it as he pleases. What about emotion? My dog, Alexander the Great, in the snow. We lived up north, so lots of snow. If I made a snowball, Alex was right there. And he had a smile on his face. I swear now you might think I'm just crazy, but he had different emotions. They surely were there. And he was really excited. His eyes twinkled and he was ready with a snowball. He loved to catch snowballs. And he'd be out there for hours catching snowballs till there was blood on the snowballs. And it was amazing. He just loved it. He just seemed excited about it. How is this explained? How is emotion explained? Where does it come from? How does a physical thing produce a non-physical thing like emotion? There is no explanation for the origin of emotion of humans, but also it's found in animals. How about the dog when you come home? I was watching Sheila's dog when she came home. He's so excited. He's normally not. Kind of laying there. That's about all he does, okay? But when she comes home, he's all excited. I swear that looks like excitement to me. I don't know how else you describe it, but excitement. How about when you leave your dog on a trip and you leave somebody there. I mean, you've taken care of them. Somebody's there to feed them, but the report you get when you get back, your dog didn't eat a thing while you were gone. They moped the whole time. I mean, I could swear that's moping. Dog on it. Sorry, doggone. Porpoises, when they get caught in nets and then are released, they have this tendency to jump and leap out of the and shatter and all sorts of as if they're excited for having been released from the nets. There's a elephant, circus elephant named Sadie, who she wasn't apparently the brightest elephant on the block. There are different intelligences of elephants, and the trainers were trying to teach her to do some things that the other elephants had no trouble getting, but she couldn't get it. Trying, and trying, and trying, and finally, Sadie just stopped, dropped down to her knees, both the front and the back, and big old tears fall out of her eyes, and then she just fell over and sobbed, and sobbed, and sobbed. I mean, it sure does look like she was crying. How about a Canada goose upon the death of a mate? Moping about completely different behavior and dying almost invariably within six months of the death of a mate. There seems to be emotion in organisms. Where does it come from? I believe it comes from a god of emotion. What a beauty. Biology has extraordinary beauty. And one thing that's cool about it, people say beauty is in the eyes of a beholder, of the beholder. There is not a single person on this planet, no matter how, what their definition of beauty is, who'd say there's no beauty in the creation. Because whatever your definition of beauty is, there's biological beauty to me. I've never met a person who would say there's no beauty there. Independence of your own definition of beauty. It is prevalent. And yet, evolution, takes out beauty. If, in fact, you've got an organism that invests some of its energy into being pretty, as opposed to an organism that invests that same energy into reproducing better, evolution is going to choose the better reproducing organism over the pretty one. And the one that spends its time looking at the mirror, as opposed to actually reproducing, is going to be selected by evolution. So, there's a tendency for evolution, for natural selection, to take out beauty. And there's been a long-standing problem in evolutionary theory. Where does biological beauty come from? A classic example is the peacock's feathers. And Darwin said it was a problem. Darwin understood it was a problem. So, he suggested the reason the peacock's feathers were pretty, because he had to solve this problem, was that peahens chose pretty peacocks. Well, that explains it. Sort of. Because the question is, why then did the peahens choose the pretty guys? Because if they chose the uglier guys that put their energy into producing more babies, they would be more successful. So actually, it doesn't make sense that the peahens would choose the pretty guys. And the beauty of a peacock's feathers is nothing compared to the beauty that's found in the biological creation. Evolution has a problem with beauty. It has a problem with there being any beauty in the world, let alone there being a lot of it. And biological beauty is ubiquitous. It is everywhere. It is also deep. I love this. If you look at the beauty of a human creation, the beauty of a painting, if you look too close, it don't look pretty anymore. If you get too close and see the individual brushstrokes, it just ain't pretty. If you're too far away, it's too small to be seen. But in biology, it's true at every scale. The purple mountains from a distance are beautiful. The mountain scenery when you're in the midst of the mountains are beautiful. The flock of birds you're seeing at a distance is beautiful. The individual bird you're seeing is beautiful. The individual feather is beautiful. Under a microscope, it's extraordinary. And under a stronger microscope, the cells you see, it keeps going. And if you go bigger, the universe, no matter the scale, beauty abounds in the creation. Where does it come from? And it's ever-changing, sparkling, There's beauty to the beauty in the creation. And it's profound. It has this ability to blow our socks off. Hike to the top of that ridge and see the sun setting. Whoa. Look in a microscope and see. My students do this from time to time. It's fun to give this experience to them. When you see them, look through a microscope and then quickly look to see, where did that come from? And then they look back in the microscope. They're having an awe experience. This is awesome. The beauty of God's creation is profound. It's not just there. It's awesome. As if the Creator has awesome beauty. The appliques on the mailbox. And I love the phrase in Hebrews chapter 11. The time would fail me to tell of. We could keep going. biological disparity, biological diversity, biological systems, mutualism, biological provision, sustenance, unity, discontinuity, the nature of life itself, the netted hierarchy of life, the design of life, the language of life, all of these things give us extraordinary insight into a creator. None of these things can be explained by evolutionary theory. What they seem to indicate is that we have, when you put it all together, a living, personal, willful, feeling, communicating, all-loving, providing, sustaining, all-good, holy, beautiful, omniscient, transition, transcendent, imminent, triune Creator who created man, you, and me to have a relationship with us. That's what biology tells us. We have an awesome God. Thank you.