1/8/2026
| 100-Foot Ferns… |
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| Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species opened the modern era of evolutionary thinking. The very name of his book suggests that as we look back in time, we should see fewer kinds of animals. Darwin led many people to think that there should be a greater variety of plants and animals today than in the distant past. And, those plants and animals should be more sophisticated today. But the fossil record tells just the opposite story. The most ancient rocks with identifiable fossils of multicelled creatures in them contain every major family alive today. These creatures just appear fully formed all at once. And both evolutionists and creationists admit that not all the creatures that existed in the day when these fossils were formed have been preserved in the fossil record. When you think of some of the pictures of strange creatures from the early days of earth history, it seems obvious that, contrary to Darwin’s theory, there was a much greater variety of creatures alive in the past than exists today. And generally, they were bigger and stronger than creatures are today. Ferns grew over 100 feet high, and dragonflies had wingspans of six feet. There are fewer kinds of creatures today, and what we have are often smaller and weaker than what we find in the fossil record. These facts don’t present a picture of evolutionary development and improvement at all. It is a picture of a perfect creation corrupted by sin and running down. This is the same flow of history revealed in Scripture. But thankfully, Scripture shows us how in Our Magnificent Creator God Christ Jesus there is escape from all the effects of sin! |
1/7/2026
| Did Job Have a Weather Satellite… |
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| One of the most amazing things in our modern age is the scientist who thinks he can use science to judge the Bible. After all, many things accepted today as scientific fact were first taught in the Bible. Job 36:27-28 explains the water cycle in which, through evaporation, tomorrow’s rains are drawn into clouds. Ecclesiastes 1:7 explains why the rivers do not fill the seas. It tells us that there is a cycle of water from rivers to seas back to fill the rivers again. It was not until 350 B.C., long after Job was written and more than 600 years after Ecclesiastes was written, that Aristotle began to understand the water cycle. And finally in 1841 a scientist, using a thermometer that Galileo invented in 1593 and a barometer that had been invented by Torricelli in 1643, showed that clouds were actually the result of rising water vapor. Job 37:9 and Ecclesiastes 1:6 both speak of wind and weather patterns that were finally confirmed in 1940. Read these passages before you look at the latest satellite weather pictures—the satellite clearly shows what Scripture is talking about in these verses. Many of the accepted facts of today’s science were originally stated by our Magnificent Creator God in the Bible. Science should not pass judgment on the Bible. After all, it has taken science thousands of years to begin to catch up with the Bible’s level of knowledge about even such a simple thing as the weather. |
1/6/2026
| Creation Makes Better Science… |
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| While the origins debate is basically a religious debate, many people have been taught that evolution is science and creation is religion. But even according to the evolutionists’ own rules of science, evolution is not good science. Let’s examine the claims of evolution in light of what science knows today. Life has never been seen to develop from nonliving materials. Yet evolution says it did. Mutations, said by evolutionists to have created all the kinds of living things, have never been seen to produce one creature who was more complex or better able to survive. Then again, the moon has moonquakes, a magnetic field and internal heat—all indications that it is far younger than evolutionists believe. The Cretaceous limestone was produced from sediment in water and extends in one continuous band from Northern Ireland through Europe and Asia to Australia. This suggests that the entire area was beneath the sea all at the same time, yet evolution refuses to accept Noah’s Flood as a global and historical event. If language evolved, why are the most ancient languages the most complex? If religion evolved, why do the most ancient forms of religion worship one Magnificent Creator God, while later forms of the same religions have many gods—who are much more like human beings? I could list many more examples showing that only the Bible’s account of history makes sense in light of what we know today. |
1/5/2026
| The Fossils Show Creation… |
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| Evolution says that life began with the simplest forms. It took over a billion years just to evolve algae and another billion years for living things to have more than one cell. It took half a billion years of slow development to generate today’s creatures. And evolution says that this story comes from the fossil record. What most people do not know is that there is no such story in the fossil record. And when not writing textbooks or appearing on television, evolutionary scientists will admit that their story of life cannot be found in the fossil record. According to the fossil record, every major family alive today appears suddenly and fully formed in the Cambrian rocks, which contain the first clear evidences of developed life. Charles Darwin was aware of this. Believing his own theory to be true, he called this problem a real mystery and wrote that it is probably a valid argument against evolution. Darwin wrote that he expected the problem to be solved as more fossils were discovered. But today, well over a century later, the problem remains and was written about in recent history in the Scientific American. So, Christians should not feel intimidated by the claims of scientists. We Christians have our faith by which we interpret what we see in the world. But the evolutionary story of life and the fossils is nothing more than the interpretation of the world according to evolutionary faith. We agree that far greater faith is required to believe in the revelation of Charles Darwin than to believe the revelation of our Magnificent Creator God. |
1/4/2026
| It May Sound Like Science Fiction… |
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| While the Bible teaches us that sex is a wonderful gift of God, evolutionists believe that sexual reproduction should not have evolved. According to evolutionists, if sexual reproduction were to develop, evolution is supposed to get rid of it. To make matters worse, immobile plants use sexual reproduction. This creates a problem in transferring the male genes to the female for fertilization. Just to confound things even more, God uses insects and even mammals to transfer the pollen. Since evolutionists believe that plants were around for many millions of years before animals, evolutionists have yet another problem. The European family of the Arum lilies attracts beetles and flies. When one of the insects lands on a flower, he finds a slick, oil-coated surface and ends up sliding down into a chamber filled with small hairs. Imprisoned, he finds a sweet sap that makes good eating. While he is gorging himself on the sap and getting sticky in the process, the male part of the flower showers him with pollen. The next day, the sticky, pollen-coated insect finds that the doors to his prison are open. So he flies off to another flower to unwittingly deliver his load of pollen! It sounds like science fiction to say that a flower figured out how to do this. And it certainly doesn’t sound very scientific to say that nobody designed and made this complex arrangement. As we learn more about these arrangements in nature, it becomes even more clear that an all-wise Magnificent Creator God designed these beautiful, symbiotic relationships between different members of the living kingdom! |
1/3/2026
| Simple But Elegant… |
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| The yellow-and-black striped archer fish shops among the insects that land on branches overhanging his pond in the peaceful waters of the East Indies. Sometimes he will wait under a branch until something that would make a good lunch lands on it. When the archer fish finds a tasty-looking insect, he shoots an accurately aimed stream of water at his prey, knocking the insect into the water. Before the insect has a chance to recover, the archer fish has eaten him and is looking for dessert. The archer fish has a deep groove in his mouth. When he places his tongue against this groove, he ends up with a blow tube that is about 1/16-inch in diameter. Compressing his gills forces pressurized water through the blow pipe. The rounded tip of the archer fish’s tongue acts as a valve so the fish can shoot a few small bursts or one long stream of water at his prey. The archer fish seldom misses if his prey is within four feet. This simple but elegant arrangement is testimony to a wise and skillful Creator. Neither mindless chance evolution nor any fish could be smart enough to design this system. Nor could any fish redesign his normal mouth tissues into this unique tool. Here we see that our Magnificent Creator God even cares about providing the needs of a fish. We know that He cares even more about our lives! In fact, He has said so! |
1/2/2026
| Brain Talk… |
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| There is a huge difference between computers and the human brain. While the computer transmits information using electricity, the brain communicates its information using powerful chemicals. Let’s say that you accidentally touch a hot pan on the stove. In less than two-tenths of a second, millions of reactions take place while your brain performs a huge number of operations. As a result, you pull your hand away from the hot pan—very quickly! Depending on the need, your brain uses many different chemicals for communication within itself and with the nerves that connect your brain to the rest of your body. Over 50 such chemicals have so far been identified. And it has been learned that many of these chemicals work in combination with each other so that over 800 different messages are possible. Nor does the brain have set paths for messages, like a computer. In fact, it has been compared to a chemical soup rather than the circuits of a computer. In addition, the information paths in your brain change based on experience. If we can use computer language for a moment, the brain writes its own programs, doing many complicated tasks of which you and I are never aware. We know that the computer is the product of careful design by our Magnificent Creator God, but to argue that the much more complex human brain is an accident of nature makes very little sense! |
1/1/2026
| Giraffes in Antigravity Suits… |
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| On previous Creation Moments, we have talked about some of the wonderful designs that help make the giraffe possible. The giraffe has a strong heart to pump blood all the way up to its head and strong arteries to withstand the high blood pressure needed to carry the blood to its head. We have also talked about the giraffe’s so-called “wonder net,” which is a network of blood vessels that helps to stabilize the blood pressure in the giraffe’s head even when it raises and lowers its head. But modern science continues to uncover engineering wonders that enable the giraffe to keep blood flowing evenly to its brain and keep blood from pooling in its legs. Researchers have discovered that giraffes, unlike human beings, have a valve in the jugular vein. But these valves work in the wrong direction to help blood stay in the head. Instead, they close when a giraffe lowers its head, preventing used blood from backing up into the brain. And how does a giraffe, which stays on its feet all day, keep blood from pooling in its legs? Scientists have found that the skin on a giraffe’s legs is very tight fitting. When a giraffe walks, its muscle movement within that tight skin actually helps pump used blood out of the legs. If life owed its existence to chance and genetic mistakes, we wouldn’t have any giraffes today. But what a wonder of our Magnificent Creator God’s design these stately creatures are! |
12/31/2025
| Why You Don’t Rust… |
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| Did you ever wonder why you don’t rust? Before you laugh, remember—iron is not only a major part of your blood, it is used to attract the oxygen that is carried by your blood to the rest of your body. And you know what happens when oxygen meets the iron in your car or a tool that is left outside overnight—rust! So, why don’t we rust? Part of the reason is that the molecular structure of hemoglobin is very cleverly designed so that the iron in your hemoglobin attracts oxygen and holds it but, at the same time, is prevented from rusting. There are many designs that hemoglobin could have—but the actual structure prevents rust from forming. But 200 billion of your red blood cells die every day. The iron in those cells is no longer prevented by the hemoglobin from forming rust. So your body collects iron from these cells and stores it in tiny protective containers made up of the protein ferritin, where it is prevented from combining with oxygen and turning into rust. Actually, these rust-proofing systems in the body can go wrong because of a rare genetic defect called bronze anemia. People suffering from this defect actually do develop rust-like deposits in their bodies, and sometimes the rust actually discolors their skin. The careful planning and intricately related systems that make life possible speak loudly of a Magnificent Creator God. No wonder discoveries in the biological sciences have caused some scientists to defect from evolution and see creation as the better explanation. |
12/30/2025
| Wernher von Braun on Creation… |
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| Dr. Wernher von Braun was considered one of the 20th century’s greatest scientists. After pioneering work in rocketry, von Braun developed the Saturn V rocket, which successfully powered the first manned moon landing. In 1972, this scientist was asked to comment on the case for design as a scientific theory for the origin of the universe. Aside from my brief comment at the end of this program, the rest of today’s Creation Moment is in Dr. von Braun’s words: “For me, the idea of a creation is not conceivable without invoking the necessity of design. One cannot be exposed to the law and order of the universe without concluding that there must be design and purpose… While the admission of a design for the universe ultimately raises the question of a Designer (a subject outside of science), the scientific method does not allow us to exclude data which lead to the conclusion that the universe, life and man are based on design… Some people say that science has been unable to prove the existence of a Designer… But they still maintain that since science has provided us with so many answers, the day will soon arrive when we will be able to understand even the creation of the fundamental laws of nature without divine intent. They challenge science to prove the existence of God. But must one really light a candle to see the sun?” Just remember Dr. von Braun next time you hear someone claim that no real scientists accept the existence of a Magnificent Creator God. |
12/29/2025
| The Oldest Dinosaur… |
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| Many people mistakenly believe that dinosaurs prove evolution. After all, dinosaurs are strange creatures and seem to represent a very different world from the one we know today. But a discovery of one of the most ancient dinosaurs challenges this. One of the oldest dinosaurs ever discovered was about six feet long and weighed about 300 pounds. Scientists had never before seen a complete skeleton of the creature they called Herrerasaurus. But being the most ancient dinosaur discovered at the time, perhaps the dinosaur from which all others evolved, evolutionary scientists expected it to be much less advanced than later dinosaurs. What they found was yet another well-designed creature. The meat-eating dinosaur had excellent teeth, like those of a shark; its jawbone had a double hinge so that it could easily hang onto its prey. These sophisticated features weren’t expected in such an ancient dinosaur. This is yet another proof that all creatures were well designed from the beginning. Herrerasaurus is yet one more example of the impossibility of evolution. Dinosaurs, just like all other creatures, were created by our Magnificent Creator God during the first six days the universe existed. This means that dinosaurs and humans once shared this earth in the recent past. All things were created in a perfect state, so there was no need for evolved improvements. The changes we see since creation are not due to evolution but due to the degenerating effects of sin. |
12/28/2025
| The World Is Smaller Than We Think… |
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| “And the LORD God formed man out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” It’s behind your refrigerator and under your bed. It’s part of the air you breathe. While dust is common, it’s not commonplace at all. Much of the dust in our everyday lives is nothing more than tiny particles of skin, clothing, carpeting – just pieces of everyday life floating in the air. Studies of dust particles reveal that most dust is soil. However, a second common dust – even a thousand miles from the sea – is salt, driven into the wind by the waves. This salt helps form the clouds that bring us rain. The next most common forms of natural dust are volcanic eruptions and forest fires. Transatlantic winds pick up the dust of the Sahara and sweep it across the ocean where enough of it lands in Miami to sometimes give the rain a light pink color. Not only does your home have dust from all over the world, there’s probably also some from outer space. Ten thousand tons of disintegrating meteorites and comets rain down on the Earth every year. You can even identify some of this dust by running a magnet through the dust in a rain gutter. Most of the magnetic particles that stick to the magnet are probably from space. In addition, some dust is alive, made up of pollen, fungus spores and even dormant bacteria, hoping to land on a good place to grow. Dust reminds us that the world is smaller than we think and that it won’t last forever. Are you ready for the next world? All your preparations have been made by Jesus Christ. Find out in the Bible what our Magnificent Creator God has done for you today!!! |
12/25/2025
| Construction Frogs… |
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| Perhaps to get evolutionists to rethink their beliefs, the Creator has provided many inventive and unique structures. There are so many of these that even the longest evolutionary timescale could not account for their evolution. Let’s focus on a few examples among frogs for a moment. Frogs need to keep their eggs moist. Water must be available for their tadpoles. Frogs have many different ways of doing this. The Venezuelan marsupial frog has a skin pouch, just like a kangaroo, except hers is on her back. The female marsupial frog stores her eggs in the pouch. There is plenty of moisture and protection in her pouch for the young frogs. When they are mature, the skin pouch sort of unzips, and out come up to 20 young frogs! The Brazilian tree frog uses a completely different approach. This frog actually builds a pool of mud, near a pond, in which it lays its eggs. This pool is usually built so that by the time the eggs have developed into strong tadpoles, the regular tropical rains wash the pool, along with the swimming tadpoles, into the pond! In Job 38:36, the Lord asks Job, “Who has put wisdom in the mind?” It is obvious to us that only the Lord, our Magnificent Creator God of heaven and earth, could have given frogs these abilities and this knowledge. And it is just as clear that it is nonsense to say that chance and time made these frogs and their abilities. |
12/24/2025
| Beavers Build More than Dams… |
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| Beavers are widely known for their huge constructions. However, beavers build more than just dams. The beaver is quite an engineer. When building a dam, a beaver first rams poles into the bed of his waterway. The poles are placed on an angle to increase holding power and are then rammed into the waterway bed, thick end first. This basic skeleton is then reinforced with twigs, leaves, mud and stone. It’s not unusual for the beaver to use forked branches to further anchor his construction to trees and boulders. One beaver dam was over 1,800 feet long, 9 feet high and 18 feet wide. It was strong enough for a horse and rider to use as a natural bridge. Large trees brought down for use in construction are not dragged by the beavers to their project. Instead, beavers dig overland channels and float the trees to the main body of water where they are working. These channels can be 1,000 feet long. Our wise Creator gave so much intelligence and wisdom to the animal kingdom that often we can learn some things from the animals. Rather than supporting the idea of evolution, with its claim that there is progressively greater intelligence in higher creatures, the beaver supports the idea that our Magnificent Creator God is the source of all intelligence. |
12/23/2025
| The Beetle Who is a Chemist… |
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| Imagine a beetle that can move across the surface of water without any body movement. Some creatures have been given such ability and skill that it should be clear to even the most skeptical person that their Maker and Teacher is greater than any human being. One such creature is the large-eyed rove beetle. Like many other insects, this beetle can walk on water. The surface tension of the water is enough to support the beetle on top of the water, given the special structure of his legs and feet. Should you see the large-eyed rove beetle, you will notice that he moves across the water, stops, turns, and starts up again without moving any part of his body. How does this work? The large-eyed rove beetle has special glands that produce a chemical – something like detergent – that changes the surface tension of the water. When the surface tension of the water near his back feet is different from the surface tension of the water near his front feet, the beetle is pulled forward. Such a unique method of movement requires sophisticated knowledge of both hydrodynamics and chemistry. Since the beetle is obviously not that smart, it is no wonder that evolutionists often speak of evolution as though it were intelligent and able to create such wonders. However, it makes a lot more sense to talk about a wise, personal Magnificent Creator God than it does to speak of the wisdom of a mindless force like evolution. |
12/22/2025
| Whale moans frighten seals… |
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| “Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” Genesis 11:7 When you hear a bird’s song, can you decipher where it spends the winter based on its dialect? Birds, like some other creatures, have different dialects depending on where they live. However, for most of us, animal dialects aren’t easy to detect. Killer whales also have dialects, reflected in their 17 different calls. Some killer whales are homebodies, staying in the same area for their entire lives. These whales pose few problems for local harbor seals on the North American west coast, as they feed on a diet of local fish. Other killer whales form groups that swim up and down the west coast of North America and hunt together. These groups are not satisfied with fish and particularly like harbor seals. Researchers have recorded calls from both groups and noted that each group’s calls have different qualities, amounting to distinct dialects. They also found that harbor seals are aware of this. Although the calls are at a frequency that fish cannot hear, the seals can hear them very well. They ignore the calls of local whales that feed on fish. But when a group of killer whales appears in their vicinity, the harbor seals tend to evacuate the area quickly. The ability to communicate and interpret communication are gifts from our Magnificent Creator God, not only for us humans but clearly also for His other creatures. |
12/21/2025
| That We might See… |
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| It was first discovered in 1855, but many scientists debated its existence for another 50 years. Once its existence was finally proven to everyone’s satisfaction, it was another 50 years before science had any tools to begin studying it. Finally, in the late 1980s, scientists began to learn a little about the secrets of one of the tiniest, yet most amazing structures in the body. At the back of the eye, between the deepest layer of the retina and the cells beneath it, lies a tiny moat made up of about 10 drops of a mysterious fluid. The entire moat is thinner than a sheet of cellophane. It seems that the clear fluid in the moat serves the surrounding light-sensing tissues of the eye in place of blood, bringing in nutrients and carrying away waste. It also transports light-sensitive chemicals needed by the light-detecting cells in the eye. In addition, it seems to glue the retina in place. More than that, the moat is rich in a growth factor. This fact makes scientists believe that the gel may also be important to repairing injuries to the retina, keeping the cells of the retina young and active, as well as helping in the growth of new cells. As one researcher said, the more they study this tiny structure, the more unexpected abilities they find – something like a bottomless suitcase. Charles Darwin, who didn’t even know about the moat, was right when he said that it was impossible to believe that natural selection by our Magnificent Creator God could have produced the eye!!! |
12/20/2025
| The Greatest Engineer Ever… |
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| Scientists and manufacturers are studying a new technique that could lead to more durable fibers. This technique manufactures liquid crystals to produce stronger, longer-lasting fibers. The process uses sulfuric acid, temperatures well above the boiling point of water and a high-pressure atmosphere. Meanwhile, another team of researchers finally discovered how orb weaving spiders and silkworms manufacture their silk. Scientists had theorized that silk from spiders and silkworms was stronger by weight than steel because proteins in the silk cross-linked with each other. But after watching silk production and drying in careful lighting under magnification, astonished scientists actually saw what happens. Silk is produced in the silk gland as a thin, watery liquid. Once the protein-rich liquid is released from the gland, the liquid begins to concentrate because of evaporation. As the liquid concentrates, it changes into a liquid crystal state. Scientists have been trying to create fibers in the lab from liquid crystals. They would love to know how the spider does it, using only water at normal temperatures and pressures. This is another example of how our Magnificent Creator God has already solved an engineering problem that we were trying to solve. It is especially interesting that He allowed scientists to discover His solution at the same time that others were trying to solve the problem. This allows us to reemphasize that our world is the work of a Creator and not mindless, natural accidents. |
12/19/2025
| The Most Complex Structure… |
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| What is the most complex structure in the universe? I’ll give you a hint: it weighs only a few pounds, and you own one. The most complex structure in the universe is the human brain. It has so many interconnections within it that if it evolved, its evolution – even over billions of years – would be easy to measure. The fact that there is no hint that the brain is evolving is a good argument against evolution. Intelligence is not what sets humans apart from animals. Rather, it is the fact that we were made in the image of God. The Clark’s nutcracker, a small bird found in the American southwest, has an incredible memory. It can store up to 30,000 seeds for winter food in different locations. Over the winter months, it will remember where the seeds are stored in all these thousands of locations so it doesn’t run out of food. It is calculated that a human brain can store up to 100 trillion bits of information. The most powerful supercomputer today can’t store even 1/10th of one percent of that. That is not to say that the proper use of our thinking abilities can happen without helpful instruction. In fact, your brain’s manufacturer, our Magnificent Creator God, has provided just such a manual in His holy Word. And just like a sophisticated computer, we all risk ruining our thinking abilities if we operate our brains without our manufacturer’s helpful instructions. |
12/18/2025
| A Tuft Mystery for Evolution… |
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| Those of us who accept our creation as the work of the Creator find many examples of what seems to be His wonderful creativity – creativity just for the sake of creativity! These add to our appreciation of the creation and stir us to learn more of the wonders of His creative thought. The evolutionist has robbed himself of the opportunity for that wonder. For the evolutionist, everything must have a reason related to survival. Some evolutionists even study why people think flowers are beautiful, while we enjoy flowers’ beauty and fragrances. The fact that many rabbits and hares have a tuft of longer hair in their upper chest is one mystery to evolutionists. This mane seems to be present in both the males and the females of one family of rabbits and hares all through the year. Science articles are full of speculation about how this mane might help in the struggle for survival. However, no one has been able to offer a convincing argument. Finally, someone suggested that the mane may have no survival value at all. However, evolutionists are so committed to their faith that the magazine Science Digest called this a “lame conclusion.” The Creator has given His creatures many things to help them survive. One of those things that He knows makes life better, but for which evolution cannot account, is sheer beauty. Let’s not forget to thank Him for that too! |
12/17/2025
| Animals Don’t Need Technology… |
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| When we compare ourselves with many of the other living things on this Earth, our abilities are not very impressive. A camel can carry 1,000 pounds 30 miles through the desert every day. As a human being, I become tired even thinking about walking 30 miles with empty pockets. The ostrich can run at 30 miles per hour, faster than my car might go during rush hour. The Indian swift can fly at more than 100 miles per hour. The elephant’s trunk has 40,000 muscles. This is 70 times the number of muscles in your entire body. Yet, his trunk can bulldoze a tree or pick up a pin. Many of us can’t do either one on the first try. The flea can jump 350 times its own length, a total of 13 inches. This is equivalent to our jumping 2,000 feet into the air. Most of us can’t jump more than two feet off the ground. As it works out, 13 inches is just about right if you are looking for a nice warm dog on which to raise a family. A tiny insect called the midge beats its wings an amazing 133,000 times per minute. That’s a hundred times faster than you can blink your eye. Humans can use their superior intellect to build the machines they need. With those machines, they can outdo any one of these creatures. But God simply made a gift to the animals of the specialized abilities they needed. God expects us to follow His example and design and build what we need. If we look carefully, we will see that our Magnificent Creator God has given us all the materials and all the ideas we need within the creation. No one can say that He does not care what we do with our lives on Earth. |
12/16/2025
| Tool-Using Animals… |
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| Evolution devalues humanity. It tries to find the most unflattering way to describe human beings to try to counter the Bible’s claim that they were created in God’s image. For generations, evolutionists said that the humans’ use of tools was all that made them different from animals. Creationists who objected, saying there was obviously more of a difference than that, were ignored as unscientific. It wasn’t so long ago that evolutionists scoffed at creationists who showed them that there are animals who use tools – and, therefore, the evolutionists’ definition was wrong. Elephants often take sticks in their trunks to scratch their backs. Galapagos woodpeckers use cactus spines, held in their beaks, to probe insects out of cracks in trees. Chimpanzees even use sticks as levers to move heavy objects. They also make tools out of sticks by shaping them to the right size to poke into termite nests. The stick full of termites they pull out of the nest offers them a tasty snack. West African chimps actually use stones as hammers to crack nuts. So today, evolutionists recognize that some animals not only use tools, but also make them! Only now they claim that animals who use tools prove their theory. Which only goes to show that evolution is not science that can be disproved. It is a faith that will be believed even when the facts contradict it. Our Magnificent Creator God says the facts say that there is an unbridgeable difference between humans and animals. |
12/15/2025
| Whales: Engineered for Water… |
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| We are told by evolutionists that the whale evolved from a cow-like creature that originally lived on land. Let’s look at that claim. First, the whale can hear what direction a sound is coming from under water. Neither cows nor humans can do this. Nor is the whale’s ear damaged by the pressures deep in the sea. The whale also has other, very complex differences from land-living mammals that allow him to cope with the great pressures in the depths of the sea. If the whale evolved from some cow-like mammal, the entire head would have to be restructured. What we could call the whale’s nose is on top of his head, in back of his brain. Land-living mammals, of course, keep their noses on the front of their faces, in front of their brains. Evolutionists would have us believe that in the evolution of the whale, his nose, or at least his nostril, migrated up his face through his brain, and finally ended up where it is today. That’s major restructuring! These are just a few of the miracles we are supposed to believe that mindless evolution performed, even though it can’t think or plan. And that’s the operative word – believe. The evolutionist’s faith in the evolution of the whale shows us that the origins controversy is not science versus the Bible. This debate is about a man-made and sometimes silly religion versus faith in our Magnificent Creator God’s revealed Truth! |
12/14/2025
| The Big Bang theory is not without its problems… |
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| “And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.” Many secular cosmologists believe that the universe came into existence in a singularity, as a result of a quantum event about 14.7 billion years ago. However, this so-called Big Bang theory is not without its problems. Principle among these is the Horizon Problem, which refers to the fact that Big Bangers cannot account for the Cosmic Microwave Background being the same temperature in all directions. This phenomenon would have required different parts of the universe coming to thermal equilibrium by radiation moving at the speed of light. Yet the maximum distance this radiation could travel is considerably less than the size of the universe. In the 1980s, theoretical physicist Alan Guth proposed the Inflation Theory. In this model, a very rapid expansion of the universe happened from 10-36 seconds to 10-32 seconds after the Big Bang event. This allowed the entirety of the universe to be in close contact for a while, enabling transfer of energy between all parts of the universe. There is no scientific evidence for this inflation, which is sometimes called the Big Fizz. The extremely short timescale of the event, at the beginning of a period of extremely deep time, gives the whole theory an impression of being a convenient construction, just to make the math work. Moreover, it creates new problems of its own. There are several different models of inflation, and recent work suggesting that evidence for inflation is now available, turns out simply to disprove some of the models, without validating the concept itself. As biblical creationists, we know that none of these models are correct. Our Magnificent Creator God has explained how and why the universe was created in the first chapter of the Bible!!! |
12/13/2025
| Some Things Just Can’t Be Explained In Human Terms… |
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| Outer space has a temperature. It has become common to think of space as a vacuum, that has nothing in it, which means it would be at absolute zero temperature. In fact, space is nearly a vacuum, but not quite. And the particles in that near vacuum are in motion, so they have a temperature of 2.73K—the equivalent of 2.73 Celsius degrees above Absolute Zero. This so-called Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (or CMB) has been known about since 1965. It is assumed to be an echo of the Big Bang, and is offered in High School textbooks as a proof of the Big Bang. Yet, it is actually problematic for Big Bang cosmologists. CMB is the same temperature in all directions of space. For this to have occurred, there must have been a transfer of heat energy in the past, by radiation, from hot spot to cold spot, in order to even out temperature differentials. This radiation would travel at the speed of light. Since Big Bang cosmologists assume the universe to be 14.7 billion years old, it follows that this radiation could only travel a maximum of 14.7 billion light years. But the universe is much bigger than that. Therefore, the Big Bang theory cannot explain the regular, even temperature of CMB. The Bible suggests in Genesis 1:6-8 that there is water at the edge of the universe, which could act as a blackbody, absorbing heat radiation, and neatly accounting for the regularity of the temperature of space. The Bible helps provide an explanation for a phenomenon, which remains a mystery for evolutionary cosmologists but was all just a minor part of our Magnificent Creator God’s Master Plan!!! |
12/12/2025
| The Personality of Bacteria… |
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| Scientists are learning that even the lowly bacteria have mind and memory. New research is showing that mind, memory, brain, and personality did not evolve. These can be found in the lowliest of creatures, including the bacteria. Another sign of intelligence in a life form is the ability to learn. Using attracting and repelling substances, scientists have found that bacteria can learn about their surroundings and draw conclusions. Follow-up tests showed that they later remember what they learned. Scientists have even found that younger bacteria learn better than older ones. If some things are not learned when young, they never can be learned! It seems that it’s hard to teach an old bacterium new tricks! The biggest surprise of all came when scientists discovered that bacteria have what the researchers called individual personality. They are mystified about how bacteria, each with the same genetic structure and from the same environment, can develop unique quirks in behavior. Because we find individual personality even in the lowly bacteria, we know that did not evolve. That God would give even a bacterium the gift of personality shows us something about His mind toward us. Nothing is so small or unimportant that it escapes His attention. Since He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to rescue us from the decay that is in the world because of sin, there is no force too great for Him to overcome. Surely He is a Magnificent Creator God of details as well as a God of love, Who is concerned about every individual among us. |
12/11/2025
| Bamboo’s Message to the World… |
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| Many plants reproduce simply by cloning. The most obvious example of cloning that comes to mind is the dandelion. Unless you get all of the main dandelion root out of the ground, each piece of the root can sprout another dandelion, identical to the parent. The walking fern reproduces by cloning too. It moves across the countryside, albeit slowly, by producing new plants. A new plant is generated wherever the tips of its leaves touch the ground. Each new plant is identical to the parent. The bamboo reproduces through underground stems. The different species of bamboo live anywhere from 20 to 120 years. During their life spans, they produce only by cloning. Then they flower – once. When it’s time for a particular species to flower, every member of that species, no matter where in the world it grows, flowers gloriously. Each flower can have as many as 100 pollen-producing stamens. Once the seeds are ripe and scattered, every member of that species in the world dies. At this point, the entire species exists only in the scattered seeds. This is brilliant testimony to a recent creation of all bamboos at the same time. If evolution produced them and the forces of change worked on them for millions of years, one would think that all members of the same species would no longer be in perfect synchronization. Bamboo makes a strong testimony for our Magnificent Creator God reported in Genesis! |
12/10/2025
| He Thought Of Everything… |
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| Wood will get waterlogged, if it is left in water for too long. And yet wood has often been used throughout history to build boats and ships. For example, the city of Pensacola, Florida, was, in many ways, the birthplace of the US Navy, because of the deep harbor, and the abundance of live oaks, from which to build ships. To prevent water-logging, the wood must be treated, to make it waterproof. In this regard, the Ark was no different. So God told Noah to coat the Ark inside and out with pitch. There have been many discussions on what this pitch could actually have been. Could it have been like modern pitch, which is a fractional product of petroleum oil? How could such a material have existed before the Flood, if we believe that fossil fuels were formed during the Flood? More important than this discussion, however, is what the purpose of the pitch was. It was a covering. The Hebrew word is khafar, and means “covering”. Khafar is a common word in the Old Testament—but everywhere else it is found, it is translated by the word “atonement”! Atonement refers to the covering of our sins, making us right with God. The Ark was waterproofed against the watery judgment of God by the atonement of pitch. As believers, we are fireproofed against the fiery judgment of God to come, by the atoning blood of Jesus Christ, which does not just cover our sins, but washes them away completely. Our Magnificent Creator God included everything He formed in His Master Plan before the beginning of time!!! |
12/9/2025
| Spiders the Size of a House… |
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| The largest known beetle in the world is the aptly named goliath beetle. This African beetle can become almost as large as a mouse. Dinosaurs were not the largest animals ever to live. The great blue whale holds that honor. The smallest mammal in the world is smaller than many insects. A newly discovered species of bat in Thailand weighs only six one-hundredths of an ounce. Such extremes might lead some to wonder whether those giant insects we see in the movies would ever develop. Could a spider grow to be as large as a house? You will be happy to know that no spider or any other insect could grow as large as a house. We can be sure of this because of the way insects breathe. Insects breathe through small tubes along their bodies. These tubes provide oxygen directly to their internal tissues. If an insect were to grow too large, these tubes could not get enough oxygen to the tissues. This is because the larger the creature, the more internal living tissue that requires oxygen. You and I have lungs that provide a network of surfaces equal to the size of a tennis court. An insect our size would need a body that has the surface area of a tennis court, too, which is an impossibility. Even though different creatures have different organs to supply their needs, each creature has just the right organs for its needs. This is a sign of our Magnificent Creator God’s wisdom. This fact also tells us that living things are not related to each other by evolution. |
12/8/2025
| The Mind of a Bacteria… |
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| Researchers are learning that bacteria have senses similar to our hearing and sight. Bacteria even have a brain that receives information from their senses. They can make decisions. However, all of this is not enough to explain how bacteria can make the decision to swim toward food. When you want a candy bar, you know where to find one, even if you must go to the nearest store. You might also hope that your dentist doesn’t see you buying candy. All of this involves memory, which has long been considered a basic part of the mind. Researchers, using various solutions of substances that attract or repel bacteria, have now learned that bacteria do indeed have both long-term and short-term memories. They remember where goodies are to be found. Once a bacterium develops a strategy for dealing with the unknown, it will remember what to do next time. This finding shocked researchers. They know that when you or I decide to retreat or advance, at least hundreds and probably thousands of brain cells are involved. The one-celled bacteria can make the same decision based on past memories. Are there really “simple” forms of life that serve as the living traces of evolutionary development? Scientists haven’t found any yet. According to the Bible’s account of creation, we don’t expect them to find any simple forms of life from which we can be traced. Once again we must come to the realization that all creation was planned, designed, and created by our Magnificent Creator God. |
12/7/2025
| The Good News… |
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| In 2 Peter 2:5, the apostle remarks, almost parenthetically, that “[God] did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly.” Noah was a herald of righteousness—someone proclaiming the Good News! Building the Ark was very public. We can conjecture that Noah could have contracted labor and materials, and so there would have been conversations. Peter labeled Noah as a herald of righteousness was made under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, so he must be referring to actual utterances or conversations, even though these are not reported in Genesis. What could this message of righteousness have been? We know, from the account of Noah’s drunkenness in Genesis 9, that he was not a perfect man. But Hebrews 11 reminds us that Noah “became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith” (Hebrews 11:7). His righteousness came by faith. But what was the source of that faith? Scripture does indeed record this; in Genesis 6:8 we read “Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord” (Genesis 6:8 NKJV). To summarize, Noah was saved by grace, through faith. And that is how people are saved today. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast (Ephesians 2:8-9). That is the Good News from our Magnificent Creator God, of which all we believers should be heralds!!! |
12/6/2025
| Melting Ice… |
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| For many, the existence of so much ice on Antarctica is a grave cause for concern, as they have been told that climate change will cause a lot of this ice to melt and cause the sea level to rise. The worry is that many of the world’s great cities, and many small island nations, could disappear as the Antarctic melts. So why did God make such a troublesome continent which could precipitate the end of the world? Remember that the topography of the world is not the way it was originally created. We have explained previously that there was likely just one main pre-Flood continent, which we call Rodinia. This continent split up during the Flood. The massive deposits of fossil fuels known to exist on the southernmost continent are evidence of pre-Flood forests, probably populated with animals. Every time ice breaks off from an Antarctic glacier, the media worry about flooding – yet God has promised not to flood the world again, nor to bring seasons to an end. Despite seeming to be a homogeneous repository for the 70% of the Earth’s fresh water, locked in as ice, there are considerable variations in climate between different parts of the continent. For every place where ice is melting and breaking up, there are parts where the ice cap gets thicker. Our Magnificent Creator God has all this in balance for His own purposes, and we can be sure He will keep all His promises!!! |
12/5/2025
| Is it Orchid or Insect… |
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| There are at least four known types of orchids that effectively pretend to be female insects. They are so good at this ruse that they attract the attentions of male pollinators. That there are four different varieties that do this makes it clear that this trickery isn’t due to chance. The Creator does not want us to make the mistake of thinking that He doesn’t exist. The Ophrys group of orchids are found around the Mediterranean. Ophrys orchids produce flowers that look and smell so much like the insect that pollinates it, the male insect will mate with the flower. In the process, he picks up the pollen. The pollen is then carried to another flower, thus ensuring the next generation. The flowers even mimic the sheen of the female’s wings, the furry fringe on her abdomen, and her antennae. The Cryptostylus orchid, found in New Guinea and Australia, mimics the female of the wasp that pollinates it. The Cryptostylus does this so perfectly that it even moves as a mating female. The same is true of an orchid found in the Andes that is pollinated by a particular species of fly through the same ruse. Out Magnificent Creator God has much more in mind than just letting us know that He is. He wants us to see that He is intimately involved with His creatures. Through the perfect life of Jesus Christ, and His suffering, death and resurrection, He has removed the final barriers between us and Himself. With the barrier of sin removed by forgiveness, He may be even more intimately involved with each of us on a personal basis. |
12/4/2025
| The Vine that Keeps Pet Butterflies… |
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| Two groups of tropical vines rely for reproduction on the world’s only known species of pollen-eating butterfly. Neither vine has very showy flowers, nor do their flowers have any scent. However, they don’t need to attract pollinators because the Heliconius butterfly depends on the pollen produced by the vines for its food. So the butterflies don’t go far from their food source. Since the butterfly depends on the pollen, the vines produce many more male flowers than female. This keeps its army of pollinators well fed. Being messy eaters, the butterflies end up with pollen all over them. But what would attract the butterfly to the female flower, which can be up to 20 feet away? Two tricks are used. First, a female flower usually grows close to where a male flower has just withered. Second, the female flower, while producing no pollen, looks just like the male flower to invite the butterfly’s attention. Did you see the intelligence in this arrangement? If only chance were involved, why would the only known species of pollen-eating butterfly be found with the only known vines that rely on their services? This is a very big planet! If there is no design in this arrangement, why should these vines offer female flowers that look like the males so that they will be pollinated? It is so clear that these butterflies were custom-made for these vines, and the vines were made for the butterflies. This is a witness to a Magnificent Creator God Who is personally involved in life on Earth! |
12/3/2025
| What Amoebas Know… |
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| When lost in the forest with no clues to where to go, humans tend to go in circles. And we have brains. Amoebas, which don’t have brains, somehow manage not to end up going in circles when they have no clues where to go. Normally, amoebas look for food by picking up its scent. When amoebas detect something good to eat, they move in its direction by extending parts of its body called pseudopods. However, when there are no scents to follow, many single-celled creatures tend to wander aimlessly. This turns out to be a very inefficient strategy for finding food. That’s because, just like humans, they end up wandering in circles. But after careful study, researchers from Princeton University have concluded that amoebas somehow manage to avoid this problem. Somehow, though they have no brain, they appear to remember where they have been. They suggest that forming pseudopods causes a type of temporary scarring on its cell wall which serves as a type of memory. While amoebas are just looking for food, we ultimately seek an eternity with our Magnificent Creator God. Many people do not know of, or do not believe God’s Word and end up with lives that wander in spiritual circles. But God’s Word brings heaven’s light into our lives which lights the way to heaven through our Lord Jesus Christ. |
12/2/2025
| Dancing Bees… |
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| Bees depend on a good memory of their surroundings to make the thousands of trips necessary to keep their hive in operation. Each day a single bee must make trips to hundreds of flowers, some as far as a mile from the hive. Scientists have long wondered how the tiny bee can remember what may be dozens of square miles of territory. When a bee finds a good source of nectar, she returns to the hive and does a dance for the other bees. This dance tells them where a new find is located. Researchers have studied this in detail and can now interpret these dances. Researchers from Princeton University tricked a bee into dancing out a location that turned out to be in the middle of a nearby lake. After receiving the message, the other members of the hive simply ignored their fellow worker. She kept dancing, but no one would believe her. Only later, when the dance clearly said that the flowers were on the opposite side of the lake, did the other bees pay attention and check out the flowers. Researchers are now wondering whether bees keep a mental map of their surroundings. How else could they tell when someone gives them a false location? Evolutionary researchers are trying to figure out how such an “evolutionarily simple” creature as the bee could be so intelligent. However, the Bible makes clear that intelligence is not related to evolution. It is the gift of an all-wise Magnificent Creator God. |
12/1/2025
| Discovery Confirms Creation Claims… |
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| One good test of whether a theory is scientific is whether the theory can accurately predict new and surprising findings. If you have a barometer, you may do this all the time. The sky may be clear, but the barometer is falling fast. No matter how nice the weather looks, you know that rain is likely. Creation scientists believe that humans have been on Earth in their present so-called “modern” form ever since the model first came out. Since that was on day six of creation, humans have been on Earth as long as any creature. So creation scientists have predicted that as we find more fossils, we will find fossils of “modern man” in older and older rocks. Such a discovery would shock the evolutionists! Evolutionists say that, according to their theory, “modern” humans have been around for only a small part of the world’s history. In their inflated estimate, they say we have been here for only 35,000 years. Evolutionists received a surprise when that age recently had to be almost tripled. A new discovery pushed the date for “modern” humans back 92,000 years. As a result, evolutionists had to admit that we turn out to be older than some of the creatures from which we were supposed to have evolved! Of course, one has to take the hot air out of those evolutionary dates. They can be adjusted down to a number that fits the biblical calendar. However, the scientific prediction made by creation scientists has proven out. And creationists are predicting that the history of “modern” humanity will continue to be pushed back further and further! And once again we must give credit to where credit is due – our Magnificent Creator God! |
11/30/2025
| There Is A Reason For All Things… |
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| Humpbacks are among the largest whales in the world. A typical humpback weighs about 40 tons and begins its breach deep down in the ocean. Imagine the acceleration required to get this enormous animal out of the water and into the air. The whale leaves the water at an angle of 30° and a speed of 18 mph. Clearly, this monster uses a lot of energy in breaching, yet it is not unknown for the whale to repeat the exercise – the observed record being 130 leaps in 90 minutes! Why does it go to all this trouble? No one really knows. As with all such obscure phenomena, there are those who suggest that the whales are trying to “attract the girls”! Others suggest that the big splash achieved on re-entry rips some of the barnacles off the whale’s surface. There may be truth in either of these suggestions. But Wilson says that he cannot overlook the probability that the whale breaches simply because it gives our Magnificent Creator God pleasure! He is a creative God, and the world He made is not for utility only, but also for beauty! |
11/29/2025
| They Are Not All Stars… |
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| There are a number of blurry, indistinct, cloudy-looking objects in the night sky which are not pinpoints of light as the stars are. One hundred ten of these are the so-called Messier objects, which were cataloged by one Charles Messier – a French astronomer who lived from 1730 through 1817. These are a mixture of objects. Some of them we would now call nebulae – quite literally, nebulous clouds of interstellar dust and gas. Examples of these are M8 – the Lagoon Nebula in the constellation of Sagittarius, and M42 – the famous Orion Nebula. Others are star clusters, such as The Pleiades, in Taurus – an object mentioned in the Bible, which is cataloged as M45. Still others are actually other galaxies, such as M104, the Sombrero Galaxy, or M31 – the Andromeda Galaxy. Why did Messier catalog such a wide variety of different objects without commenting on their differentiation? The answer is that he wasn’t actually interested in those objects. He cataloged them, rather, as a police officer catalogs data from a possible suspect in order to eliminate them from the inquiry. Messier was interested in comets – which also, from a distance, look like blurry objects. The difference is that comets, being Solar System objects, move from night to night, whereas his cataloged objects appear fixed relative to the stars. The Hebrew word for star includes what we call stars today and other objects, such as Messier’s objects. All were made by our Magnificent Creator God and declare His glory!!! |
11/28/2025
| Bacteria’s Eyes and Ears… |
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| Modern researchers are learning that bacteria are not a simple form of life. Rather, a bacterium is a tremendously complex creature that thinks. Scientists have discovered that bacteria actually have molecule-sized sensors. Some of these sensors act as eyes, while others act as ears. A dozen other proteins have been discovered that receive the information gathered by the bacteria’s “eyes” and “ears.” The collected information is then processed the same way your brain gathers and makes sense of information. Bacteria have specialized senses and a brain. In fact, bacteria are better at sensing some things than you and I are. A bacterium can, for example, sense the difference between two parts and one part in 10,000. This is the same as if you could tell the difference between one jar with 9,999 pennies and another jar with 10,000 pennies! The idea that bacteria are just “simple” forms of life comes from evolution. Growing research is showing that even one-celled creatures are not simple at all. Think of it. Every single-celled bacterium must accomplish, within that one cell, all the tasks we accomplish using the trillions of cells in our bodies. Eating, digestion, metabolism, waste removal, reproduction – and even thinking – all take place within a single cell! There is no such thing as a simple form of life. Science certainly argues against the idea that life began by accident. What science is learning urges us to think about the wise and thoughtful Magnificent Creator God Who made us! |
11/27/2025
| A Whale of a Problem… |
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| According to evolution, life began in the sea. However, because the land was better for life, evolution developed land life from sea life. It was on land that mammals evolved, according to evolution. Here, though, evolution has painted itself into a corner. Or perhaps it is better to say that evolutionists have fallen into one of the traps set for them by the Creator. You see, the largest creatures on Earth live in the sea – and they are mammals! The great whales are mammals like many land animals. However, it is very clear that they never lived on land – nor do they resemble any land creature. Whales provide clear evidence that, contrary to evolution’s claims, not even all mammals are related to each other. And if mammals are so different that they cannot be related to each other through evolution, neither is it likely that bugs and trees and cows and humans could be related by evolution. As Genesis so clearly tells us, living things were originally made in distinct kinds, and they continue to reproduce after their kinds. One wants to ask the evolutionist, if the drive to live on land was so great it moved sea creatures to become land creatures, why did some mammals go to all the trouble to move back into the sea? To say the least, whales offer Bible-believing Christians a great testimony to our Magnificent Creator God and a good argument against evolution. For evolutionists, mammals who live in the sea are a whale of a problem! |
11/26/2025
| Three Million Children… |
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| There are five known groups of orchids that throw their pollen. These flowers are designed with mechanical flower structures that work as triggers. Some types use a bee’s back to trigger the pollen discharge. Another uses, yes, the bee’s knees. The Catasetum orchid produces a few male flowers that have a strong scent that attracts a male bee. When the bee lands and trips the pollen trigger, it is showered with that flower’s entire hope for the next generation. Then the flower stops producing any scent and begins to wither and die. Now it’s up to the bee to find a female flower for the pollen. It’s not easy for the bee to find a female flower because the Catasetum orchid produces even fewer females than males. But the female flower has an even stronger scent than the male, and it lives longer. If the bee finds a female flower, the future of this orchid is bright because the fruit that results produces three million seeds! That’s as if nearly half the population of New York City had the same mother and father! Because the designs of our Magnificent Creator God are carried out amid such beauty and with such careful planning, evolutionists often talk about evolution as if it were a living being. However, the truth is clear. God is not merely a distant God up in His heaven. Think of it for a moment. If He is so concerned about such detail even among plants and insects, how much more concerned is He about the details of our lives! |
11/25/2025
| A Desert full of Frogs… |
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| Even though many frogs live much of their lives out of the water, they need water to reproduce. This can be a problem since some frogs live in trees and some even live in the desert! For a tree frog, the trip from the treetops to a nearby pool is a long and dangerous journey. However, the Creator cares about all of His creatures. The leaves of the bromeliad that grows in the branches of many trees in the tropical forest form a private pool far above the ground. As a result, mama frog can raise her young without ever leaving the treetops! The desert would seem to offer an even greater challenge for a frog. However, since it pleased the Creator to place frogs in the desert – maybe to challenge the evolutionists – He has also provided for their needs. It may rain only once every two years in the deserts of central Australia. When it does rain, the water-holding frogs emerge from their underground hideaways to lay their eggs in the puddles. Before the puddles disappear, not only do the eggs hatch, but the young grow and develop into frogs that are able to store water until the next rain. As the desert again takes over, the frogs dig themselves back into the ground and go into suspended animation until the next rains come. A year or two later, the new generation will emerge after the next rain to raise their young. Neither chance nor the smartest frog in the world could design or create these abilities. Only a wise Magnificent Creator God could. And if the Creator has provided this much care for frogs, just think of how much more He cares about you and me in our everyday lives! |
11/24/2025
| Hydraulic Spiders… |
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| Hydraulic machines are part of our everyday lives. When you step on the brakes in your car, brake fluid, which cannot be compressed, is forced from a cylinder into the braking mechanism attached to your wheels. Hydraulic mechanisms work because fluid cannot expand, but it will easily flow to areas where there is less pressure. However, humans were not the first to invent uses for this principle. The spider uses it all the time. The spider has his skeleton on the outside of his body and his muscles inside his skeleton. Since our muscles are outside our skeleton, we can use muscles both to bend our legs and stretch them out. However, the spider’s arrangement allows his muscles only to bend his leg. When he wants to straighten out his leg to take another spidery step, he pumps fluid into his leg, and the leg joint hinges open. The North American dwarf mistletoe builds up hydraulic pressure equal to that found in a truck tire. It uses that stored pressure to catapult its seeds up to 50 feet at a speed close to 60 miles per hour. The squirting cucumber, found in the Mediterranean area, uses the same principle to propel its seeds up to 40 feet. Who would believe that the brake system in an automobile came together by chance and natural forces? Neither does it make sense to believe that spiders, other animals and plants came about without a Designer and Magnificent Creator God. |
11/23/2025
| Those Thieving Creatures… |
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| Out of more than 30,000 species of spiders, there are three species that make their living through thievery. That number was recently raised from two with the discovery of a tiny, thieving species on the island of Taiwan. The other two species live in South America and are known to steal only silk from the webs of other spiders. This strange little spider from Taiwan which steals much more than just silk and is described as looking like a tiny drop of mercury with legs attached. It preys on the webs of giant wood spiders, whose webs can be more than three feet across. Many spiders eat their own webs for the purpose of recycling the silk to repair a tattered web. But this newly discovered little thief eats the webs of the giant wood spider. Researchers say that these little spiders can, on the average, make a wood spider’s web 21 percent smaller. They have also been seen stealing small insects from the wood spiders’ web as well as wood spider eggs. They are able to do this because they are small and rather sneaky. They do spin their own webs when they are ready to lay eggs, and they also spin their own silk to cover their eggs. While it is wrong for us to steal, theft is apparently the way our Magnificent Creator God has chosen to feed these spiders in a fallen world. That our world is corrupted by our own sin should remind us that God is our ultimate provider. He has even prepared forgiveness and eternal life for us through the holy life and innocent suffering and death of His own Son, Jesus Christ!!! |
11/22/2025
| Walking On Water… |
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| Would you like to be able to walk on water the way Jesus did? The closest human beings have come to walking on water is water skiing, which some even do without skis. But they still need a powerful and noisy power boat to do it. But there is an animal that can walk on water without help of any kind. The basilisk lizard is yet another tribute to God’s unlimited creativity, knowledge and power. Basilisk are found from Mexico to Ecuador and are equally at home in the trees, on the ground and in and on the water. The basilisk is an excellent climber and can outrun any enemy on the ground. Since its back legs are proportionately longer than its front legs, when it needs extra speed, it can run just on its back legs. It runs so fast that it can run across the surface of a body of water that’s up to 100 feet wide. That’s impressive for a creature that can reach two feet in length! Skin flaps on both sides of its back toes, as well as scale fringes on the toes, help the basilisk to stay on the surface. Should the basilisk run into danger while crossing the water, it sinks beneath the surface and either swims or runs along the bottom in a different direction. The lizard is able to stay underwater for several hours. While the basilisk’s method of walking on water is different from our Lord’s, its abilities come from the same Magnificent Creator God. This lizard shows the wisdom and power of God to do things that seem impossible to us, including giving forgiveness of sins and eternal life to us through His Son Jesus Christ! |
11/21/2025
| The Strange Behavior of Orchids… |
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| There are between 10,000 and 15,000 species of orchids. While you surely are not familiar with all of them, it sounds strange to talk about orchid behavior. This huge variety of orchids offers a multitude of different flower shapes, colors and sizes. Each unique shape, color and size is perfectly suited to the bees, butterflies, bats, moths, flies and birds that are involved in that orchid’s pollination. Those orchids that use birds as pollinators have no scent. Instead, they offer the brightest of colors, appealing to the birds’ strongest sense. Evolutionists call this “co-evolution.” However, giving it a name doesn’t explain it. How did these orchids know that the bird’s strongest sense is sight? And how were these orchids able to perform genetic recombination on themselves so that they could develop their bright colors? No, giving something a scientific-sounding name doesn’t make naturalistic claims any more scientific. Or consider the bee orchid. It offers a flower that looks like a female bee. The purpose here is to attract male bees to a position that will load them with pollen. How can it be scientific to suggest that a plant purposely restructured itself to fool bees into pollinating it? Our Magnificent Creator God has purposely made it impossible to explain the creation without Him. He did this not simply so that we would see that He is real. His purpose is much greater. God seeks a personal relationship with you and has made that possible through the saving work of His Son, Jesus Christ, for us. It is to Christ that He would ultimately draw our attention. |
11/20/2025
| Can Bacteria Think… |
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| It sounds silly to ask whether bacteria can think. However, science has known for more than 100 years that the little guys can indeed think. Experiments in 1883 conducted by Wilhelm Pfeffer showed that bacteria will swim toward good food like chicken soup and away from poisons such as mop disinfectant. Pfeffer also learned that bacteria can make decisions. He made sure that his bacteria knew the location of chicken soup. Then he separated them from it with a mild mixture of disinfectant. He found that the little fellows would swim as fast as they could through the disinfectant to get to the soup. This is the same type of decision-making process you and I go through every day. We often tolerate the unpleasant to arrive at the pleasant. As a result of this research, scientists today talk about bacteria actually making decisions. These conclusions amaze most people. That’s because we have been trained to think of intelligence in an evolutionary context. The “higher” or more evolved a creature is, the smarter we expect it to be. However, if we recognize, as the Bible says, that all life is the product of an intelligent Magnificent Creator God, we should not be surprised to find that intelligence has nothing to do with evolution. Every creature has been given as much intelligence as it needs by a Creator Who truly cares for every living creature – even bacteria! |
11/19/2025
| Creative Procreation… |
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| While the Bible teaches us that sex is a wonderful gift of God, evolutionists believe that sexual reproduction should not have evolved. According to evolutionists, if sexual reproduction were to develop, evolution is supposed to get rid of it. To make matters worse, immobile plants use sexual reproduction. This creates a problem in transferring the male genes to the female for fertilization. Just to confound things even more, God uses insects and even mammals to transfer the pollen. Since evolutionists believe that plants were around for many millions of years before animals, evolutionists have yet another problem. The European family of the Arum lilies attracts beetles and flies. When one of the insects lands on a flower, he finds a slick, oil-coated surface and ends up sliding down into a chamber filled with small hairs. Imprisoned, he finds a sweet sap that makes good eating. While he is gorging himself on the sap and getting sticky in the process, the male part of the flower showers him with pollen. The next day, the sticky, pollen-coated insect finds that the doors to his prison are open. So he flies off to another flower to unwittingly deliver his load of pollen! It sounds like science fiction to say that a flower figured out how to do this. And it certainly doesn’t sound very scientific to say that nobody designed and made this complex arrangement. As we learn more about these arrangements in nature, it becomes even more clear that an all-wise Magnificent Creator God designed these beautiful, symbiotic relationships between different members of the living kingdom. |
11/18/2025
| Mysteries of the Piranhas… |
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| When the piranha is mentioned, nearly everyone thinks of a picture of a herd of cattle crossing the Amazon – and splish, splash – nothing is left but bones. Actually, the piranha is a rather interesting fish. It certainly seems to be the bearer of a few tricks the Creator wanted to play on those who want to explain the world without Him. According to evolutionary theory, new species evolve when there is some way of making a living in nature that no one else is using. So, when you have many similar species, each one should have its own specialization. However, while there may be a dozen different species of piranha living in a portion of a river, they all eat the same things and live in the same ways. As one evolutionist put it, “This clashes with evolutionary theory.” We who believe in a Creator can understand His creating variety just for the sheer joy and exhilaration of creativity. As a result, we are not surprised to find different varieties of the same kind of fish all making the same living. Even when piranhas do stage one of their mass attacks for which they are famous, each one takes a bite, then waits in line until the others take their turns. Many evolutionists have difficulty explaining this. Selflessness is not supposed to exist in an evolved world. Could this selfless behavior be left over from when the creation was perfect? It certainly is a provision by our Magnificent Creator God to make life a little better for the piranha. |
11/17/2025
| One God against the gods… |
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| Modern skeptics of the Bible, including skeptics within the church, often deny the Bible’s description of God’s actions in the ten plagues against Egypt. However, our growing knowledge of ancient Egypt tells us that the plagues described in the Bible were exactly what God Himself said that they were. They were indeed the true God’s judgment against the false gods of Egypt. When God turned the Nile water into blood, He was acting against Hapi, the Egyptian god, who was honored as the giver of life. When the river turned to blood it was no longer able to give life. When Egypt filled with frogs, God showed that the frog-headed goddess Hekt, responsible for creation and fertility, could not even control the fertility of frogs. The massive death of Egypt’s cattle was an attack on Hathor. Hathor was the cow-headed goddess of love, one of the oldest Egyptian gods, and the one that was worshipped by Pharaoh. The hail was God’s judgment against the sky goddess Nut who was also mother of the sun god. It was her job to protect the land from destruction that came from the heavens. The three days of darkness showed the powerlessness of Amon-Re, one of Egypt’s main gods. Finally, the death of Pharaoh’s firstborn and then Pharaoh, both considered living gods, left no doubt about the all-powerful nature of Israel’s true God. Today people still look to things in the creation to give them what only the true Magnificent Creator God can give them. Yet it is the creation itself that bears witness to the only true God. |
11/16/2025
| Truly Our Father… |
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| What did God have in mind when He created the human male? The world around us offers many images of what it means to be a “real man.” The world offers us the breadwinner, the tough-guy and the workaholic’s unending push for success. Also, it’s becoming increasingly universal that it is the woman who holds the family together. We can be sure that none of these images capture what God had in mind. If we want to learn some practical lessons about what God intended a man to be, we need to begin with God’s original creation of the first man. The first job given to Adam, the first man, was an intellectual task – identifying and naming the animals. Jesus Christ taught us to call God “our Father.” However, we shouldn’t make the mistake of comparing Him to our imperfect human fathers. Human fathers need to learn from God. What kind of father is He? He’s tough. However, toughness does not mean hurling thunderbolts. True toughness is best shown when love persists despite rejection and disobedience. God never tired of patiently seeking Saul of Tarsus, His sworn enemy. However, while He is loving, God is not a wimp. He has established absolutes that we can depend on. He always keeps His Word. We can be thankful for that because when we look at ourselves we know that we have not been the men or women He intended us to be. His Word of grace in the forgiveness of sins through Jesus Christ assures all who cling to Christ that the perfect and almighty Magnificent Creator God is truly our Father! |
11/15/2025
| And Medicine Too… |
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| Numerous television programs have been made about the Komodo dragon and the creatures are even going on display at some zoos. Reaching up to 400 pounds, they can even outrun a man. And they eat anything that they find dead or alive. Even a simple bite from a dragon will prove fatal within 72 hours unless you get immediate treatment. That’s because its saliva contains 52 different deadly strains of bacteria that will produce blood poisoning. Its jagged, inch‑long teeth make a tearing wound that ensures that plenty of poison will be delivered to your system. Even if you were bitten and escape, the Komodo dragon will be able to smell you from two miles away when its poison takes effect. These facts may lead some to ask not only why God made such a creature, but why He has preserved them to this day? Besides demonstrating variety in God’s creation, the Komodo dragon may eventually save more lives than it has ever taken. When the dragon eats, its teeth tear its own gums, exposing its blood to those toxic bacteria. But the dragon never gets infected. Scientists have learned why. They have identified a protein molecule in its blood stream that kills all those toxic bacteria in its saliva. That protein is now being tested on mice. It could well be that the Komodo dragon has shown us the path to a super antibiotic that could treat the blood poisoning that kills hundreds of thousands of people every year. If so, this creature will again glorify our Magnificent Creator God by giving us an important medical advance! |
11/14/2025
| Real Sloth… |
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| Some creatures are so bizarre that they suggest a lesson to us. Yet even in their strangeness we see that they have been perfectly provided for by their Creator. One such example is the three-toed sloth. It rarely moves, spending about 18 hours a day sleeping upside down in a tree. When it does bother to move, it is in ultra-slow motion. It is not unusual for the three-toed sloth to take 30 seconds to shift one leg a few inches. The three-toed sloth doesn’t do well on the ground because he can’t walk or even crawl. If a sloth is placed on the ground, it v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y pulls itself along on its belly to a tree. However, sloths hang effortlessly in the trees even when asleep. Their grasp of the tree is so solid that they continue to hang in the trees even after they have died. Even though sloths are hunted for food by the South American Indians, the three-toed sloth is the most abundant tree-dwelling mammal in South America’s forests. Despite the seeming helplessness of the three-toed sloth, it is doing well because it has been perfectly designed for its life. Because its life doesn’t seem to amount to much, it was named after one of the so-called seven deadly sins. This creature, that has a face only a mother could love, presents an image with which neither child nor adult would want to be associated. Yet the sloth still has our Magnificent Creator God’s care. The nearly helpless condition of the sloth reminds us that we are completely helpless when it comes to our relationship with God. Only because of the efforts of our Savior, Jesus Christ, do we have peace with God. Let’s not be slothful about telling others of the forgiveness of sins! |
11/13/2025
| Is There Life in Space… |
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| Back in 1836, well-known astronomer Sir John Herschel wrote a series of articles for the New York Sun reporting his discovery of life on the moon. He told of how he saw buffalo, goats, cranes, pelicans, beaches, forests, and even winged batmen. The Sun finally admitted that the whole story had been a prank, and most of the public was amused. There is as much evidence today for life on the moon or other planets as there was in 1836. As we explore those other planets of the solar system, the evidence grows that there is little hope that other life will be found in space. Evolutionists, of course, expect life to be found in space. They feel that if life evolved on earth it certainly should have evolved elsewhere, too. At a popular conference on whether there is life in space, one of today’s most famous astronomers, Dr. Robert Jastrow, stated that the question was “essentially a religious controversy.” That the question of life in space is a religious question is an important insight. Many evolutionists see the discovery of life in space as the final nail in the coffin of Christianity and proof of their religion of evolution. It would not be, of course. The Bible does not offer any clear statements on the matter, although most Bible-believing scholars conclude that the Bible implies that material life exists only on earth. However, our exploration of space has taught us that our earth is a very special place, carefully designed by our Magnificent Creator God just for life. |
11/12/2025
| The Loving Crocodile… |
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| You might not think of the crocodile as a particularly loving creature. In reality, the crocodile is among the most gentle and loving of parents. Mama crocodile lays between 40 and 80 eggs in a large nest. For the 90 days they take to hatch, she will keep close watch over them, even foregoing food so as not to leave the nest unattended. Even the father stays close to guard the eggs that are a delicacy to many animals. At the end of this three-month watch the babies begin to chirp from within their eggs. Before long there may be dozens of babies chirping from the nest of buried eggs. This brings the mother who carefully uncovers the eggs, one by one. The young are only nine inches long and weigh just four ounces. Yet the gentle and loving mother picks up each one and with a flip of her head places them in a special pouch in her mouth. When some of the young have trouble breaking out of their shell, mama picks up the eggs and delicately works the eggs inside her mouth with her tongue, freeing the imprisoned baby. Once collected, all the young are taken to a special protected nursery where they will be just as carefully tended for months. Most amazing is that, should the mother not be present to tend to the hatchling chores, the father offers the hatchlings the very same help and care! Our Magnificent Creator God loves even the crocodile! And his acceptance of you and me, because of what Jesus Christ has done for us, is an even greater wonder than the loving crocodile! |
11/11/2025
| Complex Ant Society… |
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| Imagine a huge living creature covering about one square mile and made up of almost a third of a billion cells. Imagine each of those living cells being able to move about independently of the others. No, it’s not the plot of a new science fiction movie. Some scientists have suggested that ant colonies may be thought of as one large living organism. They suggest this because of the way individual members within ant colonies behave. Ant colonies have many kinds of members, each with its own specific task. The soldier ants in a colony have extra-large heads and heavy-duty jaws for fighting. Other ants are concerned only about finding and returning food. Still other workers do nothing but process and store food. Within the colony another caste of ants does nothing but tend the eggs. Others prepare the food for the larvae and deliver it to other specialized ants who do nothing but feed the next generation. If this sounds complex, imagine the largest known ant colony. This Japanese ant colony has an estimated 306 million worker ants, and more than a million queens. The colony occupies 45,000 interconnected underground nests that range over about a square mile! There is obviously intelligent design and control behind ant society—intelligence not found in ants or in nature itself. This intelligence comes from outside nature. Here is yet another witness that no concern of any living thing is too small for our Magnificent Creator God’s complete attention! |
11/10/2025
| The Crocodile Bird… |
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| How would you like to be a dental hygienist for a crocodile? That’s how the crocodile bird makes his living. Of course you do need to know that the crocodile bird doesn’t show up to do his work with any drills or needles. He and the crocodile are on good terms with each other. After eating, the crocodile climbs the river bank and relaxes with his mouth open. The little crocodile bird enter the crocodile’s mouth to clean up the scraps that are left. While the crocodile bird makes most of his living as sort of a crocodile dental hygienist, he also helps keep the crocodile free of pesky insects that lodge in his skin. The crocodile also receives one other service from the crocodile bird. Whenever the bird senses approaching danger, he gives his sharp warning call and flies off. The crocodile, now warned, can quickly roll over into the water where virtually no animal can get the best of him. This is but one of many unlikely cooperative arrangements that we find in the plant and animal kingdoms. Every one of these relationships speaks for a Creator and against the idea that either these creatures, or their cooperation, evolved naturally. Evolutionists have written whole books on the subject. Yet they don’t seem satisfied that they have explained how these relationships could develop through evolution. We agree that they have no explanation. Nor are they likely to find one as long as they deny a Magnificent Creator God who cares for His creation. |
11/9/2025
| And How Old Is This World… |
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| Americans lead the industrialized world in belief in creationism and a literal Bible. A recent study by a University of Cincinnati compares American’s belief in a recent creation and the truth of the Bible with beliefs in other countries. The study found that 45 percent of Americans believe that God created the world less than 10,000 years ago. Another 40 percent try to mix God and evolution. Only ten percent believe in atheistic evolution. In comparison, only seven percent of the citizens of Great Britain take the Genesis account of creation literally. Surveys of people in Norway, Russia and the Netherlands produced results similar to Great Britain. Interestingly five percent of the physical scientists polled in the United States believe the account of creation as taught in the Bible. The study concluded that America is losing its scientific competitiveness because so many Americans believe in creation and the truth of the Bible. But scientific progress has come about because historically scientists believed that we live in an ordered creation that follows the rules imposed on it by a Creator. They saw science as the discovery of God’s order. Isaac Newton wrote more Bible commentaries than he did scientific books. Taking the Bible literally, he concluded that the earth was less than 7,000 years old. Other examples from history could be multiplied. But the lesson of human history is that true scientific progress is possible only when man recognizes that all knowledge and wisdom comes from our Magnificent Creator God though the Scriptures He has given us! |
11/8/2025
| The Honeybee… |
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| Why did the Creator bring together so many precise specifications and high intelligence in the honeybee? To glorify Himself and because bees are crucial to the reproductive cycles of so many plants as well as the food chain. The amazing structure of the honeycomb has amazed scientists for thousands of years. As early as the third century AD, the astronomer Pappus of Alexandria offered an explanation for the six-sided or hexagonal shape of the honeycomb. He pointed out that while the triangle, square and hexagon could all be candidates for the shape of the comb, one of these shapes holds more than the others. The most efficient shape for storing the most honey while wasting the least space is the hexagon. There are many variations of the hexagon that are available to the bee. However, the honeybee is always very precise in constructing honeycomb hexagons, with an obtuse angle of 109°23´ and an acute angle of 70°23´. These angles produce the most usable space for the least amount of building material. Humans are unable to use such precision in their designs without sophisticated equipment. Each honeybee is a tiny but powerful computer that could only have been designed and built by an intelligent Magnificent Creator God. Bees and what they do are of central importance to much of the rest of creation. No wonder God has given them so much: the complex structure of their society, their intelligence and industriousness! |
11/7/2025
| The Archer Fish… |
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| The yellow-and-black striped archer fish shops among the insects that land on branches overhanging his pond in the peaceful waters of the East Indies. Sometimes he will wait under a branch until something that would make a good lunch lands on it. When the archer fish finds a tasty-looking insect, he shoots an accurately aimed stream of water at his prey, knocking the insect into the water. Before the insect has a chance to recover, the archer fish has eaten him and is looking for dessert. The archer fish has a deep groove in his mouth. When he places his tongue against this groove, he ends up with a blow tube that is about 1/16-inch in diameter. Compressing his gills forces pressurized water through the blow pipe. The rounded tip of the archer fish’s tongue acts as a valve so the fish can shoot a few small bursts or one long stream of water at his prey. The archer fish seldom misses if his prey is within four feet. This simple but elegant arrangement is testimony to a wise and skillful Magnificent Creator God. Neither mindless chance evolution nor any fish could be smart enough to design this system. Nor could any fish redesign his normal mouth tissues into this unique tool. Here we see that our Creator even cares about providing the needs of a fish. We know that He cares even more about our lives! In fact, He has said so! |
11/6/2025
| Thinking God’s Thoughts After Him… |
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| Our Creator’s work reflects some of His incredible inventive creativity. In Matthew 6:30 Jesus reminds us how God provides for all the needs of all His creatures. Each creature is perfectly suited for its life, even if that requires special creativity from God. Many of the creatures that live in the deepest and darkest parts of the sea are equipped with lights. One has a very bright headlamp to light its way. Others have lights on their tails, jaws or sides. The light they produce, as the light produced by the firefly, is a cold light. The light is generated when chemicals manufactured by the creatures are mixed together. Or consider the small bird that has an “engine” powerful enough to allow it to fly for 10,000 or more miles. The construction of the bird’s heart differs from yours and mine in important ways. However, we couldn’t get by with the bird’s heart just as it couldn’t get by with ours. While it seems strange to think of the penguin as a bird that flies under water, that’s exactly what it does. The penguin can reach speeds of 30 miles per hour underwater, as fast as the fastest marine mammal, the dolphin. All of us would benefit from looking at the creatures around us a little more closely. If we do, we will learn a little more about the magnificent creativity of our Magnificent Creator God. As we learn about their lives and how they are provided for, we will, as one early scientist put it, learn to think God’s thoughts about the natural world after Him! |
11/5/2025
| Overcoming This World… |
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| Deserts are inhospitable places with little rain—blazingly hot by day and chillingly cold by night. Few plants can survive, but the rock morning glory can. It has large underground tubers resembling sweet potatoes that store water whenever it rains. In times of drought, it’s sustained by the water stored in its twenty or so underground reserves. Jeremiah 17:8 says of those who put their confidence in God: “They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit”. Our Magnificent Creator God can overcome any issues when adapting His Creation to this world!!! |
11/4/2025
| Death Before Adam… |
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| If God created, but He did so by evolution, it means that there were many generations and billions of deaths before the first man appeared on the scene. Does Scripture say anything about this? Indeed it does! In fact, the whole plan of salvation rests on the fact that there was no death before the first man. This truth is found throughout Scripture, but nowhere is it more clear than in 1 Corinthians 15:22. Here we read, “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.” This means that if death did not begin with, and because of, Adam’s sin, then by the same token no one is made alive in Christ. The way it is phrased in this passage, one depends on the other. If there were generations of death in the world before Adam, then death is not tied to Adam’s sin. And if death is not tied to Adam’s sin, then life is not tied to Christ. In other words, if there were death before Adam and therefore generations before Adam, Christ’s work turns out to be of no effect. So you see, even evolution with God added to it questions the Bible’s message about the saving work of Christ. The good news is that there is no fact that demands our rejection of our Magnificent Creator God’s account of creation. No scientific fact has been established that forces us to reject what the Bible says about the first human beings or the origin of sin. There is no fact that has been established that rules out the Bible’s account of creation, the origin of sin, or death. These truths are fact and the foundation upon which the Gospel rests! |
11/3/2025
| Certain: Six Creation Days… |
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| Many Christians are willing to accept what Genesis has to say about creation with one exception. They don’t want to accept the six days as literal, natural, approximately 24-hour days. Did you know that there are other important portions of Scripture that depend on those six days being literal and normal days? In Exodus 20:11 the Lord is giving the Ten Commandments to Moses. The Lord is explaining the principle of the Sabbath in this verse. God’s explanation says that man shall work six days and rest on the seventh because God Himself made the heavens and the earth in six days and rested on the seventh. Therefore He blessed the seventh day. This truth is repeated in Deuteronomy 5:13. Surely no Christian would argue that the Ten Commandments are poetry to be taken figuratively. The Lord is confirming here that His work of creation really occupied six normal days and that He rested on the seventh normal day. If these days were actually long ages, then we should work for six long ages before we take some rest. We can be sure that this is not what the Lord has in mind. If the Ten Commandments should not be interpreted literally because of this connection with creation, where does that leave us? Surely the creation days, by our Magnificent Creator God’s own confirmation and commandment to us, are literal, natural, approximately 24-hour days! |
11/2/2025
| Mental Maps… |
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| Picture yourself sitting in a friend’s living room. Can you picture in your mind where the door is located? Scientists call this a thought map. Thought maps are mental pictures of the arrangement of objects relative to one another. Thought maps help us remember where to find a water glass, the gas or brake pedal, and home. Thought maps require intelligence. They help make possible additional intelligent activity, such as finding our way around and conducting an intelligent search. This is why scientists have been surprised to find that many creatures, not just humans, use thought maps. One experimenter carried a chimpanzee on his back while he hid 18 pieces of food in a field. Then the chimp and five others were released in the field to find the food. The chimp who had seen the hiding places found most of the food, following a very different route than that originally taken by the researcher. Bees, likewise, use mental maps. Even if a bee is forced to detour on its way back to the hive, it always reports the food source as though it had used a direct route. Bees are also able to find a food source that has been moved after its discovery. Ants have also been shown to use mental maps. Mental maps help humans and animals think deductively about changes in the environment. Mental mapping ability could not have evolved because even the lowliest creature requires this ability to survive. This ability must have been given to them in the first place by their Magnificent Creator God! |
11/1/2025
| Mammoths Among Us… |
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| Will the mammoth walk the earth again? At one time, herds of these giant creatures, which stand 10 to 12 feet tall at the shoulder, covered North America, Europe, Asia and Africa. In late 1999, Russian and American scientists excavated a buried, frozen mammoth in Northern Siberia. Once excavated, the mammoth was airlifted, using Russia’s largest helicopter, to Siberian ice caves that were fashioned into a laboratory. There the frozen mammoth was studied to see if either sperm, or DNA could be extracted from it. This is not as fantastic as it sounds. A mammoth calf that was found in 1977 was found to have intact red blood cells. In 1978, DNA was first extracted from another mammoth. Researchers hope that they can extract intact sperm from the male they are now studying and use it to fertilize an elephant’s egg. The result would be half mammoth and half elephant. If scientists can extract intact DNA another possibility opens up. The DNA can be inserted in an emptied elephant egg and the egg induced to divide. The result of this procedure would be pure mammoth of the Mammuthus species, one of six or seven known species. Scientists are able to use elephants in this work because there is only a five percent genetic difference between the two creatures. If mammoths again walk among us, these huge creatures will glorify the Magnificent Creator God Who originally created them. They will add to the diversity of life we see around us that glorifies God’s power and creativity. |
10/31/2025
| Do Christians Need Evolution… |
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| Many, if not most, of the leaders of the creationist movement today were once evolutionists. Most of them once believed that God created, but that He created through evolution. When they accepted evolution, they were considered objective by many. As soon as they rejected evolution, they were considered biased by those who still accepted evolution. Those who were once convinced evolutionists point out that there are serious objections to evolution. For example, the fossil record paints no picture of the development of living things from simple to complex. If you are a theistic evolutionist you might not believe this, but check it out. Representatives of every major phylum of animal living today are found in the deepest layers of rocks containing multicelled fossils. They appear suddenly without any evolutionary ancestors. Further, the fossil record offers not one undisputed connecting or “missing link” between the various kinds of creatures. Dr. Colin Patterson of the British Museum, who is not a creationist, admits in a well-publicized letter that there is not a single transitional form to link any kind of animal with another. Even the most famous so-called transitional forms have not stood the test of scientific scrutiny. There is no single fact or group of facts that demand that the educated Christian abandon the Bible’s account of creation and history by our Magnificent Creator God. There is no intellectual reason for Christians to adopt evolutionary beliefs! |
10/30/2025
| Does Evolution Allow the Supernatural… |
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| Let’s be honest. If you believe God created, but that He used evolution to do so, you have to answer a difficult question. Does evolution allow the supernatural to take place? What is the difference between the scientific evidence needed to accept that evolution occurred without God and that needed to accept theistic evolution? Practically speaking, the physical evidence for both positions should be identical. Evolution is built on the principle that natural laws determine what happens in the physical world. Evolution rules it out of bounds for God to get involved in the workings of a reptile egg to produce the first mammal-like creature. Evolution says there is no need for supernatural intervention to modify some ape-like creatures into the first human being. As far as evolution is concerned, God’s supernatural intervention could not happen. There is no physical evidence to support the idea that God periodically intervened in evolutionary development. Nor does the Bible talk about this kind of activity. A person might accept that God created through evolution. But this belief would not be faithful to the physical evidences that evolutionists claim to have. Nor is it faithful to the statements we find in the Bible. Evolution does not allow the super-natural action of a Magnificent Creator God. Even the Bible itself cannot be God’s Word if there is no supernatural action of God. Thankfully, the Bible is God’s revealed Word and it does offer you an intelligent alternative to evolution. |
10/29/2025
| Did God Create by Evolution?… |
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| Nearly 50% of the people in the United States, including many Christians, believe that God did indeed create all things. Unfortunately, they believe He used evolution as His instrument of creation. Christians often adopt this idea because they are unaware that there are thousands of scientists who believe God created the entire universe supernaturally in six days. Many are unaware that good scientific reasons exist to accept God’s work of creating just as it is described in the Bible. While it doesn’t get much media attention, the work being done by these creation scientists is challenging evolutionism. The work of creationists has appeared in scientific journals. Scientists who believe the truth of the Bible’s account of creation are involved in the professional scientific dialogue that continually goes on among science professionals. At seminars conducted by these scientists, I have heard smiling, joyful people telling everyone they saw, “I didn’t know that the Bible offered an intelligent alternative to evolution. I didn’t know there were so many well-educated scientists who were creationists! What I have heard today shows me that I can be a more faithful follower of my Lord Jesus Christ and give up belief in evolution!” There are no ‘facts” that demand that an educated person accept evolution as fact. The testimony of thousands of believing scientists confirms this. The instrument of our Magnificent Creator God’s creation was not natural law, but His Son, who took our form upon Himself in the Person of Jesus Christ for our salvation! |
10/28/2025
| Consider All the Dating Methods… |
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| How old is the universe? Evolutionary scientists talk about how radiometric dating methods prove the universe and the earth are billions of years old. Let’s look at all the methods scientists could use. There are well over 100 methods available! There are thousands of scientists who prefer other methods that offer younger ages for our world and universe. Those few methods—out of over 100—that evolutionists prefer are not very exact. Sometimes evolutionists will actually get a negative age for something using one of their preferred methods. In other words, the same method that shows that some object is a billion years old may show that some other object doesn’t even exist yet! The fact is, more dating methods prove, just as scientifically, that the world is less than 500 years old than prove it is more than a billion years old. Of over 100 methods we know of— giving results of anywhere from 100 years to billions of years— 15% of all methods give a date of between 6,000 and 10,000 years for the age of the universe. That is a very powerful statistical argument for a young creation! We Christians should not allow evolutionists to intimidate us with scientific mumbo-jumbo. Our faith is in the Bible that our Magnificent Creator God has given us. Those who promote evolution have their faith in their own reasoning abilities. The origins debate is religious. The religion revealed by God is challenging, head-to-head, another religion. That other religion, evolution, was hatched in some little human mind! |
10/27/2025
| Monkeying with Typewriters… |
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| Nearly everyone just “knows” that if enough monkeys were allowed to pound away at typewriters for enough time, they would eventually produce all the great works of literature. But there are some fundamental laws of science and some very simple commonsense facts that show this claim to be nonsense. Perhaps after a day or two some monkey might type the word “to” with spaces before and after it. Eventually another monkey might type the word “be.” Given sufficient time and monkeys, we might end up with “To be or not to be.” By this simple, mindless chance typing of letters we could eventually get all the great works of literature. The truth is, time works against our fearless troupe of innumerable monkeys. If they are going to get their work done, they have to get their job done in a hurry. Neither monkeys nor typewriters last forever. Then there is the problem of paper. Someone has calculated that even if monkeys and typewriters lasted forever and there was an unlimited supply of paper, the worthless trash our monkeys would produce would fill the entire universe before they could get out one Shakespeare play—not to mention War and Peace! Neither science nor the laws of probability support this nonsensical theory about monkeys. Common sense shows us that this illustration, often used by evolutionists, reveals the anti-scientific nature of evolution. The Bible isn’t against science. Evolution is antiscientific! We owe all that we have to our Magnificent Creator God who did nothing by chance. |
10/26/2025
| Wired For Smell… |
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| We all know that we each started out as a single cell in our mother’s womb. Then those cells began to divide and within 21 days we had a working nervous system and a beating heart. How did all those new cells know how to hook up to each other to knit together our nerve connections? How do other cells know to hook up with each other to make our circulatory system, or form the heart? A fascinating new theory has now been proposed, based on the fact that every cell in your body has the same active genes that your nose uses to enable you to smell. Known as olfactory genes, these genes have no known reason to be active in every one of your cells. Mammals and humans have more than a thousand different olfactory genes. One or another of these crisscrosses each of your cell seven times. Researchers already know that these genes were crucial to the development of your sense of smell as you formed in your mother’s womb. As you formed, the nerve cells in your nose sent out growths, called axons, toward your brain. Each of those axons finally grew into the part of the brain called the olfactory bulb. Once there it hooked up with the cell designed to sense the specific scent detectable by the nerve cell in your nose that sent it out. It has now been proposed that olfactory genes are active in every one of our cells because this same method of wiring our noses for smell is used to link all our cells as we form in the womb. If so, this system of knitting our unborn bodies together is an elegant and precise product of a loving Magnificent Creator God. You weren’t put together by chance or by mindless forces!!! |
10/25/2025
| His Handiwork Serves Him Faithfully For Our Good… |
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| Cooked Dinosaur… In recent years a number of news articles have announced that our sun is shrinking. Scientists have been examining records kept since 1750 at the British Royal Observatory. They have concluded that the sun appears to be shrinking at the rate of one-tenth of one percent per century. If the sun is shrinking at this rate, it would have been twice as large as it is now only 100,000 years ago. And 20 million years ago the surface of the sun would have touched the surface of the earth! The dinosaurs, or more accurately their descendants, would have been cooked, to say the least. No life would have been possible on earth! This obviously poses a huge problem for evolutionists. Evolutionists wanted to escape the hot water created by too large a sun. So they suggested that perhaps the sun alternately shrinks and expands. There is evidence of a very small pulsation, but overall the shrinkage is undeniable, and at any rate of shrinkage, this places the maximum age of the earth sustaining life at only thousands of years. Some evolutionists have now suggested that the earlier studies were wrong and the sun is not shrinking at all. The matter is still under study. Whatever results from this debate about the sun, we need to remember that God, as our Magnificent Creator God, is in charge. Just as the sun must obey His wishes, so the few thousand years of world history that begins in Genesis can be trusted as His handiwork that serves Him faithfully for our good as well. |
10/24/2025
| Does Time Work Miracles… |
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| It has been said that if you take a frog and turn it into a man by adding a kiss, you have a fairy tale. But if you take a frog and turn it into a man by adding millions of years, you have science. It seems that many people think if you add millions of years, the impossible becomes possible. Even the most committed evolutionists admit that our knowledge of how things work makes it hard to explain how life could develop all by itself from nonliving stuff. The late George Wald, who taught biology at Harvard, said just this in an article in Scientific American. He was marveling at life and all of its complex systems when he penned some of the most famous words ever offered by an evolutionist. He wrote: “The time with which we have to deal here is of the order of 2 billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible becomes probable, and the probable becomes virtually certain. One has only to wait, time itself performs the miracles.” Notice how Professor Wald admits the need for miracles to produce life. Will huge amounts of time—time we know didn’t exist—create these miracles? Not at all. A fundamental law tells us that if something won’t happen by itself in a short period of time, it is virtually certain that it will not happen over a long period of time. It’s true. If you reject Almighty God as your Magnificent Creator God, you will find another false god to work miracles. For many evolutionists, that false god is time. |
10/23/2025
| A Janitorial Service in Space… |
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| Let’s say that you drop by a friend’s house, and you find her at one end of the kitchen with a sponge mop in her hands. Three-quarters of the kitchen floor is wet. That picture provides you with a type of clock. You know that she has been mopping the kitchen floor for a while and is nearly done. It’s much the same in space. There is a great deal of dust in between the earth, the moon, all the other planets, and the sun. However, you won’t need to send your friend with the mop to clean it up, because the sun and planets slowly sweep this dust from space. If you have ever seen a meteor or “shooting star” streak through the night sky, the bright trail was probably made by a particle no larger than a grain of sand. The earth was doing its part in the solar system’s ongoing janitorial work. Yes, some of this space dust actually ends up in our homes! Unlike what often seems to be true in our homes, there is a limited supply of dust in space. It is, however, still a huge amount. Like your friend’s kitchen floor, we might get an idea of how long the earth, the sun, and the other planets have been around by finding out how much of that dust has already been cleaned up. According to scientists’ own figures, our earth and the rest of the solar system could not have been around more than 10,000 years! This is such a mystery to scientists who believe that things are billions of years old that some have even suggested that this dust doesn’t follow the laws of physics. However, this is no mystery to those of us who know that the Bible provides for a Magnificent Creator God and only about 6,000 years of earth history—and therefore only about 6,000 years of space dust janitorial service! |
10/22/2025
| All About Pain… |
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| Scientists now know that plants seem to have pain and alarm responses similar to humans and animals. Of course, we don’t know if plants have feelings as we know them. But when a plant is injured, it produces a chemical called jasmonic acid. This acid produces a vapor, similar to the jasmine in commercial perfumes, that is sensed by surrounding plants. They, in turn respond to the signal. When humans feel pain it is due to chemicals totally unrelated to jasmonic acids. As we all know, aspirin is important to pain management for many people. Aspirin works by disabling the chemicals that cause our pain. Now scientists have discovered that aspirin also works to shut down a plant’s response to injury. Aspirin shuts off the plant’s production of jasmonic acid, even though jasmonic acid is not at all similar to human pain‑causing chemicals. More amazingly, aspirin’s chemical reaction is of the same kind in plants and humans. So the next time you accidentally injure your favorite house plant, it might appreciate a small dose of aspirin! While we can be thankful that God placed substances in the creation which help us manage pain, we should never forget that nothing in this creation can deal with the underlying cause of pain. Only Jesus Christ, our Magnificent Creator God, can bring healing from our sinful condition that results in both spiritual and physical pain!!! |
10/21/2025
| The Mystery of Red Sirius… |
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| Space is full of mysteries. Those who think that the universe is millions or billions of years old have more mysteries to solve than Bible-believing Christians do. One of these is the mystery of a star named Sirius B. This mystery is so great for evolutionists that it was one of the main topics of discussion at a scientific symposium at Louisiana State University in 1978. Records of Egyptian astronomers dating back to 2,000 BC describe Sirius B as a red star. The Roman senator Cicero, writing in 50 BC, also said Sirius B was red. And Seneca described Sirius as being redder than Mars. And in 150 AD, Ptolemy, one of the most famous astronomers in history, listed Sirius as one of the six red stars. There can be no question that Sirius was red. Today, Sirius B is a white dwarf star. That’s a problem because according to modern evolutionary astronomy, it should take at least 100,000 years for a red giant star to collapse into a white dwarf star. The mystery of how the red giant Sirius became a white dwarf in less than 2,000 years was, and still is, the topic of hot debate. Sirius B calls into question the most basic theories about the supposed evolution of the universe. Obviously, those evolutionary ages are not nearly so well “proven” as evolutionists would like us to believe! Once more we must turn to our Magnificent Creator God for the answers to how and when everything came into being! |
10/20/2025
| A Never Ending Supply… |
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| The huge gaseous ball, the sun, converts around four million tons of hydrogen into energy every second. And it has been doing that every second for thousands of years and continues to do so. It is releasing energy right now. Whether you are asleep, awake, at work, or at play…the sun’s energy is pouring forth. Its energy is (for all practical purposes), never-ending. Think of our Magnificent Creator God’s grace and mercy the same way. Because God is love (1 John 4:8, 16), His grace and mercy are extended on a never-ending basis. Right now, you are receiving benefits “according to the riches of His grace.” You can’t receive God’s grace by your senses. But your mind can understand that His grace came to you, is coming to you, and will come to you for all your days. The same grace that allowed you to be saved is also now building you up and keeping you from falling!!! |
10/19/2025
| To God There Is No Such Thing As Trial And Error… |
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| If, as we are continually told, evolution is a fact, why is it that human technology improves when we copy designs found in nature? If nature is really a giant trial-and-error experiment, we should not only find evidence of less-sophisticated designs in the distant past, but humans today should be able to improve on designs found in nature. Science has long known that an object moving through water or air moves with the least resistance when the ratio of its length to diameter is four to one. This ratio is found in the fastest swimmers in the sea – like the tuna, dolphin and swordfish. A Boeing 707, with a ratio of nine to one, experiences much more resistance than the larger, fatter 747, which has a ratio of six to one – much closer to the tuna and the dolphin. Studies of the vision of the horseshoe crab, supposedly one of the earlier forms of life, have taught engineers how to produce a clearer, sharper television picture. The United States Air Force copied a speed-sensing system from beetles to improve the ground speed indicators of their jets. The optics of a frog’s eye showed them how to improve their radar. The fly’s multifaceted eye taught engineers how to design a lighting system that generates more light with less energy. Humans are learning from and copying design solutions worked out by their Magnificent Creator God. The brilliant designs in our world are not the result of trial and error. This reality makes the claim that evolution is a fact of science sound empty! |
10/18/2025
| From A caterpillar Into A Moth… |
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| We have all looked in wonder at the amazing transformation of a caterpillar into a moth. However, did you realize that a moth needs an entirely different kind of brain than a caterpillar? We can truly say that here we have an insect with two brains! In the caterpillar stage, the moth lumbers around in a body that is primarily designed for eating. Its brain must be able to command powerful jaws and a comparatively huge digestive system as well as the complexities of caterpillar locomotion. The world of the caterpillar is very different from the world of the moth. During metamorphosis the caterpillar completely dissolves and the moth is rebuilt from the liquid. The brain, for example, requires new nerve cells and new connections between brain cells, while some brain cells change function, migrate to new locations, or even die. The result is a brain that is 10 times the size of the caterpillar’s and ready to control flight. The moth’s primary purpose in life is to reproduce. So its new brain is able to generate the odors used by moths to identify and communicate with potential mates. It is also equipped to detect the scents of a potential mate. Only our almighty Magnificent Creator God could completely rebuild a caterpillar into a moth. Only He could rebuild and increase its brain ten-fold in only a week or two. Even more amazing is how He remakes people. Through the forgiveness of sins, Jesus Christ turns us from people who wish to escape Him to new creatures who love Him and find joy in Him. |
10/17/2025
| May Our Amazement Never Cease… |
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| Two strange species of orchids are among the rarest flowers in the world. These unconventional plants live their entire lives underground, even flowering underground. Most often, their flowers never break the surface of the ground. One of these species, Cryptanthemus, has been found only three times in this century. Only 150 flowering Rhizanthella plants have ever been found. Since they live in the dark underground, neither orchid has any need for chlorophyll or leaves. Each looks like nothing more than a white, waxy root. Rhizanthella produces a flower that is initially white, but which turns purplish as it ages. Its fragrance has been described as delicate and sweet. Cryptanthemus produces a candelabra flower stalk that has several white flowers with small red splotches. The flowers remain almost an inch under the soil. Both species begin life in the same way as most orchids. The orchid seeds germinate when threads of a fungus invade the embryo and form coils within the seed. At this point, other orchids grow leaves so they can make their own food. But these underground orchids continue to live in a symbiotic relationship throughout their entire lives, being fed by the fungus. The wonders of our Magnificent Creator God’s creative handiwork never cease to amaze us. But God’s greatest creation is a redeemed believer in Jesus Christ, a creation He does not want hidden!!! |
10/16/2025
| A World of Dust… |
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| It’s behind your refrigerator and under your bed. It’s part of the air you breathe. While dust is common, it’s not commonplace at all. Much of the dust in our everyday lives is nothing more than tiny particles of skin, clothing, carpeting—just pieces of every-day life floating in the air. Studies of dust particles reveal that most dust is soil. However, a second common dust, even a thousand miles from the sea, is salt, driven into the wind by the waves. This salt helps form the clouds that bring us rain. The next most common forms of natural dust are volcanic eruptions and forest fires. Transatlantic winds pick up the dust of the Sahara and sweep it across the ocean where enough of it lands in Miami to sometimes give the rain a light pink color. Not only does your home have dust from all over the world, there’s probably also some from outer space. Ten thousand tons of disintegrating meteorites and comets rain down on earth every year. You can even identify some of this dust by running a magnet through the dust in a rain gutter. Most of the magnetic particles that stick to the magnet are probably from space. In addition, some dust is alive, made up of pollen, fungus spores, and even dormant bacteria hoping to land on a good place to grow. Dust reminds us that the world is smaller than we think and that it won’t last forever. Are you ready for the next world? All your preparations have been made by Jesus Christ. Find out in the Bible what our Magnificent Creator God has done for you today. |
10/15/2025
| The Bottomless Suitcase… |
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| It was first discovered in 1855, but many scientists debated its existence for another 50 years. Once its existence was finally proven to everyone’s satisfaction, it was another 50 years before science had any tools to begin studying it. Finally, in the late 1980s, scientists began to learn a little about the secrets of one of the tiniest, yet most amazing structures in the body. At the back of the eye, between the deepest layer of the retina and the cells beneath it, lies a tiny moat made up of about 10 drops of a mysterious fluid. The entire moat is thinner than a sheet of cellophane. It seems that the clear fluid in the moat serves the surrounding light sensing tissues of the eye in place of blood, bringing in nutrients and carrying away waste. It also transports light-sensitive chemicals needed by the light detecting cells in the eye. In addition, it seems to glue the retina in place. More than that, the moat is rich in a growth factor. This fact makes scientists believe that the gel may also be important to repairing injuries to the retina, keeping the cells of the retina young and active, as well as helping in the growth of new cells. As one researcher said, the more they study this tiny structure the more unexpected abilities they find—something like a bottomless suitcase. Charles Darwin, who didn’t even know about the moat, was right when he said that it was impossible to believe that natural selection could have produced the eye. Once again confirming that it was our Magnificent Creator God and His master design that brought this world and everything in it into existence. |
10/14/2025
| Squirrels Give Age of Grand Canyon… |
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| Who would have thought that squirrels would tell us how old the Grand Canyon is? Yet creation scientists tell us that the tassel-eared squirrel, who lives near the rim of the canyon in Arizona, has done just that. Tassel-eared squirrels are found on both north and south rims of the canyon. Scientists have assumed that the squirrels were there before the canyon was formed, supposedly millions of years ago. However, since the canyon has kept the two populations apart for so long, the differences between them should show what millions of years of evolution will do to squirrels. There are minor differences between the squirrels on the north rim and the south rim. But they’re not even enough to classify the squirrels as separate species. North rim squirrels have white tails and black bellies. Squirrels on the south rim have white bellies and dark tails. But many north rim squirrels have coloration like those on the south, and many on the south rim are colored like those on the north. Creation scientist Dr. John Meyer has carefully studied these squirrels. He has concluded that the squirrels on the north and south rim are actually one population that has a complete range of fur colors. According to a law of evolution accepted by evolutionists, there should be a much larger difference between the north and south squirrels if the Grand Canyon is really millions of years old. The conclusion must be, then, that the Grand Canyon is quite young – only thousands of years old and the product of our Magnificent Creator God. |
10/13/2025
| The Brainy Jellyfish… |
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| Jellyfish and their cousins are often described as the simplest animals without nervous systems. Because evolutionary scientists have thought jellyfish were such simple creatures, and because many of them show up early in the fossil record, jellyfish were said to be among the earliest animals to evolve. Marine biologists have been surprised to learn that the modern populations of jellyfish and their cousins are actually much more complex than they ever suspected. Creationists point out that because there are so many of these creatures, there was also probably a large population in the past. The more common a creature is, the more likely it is to be found in the deeper rocks of the fossil record. More recently, scientists have learned that the supposedly simple nervous system of the jellyfish is actually not so simple. They have confirmed that at least one type of jellyfish has a nervous system with the same advanced features found only in mammals and humans. Most animals generate electrical impulses using sodium. However, like humans, this jellyfish can generate different kinds of impulses depending on whether sodium or calcium is used. Thus, the jellyfish can send twice as much information through its nervous system as most other animals! We’re learning that when humans refer to a creature as simple, it’s probably because of human ignorance of the creature, not because it’s a simple form of life. This should remind those of us who believe in creation that all things witness in support of our Magnificent Creator God’s wisdom, not human stories of evolution. |
10/12/2025
| Small But Powerful… |
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| The creation is filled with plants and animals which use deception to survive. The glow‑in‑the‑dark cookie-cutter shark is a master at such deception. The cookie-cutter shark is only a foot to a foot‑and‑a‑half long. It doesn’t have powerful muscles and can’t swim very fast. But it doesn’t need to. Lunch serves itself. The shark typically lives between 600 and 3,000 feet below the surface of the water. Looking down from above one of these sharks, you would probably not see it because the top of its body is as dark as the deep waters where it lives. Looking up from below, you wouldn’t see the dark outline of the shark against the light that filters down from the surface. This is because of the shark’s first deception: its underside is completely covered with light‑emitting cells that match the illumination from above. The deception doesn’t stop there, however. A small patch beneath the shark’s jaw doesn’t glow. From beneath, the cookie-cutter shark looks like a small fish, just the kind of dinner a tuna might like. As the tuna speeds toward what it thinks is a small fish, at the last minute the shark turns and takes a bite out of the tuna. Its open, round jaw takes a plug of flesh out of the tuna, hence the name cookie cutter shark. Interestingly, most cookie-cutter shark wounds are not fatal. The fact that the cookie-cutter shark’s form, deceptions and habits all match each other perfectly is not a result of chance, mindless evolution, but of our Magnificent Creator God’s careful design!!! |
10/11/2025
| Time To Rethink… |
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| They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. While that is often true, they also say that it takes a highly evolved brain to picture objects and remember them. Science is learning that this bit of evolutionary myth is indeed fiction. As far as the honeybee is concerned, not all flowers are created equal. Some flowers are a good source of nectar while others are a waste of time. Alfalfa flowers can kill a honeybee because they are designed for pollination by larger insects. When an insect lands, a central petal in the flower releases the stamen and sweeps pollen upward to aid pollination. Honeybees can be tossed off the flower or trapped inside by this action. Scientists always thought that honeybees solved the problem of finding safe and productive flowers by remembering a list of characteristics. They believed the honeybee was evolutionarily too simple to remember mental pictures of favored flowers. However, recent experiments have convinced scientists that bees actually store a mental picture of productive flowers. In these experiments, bees were rewarded with sugar water for visiting some patterns and not others. Their reactions showed that they remember images, not simply patterns. What’s more, the experiments showed that bees are quite intelligent and good learners. One scientist noted that these experiments showed that evolution’s assumptions about so-called higher and lower creatures are false. Those who believe in evolution are having to rethink their view of the world. Meanwhile, we can give thanks to our Magnificent Creator God for so generously giving the gift of intelligence to so many of His creatures!!! |
10/10/2025
| Was Fruit Like This in Eden… |
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| It is difficult to imagine what things would be like had we not fallen into sin. We have never known the perfect world that God created for us. The Bible does tell us that God gave man every fruit to eat except for the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We know that fruit today is highly perishable. Fruit that is picked incorrectly – or stored improperly or for too long – quickly goes bad. As a result, we are all familiar with those green or pink flavorless things called “tomatoes.” Tomatoes in the market are picked green and then exposed to ethylene gas to make them turn red. They are picked green because tomatoes quickly over-ripen. Somehow it seems to us that this state of affairs would be different in a perfect world. Scientists at Cornell University have developed a natural way to slow the ripening process of tomatoes. They learned that there is a natural process that allows ripe tomatoes to keep for longer periods of time. They learned this from a Brazilian tomato that keeps for weeks even after being picked ripe and flavorful. This tomato has twice as much of a chemical that prevents over-ripening as other tomatoes. This natural chemical, added to other tomatoes, doubles their shelf life. This allows them to be picked ripe and flavorful. Perhaps before sin, all tomatoes had this ability. Sin touched every part of our lives. We thank our Magnificent Creator God that through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ, sin’s effect of separating us from God is reversed! |
10/9/2025
| Spidery Liquid Crystals… |
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| Scientists and manufacturers are studying a new technique that could lead to more durable fibers. This technique manufactures liquid crystals to produce stronger, longer-lasting fibers. The process uses sulfuric acid, temperatures well above the boiling point of water and a high-pressure atmosphere. Meanwhile, another team of researchers finally discovered how orb weaving spiders and silkworms manufacture their silk. Scientists had theorized that silk from spiders and silkworms was stronger by weight than steel because proteins in the silk cross-linked with each other. But after watching silk production and drying in careful lighting under magnification, astonished scientists actually saw what happens. Silk is produced in the silk gland as a thin, watery liquid. Once the protein-rich liquid is released from the gland, the liquid begins to concentrate because of evaporation. As the liquid concentrates, it changes into a liquid crystal state. Scientists have been trying to create fibers in the lab from liquid crystals. They would love to know how the spider does it, using only water at normal temperatures and pressures. This is another example of how our Magnificent Creator God has already solved an engineering problem that we were trying to solve. It is especially interesting that He allowed scientists to discover His solution at the same time that others were trying to solve the problem. This allows us to reemphasize that our world is the work of a Creator and not mindless, natural accidents. |
10/8/2025
| Bees: Master Engineers… |
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| Why did the Creator bring together so many precise specifications and high intelligence in the honeybee? To glorify Himself and because bees are crucial to the reproductive cycles of so many plants as well as the food chain. The amazing structure of the honeycomb has amazed scientists for thousands of years. As early as the third century AD, the astronomer Pappus of Alexandria offered an explanation for the six-sided or hexagonal shape of the honeycomb. He pointed out that while the triangle, square and hexagon could all be candidates for the shape of the comb, one of these shapes holds more than the others. The most efficient shape for storing the most honey while wasting the least space is the hexagon. There are many variations of the hexagon that are available to the bee. However, the honeybee is always very precise in constructing honeycomb hexagons, with an obtuse angle of 109 degrees 23´ and an acute angle of 70 degrees 23´. These angles produce the most usable space for the least amount of building material. Humans are unable to use such precision in their designs without sophisticated equipment. Each honeybee is a tiny but powerful computer that could only have been designed and built by our Magnificent Creator God. Bees and what they do are of central importance to much of the rest of creation. No wonder God has given them so much: the complex structure of their society, their intelligence and industriousness! |
10/7/2025
| Mapping Intelligence… |
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| Picture yourself sitting in a friend’s living room. Can you picture in your mind where the door is located? Scientists call this a thought map. Thought maps are mental pictures of the arrangement of objects relative to one another. Thought maps help us remember where to find a water glass, the gas or brake pedal, and home. Thought maps require intelligence. They help make possible additional intelligent activity, such as finding our way around and conducting an intelligent search. This is why scientists have been surprised to find that many creatures, not just humans, use thought maps. One experimenter carried a chimpanzee on his back while he hid 18 pieces of food in a field. Then the chimp and five others were released in the field to find the food. The chimp who had seen the hiding places found most of the food, following a very different route than that originally taken by the researcher. Bees, likewise, use mental maps. Even if a bee is forced to detour on its way back to the hive, it always reports the food source as though it had used a direct route. Bees are also able to find a food source that has been moved after its discovery. Ants have also been shown to use mental maps. Mental maps help humans and animals think deductively about changes in the environment. Mental mapping ability could not have evolved because even the lowliest creature requires this ability to survive. This ability must have been given to them in the first place by their Magnificent Creator God. |
10/6/2025
| The Animal with Two Life Cycles… |
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| The jellyfish almost seems like a creature from a bad science fiction movie. Around 500 species of jellyfish, ranging in size from small marbles to several feet across, inhabit the world’s oceans. Jellyfish have several mouths and will try to eat anything, including each other. Thankfully, the stings of most jellyfish have no effect on human beings. The jellyfish lives two very different lives, each with different lifestyles and methods of reproduction. The familiar jellyfish form is a swimming lifestyle in which the creatures reproduce sexually. However, in another phase of their life, they are called polyps. In the polyp stage, they look like small anemones, cling to rocks and reproduce by cloning. Jellyfish cannot move fast enough to chase prey. However, careful study of jellyfish swimming patterns shows that jellyfish don’t swim at random. The pattern in which they swim produces the greatest mathematical likelihood of encountering prey. Biologically jellyfish have only two internal organs: a stomach and sex organs. Although evolutionists tell us jellyfish were among the earliest creatures, some of them have sophisticated brain functions that – outside of jellyfish – are found only in mammals and human beings! The jellyfish is a tribute to God’s creativity and imagination. Even though the jellyfish appears to be one of the simplest forms of life on Earth, it is also a mathematically precise hunter. Even this living bag of lukewarm Jell-O praises our Magnificent Creator God through its existence. |
10/5/2025
| Not Only The Great Physician…The Great Pharmacist as well… |
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| Someday, instead of having to give a blood sample during your physical exam, the doctor might just ask you for a saliva sample. Saliva is an amazing fluid. Besides helping us moisten and digest food, saliva is able to speed healing and fight bacteria, fungi and viruses. Saliva is chemically almost identical to the clear part of your blood. It even has, in lesser concentrations, the infectious organisms found in your blood. Let’s say, for example that you suddenly find yourself in a stressful situation. The level of the hormone cortisol will increase in your blood in response to the stress. Within 20 minutes, that increase will be evident in your saliva. This means that someday saliva tests may replace blood samples. In the United States, saliva tests have been approved to diagnose AIDS, illegal drugs, periodontal disease, alcohol and premature labor. If the hormone estriol rises in a woman’s blood before 36 weeks of gestation, doctors know that the woman may go into labor prematurely. Saliva testing is also used to check hormone levels in women who are having a difficult time conceiving a child. Other countries have approved a saliva test for hepatitis B. Saliva’s remarkable abilities are a witness to a loving and Magnificent Creator God!!! He knew that we would sin and thus bring disease into the world. So He gave us saliva that, not only defends us against infection but also helps us heal. But the greatest love He has shown us is in sending His Son to give us spiritual healing!!! |
10/4/2025
| How Small Can It Be… |
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| How small can a living thing be and still be considered alive. Viruses are not considered living things because they cannot reproduce on their own. But now scientists have confirmed the existence of bacterai that are smaller than the largest viruses and yet can reproduce on their own. They call this amazing class of bacteria nanobacteria. They are less that 20 percent the size of normal bacteria. The unusual nanobacteria have some unusual abilities. Normally, cells in the immune system detect a bacterium in the bloodstream, engulf it, and destroy it. But nanobacteria are able to trick immune cells into committing suicide. Luckily, nanobacteria reproduce very slowly. While the average bacteria reproduces once an hour, nanobacteria take three days to double their numbers. But they still do a lot of damage. Researchers have found that nanobacteria are apparently able to build a calcium shell around themselves. It appears that when they enter the bloodstream, they quickly migrate to the kidneys, where they begin building their shells. Researchers investigating whether nanobacteria cause painful kidney stones have reported testing 30 stones so far. Each stone showed antibodies that bind to nanobacteria. The good news is that if nanobacteria are a cause of kidney stones, they can be eradicated with antibiotics. While scientists are unsure of how something so small can be alive, our Magnificent Creator God is able to fashion even these tiny, amazing creatures!!! |
10/3/2025
| Are Bees Intelligent Planners… |
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| Before we had detailed knowledge of the daily lives of many animals, it was easy for scientists to dismiss signs of animal intelligence as instinct. After all, to the evolutionist, intelligence can only evolve in the highest creatures – like humans. In the last couple of decades, animal intelligence has become a busy field of study. Researchers are learning that animals can be just as intelligent as humans in their own area of specialization. In one experiment, researchers moved a supply of sugar water 25 percent further away from a beehive each day. The bees quickly figured out what was going on and started anticipating where the sugar water would be the next day. In another experiment, researchers placed sugar water on a boat that was anchored in the middle of a small lake. When scouts returned to the hive to report their find, other bees refused to go with them, knowing that bees don’t find food in the middle of a lake. Scientists have concluded that bees think events through to see if they make sense. Creationists know that intelligence did not evolve. It is a gift of our Magnificent Creator God who generously shared what was needed with each creature He created. We also know that intelligence is not what separates us from the animals. Only humans were made for an ongoing, intimate relationship with the Creator. That also means that each of us is responsible before our Maker. God has wisdom, not just intelligence, and He wants to share the wisdom of His forgiving love through Jesus Christ with us! |
10/2/2025
| Humans Copy the Creator… |
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| If, as we are continually told, evolution is a fact, why is it that human technology improves when we copy designs found in nature? If nature is really a giant trial-and-error experiment, we should not only find evidence of less-sophisticated designs in the distant past, but humans today should be able to improve on designs found in nature. Science has long known that an object moving through water or air moves with the least resistance when the ratio of its length to diameter is four to one. This ratio is found in the fastest swimmers in the sea – like the tuna, dolphin and swordfish. A Boeing 707, with a ratio of nine to one, experiences much more resistance than the larger, fatter 747, which has a ratio of six to one – much closer to the tuna and the dolphin. Studies of the vision of the horseshoe crab, supposedly one of the earlier forms of life, have taught engineers how to produce a clearer, sharper television picture. The United States Air Force copied a speed-sensing system from beetles to improve the ground speed indicators of their jets. The optics of a frog’s eye showed them how to improve their radar. The fly’s multifaceted eye taught engineers how to design a lighting system that generates more light with less energy. Humans are learning from and copying design solutions worked out by our Magnificent Creator God. The brilliant designs in our world are not the result of trial and error. This reality makes the claim that evolution is a fact of science sound empty! |
10/1/2025
| The Insect with Two Brains… |
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| We have all looked in wonder at the amazing transformation of a caterpillar into a moth. However, did you realize that a moth needs an entirely different kind of brain than a caterpillar? We can truly say that here we have an insect with two brains! In the caterpillar stage, the moth lumbers around in a body that is primarily designed for eating. Its brain must be able to command powerful jaws and a comparatively huge digestive system as well as the complexities of caterpillar locomotion. The world of the caterpillar is very different from the world of the moth. During metamorphosis the caterpillar completely dissolves and the moth is rebuilt from the liquid. The brain, for example, requires new nerve cells and new connections between brain cells, while some brain cells change function, migrate to new locations, or even die. The result is a brain that is 10 times the size of the caterpillar’s and ready to control flight. The moth’s primary purpose in life is to reproduce. So its new brain is able to generate the odors used by moths to identify and communicate with potential mates. It is also equipped to detect the scents of a potential mate. Only our almighty Magnificent Creator God could completely rebuild a caterpillar into a moth. Only He could rebuild and increase its brain ten-fold in only a week or two. Even more amazing is how He remakes people. Through the forgiveness of sins, Jesus Christ turns us from people who wish to escape Him to new creatures who love Him and find joy in Him. |
9/30/2025
| Pygmy Dates… |
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| Creationists are often objects of scorn because they take the Bible’s account of history literally. If the Bible’s history is accurate, humans were on the Earth at the same time as many animals that are extinct today. Creationist arguments are often dismissed without answer by skeptics. Often they do this only because creationists believe that the entire creation is only about 6,000 years old. At the same time, we are gaining a more complete picture of the early Earth’s history. As a result, evolutionists are being forced to accept important parts of what creationists have always been saying. Excavations in Cyprus have shown that humans have a long history of settlement there. Excavations have also revealed that Cyprus was once home to the extinct dwarf elephant and the pygmy hippopotamus. However, evolutionary scientists said dwarf elephants and the pygmy hippopotamus were there 1.5 million years before humans ever arrived on the scene. Creationists, of course, rejected this claim. But in recent excavations bones of pygmy hippos have been found in the same layers as chipped bone artifacts, chisels, scrapers, beads and hearths. Based on this evidence, project director Alan Simmons says, “I believe the earliest occupants of Cyprus enjoyed pygmy hippo steaks.” We may not ever know for sure whether the settlers on Cyprus ever really ate pygmy hippo steaks. However, evolutionists now have to stop laughing at our Magnificent Creator God long enough to admit that at least this part of our Young Earth position is scientific fact. |
9/29/2025
| A Thousand Words for a Bee… |
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| They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. While that is often true, they also say that it takes a highly evolved brain to picture objects and remember them. Science is learning that this bit of evolutionary myth is indeed fiction. As far as the honeybee is concerned, not all flowers are created equal. Some flowers are a good source of nectar while others are a waste of time. Alfalfa flowers can kill a honeybee because they are designed for pollination by larger insects. When an insect lands, a central petal in the flower releases the stamen and sweeps pollen upward to aid pollination. Honeybees can be tossed off the flower or trapped inside by this action. Scientists always thought that honeybees solved the problem of finding safe and productive flowers by remembering a list of characteristics. They believed the honeybee was evolutionarily too simple to remember mental pictures of favored flowers. However, recent experiments have convinced scientists that bees actually store a mental picture of productive flowers. In these experiments, bees were rewarded with sugar water for visiting some patterns and not others. Their reactions showed that they remember images, not simply patterns. What’s more, the experiments showed that bees are quite intelligent and good learners. One scientist noted that these experiments showed that evolution’s assumptions about so-called higher and lower creatures are false. Those who believe in evolution are having to rethink their view of the world. Meanwhile, we can give thanks to our Magnificent Creator God for so generously giving the gift of intelligence to so many of His creatures. |
9/28/2025
| Not Always What It May Seem… |
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| Some creatures simply try to look uninteresting to hungry predators. Others take their role-playing so seriously that they actually fulfill some of the same roles as their models. Loopers, or inchworms, move along the ground, twigs or branches with the characteristic opening and closing of an upside-down letter U. These creatures are not true worms. Rather, they are caterpillars. As caterpillars, they often look very much like the twigs or branches on which they move. However, their odd form of movement can give them away. Here’s an experiment you can try. If you ever notice a looper on a branch, simply give the branch a gentle tap. Chances are, the looper will suddenly freeze into the same shape as a nearby twig. If you were to carefully touch the looper, you would find that it had become as stiff as a twig. A botanist reports that while studying one looper moving along a branch, an ant happened along. Ants, of course, will eat loopers. The looper froze in a horizontal position between branches. The ant walked across the looper, never noticing that its walkway was actually a potential meal. Many scientists suggest that the looper “just happens” to be the same color as the branches on which it crawls. We ask, does it also accidentally know how to act like a twig to fool predators? The almighty hand of our Magnificent Creator God is evident even in the inchworm!!! |
9/27/2025
| When Bad Is Really Good… |
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| We want to avoid getting bacteria in our food, don’t we? Bacteria cause illness. Bacteria are bad. Yet, some of the world’s healthiest foods contain deliberately introduced bacteria. One such strain of bacteria is the Lactic Acid Bacterium (LAB). This is used in foods such as kimchi or sauerkraut. Brassicas, such as cabbage, often have low quantities of this bacterium. When sealed in a suitable fermentation jar with salt, the LAB can thrive. LAB is able to withstand high acidity and salinity, so it grows, even in a salty environment. One of the products of LAB’s metabolism is lactic acid. Most other bacteria cannot survive in either acid or salt, so the LAB begins to dominate, while the vast majority of other bacteria die. LAB itself is not harmful to humans, so, paradoxically, the good bacteria have effectively killed off all the bad bacteria, providing a healthy, long-lasting food. When God finished making the world at the end of day six of creation, He looked at all that He had made and declared it to be very good. This must have included bacteria. Since Adam’s sin, many bacteria have mutated (though not evolved, as they have not gained new genetic information) into harmful organisms. Perhaps originally, all bacteria were created to be as useful as LAB in that original perfect world that God gave us and that we so sinfully polluted. Our Magnificent Creator God can always make something that others may think is bad useful for something good!!! |
9/26/2025
| Catching Bigger, Stronger and Faster Prey… |
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| At first glance, jellyfish may not look like much of a creation. Many are quite beautiful. However, most jellyfish simply look like blobs of jelly, so fragile that what might be a minor blow to one of us could prove fatal to them. There are around 500 species of jellyfish. They live everywhere in the oceans – from the surface down to great depths. Some are as small as a BB. The largest jellyfish is the lion’s mane, which can grow to seven feet in diameter and have tentacles 200 feet long. Despite their apparent simplicity, these insubstantial creatures make their living by capturing and eating fish and crustaceans that could easily tear them apart. To accomplish this seemingly impossible task, the jellyfish trails out its long thread-like tentacles. Each tentacle can have millions of capsules loaded with tiny harpoons. Once touched, the tentacles fire, injecting several deadly toxins. If enough toxin is injected, the victim’s heart stops. If not enough of this poison is injected, another toxin finds its way to the brain where it stops respiration. Yet another toxin bursts red blood cells, disrupting the circulatory system. Thankfully, only a few dozen of the hundreds of species of jellyfish can hurt human beings. Imagine trying to design a creature that is not much more than a bag of Jell-O that can capture and subdue much larger and more powerful creatures. The jellyfish may look simple. However, its specialized design for a seemingly impossible task makes it an elegant witness to our Magnificent Creator God. |
9/25/2025
| Inchworm Strategy… |
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| Some creatures simply try to look uninteresting to hungry predators. Others take their role-playing so seriously that they actually fulfill some of the same roles as their models. Loopers, or inchworms, move along the ground, twigs or branches with the characteristic opening and closing of an upside-down letter U. These creatures are not true worms. Rather, they are caterpillars. As caterpillars, they often look very much like the twigs or branches on which they move. However, their odd form of movement can give them away. Here’s an experiment you can try. If you ever notice a looper on a branch, simply give the branch a gentle tap. Chances are, the looper will suddenly freeze into the same shape as a nearby twig. If you were to carefully touch the looper, you would find that it had become as stiff as a twig. A botanist reports that while studying one looper moving along a branch, an ant happened along. Ants, of course, will eat loopers. The looper froze in a horizontal position between branches. The ant walked across the looper, never noticing that its walkway was actually a potential meal. Many scientists suggest that the looper “just happens” to be the same color as the branches on which it crawls. We ask, does it also accidentally know how to act like a twig to fool predators? The almighty hand of our Magnificent Creator God is evident even in the inchworm! |
9/24/2025
| Creation Makes Better Science… |
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| Many people have been taught that evolution is science and creation is religion. However, the origins debate is really a debate between two religions. According to the evolutionist’s own rules of science, evolution is not good science. Consider the claims of evolution in view of what science knows today. Life has never been seen to develop from nonliving materials. Yet, evolutionists say it did. Mutations, said by evolutionists to have created all the kinds of living things, have never been seen to produce one creature that was more complex or better able to survive. The moon has moonquakes, a magnetic field and internal heat. These are all indications that it is far younger than evolutionists care to believe. Geological strata were at one time sediments in water – floodwaters. Evolutionists believe that the multiple layers of sedimentary rock were laid down one after another by local floods with millions of years between each flood. If that is true, how is it that these strata are often found showing the lower strata blending into the strata above it? If language evolved, why are the most ancient languages the most complex? If religions evolved, why do the most ancient forms of religion worship one God – a Creator – while later forms of the same religions have many gods – gods who are much more like human beings? Many more examples show that only the Bible’s account of history makes sense in view of what we know and were taught by our Magnificent Creator God. |
9/23/2025
| The Nose Knows… |
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| The hunted are smart to stay upwind of the hunter. Many predators hunt using scent, at least in part. The same principle works in water. Many predators smell chemicals given off by their prey and use that scent to help them locate their prey. If you were predator in a stream you would be smart to stay downstream from your prey. The prey won’t smell you. In addition, you might be able to smell him if he gets too close. Amazingly, the little shrimp‑like amphipod seems to be able to smell predators even downstream. Researchers from Lund University in Sweden have discovered that amphipods can even smell a brown trout downstream and try to avoid it. Scientists designed an artificial stream that divided into two branches. Down one branch was a brown trout, while no predator waited down the other branch. Then amphipods were placed upstream of the branch and allowed to go downstream. When the amphipods came to the branch, they avoided the branch with the trout. To check whether the amphipods were actually smelling scents from downstream, researchers put trout scents in the downstream water. This was enough to cause the amphipods to avoid that branch. Yet, when trout were placed in one of the downstream branches in glass tubes, keeping their scent from entering the water, the amphipods did not respond to the sight of the trout. We, too, are being hunted as prey by the devil and his forces. We would do well to learn how to sense where the devil lies in wait for us, and like the amphipods, flee from him. Our Magnificent Creator God has endowed us with such a sense that He enables thru the power of The Holy Spirit!!! |
9/22/2025
| When Proper Authority Is Respected… |
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| Wasp colonies in temperate zones usually wait until the end of summer to raise male young. That’s because male wasps are typically useless consumers of food. They don’t do anything worthwhile in the nest, nor do they help gather resources. Female paper wasps often practice what experts call “male stuffing.” When food is brought into the nest, a job carried out by females, other females will stuff their brothers head first into unused nest cells. Needless to say, in the typical nest males have short lives. The first exception to this pattern was recently discovered in Costa Rica. Researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle have discovered a species of wasp in which the males are not only in charge, but also, help out in the nest. The female wasps still gather the food, but the males demand and get all they want, even from the queen. But the males were also observed fanning an overheated nest to cool it. They helped remove water during a flood, and they helped take care of the larvae. The males of this species remain with their parent colony for an unusually long time for wasps. Yet, at any time, they can father a new colony. Other tropical species are now being studied to see if this behavior is unique. The Bible teaches that proper authority is respected when it comes from a spirit of servanthood. This pattern seems to extend even to wasps. Our Magnificent Creator God designed our human culture in such a way that it often needs to be reminded of the principle that when males pitch in and help, their leadership will be appreciated and followed!!! |
9/21/2025
| And That’s All There Is To It… |
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| When we look at the size of the universe, it sometimes becomes easier to see evolution as credible. After all, when we see galaxies that are said to be billions of light years away, it seems possible that there really have been millions of years. But, in truth, the immensity of space is really not so friendly to evolution’s claim that the universe, and the earth, are billions of years old. The Milky Way Galaxy, like many galaxies, is a spiral galaxy. You have probably seen the illustrations showing spiral arms of stars wrapped around the bright center of our galaxy. The stars closest to the center of our galaxy rotate around the center more rapidly than the stars further out on the spiral arms. When these differences in speed are worked out, we discover that our galaxy, no less our Earth, cannot be billions of years old. If the Milky Way was that old, the spiral arms would have long ago become nothing more than a disc of stars. Evolutionary scientists recognize this problem, calling it “the winding up dilemma.” But they have been unable to come up with an explanation that is satisfactory. As we look at the creation for evidence of its age, the clues we have so far found can only give us a upper limit. They cannot give us an exact age. But even the size of the universe fails to support the idea that the creation is billions of years old. If instead, we piece together the Biblical genealogies, which are really ancient calendars, we arrive at an age for our Magnificent Creator God’s universe of a little more than 6,000 years! |
9/20/2025
| The Lord God Made Them All… |
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| “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.” One of the most common arguments against a literal six-day creation is that the structure of the days is a literary device, called the Framework Hypothesis. The hypothesis suggests an almost poetic pattern to the days, which they claim demonstrates that the days are not meant to be taken literally. On day one, God made the universe. On day two, He made the seas and atmosphere, and on day three He made the land, with its plants. Then on day four, He filled the universe, day five filled the sea and atmosphere, and day six filled the land. So there are three days of creating ex nihilo and three days of filling those creations. Again, the advocates of this hypothesis maintain that this pattern shows that Genesis 1 is allegorical literature, proclaiming the truth of God as Creator, but does not give a historical account. A quick answer to this point is that if there is a real pattern of two sets of three days, this does not prove that the days are not literal. God is a God of order. However, their neat pattern breaks down. Day one is not actually the parallel to day four – day two is. How so? On day two, God created the firmament, and the firmament refers not merely to the atmosphere but the entirety of space. A better suggestion is to take God at His word, that our Magnificent Creator God created everything exactly how He said He did!!! |
9/19/2025
| The Spider and the Fly… |
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| One would never expect to find any insect sharing living arrangements with a spider. That’s why scientists were amazed to find a tiny fly in the rain forests of Central America who shares both room and board with a spider! The fly spends most of his time on the back of the golden web spider, who does not seem to object. This spider does not deal with its victims in the same way most spiders do. When a large insect gets caught in the tough web of the spider, the golden web spider injects the victim with digestive juices to prepare it for eating. The fly keeps track of meal preparations from the spider’s back. Just before the meal is liquefied to the spider’s satisfaction, the fly buzzes over and drinks its fill in a few seconds. By the time the spider approaches lunch, the fly is back napping on the spider. Both the spider and the fly are designed with special features to make this most unlikely arrangement work. If the golden web spider’s eating habits were like most spiders’, there would be no liquefied meal for the fly. The fly itself has a mouth that is specially designed to allow it to drink a full meal in seconds. This helps keep him out of the spider’s way. How can a spider and a fly live together? God can design a solution to any problem. Why design an arrangement between a spider and a fly anyway? So that we would know there is a Magnificent Creator God and that He can meet any challenge! There is nothing you cannot take to Him in the name of His Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. |
9/18/2025
| Thomas Jefferson and the Creator… |
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| Respect for the name Thomas Jefferson reaches far beyond the United States and far beyond the English language. By the time Jefferson was 14, he could read four languages. He later learned three more. Jefferson’s legacy goes far beyond his accomplishments in law and government. He also made his mark in the fields of mathematics, architecture, medicine, agriculture, literature, education, music and science. He earned three doctorates. And he served as president of the American Philosophical Society, America’s leading scientific organization of the time, for nearly 20 years. One might think that Jefferson would have accepted the evolutionary ideas that were being circulated then by such people as Charles Darwin’s grandfather. However, while Jefferson was a deist rather than a Christian, he spoke and wrote against evolutionary ideas and in favor of a Creator. He based his argument that belief in a Creator is more scientific than evolution on the precise and interrelated design that is visible everywhere in the creation. If you would like more information, we recommend the book The Real Thomas Jefferson, published by the National Center for Constitutional Studies in 1981. We thank God that His handiwork is so clear in the creation that one does not even have to be a Christian to know that He is our Magnificent Creator God. God’s most earnest desire for all is that seeing this much, we might be drawn to His forgiveness in Jesus Christ. |
9/17/2025
| Has the Big Bang Gone Bust… |
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| As our knowledge about the universe grows, the big bang theory looks increasingly unlikely. Deep space X-ray observations in 1990, along with other observations, showed that the universe is “lumpy.” These “lumps” – such as huge structures like quasars and galactic clusters – already existed early in its history. This contradicts one of the primary so-called “proofs” for the big bang: the background microwave radiation. This radiation seems to be smooth and even, so there shouldn’t be any “lumps.” To solve this problem, big bang believers invented “cold dark matter.” Cold dark matter is sort of an invisible genie. The gravity of this invisible stuff is supposed to have transformed the smooth, even big bang into the lumpy universe we see today. Now several eminent scientists have rejected the cold dark matter theory. The authors of the latest report on the subject had been some of the strongest supporters of the big bang theory. Jeremiah Ostriker, chairman of the astrophysics department at Princeton, told a reporter, “This would be like a conference of theologians saying there is no God.” Ostriker calls himself an “agnostic” on how to make the big bang theory work. Robert Wilson, co-recipient of the 1978 Nobel Prize for his work on the big bang, said, “I don’t know how many people actually would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that cold dark matter existed, but this sort of closes off that avenue.” If these men would take the Bible’s message for what it is, God’s message to them, they could forget the big bang theory and thank their Magnificent Creator God for His forgiving love in Jesus Christ. |
9/16/2025
| Designed Language… |
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| Language requires some very special designs that are rare in nature and found together only in humans. First, human language requires vocal cords, which none of the apes have. The only animals with vocal tracts are birds, but no one is suggesting that we evolved from birds. Language also seems to require an unusual structure to the brain. The frontal area of the left hemisphere of the brain is connected to an adjacent area of the cortex called the Wernicke area. These two areas are linked by a bundle of nerve fibers. The result is a distinct brain asymmetry that is unique to humans. Even the unborn human has this asymmetry that allows it to absorb language. Development in this area of the brain stops at puberty. That is why it becomes more difficult for adults to learn a new language. Language skills can be learned only by hearing language. So-called “feral” children, who have heard no language at all, cannot be taught language after puberty for the same reason. So where did Adam first hear language? Scripture tells us that it was the Creator God Himself who regularly spoke with Adam. This means that language is not a collection of meaningless sounds to which we have assigned meanings. The meanings and sounds have come from God, just as our unique design that makes language possible comes from God. Therefore, language is not only for worldly purposes. We have also been given language to praise our Magnificent Creator God and Savior and to tell others who He is and what He has done! |
9/15/2025
| Your Multi-Purpose Nose… |
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| Which body structure is a powerful generator of emotions, gives you a sense of direction, and serves as a cannon all at the same time? It’s your nose, of course! It is common knowledge that without our noses the scent of a rose could not give us joy, nor would our food taste like very much. Less well known is the fact that our noses are directly hooked into the brain’s limbic system. Your limbic system plays a central role in generating and controlling emotions. This is why certain scents are able to raise strong emotional memories in us. The nose is also designed to filter out and catch particles that should not get into the lungs. When a particle is taken in through your nose, it is snagged by the tissue inside your nasal passages. Next, this highly special tissue decides the best method of getting rid of the foreign material. If a bacterium is identified, your nose begins to run, bathing the bacteria in powerful chemicals that dissolve most of them. If the particles are larger, like pollen, a sneeze is triggered that can eject particles at speeds of over 100 miles per hour! Perhaps the most remarkable ability associated with the nose is its ability to act as a compass. Human beings have a small amount of iron in the bony part of the nose between the eyes. Scientific experiments have shown that we have an ability, while not foolproof, that can sense direction that is influenced by magnetic fields! Our Magnificent Creator God made your multi-purpose nose not only to bring some pleasure to life but also to help protect your health. |
9/14/2025
| The First Language… |
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| Language requires some very special designs that are rare in nature and found together only in humans. First, human language requires vocal cords, which none of the apes have. The only animals with vocal tracts are birds, but no one is suggesting that we evolved from birds. Language also seems to require an unusual structure to the brain. The frontal area of the left hemisphere of the brain is connected to an adjacent area of the cortex called the Wernicke area. These two areas are linked by a bundle of nerve fibers. The result is a distinct brain asymmetry that is unique to humans. Even the unborn human has this asymmetry that allows it to absorb language. Development in this area of the brain stops at puberty. That is why it becomes more difficult for adults to learn a new language. Language skills can be learned only by hearing language. So-called “feral” children, who have heard no language at all, cannot be taught language after puberty for the same reason. So where did Adam first hear language? Scripture tells us that it was the Creator God Himself who regularly spoke with Adam. This means that language is not a collection of meaningless sounds to which we have assigned meanings. The meanings and sounds have come from God, just as our unique design that makes language possible comes from God. Therefore, language is not only for worldly purposes. We have also been given language to praise our God and Savior and to tell others who our Magnificent Creator God is and what He has done! |
9/13/2025
| The Nose Knows… |
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| Which body structure is a powerful generator of emotions, gives you a sense of direction, and serves as a cannon all at the same time? It’s your nose, of course! It is common knowledge that without our noses the scent of a rose could not give us joy, nor would our food taste like very much. Less well known is the fact that our noses are directly hooked into the brain’s limbic system. Your limbic system plays a central role in generating and controlling emotions. This is why certain scents are able to raise strong emotional memories in us. The nose is also designed to filter out and catch particles that should not get into the lungs. When a particle is taken in through your nose, it is snagged by the tissue inside your nasal passages. Next, this highly special tissue decides the best method of getting rid of the foreign material. If a bacterium is identified, your nose begins to run, bathing the bacteria in powerful chemicals that dissolve most of them. If the particles are larger, like pollen, a sneeze is triggered that can eject particles at speeds of over 100 miles per hour! Perhaps the most remarkable ability associated with the nose is its ability to act as a compass. Human beings have a small amount of iron in the bony part of the nose between the eyes. Scientific experiments have shown that we have an ability, while not foolproof, that can sense direction that is influenced by magnetic fields! Our Magnificent Creator God made your multi-purpose nose not only to bring some pleasure to life but also to help protect your health!!! |
9/12/2025
| Inchworm Games… |
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| We have looked at many plants and animals that use different forms of camouflage to keep from being noticed. Some don’t wish to be noticed so that they can surprise their prey, while others don’t want to be noticed so they can avoid becoming prey. However, what happens when both predator and prey encounter each other in full camouflage? The predator in this drama, witnessed by a naturalist at the edge of a desert, is a yellow crab spider. The spider was waiting on a yellow flower that made him nearly invisible. The potential prey is an inchworm beneath the same flower. The inchworm was tearing off bits of the yellow flower petals and sticking them on its back. Properly camouflaged, the inchworm then worked his way toward the top of the flower where the spider waited. The spider felt the movement and ran around the edge to see whether lunch might be on the way. However, when the spider got around the edge of the flower, he saw nothing. He didn’t even notice the camouflaged inchworm on which he was standing! The spider then returned to the center of the flower, outsmarted by the inchworm who went on about his business. Our wisdom would have said that the inchworm should try to run when he noticed the spider. However, the wisdom given to him by our Magnificent Creator God allowed him to continue about his business on the flower. This offers us a good illustration of how following the Lord’s wisdom often requires us to reject our own. |
9/11/2025
| Smart Squirrels… |
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| Squirrels often seem to run about without any purpose. However, a naturalist in the State of Maine recently discovered that the squirrel’s activities are well planned and efficient. It was a cold January day when the naturalist was watching a red squirrel who seemed to be nibbling on a sugar maple. Then the squirrel would run to a tree where some of the sap had leaked out and lap at it with his tongue. The naturalist knew that conventional wisdom said it was too early to tap trees for sugar. He also knew that the sap from the trees is 98 percent water and could not provide enough energy to keep the squirrel going in cold weather. Becoming more curious, he decided to study the squirrels’ activity in detail. He discovered that the red squirrels were systematically tapping the sugar maples with a peculiar bite into the tree. Each bite went through the outer and inner bark and into the xylem where the sap runs. The squirrels were then allowing the running sap to dry until the sugar content was more than 55 percent. Not only were squirrels tapping just the maples, they only tapped them when the weather was right for the sap to run. The mad running up and down the trees actually followed a careful daily schedule of tree visitations that could include over 70 trees! Could it be that humans learned from squirrels to tap sugar maples? Whatever the answer to that question, we know that it was our Magnificent Creator God Himself Who taught the squirrel the processing and use of this sugary winter treat. |
9/10/2025
| Heated Moths… |
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| We tend to associate being warm-blooded with mammals and human beings. However, past lessons have dealt with “warm-blooded” plants, reptiles and bumblebees. There is also a warm-blooded moth. Since plants don’t have blood, you might suspect that we are here using a broader meaning for the term “warm-blooded.” When we use the term “warm-blooded” in referring to plants and insects, we are talking about a plant or animal that can generate enough body heat to carry on life normally even if the air temperature is below freezing. There are about 50 species of moths in North America that are active in the cold of winter. It takes a good deal of energy to generate heat for such a tiny body since the heat is rapidly lost in the cold air. Most moths feed on nectar that is not available in the winter. The mystery deepens with the fact that the moth could not possibly store enough energy in its body to generate heat. Naturalists now have strong suspicions that these “warm-blooded” moths are involved in one of the strangest interrelationships in nature. They believe that the moths get their energy from sugar maple sap that is tapped and made available by red squirrels! How the red squirrels do this is the topic of tomorrow’s lesson. For now, these warm-blooded moths teach us that the features we normally associate with more advanced creatures actually provide no evidence whatsoever for evolution. Again, our Magnificent Creator God had a perfect plan for all creatures from the beginning of time. |
9/9/2025
| You Can Run Or You Can Hide… |
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| We have looked at many plants and animals that use different forms of camouflage to keep from being noticed. Some don’t wish to be noticed so that they can surprise their prey, while others don’t want to be noticed so they can avoid becoming prey. However, what happens when both predator and prey encounter each other in full camouflage? The predator in this drama, witnessed by a naturalist at the edge of a desert, is a yellow crab spider. The spider was waiting on a yellow flower that made him nearly invisible. The potential prey is an inchworm beneath the same flower. The inchworm was tearing off bits of the yellow flower petals and sticking them on its back. Properly camouflaged, the inchworm then worked his way toward the top of the flower where the spider waited. The spider felt the movement and ran around the edge to see whether lunch might be on the way. However, when the spider got around the edge of the flower, he saw nothing. He didn’t even notice the camouflaged inchworm on which he was standing! The spider then returned to the center of the flower, outsmarted by the inchworm who went on about his business. Our wisdom would have said that the inchworm should try to run when he noticed the spider. However, the wisdom given to him by our Magnificent Creator God allowed him to continue about his business on the flower. This offers us a good illustration of how following the Lord’s wisdom often requires us to reject our own! |
9/8/2025
| A Master of Disguise… |
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| Many plants and animals disguise themselves as something they are not in the hope of protecting themselves. However, a true master of disguise must have many disguises. The tiger swallowtail offers no less than three disguises as it grows through its various stages toward adulthood. The newly hatched larva looks for all the world like a bird dropping. This appearance makes the larva of no interest to birds that might otherwise eat it. Three molts later the caterpillar has turned green to match the leaves on which it feeds. In case he is spotted by some birds looking for a nice fat caterpillar for lunch, the caterpillar also has two large spots on its head that look like the eyes of a snake. Birds who are interested in caterpillars usually try to stay as far from snakes as possible. Finally, in the pupal stage, the tiger swallowtail has again radically altered its appearance. The pupa now looks like nothing more than just another broken twig on a tree trunk. The immature tiger swallowtail’s bag of disguises reflects a great deal of knowledge about the behavior of those creatures that threaten it. Each of its three disguises uses a different method to fool those birds that would be interested in the larva. Each disguise has the same specific goal. This master of disguise is no accident of biology. Our Magnificent Creator God’s purpose in making Himself evident in the creation is ultimately aimed at bringing each of us into a relationship with Himself. That relationship is based on the forgiveness of our sin through His Son, Jesus Christ. |
9/7/2025
| It’s All In The Mind… |
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| Episodic memory, the ability to remember something that happened in the past is called mental time travel. It has long been thought that only humans are capable of episodic memory. New research suggests that some birds are also capable of mental time travel. Researchers gave captive Western scrub jays wax worms, one of their favorite foods. As they usually do, the jays made their selections and hid the worms in the trays of sand provided. Five days later, the birds were allowed to recover their treats. The jays discovered that after the five days, the worms had begun to decay. The researchers fooled a second batch of jays by replacing their decayed worms with fresh worms just before the birds were allowed to find their treats. Then both batches of birds were again allowed to take and hide a choice of worms. Those birds that had had experience with the decayed worms, would no longer take new worms to hide. But the birds that had been fooled took the worms and buried them, still expecting them to be good later. In other words, the birds remembered what happened in the past and adjusted their behavior. Other tests offered similar results. Our Magnificent Creator God has given all His creatures the abilities they need to make a living without regard to where those creatures are on the manmade evolutionary ladder!!! |
9/6/2025
| God’s Plan For Protection… |
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| Our Lord recognized that in a sinful world we must be prepared to protect ourselves. The same is true in the animal and plant world. When it comes to trying to explain this truth using evolutionary thinking, there are some serious difficulties. There are many plants that have effective defenses against the insects that attack them. For example, a plant called Bursera defends itself with poisons that squirt from its leaves when a certain beetle larva attempts to feed on it. However, the larvae have learnt to chew on a particular part of the leaf first. When they do this they disable the plant’s defense system and can munch away on the leaf without fear of harm. According to evolution, the plant’s defense mechanism and the beetle’s countermeasures had to evolve simultaneously: countermeasure perfectly matching defense, otherwise the countermeasure would be quite useless. The probability of this happening, even if evolution was true, is extremely remote. Even evolutionists have realized this problem and have published their attempts to explain how this could happen, but such explanations are based on a complex foundation of evolutionary assumptions and little evidence. According to evolution, such unlikely interrelationships had to evolve by chance many times when one looks at all the defenses that plants use and predators can outsmart. Creationists see these systems as created fully formed by our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
9/5/2025
| Witchweed… |
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| The strange and nasty plant called witchweed is found mainly in Africa and Asia, but some has been reported in North America as well. This parasitic plant can prevent crop plants from producing yields and is said to be responsible for intensifying the results of famine in Ethiopia. Not long after germination, witchweed sends an enzyme “feeler” through the soil around it to find nearby roots. If the enzyme finds a root system, it will digest a few of the cells on the root surface. The damaged roots actually help the witchweed by sending out a chemical response that confirms their presence to the witchweed. The witchweed then grows an attachment organ to penetrate the neighbor’s root system. However, witchweed cannot penetrate many root systems. If attachment is not made within four days, the witchweed grows aimlessly and dies in less than a week. If the witchweed successfully attaches to a neighbor’s root system, witchweed can enjoy a long and full life, being fed by its neighbor’s roots. In fact, witchweed changes the hormones produced by its neighbor so that the neighbor’s root system grows ever larger at the expense of the stem growth of the victim. While the victim may live its normal span, it will not be allowed enough strength to reproduce. Witchweed is no simple plant. We learn from the witchweed that our Magnificent Creator God’s unlimited imagination not only created some very strange living things, but also created some unique solutions to providing a means of living for them. |
9/4/2025
| Your Busy Brain… |
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| Not only is the human brain the most complex structure in the universe, it is also one of the busiest. In fact, during intense concentration, your brain can burn as many calories as your muscles do during exercise! Intense thinking can literally be as exhausting as a physical workout! More than 100,000 chemical reactions go on in your brain every second. Among the brain’s many jobs is chemist. The brain produces more than 50 psychoactive drugs. Some of these are associated with memory, others with intelligence, still others are sedatives. Endorphin is the brain’s painkiller and it’s three times more potent than morphine. Serotonin is produced by the brain to help keep our moods under control. The brain also makes dopamine. Dopamine makes people more talkative and excitable. Another hormone regulates hunger. The brain is also a radio transmitter that sends out measurable electrical wave signals. In fact, the brain continues to send these signals for as long as 37 hours after death! Our tiny knowledge of the brain is enough to show us that this incredible organ is no accident. The brain is much more than a powerful testimony to our Creator. Its incredible powers convince us that there is much more to existence than this material life. However, we can learn only from the Word of God about eternal life through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. Put your brain together with the Word of our Magnificent Creator God today! |
9/3/2025
| Living Stones and Flying Flowers… |
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| If, of all the millions of living things on Earth, a few creatures happened to look like something they are not and this helped protect them, we might put it down to chance. However, the creation is filled with too many creatures who practice look-alike deception to put it down to chance. Africa’s southern deserts have a plant called living stones. In a desert, any vegetation can be a welcome source of food or moisture. In this setting, a plant that doesn’t look like a plant has an advantage. And living stones look like nothing more than just another rock in the sand. Wasps can be some of the nastiest insects in nature. An insect in Costa Rica called the mantispid looks very much like the feared wasp, even up close. Then again, the hover fly looks like a wasp and sounds like a wasp because the frequency of its wing beats is almost identical to a wasp. Treehoppers have a very odd body shape that comes to a point on top. Not only do they look like thorns, but they usually stay on bushes that have thorns, orienting their bodies on the branches just like true thorns. This effectively hides them from hungry birds. Larval plant hoppers use a different form of deception. They attach themselves in groups on branches, orienting their frilly and feathery bodies together so they look like a flower! The clever forethought and planning involved in nature’s deceptions rule out any thought that these creatures designed themselves but by our Magnificent Creator God Himself. |
9/2/2025
| Fake Spider… |
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| One of the spider’s virtues is that it loves to eat flies. However, not all spiders catch flies in their webs. The jumping spider stalks its prey until, like a tiny tiger, it is close enough to pounce. Rather than defining its territory with a web, the jumping spider takes its territory with it in a manner of speaking. Wherever the jumping spider is becomes its territory, When one jumping spider encounters another, they wave their legs at each other, warning each other to back off. Herein lies the tale of how one species of fruit fly is able to outsmart the spider. Unlike most fruit flies, this particular species has stripes on its wings. When it waves its wings over its head, it looks something like a jumping spider declaring its territory. When stalked by a jumping spider, the fly is able to convince the spider that it’s another jumping spider protecting its territory. Researchers have discovered why this trick works even though the fly doesn’t look much like a spider. The spider’s response to the pattern is pre-wired into its brain and is triggered by certain cells in its eyes. These cells are only activated by a display of the pattern. The spider automatically reacts to the pattern. All the fly has to do is fake the pattern and it’s safe! The fruit fly’s strategy requires a sophisticated knowledge of the jumping spider’s nervous system as well as its behavior. It’s safe to say that no fruit fly was able to create this strategy. It could have been authored only by our Magnificent Creator God who created them both. |
9/1/2025
| True Through The Ages… |
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| Over the last couple of centuries many Bible scholars have developed a skeptical approach to the Bible. Their treatment of the Bible as nothing more than a human document stems from their belief in evolution. According to them, Christianity has evolved from earlier religions just as humans evolved. As a result, critics reject the idea that the Bible is God’s inerrant, inspired, trustworthy Word. Because they hold this low view of the Bible, they believe that they have found many errors in the Bible over the years. At one time they said that the Hittites mentioned in the Old Testament never existed. They said that ancient biblical writers invented these people so that Israel could make up pretend victories over them. Eventually the Hittites were discovered, one of the first evidences being hard-to-ignore six-foot-tall jars! Over the years these critics have been consistently proven wrong by new discoveries. Likewise, critics have said that the Israelites could not have entered Canaan when the Old Testament says they did. They reason that because the Old Testament mentions the Ammonites, which critics said didn’t live in Canaan until later, the Bible’s dating is in error. However, in the summer of 1989, biblical archaeologists proved that the Ammonites were in Canaan well before the Bible’s date for the exodus. Again Bible critics have been proven wrong. As one biblical archaeologist wrote, “As usual the absence of evidence is not necessarily the evidence of absence.” When the Bible says something is true, there is no question of its truth. And again, our Magnificent Creator God’s inspired Word holds true through the ages. |
8/31/2025
| And Then We Die… |
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| Before the Flood people were living hundreds of years. As man grew more evil, God declared that man’s lifespan would be reduced to 120 years. Modern biology has learned that we do indeed have built-in timers in each of our cells that limit the number of times they can divide. When enough cells can no longer divide, we die. We can even do things to speed up the timers. The timers are called telomeres. However, every time a cell divides, a small part of each telomere is lost. When these telomeres are worn down to nothing, the cell no longer divides and soon dies. Researchers studied 58 healthy women between the ages of 20 and 50. All the women had children, but 39 of them had a child that was seriously chronically ill. Stress levels were measured through questionnaires while blood samples provided information about their cell health. Among other things, scientists checked for levels of an enzyme that maintains the health of telomeres. The mothers who saw their stress levels as high proved to have much shorter telomeres than those who reported little stress. They reported that cells from stressed women had telomeres that were as short as unstressed women ten years older. Scripture tells us to cast all our cares on the Lord. Among the many blessings of doing so are healthy telomeres from Our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
8/30/2025
| The Source Of All Light… |
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| Many marine creatures reflect surrounding light. They can do so because of tiny light-reflecting platelets. Typically, these crystalline platelets are made of purine, one of the building blocks of DNA, but these particular crystals cannot change how much light they reflect. The Hawaiian bobtail squid, however, needs to be able to reflect different levels of light because of its unique lifestyle. This squid glides through moonlit waters but without its special reflective tissue its shadow would be seen as it passes over the bottom. The bobtail squid has light generating tissue on its underside facing the bottom and this produces just sufficient light to make its shadow disappear. In other words, it can generate variable levels of light. What’s more, the squid can move its light-generating platelets around so that they might be scattered among its cells or concentrated where needed. Rather than being composed of just one amino acid, this squid’s platelets are made up of six amino acids. God is the source of all light, including spiritual light. According to evolution, the squid is closely related to some of the first animals that evolved in the sea. Yet, its technically sophisticated camouflage, which perfectly fits its environment and life-style is a testimony to God’s wise design, not the early stages of mindless evolution. The spiritual light of our Magnificent Creator God’s truth makes that clear!!! |
8/29/2025
| Olber’s Paradox… |
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| Why is the sky dark at night? There’s more to the answer to this question than the fact that the stars do not appear as bright as the sun from earth. If stars were evenly distributed throughout an infinite universe—as predicted by the evolutionary big bang theory—a star would be shining no matter where you looked in the night sky. The night sky, while not as bright as the daytime sky, would not be dark anywhere. The fact that this is not what we see at night has been named “Olber’s Paradox,” after the German amateur astronomer who first asked the question. Ever since, astronomers have been trying to fit Olber’s Paradox into whatever theory about the universe was current. Modern followers of the big bang theory have written that the main reason every inch of the night sky is not glowing with stars is that the expanding universe prevents space from filling with light. New calculations and research now show that if the universe were expanding, it would have very little noticeable effect on the stars in the night sky. Even more interesting, concluded astrophysicist Paul Wesson, is the fact that the main reason the night sky is not bright is that the universe is simply not old enough to have filled with light. The daily cycle, which includes night’s darkness, is important to almost all the life that our Magnificent Creator God placed on earth. The truth is that we live in a universe that has been designed for life. |
8/28/2025
| Illogical Wisdom… |
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| In 1981 it was only a theory—one that seemed to go against all logic. The theory said that if you have a signal, say a sound that was too weak to be heard, adding a little noise would make it easier to hear. If you added too much noise, you would drown out the weak signal. Add too little noise and it wouldn’t help at all. But add just the right amount of noise and a sound signal too weak to be heard could be heard. The theory was shown to be a scientific fact in 1983. This illogical effect was given the name “stochastic resonance.” Since the 1980s, scientists have discovered numerous examples of stochastic resonance and have researched various uses for it. Radio static makes it hard to listen to a station, especially if the signal is weak. However, researchers are building unique radios that add just the right amount of static to make impossible-to-receive stations understandable. Now for the surprise! Did you ever wonder how you are able to select a single voice in a noisy, crowded room and hear what it was saying? Scientists now believe that our brains have built-in stochastic resonance processors much more sophisticated than the units they hope to build someday. As one scientist said, “Nature may have understood stochastic resonance long before we did.” What seems illogical—to add noise to a sound to make it clear—is actually an astonishing piece of wisdom. The wisdom in the way this advanced technical knowledge is used is yet one more witness, not to impersonal “nature,” but to our Magnificent Creator God. |
8/27/2025
| Coral Grows Faster than Thought… |
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| Many people know that, despite its appearance, coral is actually a tiny animal. Even a small coral growth may be made up of billions of tiny animals, each living inside its limestone skeleton. What many people don’t know is that coral cannot live without the help of algae—a plant. Thousands of one-celled algae live in the tiny stomach of each coral polyp. The polyp requires the waste products of the algae to complete its nutrition requirements and to get the calcium with which it builds reefs. In return, the polyp’s stomach provides an ideal protected living place for the algae. Incidentally, the wonderful colors in living coral come from the algae in each polyp’s stomach. Evolutionists have said that it must take millions of years for the tiny polyps to build large coral reefs, like the 2,000-kilometer-long Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The Great Barrier Reef, incidentally, is considered the largest structure ever built by living organisms. However, it has now been shown that coral polyps can double their own weight in just over 10 days! As a result, the claim of millions of years for the age of the Great Barrier Reef has been reduced by a factor of 40! Many of the long age figures claimed by evolutionists have had to be drastically revised downward as we have learned more about our Magnificent Creator God’s creation. The resulting figures fit the Bible’s account of history much more closely. |
8/26/2025
| Flying Sheep… |
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| One unusual argument that the universe is the work of the Creator rather than aimless chance goes like this: only with the highest quality research and work, often over many years, can humans begin to approach the excellence of things in nature. One would think, for example, that it would be a simple job for modern science to create a fireproof fabric better than anything found in nature. After all, no living things in nature— besides humans—crash and burn. However, 80% of those who die in airplane crash fires are killed by the blinding, poisonous smoke, much of which comes from their seat cushions. The foam in the cushion begins to produce toxic smoke when the treated upholstery fabric gives out at 1,300 degrees and allows the flames through. It took two years of work before an upholstery manufacturer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, came up with something better. The new fabric, which has since been used on some airline seats, has stood up to a 5,000 degrees blowtorch flame for several minutes without catching fire! Amazingly, the fabric itself is a very dense weave of wool backed with flame resistant yarns. Its inventor says “It’s one of God’s ideas…There are things about wool that are beyond what man can do.” Sheep have no need to produce wool with properties that could help protect them in a place crash—as would have to be the case if evolution were correct. However, since sheep are part of a larger design in our Magnificent Creator God’s provision for humans, He has given their wool qualities needed by humans as well as by sheep. |
8/25/2025
| Humans: The Artists… |
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| Which is more likely to last buried in the ground for a few thousand years, a wooden spoon or a stone hammer? Since the hammer will last long after the wood has decayed, the further back we go in human history, the more likely we are to find only the most durable things humans left behind. This general principle explains why those who believe in evolution talk about “stone age” people. They often portray so-called “stone-age” people as primitive brutes who carried clubs around, grunted a lot and were definitely in need of a bath. Those of us who know that humans have always been human know that this picture is inaccurate. It is unfortunate that, for example, the literature of our earliest ancestors, or the toys they undoubtedly made for their children, have not been preserved to our day. Do you think it sounds strange to talk about the literature of “stone age” people? Yet modern science does recognize their art. So-called prehistoric people have left us hundreds of beautiful paintings in caves around the world. Over 220 paintings are found in Lascaux, France alone. Research reveals that the painters who created this beautiful and sensitive art did so using artificial lighting, palettes and scaffolding. They carefully milled and mixed minerals to create a variety of colors that remain bright and rich thousands of years later. As we look at the paintings left by so-called “stone age” painters, we can clearly see that the claims that humans have progressed up from the brute animal stage are false. We must turn to the truth as spoken by our Magnificent Creator God for knowledge from whence we came. |
8/24/2025
| In The Light Of The Day… |
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| You get up early. The illumination isn’t very good, you put on your socks anyway, only to find out, in the light of day, that you have one blue and one gray sock on. That’s because our eyes have cone cells to detect color, as well as rod cells that are sensitive to light, but cannot see color. So, as the light level becomes lower, we have a decreasing ability to detect colors. Not so with the hooded gecko. Based on their study of gecko eyes, some scientists wondered whether they could see in the dark. To test this, they made cards with a checkerboard pattern of blues and grays. Geckos were then trained to take crickets labeled with one of the cards. Then, when they offered the geckos crickets labeled with a blue card, they rewarded with the expected cricket. Crickets labeled with gray cards were made bad-tasting by being placed in salt water. During these tests the light level was so low that researchers could not tell the difference between colors. However, the geckos took the crickets labeled with blue cards more than twice as often, proving that they could see the color differences. While we marvel at God’s unlimited creativity in providing for His creatures’ needs, we see this truth by faith. Faith also shows us that our Magnificent Creator God redeemed us through His Son!!! |
8/23/2025
| No Two Alike… |
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| Have you ever considered that fingerprints are an amazing example of how much God cares for us? Each of us is born with a certain arrangement of arches, loops, and whorls on our hands, and they don’t change as we grow or age. They are also exclusive. Think about that for a moment: Out of roughly eight billion people on earth, no two of us have the same fingerprint. We’ve each been uniquely created by God. What’s more, He has a singular plan for every life (Jeremiah 1:5; Proverbs 16:3-4; Proverbs 16:9). There is no such thing as a non-valuable person in God’s eyes—He loves every single one of us equally and is personally involved in seeing His plans for our lives come to fulfillment. In fact, it brings Him joy to do so! So instead of comparing yourself to others or feeling inconsequential, look at the intricacy of your fingertips and remember: You are one of a kind and well-loved by the Magnificent Creator God who brought you into being!!! |
8/22/2025
| Plant Sniffs Out Prey… |
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| The dodder is a very unusual plant and is known as one of the ten worst weeds found in the United States. A newly sprouted dodder seed does not bother to grow roots. Rather, it sprouts a tendril that grows out, looking for other plants. It has, at most, a week to find a plant from which to steal water and nutrients. The dodder is a parasite, and while it does not kill its victims, it will take enough water and nutrition to stunt their growth. The dodder actually costs California tomato growers $4,000,000 a year in losses. Researchers found that the species of dodder that causes most trouble to tomato plants actually “sniffs out” its victims. Scientists knew that plants emit pheromones or scents unique to each species. The researchers gave a sprouting dodder seed a choice of targets to grow toward, including a tomato plant. When the dodder seed sprouted, it immediately sent a tendril out to the tomato. In a more rigorous test, researchers connected possible targets in separate enclosures to the sprouting dodder with curved tubes. The dodder still found the tomato plant. The dodder has no nervous system, and scientists marvel at what it can do. Rather, they should be marveling at what our Magnificent Creator God can do in providing for the needs of all living things. |
8/21/2025
| Linked To The World Around Us… |
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| Our senses link us to the world around us and enable us to interact with the world. While most people believe that our sense of sight is the highest of the senses and the most marvelous in design, our sense of hearing is no less marvelous. When a sound strikes your ear, your eardrum vibrates with the sound waves, fast or slow, soft or hard. These variations in vibration provide us with important information about the nature of the sound we are hearing. Some sounds produce a vibration in the eardrum as small as a billionth of a centimeter – only one-tenth the diameter of a hydrogen atom! There are three tiny bones in the middle ear called the hammer, anvil and stirrup. They pick up the vibrations from the eardrum, amplify them and send them on to the cochlea. The cochlea is filled with about 25,000 tiny hair cells that finally turn the vibrations into electrical signals that are sent on to the brain. Our hearing is designed to be more sensitive to high-pitched sounds than to lower sounds. If we had just a little more sensitivity to lower-pitched sounds, we would continuously be distracted by the internal sounds of our body, including the blood rushing through our arteries. In fact, to help prevent this, there are no blood vessels at all in that part of the ear where vibrations are turned into electrical impulses. The body supports life in these tissues by constantly bathing them in dissolved nutrients. While we can hear many things, and decide not to hear other things, our Magnificent Creator God who so marvelously designed our ears invites us to hear His Word to us from the Bible. |
8/20/2025
| Trying to Spin an Evolutionary History out of Spider Silk… |
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| Scientists recently examined a well-preserved spider web encased in amber. It is the oldest example of a spider web in existence and was declared to be 110 million years old. The researchers were eager to find out what the specimen might teach them about spider evolution. The web consisted of 26 strands of silk preserved in the amber while the pattern of the web appeared to be just like that of the modern orb-weaving spider. Three insects that were held by the web when it was encased in amber were also preserved. Interestingly, these three insects – a wasp, a fly, and a mite – are the same three insects that are most often caught by modern orb spiders. Today’s orb spiders place drops of glue along their web to capture their prey. The composition of the ancient glue and the modern glue was the same; however, it turned out that the ancient spider had applied the glue in a slightly different way from its modern cousin. From this small detail, the researchers tried to spin an evolutionary tale about this spider. Mankind, the world over, uses different techniques to achieve the same purpose. The fact remains that the ancient spider’s web design and way of making a living were identical to that of modern spiders. There was certainly no evidence of evolution here but just more evidence that our Magnificent Creator God designed it that way in the beginning. |
8/19/2025
| Doctor Lobster… |
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| The spiny lobster is a social creature. Lobsters like to congregate in groups in crevices and cooperate in defending their home against danger. When they migrate, they walk head to tail in single-file groups. However, researchers have noted that certain lobster lairs contained only one lobster. They also noted that some of these loners did not appear healthy. Upon further study, they found that the lobsters that looked unwell were infected with a virus they named PaV1. That virus, they learned, is commonly spread by physical contact, although young lobsters can be infected through water contaminated with the virus. Further, underwater surveys revealed that even when the disease is not apparent, healthy lobsters avoid those infected with the virus. While 56 percent of the healthy lobsters were found sharing a lair, only 7 percent of the infected lobsters shared living space. In lab tests, 60 percent of the healthy lobsters avoided a hiding place If it had an infected lobster in it. Scientists don’t know how the healthy lobsters can sense the virus, but it is obvious that they do and they avoid their sick comrades. Before the advent of modern medicine, people knew to avoid others with obvious diseases like leprosy. It appears that our Magnificent Creator God also gave the same ability to sense disease and avoid contact with it to the lowly lobster. |
8/18/2025
| Hummingbird Wristwatches… |
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| When you remember something that happened and where and when it happened, you are using what scientists call episodic memory. Scientists have traditionally thought that such memory was unique to man. Other scientists suspected that possibly some creatures may have episodic memory. For example, take the hummingbird with its fast metabolism. They need to eat often and remember where reliable sources of nutrition are to be found. At the same time, different flowers regenerate nectar at different rates. Researchers went to the natural habitat of the rufous hummingbird, equipped with some fake flowers and sugar water. The manmade flowers were constructed with reservoirs that could hold the sugar water. Half the flowers were refilled ten minutes after a bird would feed from it, while the other half were refilled twenty minutes after a feeding. Researchers found that the birds quickly learned which flowers were filled at which intervals. They soon returned to the flowers that were filled every ten minutes at ten-minute intervals while they waited twenty minutes in between visits to the other flowers. They noted that the birds did a good job of this even though they were keeping track of eight flowers. It makes more sense to believe that episodic memory is a sophisticated ability that is a gift from a caring Magnificent Creator God to those creatures whom He knew would need it. |
8/17/2025
| Music Is Wired Into Our Brain… |
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| The Bible tells us that the earliest generations of human beings were making music. By the time the eighth generation of man came along, Jubal, a member of that generation was able to make his living providing musical instruments. On the evolutionary side of things, however, musical ability would seem to provide no survival advantage. Yet, the human brain devotes considerable resources to the processing of music. Our love of music is wired into our brain. Each of our sense organs is important to our enjoyment of music. And each of these organs is linked to its own part of the brain which is responsible for how we experience the music. Parts of the brain are reserved for memory which stores the music. Other parts of the brain are dedicated to trying to understand the entire piece of music, referencing back to parts of the music stored in the memory. Even more interesting is that one need not hear music to activate the various parts of the brain devoted to music. Positron-emission tomography reveals that a person only needs to imagine music for these portions of the brain to become active. The ability to make or appreciate music offers us no apparent survival value, and therefore, according to evolutionary theory, should not have developed. Yet, our brains, and indeed, all our senses, are designed to make and appreciate music. The obvious message here is that evolution had nothing to do with the formation of human beings. We were created by a Magnificent Creator God Who loves music, and wants us to praise Him with music!!! |
8/16/2025
| A Real Calorie Burner… |
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| Not only is the human brain the most complex structure in the universe, it is also one of the busiest. In fact, during intense concentration, your brain can burn as many calories as your muscles do during exercise! Intense thinking can literally be as exhausting as a physical workout! More than 100,000 chemical reactions go on in your brain every second. Among the brain’s many jobs is chemist. The brain produces more than 50 psychoactive drugs. Some of these are associated with memory, others with intelligence, still others are sedatives. Endorphin is the brain’s painkiller and it’s three times more potent than morphine. Serotonin is produced by the brain to help keep our moods under control. The brain also makes dopamine. Dopamine makes people more talkative and excitable. Another hormone regulates hunger. The brain is also a radio transmitter that sends out measurable electrical wave signals. In fact, the brain continues to send these signals for as long as 37 hours after death! Our tiny knowledge of the brain is enough to show us that this incredible organ is no accident. The brain is much more than a powerful testimony to our Creator. Its incredible powers convince us that there is much more to existence than this material life. However, we can learn only from the Word of God about eternal life through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. Put the brain our Magnificent Creator God gave you together with the Word of God today! |
8/15/2025
| Another Evolution Claim Goes Extinct… |
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| Evolutionists regularly announce that they have scientifically proven that this creature evolved from that creature. Or they say that science proves that this creature or that one has been extinct for millions of years. Further, such claims are not to be questioned because they have been proven by science. It’s been well over a century since Darwin laid the foundation for these claims. Since that time, whole books have been written about how the alleged claims of scientific proof have, themselves, been proven wrong. Today, we add one more discovery to the list of unproven claims. Evolution claims that the Diatomyidae, commonly known as the rat-squirrel, has been extinct for eleven million years. That is, until freshly caught rat-squirrels were found for sale at a meat market in Laos. The creatures have a rat-like face with a squirrel-like body and a not-very-bushy tail. They are smaller than the common squirrel. A careful analysis of the fossils and the skeletons of the modern specimens have convinced scientists that they are indeed the same creature. The rat-squirrels live deep in the forests of Laos seldom visited by Westerners. Man’s wisdom has given birth to the theory of evolution. Our Magnificent Creator God’s wisdom, the heart of which is the Gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ, naturally contradicts man’s wisdom where man is wrong. You can count on it. |
8/14/2025
| Life From Blood… |
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| The Bible teaches us that our physical life is in our blood. It also teaches us that our spiritual and eternal life is dependent upon the blood of Jesus Christ. Your heart pumps blood at a speed of more than three feet per second. This means that any given red blood cell will make a full circulatory trip from your lungs and back in only about a minute. But your heart is not the only hard-working part of your circulatory system. Your red blood cells live only about 4 months. In that time, a red blood cell has made over 170,000 trips from your lungs to bring oxygen to every part of your body. That means your body must constantly replace red blood cells. So your body produces about 2 million new red blood cells every second. Your body does this most efficiently by recycling the iron from dead red blood cells into the new red blood cells. Iron, of course, gives the hemoglobin in red blood cells the ability to carry oxygen. As we learn more about our circulatory systems, we see that physical life is a daily gift from our Magnificent Creator God. Yet, it was the life-blood of our Savior, Jesus Christ, shed on the cross for us in His holy, innocent suffering and death that makes eternal life possible for us. |
8/13/2025
| The Worm Turns on Plants… |
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| Regular readers are familiar with the many examples we have described of plants protecting themselves from insects. A wide variety of plants make self-defense insect poisons by first producing the chemical jasmonate. Consideration was being given by the insecticide industry to stimulate plant defenses by spraying crops with this naturally occurring chemical. However, research now shows that this might not be a good idea. A worm – known variously as the corn earworm, the cotton bollworm or the tomato fruit worm – infests more than 100 plant species. This worm has two amazing abilities that probably explain why it’s such a pest. First, it can sense when a plant begins to produce jasmonate, the first step in production of its self-defense poisons. When the worm senses jasmonate, it produces enzymes that will detoxify those plant’s poisons. Studies have shown that spraying crops with jasmonate will only tip off the worm’s detoxification abilities and make it more resistant to the plant’s self-defense poisons. It appears that the plants rely on surprise to discourage the worms. Of course, neither the plants nor the worms know anything about chemistry. It is our Magnificent Creator God of heaven and earth Who has given both the worm and the plants their defense mechanisms and, through His Son, Jesus Christ, has offered mankind protection from sin, death and the devil. |
8/12/2025
| The Most Perfect Design Ever Seen… |
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| “The most perfect design I’ve ever seen.” Those words were uttered by a materials engineer after studying a deep sea sponge from the Pacific Ocean. And, indeed, the Euplectella aspergillun, claimed to be an early and primitive sponge, can teach modern materials engineers a number of useful things. The sponge’s body is made up of a thin layer of cells over an intricate glass skeleton. The sponge grows into a cylindrical shape about 8 inches long and about an inch across. The wonder lies in the glass skeleton that is made up of vertical and horizontal beams of glass. Diagonal beams strengthen this grid. One-third of these beams are thicker than the others, adding the extra strength of ridges to the cylinder. What’s more, each of these glass beams is made up of small cylinders of glass glued together with more glass-like tree rings. The result is a structure that spreads the pressures that might crush an ordinary glass structure this size. It is a delicate looking, but nearly unbreakable, glass structure. In a less-than-scientific test, one researcher noted that one has to jump full weight on one of these cylinders to even produce any cracking, and such jumping will still not break it. “The most perfect design I’ve ever seen,” said the researcher. Just another of our Magnificent Creator God’s perfect designs. |
8/11/2025
| Self-Cleaning Feet… |
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| We have often mentioned the gecko’s amazing ability to walk up or even upside down on surfaces as smooth as glass. We have pointed out that the gecko can grip even a glass surface as it walks with microscopic hairs on its feet. These minute hairs actually grip the surface at the molecular level. Noting that geckos never seem to clean their feet, scientists wondered what would happen if the microscopic hairs became fouled with microscopic dust particles. They computed that particles would have to foul between 26 and 59 hairs on each foot to be effective. They then fouled geckos’ feet with micro-spheres and observed them as they walked on a glass surface. To their surprise, with each step the geckos’ grip on the glass surface became stronger. This result suggested that with each step, the geckos’ feet were shedding some of the micro-spheres. To determine if this was what was happening, scientists removed some of the fibers from gecko feet and studied their interaction with the micro-spheres. Their conclusion was that gecko feet are indeed self-cleaning. Not only is the design of the gecko’s feet amazing, but our Magnificent Creator God evidently realized that His design would not work unless it was self-cleaning and able to shed dust. This design certainly cannot be attributed to a hit or miss process like evolution. |
8/10/2025
| There Are Impostors Among Us… |
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| If, of all the millions of living things on Earth, a few creatures happened to look like something they are not and this helped protect them, we might put it down to chance. However, the creation is filled with too many creatures who practice look-alike deception to put it down to chance. Africa’s southern deserts have a plant called living stones. In a desert, any vegetation can be a welcome source of food or moisture. In this setting, a plant that doesn’t look like a plant has an advantage. And living stones look like nothing more than just another rock in the sand. Wasps can be some of the nastiest insects in nature. An insect in Costa Rica called the mantispid looks very much like the feared wasp, even up close. Then again, the hover fly looks like a wasp and sounds like a wasp because the frequency of its wing beats is almost identical to a wasp. Treehoppers have a very odd body shape that comes to a point on top. Not only do they look like thorns, but they usually stay on bushes that have thorns, orienting their bodies on the branches just like true thorns. This effectively hides them from hungry birds. Larval plant hoppers use a different form of deception. They attach themselves in groups on branches, orienting their frilly and feathery bodies together so they look like a flower! The clever forethought and planning involved in nature’s deceptions rule out any thought that anyone but our Magnificent Creator God could have created these creatures!!! |
8/9/2025
| The Beginning Of All Wisdom… |
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| For centuries, Asian cooks have wrapped meat, sushi and candy in bamboo bark. Though the reason for this practice seems to have been forgotten, humans evidently once knew what modern science is rediscovering about bamboo. Chemists have succeeded in extracting the natural chemicals in bamboo bark. What they found was not one or two but four natural chemicals in the bark that inhibit bacteria, especially staph germs. These natural antibacterial agents are now under study for possible use as natural food and cosmetic preservatives. If these natural chemicals can be shown to kill bacteria and yet be harmless to people, the door will be open for an entirely new class of natural food preservatives. The question naturally arises about how Asians originally came to use bamboo in the kitchen. Is it possible that thousands of years ago, when ancestors of today’s Asians headed east from the Tower of Babel, humans knew that bamboo would help keep their food from spoiling? Much of what we are learning today was already known to a humanity that was only a few generations removed from our first and once-perfect parents. Remember that the perfection with which humanity was created was more than moral perfection. Because Adam and Eve had a perfect knowledge of God, they also had a perfect understanding of all that He had made. While we cannot be perfect except through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ, it is also true that the fear of the Lord – our Magnificent Creator God – is the beginning of all wisdom. |
8/8/2025
| Reptilian Fuzzy-Feet… |
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| It defies gravity, walking up walls and across ceilings; it is harmless and only an inch-and-a-half long if you include its tail. It’s the gecko. There are 670 species of geckos around the world. They are found in deserts and jungles, and they like living in homes where they are excellent at controlling insects, while leaving almost no trace of their presence. But the feature of the gecko that inspires the most wonder is its ability to effortlessly walk up a wall or across the ceiling. To accomplish this neat trick, the gecko has pads on his feet. Under the microscope, these pads look like tiny pincushions. Each microscopic bristle contains even smaller branches, enabling the gecko’s foot to hook, with these microscopic hooks, into the smallest irregularities. Some geckos have over a billion of these hook-like hairs on their feet! Incidentally, this explains why geckos walk with that funny skitter. Each foot must be unhooked before it is lifted for the next step. Unfortunately, when the gecko is stuck to a wall, and the wall falls, he will fall with it. The same is true of us. If we cling to evil – we will end up going where the evil goes. It is not by our own good intentions, but only through Jesus Christ that we are released from evil through the forgiveness of sins. Just another small part of our Magnificent Creator God’s master design. |
8/7/2025
| God’s Water Engine… |
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| Let’s talk about the tremendous power in water. Perhaps the first thing that you think of when the power of water is mentioned is the way it has cut and eroded the rocks of the Earth. But I am thinking of a power much more subtle than that. Some of the most impressive power of water is seen when it powers one of the water engines that God has created. You see, there are certain substances, like the jelly mass in which frogs’ eggs are suspended, which are hungry to absorb immense amounts of water. After a short amount of time in the water, a swollen mass of frog eggs may be larger than the mother frog from which they came. And this engine does its most impressive work when it is enclosed so that it cannot easily expand as it absorbs water. The resulting pressures have been measured at thousands of times higher than atmospheric pressure. In practical application, a small number of dry bean seeds, accidentally left under a concrete sidewalk, will, when they get wet, swell with such power that they will break the concrete! Our Magnificent Creator God uses seemingly simple and powerless things to do incredible feats. His Word, even though it takes the same form as human words, creates worlds and galaxies. But more amazingly, and more powerfully, it changes human hearts and minds! |
8/6/2025
| Bird School… |
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| Sure, we know that birds usually take very good care of the material needs of their young. But there is much more to it than that, as Scripture suggests – and science now confirms. It used to be thought that all animal behavior was by instinct. After all, many scientists said, animals are so much lower on the evolutionary scale than human beings. Now scientists have learned that at least some birds, and most likely most birds, teach their distinctive song to their youngsters. In one recent study, young cowbirds were paired with song-less female cowbirds from another part of the country where the cowbird song is distinctly different. Before long, the young cowbirds had totally reworked their songs to match the area of the country from which the females came, even though the females had never uttered one note! Further research showed that the females taught the new singing style to the males using only motion and touching – very sophisticated communication indeed! Clearly, it is pride that leads man to say that the Word of his Magnificent Creator God is in error. But pride does not only belong to the unbeliever – it’s part of the old Adam in all of us. That is why we need the constant instruction of our heavenly Father Who Himself teaches us with more than human words! |
8/5/2025
| Blister Beetle Protection… |
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| Everyone and, it seems, nearly everything in the creation, wants to be safe. If threatened, we want to have protection. Many of the methods used for self-protection in the animal world show a great deal of creativity and intelligence. For example, the blister beetle oozes a chemical that effectively deters ants and other predators that might disturb it. The beetle’s entire body serves as a trigger for this self-protection mechanism. As soon as any body part – say a leg – is disturbed, that part of the body begins to ooze the nasty chemical, driving off the predator. It is surely true that appeal is in the eye of the beholder, for the male blister beetle uses this same chemical to attract female blister beetles! The ornatrix moth employs the same chemical to attract female moths. In fact, many of the chemical tricks used by man for self-protection were first used by insects and other animals. Again, man learns from the way the Creator has designed things. But the threats against us human beings are much greater. Sin, death and the devil are very real forces in our lives, and without the protection of Jesus Christ, they would continue to be constant dangers into eternity. But thank our Magnificent Creator God that He has provided protection from all the dangers we face through the work of His Son, Jesus Christ! |
8/4/2025
| Frozen Turtles… |
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| Reptiles are cold-blooded and like to live in warm places. However, there are exceptions to every rule. Turtles are reptiles but live in places like the northern United States where temperatures drop far below freezing. Some creatures hibernate while others burrow deeply into the ground to survive the cold winters, but research has shown that at least some turtles actually freeze during the winter. Studies on the painted turtle, common in the northern United States, show that this species can survive being frozen. The turtles can actually be in water that freezes solid. As long as less than about 54 percent of the water in their bodies freezes solid, they can thaw out and survive quite nicely. How does the turtle get away with this? First of all, blood sugar levels in the turtles nearly triple when they are frozen, and there is a sharp increase in certain amino acids which act as antifreeze. In addition, glycerol, another antifreeze, triples. Researchers point out that while these changes supply some answers, they don’t completely explain the turtle’s survival. Scientists are trying to find out just how painted turtles live through being frozen. They hope to learn how to preserve human organs longer for later transplantation. In effect, they are trying to find out how our Magnificent Creator God enables the painted turtle to survive freezing so they can copy His method. |
8/3/2025
| Clever Chemistry… |
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| The bacterium Bacillus cereus likes to live in soil that would kill most other bacteria. It’s bothered neither by lethal concentrations of metal nor natural antibiotics. The bacterium is commonly found in the soil. However, in soil that overlays metal deposits like gold and copper, there may be 100,000 times as many cereus as normal. Soil over such deposits picks up a metallic content from the mineral below. If the metallic content is high enough, only a few plants, metal-tolerant fungi, and cereus can live in the soil. To make matters worse, the metal-tolerant fungi make penicillin and other antibiotics in concentrations high enough to kill bacteria. But none of this fazes cereus. How can cereus survive under conditions that would kill any other known bacteria? Researchers believe that cereus performs some sophisticated chemistry that detoxifies the metal and makes the penicillin harmless at the same time. For example, in the case of copper, they believe that cereus removes a water molecule from the penicillin molecule. The resulting gap in the penicillin molecule traps metallic molecules in the soil and makes them harmless. They suspect that cereus may use different sophisticated strategies to deal with different metals. As one of the scientists pointed out, each cereus seems to be genetically coded for its unique location. Cereus may be only a bacterium, but its clever chemistry and unique individuality bear witness to both our Magnificent Creator God’s supreme intelligence and His care for each of His creatures!!! |
8/2/2025
| Every Living Thing Has A Sense Of Itself… |
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| Some of the most fascinating discoveries in recent years have to do with our growing knowledge of plant communication. New research continues to reveal even more amazing facts about the exquisite intricacy of God’s marvelous work. Naturalists have long noted that plants often choose to grow at precise spacing from each other and plants of other species. Scientists at the University of California at Santa Barbara theorized that this precision might be a result of communication between the roots of these plants. So they devised an experiment to find out. They designed a network of interlocking, partially transparent growth boxes. These boxes allowed them to watch how root growth took place in single plants, two plants of the same species, and plants of different species. They discovered that when burro weed roots neared the roots of the creosote bush, the roots of the creosote bush slowed the growth of the nearing roots. They also discovered that burro weed roots will stop growing when they encounter other burro weed roots. This allows the plants to send their roots out where they will not compete with their own kind. Most astonishing is the discovery that burro weed roots continue to grow if they encounter other roots from their own plant. The amazed scientists noted that this means that even plants may have a sense of self. When the Bible tells us that the whole creation praises its Magnificent Creator God, it certainly suggests that at least every living thing has a sense of itself as well as its Magnificent Creator! |
8/1/2025
| The Helpful Honeyguide… |
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| It has long been known that an African bird known as the honeyguide leads badgers to bees’ nests, where the badger tears the nest apart to eat the honey. The badger always leaves more than enough for the honeyguide. Now it has been learned that the honeyguide has a similar relationship with the Boran people of Kenya. When the bird has found a bees’ nest, it will alert the Boran, bidding them to follow it to the honey site. On the other hand, if the Boran want to know where honey is, they know how to whistle and call for a honeyguide. The honeyguide also calls to the people so that they know which way to go. When the Boran reach the honey, they always make sure that they leave some for the honeyguide. Researchers also reported that they saw honeyguides scouting out bees’ nests at night so that they had good sites to lead the Boran to the next day. While the honeyguide does get its reward of honey in return for its help, the intelligence of the honeyguide in establishing these relationships with human beings is impressive. But while the honeyguide can help teach us that the creation is the work of our Magnificent Creator God, it cannot teach us how to have a relationship with Him. For that we must go to the Bible. |
7/31/2025
| A Day at the Flea Circus… |
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| When King Saul pursued David to kill him, David compared himself to a flea by asking whether the king had come out with soldiers to kill a flea. But just because a flea is small, it doesn’t mean that God treated it as unimportant when He designed it. The flea, has an ability to jump many times its own length and is a miniature marvel of engineering. If you see a flea jump – and that’s not easy to do – you will wonder whether the flea is actually powered by springs! The amazing truth is that the flea is powered by tiny springs. When it jumps, the flea actually releases more than five-and-a-half times as much energy as the most perfect muscle tissue can generate! The flea is able to do this using normal muscle output because he has small pads of natural protein rubber called resilin in his legs. As he slowly depresses the pads, he stores the energy which will be released in his next leap in one-seventh of the time he took to store it! To our Magnificent Creator God, nothing and no one is unimportant. This is because He is, by nature, a loving and caring Creator. Do you know His love? Do you know that He seeks a personal relationship with you through what Jesus Christ did for you on the cross? |
7/30/2025
| Young Fish Learn New Tricks… |
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| Isn’t it true that when we are very young we think our parents know everything? Then, when we become teenagers, we decide that our parents know virtually nothing. Finally, when we become parents ourselves, we discover how wise our parents really were! Learning and wisdom are supposed to be products of human evolution and for this reason textbooks usually speak of instinct when referring to animals. But do animal parents teach their children, and do they learn? Biologist Robert R. Warner of the University of California showed that even adult fish teach their offspring the facts of life. Warner’s study involved moving fish called wrasses around to various reefs where they prefer to mate. He discovered that if there were no other wrasses at the reef, the young wrasses would establish their own mating sites. But if there were already adult wrasses at the reef, the young wrasses would share the mating sites that were taught to them by the established adults. In other words, the adults taught their traditional mating sites to the next generation! The Creation teaches us that the intelligence of a creature has nothing to do with its supposed place in the evolutionary ladder. Even fish teach their young. This teaches us that it is a natural part of our Magnificent Creator God’s plan that we learn from the experience of those who are older than ourselves. |
7/29/2025
| Mysteries of Breaking Glass… |
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| Everything in the world is running down – nothing will last forever. It would be quite depressing if we didn’t know the reason for it and what God has done about it. If glass were perfect, it would be much stronger than steel. But glass is not perfect; its surface is full of tiny cracks, too small for the human eye to see. These cracks slowly creep along the glass. This is why a glass can be dropped several times and not break. Then one day it will shatter into a million pieces. Glass “remembers” every stress it receives. If you jar the glass, the cracks can grow quickly – as fast as 60 miles per hour! Most amazing is that this behavior is so strange, considering that glass is not really a solid. Glass never truly solidifies from a thick liquid state. Sometimes you can even see the sag caused by the flowing glass on windowpanes that are over a century old. We encounter the natural degeneration of the world every day. As St. Paul writes, the entire creation groans under the consequences of sin. But thank our Magnificent Creator God that He refused to leave us subject to decay and death – for He sent His only Son to save us from every consequence of sin. In Christ there is no more death and decay! |
7/28/2025
| The Ingenious Assassin Bug… |
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| Christians have often been accused of being naïve when they claim to see the evidence of intelligent design in nature. But sometimes even those who believe in evolution concede that we can learn a lot by studying nature. Dr. Thomas Eisner, of Cornell University, pointed out during an interview that “every single new idea in chemistry has come not from the minds of chemists, but from nature.” In other words, even our greatest chemists go to the creation to learn their science. Take the female assassin bug’s use of chemistry, for example. The female assassin bug will rub the resin of the camphor plant on her belly until she has a good store of it on her. Then, when she lays her eggs, she carefully coats them with the resin. It took chemists some time to learn that the resin acts in the same way as do mothballs against moths – it keeps ants from eating her eggs. So the female assassin bug has shown chemists a new ant repellent! The reason that our Magnificent Creator God’s hand is so evident in the creation is because He wants all people everywhere to know that He exists as a personal, intelligent Being. Once that is established in people’s minds, He seeks to draw them to a personal relationship with Himself through His Son, Jesus Christ. |
7/27/2025
| They need each other… |
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| The strange partnership between the snapping shrimp and the goby is absolutely necessary if both creatures are to survive. The nearly blind shrimp relies on the goby, a small fish, in the same way a blind person relies on his Seeing Eye dog. The goby relies on the safety of the complex tunnel system the shrimp digs. The shrimp is well designed for digging. Once a tunnel is started, the shrimp can dig a burrow large enough for both itself and the goby within a few hours. Each of its five pairs of legs is specialized. The first pair of claws is designed for carrying sediment out of the burrow. The second pair of legs is designed to probe for and clean objects as well as scratching sediment from walls. Pairs three, four and five are walking legs that also work well for scratching material from tunnel walls. On its abdomen, the shrimp has several appendages that allow it to move rapidly to protection. Other appendages can create water currents that shift sand back from the digging site. The snapping shrimp, which is less than two inches long, can dig a system of tunnels covering several square feet within a few days. The burrow will have several entrances, as much as four feet apart. All lead to a chamber at the deepest point of the system. Our Magnificent Creator God has given both the goby and the shrimp different gifts that they both need to live. If they did not share their gifts with each other, neither could survive. |
7/26/2025
| Whichever way you cut it… |
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| What can be more appealing, than the sight of a cherry tree in full bloom? Cherry blossom seems to enhance every environment, of which it is a part. Even urban areas can play host to cherry trees, and concrete city can be made attractive for a while, when the blossoms appear. Cherry blossom is often fleeting. Many varieties are in bloom for no more than 2 weeks of the year. But for those two weeks, they burst into an explosion of pink, followed by a ground covering of pink snow. It is often forgotten how much energy a plant uses, in producing flowers and blossoms. Though cherry blossoms are small, there are a lot of them. The colors they reflect, and the aromas released, are attractive to the insects necessary for pollination. But what an awkward method of reproduction pollination sometimes seems to be. The male pollen cells need to travel from the anthers of the flowers on one cherry tree, to the stigma of another. To attract the right pollinator, the blossoms must be the right color, and the right size. But why would they have evolved this way, if the insects were not originally pollinating these flowers? Whichever way you cut it, the burst of energy needed to produce the annual cherry blossoms is not explicable without presupposing the truth of God’s word. But God made everything in six days, so the inexplicable becomes logical. Like the stars of the heavens, bright flowers tell forth the glory of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
7/25/2025
| Growing Backbone… |
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| Modern medicine has increasingly returned to study how nature accomplishes medical miracles to bring the benefits of what they learn to mankind. Man has dreamed for thousands of years of being able to restore a severed spinal cord. Once the nerves running inside our backbones are severed, we permanently lose the use of our limbs below the point of damage. Medical researchers have learned that the black ghost knifefish, native to South America, is actually able to re-grow its backbone if it is severed. The black ghost knifefish can even re-grow the spinal cord within the backbone and the supporting muscle structure! What’s more, scientists have identified the layer of cells responsible for this re-growth. And the best news is that human beings also have the same layer of cells. Unfortunately, the layer becomes dormant by the time we reach adulthood. Researchers are currently trying to learn how that layer of cells, with its wonderful abilities, might be stimulated back into action if needed to repair a severed spinal cord. This shows us that when we Christians talk about the clear evidence of our Magnificent Creator God’s intelligence in the universe, we are not engaging in wishful thinking. Even our best medical researchers recognize the intelligence with which the creation is made and desire to learn from that intelligence! |
7/24/2025
| Retracting Mosquito Antennae… |
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| Most people are aware that it is only the female mosquito that feeds on blood. The male feeds on plant juices. It is also easy to see the difference between males and females in most species. The male has a distinctive pair of antennae. While the female mosquito’s antennae are difficult to see, the male’s looks like a pair of branched feathers coming out of its head. And if it weren’t for a very special feature, these large, feathery antennae would make it difficult for him to fly. Each antenna is planted in a socket, next to which there is a pad made out of special protein. This pad is actually a water-powered engine. When flying, the mosquito’s antennae are flattened against its head. But when he lands, he raises the antennae so that he can hear. To raise the antennae, a small amount of water from his system is pumped into the pad which increases its size by 25 percent and causes the pad to unfold, raising the antennae. Nature is full of so many wonders that it would be easy for us to get lost in them. But every one of these wonders is designed by our Magnificent Creator God to lead us to desire to learn more about Him – especially to learn from His Word that He wants a relationship with you through His Son, Jesus Christ. |
7/23/2025
| Smart Brain… |
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| The human brain is the most complex arrangement of matter in the universe, and modern brain research is adding to this wonder. But medical researchers are learning that if the part of the brain that controls your left hand, for example, is damaged beyond repair, other parts of the brain will take over for the injured part. This doesn’t always happen automatically, however. It takes effort on your part. If you don’t use the hand, the brain won’t work very hard to reassign its function to another part of the brain. It also works the other way. Even if the brain isn’t damaged, failure to use your left arm will result in a shrinkage of the brain area that controls it. So pianists, for example, will have a growth in the area of the brain controlling their skills, if they practice. These discoveries fill us with more wonder over the incredible abilities of the brain. But they also tell us something about ourselves. We are not, as many think, locked into certain bad habits or sins. We are learning that the transformation of our minds by God’s power is not only something that happens spiritually – physical changes take place in our brains as a result of our behavior. Is your mind being transformed by the power of our Magnificent Creator God, or is it being conformed to the world? |
7/22/2025
| New Recipe for Primordial Soup… |
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| One of the most difficult problems for those who believe in evolution is to explain the origin of life without reference to God. Science is now aware that even the elementary living cell is, in reality, extremely complex, and it has become increasingly difficult to explain this without a Creator God. The most popular explanation says that the early Earth had an atmosphere of ammonia, methane, hydrogen and water. Oxygen had to be absent because it pretty much ruins the chemical reactions that are needed to form even simple biological molecules. It was also important that this early Earth be protected from ultraviolet radiation, which also ruins the chemistry. But this picture of the early Earth has been shown to be totally inaccurate. For one thing, geologists can see from the oldest rocks that the Earth has always had plenty of oxygen in its atmosphere. Then astronomers have pointed out that a younger sun would be turning out l0,000 times more ultraviolet radiation than it does now. Modern science is finding out that what the Bible says is true. Scientists just won’t admit it. The Earth has always had oxygen, since life needing oxygen has been around from the first week that the Earth existed. And life can only be explained as the work of the Source and Author of life, our Magnificent Creator God. |
7/21/2025
| The Solar-Powered Pump… |
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| When you look at a tall tree with good green leaves on the topmost branches and it hasn’t rained in a week, did you ever wonder how those leaves get their water in order to stay green? On a nice, warm summer day, a large tree may pump over a thousand gallons – that’s four tons – of water from the ground up to its leaves. The water is collected by the roots, a drop at a time. But the real work of pumping tons of water 30, 60 or 100 feet into the air comes from the top of the tree. As water is pulled toward the treetop, it passes through vessels that have negative pressure in them, pulling the water up. Negative pressure in these vessels, high in a tree, has been measured as low as negative 20 atmospheres. This very low pressure is created as water evaporates from the leaves of the tree, creating a vacant space in the vessel that must be filled with more water from below. The pump in every tree can pull water up from more than 32 feet, which is the limit for man-made pumps. The engineering excellence and power of the silent pump that delivers water within the tree is a witness for our Magnificent Creator God and against chance evolution! |
7/20/2025
| Such Beauty Surrounds Us… |
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| What can be more appealing, than the sight of a cherry tree in full bloom? Cherry blossom seems to enhance every environment, of which it is a part. Even urban areas can play host to cherry trees, and concrete city can be made attractive for a while, when the blossoms appear. Cherry blossom is often fleeting. Many varieties are in bloom for no more than 2 weeks of the year. But for those two weeks, they burst into an explosion of pink, followed by a ground covering of pink snow. It is often forgotten how much energy a plant uses, in producing flowers and blossoms. Though cherry blossoms are small, there are a lot of them. The colors they reflect, and the aromas released, are attractive to the insects necessary for pollination. But what an awkward method of reproduction pollination sometimes seems to be. The male pollen cells need to travel from the anthers of the flowers on one cherry tree, to the stigma of another. To attract the right pollinator, the blossoms must be the right color, and the right size. But why would they have evolved this way, if the insects were not originally pollinating these flowers? Whichever way you cut it, the burst of energy needed to produce the annual cherry blossoms is not explicable without presupposing the truth of God’s word. But God made everything in six days, so the inexplicable becomes logical. Like the stars of the heavens, bright flowers tell forth the glory of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
7/19/2025
| A Very High Standard Of Excellence… |
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| There’s an old saying that people seldom remember how rapidly the job was done, but they do appreciate good workmanship. However, the staggering variety and number of things created by God did not limit the elegance of His fine workmanship. The relationship between the snapping shrimp and a fish called the goby is a good example of the Creator’s attention to the finest detail. The snapping shrimp has very poor eyesight, while the goby has excellent eyesight. Both share the same burrow, which is dug by the shrimp and guarded by the goby. The shrimp uses the goby as a blind person uses a Seeing Eye dog. Whenever the shrimp is outside its burrow, it always keeps one antenna on the goby. The shrimp stays hidden inside the burrow if the goby should temporarily swim away. When danger approaches, the goby signals and disappears inside the burrow. The shrimp is right behind him. Neither the goby nor the shrimp can survive without each other, so pairs are established for life when both goby and shrimp are very young. In order for this system to work, both goby and shrimp reproductive systems, which differ greatly, are synchronized so that shrimp and goby youngsters are ready to pair at the same time. This astonishing relationship shows us how our Magnificent Creator God’s standards of excellence bring His love to every corner of the creation. |
7/18/2025
| Your Body’s Self-Repair… |
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| Let’s take a moment today to look at your body’s incredible system for repairing itself. Suppose you accidentally cut your finger. Almost instantly, a series of precisely ordered steps begins to repair your finger. First the bleeding must be stopped. While the scab is forming over the surface of the wound, the blood below is making another kind of clot out of blood platelets and protein. With the bleeding stopped, your body increases the flow of blood enriched with white blood cells. These not only search out and kill germs, but they clean the wound of damaged cellular tissue. Skin cells begin to increase the rate at which they make new cells in order to bridge the cut with new skin. Underneath, cells called fibroblasts fill the wound to strengthen the tender new tissue, and contract to pull the wound closed. Now blood vessels and nerves complete their repairs as the fibroblasts position themselves along the lines of stress to prevent future damage. The intelligence in the order in which the steps to healing take place, as well as the advanced biochemistry involved in making those steps happen, makes the healing of a cut finger no less of a miracle than Jesus’ healing of the high priest’s servant’s ear. Healing is clearly the doing of our Magnificent Creator God, whether it happens slowly or instantly! |
7/17/2025
| Mechanical Excellence Under Stress… |
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| God created this world, but He did not then stand back and let it and all life on it spin off into space. No, He supervises this world, and He is concerned with every day-to-day detail. Most living things move or change shape in response to high-speed wind or water movement. Take leaves, for example. As the wind increases, leaves automatically change shape with respect to the wind direction so that they offer less wind resistance. Holly leaves fold up and over each other along the branch, cutting the area exposed to the wind by over 50 percent. The same is true of an entire tree. As the old saying goes, the tree that bends with the wind is less likely to break. Even people, when faced with a strong wind, walk and move differently than in a light breeze. Recent scientific studies on the amount of drag which living things have has shown that living things generally offer less than half as much drag as non-streamlined objects like buildings. In fact, living things have 30 percent less drag than modern streamlined automobiles. Our Magnificent Creator God has not missed any details in His design of the creation. Modern technology has yet to come up with better designs, even in this simple area of engineering. Nothing has been left to chance! |
7/16/2025
| Can Cats See in the Dark… |
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| Some creatures can see forms of light that are invisible to us; others have built-in binoculars. The rattlesnake has two sets of eyes – one set for light that is visible to us and another set for infrared radiation. But one thing that creatures with vision all have in common is that sight requires some form of light. While some creatures, like cats, are supposed to be able to see in the dark, they cannot, in fact, see any better than we can in a room that is too dark. However, cats and many other animals are able to see more clearly than we can at light levels where our eyes become useless. One of the main reasons for this is that their eyes have a reflective layer of cells below the light receptors. So, if a particle of light – called a photon – misses a light receptor on its way into the eye, it is reflected back through the light receptor cells and gets a second chance to register. It is this reflective layer of cells which makes it look like your cat’s eyes are glowing in the dark. The great variety and abilities of sight that we find in different creatures perfectly fits each of their lifestyles and needs. Truly, our Magnificent Creator God has provided perfectly for each one of them. |
7/15/2025
| Holding Comparisons at Arm’s Length… |
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| Many people still believe that as we developed from the fertilized egg in our mother’s womb, we went through all the earlier evolutionary stages. That is, we had gills like a fish, then our heart developed from two-stage to four-stage, and at one point we even had a tail like a monkey. Unfortunately this myth, based upon fraudulent work done in 1866, can still be found as evidence for evolution in some school textbooks. Certain evolutionists say that even our arms go through the evolutionary stages, looking like the fins of a fish at one point. Many people are fooled by these arguments that are not even close to the truth. The fact is, the human embryo’s arms are always human arms. Their tissue, and the tissue from which they develop, is genetically nothing other than human. They may not look like an adult’s arms as they develop, but then a baby’s arm doesn’t look like a construction worker’s arm either! What’s more, despite the similarity in mechanical design between a human arm, a lizard’s foreleg, a seal’s flipper or a bird’s wing, each of these creature’s forelimbs develops from a different part of the embryo. As Christians in a modern scientific age, we need not ever be afraid of what true science will discover. True discovery clearly bears witness to our Magnificent Creator God! We expect it! |
7/14/2025
| Fast Bees or Fast Talking… |
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| According to the Bible, God created the land-living insects, and that would include the bees, on day six of creation. This was just three days after He created the flowering plants. According to evolution, bees evolved from a simpler insect after the pollen-bearing plants had developed. The specialized bee and its complex social structure was thought to have taken a long time to evolve. Creationists, who believe the time line of events laid out in Scripture and reject inflated evolutionary years, were not surprised when a bee was found preserved in amber which evolutionists said was many millions of years older than the oldest known bee. The almost perfectly preserved bee is like modern bees and can even be identified as a worker. Not only does this show that bees, with all their superb specializations, were around much earlier than ever thought by evolutionists, it also shows that they were around for some time before this specimen lived. In fact, the evolutionist who reported the findings admitted that there is a real problem explaining how bees could have developed nearly at the same time as pollen-bearing plants. As creationists, we have no such problem. Bees were created, fully formed, only a few days after pollen-bearing plants by our Magnificent Creator God. Science has shown us once again that the biblical history makes more sense than the evolutionary story of history. |
7/13/2025
| Small Does Not Mean Simple… |
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| Roman Vishniac is a renowned photographer of microscopic scenes. One of his favorite subjects is one of the so-called simplest forms of life. This “simple” life, the protozoan, is supposedly the ancestor of all living things. However, Vishniac has noted that the protozoan is neither simple nor archaic in character. This creature carries out all the functions of life that we require millions of cells to sustain—all within a single cell. There is a parallel in technology. The first adding machines were large and heavy contraptions. As these mechanical adding machines became smaller, they had to be more cleverly designed because they were smaller. The first electronic calculators were even smaller and lighter than their mechanical brothers. But they were still much larger and simpler than calculators today. As calculators have decreased in size, they have had to be more cleverly designed because they are smaller. Vishniac has learned that the so-called “simple” one-celled creatures are not simple at all. This is because they must carry out the business of life within the limits of their small size. This has not swayed him from evolution. However, this fact has convinced him that current theories are wrong. You see, evolution is in trouble if there are no “simple” forms of life. We believe that this clear evidence that there are no simple forms of life—evidence powerful enough to sway the experts—supports the Bible’s claim that all forms of life were created in finished form by a wise Magnificent Creator God!!! |
7/12/2025
| Not Cavemen At All… |
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| We are beginning to discover more about how Neanderthal people were not primitive subhuman cavemen, as popular-style evolutionary documentaries show. Instead, they were actually fully human – and the evidence for this is so conclusive that even serious evolutionists accept the fact today. It appears that Neanderthals cooked. They didn’t just eat raw or burnt meat. It appears that food remains were seasoned with herbs. They also used nuts and legumes, among other plant-based edibles. Perhaps they were familiar with the Keto Diet! Those interested in natural remedies often recommend using certain tree barks as an infusion or just chewed, as a painkiller. This is because such barks – I use willow bark – are a source of salicylic acid, which is closely related to aspirin. It has even been found that Neanderthals consumed the mold penicillium, which we now know produces the well-known antibiotic penicillin. Their clothing included furs, required to combat European conditions during the post-Flood Ice Age. But they also seemed to wear pendants and other jewelry. As always our Magnificent Creator God has a reason and purpose for everything He made. |
7/11/2025
| Wisdom In Hiding… |
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| You don’t have to watch a drama very long or read too far into a book before you find what is hidden being revealed. The Bible often talks about truths that are hidden because of unbelief. A scientist was recently studying insect-eating birds in an oak tree that was in bloom. He was surrounded by male flowers called catkins. Suddenly, one of the catkins began walking away. The surprise that he had discovered was a species of caterpillar that feeds on catkins and ends up looking just like a catkin – even having fake pollen sacks. In this way, it escapes the notice of feeding birds. The scientist then found that the members of this caterpillar species that hatch in early spring and feed on catkins end up looking like catkins. But members of the same species that hatch later and feed in oak trees end up looking like oak twigs. This observation was a complete surprise because it means that it is the caterpillars’ diet that causes the difference in appearance. When things are hidden, reality is always different than we expect. While the Gospel is clear, Scripture often mentions that unbelief causes the clear to be hidden to the unbeliever. It is helpful for us to understand this as we see the popularity of belief in evolution and a world without our Magnificent Creator God. |
7/10/2025
| Against All Odds… |
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| Blood is one of the most miraculous of all creations. It carries oxygen and energy to our cells, and carries off wastes. It is also a communications pipeline, using powerful hormones to provide communication between various parts of the body. Hemoglobin is the substance within the blood that enables it to carry oxygen to your cells. Many different kinds of creatures, including lobsters and spiders, all have some type of blood with hemoglobin in it. Some creatures even have transparent blood. Hemoglobin, all by itself, testifies to a Creator. You see, so many different and obviously unrelated creatures have hemoglobin that evolutionists could only account for this by saying that hemoglobin must have evolved many times in many different creatures. This explanation worked when scientists thought that hemoglobin was a relatively simple molecule. But now we know that hemoglobin is a very complex, eight-helix twisted molecule of about a hundred atoms, all arranged in just the right way around a central atom of iron. There is a zero chance of this complex molecule happening accidentally even once, much less the many times suggested by evolutionists. Blood is a wonderful creation of our Magnificent Creator God. He wants us to realize this so that we look for a relationship with Him, which is possible for us through the shed blood of His Son, Jesus Christ. |
7/9/2025
| A Mammoth Mystery… |
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| One of the most important differences between man’s word and God’s Word is that man’s word can sometimes be true, while God’s Word is always true. When a scientist finds the fossil imprint of a fish, he usually says that he has found a fish and will even give it a name. But what has he really found? Well, just the flattened and deformed imprint of what used to be a fish’s dead body. Everything else the scientist says about the imprint is story telling. The stories might be true, but the important thing is that stories are not facts. The uncertain nature of such story-telling was illustrated when scientists decided that the Holly Oak pendant, a whelk shell with an engraving of a wooly mammoth on it, is not really evidence that man saw mammoths in North America. According to theory, mammoths disappeared from North America long before the arrival of man. One dating method supported an ancient age for the Holly Oak pendant, but another dating method gave an age of about one thousand years. Scientists have now decided that the carving is modern. In other words, evidence has been selected to support the theory that mammoths disappeared from North America long before the arrival of man. God’s Word about ancient history is completely trustworthy. Man’s story-telling about ancient history has always been subject to change. |
7/8/2025
| The Too-Young Rings of Uranus… |
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| Everyone has seen pictures of the planet Saturn and its beautiful rings. Well, it is now known that many of our solar system’s outer planets have rings. However, these rings are a problem for those astronomers who think that the universe is billions of years old. You see, the rings, which encircle the outer planets, would not be around today if the universe really was billions of years old. Recent studies of the rings of Uranus highlight the problem of why these rings are still around today. One theory says the rings are kept in shape, and in orbit, by small satellites circling the planet near one set of rings. The problem is, there are nine other rings around the planet that are not associated with satellites. Astronomers have also found 50 to 100 tenuous dust bands around the planet. These dust bands would disappear even more rapidly than rings. One astronomer has suggested that perhaps these bands are replenished with dust when tiny grains of dust collide with invisible moons around the planet. Science usually doesn’t have room for invisible moons and unseen causes. It is unfortunate that when the only alternative is to admit that the Bible and our Magnificent Creator God is right about the creation being relatively young, some scientists are so biased that they must invent invisible moons and mysterious causes. |
7/7/2025
| Reversible Wings: Mystery or Creativity… |
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| Sometimes incredible wonders pass right before our eyes, but we are not equipped to see them. Take the hummingbird, for an example. Did you know that like the woodpecker, the hummingbird has a tongue that wraps all the way around its head just under the skin? This feature is not really evident when you look at the hummingbird. Nor is the wonderful way in which its wings move, so that it can hover, fly forwards or fly backwards. High-speed photography has revealed some amazing secrets about the hummingbird’s wings that cannot be noticed by the eye. All birds, except the hummingbird, move their wings at the shoulder, elbow and wrist. Only the hummingbird is capable of turning his wings upside down, so that when he hovers, both strokes of his wings beat the air in order to support him. This demonstrates that the hummingbird is not a modification of the general bird design – as evolutionists tell us. Rather, the hummingbird was created with unique features that enable it to make its living. Likewise, when our Magnificent Creator God tells us that He cares for those who are His through faith in Christ’s saving work, we don’t always see exactly how He is caring for us. But like the virtually invisible features of the hummingbird, His care is nevertheless there. |
7/6/2025
| Each One Perfectly Designed… |
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| When we compare ourselves with many of the other living things on this Earth, our abilities are not very impressive. A camel can carry 1,000 pounds 30 miles through the desert every day. As a human being, I become tired even thinking about walking 30 miles with empty pockets. The ostrich can run at 30 miles per hour, faster than my car might go during rush hour. The Indian swift can fly at more than 100 miles per hour. The elephant’s trunk has 40,000 muscles. This is 70 times the number of muscles in your entire body. Yet, his trunk can bulldoze a tree or pick up a pin. Many of us can’t do either one on the first try. The flea can jump 350 times its own length, a total of 13 inches. This is equivalent to our jumping 2,000 feet into the air. Most of us can’t jump more than two feet off the ground. As it works out, 13 inches is just about right if you are looking for a nice warm dog on which to raise a family. A tiny insect called the midge beats its wings an amazing 133,000 times per minute. That’s a hundred times faster than you can blink your eye. Humans can use their superior intellect to build the machines they need. With those machines, they can outdo any one of these creatures. But God simply made a gift to the animals of the specialized abilities they needed. God expects us to follow His example and design and build what we need. If we look carefully, we will see that our Magnificent Creator God has given us all the materials and all the ideas we need within the creation. No one can say that He does not care what we do with our lives on Earth!!! |
7/5/2025
| And We Still Do Not Know… |
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| Scientists have not even been able to chart the size of the known physical universe. There is a photo called the XDF (eXtreme Deep Field) that was put together from images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope over the course of ten years. It shows a vast number of galaxies, each comprising billions of stars like our sun. Our sun is 93 million miles away from the earth. And the galaxies are very, very far apart—Andromeda, the closest galaxy to our own, is 2.2 million light years away. To give an idea of how far that is, a shuttle traveling at 18,000 miles per hour would need 37,200 years to travel one light year. The universe is absolutely huge—and our Magnificent Creator God created it all – just by speaking it into existence!!! |
7/4/2025
| The Power of God Touches Earth… |
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| The first Good Friday was the day in which the hand of God was more evident on Earth than on any other day since the Great Flood. God’s hand was especially evident to those who knew the Old Testament Scriptures, while even the Roman centurion could see it. In Psalm 22, King David described the details of the Savior’s crucifixion and gave the very words that the Savior would speak as well as the words that would be said by the bystanders. He wrote this a thousand years before it all took place! He described, in detail, what it felt like to be crucified, even though that torture had not yet been invented. He described Christ’s pierced hands and feet, and even how the soldiers divided the Savior’s clothes and cast lots for His robe. Even though this detailed and accurate prediction was widely distributed in writing long before the event, many scientists, who so value prediction to prove theory, claim that Jesus’ death was not extraordinary and possibly even a myth. But God’s Hand in human history could not be more clear than it is here. That detailed description of Christ’s death for your sin and mine a thousand years before it happened is so dramatic because it is our Magnificent Creator God’s greatest desire that you accept what He has done for you on the cross of Calvary. |
7/3/2025
| Feathered Pilots… |
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| You are the pilot of a Boeing 767 airliner, bringing the great ship in for a landing. Approaching the airport, you extend the slat on the leading edge of each wing so that you have more lift as your speed slows. As the runway nears, you raise the nose of the plane to catch more air. In the final moments of landing, you bring the feathers, which act as air brakes, out of the wing to reduce your lift and settle easily onto the runway. Yet, without any training, young birds do this very same thing every day. High-speed photography has revealed that birds follow each one of these sequences as they approach and land. First, as they prepare to land, they slow their speed and increase their lift by extending and lowering the front part of the wing. Then, to slow even more, they angle their body from a horizontal flying position to a more upright angle. Finally, they drop the feathers on the back of their wing – after which the plane’s feathers are named – to settle nicely on a tree branch, with virtually no effort at all. Yes, the principles of flight, refined by over 80 years of man’s experience, were simply taught to the birds by our loving Creator. What a wonderful testimony birds offer to the work of our Magnificent Creator God! |
7/2/2025
| Electric Bushes and Trees… |
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| Is it silly to speak of plants anticipating a good watering or is it naive to think of a plant anticipating spring? Scientists are learning that although plants do not have a nervous system, they do use electrical signals to respond to their surroundings – and sometimes they respond just like human beings! Most of us are familiar with the Venus flytrap, which responds very quickly when the trigger hairs are touched. Other plants are “sensitive” and close their leaflets when touched. One mimosa tree was so disturbed by its keeper that it shed all its leaves, seemingly, as one writer put it, having a nervous breakdown. Tomato plants will wilt to conserve water, but if they are overly disturbed, they will wilt even though they don’t need to conserve water. Scientists have found that cells within plants communicate with each other through electrical signals in a similar way to our nervous systems. Such responses are very unexpected in what evolutionists consider simple plants. However, if we see the creation as the work of a caring Magnificent Creator God Who endowed all of His creation with its own form of emotional sense, then even these limited plant responses are not unreasonable reflections of their Creator. The fact that we can recognize emotional response will hopefully enable us to see the importance of His love. |
7/1/2025
| God’s Optic Fibers… |
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| One of the areas in which modern technology is advancing most rapidly is fiber optics. Crystal clear telephone messages are carried on cables of special fibers that conduct messages in digital form, using laser light. Offices and industries now use computer systems in which processors are linked with fiber optic cables in order to increase speed. But man has only discovered this technology – he has not invented it, for God used fiber optics in providing for the needs of certain plants. Scientists have learned that sprouting oat, corn and mung bean plants use the principles of fiber optics so they can grow. When the tip of a young seedling first pokes its nose above ground, it gathers and sends light to the growth center – which may be half-an-inch, an inch or more below the ground. The conducted light then stimulates the growth center, providing energy for growth. Without this provision, the seedling could die, or at least growth retarded. Scientists have learned that the seedling stem is such an efficient optic fiber that it will even faithfully conduct a focused image of the light source. We are learning that just about every technological breakthrough made by man was already used by our Magnificent Creator God when He made the creation. There is hardly a stronger argument than this in favor of belief in an intelligent Creator! |
6/30/2025
| Dinosaurs Need Friends Too… |
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| Almost every creature seeks companionship with others. This universal, basic need gives us additional insight into the mind of the Creator. Those who believe in evolution have always thought that only warm-blooded creatures valued companionship and love. So for generations, dinosaurs – which are supposed to be much further down the evolutionary scale of living things – were seen as hard-hearted, dull-witted, uncaring creatures that didn’t even care whether their own young lived or died. Now, many instances of the desire for companionship – even among dinosaurs – is being uncovered. Scientists are learning that dinosaurs often lived together in communities, building nests, caring for their young and traveling together, even when they had no need for protection. In some sites, huge dinosaur trackways show that various kinds of dinosaurs lived in groups, close to each other, and that the same kinds generally followed their own pathways. These discoveries at several sites and involving many different kinds of dinosaurs have convinced scientists that dinosaurs were very much like modern animals in their social habits. In other words, dinosaurs needed friends, too. That almost all of His creatures value companionship tells us a little about our Magnificent Creator God. Scripture reveals more details about this aspect of the Creator when it tells us that He created man because of His great love. Do you know His love for you through Jesus Christ? |
6/29/2025
| And It Is Only 3 Atoms… |
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| Have you ever thought what a strange material water actually is? A water molecule comprises of three atoms – two hydrogens and one oxygen. Oxygen is an element in Group VI of the Periodic Table; Group VI also contains the elements sulfur, selenium, and tellurium, in increasing order of size (oxygen is the smallest. Hydrogen can also form compounds with these elements: H2S, H2Se, H2Te. These have the boiling points -60.7, -41.5, and -2.2deg Celcius. Therefore, all these compounds are gases at room temperature. If we were following the size of the Group VI atom only, then water should have a boiling point considerably lower than that of H2S. But it doesn’t. In fact, the boiling point of water is higher than all those other compounds, at 100 deg C (or 212 deg F). This, of course, is not the only anomalous property of water. The solid form of water – ice – floats on liquid water. So what, you might say. Well, the solid form of every other liquid there is always sinks in its liquid. If you have ever allowed molten candle wax to cool down, for example, you will notice it freezes from the bottom up. Nearly all liquids behave that way – except water! In short, the most common liquid in the world – the one that we require most for life – behaves like no other liquid. It is almost as if it were specially designed! Our Magnificent Creator God designed the Earth – including water – for us to inhabit!!! |
6/28/2025
| And Every Single Cell Was Created To Serve Him… |
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| You have 30,000,000,000,000 individual cells in your body. That’s thirty trillion, and you have about two hundred different types of cells, including red blood cells, skin cells, nerve cells (neurons), and fat cells. Each type of cell performs a vital role in keeping your body healthy. As amazing as it seems, the average human body makes between two and three million new red blood cells every second. Oh, how we want each of our thirty trillion cells to be devoted to Jesus. We’re to love the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. As amazing as our incredibly-designed bodies are, we also have minds, personalities, and spirits. And we have gifts, talents, abilities, and strengths. The Lord gave you the wonderful workmanship of YOU so you could serve Him. Today, present your body to Him as a living sacrifice and let your life be transformed by the renewing of your mind, which happens as you meditate on His Word. Let Him be Lord of all there is of you. We are more than the chemicals that form our body. We are a special creation of God. Man is our Magnificent Creator God’s masterpiece—His workmanship, the crown of creation!!! |
6/27/2025
| Rat Language: More than Meets the Ear… |
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| It was once thought that language was a relatively late development in the evolution of man. Language among the lower animals was dismissed as a fantasy. So when the Bible speaks of the whole creation praising God, these same people said that this was just a figurative expression. Now modern science has shown that many creatures do have a language of their own – language which, we point out, can also be used to praise the Creator. The human ear can detect sounds between 20 and 20,000 vibrations per second. Many creatures that we once thought were silent are busy communicating in sounds well above this range of frequencies, and we just don’t hear them. Scientists have cataloged many of the calls of Norway rats who communicate at 70,000 vibrations per second and conclude that they have the richest vocabulary of calls with specific meanings. Young rat pups screech a distress call that reaches the same volume as a jackhammer, yet we are not able to hear it. There is an advantage for these small rodents having such a high-pitched language. Even though many predators, like cats, can easily hear these frequencies, the loudest call does not travel far enough to give away the location of the nest. Language is a gift from our Magnificent Creator God; therefore, it is only fitting that the entire creation has language with which to praise Him! |
6/26/2025
| King Catfish and Ancient Writing… |
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| One of the mysteries of ancient Egypt is that it appears to have begun as a high civilization. The very first pharaoh of Egypt is known as Narmer, and his name simply means “Catfish.” From what we can tell, King Catfish, who lived around five hundred years after the Great Flood, is helping to prove the truth of the Bible’s history. It was long thought that writing had not yet been invented at the time of King Catfish, or even at the time of Moses, 400 years later. But recent discoveries of writing on both carved stone slabs and papyrus-like paper from the time of King Catfish have shown that even at this early date, writing had been around for a long time. Even more amazing has been the discovery, from Catfish’s time, of a well-organized industrial complex that had many production facilities, each specializing in the production of certain types of fired clay pots. The ruins clearly show that this industrial complex shipped its product all over the ancient Egyptian empire. One thing is clear. Those who argue that Moses could not have written the early books of the Bible because they believe that writing had not at that time been invented have been clearly proven wrong by old King Catfish! Just another example of the advanced plans our Magnificent Creator God had for this civilization. |
6/25/2025
| Glacier Races… |
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| Life depends on what chemists call one of the most complex substances in the universe. This stuff refuses to act like other materials – and because it does, we are alive. This odd material flows when it is solid, and its solid state is less dense than its liquid state. It can become a gas directly from a solid. Based on the expected behavior of matter, it should boil and freeze at much higher temperatures than it does. In addition, this substance conducts electricity in a very unusual manner – the usual method would not support life. This mystery substance is ordinary water. If it didn’t float when it became a solid, most of the life in every lake in a cold climate would be wiped out every winter. Water’s unusual method for conducting electricity makes the processes of life possible within your cells. And water’s strange behavior as ice under high pressure causes glaciers to flow down hill. While many glaciers move at a rate of only one or two feet per day, one glacier was once clocked at 250 feet per day! Every substance that God has created was made with special abilities and features to make life possible. This is yet another testimony that our Magnificent Creator God’s attentions are focused upon us. |
6/24/2025
| The Dormant Toad… |
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| Few deserts are more inhospitable than the Sonoran Desert of North America. Life is so hard there that even the Couch’s Spadefoot toad must lie dormant for 11 out of 12 months. Normally, the Spadefoot has only one month out of twelve to carry out the normal business of life. The Spadefoot has an internal clock that tells it when the violent desert rainstorms are near and when to begin to near the surface of the ground. The toads, extremely sensitive to ground vibrations, can hear the pounding rains miles away. The distant rains bring the toads out of the sand so that as soon as pools have formed, the male toads are in them, calling for the females. Mating and egg-laying are completed by morning, and dawn finds the toads safely protected from the sun’s heat beneath the sand. But the desert pools reach 100 degrees and will not last long before they dry up, killing the eggs. Under ideal conditions it takes only nine days for the eggs to hatch. However, even in a good year, the young toads have only a few weeks at most to eat the food necessary to keep them alive for the next eleven months until the next rain. Our Magnificent Creator God not only creates life which can survive under the most extreme circumstances, but He is also the source of eternal life. |
6/23/2025
| Then What Is It… |
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| It comes as quite a surprise to discover that the word locust does not actually indicate any separate species. Locusts are really just grasshoppers, but the term refers to their well-known swarming behavior. Under normal conditions, locusts are solitary insects. In normal times, they cause little or no problem to agriculture. But sometimes, conditions are not normal. After times of drought, the locusts seem to produce far more nymphs than would be normal. These then begin to swarm as the insects suddenly become gregarious. These swarms of locusts cause terrible problems for agriculture. In swarming conditions, the insects turn to eating crops and can devastate whole fields in short order. The transformation seems to be caused by increased body concentrations of serotonin, and this, in turn, is produced when there are multiple touches of the hind legs by other locusts, caused by overcrowding. Towards the end of 2019 and into 2020, large swarms of locusts affected parts of Africa and Asia, and these were so large that they brought to mind the plague of locusts in Egypt, mentioned in Exodus. For these reasons, locusts were, in the Bible, a symbol of destruction. In Joel 2:25, we read: “I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent among you” (Joel 2:25). The destruction caused is to be reversed by the blessing and favor of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
6/22/2025
| Conventional Wisdom Is Not Always Sufficient… |
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| If you had painful skin, one of the last things you would apply to it would be hot peppers. Not only do hot peppers burn the mouth, some can even blister the skin. Yet in South America, ground hot peppers have been used for centuries to help relieve pain. Scientists have discovered the active ingredient in peppers that relieves skin pain. This substance blocks the pain signals that come from the nerves just under the surface of the skin. The “hot pepper” sauce for skin not only causes no pain, it relieves pain that doesn’t respond to any other treatment. It’s available in creams and ointments that, tests show, relieve pain in two out of three people. Conventional wisdom says that medicines that are found in natural plants were discovered by accident. Someone might accidentally discover a relationship between a person’s having eaten a certain plant and then getting well. They would try the same plants on others with the same disease. If they found that there were more cures, the plant would be remembered as a folk medicine. The “hot pepper” pain reliever for skin tells us that there’s a problem with this theory. People who have a painful skin condition are not likely to apply a pepper sauce. Doing that would be expected to make their skin more painful and cause it to blister. However, it’s possible that our Magnificent Creator God originally gave humans some knowledge of the cures for our ills – cures that He wisely built into creation!!! |
6/21/2025
| The Gift Only He Can Give… |
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| Scientists are learning that even the lowly bacteria have mind and memory. New research is showing that mind, memory, brain, and personality did not evolve. These can be found in the lowliest of creatures, including the bacteria. Another sign of intelligence in a life form is the ability to learn. Using attracting and repelling substances, scientists have found that bacteria can learn about their surroundings and draw conclusions. Follow-up tests showed that they later remember what they learned. Scientists have even found that younger bacteria learn better than older ones. If some things are not learned when young, they never can be learned! It seems that it’s hard to teach an old bacterium new tricks! The biggest surprise of all came when scientists discovered that bacteria have what the researchers called individual personality. They are mystified about how bacteria, each with the same genetic structure and from the same environment, can develop unique quirks in behavior. Because we find individual personality even in the lowly bacteria, we know that did not evolve. That God would give even a bacterium the gift of personality shows us something about His mind toward us. Nothing is so small or unimportant that it escapes His attention. Since He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to rescue us from the decay that is in the world because of sin, there is no force too great for Him to overcome. Surely He is a Magnificent Creator God of details as well as a God of love, Who is concerned about every individual among us!!! |
6/20/2025
| Another All-Wet Theory of Evolution… |
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| There is a universe of difference between saying that man was created by God, in the image of God, and saying that man is nothing more than a hairless ape. And the fact that man is not covered with hair like the ape has led to a weird, new twist in the theory of evolution. British author Elaine Morgan has written that current evolutionary theory, which says that man’s ancestors lost their hair because they ran and hunted in the hot sun, doesn’t make any sense. If that were true, she says, lions wouldn’t have any hair either. She thinks ape-like creatures lost their hair for the same reason that evolutionists believe whales lost their hair – they became aquatic creatures. She also says that swimming apes would have to learn to speak instead of communicating with sign language because their hands would be occupied with swimming. Morgan suggests that with the absence of fossil evidence for missing links between apes and man, her theory makes as much sense as any other. We would agree with her about the lack of fossil evidence and that her theory makes as much sense as any other evolutionary theory – and that’s no sense at all! Man was made by our Magnificent Creator God to be so different from the ape that it’s impossible to say that the two are related. Rather than seek a relationship with apes, we are to seek our relationship with God the Father through His Son, Jesus Christ. |
6/19/2025
| Man and Horse Domestication… |
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| Bones can tell stories. An interesting story of man’s relationship with the horse is told by the fossilized teeth of ancient horses. You see, domesticated horses have a habit called crib biting – biting the rails in their corral. Wild horses don’t do this. Crib biting creates a specific pattern of wear. So, when scientists find horses’ teeth that have this pattern, they know that it comes from a domesticated horse. At one time it was believed that horses were first domesticated – using inflated evolutionary years – about 8,000 years ago. But several instances of horse teeth with the crib biting wear pattern have now turned up in much more ancient sites. Man may have had a partnership with the horse for much longer than this. But we who believe the Bible are not surprised that the evolutionary description of man’s relationship with the horse must be revised. In the book of Genesis we read that during the famine in Egypt when Joseph was administering Egypt’s grain, he exchanged grain for livestock, including horses. Bible critics have long said that the horse was unknown in Egypt at Joseph’s time – proof, they said, that the Bible is full of mistakes. But now we know that it was the critics of the Bible who were wrong. Man’s relationship with the horse is much, much older than most people ever thought. |
6/18/2025
| Don’t Offend Your House Plants… |
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| A few years ago there was a lot of publicity about people who claimed that their house plants did better when they were talked to. Many experts thought that this was a silly idea since plants are very low, comparatively speaking, on the (imaginary) evolutionary scale. Research eventually proved that plants which were treated to music, especially classical music, did indeed seem healthier. New research has convinced many scientists that plants also have feelings and memory. Researchers carried out their experiments on the bur marigold, which typically sprouts and immediately produces two identical leaves. Scientists made several tiny needle holes in only one of the leaves and then, after only five minutes, they removed both of the leaves. Later they removed the top growth of the young plants in order to force growth from the buds adjacent to the leaf sites. As a result, the plants tended to show growth only on the side where the undamaged leaf had been. Further study has shown that, while plants do not have a nervous system, they do have a chemical communication system which works something like memory! We certainly must marvel at our Magnificent Creator God’s care in giving even plants feelings and memory. And then we are reminded that if He has taken such care in creating and caring for plants, how much more must He care for each and every one of us! |
6/17/2025
| Ever-Curious Man… |
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| According to Genesis, the first men were even building cities, inventing musical instruments, crafting in bronze and iron, and keeping calendars. Calendars are among the very earliest forms of writing found by archaeologists today. The Bible’s picture of advanced, intelligent and ever-curious man is further supported by the discovery all over the world of ancient observatories. Some of these observatories, such as Stonehenge, are so ancient that little is known about the builders. In fact, when many of the structures which are now known to be observatories were first discovered, no one could figure out the purpose of these structures. Several years ago, 60 additional observatories were positively identified in the American Southwest. The first, and most famous, is the so-called “sun dagger” in New Mexico. Two spiral designs had been cut into the rock so that a shaft of light, passing through nearby rocks, would illuminate key portions of the carvings only on solstices and equinoxes. The creation itself declares the glory of our Magnificent Creator God. Man’s own activities provide a strong witness to the fact that the Bible’s story of the special creation of intelligent, inquisitive man is completely reliable. |
6/16/2025
| Sherlock Holmes’ Greatest Mystery… |
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| In 1912 Charles Dawson announced the discovery of Piltdown man to the world. Piltdown man was a half-human, half ape-like creature which was offered as proof that man was nothing more than a glorified ape. Today, everyone knows that Piltdown man was a fraud. Among a number of theories, there is one that claims the hoaxer to be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was well-known for his practical jokes. He only lived seven or eight miles from the site where the bones were discovered, and he had visited the site. Doyle was also a doctor who understood human anatomy, chemistry and anthropology. In addition, he had access to bones like those which were found. What’s more, in Doyle’s The Lost World, his character actually talks about faking bones, and Doyle’s map of the “Lost World” looks surprisingly like the Piltdown site and surrounding area. William Fix, who is not a creationist, argues that no one has yet found one bone to support the idea of human evolution. But, he says, there has been no shortage of those who hype their findings and try to make a name for themselves. Man was made in the image of our Magnificent Creator God, but when we try to contradict this, the result is confusion and even fraud. |
6/15/2025
| Not A Coincidence… |
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| Many materials in nature give an appearance of design. Consider just a small number of properties of water. It freezes from the top down. We are so used to this, that we forget how unusual it is. All other liquids freeze from the bottom up, but if that happened in ponds and rivers, fish would never be able to survive through winters. Water has a tiny molecular mass, so the molecules can pass through semi-permeable membranes, enabling the movement of water through cell walls, and yet the molecules associate together, held by forces called hydrogen-bonds, so that the melting point and boiling point are much higher than we should expect from the size of the molecules. Of course, there are those who think such properties are coincidental. But these properties, and many others, are precisely what we would expect, given that the world was designed and created by our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
6/14/2025
| His Magnificence Exceeds Anything We Can Comprehend… |
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| “For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof.” Psalm 50:10-12 “If God exists, why is there so much suffering in the world?” Many of us are used to such accusations from atheists, but, unfortunately, many Christians do not know how to answer the point. Christians would be right to point to Genesis 3 and show that evil came into the world by disobedience – the disobedience of Adam – which polluted the entire world. However, there are some who object to this presentation of the Eden account on the grounds that, if God is a God of love and righteousness, how could He allow evil to happen in this way? This question leads some, incorrectly, to assume that God cannot know for sure what is going to happen in the future. The problem, if such it is, is better resolved by reasoning in biblical categories. Thinking in categories appears to be a lost art. Our error is in judging God by human standards even though God rebukes us, in Psalm 50, declaring: “You thought that I was just like you.” God is not like us, even though we are made in His image. We understand events through the passage of time, but God is transcendent over time. Therefore, to us it appears that God, in His Sovereignty, wills two different things; He permits evil but is not responsible for it – we are. If we do not fully understand this, we remind ourselves that His thoughts are so much higher than ours. His magnificence exceeds anything we can comprehend with our human minds which is why we have faith in an omniscient and omnipotent Magnificent Creator God!!! |
6/13/2025
| Older Farmers… |
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| Evolutionary theory says that man only developed farming recently in his history. Besides going against common sense, this evolutionary idea is beginning to cause problems with the greatly inflated evolutionary dating system. Evolutionary scientists were confident that man only began farming 8,000 years ago. However, while studying a site in Egypt, which by inflated evolutionary dating was thought to be 18,000 years old, evolutionists found grains of wheat and barley. They couldn’t believe that man was farming so early in his history. Using different methods, they arrived at dates anywhere from 4,800 to 18,000 years old. Not knowing what to do, they decided that the grains must have somehow fallen to the older layer and that man really wasn’t farming or harvesting so early in history. However, this explanation didn’t solve all of their problems. Evolutionists still have no explanation for the hundreds of grind stones – used to grind grain – which were found at the older site. There are two lessons in this for us. One is that evolutionists’ dates are not very objective. They pick and choose whatever fits their theory. The second lesson is that man was farming and harvesting a lot earlier than most people think. In fact, the Bible tells us that the job of the first man, Adam, was to tend the Garden of Eden! |
6/12/2025
| Spiders Hurt Too… |
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| Evolution has given people today the idea that there are “higher” and “lower” animals. As a result, many people have come to think, for example, that the so-called “lower” animals don’t feel pain. Some people even fault the Bible for using language which speaks of animals experiencing life as humans do. But as our knowledge of the created world grows, even the Bible’s language on this subject is being vindicated. When a spider catches an insect in its web, that is usually the end of the insect. But researchers were watching as a poisonous ambush bug, caught in a web, was about to be bitten and wrapped by a spider. As the spider moved in on its prey, the ambush bug stung one of the spider’s legs. To the researchers’ surprise, the spider reacted immediately by dropping its injured leg and running back to the center of its web. This led scientists to wonder if the spider reacted like this because he felt pain. Further study showed researchers that spiders do indeed feel pain, and most living things probably do, too. Since living things are capable of experiencing life in similar ways, even our emotions and senses can be compared to our Magnificent Creator God’s – even though they are poor when compared to His. For this reason, we should not be surprised to learn that His other creatures experience life as we do without the false limitations imposed by evolutionary distinctions of so-called “higher” and “lower” life. |
6/11/2025
| Termite Assassin… |
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| The assassin bug uses a combination of camouflage and baiting which is totally unknown to any other creature. The assassin bug glues bits of termite nest to himself using fluid from special glands in his body. This termite nest material is his camouflage as he performs his work at the nest. By the time he is done, no part of his body will be showing. Sneaking, unnoticed, to an opening in the nest, the assassin bug waits for some hapless termite to come by. Having captured his first victim and drained it of body fluids, the assassin bug now takes his victim and waves it near the nest opening. Seeing the corpse, a worker moves forward. As he does so, the assassin bug slowly draws his bait back, luring the worker further from the protection of the nest. Suddenly, the assassin bug grabs his new victim and discards the old one. Victim number two will become bait for victim number three. In one such operation, researchers watched as one assassin bug continued this for three hours, killing 31 termites! The gruesome way in which the assassin bug makes his living demonstrates a great deal of intelligence. The assassin bug is yet another example of the fact that intelligence doesn’t have anything to do with evolution – rather, it is a gift of our Magnificent Creator God to His creatures. |
6/10/2025
| Mistletoe’s Special Needs Supplied… |
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| When God designed the mistletoe, He brought the design of the plant and the feeding habits of birds together into a wonderfully designed working system. Then He made one amazing exception to the design. While the wild mistletoe has chlorophyll so that it is able to make some of its own food, it is a parasite that also receives much of its nourishment from the tree on which it grows. The seeds of the mistletoe must sprout into the living tissue of a tree. Mistletoe blooms in early winter, producing a white berry. These berries contain seeds as well as a very sticky pulp which birds find quite tasty. Many of the seeds are thus spread through the birds’ droppings. Some seeds, covered in the sticky pulp, end up on the outside of the birds’ beaks. We have all seen how birds will clean their beaks by rubbing them on a tree branch. If they have been eating mistletoe berries, their beak cleaning glues the mistletoe seeds to a perfect spot for them to grow. The dwarf mistletoe is the one exception to this system. When its seeds are ripe, the berries explode, shooting seeds to neighboring branches up to 40 feet away. Whether we look at how our Magnificent Creator God has brought different creatures together for their mutual benefit, or see the creative means He has designed so they can reproduce, we must exclaim, “Truly the Lord has done all things well!” |
6/9/2025
| Shifty Red-Shifts… |
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| All of us remember hearing about how many of the stars and other objects in space are millions and even billions of light-years away. Since the light from those objects is slightly redder than expected, scientists say that they are moving away from the earth at tremendous speeds. So the redder the light, the more distant they are. But is the red-shift really proof that there are objects millions of light years away? Creation scientists point out that many things can cause light to become red. Various gasses and dust like those found in space regularly turn our sunsets and sunrises red. Astronomer Halton Arp, formerly of the Mt. Wilson Observatories in Pasadena, California, has uncovered many evidences that the red-shifting of starlight is more likely caused by factors other than distance. I should add that Dr. Arp is not a creationist, just an honest scientist. His work has caused a great stir among scientists who believe in evolution to the point where he has now returned to work in Germany. When man uses evidence from the creation – like starlight to try to prove that there is no God – he is placing the creation above the Magnificent Creator God, and the Bible calls this idolatry. We Christians must be careful before accepting any claims not found in the Bible. And we must reject those claims that contradict the Bible. |
6/8/2025
| Dominion Over The Whole World… |
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| When Isaac Asimov wrote his famous robot stories, we all thought we knew what robots looked like. They looked like us. Indeed, many of Asimov’s robots began to look indistinguishable from human beings, such as the iconic R Daneel Olivaw, who partnered with detective Elijah Baley in the sci-fi crime novel The Caves of Steel. As real-life robots began to appear in industry, making cars and operating other machinery, they did not look quite so anthropomorphic. Now in the 21st century, self-mobile robots are not necessarily built to walk like people. For example, we have already seen tiny flying robots about the size and shape of a cockroach – and liable to be just as beloved! A more recent robotic development has seen soft robots built to imitate jellyfish. Two layers of elastic polymer are joined – one stressed and one unstressed. Between the layers, air can be pumped, reversing the stressing and enabling the robot to swim through water. A third stress-free layer provides direction, and the whole machine is able to lift and carry fairly large cargos. The video accompanying the research shows strips of this robotic material being used out of water as a prehensile grip that would have sensitivity approaching that of human hands. As with all new technologies, it is to be hoped that good uses are found for it. God has given us dominion over this world, and technological developments, such as the soft robot, are methods by which humans can operate under this divine mandate. What a Magnificent Creator God we serve using the vast array of inventions He has taught us to make!!! |
6/7/2025
| Just A Little More Of His Wise Handiwork… |
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| Several different animals communicate on a limited basis with one another. But human speech is unique, leaving those who believe in evolution perplexed. The very oldest human fossils show the bony structures needed to support speech. Evolutionists will admit, in a candid moment, that they have no idea how speech could have evolved. One modern researcher said they have only “inferences based on hunches.” Some scientists have observed that human beings come with the built in ability to learn and speak. While this idea is not popular among evolutionists, it is supported by the unique structure of the human vocal tract. No other creature has anything like it. The human larynx is placed low in the throat. That placement creates a sound chamber that allows us to make language expressive. Moreover, the placement prevents us from breathing and eating or drinking at the same time. But we are not born that way. A newborn’s larynx is placed higher up in the throat, allowing a baby to breathe and suckle at the same time. By the time a child is six – and has no need to suckle and breathe at the same time, but is learning language – the larynx has moved to its adult position. This obviously designed arrangement in support of human speech presents only more problems for the evolutionist. But for those who believe in our Magnificent Creator God, it is one more testimony of His wise handiwork!!! |
6/6/2025
| Bird Brained… |
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| Mankind has been teaching birds to talk for thousands of years. Man has also been using birds to deliver messages for just as long. But new research on the intelligence of birds suggests that they might be more intelligent than we suspect. Researchers studying pigeons have learned that they can read all of the letters of the alphabet and they read them in a way similar to people. Scientists became convinced that pigeons see the world in much the same way as we do when they discovered that pigeons tend to confuse the very same letters that people do. What’s more, it took only four months for pigeons to learn to distinguish all the letters of the alphabet. For years, pigeons have been used to spot and reject defective items on assembly lines, where they have better records than human beings. Based on evolutionary theory, scientists naturally conclude that the recognition of abstract forms such as letters of the alphabet requires the larger brain. But this is an assumption, and we might be reminded of the work of Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner who made extensive use of learned behavior using pigeons. Brain size has little to do with intelligence. Real science and experience show this and disprove evolutionary views. The only alternative is that it is our Magnificent Creator God who gives His creatures their intelligence. |
6/5/2025
| What Mothers Always Knew… |
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| You wouldn’t guess that a 36-hour-old infant would be able to teach grown scientists about the Creator – especially by making faces. But that is exactly what has happened! The Bible teaches that each of us is an individual, made by God, and known to Him even before we are born. However, those who have tried to promote the idea of chance and natural law have portrayed the newborn as a blank slate upon which experience writes. To the humanist mindset there is no such thing as normal human expressions like a smile – everything is learned. But now researchers, studying 36-hour-old babies, have learned differently. They now confirm that smiling is a natural, human reaction – something that babies do even before they are born. Babies also recognize human faces and can tell the difference between human expressions. Babies also connect expressions they see with their own expressions. Even the newborn in a crib is not kicking and crying without meaning. What’s more, scientists have confirmed one other thing that mothers have always known – babies really enjoy those silly faces and funny sounds we use to get them to laugh. The Bible clearly offers a better view than modern humanistic evolution when it defines each human being, from before birth, as a unique individual, made by a Magnificent Creator God Who loves us and seeks our love. |
6/4/2025
| Mystery of the Elephant Ears… |
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| There are a wide variety of decorative and ornamental plants that go by the popular name “elephant ears” because of their very large leaves. Elephant ears are among the 2,500 known species of plants that generate heat in much the same way as warm-blooded animals. Some flowering elephant ears actually raise their temperatures close to human body temperatures while in bloom! Even more amazing is the relationship between many elephant ears and the scarab beetle. It has only recently been learned that many elephant ears depend completely on the scarab beetle for pollination. Elephant ears produce a flower stalk, called a spadix, which has three different kinds of flowers – male, female and sterile. The beetles live to eat the sterile flowers and, in the process of crawling around the spadix, the beetles pick up the pollen from the male flowers and pollinate the female flowers. Incidentally, while the male and female flowers look exactly like the sterile flowers, they are never eaten. This close dependency between totally unrelated creatures which have special features perfectly suited to one another bears witness to an overall plan and Planner for all the creation. And if our Magnificent Creator God has made such detailed provisions for these plants, which are here today and soon gone, you can rest assured that He has made many more provisions for you and all of mankind. |
6/3/2025
| Mercury’s Young Magnetic Field… |
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| In Psalm 19:1, we read, “The heavens declare the glory of God.” When we read this, we should be reminded of more than the witness of the beauty of the skies. The material creation bears witness to God’s glory in many different ways. Take, for example, the claim made by modern evolutionists that the creation is billions of years old. Everyone realizes that a young creation has to be the work of a Creator. Yet, there are many ways in which the creation makes its own witness to its youth, and therefore to the glory of God. In 1974 and 1975, the space probe Mariner 10 studied the magnetic field of the small planet Mercury. Scientists expected that since the solar system is supposed to be 4.5 billion years old, Mercury would have lost all its magnetic field long ago. Yet, scientists discovered that Mercury’s magnetic field was alive and well! Today, after more than 35 years, scientists have been unable to offer an explanation. But the explanation is very simple. If Mercury is only about 6,000 years old, which is consistent with the Bible’s history of things, we can easily expect that if Mercury was created with a magnetic field, it should still have some magnetic field left. And so, tiny Mercury, which doesn’t seem to have much use otherwise, clearly declares the glory of our Magnificent Creator God! |
6/2/2025
| Hot Flowers… |
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| At the end of winter, when so many of us become weary of winter and look forward to spring, it might seem a little early to be talking about flowers blooming. You might like to know, however, that man is not the only one of God’s creatures who would like to welcome spring a little early. There are some 2,500 species of plants that actually generate heat when they flower, and many of them are heating up beneath northern snows. As early as February in western Pennsylvania, the skunk cabbage begins to generate enough heat to melt the ground and snow around itself so that it can begin to grow and flower. Even if the air temperature is zero degrees (F), the skunk cabbage can raise the air temperature around its flowers to 50 degrees – the temperature it needs for flowering. Plants in the same family begin heating up across the northern climates around the world. Sometimes it seems as though the entire living world strains toward spring at this time of year. In the midst of widespread fears that the weather has somehow gotten seriously off track, spring should remind us of what our Magnificent Creator God promised Noah and his descendants – all of us, and all living things – “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, and day and night shall not cease.” |
6/1/2025
| He Knows Them All… |
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| In the early 1960s, some unusually blue star-like objects were observed in the universe, giving out radio frequencies along with visible light. There were a number of them. Through telescopes, they appeared to have fuzzy boundaries. They were given the name Quasi-Stellar Radio Sources – and this was quickly abbreviated to quasars. Another odd feature of these objects was the existence, in their spectra, of emission lines, similar to those of stars, but at the “wrong” frequencies. The emission lines in normal stars were known to be due to hydrogen, but the lines in the quasar’s spectrum had a wavelength about 15% longer than that of hydrogen in other stars, or in the laboratory. It was eventually realized that this effect must be due to red shift – but a red shift bigger than anything that had previously been seen. An application of Hubble’s Law – which shows that the red shift is proportional to the object’s distance – showed that the quasar 3C 273 was over 2 billion light years away and was therefore over 100 times more luminous than typical stars within the same cluster. The existence of such amazing objects once again underlines for us how true it is that the heavens declare the glory of God. So many objects have now been discovered that astronomers give them numbers like 3C 273. How interesting it is, then, that the Bible tells us that our Magnificent Creator God knows the actual name of every single astronomical object!!! |
5/31/2025
| Something Special… |
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| A number of species of fish live, apparently comfortably, in Antarctic waters as cold as the freezing temperature of seawater, which is a couple of degrees colder than fresh water. This presents us with several mysteries. First, cold slows down the chemistry necessary for life. At these temperatures, life’s chemistry all but stops. Second, from a creation perspective, how could fish created to live in a perfect, warm, comfortable world be able to live in an environment that makes life seemingly impossible? A team of biologists from Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station has found some remarkable answers to these questions. The biologists studied an enzyme found in many creatures that changes a compound called pyruvate into lactate within the muscles. In the Antarctic fish this enzyme appears to help this conversion take place at speeds usually only found in warmer creatures. It seems that the cold-water fish have a slight modification of this common enzyme that allows the enzyme to work more quickly, despite the cold. And yes, researchers have also found the same modified version of the enzyme in a South American warm water species. It appears that God’s foreknowledge of what would become of His once perfect world, and His desire to provide for His creatures, led Him to give this special version of this enzyme to creatures of His choosing. If our Magnificent Creator God provides so wisely for fish, will He not provide for you and me, for whom His only Son died? |
5/30/2025
| A Highly Complex Science… |
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| Aerodynamics, the science of flight, is a highly complex science. This is because many complex forces are acting on anything in flight. These forces include the power available for flight and drag produced by the flying object. Each of these categories includes many additional forces that depend on the shape of the flying object, the shape and length of the wings, the speed and the altitude. This is why, for example, high altitude planes have very long wings. One critical force that has been under recent study is the turbulence that forms at the tips of the wings. The shorter the wing, the more energy consuming turbulence forms at the tip of the wing. Different wing designs have been tried to decrease this turbulence. Engineers have had some success reducing this turbulence with winglets. You may have seen these small vertical wings on the wingtips of some airplanes. Swiss researchers have been studying vultures with the hope of finding a better solution to this problem because vultures have a relatively short wingspan that has proven to be surprisingly efficient. They discovered that this is because the feathers at the vultures’ wing tips spread out. They then tested a wing with a finger like cascade of blades at the end. Their new wing was more than four times more efficient than the average wing design in use today! It takes a great deal of faith in evolution to think that natural selection possesses such knowledge of aerodynamics. Clearly the vulture was designed by an intelligent Magnificent Creator God who understands aerodynamics even better than we do!!! |
5/29/2025
| No Where To Hide… |
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| Shore birds like the oystercatcher search for buried mollusks by touch. They poke around in the sand, hoping to find a hard shelled mollusk. But if you have ever tried to find something that was hiding where you couldn’t see it, you know that this method of looking for something is not very efficient. But another shore bird, the red knot, seems to know just where to find its hidden food. Scientists observed that the red knot, a type of sandpiper, was seven to eight times more efficient at finding buried food than it would be if it were randomly searching. Red knots, who also search for food by pushing their bills into the sand, did better than those birds who search by touch. The answer didn’t come until scientists looked at the red knot’s bill under the microscope. On the top of the bill they found tiny pits. Inside the pits they found cells called Herbst corpuscles. Scientists knew that other shorebirds have organs similar to these corpuscles that are used to feel vibrations from wriggling prey. They theorized that the red knot’s Herbst corpuscles sense pressure changes in the displaced water under the sand when a mollusk obstructs the water’s flow. Next they tested captive birds who were trained to find mollusks in pails of sand. Scientists found that if the sand was dry, the red knots did not do very well. But when the sand was wet, the red knots could indeed find the hidden mollusks. Our Magnificent Creator God’s creative nature and divine wisdom has provided His living creatures with a beautiful variety of ways of making their living!!! |
5/28/2025
| The Secret of Bee Bread… |
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| Bee bread is a highly nutritional derivative, made from pollen by bees. Scientists have understood for some time that worker bees who have just emerged from the comb must eat bee bread so that their glands produce food for the queen and developing larvae. However, older worker bees get by on honey alone. So scientists suspected that bee bread must have a higher nutritional value than honey. Now, after painstaking work, researchers have learned how bee bread is made. Even as bees collect the pollen, they begin to work on the recipe. They add secretions from special glands, as well as microorganisms that produce enzymes which release a number of important nutrients from the pollen. Other microbes are added to produce antibiotics and fatty acids to prevent spoilage. At the same time, unwanted microbes are removed, and the bees add honey or nectar to the bread to get it to stick together. The bees’ recipe for bee bread involves a highly sophisticated knowledge of microbiology, nutritional chemistry and biochemistry in general. Modern science, therefore, absolutely requires us to reject the idea that bees and their culture evolved by blind chance and ignorant natural forces. Only a perfect Magnificent Creator God could have made these wonderful creatures and taught them how to make bee bread! |
5/27/2025
| Bacterial Physicists and Chemists… |
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| Some types of bacteria are able to go into a state of suspended animation when living conditions become too harsh. Not only do they change their form and appearance, they are amazingly able to change their DNA structure to avoid damage from harmful types of light! Like other living things, bacteria need the right temperatures, the right amount of moisture, and other conditions that support life. When conditions change, bacteria are too tiny to move to better conditions. However, they can sporulate. When living conditions become too harsh, some bacteria encase themselves into a tough coating of protein and enter a state of suspended animation. As spores, bacteria can rest in bone-dry soil for up to 60 years, waiting for rain. Ultraviolet radiation poses another danger to bacteria. This light damages a bacterium’s DNA at a point where two thymine molecules sit next to each other. The light strikes the molecules and twists them. The result can be fatal to bacteria. So when a bacterium begins to go into spore form, it produces a protein that slightly and harmlessly changes the shape of these two thymine molecules so that they are not affected by ultraviolet light. The entire process by which bacteria go into spore form reflects a sophisticated knowledge of both biochemistry and physics. Even in the lowly bacteria, our Magnificent Creator God has made it clear that He and He alone deserves the credit for the creation in which we live! |
5/26/2025
| The All-Purpose Foot… |
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| Nothing is more frustrating than glue that refuses to stick. And nothing is harder on an adhesive’s ability to stick than water. Water can prevent adhesives from solidly touching the surfaces that are to adhere. Freezing and thawing temperatures can force glued surfaces apart. Yet, biological adhesives constantly work without fail in continual contact with water. The mussel is the champion in the creation and use of biological adhesives. When a mussel finds a suitable spot, it extends its all-purpose foot. The foot, which is like a rubber plunger, searches the surface until it finds the exact spot that will make the best bond. The foot then cleans the glue point. Next, the foot presses to the surface and, as the plunger-shaped foot flattens, water is pumped out. The mussel then lifts the center of its “plunger” and creates a small vacuum. Now the ingredients for its adhesive are pumped down through the foot and into the vacuum. This material creates a foamy foundation for the individual glue threads. The glue itself is made of several proteins. They are mixed in various ratios to provide just the right amount of strength, flexibility and resistance to compression needed for each unique anchoring spot. Some of these proteins are very unusual in structure. Scientists suspect that they change their properties in response to changing conditions – what scientists call a “smart” material. The mussel is not only a wonder of design, but a sophisticated chemist as well. Modern science is still trying to learn what our Magnificent Creator God has taught the mussel about glue. |
5/25/2025
| And Tasty Too… |
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| Plants make cellulose. Cellulose is a type of natural plastic made of many sugar molecules linked together. Scientists have known for years how to use the natural plastic qualities of cellulose to make things like cellophane and rayon. Scientists have also known that animals generate a similar natural plastic called chitin. Like cellulose, chitin is a carbohydrate made of long chains of sugar molecules. Chitin is found in the shells of all insects and crustaceans, like crabs. Each year the crabmeat industry had thrown away thousands of tons of chitin because scientists couldn’t figure out how to extract chitin from the shells in a usable form. Finally in 1975 scientists discovered how to remove the chitin from shells and change its form so it could be made into whatever forms they needed. Suture thread made from chitin dissolves in the body. This means that stitches don’t have to be removed, and it can be more easily knotted than regular suture thread. Suture thread made from chitin also causes no allergic reaction, and it seems to promote healing. It’s hard to believe that a crab shell, which is usually thrown away, could do so much! Food processing companies are even using a chemical made from chitin to recover protein from wastewater. Almost everything in the creation seems to have numerous uses for human needs. This is testimony that the Creator has made this universe for us and that He cares about our needs. In the Bible we learn that He has provided for our greatest need through His Son, Jesus Christ. We owe everything to our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
5/24/2025
| And Tasty Too… |
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| Could pizza be good for you? Research has shown that tomatoes, especially cooked, have powerful health benefits. That’s because tomatoes have a powerful antioxidant called lycopene, in addition to beta-carotene, other B vitamins, vitamin C and other important minerals. A four ounce tomato can provide you with one third the recommended daily amount of vitamin C. A European study of 1,300 men suggested that those who consumed the most lycopene in their food cut their heart attack rate in half, compared to those who had less lycopene in their diet. Another study that lasted five years followed the eating habits of 48,000 men. Those who ate 10 servings a week of cooked tomatoes, in whatever form, had one third the rate of prostate cancer of those who ate less than two servings a week. Cooking tomatoes, as you would for pizza and pasta sauce, makes five times more lycopene available to you than eating the same amount of raw tomatoes. That’s because cooking breaks down the cell walls of the tomato, making the lycopene more available for digestion. (Watermelons and pink grapefruit also have lycopene, but only as much or less as cooked tomatoes.) Our bodies are called temples of the Holy Spirit by Scripture. God has richly provided us with healthy foods to keep our temples healthy. Even pasta sauce and pizza offer us health benefits in addition to tasty dining. Our Magnificent Creator God not only provided for our healthcare but blessed us with a tasty medicine as well!!! |
5/23/2025
| A Discovery Predicted by Creationists… |
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| The ability to predict new discoveries is an important test of whether someone is being scientific in their approach to knowledge. In science, it is especially desirable to predict correctly an unexpected discovery. Many theories that were rejected by almost all of science became accepted because they correctly predicted unexpected discoveries. Not too long ago, evolutionists did not believe that any mammals lived at the same time as dinosaurs. Creationists knew that all the different kinds of living things appeared during the first week of Earth’s history. They have long been predicting that as more fossils are discovered, the age of so-called “modern” creatures would become older and older. They have even explained why, based on the Flood. Over the years, evolutionists have had to admit that some mammals were alive while dinosaurs were still living. Now, a new discovery has pushed back the age of anthropoids by 50 percent. That places anthropoids fairly close to the age of the dinosaurs. According to evolution, anthropoids – like tarsiers – are ancestors of apes, monkeys and humans. What is even more amazing is that the fossilized tarsier is said to be nearly identical to tarsiers today. This discovery offers strong support for the views held by scientists who believe that the Bible’s account of history is true. And creationists continue to predict that the age of all living things will be pushed back toward the appearance of the first life. Once again it is apparent that our Magnificent Creator God has a plan and purpose for everything. |
5/22/2025
| Plants Call in Air Defenses… |
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| Research shows that, when attacked, many plants make chemicals that will give munching insects a bad case of indigestion. They also seem to warn their neighbors about the attack so that they, too, start up their defenses. Some plants even call in air defenses. Some plants, when attacked by caterpillars, release a scent that scientists simply describe as “green leaf odors.” These odors attract certain female wasps, who home in on the plant. The wasp will sting the caterpillar, leaving him paralyzed. She then lays her eggs in the pest, who remains paralyzed until the hatching young wasps consume it. That “green leaf odor” is a plant’s way of calling in air defenses. It is communication between plant and insect! Some evolutionary biologists are upset with the intelligence and design in this arrangement. Plants are supposed to be too simple to communicate. As one evolutionist put it, this is “not a defense against anything” … it “just happens.” I remember trying that excuse as a child. The cookie jar fell to the floor while I was trying to sneak a cookie. “It just happened,” I said, as if the cookie jar had come alive before my unbelieving eyes and jumped to the floor. My mother reminded me that things don’t “just happen.” And science teaches us that things don’t “just happen.” Not only do we see that our Magnificent Creator God exists, we also see a bit of His love in providing for the plant and His intelligence as the author of communication. |
5/21/2025
| Unimagined Actions and Reactions… |
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| The study of plants’ abilities to protect themselves from insect attackers is a fairly new and rapidly growing area of research. It seems that new and even more amazing discoveries are appearing every month. Let’s imagine that you are a nice little beetle looking for a tasty tomato plant. Soon after spotting a juicy-looking tomato, you are happily munching away. However, before you can finish your meal, you are in trouble. Every leaf on the tomato has started turning out chemicals that will, at the least, give you serious indigestion and possibly kill you. At the same time, the plant has warned its neighbors of your presence, and the other tomatoes, too, are turning out the same nasty chemicals. Your very act of eating has made it impossible to get a decent meal in this garden! The latest research suggests that the tomato under attack communicates with its neighbors by releasing a chemical called methyl jasmonate. (This chemical is commonly found in perfumes.) Methyl jasmonate warns neighboring plants that hungry insects are in the neighborhood. On receiving the news, they begin producing the two chemicals that prevented you from digesting the protein in your lunch. This reaction has been seen among a number of plants, including cotton plants and various trees. Who would ever have imagined that plants warn each other about attack? Who would have guessed that they know enough chemistry and insect biochemistry to mount such a clever defense? While even we who believe in creation are amazed, we know that our Magnificent Creator God can and did equip plants with these abilities. |
5/20/2025
| Keeping Males and Females in Balance… |
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| Have you ever wondered how, over thousands of years, the population balance between males and females remains roughly even? Science has learned that there seems to be several mechanisms working together to keep things balanced, providing a fail-safe system. Many species have gene transfer systems that always produce a one-to-one ratio in the next generation. However, what happens if, perhaps due to a natural disaster, the balance is lost between males and females in a population? Scientists have been testing a theory that when either sex is significantly underrepresented, its increased contribution to the next generation brings things back into balance. This amazing theory is supported by recent studies on the Atlantic silverside fish. Studies show that even when the population has three males for every female, the ratio returns to 50-50 within four-to-six generations! According to evolution, males and females should not have developed at all. Evolutionary doctrine says that if males and females should develop, evolutionary forces will not favor sexual reproduction. The Bible says that our Magnificent Creator God not only created male and female, but that the creation is designed with great wisdom. What science is learning about how balance is maintained between the sexes contradicts evolution and supports the Bible. |
5/19/2025
| Be Thankful For Everything… |
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| For many people, bats bring to mind words like “creepy,” “fangs,” “rabies,” and even “ugly.” However, over 450 years ago, Martin Luther marveled at the delicate beauty of the bat. He pronounced the creature an excellent witness to the skill and wisdom of the Creator. God must also like bats. Almost one-fourth of all mammals He created are bats! The flying fox bat has a wingspan of nearly six feet. Bumblebee bats, native to Thailand, are the smallest mammals known, weighing less than a penny. There are brilliantly patterned tropical bats called butterfly bats. And hundreds of species of tropical plants depend on bats as pollinators. Popular legend considers bats a serious part of the rabies problem. The truth is that raccoons, skunks, foxes, and even dogs and cats are more likely to have rabies. In fact, one study shows that in Pennsylvania you are more likely to find a rabid cow than a rabid bat. In reality, bats are delicate, helpful and intelligent creatures. A typical North American bat will eat about 600 mosquitoes an hour. Large colonies will consume between 250,000 and 500,000 pounds of insects per night! Bats can be trained, demonstrating their intelligence. And finally, an important warning. If you find sleeping bats, don’t disturb them. Even one such disturbance during sleep can be fatal since stored nutrition may be consumed by the disturbance before the next feeding cycle. So next time you see a bat, don’t recoil in fear. Rather, say a prayer of thanksgiving to the Magnificent Creator God who made both of you!!! |
5/18/2025
| He Thought Of Everything… |
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| One of the criticisms of solar power is that it is so variable. Clearly, a solar plant is going to produce no energy at night and an inadequate supply when the sky is cloudy. On the other hand, a suitable size plant could over-produce when sunlight is intense. Plants have a similar problem. The rapidly changing incidence of sunlight on their leaves could, conceivably, cause problems within the plant. However, researchers have discovered that plants have mechanisms to cope with these variations, and one such mechanism could answer the old question: “Why are plants green?” Plants produce high energy carbohydrate molecules from water vapor and carbon dioxide by the well-known process of photosynthesis. This endothermic reaction requires the input of energy in the form of light, and the reaction is catalyzed by the green dye chlorophyll. What many of us have not considered is why chlorophyll is green. White light is a mixture of all three primary colors – red, green and blue – which have increasing frequency and, hence, increasing energy, in that order. The remarkable thing about plants, therefore, is that they are absorbing light energy only at either end of the visible spectrum while rejecting – and reflecting – the middle of the spectrum, which is green. Researchers have shown that this selective absorption of certain frequencies minimizes “noise” and, therefore, enables the plant to cope with rapidly changing conditions of sunshine. Our Magnificent Creator God has literally thought of everything. No wonder He said “and it was good”!!! |
5/17/2025
| Such Rich Creativity… |
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| Deep inside an ant colony, perhaps in a decaying log in northern Idaho or even the north woods of Minnesota, there are ants who think they are taking care of their only pupae. In addition to attending to their young, however, they are providing a dangerous ant predator with food and protection as it matures. The predator, called Microdon, matures into a fly like creature that lives only long enough to mate and lay eggs. How does Microdon get welcomed into the ant’s nest? It folds itself in half and ends up looking just like an ant larva. When researchers exposed some of the fly larvae in an ant nest, the ants quickly rescued the folded-over Microdon as if they were ant larvae. During its first of three larval stages, Microdon enters an ant cocoon and eats the contents. During its two later stages, Microdon moves unchallenged about the nest, eating more ant larvae. This fact at first puzzled researchers, since ants communicate and identify each other through specialized chemical signals. Further research revealed that Microdon are actually able to perfectly mimic this chemical communication! But perhaps the most fascinating features of Microdon are the odd structures found on the outside of its third stage. These vary from individual to individual and may look like toadstools or flowers. Scientists are unsure of their purpose. But they do marvel over the rich variety of the shapes, which seem unnecessary. While such variety may be unnecessary, they and the other features of Microdon testify to the rich creativity of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
5/16/2025
| Microscopic Engineers… |
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| There are a number of species of bacteria that possess tiny chains of crystal particles called magnetosomes. Magnetosomes, as the name suggests, have iron in them to help the bacteria sense magnetic fields for navigation. They can also help the bacteria find food. These bacteria live in salty, sulfurous waters and sediments. Unlike most bacteria that have magnetosomes, the three species that prefer sulfurous waters don’t make their tiny compasses out of iron oxide. Rather, they combine iron and sulfur to make a crystal called greigite. Now, it would seem astonishing enough to find bacteria that build their own compasses for navigation, but scientists had even more surprises coming as they learned about these three new species. They discovered that each of the species makes its own unique crystalline form of greigite. The bacteria seem to be able to build the crystals, molecule by molecule, at the normal temperatures and other conditions at which life exists. Scientists would like to know how these bacteria do this. Modern science can only make crystals under searing hot temperatures and other conditions that would kill anything alive. These amazing abilities were not designed and built by mutations and accidents. They show that our Magnificent Creator God provides for the needs of all His creatures – even bacteria – and that He does so with unlimited creativity. |
5/15/2025
| An Accent on Language Ability… |
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| After suffering a stroke, a man in Baltimore suddenly began speaking with a Scandinavian accent. Though he had no experience with languages other than English, he suddenly sounded Nordic and appeared unfamiliar with English! In the weeks after the stroke, his speech gradually returned to normal. After three and one-half months, he again spoke with no trace of accent. This affliction is real. It’s called “foreign-accent syndrome.” It’s a rare condition in which a brain malfunction causes speech to sound as if the speaker has a foreign accent. Americans have also reportedly developed apparent German, Welsh, Scottish, Irish and Italian accents. Scientists say the fact that speech follows certain patterns in this way suggests something about the way the human brain is wired. A growing number of studies and experiences – such as “foreign-accent syndrome” – suggest that humans have been programmed with much more than just language ability. Some of the unique features of specific languages may actually be programmed into our brains. The Bible tells us that everyone on Earth spoke the same language until God confused the languages of rebellious people at Babel. “Foreign-accent syndrome” suggests that many of the detailed characteristics of language may have been originally wired into the brain. It also helps us see that language is more that just noises to which we have given meaning. Language is our Magnificent Creator God’s gift. |
5/14/2025
| The Rock-Climbing Catfish… |
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| It’s not very pretty, nor is it graceful, but Colombia’s rock-climbing catfish has a unique ability among fish. Perhaps there are days when a salmon, trying to make it up a waterfall, wishes that it could simply climb the rocks. The rock-climbing catfish’s climbing equipment begins with a powerful sucker mouth. Once it attaches itself to a rock, it can stay stuck despite any torrent. The rock-climbing catfish also has a bony plate on its belly that helps it hold its place while it repositions its sucker a little further up the rocks. The plate has fins with tiny, backward-pointing teeth. These teeth dig into the rock and prevent slipping. The catfish’s third special feature is a set of powerful muscles to control the plate. Once the rock-climbing catfish has attached its sucker to the rock, it pulls up its stomach plate and anchors it. With its body anchored, it moves its sucker up the face of the rock and repeats the process. Following this method, the rock-climbing catfish can walk its way up a 20-foot rock wall against the torrent of a waterfall in about 30 minutes! Who gave the rock-climbing catfish that powerful sucker mouth? Who gave it such a clever bony stomach plate and the powerful muscles to control it? And who taught it to climb rocks? There are two opinions today. One opinion says that no one did it. The other says that it was the work of the Creator of worlds and stars and you and me. The Bible’s claim of a Magnificent Creator God is the only one that makes sense! |
5/13/2025
| Smart Trees and Clever Bugs… |
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| How smart is the smartest tree you ever met? Does it sound silly to speak of trees as being smart? Botanists are learning that some trees have elaborate defenses against insect pests. Studies have shown that a cottonwood tree sets up an elaborate zone defense when attacked by aphids. Some branches will manufacture poisons to resist the aphids, while others use a different strategy. Branches that offer the aphids poisons can be dozens of times more resistant to aphids than neighboring branches. Should an aphid land on a leaf that is not manufacturing poisons, that leaf is very likely to be shed by the tree. This squeeze play by the tree keeps both strategies viable in resisting aphids. However, sometimes insects are almost as clever as trees. The eastern tent caterpillar eats a fatal dose of cyanide with each mouthful of cherry tree leaves without harm. The poison is combined with two sugar molecules in the leaves. Normally an insect’s digestive system would separate those sugars, releasing the cyanide. However, the tent caterpillar’s digestive system releases only one sugar, leaving the cyanide bound and harmless. On the other hand, the pink sawfly larva concentrates and stores the toxic oils of the eucalyptus leaves it eats. When threatened, the worm-like larva rears up and spits droplets of the poisonous oils at its attackers. There is no level at which the creation fails to show forth intelligence and planning. Every level of creation glorifies our Magnificent Creator God! |
5/12/2025
| The Ant Imposter… |
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| One good method of avoiding attack in nature is to pretend that you are somebody who should not be attacked. In the insect world, one of the most feared creatures is the ant. Not only are ants ferocious, they also taste bad. As a result, many insects mimic ants to avoid predators. One of the most interesting groups of ant mimics is spiders. Of course, even insects can count, so they know that ants have six legs while spiders have eight. To solve this problem, some ant-mimicking spiders wave their front two legs over their heads so they look like antenna. The ants don’t seem to be fooled, however. Nevertheless, they will allow the spiders to hang around so long as they stay out of trouble. Some red ants have red spiders who mimic them and black ants have some black spiders who mimic them. This suggests that many insects can see color. Wasps that prey on one African red spider are no match for the vicious red ant the spider sometimes mimics. The African red ant can easily kill the wasp. This wasp also preys on a black spider. So the black spiders are often found among black ants that are almost as dangerous as the African red ants. Some modern scientists tell us that this appearance of intelligence in insect behavior is nothing more than appearance. However, we should not be as easily fooled as these wasps are by the spiders. There are millions of similar evidences of intelligence in our Magnificent Creator God’s creation, and they can’t all be deceptive appearance! |
5/11/2025
| Even More Evidence… |
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| When someone receives a donated organ they must take powerful drugs to prevent rejection. That’s because the body’s immune system identifies the implanted organ as “not me.” It then assumes that the invader is dangerous and must be destroyed. That brings us to a puzzling mystery that scientists have been trying to solve: Why doesn’t a mother’s body recognize her unborn baby as being foreign to her body? After all, carrying genetic information from the mother and father, the unborn baby is genetically unique. Some scientists theorize that the placenta is a physical barrier between the baby and the mother’s immune system. Others believe that the unborn baby somehow hides from the mother’s immune system. A third theory is that the mother’s immune system is somehow forced to tolerate the unborn child. New research from scientists at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, Georgia, supports this third alternative. Researchers have shown that the placenta produces an enzyme (IDO) that works to suppress immune cells. In effect, the unborn child puts together just the right enzyme to keep mom’s immune system from attacking it. Scientists say that this discovery may lead to new drugs to treat autoimmune diseases and organ rejection. This system or a similar system had to be fully operational in the first creature for successful pregnancies and births. It could not gradually evolve. This fact and the wisdom of this system provides more evidence of an all wise, all-powerful Magnificent Creator of every form of life and all that exists!!! |
5/10/2025
| God’s Solution For A Cure That Also tastes Good… |
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| Garlic. Even say the word and some people move away to give you some distance. Others gather around because, to them, garlic helps make the meal. Garlic has begun to attract the attention of medical researchers as well. At the Tagore Medical College in India, researcher Arun Bordia kept track of 432 heart attack survivors for three years. During that time, half of the survivors drank the juice from six to ten cloves of fresh garlic each day, while others took a garlic-scented drink with no garlic in it. Over the three-year period, the garlic group had 32% fewer heart attacks and 45% fewer deaths than the other group. Research in the United States with chickens, who metabolize cholesterol in much the same way as humans, suggests a reason for these results. Chickens that were fed aged garlic extract showed a 50% reduction in the kind of cholesterol that clogs arteries. Medical researchers are also looking at some interesting evidence that garlic may help prevent some forms of cancer, especially stomach cancer. When the Creator made the heavens and Earth, He knew that humans would disobey Him, destroying the creation with sin. He also knew that in doing so we would bring disease and death into the world. We can thank Him that He stocked the Earth with substances that could be used to treat some of the earthly effects of sin. However, we can thank our Magnificent Creator even more joyfully that He provided the full cure for sin for each of us in the life, death and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ!!! |
5/9/2025
| Scientist Says Evolution Makes Bad Science… |
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| Since the days of Charles Darwin, over a century ago, naturalists have generally classified living things by their appearance. A zebra and a horse are said to be more closely related than a zebra and a whale. This has been the foundation of all those evolutionary trees that claim to show that all living things have supposedly come from older, simpler living things. In recent years, some scientists have been comparing another feature that all living things share. Today, scientists are able to look for similarities and differences among the biological chemicals – like hemoglobin. What they are finding does not agree with the evolutionary tree in their textbooks, according to Dr. Colin Patterson of the British Museum of Natural History. Among the examples Dr. Patterson offered to American evolutionary scientists was a comparison of alpha myoglobin among mammals, birds and reptiles. According to evolution, comparisons between mammals, reptiles and birds should show mammals and birds to be most distantly related. Reptiles should have more similarities to each. However, when humans were compared with crocodiles and birds, birds were closer to humans than were crocodiles – the opposite of what evolution predicts. Dr. Patterson asked, “What’s going on?” While Dr. Patterson did not become a creationist before his death in 1998, he was definitely dissatisfied with evolution. |
5/8/2025
| Multiple Blessings from Trees… |
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| Genesis uses only a few words and simple language to describe the creation of trees. That hardly seems fair, considering the importance, variety and complexity of the largest and longest-living things on Earth. The largest Sequoias in northern California weigh more than six blue whales. The tallest Australian eucalyptus trees and redwoods tower as high as a 30-story building. Some of the Bristlecone pines in the American west are 4,000 years old. Trees do more than provide us with building materials, food and medicine. Like other green plants, trees take the waste carbon dioxide produced by animals and humans and turns it into oxygen. As a bonus, trees produce sugar. The cellulose fiber we call wood is actually only thousands of sugar molecules linked into long chains. In recent years, scientists have also learned that trees communicate with each other. They cool the air and pump enough moisture into the air to transform a dry, desert-like climate. If it were not for the mycorrhiza fungi, trees would battle through their roots for control of moisture and soil resources. However, when this fungus is present in the root systems, trees will link roots with each other and share water and nutrients. Scripture’s simple statement that God created trees expands into volumes of information as we learn more about them. This is how science done in faith – that is, as our search for knowledge about what God has made – serves to glorify our Magnificent Creator God! |
5/7/2025
| The Hungry Leaf… |
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| It’s a warm day on the Amazon River. A small fish swims near the surface, looking among the natural floating river debris for some food. As he looks among the occasional leaf or twig in the water, he sees no danger. At the same time, one of the floating “leaves” is waiting for the little fish to move just a bit closer. Then, without warning, the floating “leaf” comes to life, grabs the fish and eats it! What the little fish thought was simply another floating leaf was actually another fish. The Amazonian leaf fish is carefully designed not only to look like a leaf, but to act like one as well. It has a flat body, very much like a leaf. A black line runs the length of its body, giving the appearance of the midrib of a leaf. A fleshy growth in its lower jaw looks like a leaf stem. Beyond looking like a leaf, the leaf fish also acts like a leaf. It lies still in the water, drifting with the current. To hide its identity further, it draws its fins close to its body, removing any last hint that it is indeed a hungry fish looking for lunch. The leaf fish combines deceptive coloring, appearance and behavior into one design so that it, too, can make its living. In this, the leaf fish shows that our Magnificent Creator God makes nothing without also designing a special purpose for that creature. According to the Bible, the same can be said even more emphatically for each human being He has made. Your Creator has a special purpose for you, too, and it begins with His plan of salvation for you through His Son, Jesus Christ. |
5/6/2025
| Musical Memory… |
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| Are you a musician? From the standpoint of evolution, human musical ability serves no purpose. Assuming that the laws of nature could even invent musical ability, they would have no reason to do so. However, from the standpoint of creation, music serves to praise our Creator. Unfortunately, some of us who enjoy music cannot carry a tune, while other people can play or sing a piece without even looking at any music after hearing it once. The scientific study of musical ability has become an important area of study as a result of some recent discoveries. Researchers have discovered that it’s true that some people have natural musical ability and some don’t. They have found that some people have perfect pitch, even if they have no musical training, while those who are tone-deaf remain tone-deaf despite musical training. Studies show that only about one person in 2,000 has perfect pitch. Researchers were shocked to find solid evidence that musical ability is genetically inherited. Studying musical ability in both musically trained and untrained families, they found that musical ability follows a dominant inheritance pattern. Sons or daughters have a 50 percent chance of inheriting the gene from a parent who carries it. How could mindless evolution develop a gene that codes for musical ability? Even evolutionists appear to be puzzled by this. But those of us who believe in the Magnificent Creator God praise Him whether we have musical ability or not! |
5/5/2025
| Tree Wars… |
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| A gypsy moth caterpillar infestation can strip the leaves from large numbers of trees, threatening the trees’ lives. Since they don’t have a means of escape, it doesn’t seem as if the poor trees have much of a chance. But botanists were tipped off to the possibility that trees may not be all that defenseless when they began to investigate why only a few trees were badly damaged by insects in an infected grove while most stood unharmed. They discovered that when facing a threat like gypsy moth caterpillars, trees begin to defend themselves by sounding the alarm. A large variety of trees – including beeches, poplars, sugar maples and red oaks – communicate with each other. Scientists believe the trees communicate by releasing chemicals called pheromones into the air. What they now know is that before insects attacking one tree can get to the tree next door, the second tree has already begun defending itself. How do they defend themselves? When under attack or notified by other trees of attack, most trees begin to manufacture an array of poisons. Some of the poisons make leaves impossible to digest, while others kill the insects outright. Some make as many as eight poisons at once, and many can change the poisons that are made from year to year. Our Magnificent Creator God’s concern for living things extends even to plants. If He sees to this detailed level of care for trees, can there be anything in our lives that is too small for His loving concern? |
5/4/2025
| The Amazing Eye… |
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| Our eyes do more work and tell more about us than many people realize. These amazing organs are so closely tied into the brain that they have been referred to as part of the brain. Your eyes were among your first organs to form. Within four weeks of fertilization, an unborn infant’s eyes begin to form. Interestingly enough, many newborns can move their eyes independently of each other, which can be a shock to unsuspecting parents. Usually the eyes are working together within a few months. However, those eye muscles will get more of a workout during our lifetimes than any other voluntary muscle. During any 24-hour period, our eyes will move about 100,000 times. That’s equivalent to walking 50 miles every day! Studies have shown that people with dark eyes generally have faster reaction times than people with light-colored eyes. Brown-eyed people generally are better at tennis while blue-eyed people generally do better at golf. Our eyes secrete different kinds of tears. Normal tears contain bacteria-fighting chemicals produced by cells in the lining of the eyelid. Emotional tears contain hormones released by the body in response to stress, including a natural painkiller. One more eye fact: The vitamin A in carrots is necessary for the proper working of the rods in your eye. The rods themselves are responsible for night vision. On a clear, dark night a healthy eye can see the light from a single candle 25 miles away!!! What a Magnificent Creator God we have!!! |
5/3/2025
| The Unlimited Creativity and Extravagance… |
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| There are more than 200 species of fireflies around the world. Almost everyone has seen these small insects flying about or sitting in the grass. On dark summer nights they can be seen flashing their lights like ships far out at sea. As they flash, they are communicating very specific messages to one another. The light created by fireflies is called cold light because it is produced without creating any heat. To make a flash, the firefly must make and mix a chemical called luciferin with oxygen and an enzyme called luciferase. This mixture is combined with a catalyst to create the flashes of light. The result is a method of producing light that is far more efficient than any source of light in your home. A relatively tiny amount of energy creates a generous amount of light. Fireflies do not make light so they can read a book. Their flashes are used for finding a mate. Fireflies are able to read the light signals of other fireflies. These signals may contain several messages. Some flashes can tell a firefly whether the sender is one of his species. Light flashes are used to identify whether the sender is a male or female. If it’s a female, the flashes can identify whether she has already mated. This is another example of the unlimited creativity and extravagance of our Magnificent Creator God. The same beauty of the firefly that creates wonder in the child should also fill us with wonder at the limitless imagination of God!!! |
5/2/2025
| Creative Strategies for Life… |
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| Some creatures seem more wise and powerful in dealing with the problems of living than seems reasonable. For example, when threatened with parasites, some creatures change their method of reproduction to put the parasites at a disadvantage. Several types of fungus infect some grasses, producing poisons. However, these poisons don’t harm the infected grass. Instead, they protect the grass from insects and other enemies. This makes it less likely that the fungus will lose its happy home. When fungal parasites take over certain wild grasses, the fungus destroys the flowers of the plant so that it can only reproduce by sending out shoots from its roots. Can you figure out the fungus’s clever strategy? New shoots are genetically identical to the parent, and just as susceptible to the fungus. New plants from seeds, however, might express traits that were present, though unexpressed, in the parent, like resistance to the fungus. So it’s in the fungus’s best interest to restrict the grass to identical offspring. A New Zealand freshwater snail can reproduce with or without fertilized eggs. However, in those lakes where the snail is threatened by a parasitic worm, the snail uses only fertilized eggs, increasing the likelihood that some of the offspring will be able to resist the parasite. There is a lot more thought and power to be seen in these examples than worms, snails and grasses could generate. Our Magnificent Creator God is even glorified in the relationships between parasite and host! |
5/1/2025
| Genesis, Naturally… |
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| Many people today think it’s unusual for someone to interpret the Genesis account of creation literally. For example, many in the church seem unsure of whether Adam was a real person. How are we to understand Genesis? Until the nineteenth century, virtually all Christians understood Genesis chapter 1 as a history of what actually happened during creation week. The few exceptions were influenced by Greek and Roman philosophy that was very much like modern evolution. For thousands of years, believers understood the text of Genesis chapter 1 in its natural sense. In other words, unless the Bible itself gives us some reason to do otherwise, we understand the words in their literal, natural sense. We could mention many leaders of the church who understood Genesis creation as an historical account of actual events. Most importantly, Jesus Christ treated the Genesis account of creation as actual history … and Adam and Eve as real people. In defending the natural understanding of Genesis chapter 1, the great teachers of the church have most often cited Christ as the best example of how to understand Genesis. |
4/30/2025
| Heating for Health… |
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| You’re not feeling well, and you have a fever. Is your increased body temperature good for you or should you try to lower it? Medical researchers are learning what happens in the body when we develop a fever. They say that the body’s fever response is usually a very important part of our body’s defense against disease. Normally, the body’s temperature varies throughout the day. If the body’s temperature drops below 80 degrees or climbs higher than 108 degrees for a prolonged period, death usually results. Your body has a thermostat, called the hypothalamus, to keep its temperature within that range. When disease germs are detected in your bloodstream, your white blood cells release a chemical called EP. EP quickly makes its way to the hypothalamus, where it raises the setting of your thermostat. This increase in temperature can make your body increase its production of T cells by 20 times or more to fight bacterial infection. It also increases the production of blood chemicals that fight viruses. EP also blocks bacteria’s ability to make use of the free iron in your blood at just the time bacteria are most in need of that iron. Even iguanas and fish are known to raise their body temperature when ill by moving into warmer environments. Does the fever response just accidentally happen to help fight infection or was it designed to work the way it does? Clearly we must thank our Magnificent Creator God for this cleverly designed defense against disease. |
4/29/2025
| Not Always What They Seem To Be… |
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| The creation is filled with a remarkable number of creatures that are able to fool their enemies into thinking they are something else. They provide us with examples of God’s attention to details in the creation. The toad grasshopper of South Africa may be found among different kinds of rocks. Grasshoppers that live among quartzite pebbles have the same lighter colors and markings as the pebbles, making them nearly invisible. Across the valley, other toad grasshoppers – living among the volcanic rocks – are darkly colored like the volcanic rocks. The Kenyan bush cricket lives almost invisibly among the moss that commonly covers trees because it looks just like the moss. The Trinidadian katydid looks as if it might be a patch of blotchy fungus that grows on the same leaves it lives on. The Malaysian katydid takes a different approach. It looks just like one of the veined leaves upon which it lives. The Malaysian tussock moth has transparent patches on its wings so that with its coloration it looks like a decayed section of the leaf upon which it lives. The larva of the silver king shoemaker butterfly eats leaves in the protection of nights’ darkness and by day hangs from the leaf it has been eating, looking like part of the tattered leaf. No creature was too small or unimportant when our Magnificent Creator God planned the details of His work. We should see from these examples that He cares for each of us. His message of how He cares for you is in the Bible. |
4/28/2025
| Designed to Renew… |
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| We live in a world—indeed a universe—that is in continual change. Things have been designed that way for a very important reason. Unfortunately, some people choose to define evolution as simply change. However, that’s not the kind of continuous change that surrounds us. The change we see around us serves to keep things the same. Biologists call this stasis. That might sound contradictory, but think about it for a moment. A baby is born—that’s change. The baby grows into a child and then a young adult. That’s more change. In the end, though, a new generation is born to replace the last generation, and things are as they were. It’s the cycle of life, common to all living things. What’s more, the interrelated life cycles of all living things complement each other. Plants use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make oxygen and food, which are needed by the animal kingdom and human beings. Each generation of living things reproduces after its own kind, helping to keep this balance in tune. The change we see all around us was designed by our Magnificent Creator God to renew the creation so that it might remain stable—the same. We can truly say that the more things change, the more they stay the same. However, this state of affairs will not go on forever. One day—and perhaps soon—the world will end. The Son of God who was the instrument of our creation and the instrument of our salvation will return. Are you ready to meet Him? |
4/27/2025
| In Every Creation A Lesson… |
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| “Dog bites man” is not an unusual headline. However, “Man bites dog” would usually get people’s attention. If that’s true, the headline “Leeches teach physicians” should capture everyone’s attention. Physicians used leeches in bloodletting treatments well into the 19th century. They were used to treat everything from headaches to heart disease. As the 20th century matured, the medical use of leeches became not only a memory but a symbol of how backward medicine used to be. Now, as the 21st century is underway, leeches are again a part of modern medicine. To obtain their food, leeches inject a powerful blood thinner called hirudin. This hirudin is what interests modern medical researchers in leeches. Doctors have for many years been using a blood thinner called heparin to dissolve blood clots, such as those associated with heart attacks. But researchers are finding that hirudin is ten times as effective as heparin in dissolving clots, and in addition it works directly to prevent clotting. The studies continue. However, medical researchers are convinced that the blood thinner which leeches taught them how to make offers a powerful medicine. Should the possibilities presented by this modern medicine be realized, many lives that are now lost due to blood clotting may soon be routinely saved. The Magnificent Creator God of the heavens and Earth is so wise and generous that He can teach even modern science some new things through a seemingly simple creature like the leech!!! |
4/26/2025
| Every Single Hair… |
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| They are the only cells in the human body that repeatedly die and self-regenerate throughout life. They are probably the only cells in the body that inspired a Broadway play named after them. And science considers them so interesting that several branches of science are studying them. I am talking about hair cells. As scientists are learning more about hair, they are coming to greater appreciation of, as one researcher put it, hair’s bewildering biology. A Harvard molecular biologist admitted that one of the reasons we know so little about hair is that scientists have avoided studying this complex structure. The average scalp has about 100,000 hairs growing at any one time. Each hair follicle produces hair for about two to five years, followed by a rest period of four to six months. A miniature assembly line of cells divides within the follicle, pushing older hair cells upward through the skin. Pigmentation is added as each new cell is produced. When the follicle is at rest, it shrivels and many of its cells die. However, seed cells, promising new life to the follicle, hide within it waiting for the signal to spring back to life. As humans grow older, the resting time of the follicles increases and growing time decreases, especially in men. So if you find yourself balding, you’re not necessarily losing your hair. It’s just that your hair is spending more time resting than it used to. Our Magnificent Creator God tells us that He cares so much about each one of us that He even knows how many hairs we have on our head!!! |
4/25/2025
| And What A Gift It Is… |
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| When Scripture talks about laughter, it most often speaks of laughter as a form of derision. God is described as laughing at the pride and plans of the wicked. However, that does not mean that God is against the right kind of humor. After all, He gave us the ability to laugh. In Ecclesiastes 3:4 we read that there is also a time to laugh. Jesus reminds the faithful, in the Beatitudes, that those who weep now will laugh with joy later. When you stop and think about it, anyone who can create the playful kitten cannot be against laughter. Medical researchers are finding out just what a wonderful gift laughter is. Laughter, it has been found, is excellent exercise for the lungs. It clears the respiratory system and is emotionally healthy. Laughter relaxes muscles. It is a proven reliever of emotional tension. Research also suggests that laughter has healing effects, possibly boosting the immune system. Laughter also has been found to have a natural pain-killing effect. In one experiment involving patients viewing funny films, the pain-killing effect of laughter lasted for up to two hours. Laughter has also been identified among chimpanzees and apes. Very possibly, other creatures have their own way of laughing. If we remember that Scripture also encourages us to “avoid foolish talk,” we can also give thanks to our Magnificent Creator God for the gift of humor!!! |
4/24/2025
| A Truly Strange Bird… |
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| Though God created the entire living kingdom in only a few days, the variety and creativity of what He made seems nearly unlimited by our standards. One of the more unusual creatures He made was thought extinct until it was rediscovered in 1958. The kakapo parrot lives in New Zealand. The most unusual parrot on earth, it is one of only a few known parrots that prefers to sleep during the day and becomes active at night. Weighing in at five pounds, it is also the world’s heaviest parrot. It is, perhaps not surprisingly, the world’s only non-flying parrot. The Creator’s unusual expression of inventive creativity in designing the kakapo did not end here. The mating habits of the kakapo are especially peculiar for birds. In mating season the males gather in locations that are used year after year for mate selection. Female parrots come to these places to inspect the males to select a mate. However, in most un-bird-like fashion, the males provide absolutely no help building the nest or rearing the young. The kakapo is remarkable because of its many strange traits, most of which would make it least fit for survival. In other words, not only is it an unusual creature, but its more unusual characteristics seem to put it at a disadvantage as far as evolution is concerned. So while evolution would not have made the kakapo, our inventive Magnificent Creator God did, perhaps as a witness against evolution. |
4/23/2025
| The Well-Designed Living Fossil… |
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| The coelacanth is a rather strange looking fish that was supposed to have become extinct 70 million years ago with the dinosaurs. That’s what scientists thought anyway. After all, they argued, the fish looks so primitive. Its fleshy fins are obviously the first step in the evolution of legs. Meanwhile, fishermen off the east cost of Africa were familiar with the creatures because the fish were turning up in their nets. Science discovered in 1938 what these fishermen already knew. In the last half-century more than 80 of the creatures have been caught and studied. Deep-diving submarines have also allowed scientists to study the coelacanth in its natural habitat. As science has learned more about the coelacanth, it has become clear that this fish is not primitive, nor does it provide aid and comfort to evolution. Studies on living creatures show that the fins are structured all wrong if they are evolving into legs. They’re just fins. In addition, the coelacanth is a remarkably sophisticated creature. It reproduces more like a mammal than a fish, giving birth to live young after about a year’s gestation. The coelacanth has a small second tail that improves its swimming abilities. It also appears to have a gland that gives it the added ability to find its prey by detecting the prey’s electrical signals. Science had declared the coelacanth extinct, primitive, and an evidence for evolution. Now having studied them, we learn that each scientific conclusion was wrong and that the coelacanth glorified our Magnificent Creator God by its sophisticated design. |
4/22/2025
| The Nose Knows… |
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| We don’t often think about our sense of smell. While our noses are on the job all the time, we note an odor only when it is unusual. Most of the time, the scents around us contribute, unnoticed, to our overall impression of our surroundings. It’s hard to remain tense at the beach. Simply the mention of the water and waves, the sand and sun brings back to memory the last trip to the beach and starts relaxing a person. However therapeutic these elements of the beach are, scientists have found that the one beach fixture that is probably most responsible for relaxing us is the smell. The smelly chemical that utility companies put in natural gas so that we can smell leaks is methyl mercaptan. This chemical is also produced by rotting meat. The human nose is extremely sensitive to this smell. We can detect as little as one 400-billionth of a gram of it in a quart of air. Doctors have long known that their noses are helpful in diagnosing disease. A person is brought into the emergency room in a coma. It’s very likely that the doctor will smell the patient’s breath as he tries to discover the problem. A sweet smell could indicate diabetes. The smell of ammonia could indicate a kidney malfunction. Arsenic poisoning smells like garlic. Diphtheria can be identified by a sickeningly sweet odor, and people with the plague smell like apples. A patient who smells like freshly baked bread may have typhoid. While we seldom think about our sense of smell, it’s a wonderful gift from our Magnificent Creator God for which we owe Him thanks!!! |
4/21/2025
| No Imagination Needed… |
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| Do your eyes ever play tricks on you? Our eyes regularly play tricks on us with the help of our brains. Repeated research has shown that the images we see are not exactly what our eyes see. Our eyes and brains work together to construct the images we call sight. It’s not that our eyes are out to hoodwink us. Most of the time our eyes are working to help us. Working together, our brain and eyes add logical details to the images we see. Each of us has a blind spot in our vision because there are no vision cells where the optic nerve is. Instead of showing us a spot of nothing at the blind point in our field of vision, our brain invents an image from surrounding details. Your brain pulls the same trick on you when you proofread your completed manuscript. While others can still find typos, you may not. Your brain knows what you are saying and so it automatically shows you a repaired version, making many of your typing errors invisible. Your pupils can reveal your thoughts. Studies show that when seeing unpleasant scenes the pupils retract. Pleasant or interesting scenes cause the pupils to open wider. Charles Darwin wrote, “To suppose that the eye, with all of its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.” We don’t often agree with Charles Darwin, but this time we do! Is there anything beyond the imagination of our Magnificent Creator God? |
4/20/2025
| The Sole Focus… |
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| In recent years, our knowledge about Pluto has multiplied over and over again. Despite its status being downgraded to that of a mere Dwarf Planet rather than a planet proper, NASA determined to send out a space probe called New Horizons in January 2006. New Horizons finally reached Pluto in January 2015 and sent back invaluable data for about 18 months, with the result that we now probably know more about the surface of Pluto than that of parts of Earth’s ocean floor. Some surface evidence has caused scientists to think that maybe Pluto was a hot body when it came into existence. This heat could still be there, prompting speculation that there could be a liquid ocean beneath the icy frozen surface. Whenever water is discovered in the Solar System, thoughts turn to the possibility of life having evolved – especially as Pluto’s surface shows evidence of the existence of methane and ammonia molecules, which scientists always think could provide a synthetic route to organic compounds. Such interpretations ignore the fact that Earth was created separately from, and three days before, the creation of the other stars and planets. Our Magnificent Creator God in His infinite wisdom chose the Earth to be the sole focus of life!!! |
4/19/2025
| Spiders Help Make the Sun… |
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| The closest star to Earth is Alpha Centauri 26 trillion miles away. That is 26 with 12 zeros after it. 26,000,000,000,000. When God in His magnificence creates something, distance is of no concern!!! |
4/18/2025
| Spiders Help Make the Sun… |
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| The instruments that scientists are using to develop fusion energy continue to become more complex and powerful. They are trying to generate the energies needed to cause hydrogen to fuse into helium. This is the same process thought to be going on in the sun. Once the fusion process is started, it will continue on its own as long as hydrogen is available, quickly generating much more energy than was used to start the process. Hydrogen fuel is easily and cheaply generated from seawater. Scientists have been using lasers to generate the power needed to start the fusion process. In current experimental devices, the hydrogen fuel is held in a hollow glass sphere that is about as big around as a human hair. The sphere must be suspended in mid-air. To reach the 90 million degrees needed to start fusion, 24 lasers with 12-trillion-watt beams are aimed at the sphere. What do you suppose scientists use to suspend the sphere? They thought of using strands of glass, but then they remembered something even stronger, yet thinner: spider silk. Spider silk has the added benefit of being sticky, so it easily holds the sphere in place. Despite the impressive technology of fusion experiments, humans often find that they cannot create better materials than those found in nature. Our Magnificent Creator God freely gave His creatures a sophisticated array of materials for life. He has just as freely given His Son, Jesus Christ, unto death for the forgiveness of your sins. |
4/17/2025
| Wild Medicine… |
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| Is it possible that your pharmacist could be a chimpanzee? That’s not such a silly question. Naturalists are discovering that many animals use a variety of plants and other items to treat their illnesses. Animals often know about the medicinal properties of plants when modern medicine has yet to learn about them. Recently naturalists noticed that one of the monkeys in the African preserve under their care had become lethargic, lost her appetite, and obviously had a severe gastric upset. A few hours after she became sick, she started munching on a native shrub that is not a normal part of the monkey’s diet. She chewed the plant, swallowed the bitter juice and spit out the pulp. By the next afternoon her symptoms were gone and she was feeling better. After a little research, scientists discovered that local tribes use juices from the same plant to treat intestinal upset and loss of appetite. Studies of the juices of a root that bears rub into their coats show that the bears are using an effective insecticide. Scientists have observed elephants, monkeys, birds and bears eating a variety of things that were not a normal part of their diet only to discover that the things being eaten had medicinal properties. Most amazing is that the animals know how best to take their medicine. If a leaf is best swallowed whole to kill intestinal parasites, it will be swallowed unchewed! Who other than the Magnificent Creator God and Great Physician Himself could have taught the animals this medicine? |
4/16/2025
| Simple Math, Hard Questions… |
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| Today the Bible is often accused of giving answers that don’t add up to reality as we know it. Many Christian students have been told that evolution gives answers that do make sense. Is this really true? These are questions that we Christians can and should ask when we are told that evolution fits the world as we know it. Evolutionary geology says that, on the average, geological processes such as erosion and mountain building have always taken place at the same rate we see them happening today. However, if we take the volume of the world’s continents and divide it by the known rate of continental erosion, we find that it should take only 14 million years to erode the continents down to sea level. We are also told that the last mountain building activity took place about 65 million years ago. So if evolutionary geology is correct, the continents should have long ago been worn down to sea level. Evolutionary biologists tell us that the first modern women lived about 200,000 years ago. At an average of three children per family (the current world average is four), the world’s population should have reached 3.5 billion in 4,000 years. In fact, we reached that figure only within recent centuries. Yes, wars and disease accounted for more losses in the past, but this fact does not explain this huge error. More examples could be mentioned. The truth is, the facts don’t add up to evolution. They do support the Bible’s view of history. Explanations that deny the Magnificent Creator God just don’t add up. |
4/15/2025
| The Mystery of Male and Female… |
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| “God created them male and female.” That simple phrase heaps a world of problems on those who believe in evolution. Evolutionists tell us that in the early stages evolution would have produced creatures that reproduce without the need for male and female. They then suppose that some mutation would have produced the gender differences, but what advantage would these differences offer? Quite the contrary, these differences would be a disadvantage and become quickly selected out. An even more serious problem is that, according to evolution’s history of life, the male and female sexes must have developed in different kinds of creatures dozens of times. No one has the slightest idea how one or a dozen mutations could have produced male and female. To change a creature from having no gender into a male or a female requires developing several new organs, changing some others, creating entire new hormone systems, and changing others. New organs and systems would have to be immediately integrated into the workings of the rest of the body. In addition, the independently developed male changes would have to work with the independently developed female changes. Changes would also have to be made in the brains of the new creatures so that they would want to mate with each other. And evolutionists tell us this must have happened dozens of times! Yes, that simple phrase “God created them male and female” leaves evolution with an imponderable mystery. This mystery is solved easily by our Magnificent Creator God’s Word. What a mistake it is to say that the Bible is obsolete in our modern scientific era! |
4/14/2025
| Changing Poison into Medicine… |
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| If God created the world and everything in it in perfection, where did disease, sickness and death come from? It’s clear from the Bible that God did not intend for humans to suffer disease and death. However, when humans withdrew their love from God by disobeying Him, they caused the nature of creation to be changed. It appears that it would take only small, subtle changes in chemistry and biology to change helpful and good organisms into deadly organisms. For example, botulism is a fatal food poisoning caused by the botulinum toxin produced by a microbe growing in food. Botulinum is the most powerful toxin known to modern science. Medical researchers have discovered that very tiny amounts of botulinum toxin may be safely injected into spasming muscles to stop involuntary spasms. These small doses stop involuntary nerve impulses without interfering with voluntary use of the muscles. This therapy promises to help people who suffer from involuntary clinching of eyelids, throat, misaligned eyes, stuttering and the cramps often suffered by musicians, writers and typists. Therapy appears to work for several months before it must be repeated, and there appear to be no side effects. This treatment is not theoretical; doctors are being trained in using it right now. So a dangerous poison can be medicine. Perhaps this hints at a purpose our Magnificent Creator God may have originally intended for the botulism microbe. |
4/13/2025
| No Trouble At All… |
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| There are many methods of communication, some of which we human beings don’t often think about. One of these is chemical communication. Take, for example, the female silkworm moth. When she is ready to mate, she releases a very small amount of a chemical. This chemical, called a pheromone, can attract a male silkworm moth from up to two miles away. Even though the female has released only 100-millionth of a gram, the male can sense the chemical. Many other insects use similar pheromones to attract mates. Pheromones are also used for chemical communication by ants to mark their trails. When an ant finds a good source of food, it returns to the nest, leaving an invisible scent trail. Its fellow ants also use this trail to find the food. As long as they still find food they will continue to reinforce the scent. Once the supply is exhausted and ants no longer follow the trail, it disappears within a few minutes. This chemical scent is so specific that another species of ant will not recognize the trail if he stumbles upon it. This helps protect the ants’ food source from being discovered by other ants. Chemical communication allows the communicator to communicate to another of its species, even over long distances. In one sense, pheromones are the animals’ version of radio. Our Magnificent Creator God had no trouble providing for His creation to communicate in ways we still cannot fully understand!!! |
4/12/2025
| Every Creation Is Practical… |
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| The loop-and-hook fastener called Velcro has come a long way since it first appeared. Velcro goes into space as a light, easy-to-use fastener. Here on Earth, it’s replacing everything from laces in children’s shoes to buttons and zippers on coats. However, humans were not the inventors of the hook-and-loop fastener. Plants were the first to use this principle. Scientists learned about the principle when they were checking out stories of how bean leaves were used to trap bedbugs during World War II. They discovered that the hooked hairs on the underside of bean leaves did indeed trap bedbugs by their feet. The bedbugs stayed stuck to the leaves until they starved to death. In nature, the hooked hairs trap leafhoppers, leaving them unable to munch on the leaves of bean plants. Further research has shown that some varieties of wheat trap the cereal leaf beetle, preventing damage to their leaves. Most amazing of all is the timing of this defense. Plants that use this method to protect themselves don’t start growing the hairs until a few days before the annual attack by their insect enemies! Humans might think their inventions are clever. However, because God is smarter than we are, it is very likely that somewhere, somehow, He has already created nearly every practical invention. This is yet another argument for creation by our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
4/11/2025
| You Are Left-Handed… |
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| If I were to ask you whether you are left-handed or right-handed, you would probably answer with most people that you are right-handed. While that may be true, you are also left-handed, and your life depends on it. Biologists have absolutely no idea why molecules of living things are left-handed. You see, when biological molecules are made in “origin of life” experiments, they are always a mixture of both left-handed and right-handed molecules—mirror images of each other that won’t work together in living things. A right-handed amino acid can be chemically identical to a left-handed amino acid. But for some mysterious reason, a living organism will treat the right-handed amino acid as if it were useless, even though normal chemical reactions ignore the difference. This tells us that living things are much more that just the result of chemical reactions. As the Bible suggests when it describes the creation of life, living material is different in some very important ways from nonliving material. The fact that life uses only left-handed versions of biological molecules poses another problem for those who think that life formed spontaneously, without a Creator. While experiments show that some simple biological molecules can be formed in the laboratory, experiments always produce a mixture of left- and right-handed molecules. So life’s origin, with its left-handed-only molecules, remains a mystery to those who reject the Magnificent Creator God. Could this be why God designed life with left-handed only molecules in the first place? |
4/10/2025
| The Orchid That Captures Workers… |
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| The relatively rare bucket orchid, Coryanthes, behaves almost like an animal at pollination time. This remarkable ability is essential to its survival. Coryanthes has a steep-sided flower. Two glands extend over the center of the “bucket” and secrete a clear fluid into the flower after it opens. Just above the pool of fluid inside the bucket, a tunnel opens to the outside of the bucket. At the end of the tunnel are the flower’s pollen and stigma. When it opens, the flower sends out a strong sweet odor that can attract male bees from over five miles away. The male bees collect a waxy material on the flower’s surface that they later use in mating rituals. As the number of bees collecting this substance off the flower’s surface increases, so does the likelihood that in the excitement one of them will fall into the pool below. When this happens, the sticky fluid makes it impossible for the bee to make it out of the “top” of the bucket-shaped flower. However, the tunnel provides an easy exit. But as the bee nears the tunnel’s end, the flower drops down a projection from the tunnel’s ceiling, holding the bee for about ten minutes before freeing him. While the bee is held, the flower glues two packets of pollen to the bee. If it should happen that the bee already has pollen packets, this activity delivers the pollen to the stigma, and pollination is complete. The Coryanthes orchid not only shows us the Magnificent Creator God, but it shows us how unlimited His creativity and imagination are. |
4/9/2025
| The Underrated Sense… |
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| How does your nose work? Medical researchers admit that they don’t know. Your nose performs an extremely unlikely job. It senses invisible molecules in the air and turns each molecule into a unique sensation that is sent to the brain. If the fact that molecules floating in the air could be detected was a modern discovery, it would be hailed as the scientific discovery of the century! Medical researchers do know that the roof of your nose cavity contains about 10 million cells that are wired directly into the brain. The nervous system that connects your olfactory cells to your brain is so large and complex that its surface area is several times greater than the surface area of your body. Researchers also know that your sense of smell is important to your sense of taste. For example, that’s why, when you have a head cold, chocolate tastes like a flavorless waxy paste. In this case what you taste in your mouth has more to do with what is happening in your nose than on your tongue. Many creatures, including birds, can sense odors. Farmers who had difficulty with birds eating as much as 20% of the food set out in feed lots discovered that birds hate the smell of grapes. When they laced the feed with grape scent, the birds left it alone, but the cattle didn’t seem to mind. Researchers have also learned that each of us has a unique “odor print.” This reminds us that each of us is a unique being, made by our Magnificent Creator God because He wanted to have a relationship with us. |
4/8/2025
| Ancient Well Surprises Scientists… |
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| Some years ago, archaeologists discovered a water well that is the oldest they’ve ever seen. Because of the well’s sophisticated design, they immediately concluded that ancient humans were much smarter than they ever expected. The well was found beneath the Mediterranean Sea bed off the coast of Israel. The location in which the well was discovered is part of a 10-acre site of an ancient city that was found beneath 10 feet of sand and 39 feet of seawater. Other more shallow wells have also been found at the site as well as stone houses, fireplaces, 23 skeletons, seeds, tools—and the village garbage pit. The deepest well is a round shaft, extending 16 feet into the ground and paved with stone. Evolutionary archaeologists said that the discovery raises some interesting questions. For example, how did ancient humans know that if they dug deep enough they would find the water table? Archaeologists also wondered where ancient humans learned the skill of sinking a round shaft and paving it with stone. Finds like these, which extend so-called modern humanity with all their skills and intelligence further into the past, are no surprise to those who accept the Bible’s account of human history. We would guess that this city was built within several generations after the great Flood. That date is not ancient for human beings, since we have been fully human and skilled since the sixth day of the universe’s existence. In fact, based on the Bible’s description of Adam and the first generations of humans, we are probably less skilled today than most ancient people. Once more, our Magnificent Creator God formed all things His way. |
4/7/2025
| Fields and Forests of Medicine… |
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| Blessings can become curses. For example, a painkiller may be used to cover up an injury that needs immediate treatment. Pain is unpleasant. However, when pain tells us to move our hand from the hot stovetop, it helps us prevent worse injury. When God created the universe and placed humans on this earth, there was no disease, no pain, and no death. The Bible tells us that God also knew that our freedom to withdraw our love from Him would also result in the consequences of withdrawing that love—that is, disease, pain and death. In His wisdom, God filled the creation with chemical factories that could provide temporary help for pain and disease. Foxglove, or digitalis, offers a treatment for heart failure. Quinine, from a South American tree, is used to treat malaria. Steroids come from a Mexican yam. A treatment for gout is made from the autumn crocus. A fungus that grows on the rye plant and caffeine from coffee beans are used to treat migraine headaches. White willow bark, which contains a form of aspirin, has been used for thousands of years as a natural treatment for pain and fever. Pain, disease and death call our attention to our much more serious spiritual condition. If we did not have to face death in this life, we would be condemned to spend eternity in an imperfect world. We can thank our Magnificent Creator God that He has provided the remedy for our sin in the forgiveness of sins through His Son, Jesus Christ. Is your trust for salvation in Jesus Christ and what He has done for you? |
4/6/2025
| No Fault Here… |
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| Many people know that, despite its appearance, coral is actually a tiny animal. Even a small coral growth may be made up of billions of tiny animals, each living inside its limestone skeleton. What many people don’t know is that coral cannot live without the help of algae – a plant. Thousands of one-celled algae live in the tiny stomach of each coral polyp. The polyp requires the waste products of the algae to complete its nutrition requirements and to get the calcium with which it builds reefs. In return, the polyp’s stomach provides an ideal protected living place for the algae. Incidentally, the wonderful colors in living coral come from the algae in each polyp’s stomach. Evolutionists have said that it must take millions of years for the tiny polyps to build large coral reefs – like the 2,000-kilometer-long Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The Great Barrier Reef, incidentally, is considered the largest structure ever built by living organisms. However, it has now been shown that coral polyps can double their own weight in just over 10 days! As a result, the claim of millions of years for the age of the Great Barrier Reef has been reduced by a factor of 40! Many of the long-age figures claimed by evolutionists have had to be drastically revised downward as we have learned more about the creation. The resulting figures fit the Bible’s account of history much more closely. Our mighty and Magnificent Creator God worked with a plan that many try to find fault with but none have been successful!!! |
4/5/2025
| Special Features For Special Needs… |
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| It’s not very pretty, nor is it graceful, but Colombia’s rock-climbing catfish has a unique ability among fish. Perhaps there are days when a salmon, trying to make it up a waterfall, wishes that it could simply climb the rocks. The rock-climbing catfish’s climbing equipment begins with a powerful sucker mouth. Once it attaches itself to a rock, it can stay stuck despite any torrent. The rock-climbing catfish also has a bony plate on its belly that helps it hold its place while it repositions its sucker a little further up the rocks. The plate has fins with tiny, backward-pointing teeth. These teeth dig into the rock and prevent slipping. The catfish’s third special feature is a set of powerful muscles to control the plate. Once the rock-climbing catfish has attached its sucker to the rock, it pulls up its stomach plate and anchors it. With its body anchored, it moves its sucker up the face of the rock and repeats the process. Following this method, the rock-climbing catfish can walk its way up a 20-foot rock wall against the torrent of a waterfall in about 30 minutes! Our Magnificent Creator God thought of everything in His master design for every creature!!! |
4/4/2025
| An Internal Clock You Can Feel… |
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| We all have a number of clocks within us that help keep life constant in changing surroundings. The pineal gland is one clock that helps us adjust to our surroundings like the changing lengths of daylight through the year. Earlier in this century many scientists, having no understanding of the pineal, decided that it had no purpose and was left over as a vestige from our evolution. Creationists knew it must have a purpose because they knew we have not evolved. If you are one of those people who typically feel a bit more lethargic or even depressed during the darkest months of winter, you might be able to blame your pineal, which is located near the center of your brain. How can a gland deep in the center of the brain know how long the days are? Light causes our bodies to make certain chemicals. When days are short, those chemicals are scarce, so the pineal cannot make from these chemicals the hormones that encourage the alertness we feel in the spring and summer. In addition, your pineal has a private nerve hookup to your eyes, so it can literally see for itself how much light is available! Scientists have found that adding artificial light during winter can sometimes help the winter blues. Our bodies are a network of complex control systems and chemical factories—a complex union of systems that go beyond the abilities of the best human designers, but which testify to the wisdom of our Magnificent Creator God! |
3/29/2025
| Infinite Detail… |
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| A hummingbird heart weighs a fraction of an ounce and beats eight hundred times a minute; a blue whale’s heart weighs half a ton, beats only ten times per minute, and can be heard two miles away. In contrast to either, the human heart seems dully functional, yet it does its job, beating 100,000 times a day [65–70 times a minute] with no time off for rest, to get most of us through seventy years or more. Our Magnificent Creator God’s master design for His master creation is infinite in detail and function!!! |
3/28/2025
| Devious Fungus… |
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| Parasites, especially fungi, are usually written off by evolutionary biologists as simple, primitive organisms. However, whether they choose to recognize the Magnificent Creator God or not, biologists are learning that nothing in God’s creation is simple or primitive. Parasites seem to display some of the most clever planning or scheming – depending on your point of view – in all creation. A parasitic fungus that infects a roadside weed called catchfly seems to do nothing harmful to the plant. After infection, a profusion of white blossoms will open – even a few weeks earlier than normal. Bees and butterflies will arrive to collect the grains from the flowers. However, the grains they are spreading aren’t pollen but fungus spores. The fungus has not only turned female flowers into males, but has transformed the stamens into spore factories. This is not the only trick played by the fungus. It also coaxes the catchfly into producing far more flowers than usual, making the plants it infects more attractive than surrounding catchflies. As a result, pollinators come first to the infected flowers before going to the uninfected plants. This is but one example among many showing that nothing from God’s hand is carelessly done. The lesson for us is more than that living things don’t fit into the evolutionary simple-to-complex scheme. God also wants us to know that He cares about everything He has made, no matter how lowly. |
3/27/2025
| Learning in the Womb, Learning from the Womb… |
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| January 22, 1973 marks the disastrous turn in American law that granted women the so‑called right to kill their unborn babies. The Bible makes it abundantly clear that the unborn child is a human being who is known and loved by God as He knits it together in the womb. Science knows that even when it is a single fertilized cell, the unborn child is uniquely human. Now science is learning the truth of what the Bible has told us all along about the individual human nature of the unborn child. Research is confirming that even before birth children in the womb are learning about the world. The child in the womb does much more than simply hear sounds, including its mother’s voice. The child also becomes familiar with odors in the outside environment. To test what newborns were thinking, scientists very cleverly hooked up a pacifier to a tape recorder. They then rewarded a particular sucking pattern with various sounds such as mother’s voice. They found that the infants would concentrate on a pattern that would produce their mother’s voice. In another test, women’s voices, and even their father’s voices, were not favored over mother’s heartbeat – a familiar sound in the womb. Even science is beginning to agree that life in the womb is nothing less than a normal stage of human existence. Like every other stage of life, life in the womb includes learning new things and developing relationships. If only this knowledge was applied to the abortion debate. Our Magnificent Creator God knew exactly when life begins. |
3/26/2025
| Miracle Smell… |
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| It’s commonly known that many animals are able to detect extraordinarily weak odors. The real mystery is how they can smell scents that are 1,000 times too weak to produce the chemical reactions necessary to make a scent signal. From the chemist’s point of view, our sense of smell shouldn’t work as well as it does. When you smelled that wonderful dinner a few days ago, a marvel of chemical reactions was taking place in your nose. Scientists still aren’t sure how we sense such a wide range of smells. It was while investigating this question that scientists may have stumbled across the answer to another question. The receptors in our noses have to detect a certain number of scent molecules before they can trigger the chemical response that makes the signal that tells us we have smelled something. When air is drawn into your nose, an organ called Steno’s duct sprays a fine mist. Scientists always thought this mist simply humidified the incoming air. Now they’ve discovered that the duct also makes proteins that grab onto odor molecules. Sprayed into the incoming air, the proteins collect odor molecules. Then, with their load of odor molecules, they settle onto receptors that trigger your sense of smell. As a result, even scents that are too weak to smell are concentrated by this ingenious system so that we can sense them. Our sense of smell helps protect us, gives our food flavor, and adds richness to the experience of living. It’s truly a marvel of our Magnificent Creator God’s design. |
3/25/2025
| Fossil Termites… |
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| The unusual discovery of the most ancient termite nest ever found sheds light not only on termites but also on their social behavior. The nest dates back to the time of the dinosaurs. The nest was discovered in fossilized wood from the Big Bend National Park in Texas. A paleontologist examining the wood noticed small grain‑like particles in the wood. He decided that the grains must be insect eggs. Later, other scientists examined the grains under a microscope and found that they were hexagonal in shape. That distinctive shape told them that the grains were termite droppings. Termites are the only insect that makes hexagonal droppings. And these droppings were identical to those made by modern termites. With this discovery, the holes in the fossilized wood suddenly made sense. The wood had been tunneled out in the same way modern termites tunnel wood. The nest was in the center of the wood, just as modern termites build their nests. These ancient termites had placed their droppings around the edge of the nest. Modern termites do the same thing to plug any air leaks and prevent drafts. In short, every evidence says that termites from the time of the dinosaurs were built just like modern termites, and they behaved in the same way as modern termites. That there was no evidence of any termite evolution in this nest agrees perfectly with the Bible’s claim that all things reproduce “after their kind.” Again, just exactly the way our Magnificent Creator God intended. |
3/24/2025
| Unusual Island Love Song… |
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| Tropical beauty has inspired many Hawaiian love songs. However, none is more unusual than the love song of Hawaiian fruit flies. There are more than 100 species of Hawaiian Drosophila, or fruit fly. Just like everything else in that tropical paradise, these fruit flies are not the drab creatures known in mainland biology labs. Hawaiian fruit flies are larger and more brightly colored. And while mainland fruit flies do sing, Hawaiian fruit flies offer more variety in their songs and in the way they make the sounds. One of their unique songs is called the click song. Its high‑pitched clicks sound something like a fingernail being dragged across a comb. Another song is made up of a complex pattern that includes pulses and trills. A third song pattern is a steady purr. A fourth pattern is made up of a low hum. Scientists describe the singing patterns as elaborate for a fly. Scientists suspect that the fruit flies use singing as part of their mating ritual. In one encounter, a male stood behind a female with his head under her wing. He then hummed until she either accepted his advance or flew off. It may be, scientists speculate, that the female feels the male’s song rather than hears it. Songs and rituals seem to vary between the species. Scripture tells us that everything in the creation sings praise to our Magnificent Creator God. Often that truth is taken as figurative. However, as we learn more about His creatures, we see that the complexity of music is a gift that has been given to many things in the creation. |
3/23/2025
| Nothing Is Too Small For Him… |
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| A gypsy moth caterpillar infestation can strip the leaves from large numbers of trees, threatening the trees’ lives. Since they don’t have a means of escape, it doesn’t seem as if the poor trees have much of a chance. But botanists were tipped off to the possibility that trees may not be all that defenseless when they began to investigate why only a few trees were badly damaged by insects in an infected grove while most stood unharmed. They discovered that when facing a threat like gypsy moth caterpillars, trees begin to defend themselves by sounding the alarm. A large variety of trees – including beeches, poplars, sugar maples and red oaks – communicate with each other. Scientists believe the trees communicate by releasing chemicals called pheromones into the air. What they now know is that before insects attacking one tree can get to the tree next door, the second tree has already begun defending itself. How do they defend themselves? When under attack or notified by other trees of attack, most trees begin to manufacture an array of poisons. Some of the poisons make leaves impossible to digest, while others kill the insects outright. Some make as many as eight poisons at once, and many can change the poisons that are made from year to year. Our Magnificent Creator God’s concern for living things extends even to plants. If He sees to this detailed level of care for trees, can there be anything in our lives that is too small for His loving concern??? |
3/22/2025
| The Extent Of His Knowledge Is Immeasurable… |
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| In Genesis 1:28, God tells man to subdue the Earth. That command implies that He has placed within creation tools and knowledge that humans can learn to use for their own benefit. After sin entered the world and sickness and death became a reality, God’s remarkable foreknowledge became evident. One of the first antibiotics ever discovered by humans has been in use for thousands of years. Modern researchers are just beginning to appreciate the wonder of this natural antibiotic that kills some 650 different strains of disease organisms. It is virtually nontoxic. And best of all, disease organisms don’t become resistant to it. What is this miracle antibiotic? Silver. Ancient Greeks and Romans used silver containers to keep liquids fresh. American settlers would often place a silver dollar in milk to delay its souring. Most of the world’s airlines use silver filters on aircraft to prevent dysentery. After testing 23 different methods for purifying water, NASA selected silver water filters for use on board the space shuttle. Japanese researchers have found that silver is even able to detoxify some poisons. God’s knowledge is far above ours. He has hidden in the creation around us knowledge that can help us in this earthly life. He invites us to learn from Him. He has “hidden” greater knowledge – knowledge that can help us here and in eternity – in the Bible. How could anyone be satisfied with what little we know from our Magnificent Creator God’s great mind!!! |
3/21/2025
| Of This You Can Be Certain… |
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| Did you ever wonder where frogs go in the winter? Yes, frogs hibernate, but there is much more to it than that. Frogs are cold-blooded, meaning that they don’t create their own body heat. The heat they need to maintain life must come from the sun or the heat in the water and air around them. As the weather cools off, a frog’s blood begins to thicken, and life slows down. Frogs begin looking for places to hibernate. The frog must carefully select his winter resting spot. If his body temperature falls more than two degrees below the freezing point of water, ice crystals will begin to form in his blood, and he will die. Some frogs bury themselves deeply enough in the mud to avoid freezing temperatures. Others may crawl inside decaying logs or under leaves, both of which provide heat from decay to avoid freezing temperatures. Scientists have found that frogs have still another trick to help them survive. When the weather is unseasonably cool during the spring or summer, meaning a harder life and more deaths among the frog population, the next generation of frogs will automatically have more females. Additional females means that more eggs can be laid in the spring. As a result, the frog population will more quickly return to normal. Everywhere we look in the creation we find evidence, not only of the Creator’s wisdom, but of His loving care for every living thing. Do you know His loving care in your life? You can be absolutely certain of that care through the forgiveness of sins in our Magnificent Creator God and Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!!! |
3/20/2025
| Mount St. Helens Surprises Scientists… |
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| In 1980, Mount St. Helens exploded with incredible force, leaving a sterile, barren scar on the face of the earth. Basing their expectations upon the slow pace of evolution, the scientific establishment said it would be generations before life would return to the area. Yet, the US Forest Service has reported that virtually every species that lived in the area before the eruption had already returned after only five years! In most but not all cases, the populations were much smaller than before the eruption – but they were back. As a result, scientists are surprised at the speed at which life is returning to Mount St. Helens. Unexpected forces helped cause this transformation. For example, as gophers tunneled, they mixed soil into the top layer of volcanic ash. Seedling trees, protected during the blast by thick snow and the debris of larger trees, provided the basis for a nearly instant new forest which has grown over the years since the blast. Spirit Lake was supporting fish only five years after the blast. The return of life to Mount St. Helens shows us that commonly accepted ideas about how long life takes to establish itself need to be revised downward drastically. And this fact helps to show us that the Bible’s claims of a young earth are not at all unbelievable. Once more the bounds of our Magnificent Creator God know no limits… |
3/19/2025
| No Detail Is Too Small… |
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| In showing how the Creator is intimately involved with His creation, Jesus Christ said that the very hairs of our heads are numbered by Him. This means that no detail is too small to escape His attention; no change misses His careful and loving eye. The hair that you see is nothing more than dead protein that is produced by the cells of the hair follicle anchored inside the layers of the skin. The total number of hair follicles on the adult body is about 5 million; only about 100,000 of them are on the scalp. Each hair grows out of one follicle for about three to five years. Then the hair is shed and the follicle rests for about three months before starting to grow hair again. So, you see, once you know how many hairs are on your head, it’s still no easy job to keep track of their changing number. The average scalp hair grows about one inch every two or three months. This means that each day, your head is growing the equivalent of one hair, 100 feet long – that’s nearly seven miles per year! Yes, it’s true – our Magnificent Creator God cares so much about you that He knows from moment to moment how many hairs are on your head. He has not created our world and then left us to drift through space and life all alone. He has even expressed His love and purpose for you in the words of the Bible. Take a look today at what Scripture says about His Son, who loved you so much He even gave His life for you!!! |
3/18/2025
| Diamonds in the Sky… |
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| Imagine – countless tons of diamonds, virtually free for the taking. Such wealth is the stuff of legends. But now it might be for real. The only catch is that these diamonds, if they exist, are under an atmospheric pressure as high as six million times that on earth, and the temperature could be more than a balmy 12,000 degrees (F). Those are the conditions thought to exist on the planets Uranus and Neptune. Scientists now believe, contrary to their earlier speculation, that simple molecules could not exist in normal forms on these planets. This put an end to speculation about life evolving on these planets. Great pressures, along with extreme heat, force all the carbon atoms to be compressed into diamonds. Why would our Magnificent Creator God create all those diamonds in a place where they don’t do anyone any good? The fact is, God knows that material wealth gives us very little. We human beings begin to realize this fact when we discover that all the wealth in the world is meaningless if no one loves or cares about us. Our Creator is the only source of true wealth. Through His Son, Jesus Christ, He brings the riches of heaven to the poorest among us. He brings to His children peace that cannot be destroyed by the hottest war zone and gives life that never ends. You can learn more about these riches, which bring both temporal and eternal benefits, in the pages of the Bible. |
3/17/2025
| The Great Provider… |
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| The rattlesnake is one of the greater wonders of God’s creation. The eyes of the rattlesnake are different from all other back-boned animals. Rattlesnakes have no eyelids, but their eyes are protected by clear cover-plates. Their yellow lenses slide in and out like binoculars – and, like built-in binoculars, provide detailed magnification of distant objects. The rattlesnake has many more ways of sensing its environment than we do. Its lower jaw is linked, through fine bones, to its inner ear. With this arrangement, if the rattlesnake places its lower jaw on the ground, it can hear distant footsteps – its jaw acting just like a stethoscope. Rattlesnakes also adjust their venom dosage to the size of their prey. The larger the victim, the more venom needed – and the rattlesnake knows just how much to deliver. The truth is, about 20 percent of all rattlesnake bites inflicted on humans deliver no venom at all because we are too big for the snake to swallow. While the rattlesnake is dangerous, more people die from bee stings each year than rattlesnake bites. The abilities of the rattlesnake certainly glorify God, Who designed this amazing creature. Realize that you, too, are fearfully and wonderfully made by the same Magnificent Creator God and that He has given you even more wonderful abilities to use in grateful service to Him. |
3/16/2025
| The Great Provider… |
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| The surface of the Earth 50 to 150 feet below the great living canopy of the rainforest is a dark, humid, still world dominated by great columns of tree trunks. Within those trunks and some of the giant hollow branches extending from them lie the secret of the life of the canopy itself. A rainforest typically receives 12 or more feet of rain per year. That much rain washes out of the soil most of the nitrates needed by the trees for growth. What the trees need is a rich source of nitrates that is constantly being replenished. And that’s where the bats come in. Typically, these huge trees are hollow inside. Many different kinds of creatures, including fruit bats, enter the hollow trees through various openings. Fruit bats find ideal daytime sleeping rooms inside the great hollow branches that extend like caverns from the hollow tree trunk. The accumulating layer of bat guano inside the tree itself is one of the richest sources of nitrates known. So the bats provide the tree with the nitrates it needs in exchange for a protected home during the day! In a very real sense, the fruit bats are the collection and transport system for the raw materials that make possible the tropical rain forest canopy with its millions of residents. The Creator has devised an ingenious way to provide for the needs of many creatures. Truly, the Lord – our Magnificent Creator God – does indeed provide all living things with their food in precisely the way they need it and when they need it!!! |
3/15/2025
| All things must reproduce… |
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| Many plants reproduce simply by cloning. The most obvious example of cloning that comes to mind is the dandelion. Unless you get all of the main dandelion root out of the ground, each piece of the root can sprout another dandelion, identical to the parent. The walking fern reproduces by cloning too. It moves across the countryside, albeit slowly, by producing new plants. A new plant is generated wherever the tips of its leaves touch the ground. Each new plant is identical to the parent. The bamboo reproduces through underground stems. The different species of bamboo live anywhere from 20 to 120 years. During their life spans, they produce only by cloning. Then they flower – once. When it’s time for a particular species to flower, every member of that species, no matter where in the world it grows, flowers gloriously. Each flower can have as many as 100 pollen-producing stamens. Once the seeds are ripe and scattered, every member of that species in the world dies. At this point, the entire species exists only in the scattered seeds. This is brilliant testimony to a recent creation of all bamboos at the same time. If evolution produced them and the forces of change worked on them for millions of years, one would think that all members of the same species would no longer be in perfect synchronization. Bamboo makes a strong testimony for the recent creation reported in Genesis! |
3/14/2025
| All things are not real… |
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| Many plants, especially orchids, offer different ploys to fool insects into pollinating them. Each of these ploys shows planning, design and the ability to create the design that will work. That there are so many examples makes it impossible for any rational person to believe that mindless, impersonal forces could have made these plants. Four different groups of orchids produce flowers that look so much like the female of the insect that pollinates them that pollinators will try to mate with them. The Brassia orchid found in southern Florida produces a flower that mimics the prey of its pollinator, the spider wasp. The flower is so designed that as the wasp stings its supposed prey – really the flower – pollen is deposited on his head. The pollen is then carried to a nearby female flower and deposited in just the right place during another attack. Another orchid imitates an aggressive swarm of bees as it blows in the wind. The strongly territorial bees that live in the area swarm and attack the flowers. In the process, they transfer the pollen from male to female flowers. The female flowers of at least 50 species of Mexican orchids offer fake pollen to lure pollen-eating insects that have been feeding on male flowers. Many of these insect-orchid relationships are so tightly interlocked that neither could survive without the other. This speaks of a planned creation. It also bears witness that all forms of life came into being in a relatively short time, not over millions of years as evolutionists would have it. Only our Magnificent Creator God could have done this!!! |
3/13/2025
| The snake that fishes in the desert… |
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| The intelligence of the interrelationships between three unrelated desert creatures gives witness to the fact that there is a single, all-wise Creator of all things. Today we want to tell you about the sidewinder snake. While the sidewinder’s weird, whip-like method of movement across the desert sands propels him faster than you might think, he cannot hope to catch one of his favorite foods, the gecko. Sometimes the sidewinder can sneak up on the lizard, but as soon as the gecko spots him, it runs off at top speed. Now the sidewinder may begin plan “B” and collect a little “bait” for desert fishing. The snake buries his entire body in the soft sand, except for the very tip of his tail, which sticks out of the sand, looking like a lone blade of grass. Soon ants discover this potential source of food in the barren desert and begin to explore it. Now it will only be a matter of time before the gecko finds the ants – one of his favorite foods. While the unsuspecting gecko prepares for his dinner, the sidewinder strikes from beneath the sand and gets his dinner by eating the gecko. Could the sidewinder have perfected this neat little trick by any natural device? No. This is a witness to the intelligence of our Magnificent Creator God, as well as to His care of all His creatures – even the sidewinder. |
3/12/2025
| Legs knocked out from under snake revolution… |
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| Did you ever notice how your photographs sometimes turn out showing different colors than you remember seeing when you took the picture? Fluorescent lights might make faces look a little green. A tungsten lamp will make everything in a photograph look pinkish. Even though you did not see those colors when you took the picture, they were there and could be measured by the right equipment. The reason that the colors we see are often different is because our brains have the amazing ability to adjust and correct the colors we see to those colors that are expected. This ability is called color constancy. More recently, researchers discovered that goldfish not only see color but that their brains also adjust for color constancy. Scientists had always thought that goldfish were too primitive and had brains that were too small to even see color, much less provide color constancy. There is no such thing as a simple living thing. Nor can living things be arranged on a scale from simple to complex, the way many scientists would like. Color vision and color constancy were not produced by trial and error genetic accidents, they are abilities given by our Magnificent Creator God. He can give these abilities to any creature He wants and has done so, that the entire creation might glorify Him! |
3/11/2025
| Legs knocked out from under snake revolution… |
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| It’s rather interesting that evolutionists believe that snakes once had legs and lost them. This sounds very much like the Genesis account of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Obviously, evolutionists don’t accept the story of the first temptation. As far as they are concerned, the snake evolved from some reptile which originally had legs. But evolutionists have always tried to find some evolutionary advantage to losing legs and, thus, justify their theory. In 1973 an unpublished study suggested that garter snakes use 30 percent less energy for locomotion than they would if they had legs. That study was preliminary and never published. But that didn’t stop evolutionists from saying that they had found the reason that snakes don’t have legs. Now, a much more exhaustive study done at the University of California at Irvine, has shown that this evolutionary explanation is false. Outfitting black racer snakes with oxygen masks and using modern precision equipment, including a snake-sized treadmill, researchers have shown that snakes use as much energy as a creature of the same weight to get around. The supposed evolutionary advantage to not having legs has disappeared under the bright light of scientific investigation. And so yet another so-called scientific claim that the Bible has been proven wrong fails in the light of careful science. Once more the master plan of creation by our Magnificent Creator God prevails. |
3/10/2025
| He breathes through his legs… |
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| Members of the animal kingdom generally have similar parts. For example, the radius bone in the forelimbs of the bat, the horse and the human look similar but this is because they have similar functions. Listeners will recall the illustration in their high school biology textbook where this similarity of parts is called “homology”. Similarity is said to be the result of descent from a common ancestor and, thus, is evidence of evolution. But this is circular reasoning because the evidences are chosen on the belief that there was a common ancestor. Then it is argued that the evidences of similarity proves a common ancestor! The octopus eye and the human eye are very similar but this example is never given since no one believes the octopus and humans had a common ancestor. God seems to have deliberately created novelties in order to make it more difficult to believe in evolution. For example, almost all animals get their oxygen through lungs or gills located in the main part of the body. Usually, the hearing organs are in or on the head, but occasionally there is a novelty where the ears are close to the knees. Until a few years ago scientists thought that two organs on the sand bubbler crab’s legs were ears, but then they discovered that they were actually breathing organs! God’s creation of novelties like this should help us challenge ideas that try to deny that He is our Magnificent Creator God. |
3/9/2025
| Only He would have thought about this… |
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| Much of the world’s surface is covered by rainforest. If you are unfamiliar with the rainforest, you may be tempted to compare it to forests you have seen. But really there is no comparison at all. In a rainforest, the Earth’s living surface is covered by a second living habitat some 50 to 150 feet in the air. Here, thousands of species of plants and animals live and breed for generations without ever touching the ground. The canopy of the rain forest is supported by huge trees that usually have no branches for the first 50 or more feet. They grow so close together and their tops are so dense that sunlight seldom reaches the jungle floor. This canopy can be up to 100 feet thick. While you might expect to find monkeys living in the canopy, you may not expect to find mice, frogs and even earthworms there as well. Here, most of these creatures are born, they live and die without ever touching the ground. The rainforest canopy is truly a second environment for life high above the surface of the Earth! Unusual environments like the rainforest canopy show us that the creativity of God is unlimited. He can create living things to carry on successful lives in any environment. He can create varied communities that interact and depend upon each other within each unique environment. Our Magnificent Creator God is truly a wonder!!! |
3/8/2025
| Size does not matter… |
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| The largest known beetle in the world is the aptly named goliath beetle. This African beetle can become almost as large as a mouse. Dinosaurs were not the largest animals ever to live. The great blue whale holds that honor. The smallest mammal in the world is smaller than many insects. A newly discovered species of bat in Thailand weighs only six one-hundredths of an ounce. Such extremes might lead some to wonder whether those giant insects we see in the movies would ever develop. Could a spider grow to be as large as a house? You will be happy to know that no spider or any other insect could grow as large as a house. We can be sure of this because of the way insects breathe. Insects breathe through small tubes along their bodies. These tubes provide oxygen directly to their internal tissues. If an insect were to grow too large, these tubes could not get enough oxygen to the tissues. This is because the larger the creature, the more internal living tissue that requires oxygen. You and I have lungs that provide a network of surfaces equal to the size of a tennis court. An insect our size would need a body that has the surface area of a tennis court, too, which is an impossibility. Even though different creatures have different organs to supply their needs, each creature has just the right organs for its needs. This is a sign of our Magnificent Creator’s wisdom!!! |
3/7/2025
| A Computer with Fins… |
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| The glass knifefish, popular in home aquariums, has been the subject of study by two University of California researchers. They have concluded that this unusual looking fish has such a complex nervous system that it is basically a computer with fins. As the 6- to 7-inch native of South America swims along, it generates up to 700 weak electrical impulses a second, which it uses like radar to navigate. The returning signals are received by specialized cells all over the fish’s body. The fish’s brain then processes these signals in much the same way that our brain processes the signals from our ears and tells us the direction of the source of sound. However, where we use sound waves to tell us direction, the glass knifefish uses electrical impulses that travel much faster than sound. But not only are those impulses faster but there are up to 700 signals per second to process. The fish’s secret to processing this huge amount of information is called parallel processing. This is a technique that has been discovered and applied to produce the fastest computers yet. The glass knifefish is an unlikely design to have evolved. The highly sophisticated information-processing technology built into this fish can only be attributed to the Magnificent Creator God, presented to us in the Bible. |
3/6/2025
| The Birth that ended Death… |
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| People ask, “Why is there death and suffering in the world? Is this the way God wants it?” The Bible’s clear answer is an emphatic “No!” The world God created in the beginning had no death, suffering or disease. When God created mankind, man knew God with a perfect knowledge and was happy with that knowledge. God and man communicated with each other more simply and easily than we can between ourselves today. This is what God wanted for man. However, God did not create robots. He wants us to love Him, but this involves our will to do so and the choice not to do so. God warned us that choosing not to love Him, or turning our back on Him, would result in death. We have to admit that even Christians sometimes withdraw their love for God. The resulting suffering in this world is only a warning of the eternal consequences of our sin. Our Magnificent Creator God came to earth in the person of Jesus Christ and died for us that our death may not be eternal. Jesus lived a perfect and sinless life and, while He deserved no punishment for sin, He willingly suffered that punishment on our behalf. His resurrection from the dead was God the Father’s signal that He had accepted Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf. In Christ, our death has become a mere passage to eternal life. |
3/5/2025
| Chimps discover new antibiotic… |
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| When penicillin was first used as an antibiotic, it was considered a wonder drug. Infections which had been fatal for thousands of years were all of a sudden curable. Man has long known that some natural substances have a natural ability to fight infection. But modern medicine had to step aside and acknowledge that not all medical breakthroughs are made by doctors – or even human beings! For years it has been known that the roots and leaves of the Aspilia shrub are used as a traditional African treatment for wounds and stomachaches. Researchers also observed chimpanzees swallowing the leaves of the shrub. This led them to investigate more about the leaves. They learned that Aspilia leaves and roots contain a chemical which kills some infectious bacteria as well as fungi and worms. Researchers hope to learn whether this chemical is safe and effective for humans when taken orally. However, the mystery remains. How did the chimps discover the antibiotic nature of Aspilia? We need to look to our Magnificent Creator God, Who appears to have given the chimps this knowledge. For while disease and death are not part of His original design for the creation, He was loving enough to provide medicinal help for these consequences of human sin. But the permanent cure for sin and death began with the birth of His Son, Jesus Christ. |
3/4/2025
| The bird that lies and steals… |
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| Many species of birds live in communities that are quite complex and even resemble human communities. In the Amazon rainforests of Peru, 20 or more mixed species of birds will flock together in the lower levels of the rainforest canopy. Each flock has a leader and organizer – the bluish-slate ant-shrike. Each morning the ant-shrike will assemble its flock with loud calls. This strange arrangement has a very good purpose. The ant-shrike watches over the flock like a mother watches her children. When a bird-eating hawk appears overhead, the ant-shrike shrieks a warning so that members of the flock can take cover. But as often as half the time, the ant-shrike sounds the alarm when there is no hawk. The ant-shrike sounds the alarm to distract members of the flock when he sees that they have discovered some choice insects. In this way, the ant-shrike gets up to 85 percent of its food by sounding the false hawk alarm. Nevertheless, the rest of the flock put up with his lying and thieving because of his value as a hawk watcher. Lying and stealing are, of course, wrong for human beings. And our Magnificent Creator God will hold us each personally responsible for our thoughts and actions. But His Son, Jesus Christ, took our sins upon Himself so that all who believe in Him as their Lord and Savior will stand before Him cleansed of all their sins. Our Creator has promised this! |
3/3/2025
| Phony Fungus Flowers… |
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| As bees go about their business of gathering nectar, they also pollinate the flower, making possible the next generation of flowers. Now, there is a certain crafty fungus that doesn’t have flowers, nectar or pollen but makes use of the bees to reproduce itself. This is the fungus that causes the mummy-berry disease among blueberries. As soon as a plant becomes infected with the fungus, the leaves wilt. Amazingly, the fungus then causes the leaves to ooze a nectar-like substance, send out a perfume and reflect light in the ultraviolet range. To a bee, these are three unmistakable signs of a good flower. The bees collect what they think is nectar from the diseased plant and sooner or later transfer the fungus to a healthy plant. Blueberry flowers which have been infected produce white seedless and tasteless mummy-berries which are full of fungus. Did this fungus invent this plan to mimic the flower and fool the bee to reproduce itself? If so, it had to get everything right the first time. I think that once again this teaches us that our Magnificent Creator God planned these relationships from the beginning. If good for nothing else, this example of the mummy-berry fungus teaches us that the creation could not have made itself – this is the work of our Creator God who made everything! |
3/2/2025
| Let there be light… |
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| A frequent objection to the truth of Genesis 1 is as follows: If the Sun was not created until Day Four, what was the source of light on Day One? As is so often the case, the answer to the question is not the first issue to be addressed. The first issue is always to see if there is a false presupposition behind the question. And there is! The assumption is that the light on Day One required a source. Even today, light can exist without a source. Light is so fast, that we are used to thinking that a light turns on immediately when a switch is thrown and is extinguished instantly when the switch is opened. This is not the case. Light actually has to travel, but does so very, very fast. The speed of light is often measured by firing a laser at the Moon to reflect this intense light off one of the mirrors placed for that purpose by Apollo astronauts. The light takes about 1.5 seconds to return to Earth but does not need to be left switched on all that time. A sharp pulse a fraction of a second will suffice. The laser is then switched off, but the light continues traveling without a source. On Day One, God set the light waves moving. He did not require help in doing so, and there is no problem understanding that He chose to place a source for that light on Day Four. As we think about the created light of Day One, we thank our Magnificent Creator that His word reminds us that He is light, and in Him is no darkness!!! |
3/1/2025
| And these are just a few of the parts… |
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| For a moment think of the uniqueness of the human body. You, friend, are not a blob of protoplasm but a living organism of some 50 trillion cells. Your brain weighs about a kilo—roughly 2 ½ to 3 pounds. It consists of two hemispheres of gray matter connected by an interface called a corpus collosum. Daily, 10,000 thoughts flit in and out of your brain. A hundred billion neurons process information. Its complexity is something that we are just beginning to understand. Your heart pumps 18,000 gallons of blood daily through 75,000 miles of vessels and arteries. Try building something like that. Then there is the iris of your eye that automatically opens and closes depending on the intensity of light and lubricates itself with fluid called tears. Your hand, though, is perhaps the most amazing part of your body. Dr. Paul Brand, the great hand surgeon of the past century, believed it proved your uniqueness as a human being as does nothing else. Our magnificent God and creator simply spoke this magnificent creation into existence!!! |
2/28/2025
| The Warm-Blooded Bumblebee… |
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| What is warm blooded, sits on its eggs like a hen, but flies much better than a hen, and has six legs? It’s the bumblebee. The amazing fact that bumblebees are warm blooded was discovered after a scientist saw a bumblebee out gathering nectar one frosty cold morning. As it turned out, even with air temperatures near freezing, a bumblebee can maintain a body temperature of 95 degrees (F). Bumblebees are made up of three body sections: the head, the thorax and the abdomen. They heat their blood in the thorax, where the flight muscles are and where the heat is most needed. This heat is regulated by its circulatory system which flows through its narrow “waist”. The blood then passes through a heat exchanger in which it is further heated by the warmer blood flowing away from the muscles. On a hot day, the bee does the neatest trick of all. It actually changes its circulatory system so that fresh blood coming to the wing muscles is not heated at all by the heat exchange system. The queen bumblebee also uses this ability to control heat to incubate her eggs at 80 degrees like a mother hen. There is no simple form of life. What sets man apart from other life has nothing to do with warm blood, his brain or evolution. Man, created in our Magnificent Creator God’s image, finds redemption only in Jesus Christ. |
2/27/2025
| Yoho Surprise… |
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| Evolutionists tell us that life is an ever-ascending ladder of increasing complexity as new forms of life develop. For proof, they claim that the fossil record shows this kind of development of life. But is this really what the fossil record shows? It would be easy for me, as a creationist, to tell you that the fossil record shows no increase in biological complexity. But a brochure from the Yoho National Park in Canada talks about the richness and complexity of the fossilized life forms in the Burgess Shale of the park. Let me share a few quotes with you. “Life is simpler today than it was long ago.” “Long ago things used to be much more complicated. In fact, this is the central truth underlying one of the most revolutionary discoveries in the history of paleontology.” “The animals of the Burgess Shale were more diverse and no less highly-specialized than today’s living creatures.” The Bible gives us the same picture as the fossil record. Living things have always been complex. But early in the Earth’s history there were many more kinds of living things than there are today. And no fossil anywhere shows one kind of creature changing into another. The Bible has correctly predicted what is now found in the fossil record! Once more our Magnificent Creator God’s version of creation in The Bible is fully supported. |
2/26/2025
| Horned Animals in Australia… |
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| The fact that no animals with horns are known in Australia makes it difficult to explain aboriginal rock art from Mount Manning, north of Sydney. This art, drawn before Europeans settled in Australia, clearly shows an animal with horns! The obvious explanation is that the first aboriginal people to move to Australia brought with them memories of horned cattle or deer from Asia. But most evolutionary scientists reject this explanation because, according to evolutionary dating, the memory would have had to have been passed down through 2,000 generations. Evolutionists correctly conclude that this is hard to believe. But if the Earth is relatively young as the Bible says, and the aboriginal population settled in Australia after the great Flood, much less time is involved. Instead of 2,000 generations between aboriginal and European settlement, there would be far less than 150 generations! This is a reasonable number of generations to preserve memories of horned creatures. What’s more, it supports the account that all human beings descended from the original eight Flood survivors. Once more our Magnificent Creator God’s version of creation in The Bible is upheld. |
2/25/2025
| Facts that Weren’t… |
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| What is a Christian to think when we are told so often that the “facts of science” prove evolution – and disprove the Bible’s story of man’s history? Not all “facts” are created equal. For example, the fact that Jesus Christ was a real person is not open to interpretation. He is mentioned in the Bible and by other writings of the time. That’s a fact. Evolutionists use a different meaning for the word “fact”. A fossil, the “Tepexpan Man”, is an example of an evolutionary “fact.” “Tepexpan Man” is a fossil which, school children were taught, lived over 10,000 years ago. It is now known to be less than 2,000 years old and is a woman! An object found in the United States was said to be a fossilized egg, possibly 16 million years old. Now it is known that the object is a three to five year old stomach stone from a modern mammal – possibly a cow. A giant fossil found in South Australia early in 1990 was declared to be Australia’s largest dinosaur bone. Further study has now shown the object to be a fossilized tree trunk. As I said, all “facts” are not created equal! You need to know that most of the “facts” that you were taught 20 years ago supporting evolution have since been found to be either in error or open to serious question. Evolutionary “facts” are only interpretations of the world. So the Christian can follow the Truth of Scripture with confidence, knowing that the Bible is unchallenged by the “facts” of evolution. Once again our Magnificent Creator God made it all just the way The Bible says. |
2/24/2025
| Economic Life Among Bumblebees… |
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| Although a bumblebee’s life to us may seem relaxing, the fact is that the pace for the bumblebee is as hectic as for any human sitting in rush hour traffic. This is largely because, like humans, bumblebees are warm blooded. Many books about bee societies extol the virtues of communism. These books almost make it appear as if bees sit around deciding who should work which flowers, all for the good of the hive. But it is precisely because this method is less productive that warm-blooded bumblebees, who need more energy, must use a system which requires personal initiative to increase productivity. Researchers have found that bumblebees gather nectar and return it to the hive completely on their own initiative. Young bumblebees gather nectar from many different kinds of flowers until they find which flowers produce the most nectar. When the most rewarding flowers dry up, they switch to the second most rewarding. So individual motivation leads each bee to make the most of his own efforts. As a result, the entire colony benefits. One researcher commented that this method works so well that it almost looks like the entire hive is guided by an “invisible hand”. This is more than simply appearance, for our Magnificent Creator God does care for all His creatures, including you and me. He has shown His greatest love for us in sending His Son, Jesus Christ, so that we could have the forgiveness of sins through Him. |
2/23/2025
| He is intimately involved… |
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| There are at least four known types of orchids that effectively pretend to be female insects. They are so good at this ruse that they attract the attentions of male pollinators. That there are four different varieties that do this makes it clear that this trickery isn’t due to chance. The Magnificent Creator God does not want us to make the mistake of thinking that He doesn’t exist. The Ophrys group of orchids are found around the Mediterranean. Ophrys orchids produce flowers that look and smell so much like the insect that pollinates it, the male insect will mate with the flower. In the process, he picks up the pollen. The pollen is then carried to another flower, thus ensuring the next generation. The flowers even mimic the sheen of the female’s wings, the furry fringe on her abdomen, and her antennae. The Cryptostylus orchid, found in New Guinea and Australia, mimics the female of the wasp that pollinates it. The Cryptostylus does this so perfectly that it even moves as a mating female. The same is true of an orchid found in the Andes that is pollinated by a particular species of fly through the same ruse. God has much more in mind than just letting us know that He is. He wants us to see that He is intimately involved with His creatures. Through the perfect life of Jesus Christ, and His suffering, death and resurrection, He has removed the final barriers between us and Himself. With the barrier of sin removed by forgiveness, He may be even more intimately involved with each of us on a personal basis!!! |
2/22/2025
| From The Twilight Zone… |
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| The cockeyed squid lives in the ocean’s “twilight zone” where sunlight barely filters through the deep waters. The squid’s nickname is a reference to its two extremely different eyes: the left eye develops over time to become considerably larger than the right—almost twice as big. Scientists studying the mollusk have deduced that the squid uses its right eye, the smaller one, to look down into the darker depths. The larger, left eye, gazes upward, toward the sunlight. Our Magnificent Creator God thought of every need for every creature He ever made!!! |
2/21/2025
| Whales: Armed And Dangerous… |
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| The narwhal is a small whale, reaching perhaps 10 feet in length, which has an eight-foot spiral tusk coming out of its head. While a whale with a tusk nearly as long as its body might be a dramatic sight, it must be difficult for the narwhal to hunt down its food. The strap-toothed whale would seem to have an even more difficult time catching its prey. You see, this whale has two long teeth growing out of its lower jaw which curve over its upper jaw, preventing it from opening its mouth very wide. Now scientists believe that they may have discovered how these apparently ill-equipped creatures make their living. They suspect that toothed whales and dolphins can create explosively loud, focused sound beams under water which literally stun the fish they eat. Bottle-nosed dolphins have been seen to emit sounds louder than 228 decibels, nearly the same as a blasting cap under water. It seems they quite literally catch fish with dynamite! Sperm whales can outdo a blasting cap, generating 265 decibels. The wonders to be discovered in the living world beautifully combine and harmonize even the most subtle principles of chemistry, physics and biology in most creative and imaginative ways. What science is learning leaves us with no other conclusion than the Bible’s own statement that we have a wonderful, powerful and glorious Magnificent Creator God! |
2/20/2025
| A Not So Rock Solid Moon… |
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| How old is the moon? Evolutionary scientists talk about the craters on the moon being sixty-five or a hundred million years old or even billions of years old. But since we have learned what kind of rock the moon is made of, we now know that these ages are impossibly old. Craters were made when a large rock from space crashed into the moon at high speed. If the moon were made of water, a rock would only make a big splash. That splash would be a crater for only a few seconds before it was once again filled with water. If the moon were made of honey, the crater would last a little longer, but the honey would soon flow smooth again and the crater would be gone. American astronauts returned to the Earth with many samples of the moon rock for scientific study. The basic rock on the moon is basalt. Studying this rock, scientists have learned that basalt, too, flows (although much more slowly than honey or even molasses in January), but the flow can be measured. According to their measurements, none of the craters on the moon can be more than a few thousand years old. The natural tendency of the basalt to flow would have erased any craters which are older than that. Science has shown that the moon craters which evolutionary scientists thought were millions and billions of years old are really only thousands of years old at most. This is one more piece of evidence that the Bible’s explanation of a young creation by our Magnificent Creator God is not only true but can be scientifically supported. |
2/19/2025
| One Foot And A Sail… |
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| It was about 50 years ago that Chinese immigrants to the United States brought some freshwater clams with them. It is known that today the clam is found in at least 35 states. That’s an amazing amount of territory to cover in only 50 years for a creature that only has one foot. The spread of the Asian clam costs industry over a billion dollars per year to unclog water intake pipes. Scientists began to wonder how the creature could travel so rapidly, even going from lake to lake and stream to stream. What scientists learned was that when the Asian clam encounters a current, it sets sail. Lifting off with its one foot, it releases a transparent film that catches the current like a sail. It sails off, using its foot like a rudder. This explains not only why it spreads so rapidly down rivers, but how the clam could spread from one body of water to another during floods. The Asian clam’s ability to sail is a clever design. So, too, is the balance of nature which prevents creatures from over-populating. Unfortunately, the Asian clam in the United States has few enemies to keep it under control. If evolution were true, such lack of balance would be the rule in nature. But balance exists, keeping each creature fed but not over-populated in their natural settings, and is another witness to our Magnificent Creator God! |
2/18/2025
| Amoeba Society… |
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| It’s not exactly a plant, but it’s not completely an animal either. It crawls like an animal and then grows fruits and sows seed like a plant on colorful stalks. Sometimes it acts like a single-celled creature with a refined social order. And sometimes all those single living cells fuse into one giant organism. Scientists aren’t sure whether the strange and fascinating form of life which goes by the inglorious name cellular slime mold is a plant or actually an animal. In the normally moist forest floor, single amoebas invisible to the naked eye, live in the moisture and food provided by the decaying vegetation. But if the floor of the forest begins to dry or food is scarce, the amoebas congregate. As they come together, they combine into a tiny slug, about a millimeter long and large enough to see. This group now behaves like a little creature and crawls to meet others of its kind who may be found standing on top of each other forming a living “stalk”. More groups join to form a mass of spores at the top that “hatch” into individual amoebas when conditions are again just right for them. There is no simple life form; even cellular slime mold shows the Magnificent Creator God’s touch in its wonderful complexity and amazing way of life. |
2/17/2025
| Traces Of What Man Once Was… |
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| What was man like as originally created – before sin started taking its toll on his mind, body and the world in which he lives? Are there hints around us of the original capabilities of the human brain? Keep in mind that each of us has different strengths and weaknesses. The so-called savant has a low IQ, yet is capable of incredible mental feats. “K,” at the age of 28, has a mental age of 11 and a vocabulary of only 58 words. But he could remember the population of every U.S. city of more than 5,000 people, every county seat in the nation, and the names, locations and number of rooms in over 2,000 hotels. Leslie Lemke is a musical genius. He can play any music after hearing it only once. He once played every note of a 45-minute piece perfectly after hearing it for the first time! We might be reminded that at 14 the young Mozart was taken by his father to hear the famous Miserere. He memorized it note for note, wrote it down and a few days later played it at a concert, causing a sensation. But Mozart was no savant. Our Magnificent Creator God created man in His own image and, whether genius or savant, these are living evidence of man’s continuing regression from a once-noble origin. |
2/16/2025
| Just Another Bird… |
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| The Andean condor is the world’s largest soaring bird. With a wingspan of more than ten feet, condors can soar for up to five hours, covering one hundred miles, without flapping their wings once! In one study, a group of condors spent just one percent of their time aloft flapping their wings. Our magnificent Creator God saw to every need of every creature He ever made!!! |
2/15/2025
| Not Very Showy Or Sweet… |
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| Two groups of tropical vines rely for reproduction on the world’s only known species of pollen-eating butterfly. Neither vine has very showy flowers, nor do their flowers have any scent. However, they don’t need to attract pollinators because the Heliconius butterfly depends on the pollen produced by the vines for its food. So the butterflies don’t go far from their food source. Since the butterfly depends on the pollen, the vines produce many more male flowers than female. This keeps its army of pollinators well fed. Being messy eaters, the butterflies end up with pollen all over them. But what would attract the butterfly to the female flower, which can be up to 20 feet away? Two tricks are used. First, a female flower usually grows close to where a male flower has just withered. Second, the female flower, while producing no pollen, looks just like the male flower to invite the butterfly’s attention. Did you see the intelligence in this arrangement? If only chance were involved, why would the only known species of pollen-eating butterfly be found with the only known vines that rely on their services? This is a very big planet! If there is no design in this arrangement, why should these vines offer female flowers that look like the males so that they will be pollinated? It is so clear that these butterflies were custom-made for these vines, and the vines were made for the butterflies. This is a witness to a Magnificent Creator God Who is personally involved in life on Earth!!! |
2/14/2025
| Plants Focus Light… |
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| In many ways, a plant is like a machine that changes the energy of sunlight into food energy that is needed by the rest of the living world. The energy which runs the plant is light. Now, if you were going to design a better, more efficient plant, how might you do it? Obviously, one way to improve a plant would be to create one that can do its job with less light. But remember, the plant cannot store more energy than it receives. And if the plant was too sensitive to light, a strong dose of sunlight could kill it. The obvious solution is to outfit the plant with tiny lenses which focus even dim light into the chemical centers where photosynthesis takes place. Due to man’s ignorance, modern science has often regarded plants as if they were simple, unsophisticated forms of life. Now scientists have discovered that many plants do indeed have special cells which focus and concentrate the available light into the very centers where it is needed. One plant’s shaded leaves were found to intensify available light by 26 times. And if the light gets so strong that it could damage the leaves, the light is focused onto cells which can absorb the extra light. Plants are much more complex, higher-performance living things than we ever suspected. Plants incorporate designs based on a highly sophisticated knowledge of both chemistry and physics. What a wonderful witness they are to our Magnificent Creator God! |
2/13/2025
| Why Does It Rain… |
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| In grade school we were taught how temperature, dew point and moisture in a cloud could condense around a tiny ice crystal to form a drop of rain. But scientists are not really all that sure how raindrops form. The problem is that the particles of mist in the cloud are all negatively charged. Since their charges are all the same, mist particles don’t attract one another; they repel one another so it should never rain. Some scientists have suggested that radioactive radon gas is responsible for changing this state of affairs in the cloud so that rain is formed. As the radon decays, absorbed by the droplets, it adds a positive charge to them. Because their charges are different than the surrounding negatively charged droplets, they begin to attract each other and soon the droplet has become large enough to fall as a raindrop. Unsure of this theory, other scientists are staying with the ice crystal theory. Modern science often offers its conclusions with a very sure-sounding voice. But the fact is, scientists are unsure of many things, including the simple problem of why it rains. That’s why we shouldn’t get too worried when some scientist claims to have discovered something which he says proves the Bible to be in error. By the intent of our Magnificent Creator God we will never fully understand His Ways or His Thoughts. |
2/12/2025
| A Frog’s Creative Broadcast Solution… |
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| If you live in a large city, especially one that is surrounded by other large cities, you know that the radio dial can become very crowded. To prevent the radio dial from turning into incomprehensible gibberish, radio stations are assigned a frequency on which to operate. This orderly arrangement is also found among many animals. Male birds will often stake out a territory so that their mating call does not interfere with other males of their kind. Frogs too, have mating calls, but often many species of frogs are found in the same swamp. They avoid interfering with each other by each using a unique frequency for their calls. Otherwise, no one’s call could be clearly understood. This orderly arrangement is evidence enough of the Creator’s hand. But there are two South American frogs, often found in the same locations, which use the same frequency. How can they do that? One frog calls only above water while the other frog uses his call only under water. Since the surface of the water is an effective barrier for sound, neither call interferes with the other. Frogs could have never gotten together and agreed on limiting themselves to unique frequencies. What should be clear, especially in our technological age, is that our Magnificent Creator God Himself set up this arrangement for the good of everyone. |
2/11/2025
| Caterpillar’s Diet Choices… |
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| The diamondback caterpillar is the number-one pest of plants in the cabbage family. But scientists are finding that this caterpillar isn’t as guilty of causing low yields in cabbage family plots as has been thought. It turns out that, given a choice between a cabbage field which is doing very well and a field next door which is not doing so well, the diamondback caterpillar will prefer to munch on the less healthy field where yields are already decreased. That might seem like poor judgment on the part of the caterpillar. But scientists have only recently learned what the caterpillar seems to have known all along. The caterpillar’s primary predator is a parasite wasp. But this wasp looks for its meals in healthy cabbage fields. So while the wasp is looking for caterpillars in healthy fields, the caterpillars are next door in the field that isn’t doing quite so well. This means that the solution to caterpillar problems on cabbage family plants is not more insecticide, but healthier plants. The logical question is, how did the caterpillars figure out how to outsmart the wasps? The obvious answer is that our Magnificent Creator God, Who knows all about wasps and caterpillars, built this wisdom into the caterpillars. |
2/10/2025
| Shrimp Kidnaps Chemist… |
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| High drama takes place even among the tiny, almost unnoticeable creatures in the most remote parts of the world. In the frigid waters of Antarctica, for example, there’s a tiny plankton which kidnaps even tinier chemists for its protection. The tiny shrimp-like creature has absolutely no defense of its own. But this creature is not a shrimp without a plan. As it searches about, it may find an even smaller snail-like pteropod that it will fasten to its back. The pteropod makes a chemical which fish hate. Fish which have tried to eat one of the shrimp-like creatures with its chemist backpack have been seen to shake their heads violently and spit the pair out. But the shrimp’s captive backpack slows down his foraging for food. So after several days, the shrimp releases the pteropod unharmed to search for more food and, hopefully soon, another pteropod. It sounds rather silly to suggest that one day, many years ago, one of these tiny plankton noticed that fish never ate pteropods because they produce a chemical defense. Who would suggest that once he told his friends, all the shrimp-like plankton started kidnapping pteropods? This strategy was obviously taught to the plankton by our Magnificent Creator God Himself. |
2/9/2025
| The Way He Wanted To Be Worshiped… |
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| The priests who served at the Temple began their “priesthood” at the age of thirty, having studied for twenty-eight years the priestly duties and responsibilities. The number of Levites serving the Temple in one capacity or another was 38,000, and of these, 24,000 of them were to carry out the work of the house of the Lord. It’s interesting to note that 4,000 of the 38,000 were “to praise the Lord” with instruments which King David had made to be used for “praising the Lord”. It was the “harp” that King David had made and used to “praise the Lord”. He also wrote many of the Psalms by using his harp. Our Magnificent Creator God designed the way He wished to be worshipped leaving out no detail!!! |
2/8/2025
| They Do Not Forget… |
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| Bees depend on a good memory of their surroundings to make the thousands of trips necessary to keep their hive in operation. Each day a single bee must make trips to hundreds of flowers, some as far as a mile from the hive. Scientists have long wondered how the tiny bee can remember what may be dozens of square miles of territory. When a bee finds a good source of nectar, she returns to the hive and does a dance for the other bees. This dance tells them where a new find is located. Researchers have studied this in detail and can now interpret these dances. Researchers from Princeton University tricked a bee into dancing out a location that turned out to be in the middle of a nearby lake. After receiving the message, the other members of the hive simply ignored their fellow worker. She kept dancing, but no one would believe her. Only later, when the dance clearly said that the flowers were on the opposite side of the lake, did the other bees pay attention and check out the flowers. Researchers are now wondering whether bees keep a mental map of their surroundings. How else could they tell when someone gives them a false location? Evolutionary researchers are trying to figure out how such an “evolutionarily simple” creature as the bee could be so intelligent. However, the Bible makes clear that intelligence is not related to evolution. It is the gift of an all-wise and Magnificent Creator God!!! |
2/7/2025
| The Deep Sea Specialist… |
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| The leatherback is the most massive living reptile. The largest individual ever recorded weighed over 2,000 pounds. Unlike other sea turtles, the leatherback spends its entire life in deep water except to come ashore to lay eggs. After being hatched on shore, the leatherback heads for the sea. If leatherbacks are like other sea turtles, the hatchlings won’t return to land for between 20 and 50 years to lay their first eggs. At egg-laying time, the female comes ashore at night, digs a nest in the sand and lays her eggs. When she is finished, she covers them and returns to the water. Ten days later she will return and lay another nest of eggs. She may do this up to 11 times during one season. The average female will lay 120 pounds of eggs in one season. The leatherback’s favorite food is jellyfish. The eating equipment of the leatherback is perfectly designed to eat jellyfish. The sharp, cusp-like fangs on its jaw interlock in just the right way to enable it to eat bites out of jellyfish that are as large as three feet across. Its digestive tract lacks a well-defined stomach. Digestion is best done in the small intestine because jellyfish are mostly water. The leatherback turtle has been referred to by scientists as an ocean specialist. That praises our Magnificent Creator God, whether or not researchers realize it. |
2/6/2025
| Your 20-Watt Brain… |
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| Picture in your mind the sight and sounds of popcorn popping. As you picture the popping becoming more frantic as the popper fills up, do you begin to smell the popcorn? That’s part of the wonder of the brain. The brain can not only store words and ideas, but sights, sounds and even smells. The average person’s memory is able to retain about 100 billion bits of information – the information found in 500 sets of encyclopedias. But, to use computer language, the brain is not only a place where information is stored, it is also an information processor. Yet it only weighs a little less than four pounds and uses about 20 watts of energy. Research has shown that the more you use part of your brain, the larger that part becomes – just like building muscles. And if you don’t use part of your brain, it starts shrinking. Few of us have developed our ability to memorize things to any great extent. But to show you what can be done, in May of 1974 a Burmese man recited, from memory, 16,000 pages from a Buddhist religious text! What are you doing with that marvelous organ, the brain, that your Magnificent Creator God gave to you? How much of His Word have you stored in your memory as a treasure which can never be taken away? |
2/5/2025
| Genetic Music… |
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| The entire creation is woven together on an invisible cloth of mathematics. Since mathematics is also the basis of music, the creation is often more filled with music than we think. In fact, Christians ought to think twice before dismissing as figurative those Bible passages about the whole creation praising its Creator. Sometimes the music of the creation in praise of God is more clearly seen. As one California geneticist was studying the structure of DNA, it struck him that the pattern of bases out of which DNA is built followed a pattern similar to a melody. So he assigned notes to each of the four bases: cytosine for do, adenine for re and me, guanine for fa and sol, thymine for la and te, and cytosine again for do. Upon playing different gene structures according to this orchestration the geneticist found that rather than endless repetition and wandering melodies, each gene has its own musical style and interesting melody. One collagen gene sounds like Bach. Genes which code for cell adhesion molecules sound like Debussy. And a mouse gene for RNA sounds very much like Chopin. As our knowledge of the creation grows, so does the witness to God’s power and wisdom. Truly the whole creation, in its every part, sings the praises of its Magnificent Creator God. Let us join that praise with our voices! |
2/4/2025
| A Busy Protein… |
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| Blood is made up of many components. Red blood cells carry oxygen to all parts of the body. And even though hemoglobin is based on iron, the healthy body, protected by rust inhibitors, doesn’t rust. White cells and other blood components fight infection. It’s difficult to decide which of the components of blood are more amazing in their design. But if awards were given to the various components of blood for the amazing ways in which they work, serum albumin would certainly be in the running. Like one of those gadgets advertised on cable television, serum albumin seems to do more things in the bloodstream than seems possible. Serum albumin, which is made by the liver, regulates the volume of your blood, helping to keep your blood pressure healthy. It also controls your blood chemistry so that all the components are there in the right concentration. It stores molecules and moves them to where they are needed when they are needed. When you take an aspirin or a drug, serum albumin sees to it that the medicine gets to where it is needed. Serum albumin also prevents an enzyme which digests proteins in your digestive tract from digesting the proteins in the rest of your body. Indeed, as the Bible says, much of our physical life happens in our blood. But eternal life is only found in the blood of Jesus Christ, shed on the cross in our place – His death in our place – for the forgiveness of our sins before our Magnificent Creator God. |
2/3/2025
| A Giant Wave Of Water… |
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| What’s the biggest wave you’ve ever seen on a lake or the ocean? Some scientists are now saying that there is evidence that in ancient times a wave over 1,000 feet tall swept over parts of the Earth, creating some of its geological features. While a 1,000 foot wave sounds big, and indeed it is, it’s not unbelievable. The largest wave ever recorded in modern times was a 1,700 foot high wave which struck a remote area of Alaska. A landslide caused the wave which was magnified by the shape of the bay until a wall of water almost one-third of a mile high swept onto the opposing hills, stripping them of forests. Two people drowned, but miraculously fishermen aboard two boats were swept out to sea and lived to tell about the ride of a lifetime. Some geologists have proposed that a similar wave, caused by an underwater landslide, swept across the Hawaiian Islands in the more distant past. As evidence, they point to blankets of gravel, sometimes 25 feet thick, as well as other debris from the ocean which is found scattered across the southern slopes of the Hawaiian islands. According to the Bible, they may both be right. It’s possible that these gravel beds and ocean bottom debris may represent both the violence of the great Flood and the higher sea levels at the end of the Flood which is recorded in Genesis. Once more our Magnificent Creator God planned it all! |
2/2/2025
| Only He Could… |
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| The human body, according to medical science, contains 37 trillion cells that reproduce themselves every seven years. Each one of the 37 trillion cells performs 10,000 different chemical functions, according to the late Dr. Ralph Byron of the City of Hope Cancer Clinic, yet all of them just work together to produce a healthy body. When you get tired, you cannot say, “All right, cell number 843,291, get to work. You are not pulling your share of the load.” All of these cells are linked together by nerve cells tied into a brain containing 100 billion cells (give or take a few). I hesitate to say that these 100 billion nerve cells are tied into a computer‑like device called the human brain since the human brain is far superior to any computer ever created. The eminent neuroscientist Moshe Abeles of Bar-Ilan University in Israel says, “Our ability to understand all the details of even one brain is practically zero.” Only our Magnificent Creator God in all of His brilliance and magnificence could have thought up such a complex piece of creation!!! |
2/1/2025
| There Are No Accidents… |
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| Modern researchers are learning that bacteria are not a simple form of life. Rather, a bacterium is a tremendously complex creature that thinks. Scientists have discovered that bacteria actually have molecule-sized sensors. Some of these sensors act as eyes, while others act as ears. A dozen other proteins have been discovered that receive the information gathered by the bacteria’s “eyes” and “ears.” The collected information is then processed the same way your brain gathers and makes sense of information. Bacteria have specialized senses and a brain. In fact, bacteria are better at sensing some things than you and I are. A bacterium can, for example, sense the difference between two parts and one part in 10,000. This is the same as if you could tell the difference between one jar with 9,999 pennies and another jar with 10,000 pennies! The idea that bacteria are just “simple” forms of life comes from evolution. Growing research is showing that even one-celled creatures are not simple at all. Think of it. Every single-celled bacterium must accomplish, within that one cell, all the tasks we accomplish using the trillions of cells in our bodies. Eating, digestion, metabolism, waste removal, reproduction – and even thinking – all take place within a single cell! There is no such thing as a simple form of life. Science certainly argues against the idea that life began by accident. What science is learning urges us to think about our wise and thoughtful Magnificent Creator God Who made us!!! |
1/31/2025
| Language Studies Tell Us About Ourselves… |
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| Scientists who study language are learning that language is far more complex than they had expected. Some linguists have even suggested that children already have some principles of language embedded in their brains when they are born. For example, how would you turn the statement “The man is here” into a question? Even a child knows to move the word “is” to the beginning of the sentence to make it say, “Is the man here?” But how do you turn the statement, “The man who is tall is here” into a question? A child who followed the principle used in the last example should come up with, “Is the man who tall is here?” But that makes no sense. Nor do children make this mistake. Even children know instinctively to move not the first verb in this case but the main verb to yield “Is the man who is tall here?” This exercise seems simple enough to us. And that’s the point. The rule that governs this seemingly simple solution is difficult to express either in formal linguistic terms or in a computer program. Yet children instinctively solve this problem without ever being clearly taught any rules. Human beings are unique because our Magnificent Creator God chose to make them that way. Saying that apes can learn language because they can learn some simple signs is like saying that humans can fly because they can jump. Linguistics is yet another area of knowledge which confirms what the Bible says about man being specially made and very different from the animals. |
1/30/2025
| Stars That Are Too Fast… |
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| The stars are among the most beautiful and powerful evidences for our Creator. While there are billions of them, no two seem to be identical. Even so, they can be classified into groups. The hottest stars are blue. Our own star, the sun, is an average star. It is classified as a yellow star. Red giants can be more than a hundred million miles in diameter. One of the best known red giants in the night sky is Betelgeuse which is 18,000 times brighter than our sun. Good thing it’s 600 light-years away! Scientists say that in general, the hot blue stars are young. They say that yellow stars, like our sun, are middle-aged and when they get old, they will turn into red giants before exploding. However, changes take billions of years. Their evolutionary scheme for determining the age of stars recently suffered a serious blow. Astronomers report that a star called FG Sagittae went from a blue star to a yellow star in only 36 years! This calls in question their entire evolutionary scheme for dating stars with vast ages. According to the Bible, the entire universe is only about 6,000 years old. And since man brought sin into the world, everything, including the stars, are running down. But we need not worry about our sun swelling up, exploding and killing all life on Earth. The Bible tells us that it will remain until our Lord returns for us. And in the new creation, there will be no need for the sun for our Magnificent Creator God has it all planned and prepared. |
1/29/2025
| Natural Human Language… |
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| According to evolution, human language began to develop when ape-like creatures started to grunt and make other noises at each other. Eventually they agreed on meanings for these sounds and language was born. According to the Bible, language is a gift of our Creator, Who is the source of all language. He made us to have fellowship with Him. He gave us language as an important part of our relationship with God. The evolutionary view of language doesn’t explain why the more ancient languages are the most complex, but the biblical view does. The biblical view also explains why research is showing that we are programmed for language. In one instance, researchers studied the communication of profoundly deaf children with hearing parents, neither of whom had ever been taught sign language. These children had never heard or seen normal language, so they wouldn’t be influenced by their surroundings. Researchers wanted to find out if the children followed a pattern in how they put their communication together. To their surprise, they found that the children all followed the same patterns of sentence structure. The pattern used by the children is one of two patterns into which all the world’s languages can be divided. This research supports the Bible’s claim that we were created with a built-in ability for language by our Magnificent Creator God. |
1/28/2025
| Quick Coal… |
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| How is coal made? How long does it take? Scientists did not know the answers to these questions until the last few years. Despite this lack of knowledge, textbooks have taught for generations that it takes millions of years to make coal. This was another supposed proof that the Bible’s view of history is wrong. In recent years, scientists who believe in creation showed that coal could be formed in much less time. They also showed how the coal beds offered evidence that they were formed rapidly. Unfortunately for science, much of the scientific community ignored them because they were challenging claims made by evolution. However, in the last 60 years, evolutionists in the scientific community have begun to produce their own work that confirms what creationists have been saying all along. For example, scientists at the Argonne National Laboratory heated lignin, the “glue” that holds the fibers in wood together, to 300 degrees (F) in the presence of clay. This temperature is fairly common in geological formations, and coal is found with clay. Even though the lignin was heated only for between two weeks and a year, coal formed. The lignin heated for a year produced high-grade coal. No, millions of years were not necessary. This research further strengthens creationist research claims that the flood at the time of Noah, only about 4,500 years ago, is most likely responsible for most of the world’s coal beds. Again, the false scientific claims that challenged the truth of Scripture have been discredited and our Magnificent Creator God is glorified. |
1/27/2025
| Self-Esteem And Forgiveness… |
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| We hear a lot about “self-esteem” today. The “self-esteem movement,” made up of some religious teachers and psychologists, seeks to make people feel better about themselves without making any reference to sin or the need for forgiveness. Some religious teachers have even said that Christianity should stop talking about sin. Because the movement is associated with psychology, many mistakenly believe that the claims of the “self-esteem movement” have a scientific basis. They do not. Consider the Pharisee who prayed, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men…” From the world’s standpoint, he had no trouble with self-esteem. On the other hand, the world would say that the sinner who prayed, “God be merciful to me, a sinner…” had a serious self-esteem problem. In Jesus’ analysis, however, the Pharisee’s self-righteousness – his “good self-image” – was what kept him from God. It was the sinner’s knowledge of his self-worthlessness, and humble repentance, that brought him the peace of God in a personal relationship with his Maker. From this vantage point, it is easy to see that the cult of self-esteem promotes self-righteousness. Adding Christ to self-esteem still produces self-righteousness. Christians and all people need to be encouraged to focus on Christ! The Christian who lives a daily life of repentance in the full knowledge that Christ has redeemed him, making full atonement and peace with God, will have no “self-esteem problem.” |
1/26/2025
| No Detail Too Small… |
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| How does your nose work? Medical researchers admit that they don’t know. Your nose performs an extremely unlikely job. It senses invisible molecules in the air and turns each molecule into a unique sensation that is sent to the brain. If the fact that molecules floating in the air could be detected was a modern discovery, it would be hailed as the scientific discovery of the century! Medical researchers do know that the roof of your nose cavity contains about 10 million cells that are wired directly into the brain. The nervous system that connects your olfactory cells to your brain is so large and complex that its surface area is several times greater than the surface area of your body. Researchers also know that your sense of smell is important to your sense of taste. For example, that’s why – when you have a head cold – chocolate tastes like a flavorless waxy paste. In this case, what you taste in your mouth has more to do with what is happening in your nose than on your tongue. Many creatures, including birds, can sense odors. Farmers who had difficulty with birds eating as much as 20 percent of the food set out in feed lots discovered that birds hate the smell of grapes. When they laced the feed with grape scent, the birds left it alone, but the cattle didn’t seem to mind. Every detail in the creation of everything that has ever existed was planned and created by our Magnificent Creator God who knew that no detail was too small!!! |
1/25/2025
| Only God Can Make A Bumble Bee Fly… |
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| What keeps the big-bodied bumblebee with those little, stubby wings in the air? Scientists are still trying to learn the secret of bumblebee flight. And while they are learning some astonishing things about the bumblebee, they still don’t know how he does it. Scientists have been testing bumblebees by monitoring their energy use, placing them in wind tunnels, and measuring their oxygen use. No, they haven’t been able to make little oxygen masks for the bees – bumblebees have 24 breathing holes. Scientists have learned that a flying bumblebee flaps its wings 160 times per second and consumes the equivalent of 180 candy bars per hour! A flying bee uses the same amount of oxygen for its body weight as a flying bird or a bat. However, unlike birds, the bumblebee uses no more oxygen when hovering than when flying. This is only one of the discoveries that contradict scientists’ theories. In fact, the director of the latest studies on bumblebee flight admits that they still have no idea how the bumblebee stays in the air. He warns other scientists to stop using the current theories on the subject because they are far too simple. Of course, our Magnificent Creator God knows how to make a bumblebee fly, even if the best of modern science can’t figure it out. This should help us to see that when scientists tell us they have figured out how everything could have been made without a Creator, they don’t know what they’re talking about. In His great magnificence God did it and that’s all there is to it!!! |
1/24/2025
| Stars Are Dying Too Fast… |
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| The Bible tells us that the entire universe is decaying and dying because of the burden of sin. We know from Scripture that the entire heavens and Earth as we know it will someday be destroyed by fire to make way for a new creation. The Bible also indicates that the entire creation is young. These facts were generally accepted until evolution became a fashionable theory. Early evolutionists were quick to realize that people would not believe that a relatively young Earth could produce the life we see today. Chance and a young Earth simply don’t go together. As a result, the Earth and the universe have been declared to be billions of years old. Now conclusions about the rate at which stars are dying can be added to the evidences that contradict an ancient age for the creation. When a star dies, it typically explodes, leaving a shock wave of expanding dust and gas. While stars are dying, no one has ever confirmed the formation of new stars. The fact that stars are evidently dying faster than they are being formed has been a problem for evolutionists. That problem became worse as stars are evidently dying at twice the rate astronomers thought. Astronomers report that they have now found evidence of 24 stars that have died in the last several thousand years in a space of about only one-eighth of our galaxy. What the Bible says about the birth and death of our Magnificent Creator God’s creation is true. The evidences for both are all around us. |
1/23/2025
| Lightening-Like Vision… |
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| Your eyes are quicker than anyone ever thought. For you to see an image, a huge number of chemical and electrical reactions must take place in sequence. Science still does not fully understand all the reactions. Science does know that each set of chemical or electrical reactions must take place in a sequence that leads to the next set of reactions. Obviously, each of these reactions in the chain must take place extremely rapidly for us to see what is happening while it is still happening. Researchers have been studying how quickly light causes the first chemical changes in the eye that finally lead to you seeing an image. This type of chemical change is called a photochemical reaction. Photochemical reactions are the basis of photographic prints. However, the photochemical reactions that result in a printed photograph take place much more slowly than the photochemical reactions in your eye. Now, for the first time, scientists have timed the first photochemical reaction in the eye. They have found that the eye’s photochemistry is among the fastest ever studied. They report that the first reaction takes place in 200 thousandths of one thousandth of a millionth of a second! Clearly the many chemical and electrical operations involved in sight could not have developed by trial and error, step by step, over huge spans of time. Our Magnificent Creator God has given us the ability to see so that we could see His handiwork in the creation. Even the process by which we see clearly shows the excellence of His work! |
1/22/2025
| Can Science Beat Death? |
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| Are we programmed to die? Scientists who have been studying the aging process hold one of two positions. One school of thought says that death takes place when too many of our body’s parts simply wear out from use. The other school says that death is programmed into our genes. As a result, they believe that there are built-in limits to how long we can live. What some scientists have called an “anti-aging gene” makes a chemical, abbreviated as SOD. SOD keeps the body from burning itself up. SOD is among a number of chemicals in the body that take the dangerous products of normal chemical reactions in the body and make them harmless. If not rendered harmless, these chemicals – called free radicals – can damage parts of our cells, including DNA. Through selective breeding, biologists have developed fruit flies that live twice as long as normal. Their studies show that these flies have a gene that makes higher amounts of SOD, and so, seem to have extra protection against aging. There is only one permanent solution to death. Death is the result of sin. Jesus Christ, Who has taken away the reign of sin, promises eternal life to all who come to Him for the forgiveness of sins. He lived the sinless life that we cannot live. Then He went before God with our sins to take our punishment for those sins. Are you sure of the forgiveness of your sins through Jesus Christ? You can be! |
1/21/2025
| An Amazing Australian Frog… |
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| A rare Australian aquatic frog has one of the most amazing systems for rearing its young to be found in the animal kingdom. If any other creature tried the same method, the result would be fatal to its young. The frog is a species of Australian frog so rare that it only has a Latin name. Once the eggs are laid and fertilized, the female swallows the eggs. Sometimes she waits until they begin to develop. However, once the young are in her stomach, she forgoes eating for eight weeks. After eight weeks, the young, developed frogs emerge from her mouth. Why aren’t the young frogs digested in the mother’s stomach? Once the offspring are in her stomach, they begin to release fine threads of chemicals from their mouths. Among these chemicals is one that causes the mother’s stomach to stop manufacturing acid. In other words, the tiny young frogs change the mother’s stomach from an organ for digestion into a comfortable, protected nursery. Scientists were amazed at the frog’s system since no other creature in nature is able to do this. The Bible often notes that when Jesus Christ walked this Earth in bodily form, He frequently amazed people. Sometimes He used a miracle to astonish them. Sometimes it was His teaching that astounded them. Here we see that through His work as our Magnificent Creator God, He can still amaze even the most hardened unbelievers. You can learn more about why He is so amazing in the pages of the Bible. |
1/20/2025
| Another Miracle Of Sight… |
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| The eye is a chemical and technological wonder. It would take thousands of carefully directed mutations for an eyeless creature to develop sight. And since a partial eye doesn’t provide sight, each of these thousands of mutations would offer no advantage to the creature. The fact is, of course, that mutations don’t happen this way. All the true mutations we know about have harmed rather than helped the creature with the mutation. This fact places the thought of thousands of positive mutations in a row outside the realm of scientifically reasonable consideration. In addition, neither living nor known fossil animals show any evidence of gradual development of eyes. Therefore, the most reasonable scientific conclusion is that there is a Creator Who designed and created the eye. The lens of the eye is a marvel of chemistry. It is made up of a concentration of protein molecules inside water-lined cells. When scientists learned this, they were amazed. Protein molecules in water are not transparent, as the lens must be. After more research, they discovered God’s secret. The high concentration of protein molecules in the lens of the eye causes the proteins to pack together something like the molecules of window glass. As a result, the normally opaque protein solution in the lens becomes transparent. The eye does more damage to ideas about origins that leave out God than almost any other feature of the creation because it allows us to see our Magnificent Creator God’s fingerprints all around us! |
1/19/2025
| Start Digging… |
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| Perhaps no type of animal has been used more in biological research than the fruit fly. Certain biological processes such as reproduction or genetic replication are similar in most eukaryote organisms, so observing these in fruit flies might, unlikely as it may seem, have implications for how the processes work in humans. The great volume of academic research which uses the fruit fly as the subject can be seen by the fact that, to date, eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded to work involving drosophila. There are several reasons why fruit flies make useful research subjects. From the moment a fruit fly egg has been laid to the moment the adult dies is, on average, about 50 days. The adult flies can mate and lay eggs after just 10 days. This means that three generations can have been studied in a month. A year would yield 36 generations. The effects of inherited genetic problems or defects can, therefore, be analyzed within months, as can the probabilities of genetic problems being inherited by future generations. Our Magnificent Creator God has surely designed all that there is for our benefit to help us study and improve our lives in this world. God expects us to use His blessings to help ourselves and to not expect Him to do everything for us. We may need a hole in the ground but God might bless us with a shovel and wisdom to know how to dig!!! |
1/18/2025
| No Matter Where It Lives… |
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| Even though many frogs live much of their lives out of the water, they need water to reproduce. This can be a problem since some frogs live in trees and some even live in the desert! For a tree frog, the trip from the treetops to a nearby pool is a long and dangerous journey. However, the Creator cares about all of His creatures. The leaves of the bromeliad that grows in the branches of many trees in the tropical forest form a private pool far above the ground. As a result, mama frog can raise her young without ever leaving the treetops! The desert would seem to offer an even greater challenge for a frog. However, since it pleased the Creator to place frogs in the desert – maybe to challenge the evolutionists – He has also provided for their needs. It may rain only once every two years in the deserts of central Australia. When it does rain, the water-holding frogs emerge from their underground hideaways to lay their eggs in the puddles. Before the puddles disappear, not only do the eggs hatch, but the young grow and develop into frogs that are able to store water until the next rain. As the desert again takes over, the frogs dig themselves back into the ground and go into suspended animation until the next rains come. A year or two later, the new generation will emerge after the next rain to raise their young. Neither chance nor the smartest frog in the world could design or create these abilities. Only a wise Creator could. And if the Creator has provided this much care for frogs, just think of how much more He cares about you and me in our everyday lives! What a Magnificent Creator God He is!!! |
1/17/2025
| Flipperpithicus… |
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| Creation Scientists have often complained that evolutionists seem unscientifically eager to turn any ancient fossil into proof of human evolution. In the past, bones from pigs, monkeys, alligators, horses and even an elephant have been “reconstructed” into missing links between humans and ape-like creatures. While these examples are all old, evolutionists continue to be over-enthusiastic about using animal bones to make human-like creatures. A more recent example caused the respected magazine, Science News, to note that even some evolutionists have begun to discuss “anthropologists’ over-zealous pursuit of human ancestry.” In 1979, a bone discovered in northern Africa was described as a hominoid clavicle. In plain English, the bone was said to be the collarbone of a creature that was an ape becoming man. Its discoverer said that the bone indicated that its owner had possibly even walked upright, like modern humans. As in most of these claims, its discoverer said that it was the oldest evidence yet for the evolution of modern man. Others studied the fossil bone over the next few years. They came to the conclusion that it was, in fact, the rib bone from a Pacific white-sided dolphin. One scientist jokingly nicknamed the creature “flipperpithicus” – meaning the dolphin ape. We need to take care that we don’t become over-impressed by the conclusions of scientists with lots of letters behind their names. When it comes to supporting evolution, many scientists are driven more by their desire to prove evolution than by any facts. Once more a perfect case is made for our Magnificent Creator God! |
1/16/2025
| Your Fail-Safe Heart… |
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| Your heart will beat some 100,000 times today. That’s over 36 million heartbeats a year and over 2.5 billion times in a 70-year lifespan. A healthy heart ticks along, producing beat after beat, whether we are awake or asleep. If we become more active, the heart increases its beating to meet the increasing needs of the rest of our body. Doctors tell us that it’s amazing how few of these beats are faulty. They say that it’s perfectly normal for even a healthy heart to produce an occasional irregular heartbeat. Sometimes an irregular heartbeat is noticeable, but most often it’s not. Doctors say that when your heart seems to skip a beat, it has really only beat prematurely. The premature beat leaves a pause before the next regular beat, making it feel as if your heart skipped a beat. The clockwork precision of the heart’s continuing beats is controlled by a built-in pacemaker. The pacemaker, called the sinus node, is a group of cells in the heart’s upper right chamber. However, research has shown that every cell in the heart is able to send the electrical signal needed to produce a heartbeat if the sinus node fails. Using highly complex computer models, medical researchers have only begun to understand within the past few years, the electrical action within the heart. The human heart is much more than a pump, as once believed. It is also a computer and regulator. Every beat of this wondrously designed biological machine glorifies the Magnificent Creator God Who made it! |
1/15/2025
| God’s Agriculture and the Stink Bug… |
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| The world originally created by God was perfect in every respect. However, among the consequences of sin mentioned in Genesis 3 are the thorns and thistles, which make man’s agriculture more difficult. We could certainly classify insect pests in the same category as noxious weeds. However, God did not leave us without earthly solutions to these problems. Modern agriculture has relied largely on powerful herbicides and insecticides to protect crops from pests. At the same time, God’s design of nature has always included more natural, less toxic ways of controlling pests. Modern science is learning how to use the same methods God uses to control insects. The spined soldier bug, also known as the stink bug, is one of God’s natural controllers of insect pests. The stink bug eats over a hundred different kinds of insect pests, including some of the worst, such as the cotton bollworm and the gypsy moth. Researchers have found that spraying a crop with natural attractant, produced by the stink bug, serves as a call to dinner. Stink bugs naturally move in and begin devouring harmful pests without damaging the crop. Since the stink bug attractant is a naturally produced chemical, it does no harm in nature before it breaks down. Our Magnificent Creator God’s solutions to problems are always better than ours. You can learn more about His solutions to your problems, including the problem of sin, in the Bible. |
1/14/2025
| The Wrong Pattern… |
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| Does the belief in evolution adversely affect the medical and the social sciences? It sure does. One example of evolution’s negative effect in helping people is a technique called patterning. Patterning is a common treatment for children with brain damage and language disorders. The theory behind patterning says that the human nervous system must develop by passing through all its earlier evolutionary stages before it works properly. As a result, children with these problems are put through a series of movement exercises that are supposed to mimic the evolutionary development of the nervous system. First the child crawls, then creeps, and finally is supposed to walk around like an ape. This is supposed to help the brain get organized by re-patterning its evolutionary development. Does it work? There’s no reason for it to work if evolution never took place. In the early 1980s, American pediatricians did an in-depth study of patterning. They said that they could find no evidence that patterning helps the child at all. They also warned that patterning could even be harmful to children because the program places great demands on the children and their families. It can create unnecessary stress in families and lead to neglect. Scripture tells us that those who reject our Magnificent Creator God sink into ever deeper levels of ignorance, all the while claiming that they are wise. Here’s an example of where modern science has illustrated this biblical truth. |
1/13/2025
| And they all came… |
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| I’m sure everyone has noticed that whenever one of those interesting nature programs on television show an especially clever design in nature, the program is always quick to explain how this came about by evolution. One good example is the unusual hearing ability of the moth. Night flying moths have hearing organs that are able to hear the ultrasonic signals used by bats. The bats use these signals to navigate and to find food, which includes the moths. However, evolutionists never want anyone to think about a Creator Who might have given the moths the ability to hear one of their main predators. So they quickly explained that as moths evolved, they developed the ability to hear the bats in response to bat attacks. Several years ago, a fossilized egg from a night flying moth was discovered. Evolutionists said that the egg was half again as old as any evidence of the first bat. Yet the egg clearly belongs to a moth species that can hear bats. Evolutionary scientists said that this discovery was most puzzling. They said that evolution would have no reason to evolve this species of moth before bats existed. Those of us who believe the Word of our Magnificent Creator God in the Bible realize that all living things were made within a few days of each other. We see around us how each was designed in a way that keeps in mind the design found in other creatures. Moths have always been moths, and bats have always been bats. There’s nothing puzzling about it at all. |
1/12/2025
| And they all came… |
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| “And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” Genesis 2:19 It surely wasn’t possible, we are often told, for Adam to have given names to all the millions of species of animals that exist on earth in the space of one day. Obviously, they tell us, this means that the Bible is wrong. In fact, the activity was nowhere near as arduous as this accusation suggests. The number of animals would be far less than the estimated 2 million species. Adam did not have to go looking for these animals. God brought them to him. God brought three classes of animals to Adam – livestock, birds of the heavens, and beasts of the field. All of these are vertebrates, whereas 98% of all species are invertebrates. Of the remaining 2% – or 40,000 species – many have developed from others (note: developed, not evolved) by the process of speciation. It is likely that the creatures were all descended from just a couple of thousand baramins, or created kinds. It would not be that difficult for Adam to assign a name to each of the animals that paraded before him, especially as he was created perfect, and unlikely to get tired. Suppose he took five seconds to name an animal. He could have named 2,000 animals in 2¾ hours. You might think such a task would be boring, but it was not onerous and would easily fit with all the other activities occurring on that sixth day of God’s creation, including our Magnificent Creator God making the land animals and making Eve from Adam. |
1/11/2025
| The End… |
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| It has long been assumed that the Siberian woolly rhinoceros died out because of hunting by people. Evolutionists have, in the past, assumed that the extinction of the woolly rhino coincided with the migration of humans to Siberia. Now a new theory has emerged, which was headlined on the Science Daily website as “Ancient genomes suggest woolly rhinos went extinct due to climate change”. Analyses of the genetic make-up of woolly rhinos have been compared with alleged evolutionary dates. As creationists, we do not accept such dates because the Bible makes it clear that the world was created about 6,000 years ago, while the Flood occurred about 4,400 years ago. However, we do agree with the article that woolly rhinos had a common ancestor with the extant five species of rhinoceros. This is not evolution; as we have frequently explained, God made animals according to their kind [baramin] so that, after the Flood, they could cope with changing environmental conditions, adapting by a process called speciation. Scientists now suggest that the end of the Ice Age could have created conditions with which the highly cold-adapted woolly rhino would not have been able to cope. The world would have gone through the Ice Age in the centuries immediately following the Flood as water vapor from warm oceans condensed in a cold atmosphere. As is always the case, good modern scientific research on issues, like the extinction of the woolly rhino, is consistent with the biblical account of the world from our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
1/10/2025
| “Cave Men” or Men… |
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| There are numerous sites where evidence that people once lived in caves has been studied. It’s an ancient idea that the first primitive human beings, on their way from becoming apes to humans, lived in caves. Greek and Roman evolutionists wrote about it over 2,000 years ago. However, we need to ask whether people who lived in caves are truly less human than we are today. When we think of the term “cavemen”, we usually think of creatures that are less than human. Evolutionary belief has had its effect even on minds that accept the truth of the Bible’s account of creation. Several years ago, a group of so-called “primitive” cave people – called the Tasaday – were reportedly discovered in the Philippines. Dozens of scientific papers and articles were written about them, showing how they supposedly represented ancient man. Then it was discovered that the entire tribe was a hoax. Later, Indonesian Christians made contact with another cave-dwelling people. These people, the Basap, live in a remote area of Indonesia. The Christians presented the gospel to the chief and left. Nine months later, they returned to find the fruit of their labors. One hundred members of the tribe said that they believed that Christ is their Savior. Baptisms were carried out with the chief’s blessing. The lesson is that from the very first individual, human beings have been fully and completely human. Each has been a creation of God, loved and sought by Him. And our Magnificent Creator God has a special place in His heart for those we often consider the very least among us. |
1/9/2025
| Benefits from rejecting evolution… |
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| He lived in the last half of the nineteenth century. He was a strong believer in our Magnificent Creator God, and that made him very unpopular in some circles. As he pursued his scientific studies in Paris, he became a thorn in the side of his contemporaries, the followers of Charles Darwin. They argued that life arose spontaneously long ago from non-living material, but Louis Pasteur believed that life was created by God. He decided to apply his scientific expertise to Darwin’s claims. His careful experiments, conducted 150 years ago, showed that life could only come from pre-existing life. He effectively put out of business the claim that life could arise from non-living chemicals. His research also showed that fermentation was caused by tiny yeast cells. This led him to discover that many diseases were caused by living organisms too small to see. As a result of his scientific work disproving important evolutionary claims, Louis Pasteur developed vaccines to combat diseases like rabies, diphtheria and anthrax. Today, millions of people enjoy better health and safer food because Pasteur sought to show that true science does not disprove the Bible. We can thank God that Pasteur did not sit back and quietly accept the atheistic, materialistic claims of his day. He once commented that the more he learned in science, the simpler his faith in the plain words of Holy Scripture became. |
1/8/2025
| Unique… |
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| Every second, our sun casts energy equaling over four-and-a-half million horsepower on every square mile of earth. Yet the earth receives less than one-tenth of one percent of the sun’s energy. Our galaxy contains 100 billion stars, of which our sun is only about average. Truly God’s power is so great that we cannot even measure the relatively small amount of power He has used to energize the cosmos! This makes many people ask, “How can such a great God care about me?” Yet He does, and He has shown us that He does. He has written a unique genetic code that describes you and only you. If your unique code would be written out as information in the average book today, it would take over a million pages to describe you. In all the universe, there is only one you! Why has He gone to all this work just for you? Because He wanted to get to know you, love you and have a relationship with you. This is why God sent His only Son into our world. That Son of God, Jesus Christ, lived a life that was perfectly pleasing to God. In contrast, we have all gone our own way and have almost ruined God’s creation. But God’s Son died on the cross for us so that we might be forgiven. God accepted this sacrifice on our behalf, and this was proven by Christ’s resurrection from the dead. You can learn more about our Magnificent Creator God’s special love for the unique person you are in the Bible. |
1/7/2025
| The Amazing Mexican Free-tailed Bat… |
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| The largest community of mammals in one space spends the summer in Bracken Cave, outside San Antonio, Texas. Here, 20 million female Mexican free-tailed bats raise their 20 million pups, gulping down 150 tons of insects every night! The bats winter in Mexico and mate in the spring. Then, for some reason unknown to scientists, the females head to Texas. While they make the difficult migration, the females store the male sperm in suspended animation. Once settled in at Bracken Cave, they become pregnant. Four months later, each has a single pup. Although the cave’s one-room nursery has 20 million noisy pups, a mother bat can find her own youngster in as little as 12 seconds! At night, each female leaves the cave and flies as far as 60 miles, consuming as much as her total body weight in insects. After about five hours, she returns to the cave to nurse her pup. The bat’s normal diet does not provide enough fat for the mother bat’s rich milk. But the nursing period also falls at the same time that an ant, that is a rich source of fat, grows wings. These flying ants are available, in the bats’ airspace, at just the right time! Someone has remarked that our Magnificent Creator God must like bats a lot. He made more species of bats than any other mammal. And He has designed nature to provide for all the bats’ needs. |
1/6/2025
| Baby Talk… |
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| The evidence continues to mount that human beings, unlike any other creature on earth, are born with language ability. We even begin learning the unique characteristics of our own languages at a young age. Research shows that children as young as two months old have already learned to distinguish characteristic vowel and consonant sounds in whatever language those around the children regularly speak. Researchers rewarded infants who responded with a head turn in the direction of the test sound. Vowel and consonant sounds distinctive to English and Swedish were used. American infants responded to English sounds two-thirds of the time. Swedish infants ignored these sounds as gibberish. Swedish infants responded to the Swedish test sounds two-thirds of the time. American infants ignored these as gibberish. Researchers say that this shows that the children have already begun classifying the elements of language that they hear every day. This is the first step in organizing these sounds into meaningful words. Other research shows that by six months of age infants already understand the basic emotional tones of language. Learning to speak takes longer. The human ability to learn language appears to be pre-programmed into the infant brain. Our Magnificent Creator God created human beings for a relationship with Himself. Because He loves even the least among us, He gave infants built-in language skills. He couldn’t wait to begin communicating with each new human being born into the world! |
1/5/2025
| Until the end of the world… |
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| A study by the University of Lincoln in England suggested that “global sea level rise of at least 10 centimetres by the end of the 21st century if global warming trends continue”. Their conclusions, they report, are based on 30 years of scientific data in Greenland, looking at the melting of the glaciers on that large ice-covered island. The Greenland ice sheet, say the researchers, could potentially raise the entire world’s sea level by seven meters (about 23 feet). One is reminded of a recent documentary by a well-known politician turned environmental campaigner, which started with film of rapidly running water plunging through holes in the ice of Greenland’s glaciers. The unspoken implication was that this was caused by global warming. In fact, there has been no global warming trend over the last 30 years. Global temperatures rose rapidly in the ‘90s, followed by cooling from 2000 to 2009, with temperatures only picking up again in the last few years. So the idea that the next 80 years of the 21st century will see steady temperature increases is not based on evidence. As is so often the case, we need to recall that God has promised there will be no catastrophic climate change again until the end of the world. Our Magnificent Creator God has plans for every need we will ever have!!! |
1/4/2025
| Such a long flight… |
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| The Willow Warbler is a fascinating little bird. It weighs less than half an ounce and measures about four inches from its beak to the tip of its tail. It likes open woodland with small trees and is particularly happy in areas managed by humans, such as coppices and young plantations. An attractive little bird, it is greenish-brown from above, with a yellowish underside. Willow Warblers are part of the Leaf Warbler, or Phylloscopus baramin (or created kind). There are 77 species in this baramin, but we are interested here in the species Phylloscopus trochilu, especially the subspecies Phylloscopus trochilus yakutensi. This remarkable little bird has the most incredible migratory behavior, traveling about 7,500 miles. Between April and August, the birds live and breed in eastern Siberia. But as the breeding season ends, the birds begin their long, exhausting flight to sub Saharan Africa, where they will spend the winter, from October through March. Then they begin the 7,500-mile journey back to Siberia. That’s 15,000 miles per year! The reason why these warblers migrate seems clear. They do not like the extremes of temperatures in either of their homes. But a more interesting question is: How do they know where to migrate? Scientists have speculated that migratory birds are able to sense the Earth’s magnetic field. But those scientists who believe in evolution have to explain how the birds used trial and error to find their routes. A more logical explanation is that our Magnificent Creator God designed them to achieve this remarkable feat!!! |
1/3/2025
| Deception of the Bola… |
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| The bola spider is said to have evolved its amazing abilities all by itself. Why, then, is it smarter and why does it have more abilities than mankind? The bola spider’s favorite food is moths, but it doesn’t weave a web. The bola spider produces the same scent produced by a female moth. Male moths are attracted to this scent, and the spider waits for the inevitable appearance of a male moth. As the male moth nears, the bola senses the vibrations from its wings. At just the right moment, the spider casts out its bola. The bola, after which the spider is named, is a special spider-silk thread with a sticky glob on the end. Scientists who have studied this glue-glob say that modern chemistry could not equal it. The silken line is so elastic that it can stretch up to six times its original length. This allows the spider to conserve its energy while the moth struggles. Once reeled in, the bola wraps the moth in silk for storage until it’s hungry. The bola’s method works so well that it is not unusual for one spider to catch up to eight moths a night. Normally, a species is unable to detect the mating scents of other species. How could the bola spider devise its plan? Once the plan was invented, how could the spider learn how to duplicate the female moth’s chemistry? How could the bola spider be more clever than our best chemists? Of course, the only answer to these questions is that the bola spider was designed and created by our Magnificent Creator God, Who invented chemistry in the first place. |
1/2/2025
| Strange but not unexpected behavior… |
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| There are between 10,000 and 15,000 species of orchids. While you surely are not familiar with all of them, it sounds strange to talk about orchid behavior. This huge variety of orchids offers a multitude of different flower shapes, colors and sizes. Each unique shape, color and size is perfectly suited to the bees, butterflies, bats, moths, flies and birds that are involved in that orchid’s pollination. Those orchids that use birds as pollinators have no scent. Instead, they offer the brightest of colors, appealing to the birds’ strongest sense. Evolutionists call this “co-evolution.” However, giving it a name doesn’t explain it. How did these orchids know that the bird’s strongest sense is sight? And how were these orchids able to perform genetic recombination on themselves so that they could develop their bright colors? No, giving something a scientific-sounding name doesn’t make naturalistic claims any more scientific. Or consider the bee orchid. It offers a flower that looks like a female bee. The purpose here is to attract male bees to a position that will load them with pollen. How can it be scientific to suggest that a plant purposely restructured itself to fool bees into pollinating it? Our Magnificent Creator God has purposely made it impossible to explain the creation without Him. He did this not simply so that we would see that He is real. His purpose is much greater. God seeks a personal relationship with you and has made that possible through the saving work of His Son, Jesus Christ, for us. It is to Christ that He would ultimately draw our attention. |
1/1/2025
| Where Did Learning Come From…. |
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| It appears that all animals have the ability to learn. This is because they need information about their surroundings that will help them predict other things about their surroundings. For example, honeybees know which types of flowers offer pollen at any given time. They don’t waste their time checking out flowers that have nothing to offer. Scientists have been amazed at how a wide range of animals show two different types of learning. Even a garden slug can learn to avoid its favorite food through simple conditioning. However, many animals also learn from changes in their environment. Animals learn to expect different results if their schedule is changed, for example. Birds learn the song their species sings by hearing their elders sing. They also learn regional variants of their species’ songs. Scientists who believe in evolution are struggling to explain how the ability to learn could have evolved. They are struck by the fact that learning follows the same principles in pigeons, bees and slugs. At the same time, they admit that they don’t know how learning works. We need to ask: How could they know learning evolved if they don’t even know how it works? The fact that they are sure the ability to learn could have evolved, even though they don’t know how, shows that evolution is a faith and not science. We learn a better faith when we go to the Book that was written by the Author of all learning. The Bible tells us about His will and explains that He offers us the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. |
12/31/2024
| Seismic Frogs… |
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| The male white-lipped frog of Puerto Rico communicates using more than a variety of sounds. The frog also sends seismic signals through the ground. Researchers studying the frog have learned that it is more sensitive to seismic signals than any other creature. The male white-lipped frog communicates using chirps, chuckles and thumps on the ground. The male begins to establish his territory by sending out a rapid stream of chirps. When he is sitting on the mud, each chirp begins with a thud. The thud is a thump on the ground that is strong enough to travel for some distance. It’s thought that he does this by inflating his throat pouch so rapidly that it thumps on the ground, setting up a seismic wave. The thump is an important part of the frog’s territorial strategy. While his chirps tell other males his direction, they don’t let the others know how far away he is. However, the seismic wave travels through the ground at a different speed than the chirp travels through the air. This difference allows the other males to know both the distance and direction of the male by the different times at which they hear the thump and the chirp. The other males respond to the chirps and thumps with longer sounds called chuckles. Who taught the frog this complicated, but precise system? Who taught him how to measure distance by using both airborne and seismic waves? Only our wise Magnificent Creator God could have done this. |
12/30/2024
| How Old Are Fossils… |
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| How long does it take to make a fossil? Would you believe that when the correct natural conditions are duplicated in the laboratory, the process only takes a few days to get underway? Anything that was once alive can become a fossil. Bone, hair, feathers and even cloth can fossilize. However, the conditions must be just right, or the candidate simply decays. This is what happens to most things that were once alive. To become fossilized, the candidate for fossilization has to be protected from air and other things that could cause decay. Then the original once-living molecules are replaced by molecules of silica before they can decay. We are often given the idea that it takes millions of years for something to be fossilized. Scientists who believe in creation have never accepted that fact because they do not believe that the world is that old. Research into how things fossilize shows that believers in a young creation were right. For example, scientists made a discovery while they were studying fossilized silk fabric from a human burial site. They discovered if copper was buried with the person, the copper atoms would be washed into the silk by water and begin to deposit within the fiber. The result was a fossil that even showed the detail of the original threads in the cloth. In lab tests, researchers found that it only takes a few days for a considerable amount of copper to deposit in the silk. The truth is, you could be older than a fossil! All things are the way they are because our Magnificent Creator God had a plan! |
12/29/2024
| Just an ant… |
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| Honeydew is one of the favorite foods of ants. There are a number of insects, including thorn bugs and aphids, who consume so much honeydew that they cannot digest it all. These insects are designed so that ants can milk them for the excess honeydew, just the way a farmer obtains milk from a cow. Many species of ants will milk the honeydew-collecting insect by stroking its abdomen with its antennae. The tree hopper actually slows its secretion of excess honeydew to the milking ant so that the ant may drink his honeydew “fresh from the cow” so to speak. Some ants construct clay pens and shelters in which they enclose certain species of aphids, just as a farmer keeps his herd. Like the farmer, the ants move the aphids to better honeydew feeding sites when necessary. They also care for the aphid eggs during the winter. Herding ants are even better able to protect a young tree hopper than its parents. It is not unusual for a tree hopper parent to turn her young over to herding ants because they can do more for the young insect than she can. Such complex relationships between creatures points to a God who is both a Magnificent Creator God and Teacher—even to insects!!! |
12/28/2024
| Just another mother… |
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| You might not think of the crocodile as a particularly loving creature. In reality, the crocodile is among the most gentle and loving of parents. Mama crocodile lays between 40 and 80 eggs in a large nest. For the 90 days they take to hatch, she will keep close watch over them, even foregoing food so as not to leave the nest unattended. Even the father stays close to guard the eggs that are a delicacy to many animals. At the end of this three-month watch the babies begin to chirp from within their eggs. Before long there may be dozens of babies chirping from the nest of buried eggs. This brings the mother who carefully uncovers the eggs, one by one. The young are only nine inches long and weigh just four ounces. Yet the gentle and loving mother picks up each one and with a flip of her head places them in a special pouch in her mouth. When some of the young have trouble breaking out of their shell, mama picks up the eggs and delicately works the eggs inside her mouth with her tongue, freeing the imprisoned baby. Once collected, all the young are taken to a special protected nursery where they will be just as carefully tended for months. Most amazing is that, should the mother not be present to tend to the hatchling chores, the father offers the hatchlings the very same help and care! Our Magnificent Creator God loves even the crocodile! And his acceptance of you and me, because of what Jesus Christ has done for us, is an even greater wonder than the loving crocodile! |
12/27/2024
| Ancient Eye Surgery… |
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| Man has always treasured his ability to see. And since man was created as a highly intelligent creature, rather than a simple primitive, it seems that man has practiced eye surgery as far back as we have records. Eye surgery is no more a modern development than malpractice penalties. Ancient Egyptian eye doctors applied various kinds of salves to the eye. Some of their stranger salves contained mud from the Nile river and crocodile dung. Before you laugh, you should know that modern eye specialists admit that these strange ingredients may have contained effective antibodies to relieve infections. Eye surgeons were busy in India six or eight centuries before the birth of Christ. A surgeon named Susruta performed a surgery in which he pushed an opaque lens that sits behind the pupil of the eye into the interior of the eyeball; there, the lens would no longer block vision. The oldest record of eye surgery, however, dates to 4,000 years ago. The Code of Hammurabi said that the surgeon who saved a man’s eye was to be paid the same fee that was given to a doctor who saved a man’s life. On the other hand, if the surgeon caused the eye to be lost, the law required the surgeon’s fingers to be cut off. There were lesser penalties if the patient was merely a slave. History records that man has always been an intelligent creature with a surprising amount of knowledge. Although sometimes some has been lost, knowledge is a gift from our Magnificent Creator God. |
12/26/2024
| Human Magnets… |
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| Do you know that you have something in your head besides bone, soft tissue and blood? You have rocks in your head! Well, sort of, anyway. Scientists recently announced that they have discovered that the human brain is laced with tiny magnetic particles made of magnetite. Magnetite is the same mineral that occurs naturally in lodestones. While the particles are distributed throughout the brain, they seem to be more concentrated in the membrane that encloses the brain. Scientists said that they had not seen the particles before because they are so tiny. The smallest are about a millionth of an inch in diameter, while the largest are a hundred-thousandth of an inch in diameter. Added together, all the particles in the average brain amount to only one millionth of an ounce. The particles are identical to those found in many bacteria, pigeons, salmon and whales. The particles help those creatures navigate, using the earth’s magnetic field. Scientists are not prepared to say that they serve the same purpose in humans. Instead, they continue to study the particles to learn what purpose they serve. At the time our Magnificent Creator God made everything, the earth’s magnetic field was several times stronger than it is today. When Christ walked this earth, the magnetic field was twice as strong as it is today. Perhaps in that stronger magnetic field, human beings were easily able to keep track of their direction, something few people can do today. |
12/25/2024
| The Giant Helper… |
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| Nearly everyone has heard of the giant fungus in Michigan’s Iron County, near the Wisconsin border. The 38-acre fungus weighs as much as a blue whale. Scientists estimate that it is about 1,500 years old, based on its current rate of growth. Strange life forms such as this fungus bring out the whimsy in some people. A California health food store suggested that eating some of the fungus might help people live longer. Since we at Creation Moments can’t resist living things that can be regarded as “strange,” the fungus is a natural for us. We thought that you might like to know, however, more about the Armillarias fungus and its unique life. Like most fungi, Armillarias is made up of tiny tendrils growing almost invisibly underground. The honey mushrooms that sprout above ground are merely the fruiting bodies of the organism. Armillarias are commonly found in hardwood forests throughout North America. The species is territorial, which means that no two individuals will share the same area. The fungus serves a crucial purpose in the forest ecology. It breaks down dead wood for reuse by other plants. In the process, it makes carbon dioxide for the forest plants to turn into oxygen. Without the Armillarias, the forest would eventually die, choked with dead wood. Our Magnificent Creator God has designed the Armillarias to be a primary recycler of waste wood in the forest. |
12/24/2024
| The Dynamic Rainforest… |
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| The environmental movement has rightfully shown concern about the South American rainforest. While it is true that the entire rainforest system is a delicately balanced harmony of thousands of subsystems, it is generally believed that it has taken millions of years to evolve. After all, each living thing forms part of the environment for other living things so that adaptation is a dynamic process seemingly taking much longer than might be imagined. This is why the rainforest is spoken of as being a fragile ecosystem. Anthropologist Anna Roosevelt of the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, has found, in Brazil, the oldest evidence of pottery in the Americas. The site where the pottery was found supported a large and industrious population. Roosevelt points out that the descendants of these ancient peoples conquered large parts of South and Central America. They cleared rainforests, built cities and spread their culture and industry. After the invasion of the Europeans in the 1500s, these cultures died out and the rainforests again took over. Thus, today’s rainforests are likely only a few hundred years old, meaning that it has not taken millions of years of adaptation. While we are not advocating greedy exploitation of the rainforest, it would seem from previous history that the most fragile element of the ecosystem is not the plants and animals but the indigenous human populations. And once more we realize that all of this is just a small part of our Magnificent Creator God’s Plan. |
12/23/2024
| Clouds of Beauty… |
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| The painted lady butterfly gets its name from the beautiful design in orange, black and white on its wings, which average about two and a half inches in full span. Every year, millions of these little creatures are seen in full migration. The painted lady is the most widespread of all species of butterfly. It is found in Asia, Africa and South America. The species familiar to North Americans migrates from Mexico all the way to Canada. This is a one-way trip because the female butterfly lays her eggs in Mexico, then migrates to Canada, where she eventually dies. In some way the following year, each newly hatched butterfly in Mexico knows exactly when and where to migrate, but this is one of the great mysteries of migration. Some years there are more painted lady butterflies than others, and Dennis Murphy, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University, has pointed out that the migrating population can be a thousand times greater in an exceptional year compared to normal years. Dr. Murphy believes that these unusually large populations are the result of drought conditions that also produce a greater crop of weedy thistles. The painted lady butterflies live on these thistles and never threaten any other crop. God’s design of the painted lady butterfly bears witness to His work as an artistic Magnificent Creator God who paints the landscape for thousands of miles with these beautiful creatures and a logical Creator who maintains the balance of nature. |
12/22/2024
| How many could there be…. |
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| How many ants are there in the world? No one has actually counted them all or asked them to fill out little ant census forms. However, scientists have estimated that there are about 10 million billion ants in the world, waiting for you to have a picnic. That’s more ants than there are mammals, reptiles, birds, and amphibians combined. God made so many ants because ants are important housekeepers for the earth. Ants, not earthworms, turn most of the world’s soil, drain it, and enrich it. Ants dispose of 90% of the corpses of small dead animals. As the world’s gardeners, ants spread and plant more seeds than any other creature. Like bees, ants have a sophisticated society, which includes workers, nurses, soldiers, hunters, farmers, and even builders. Each of these different classes have specialized organs for their work. The soldier ants of one species are walking bombs. They are loaded with poison and literally explode when under attack, spraying poison on their enemies. Army ants in Central and South America march across the countryside in a line that can be nearly 50 feet long. The solid column sweeps along, flushing out even small animals, as it looks for food. The huge variety of living things around us represents more than simply variety. That variety carefully includes creatures to do every job that needs to be done to maintain life on earth. This, in itself, is a witness to both the creativity and wisdom of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
12/21/2024
| And The Lesson Is… |
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| If your measuring stick is inaccurate, you could end up with too much wallpaper or too little. If your map tells you that your destination is 200 miles away when it’s really only 50 miles away, you might drive right past it. If your map of the universe is inaccurate and stars are a lot closer than you expect, you will arrive at the wrong age for the universe. Most science textbooks solemnly teach that the universe is 10 to 20 billion years old. A distant galaxy in the Virgo cluster is one of the primary measuring sticks used by astronomers to figure out the distance of other objects in space. Ultimately these distances are used to compute the age of the universe. Recently, though, astronomers were finally able to see individual stars in this distant cluster. Using a new, high-resolution camera, astronomers saw stars that are very much like stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. Since they know how bright these stars are, they were able to check their computations on how far away the measuring-stick galaxy is. Instead of the expected 100 million light-years, their new figures told them that the galaxy was only 50 million light-years away. This means that the universe might only be half as old as they thought. The lesson for us in this is that the millions and billions of years many scientists talk about are mere speculation. Many measuring sticks for the age of the universe are available, and many of them support an age in the biblical range of only thousands of years. The only source for the age of this universe is our Magnificent Creator God himself!!! |
12/20/2024
| The Miracle of Hearing… |
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| Your high school biology textbook may have given you the idea that modern science understands how hearing works. While science understands the general principles, researchers are still trying to understand the details. Hearing starts with the skin and cartilage on the outside of our heads that we call the ear. This tissue is carefully designed to collect sound waves and focus them into the hole in the lower center part of the external ear. That hole is a tube that runs for about an inch to the eardrum. As the eardrum vibrates with the incoming sound, tiny specialized bones pick up the vibrations. One of these bones changes the vibrations into hydraulic pressure. The sound, now converted to hydraulic pressure, is sent to the cochlea. This coiled, bony canal is lined with tissue that has four long rows of hair cells. A vibration as small as the width of an atom will move these hairs. Each movement of the hair causes a change in the electrical potential of the hair cell’s membrane. This change triggers a current that is fed to the auditory nerve and interpreted as sound by the brain. Each of the hairs in the ear responds best to a specific frequency. The ability to hear could have been engineered using a much less complex design. Such a design, however, would leave us unable to hear the subtleties of an orchestra or a bird’s song. Our Magnificent Creator God is not only capable of excellent workmanship, but also generous in His creation. |
12/19/2024
| A Star Takes a Swan Dive… |
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| The life cycle of a star is supposed to be millions of years; thus, human observers should not be able to see the birth and death of an individual star. Now a star that first became visible in the year 1600 is causing some astronomers to rethink their theories about the time it takes for stars to evolve. According to the evolutionary way of dating things, some stars – like our sun – have been burning for billions of years. Astronomers say that stars go through different stages in their lifetimes. As a result, they can tell by color and brightness just how old a star is. The Bible says, of course, that the stars were created by God in the much more recent past. In the year 1600, a star in the constellation of Cygnus, the swan, suddenly became bright enough to see from earth. Astronomers report that the star, called P Cygni, has gotten gradually brighter and is half again as bright today as it was in 1700. This brightening is expected in the normal lifetime of a star. The problem is, at this rate the star is aging too fast, even for a large star. One scientist noted that the time scale for star aging can be measured in centuries rather than hundreds of centuries. In other words, so-called “old stars” can be much younger than expected. That being the case, our Magnificent God’s universe itself is seen to be much younger than expected – perhaps only thousands and not billions of years old. |
12/18/2024
| Crunchy Medicine… |
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| Celery is an old Asian folk remedy for mild cases of high blood pressure. In one unscientific test, the father of a University of Chicago medical student lowered his mild hypertension simply by adding a quarter pound of celery to his diet every day for a week. Now his son, a doctor named Quang T. Le, believes he has discovered how celery lowers blood pressure. His discovery could change the way high blood pressure is treated. Hypertension is caused when the smooth muscle lining of the blood vessels tightens. This makes vessels narrower, making it more difficult for blood to get through. Stress hormones in the blood cause the muscles to tighten. Dr. Le discovered that celery contains a chemical that relaxes the smooth muscle tissue of the vessels. It does this by getting to the root of the problem. Stress hormones are made by the body using a specific enzyme. The natural chemical in celery prevents the enzyme from forming into stress hormones, thus preventing the chemistry that creates high blood pressure. The researchers hope that the chemical will lead to a more effective treatment for high blood pressure. They also recommend against eating celery to lower blood pressure since it contains sodium and other chemicals that can be harmful to some people when taken in high dosages. How did the ancient Asians learn about this natural solution to hypertension? Clearly, so-called ancient man had a great deal of knowledge about the creation that we are only just learning. Once more we owe everything to our Magnificent Creator God! |
12/17/2024
| Miracle Bugs… |
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| God designed and made the universe from nothing. That’s creation. Man takes what God has made and simply rearranges it to make things that help him. That’s building. The wonderful abilities that God built into plants and animals come from the genetic information that God built into them. Man has now started to use the genetic information created by God to build harmless creatures that better serve our needs. For example, the silk of the golden orb spider is five times stronger than steel, yet more elastic than any similar material we could manufacture. It could be used to make light and comfortable bulletproof vests and helmets. The problem is, it takes over half a million spiders to make a pound of silk. So scientists have taken the spider gene that makes the silk and put it into a harmless bacterium. When that bacterium divides, it makes more bacteria, complete with the gene. Today there are millions of bacteria making usable amounts of spider silk. This technology has resulted in what has been called the greatest revolution since industrialization. Bacteria are now making insulin, vaccines and even chocolate. Today, bacteria are mainly used to manufacture medicines. Man has learned a great deal about how to make use of the creation. However, the genetic information that makes this all possible in the first place is a product of the genius of our Magnificent Creator God. |
12/16/2024
| Insulated Blackbirds… |
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| European blackbirds love southern Germany so much that many of them stay for the winter. Some of the blackbirds migrate to North Africa, Spain or southern France to escape the cold. Like the robin in North America, however, some European blackbirds don’t migrate. European blackbirds are able to live through the cold German winter because they are designed with several features that use sophisticated principles from biochemistry and physics. To cope with the winter cold, the birds fluff up their feathers. This creates more insulating dead air spaces between their warm bodies and the cold. Then they tuck their head inside the feathers, making their body into a ball. A round ball is the most heat-conserving shape possible for any object. The ball also protects poorly insulated parts of their bodies – like feet, legs and beak. Food is also more scarce in the winter. On top of that, the birds’ need for energy is five times higher at 20 degrees below zero (F) than it is during the summer. The blackbirds reduce their energy needs by lowering their body temperature at night when they are curled into a ball. Scientists have found that, as a result, European blackbirds are in no danger of freezing, even at 20 degrees below zero, as long as they can get enough food! The intelligent special designs found in the European blackbird reflect a sophisticated knowledge of biochemistry and physics. By its very existence, the European blackbird glorifies our Magnificent Creator God. |
12/15/2024
| The Talk Of The Land… |
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| Some people have the green thumb in their family. Others may complain that they fail with plants because plants don’t tell them when they need care. Of course, most people can do well with family pets, who are enthusiastic about letting their needs be known. Now scientists have learned that plants do indeed cry out when they need attention. We just haven’t heard them because the sounds made by a thirsty plant are about five times higher-pitched than we can hear. But scientists with tiny, specialized microphones have heard corn plants calling for water. During their study, researchers learned that plants make a great deal of noise. Corn leaves and stalks make noises as they slide against each other during growth. We have all heard the sound of plant leaves rattling in the wind. Corn stalks also make noise as they bend in the wind. However, another sound was heard when the corn didn’t have enough water. It was a high-pitched popping noise. Plants have water tubes in them that carry water and nutrients up from the roots to the leaves. Water flows up these tubes under tension. When there is not enough water, the tension becomes too great and the tubes fracture. The popping is the sound of those tubes fracturing. The result of fractured tubes is a wilted plant. When water is restored, the tubes refill, the popping noises stop, and the plant again looks healthy. The purpose of this research was to learn when to water crops and how much water they need. Now that we have learned how plants communicate, crops can tell farmers when to water! Aren’t we blessed to have a Magnificent Creator that took care of so much minute detail!!! |
12/14/2024
| A Giant In The Land… |
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| Imagine a huge living creature covering about one square mile and made up of almost a third of a billion cells. Imagine each of those living cells being able to move about independently of the others. No, it’s not the plot of a new science fiction movie. Some scientists have suggested that ant colonies may be thought of as one large living organism. They suggest this because of the way individual members within ant colonies behave. Ant colonies have many kinds of members, each with its own specific task. The soldier ants in a colony have extra large heads and heavy-duty jaws for fighting. Other ants are concerned only about finding and returning food. Still other workers do nothing but process and store food. Within the colony another caste of ants does nothing but tend the eggs. Others prepare the food for the larvae and deliver it to other specialized ants who do nothing but feed the next generation. If this sounds complex, imagine the largest known ant colony. This Japanese ant colony has an estimated 306 million worker ants, and more than a million queens. The colony occupies 45,000 interconnected underground nests that range over about a square mile! There is obviously intelligent design and control behind ant society—intelligence not found in ants or in nature itself. This intelligence comes from outside nature. Here is yet another witness that no concern of any living thing is too small for our Magnificent Creator God’s complete attention!!! |
12/13/2024
| The Problem of Genius… |
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| We have for so long been led to believe that early man evolved from the animal kingdom and, thus, began with little intelligence. But is our mental capacity today really the result of evolution from brute beginnings? From time to time, individuals display a mental capacity that far exceeds their need of it. This anomaly presents a serious challenge to the theory of evolution. Consider the example of George Koltanowski, International Chess Grandmaster. In 1960 he played against 56 other chessmasters simultaneously, winning 50 games and tying 6. He took about 10 seconds per move and was blindfolded throughout the entire nine-hour marathon! This is an incredible achievement of the human memory. Evolution is said to depend upon chance mutations that give the individual a survival advantage, but it is difficult to see how this would explain George Koltanowski’s extraordinary memory capacity. It is sometimes suggested that most of us only use part of our brain capacity, while a genius uses almost all of it. But why would an evolutionary process have given us all this capacity in the first place? A far more reasonable argument is that today’s genius is simply an unusual retention of ancestral brain capacity that reminds us that our Magnificent Creator God created man in His own image. |
12/12/2024
| Octopus School… |
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| Can an octopus be as smart as a dolphin or even a human? The octopus is thought by those who believe in evolution to be an early, primitive form of life. They certainly look primitive, but that’s a subjective opinion based upon the many imaginative illustrations we have all seen in books and films. And we might also say that they do not appear to be very intelligent, but again, do we really know for sure? In some recent work, researchers had two tanks of octopi and placed a red ball in one and a white ball in the other. The octopi in each tank were trained to attack the balls in their tank. They then placed another tank of untrained octopi close by where they could watch their trained companions. A red and a white ball were then dropped into their tank and, sure enough, those who had watched a red ball being attacked did the same thing but ignored the white ball. Not only did the untrained octopi attack the same color they had watched being attacked, but they learned the lesson much faster than the first group. This discovery about the intelligence of the octopus is even more surprising because they’re not social creatures. Social vertebrates tend to appear more intelligent because they learn from one another. In a similar way, the Magnificent Creator God of this universe became a human being in the person of Jesus Christ so that we could learn by watching and listening to Him. |
12/11/2024
| A Fish Story… |
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| School biology textbooks offer students good facts but often bad interpretation of those facts. For example, when explaining how fish evolved into air-breathing land animals, students are usually offered a great deal of misinformation about living and extinct fish. It is not true that lungfish are an odd class of fish and that no other fish have lungs – many do, and some have lungs as well as gills. The textbook explanation says that all early fish had air-filled swim bladders, as most fish do today. The textbooks go on to say that the bladders in some of these fish eventually evolved into lungs. Then, as these fish spent more time on land, some of them gradually lost their gills and developed from amphibians into reptiles. The facts are shown in the fossil record where, according to evolutionists’ own inflated system of dating, lungs actually appeared in fish before swim bladders! A logical evolutionist would have to conclude that the fish’s air bladder evolved from lungs. The problem for evolutionists is that this is precisely opposite of what they need for the theory. If we telescope the evolutionary years into historical years, however, the fossil record agrees with Scripture. In other words, fish with lungs and fish with swim-bladders both appeared on day five of creation. The lesson for us here is that when science tells the truth, it actually confirms those seemingly simple statements found in the Bible about our Magnificent Creator God. |
12/10/2024
| Humans: artists… |
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| Genesis 4:21 “And his brother’s name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and flute.” What is more likely to last buried in the ground for a few thousand years, a wooden spoon or a stone hammer? Since the hammer will last long after the wood has decayed, the further back we go in human history, the more likely we are to find only the most durable things that humans left behind. This general principle explains why those who believe in evolution talk about “stone age” people. They often portray “stone age” people as primitive brutes who carried clubs, grunted a lot, and definitely needed a bath. Those of us who know that humans have always been human know that this portrayal is not accurate. It is unfortunate that, for example, the literature of our earliest ancestors, or the toys they no doubt made for their children, have not survived to this day. Do you think it sounds strange to talk about the literature of the “stone age” people? However, modern science does recognize their art. The so-called prehistoric people have left us hundreds of beautiful paintings in caves around the world. More than 220 paintings are found in Lascaux, France alone. Research reveals that the painters who created this beautiful and sensitive art did so using artificial lighting, palettes and scaffolding. They carefully ground and mixed minerals to create a variety of colors that remain bright and rich thousands of years later. Looking at the paintings left by those so-called “stone age” painters, we can clearly see that the claims that humans have progressed upward from a brute animal state are false. We clearly owe it all to our Magnificent Creator God. |
12/9/2024
| Moth Talk… |
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| Scientists are learning that there is much more going on among those moths that flutter around your yard light than they ever expected. Scientists have long known that moths communicate with each other, using hormones called pheromones. A female moth who is ready to mate will send a pheromone into the air. Males who sense the pheromone will seek out the female. Research now shows that the moths’ system is much more elegant than this. The female who wants to contact a male doesn’t simply send out a scented invitation. Rather, she releases her pheromones in a series of pulses. These pulses are released at the rate of from one to more than two pulses per second. Scientists used powder to study the pulses. To their surprise, they discovered that the pulses can be propelled for up to a meter. That’s equivalent to you being able to blow out a candle from 60 feet away! These pulses had researchers puzzled. Then they realized that the pulses would help male moths locate a female as they were drawn near by the scent of the pheromone. This seems to be confirmed by the fact that the male’s antennae send a signal to its brain that has the same frequency as the female’s pulses. The creation shows much more than design. Each of the details of the creation have the elegant intricacy of a master Designer. This is, in part, what St. Paul refers to when he writes that the very Godhead of our Magnificent Creator God can be seen in the creation. |
12/8/2024
| No Instruments Required… |
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| How would you like to be a dental hygienist for a crocodile? That’s how the crocodile bird makes his living. Of course you do need to know that the crocodile bird doesn’t show up to do his work with any drills or needles. He and the crocodile are on good terms with each other. After eating, the crocodile climbs the river bank and relaxes with his mouth open. The little crocodile bird enters the crocodile’s mouth to clean up the scraps that are left. While the crocodile bird makes most of his living as sort of a crocodile dental hygienist, he also helps keep the crocodile free of pesky insects that lodge in his skin. The crocodile also receives one other service from the crocodile bird. Whenever the bird senses approaching danger, he gives his sharp warning call and flies off. The crocodile, now warned, can quickly roll over into the water where virtually no animal can get the best of him. This is but one of many unlikely cooperative arrangements that we find in the plant and animal kingdoms that our Magnificent Creator God has designed!!! |
12/7/2024
| Unique Individuals… |
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| Most of us are familiar with the body’s response to foreign tissue. Transplant patients must be carefully matched and then patients still must be given powerful drugs to prevent destruction of the transplanted tissue. Our bodies’ immune system identifies tissue that’s not its own and then tries to destroy that tissue. As we have learned more about the immune system, doctors began asking themselves why a pregnant mother’s body doesn’t reject the foreign tissue of the baby growing inside her. The answer to this mystery is not fully understood, but research has suggested some answers. From conception the unborn child is a genetically unique individual. Researchers think that the most important protection the unborn child has is the trophoblast. This tissue, known as the caul, seals the growing infant from its mother. However, the trophoblast itself develops from the same cells as the infant. So why doesn’t the mother’s immune system attack? It appears that under normal conditions the trophoblast is a special set of cells that the body cannot identify as foreign. In addition, the trophoblast makes cells that encourage the mother’s immune system to protect it. Scientists now believe that this amazing feature may actually be provided by the father’s genetic information. In effect, the baby, with the help of the father, immunizes the mother’s system so that it doesn’t reject the baby! So, even before birth, the mother nurtures and the father protects the child. What a Magnificent Creator God we have!!! |
12/6/2024
| Intelligent Artists… |
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| The ancient, yet beautiful, paintings in the Lascaux cave in France were discovered more than 80 years ago. The paintings are thousands of years old and there seems to be no other record of the painters. In those 80 years, researchers studying the paintings have deepened their admiration for the intelligence and skill of the artists. Researchers have found the scaffolding used by the artists as well as the stone lamps they used to light the work area. The palettes and even the pigments still on the palettes have also been found. Using scanning electron microscopes and other high-tech equipment, researchers learned that the artists collected a range of local minerals. Mineral deposits within 15 kilometers of the cave were able to provide a full range of colors. The minerals were ground into fine powder and mixed to create pigmented paints that hold their color and beauty to this day. As we look around the creation, we can clearly see that our Magnificent Creator God has a love for beauty. When He made us, He gave that appreciation for beauty to us as well. However, in our day we have also seen how man’s rebellion against God can twist art into ugliness and evil. Christians today need to face the question of what is art and what isn’t. As we do this, we can ask ourselves whether a given piece of art reflects our Creator’s love of beauty, or whether it reflects the ugliness of man’s sin and rebellion against his Creator. |
12/5/2024
| Crystalline Silk… |
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| Scientists have been studying the safety line used by the common garden spider to save itself when falling. This safety line is as strong as nylon and has twice as much stretch. The drag line silk is only one of several kinds that the spider can make. Scientists report that the silk is made of sections that are crystalline and sections that are like rubber. This makes it both stretchy and strong. Amazed chemists note that usually when you make something stronger, you also make it more likely to break rather than stretch. Since spider silk is twice as strong as silkworm silk, why hasn’t it been used to make more things? To harvest enough spider silk for study, scientists place a spider on a piece of cardboard. Then they bump the spider off the cardboard. As the spider makes the drag line silk, a scientist turns the cardboard to reel it in. One spider made half-a-mile of silk in ten minutes! This fact might give you a hint about why spider silk isn’t used to manufacture items. It’s too fine. In the early eighteenth century, an inventor did make gloves and stockings from spider silk. However, his experience showed that it would take more than half a million spiders to make a pound of silk! The spider and its silk are engineering marvels that clearly show why we must rely on a our Magnificent Creator God to explain the world in which we live. |
12/4/2024
| Smart Bacteria… |
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| How smart do bacteria need to be? You might be surprised. Scientists were. Some bacteria swim toward things that they like and away from things they don’t like. That may seem simple enough to us, but it’s not that simple for a bacterium. E. coli swim through liquids using whip-like hairs called flagella. However, because they are so tiny, their movement through water is like a human trying to swim through molasses. They only move when they rotate their flagella. When rotated counterclockwise, their six or eight flagella wind together, forming a propeller that rotates at 140 revolutions per second! This moves the bacterium along in a straight line. However, periodically the bacterium will reverse its propeller, causing the flagella to unwrap and spinning the bacterium into a tumble. This led scientists to wonder how a bacterium ever got where it wanted to go. Scientists also realized that for a bacterium to get to something that attracts it, it must have sensors and a memory. A bacterium must be able to say to itself, “It smells better here than where I was a moment ago. I’ll keep moving in this direction.” In other words, scientists are trying to figure out what makes bacteria so smart and gives them so many unexpected abilities. The intelligence and abilities of bacteria are no mystery to those who know that we have an intelligent Magnificent Creator God. We would expect everything He made to reflect His great abilities. |
12/3/2024
| A Matter of Life or Death… |
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| According to the Bible, God created the heavens and the earth in a perfect condition – without disease or death. However, when man did his own will instead of God’s will, death became a reality, just as God had warned. On the other hand, evolution says that death has nothing to do with man’s disobedience to his Creator. Evolution also says that our genetic information has developed over the years to help us survive. Can these opposite claims be tested? Biologists have discovered that living cells have a built-in suicide gene. The suicide gene remains dormant until it is necessary for the cell to die. For example, as a tadpole turns into a toad, its tail is no longer needed. As a result, the suicide genes in the tail cells instruct them to die. In other words, living cells have a gene in them that prevents the death of the cell until its appointed time. So in a sense, we can test the Bible’s and evolution’s conflicting claims about life and death. Why would evolution develop genes that order death? By definition, such a gene would not aid survival. However, our Magnificent Creator God told our first parents that the day that they sinned, they would die. It was obviously the curse of sin that created the genetic instructions for cell death, on the very day that they sinned. What biologists are learning about the cell’s workings fits much better with Scripture than with evolutionary claims. |
12/2/2024
| Riders on the Wind… |
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| The tiny insect called ice plant scale has no wings. That’s why scientists were surprised to learn that the creature uses sophisticated preflight and flight strategies to move from one ice plant to the next. Ice plant scale infects ice plants, which are plants used in landscaping. To study the insect, scientists had to observe ice plant scale hatchlings under the microscope because they are only one-fiftieth of an inch long. It was in this setting that scientists saw an unexpected insect ballet. Sensing a wind of ten miles per hour or more, a scale would determine the wind direction with its antennae and turn its back to the breeze. It then reared back on its hind legs and extended its antennae and legs. This doubles the insect’s surface area and makes it possible for the insect to be lifted and carried by the wind. By extending its legs and antennae, the insect slows the rate of fall so that it can be carried further by the wind. Scientists noted that even insects that are one day old are knowledgeable about flight and ready to migrate. These actions are designed to allow the wingless insect to take every advantage of the principles of flight. The only scientific conclusion that makes sense is that this knowledge was wired into the insect by its Magnificent Creator God Himself. |
12/1/2024
| The animal world was provided with their own drugs and the knowledge of how to use them… |
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| In a clever scheme of self-protection, the more poisonous the male rattlebox moth is, the more prized he is by the female rattlebox moth. In the caterpillar stage the male moth favors the pods of certain legumes. These pods contain a powerful poison that seems to have no effect on the caterpillar. After the caterpillar has become a moth and it’s time for mating, the male releases a scent produced by the poison. Those who have more poison in their bodies release a stronger scent, while those with little poison release only a weak scent. Female rattlebox moths prefer males with a strong scent. During mating the male coats the eggs with some of the poison, making them unpalatable to predators, like ladybugs, who might eat the eggs. So the more poison a male has, the better protected the female’s eggs will be. Studies have shown that female rattlebox moths will ignore males that have collected no poison. Likewise, the male of the queen butterfly species collects another plant poison in his system. This poison is produced by plants for protection against insects. The butterfly doesn’t attack the plant; rather he drinks the poison from already injured plants. Here, too, the female queen butterfly favors those males with the most poison. It appears that human beings are not the only creatures who go to the drug store to get needed medicines. Our Magnificent Creator God has provided the animal world with their own drug store and the knowledge of how to use the chemicals He has provided!!! |
11/30/2024
| Important tools of medical science… |
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| Fireflies may help light the way to new medical breakthroughs. The gentle glow of a firefly on a summer evening is produced by the chemical luciferase. The firefly has a gene with the code that makes this chemical. When that gene is added to the genetic information of other plants or animals, the cells begin to glow harmlessly. Researchers have been using the firefly gene to test their ability to add genetic information to a cell. When human heart arteries become clogged, a medicine called TPA is among the treatments doctors use. TPA is a natural clot-dissolving protein that helps prevent heart attacks. The problem is, without a continuous supply of TPA, the artery may reclog. It would help if the artery could make its own TPA 24 hours a day. Since TPA is a natural protein for which there is a genetic code, researchers wanted to know if genetic information could be added to artery cells. To find out, they injected dogs with the genetic code for luciferase. If genetic information could be added to the cells through this method, they would actually see the results in the glowing tissue. Tissue samples taken three days later did, in fact, have the distinctive glow of the firefly proving that the method works. They warn that several years of research lie ahead before artery cells may be able to dissolve their own clots. Those glowing fireflies that delight children and adults show God’s design in the creation in an unexpected way. The chemical that makes the glow is proving to be an important tool of medical science. What a magnificent creator we have to preplan our needs!!! |
11/29/2024
| Did Humans Evolve from Cockroaches? |
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| Scientists who believe in evolution will argue that similarities between different species are the result of evolution. They say that similarities between humans and apes show that we are closely related. The fact that we are so unlike sponges or microbes, says this argument, shows that we have evolved much further. The problem with this argument is that it often leads to absurd conclusions. Take, for example, the discovery that a chemical in the brains of cockroaches closely resembles two human hormones. Does that mean that humans evolved from cockroaches? Evolutionists are quick to deny an evolutionary link between humans and cockroaches. However, they add that humans and cockroaches must have a common ancestor. Or, consider the protein abbreviated CK that is found in the brains of many species. Evolutionists would expect that the CK would be most similar in the most closely related species. From what evolutionists say, one would expect humans and apes to have the most similar CK. However, when scientists compared all the CK information they have, the two most closely related creatures turned out to be the domestic housefly and the African elephant! When facts such as these are interpreted in terms of the theory of evolution, it simply flies in the face of reason, but this is the only option when our Magnificent Creator God of the Bible is denied. |
11/28/2024
| Your Sixth Sense… |
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| “Name the five senses.” Every school child is asked that question. However, now the question is outdated because a sixth sense has been discovered. Years ago, University of Utah anatomist David L. Berliner noticed a strange reaction among coworkers. Normally his coworkers did not get along well. However, when he was working with open vials of extracts from human skin, there was a noticeable rise in friendliness. A few months later, when he sealed the extracts, coworkers were again unable to get along with each other. That experience led Berliner, thirty years later, to discover the purpose of the vomeronasal organ – VNO for short. In animals, the VNO detects odorless pheromones – chemicals used to communicate readiness to mate and similar messages. Evolutionists thought that the human VNO was a useless vestigial organ left over from our evolution. Berliner discovered that the centimeter-long organ in our nose detects odorless human pheromones. It uses a system completely different from your nose. The VNO sends its messages to the hypothalamus while the nose is wired to other sections of the brain. The hypothalamus controls basic drives and emotions. Scientists long ago thought that they had identified all the senses. The discovery of the VNO shows that science still has very much to learn about the material creation by our Magnificent Creator God. That places science in a poor position to pass judgments on biblical truth. |
11/27/2024
| 11/27/2024 | An owl is silent when it flies. How can this be when with all the other birds you can hear the flapping of their wings?The owl is going to find their prey mainly by hearing. They have a circle of feathers around their face that are special feathers that channel the sound into their ear holes. Their ear holes are not the things up on top of their heads, rather their ear holes are right under their eyes, and they’re not at the same level. They get the sound in at 1/30th of a millionth of a second at a different rate, and that tells them exactly where their prey is.If an owl’s wings made noise they couldn’t hear and gauge sound. A Great Gray Owl can hear a mouse crawling around under two feet of snow. There can be a mouse under two feet of snow and it can hear it! It can’t see it, but it will dive down right on it.Owl’s have this little fringe of tiny little hairs that go up the sides of the feathers. God made those little hairs deflect the wind coming across them in such a way that the owl flies with silent flight. And, where does that come from? If there isn’t a Magnificent Creator God that designed that and made that, how would evolution produce that? |
| 11/26/2024 | Can you teach an old insect, or even a young insect for that matter, any tricks at all? Science long assumed that insects were too stupid to learn even simple things. However, researchers have now proven that insects can not only learn, they can generalize knowledge into long-term lessons for life. Researchers wanted to discover whether insects can learn, through a bad experience, to avoid certain bugs. They offered milkweed bugs to preying mantises. Milkweed bugs that feed on milkweed accumulate milkweed’s poisons in their bodies. The mantises ate one bug, and then vomited it up. Each mantis refused a second helping of milkweed bug. They even rejected bugs that were painted to look like milkweed bugs. A second test was run to test the response of preying mantises who had never had noxious milkweed bugs. The milkweed bugs they were offered were raised on sunflower seeds so they would have no poison accumulation in their bodies. These preying mantises ate the bugs without getting sick. They continued eating the bugs when they were offered. These test mantises would only stop eating the bugs after they ate one that made them sick. Learning from experience and later applying that knowledge to similar situations has always been considered a more advanced intellectual function. From the creation point of view, however, these abilities were given even to insects by our Magnificent Creator God because He knew they would need them. |
| 11/25/2024 | He sits on his eggs to protect them until they hatch, but he’s no rooster. He’s a good swimmer, but he’s no duck or swan. The Puerto Rican forest frog, coqui, is among the most common vertebrates in Puerto Rico. They are active and hunt mainly at night because they are very susceptible to dehydration during the day. So important is protection from drying, that researchers have found that the frog population is directly related to the number of sheltered spots they can find during the day. The frog’s eggs, which are not laid in water, are even more threatened by dehydration than the adults. These frogs are important in the tropical forest because they are one of the forest’s primary insect predators. After she lays her eggs, the female leaves for parts unknown. However, the dedicated father tends the eggs. The average male coqui will sit on the eggs to keep them moist for 23 hours a day, for up to three weeks. Without his care and protection, few eggs would ever hatch. While this arrangement may seem strange at first, the genius of the design becomes apparent with a little thought. God designed these frogs to be major insect controllers in the forest. After she lays her eggs, the female’s need for insects is much greater than the male’s. It’s easier for the male to give up most of his hunting for food for three weeks than it is for the female to give up eating. Again, our Magnificent Creator God’s wisdom is evident! |
| 11/23/2024 | The world is a frightening place without God. This fear can be seen today in fears that modern people often confuse with science. Several years ago stories of gloom and doom about a greenhouse heating of the earth were starting to fill the media. The people at Creation Moments looked at the scientific basis for these claims. They wanted to know if the greenhouse warming of the earth was a true threat or just another fear of a godless people. They then published the conclusion that the thin and conflicting evidence for greenhouse warming most likely came from the heat island effect of growing cities around some of the temperature measuring sites. Knowing the elegance with which God designed everything in creation, creationists suspected that God probably designed the earth with built-in thermostats that help keep it from warming up too much. When the Pacific Ocean warms more than normal, it sends increasing amounts of water vapor into the air. If heating continues, the water vapor will actually cause the heating to increase until vapor is forced higher into the atmosphere, creating icy cirrus clouds. These clouds reflect enough incoming sunlight to shut down the temperature increase and return things to normal. We are called to be good stewards of the earth. We can be good stewards in joyful service, freed from the fears that afflict those who don’t know God. What a Magnificent Creator God we have!!! |
| 11/22/2024 | Scientists describe the creatures as mean, greedy and anti-social. They are also impressive chemists. That’s some reputation for a creature whose lifespan is only four hours. The short form of this microscopic creature’s name is simply bdella. Bdellas are predatory bacteria that live in fresh and salt water as well as in sewage. In the first stage of its life cycle, it swims freely, using large, whip-like flagella. The favorite food of the bdella is E. coli bacteria and, swimming ten times faster, the bdella rams the bacteria, punching a hole in its outer membrane and injecting six different enzymes. Then the bdella drops its flagellum and enters its prey, where it starts the second stage of its existence. Over the next two or three hours, the bdella consumes the bacteria and reproduces. The new bdellas rupture the membrane and swim free to start the cycle all over. Scientists believe that the fact that bdellas eat so many different kinds of bacteria means that their purpose is to control the bacteria population. It is interesting that even though many scientists reject the Creator, when confronted with an amazing creature like bdellas, they look for purpose. Truly the whole creation glorifies our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 11/21/2024 | Many textbooks tell young people today that birds are modified reptiles. Suppose, they say, that millions of years ago the scales on some reptiles began to fray along the edges. In time, they say, the frayed scales turned into feathers and birds were born. The elegance and beauty of the feather make this story hard to believe. Can sticking a feather on a lizard produce a peacock? The bird’s feather is only a small part of the complete flying system of the bird. Even with very careful planning and redesigning, a reptile doesn’t have what it takes. A bird needs massive breast muscles for flight. In some birds, 30% of the body weight of the bird is breast muscle. By comparison, in humans breast muscles are only about 1% of body weight. A bird also needs an extremely high metabolism and blood pressure to deliver the energy those muscles need for flight. Birds have a higher metabolism than any other creature; they also have the necessary high blood pressure. Finally, as is well known, birds need light skeletons. The man-o’-war has a wingspan of seven feet. But its entire skeleton weighs only a few ounces—less than its feathers! Even the most clever rebuilding of a reptile cannot produce a bird. In fact, birds have very little in common with reptiles. The entire being of the bird, from body to brain, has been specially designed for flight by our Magnificent Creator God who clearly knows everything there is to know about flight!!! |
| 11/20/2024 | God has created us with a strong desire to know the purpose of things. Evolutionists generally believe that if a feature doesn’t serve a purpose, it should not have evolved. On the other hand, the Bible tells us that purpose is given by God. He gives the woodpecker its incredible tongue because it helps the woodpecker to make its living. In addition, this wondrous design glorifies its Creator. At other times it seems that the Creator has produced some living thing for which there is no apparent purpose other than to glorify Himself. These are the features that give evolutionists the most difficulty. Male antelopes show a vast array in the designs of their horns. Males may have spears, spirals, curves, twists or simply short daggers. These differences in design suggest that differences in purpose caused the horns to evolve, but that doesn’t make sense. Even stranger is the fact that female antelopes generally have smaller horns that are much more like daggers. Evolutionists are stumped about why female antelopes would evolve short horns while males evolved such a variety. As Bible-believing Christians, we have no difficulty accepting that the variety of designs in male horns, and the similarity in design of female horns, all serve to glorify our Magnificent Creator God and show that evolutionary explanations don’t really explain anything. |
| 11/19/2024 | Most Christians have been told, “Creation isn’t scientific because it comes from the Bible!” Does the source of an idea make the idea unworthy of science? Many believe that the only truly scientific ideas come to people dressed in white smocks working in laboratories. Experience shows, however, that scientific discoveries can come in the most unusual ways. Friedrich Kekule discovered the theory of atomic valency in a vision while traveling on the top deck of a London bus. A new, natural insecticide was also discovered in what might be considered an unscientific fashion. Mechanics working at a University of Georgia field research station used a soap called Dirt Squad. Dirt Squad is a grease cutter made from orange peels. The mechanics had dumped some of the cleaner on a fire ant hill. Listeners who are familiar with fire ants know that these nasty members of the insect kingdom are hard to kill. However, the cleaner killed all the ants. Hearing this, one of the scientists used the cleaner on his cat, who had fleas. The soap killed all the fleas. This led scientists at the research station to investigate the oils in citrus peels. They discovered a natural chemical in citric oil that is harmless to vertebrates but deadly to insects. Any idea, from any source, including the Bible, needs to be considered before it can be accepted or rejected as scientific. We have been given all things by our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 11/18/2024 | The parting of the Red Sea as the Israelites escaped Egypt is one of the most attacked miracles in the Bible. Much of scholarly opinion says that the Israelites didn’t really escape through the sea. They simply went through a nearby marsh, called the Reed Sea. In the first place, how could the Israelites, loaded down with their own possessions plus the spoils of Egypt, have traveled through a marsh? Second, how could an entire army drown in a swamp? An article in the bulletin of the American Meteorological Society shows that the Red Sea could have parted just as the Bible describes. In making their case, meteorologists used sophisticated computer simulations and the Bible’s description of the event. Because the extension of the Gulf where the Israelites crossed is so long and shallow, the strong east wind described in Exodus 14, could have lowered the water level by ten feet. The Israelites could then cross on an underwater ridge, with water on both sides of them. The water backed up into the wider portion of the Red Sea could return within a matter of minutes after the wind stopped, drowning pharaoh and his army. So many of the miraculous events described in the Bible have been explained away by science as natural events and this may just be another case. But all this means is that our Magnificent Creator God can use natural events and that He is in control of when and where they occur. |
| 11/17/2024 | While the Bible teaches us that sex is a wonderful gift of God, evolutionists believe that sexual reproduction should not have evolved. According to evolutionists, if sexual reproduction were to develop, evolution is supposed to get rid of it. To make matters worse, immobile plants use sexual reproduction. This creates a problem in transferring the male genes to the female for fertilization. Just to confound things even more, God uses insects and even mammals to transfer the pollen. Since evolutionists believe that plants were around for many millions of years before animals, evolutionists have yet another problem. The European family of the Arum lilies attracts beetles and flies. When one of the insects lands on a flower, he finds a slick, oil-coated surface and ends up sliding down into a chamber filled with small hairs. Imprisoned, he finds a sweet sap that makes good eating. While he is gorging himself on the sap and getting sticky in the process, the male part of the flower showers him with pollen. The next day, the sticky, pollen-coated insect finds that the doors to his prison are open. So he flies off to another flower to unwittingly deliver his load of pollen! It sounds like science fiction to say that a flower figured out how to do this. And it certainly doesn’t sound very scientific to say that nobody designed and made this complex arrangement. As we learn more about these arrangements in nature, it becomes even more clear that an all-wise Magnificent Creator God designed these beautiful, symbiotic relationships between different members of the living kingdom!!! |
| 11/15/2024 | We usually identify plants by their appearance. Palm trees can be identified because the many different kinds of palms have some common identifying characteristics. Pine trees, likewise, have common features that help us identify them. However, one plant has become a master at looking like many other plants. It has a good reason for doing this. Mistletoe is a parasite that’s commonly found in Europe, North America and Australia. While it uses its green leaves to make its own food, it gets its water and minerals through roots attached to a host. It’s relatively easy to see the difference between American and European mistletoe and its host. However, many species of Australian mistletoe mimic the host on which they grow. The drooping mistletoe is so named because its leaves look like those of its host, the eucalyptus tree. The box mistletoe and the pendulous mistletoe both have hard, sickle-shaped leaves that make them look much like other eucalyptus trees on which they grow. Botanists who believe in evolution are divided on how to explain this mimicry. Mistletoe can neither see its host, nor change form like an amoeba. There’s no problem, however, if we understand that our unlimited Magnificent Creator God also cares about the living things He made. Mistletoe that looks almost identical to its host can make its living without attracting attention to itself. |
| 11/14/2024 | More than a quarter of our drugs come from wild plants. Traditionally, researchers in search of new drugs would ask local folk healers about plants that might be helpful. However, that isn’t always the best approach. In some societies, plants are thought to have healing powers simply because they look like a disease. Researchers are now learning to follow animals around. Monkeys have led medical researchers to several potentially new medicines. Chimps in Tanzania were seen swallowing the unchewed leaves of a tree. Studies of the leaves and the droppings showed that the leaves were not digested. However, the chimps’ digestive system had removed chemicals from the surface of the leaves that kill intestinal parasites. The female of a rare species of woolly spider monkey in Brazil does not ovulate for about six months after she gives birth. This gives her time to raise her offspring. About six months after giving birth, the female will travel outside its usual area to gorge on the fruit of a specific tree. Researchers found that its fruit is rich in a chemical that causes the female to produce a hormone that re-starts ovulation. As in other cases of this type, we have to ask the question: Do these animals really have innate medical knowledge or is it that our Magnificent Creator God cares for them when they are sick and leads them to the right medicinal plant? |
| 11/13/2024 | Have you ever wondered how you could get cut by a blade of grass or the edge of a palm leaf? Plants have a nasty secret. They absorb silica, the same stuff of which glass is made, and store it in their cells. Some plants, like corn, store large mounts of silica on their leaves, making the edges of the leaves sharp and strong enough to give you a nasty slash. And yes, they do this largely to protect themselves. Insects that like to eat plant leaves find that when they chew on plants with lots of silica, their mouth parts wear out faster. Plants also store silica between their cells, giving them a strong, stony skeleton. These silica particles made by plants are called phytoliths, which literally means “plant stones.” Chemically they are colorless and transparent opals. They can range in size from a thousandth of a millimeter to a millimeter. Each plant forms phytoliths that are unique in shape, and some plants make up to a dozen different types. After the plant has died and decayed, the phytoliths and their unique shapes remain in the soil. This means that with a microscope and a good knowledge of which plants make which phytoliths, you could examine the soil and tell which plants have grown there in the past. This is how scientists learned that the Indians were growing corn in South America 2,500 years before the birth of Christ! Our Magnificent Creator God’s creation is filled with wonderful surprises. And every one of them glorifies Him! |
| 11/12/2024 | Before birth, a developing baby breathes amniotic fluid, which delivers dissolved oxygen to the lungs. When very premature babies are born, they often have difficulty breathing because their lungs lack a substance that enables them to get oxygen from the air. The result is often chronic lung disease or other permanent damage. But now researchers are testing something that is popularly called “liquid air.” This liquid, a perfluorocarbon*, can carry oxygen to the immature lungs of the infant who is not yet ready to breathe air, much like the amniotic fluid the child would be breathing had it not been born prematurely. Animal tests suggest that infants who were born after only 20 weeks of gestation could be helped to survive through the use of this “liquid air.” Researchers had to admit that if infants can survive at only 20 weeks, some hard questions are raised about current abortion practices. Yet, pro abortion feeling is so strong in some parts of society that researchers felt they had to disown the idea that they wanted even younger premature babies to survive. The development of “liquid air” is going to make it more difficult for some to support abortion as we now know it. It has taken humans thousands of years of medical development to come up with an advance that begins to mimic the way an unborn infant gets oxygen. This makes it even more difficult to believe that mindless nature created the womb and much easier to believe that the womb is the creation of a loving and wise Magnificent Creator God. |
| 11/11/2024 | Because the vast open seas were largely unknown to so many in the ancient world, early explorers were filled with great fear about monsters that might live in unknown regions. After centuries of exploration on and under the sea, we have learned that the seas hold far more beauty than beasts. One of the most beautiful and unusual creatures in the sea is the sea dragon. Sea dragons are not monsters; the largest members of their family reach a length of only 18 inches. They belong to a family that includes more than 200 types of sea horses and pipefish. Yet, they look completely unlike any other fish. Most of them look like seaweed with eyes and a snout, something like a sea horses’, on one end. The shapes of sea dragons are the most varied and unusual in the animal world, and their colors are among the brightest. Unlike other fish, they have no scales. They draw tiny marine organisms into their mouths through a trap door jaw that opens and closes more rapidly than the human eye can follow. The eyes of the sea dragon move independently of each other. And when it’s time to start a family, it is the father sea dragon who incubates the fertilized eggs in a pouch in his tail. Like some other creatures we have talked about on “Creation Moments,” the sea dragon is such a unique creature that evolutionists admit they have no idea how it evolved. These are the very creatures we’d expect to find if all things were created by our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 11/8/2024 | Europe was introduced to Australia’s duckbill platypus in 1798. Because of the difficulties of travel in those days, scientists didn’t send a live platypus from Australia to the British Museum in London. They sent only a platypus skin. Scientists in London looked at the duck bill, the beaver tail and the webbed feet of this egg laying mammal and immediately denounced the creature as a hoax. Two hundred years later, the duckbill platypus continues to amaze scientists. Recently researchers discovered a surprising new ability the platypus uses to find food. It seems that the nerves in the platypus’s skin, which relay the sense of touch, are also able to sense electricity. Every time we or any living creature use a muscle, a tiny electric current is generated. When the shrimp that the platypus eats flick their tails, they generate about 200 millionths to 1,000 millionths of a volt of electricity. That small amount of voltage is enough to enable the platypus to sense and locate lunch. Modern biological research has also shown another mystery about the platypus. (At least it’s a mystery for evolutionists.) While the platypus is classified as a mammal, it is genetically as different from all other mammals as mammals are from birds. Nor is the platypus genetically like the bird. This leaves the platypus with absolutely no evolutionary history, almost as if it had simply popped into existence. And that’s what the Bible says happened when our Magnificent Creator God created the heavens and the Earth and everything in them during creation week! |
| 11/7/2024 | Most of us are familiar with the body’s response to foreign tissue. Transplant patients must be carefully matched and then patients still must be given powerful drugs to prevent destruction of the transplanted tissue. Our bodies’ immune system identifies tissue that’s not its own and then tries to destroy that tissue. As we have learned more about the immune system, doctors began asking themselves why a pregnant mother’s body doesn’t reject the foreign tissue of the baby growing inside her. The answer to this mystery is not fully understood, but research has suggested some answers. From conception the unborn child is a genetically unique individual. Researchers think that the most important protection the unborn child has is the trophoblast. This tissue, known as the caul, seals the growing infant from its mother. However, the trophoblast itself develops from the same cells as the infant. So why doesn’t the mother’s immune system attack? It appears that under normal conditions the trophoblast is a special set of cells that the body cannot identify as foreign. In addition, the trophoblast makes cells that encourage the mother’s immune system to protect it. Scientists now believe that this amazing feature may actually be provided by the father’s genetic information. In effect, the baby, with the help of the father, immunizes the mother’s system so that it doesn’t reject the baby! So, even before birth, the mother nurtures and the father protects the child. What a Magnificent Creator God we have!!! |
| 11/6/2024 | The Loving Lobster… In many ways, lobster interaction seems almost human. Lobsters’ mating ritual seems, by human standards, to be especially touching. The ritual sequence begins when a female who is ready to mate lingers near the shelter of a male. The male responds by fanning his swimmerets, the four pairs of paddles beneath his tail. At this point communication is taking place through chemical signals each is releasing into the water. If he is a clawed lobster, he will show her his claws. After a couple of days of this, she enters his shelter, where more chemical signals are traded. This is followed by a sort of ritualized boxing sequence, where claws become boxing gloves. This goes on for several days as she spends increasingly more time in the male’s shelter. When she is ready to mate, she will lift her claws above the male’s head in an action biologists call “knighting.” Her body then shrinks as she sheds her shell. At first, the shell-less female’s body is as soft as a jellyfish, and she cannot even stand up. Mating must take place very tenderly, for the male with his sharp shell could severely damage the unprotected female. After mating, the male will protect the female for up to a week until she grows a new shell. We tend to recognize the tenderness and affection in the lobsters’ mating ritual, despite the fact that these creatures are so different from us, because we both have the same Magnificent Creator God Who is Himself the source of all tenderness and affection. |
| 10/20/2024 | It sounds silly to ask whether bacteria can think. However, science has known for more than 100 years that the little guys can indeed think. Experiments in 1883 conducted by Wilhelm Pfeffer showed that bacteria will swim toward good food like chicken soup and away from poisons such as mop disinfectant.Pfeffer also learned that bacteria can make decisions. He made sure that his bacteria knew the location of chicken soup. Then he separated them from it with a mild mixture of disinfectant. He found that the little fellows would swim as fast as they could through the disinfectant to get to the soup.This is the same type of decision-making process you and I go through every day. We often tolerate the unpleasant to arrive at the pleasant. As a result of this research, scientists today talk about bacteria actually making decisions.These conclusions amaze most people. That’s because we have been trained to think of intelligence in an evolutionary context. The “higher” or more evolved a creature is, the smarter we expect it to be. However, if we recognize, as the Bible says, that all life is the product of an intelligent Creator, we should not be surprised to find that intelligence has nothing to do with evolution. Every creature has been given as much intelligence as it needs by our Magnificent Creator God Who truly cares for every living creature – even bacteria! |
| 10/19/2024 | Fireflies may help light the way to new medical breakthroughs. The gentle glow of a firefly on a summer evening is produced by the chemical luciferase. The firefly has a gene with the code that makes this chemical.When that gene is added to the genetic information of other plants or animals, the cells begin to glow harmlessly. Researchers have been using the firefly gene to test their ability to add genetic information to a cell.When human heart arteries become clogged, a medicine called TPA is among the treatments doctors use. TPA is a natural clot-dissolving protein that helps prevent heart attacks. The problem is, without a continuous supply of TPA, the artery may reclog. It would help if the artery could make its own TPA 24 hours a day.Since TPA is a natural protein for which there is a genetic code, researchers wanted to know if genetic information could be added to artery cells. To find out, they injected dogs with the genetic code for luciferase. If genetic information could be added to the cells through this method, they would actually see the results in the glowing tissue. Tissue samples taken three days later did, in fact, have the distinctive glow of the firefly proving that the method works. They warn that several years of research lie ahead before artery cells may be able to dissolve their own clots.Those glowing fireflies that delight children and adults show God’s design in the creation in an unexpected way. The chemical that makes the glow is proving to be an important tool of medical science.What a Magnificent Creator God we have to preplan our needs!!! |
| 10/18/2024 | Computer engineers are learning how to speed up computers and make them more efficient by using a number of processors instead of just one. They have also learned that designing computers that process some results and then send those results to another, larger processor for more complicated processing, helps them solve even more complicated problems. But computer scientists recognize that they were not the first to use this principle. Though these systems are much simpler than the human brain, they mirror the brain’s basic structure. God has filled His creatures with biological preprocessors. Even your tongue, scientists have now learned, has preprocessors to help your brain sense a multitude of flavors. The old theory that taste buds could only sense salt, sour, bitter and sweet has now been replaced by a more complete understanding. Each of your taste buds is made up of about 40 taste sensing cells that can detect each of the four flavors in various combinations. These cells communicate with each other, in effect deciding what signals to send to the brain about flavor. Your brain then further processes these signals before you learn that the chocolate ice cream you’re eating is extra tasty. Computer scientists have been applying their best knowledge for decades in order to arrive at computers that are this well designed. This helps illustrate the point that even our tongues were designed by a great Magnificent Creator God so that we could have the blessing of taste. |
| 10/17/2024 | Around Christmastime it is common to hear some authority trying to explain the star that the wise men followed to find the infant Jesus. It is commonly explained as a comet or the conjunction of two or more planets or stars. The question is, are these and similar theories possible? About all you need to evaluate these theories are a Bible and a map of the Holy Land. Matthew 2:1 tells us that the wise men came from east of the Holy Land. Verses 2 and 9 further tell us that these men had seen the star indicating His birth in the eastern sky. They had not followed the star to Jerusalem, as often depicted in Christmas cards. We learn from Matthew 2:9 that when they arrived in Jerusalem, the star they had seen in the eastern sky moved to lead them to the Christ Child. By this time Mary, Joseph and the Child may already have returned to Nazareth, or they may still have been in Bethlehem. No matter which was the case, the movement of the star was now from the eastern sky to either the northern or the southern sky. That is very un-starlike. In fact, the movement of the star was even more un-starlike in that it directed them to a specific house! No comet, conjunction or other natural object of the night sky will do that. These wise men from the East were accustomed to the sights of the night sky. They could easily identify the unusual. This star was clearly created by our Magnificent Creator God to announce the birth of the Savior to the world He came to save! |
| 10/16/2024 | Over the centuries humans have tried different strategies to protect themselves from sharks. But it’s no secret that most shark repellents simply don’t work. But scientists have learned, from a lowly fish no less, that repelling a shark is as simple as washing his mouth out with soap – released from a squirt gun, of course. The Moses sole, a slow swimming, apparently defenseless little fish, lives in the Red Sea. What puzzled scientists was that such seemingly easy prey never seemed to be bothered by predators. Researchers wanted to know what the Moses sole’s secret was, so they offered one to sharks in a laboratory tank, knowing that sharks will eat anything. Sure enough, the sharks grabbed the sole, but just as quickly they let it go. More study showed that the sole releases a milky, detergent like substance from the pores in its skin. As soon as the shark got a little of the detergent in its mouth, it wanted nothing more to do with the sole. While the sole’s detergent is poisonous, researchers found that it’s the detergent made by our Magnificent Creator God and not the poison that drives sharks away. They have found that a commercially available detergent works even better than the sole’s defense. |
| 10/14/2024 | Deep in the Venezuelan jungle, 60 miles from the nearest settlement, it appears as if God decided to plant a very special garden. That garden grows on a mountain that rises 7,000 feet on sheer cliffs above the jungle. The mountain, rising eventually to 9,000 feet, is the highest mountain in South America outside the Andean mountain chain. Called the Mountain of the Mists, this horseshoe shaped mass features a 25 mile long river valley that is just as deep as North America’s Grand Canyon. The mountain is so remote and hard to reach that it was virtually unexplored until 1984. Scientists have found that over half of the species of living things found on the mountain are new to science. Some are unlike any other creatures ever seen on Earth. A plant called the Neblinaria resembles a large artichoke standing four feet above the ground on a thick stalk. Four foot-tall carnivorous pitcher plants, giant earthworms, and long legged frogs add to the uniqueness of the place. Rainfall has washed most of the nutrients from the soil, but many plants make their living by producing their own soil in the center of their leaves, while others live off the air itself. There is absolutely no limit to our Magnificent Creator God’s imagination. Whether the problem to be solved involves inventing creative ways to allow plants to survive, or whether it’s a personal problem that seems beyond solution, your Creator is more than willing and able to help you. Seek Him in the Bible today. |
| 10/12/2024 | You must have heard the evolutionary idea that dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid hitting the Earth about 66 million years ago – probably on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Recently, this idea has come under criticism from evolutionists as well as from creationists. Other models for the extinction of the dinosaurs have been explored. Recently, researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) have been revisiting the idea of the asteroid strike and have suggested that dust and soot, flying into the air after the impact, would have caused about two years of darkness over the entire world. The researchers suggest that this would have shut down all the photosynthesis across the world, resulting in mass extinctions and reducing the global temperature. This darkness, therefore, would have caused the demise of the dinosaurs. The word “dinosaur” was originally coined to give a label to types of animals which do not really have much in common, other than the fact that they are extinct. It seems odd to spend so much time wondering how a class of animals became extinct, whose very nomenclature was only created to state that they were indeed extinct. Many animals have become extinct. In a biblical worldview, we can see that some animals, following the Flood, might have had difficulty adapting to new climatic conditions. In any case, it seems more logical to attribute the death of dinosaurs to climatic conditions following a known worldwide catastrophe (the Flood) rather than a similar change caused by the speculation about an unknown worldwide catastrophe – the years of Darkness. Put your faith into The Word of God and know that our Magnificent Creator God is the source of all that is and all that ever was!! |
| 10/11/2024 | The Choco Indians of Panama and Colombia use the poison from the skin of the beautiful poison dart frog to make their lethal darts. The bright orange and deep blue skin of this frog serves to warn predators that it is best left alone and its poisonous skin untouched. Although it is deadly, the poison dart frog is one of the most loving parents in the entire amphibian world. The female will lay about a dozen eggs in the leaf litter within her mate’s territory. Both parents will stand watch over the eggs, keeping them moist, until the tadpoles emerge. Then the female allows each tadpole, one at a time, to wriggle onto her back. She takes each tadpole, in its turn, to its own miniature pond created by water trapped in the fronds of jungle plants. The mother poison dart frog remembers where each one of her tadpoles is and returns on a regular schedule to lay infertile eggs for the growing youngster to eat. I would prefer to think that the care of the adult poison dart frogs for their children grows out of a sense of love for their offspring, and we know that God is the author of all love. But even if this care is programmed instinct, we must still find the “programmer” – and that takes us back to our Magnificent Creator God once again. Such wisdom cannot be said to come from nowhere. |
| 10/10/2024 | Christians, especially those who believe in creation, hear this question often, “If God created the world perfectly, why are there germs that cause disease? Why did He make them?” The fact is, only a tiny minority of all microbes cause disease. Almost all microbes, or germs, are “good guys.” Not only do they make life possible on Earth, but many of them have been put to work helping humans. The most obvious example is antibiotics, which have saved millions of lives since they came into widespread use in the last century. But even 2,500 years ago the Chinese were using antibiotics when they treated boils with moldy soybean curds. And microbes make many other common medicines that save millions of lives. Bacteria are used to turn plant stems into ethanol, which is used to produce gasohol. Some microbes help recover trapped oil, while others help clean oil spills off beaches. Bacteria mine uranium and other important minerals. Without microbes, we would have no cheese, soy sauce or bread. And microbes have even been put to work producing highly nutritious animal feeds. Without microbes, we would be up to our ears in sewage and undecayed wood. Microbes are one of our Magnificent Creator God’s most important creations. He didn’t make any of them harmful to other life. They became harmful as part of the curse upon creation that resulted from sin. We thank God that in Jesus Christ He has provided a remedy for our greatest danger – eternal condemnation because of our sin! |
| 10/9/2024 | Today we’re going to a school of fish to learn about the wisdom that God built into some 20,000 different species of fish. First of all, fish don’t learn how to school; they know how to school instinctively at birth. Schooling has advantages for fish, and some schools can have over a million fish in them! You see, schools offer a lot of protection from predators. Did you ever wonder why, when a school of fish is attacked or simply startled, the fish don’t run into each other – but radiate away from the threat like exploding fireworks? Oh yes, they can all see each other; they can tell where the fish next to them are going. But schooling fish also have special organs, called lateral lines, running along the length of their bodies just under the skin. These organs are filled with sensitive hairs, which sense the movement of water around the fish, so that each fish has a better sense of the speed and direction of its neighbor from subtle movements in the water. It is clear that the advantages of schooling, plus the special organs that schooling fish have to help them school, are not the products of genetic accidents and chance. They are testimony to a Magnificent Creator God Who cares for all the creatures He has made. And if He so cares for fish, how much more does He seek you and desire a relationship with you through His Son, Jesus Christ! |
| 10/8/2024 | Christians around the world believe that Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary. To those who don’t believe in a Creator, the virgin birth of God in human flesh is beyond human comprehension. However, why should science deny what it can never understand? Life is filled with intervention by intelligent forces that we cannot understand. Television allows us to watch what is happening this instant 10,000 miles away. Few, if any of us, understand every one of the intelligently directed efforts that make television possible. Who could master and control all the details that bring together satellite, television, sound and electrical control technologies to produce sights and sounds from anywhere in the world? However, our inability to understand television does not lead us to deny its existence. Then can we say that God cannot take the form of His creatures simply because He loved us? Can we say that it is impossible for a virgin to give birth to God in the flesh? Can science rule out His suffering and death for the payment of our sin? Can science presume to tell us His grave is not empty? Even if God would have visibly shown skeptical scientists every step, our measures are too narrow to span the width, too small to plumb the depth of His purposes. And for that we thank Him. We thank Him for intervening in our history with the birth of His Son. Truly the depths of our Magnificent Creator God’s acts are only comprehended in heavenly light! |
| 10/7/2024 | If your measuring stick is inaccurate, you could end up with too much wallpaper or too little. If your map tells you that your destination is 200 miles away when it’s really only 50 miles away, you might drive right past it. If your map of the universe is inaccurate and stars are a lot closer than you expect, you will arrive at the wrong age for the universe. Most science textbooks solemnly teach that the universe is 10 to 20 billion years old. A distant galaxy in the Virgo cluster is one of the primary measuring sticks used by astronomers to figure out the distance of other objects in space. Ultimately these distances are used to compute the age of the universe. Recently, though, astronomers were finally able to see individual stars in this distant cluster. Using a new, high-resolution camera, astronomers saw stars that are very much like stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. Since they know how bright these stars are, they were able to check their computations on how far away the measuring-stick galaxy is. Instead of the expected 100 million light-years, their new figures told them that the galaxy was only 50 million light-years away. This means that the universe might only be half as old as they thought. The lesson for us in this is that the millions and billions of years many scientists talk about are mere speculation. Many measuring sticks for the age of the universe are available, and many of them support an age in the biblical range of only thousands of years. The only source for the age of this universe is the one who created it – our Magnificent Creator God himself!!! |
| 10/5/2024 | We all know that we each started out as a single cell in our mother’s womb. Then those cells began to divide and within 21 days we had a working nervous system and a beating heart. How did all those new cells know how to hook up to each other to knit together our nerve connections? How do other cells know to hook up with each other to make our circulatory system, or form the heart? A fascinating new theory has now been proposed, based on the fact that every cell in your body has the same active genes that your nose uses to enable you to smell. Known as olfactory genes, these genes have no known reason to be active in every one of your cells. Mammals and humans have more than a thousand different olfactory genes. One or another of these crisscrosses each of your cell seven times. Researchers already know that these genes were crucial to the development of your sense of smell as you formed in your mother’s womb. As you formed, the nerve cells in your nose sent out growths, called axons, toward your brain. Each of those axons finally grew into the part of the brain called the olfactory bulb. Once there it hooked up with the cell designed to sense the specific scent detectable by the nerve cell in your nose that sent it out. It has now been proposed that olfactory genes are active in every one of our cells because this same method of wiring our noses for smell is used to link all our cells as we form in the womb. If so, this system of knitting our unborn bodies together is an elegant and precise product of a loving Magnificent Creator God. You weren’t put together by chance or by mindless forces!!! |
| 10/4/2024 | It’s not at all true that penguins are flightless birds. They are perfectly designed to fly. However, when a penguin goes flying in search of its food, it doesn’t search in the air, but in the water. The king penguin is one of the world’s greatest flyers in water. Scientists have attached scientific recording devices to the backs of king penguins. To their surprise, they learned that the bird dives deeper than 600 feet in search of its prey. Scientists also studied the penguins’ metabolism. They were impressed by the fact that dives to 100 feet take very little effort from the penguins. Some birds averaged over 300 dives to various depths each day! This is especially impressive when you realize that the bird is holding its breath while making these dives. The king penguin must reach such great depths because its primary diet, squid, are found at these depths. Scientists estimated that between 50 to 90 squid must be caught by the penguins on each trip to the sea. There must be enough squid to provide energy not only for the diving parent, but also for the chick back in the nest. We should not think of the penguin as a bird that lost the ability to fly. The king penguin’s wings are not designed for flight in the air. However, they are perfectly designed for flight in water. That’s proven by the fact that they can reach such great depths and are so effective in catching squid. Even penguins glorify their Magnificent Creator God! |
| 10/3/2024 | Not a week goes by that we don’t hear of some plant or animal threatened with extinction. Is such a rapid rate of extinction natural, or is it caused by the activities of modern technological man? It is popularly thought that the extinctions of various species on the Hawaiian Islands resulted when Western civilization began to move there. However, studies of bird fossils on the islands show that many more species became extinct before we arrived. In the last 1,500 years, one-third of all the species on the islands have become extinct. Unquestionably, creatures are becoming extinct while no new creatures are evolving. Nor can there be any question that these extinctions are natural and have little to do with the growth of modern, technological man on islands or anywhere else. This shows that we could not have gotten the millions of different life forms we know on Earth today from evolution, since creatures naturally become extinct faster than they are supposed to have evolved. This is a warning to us that the creation is moving in one direction only. That direction is downward toward death. Realizing this inescapable fact, we need to see another one-way sign. It’s found in the Bible where Peter tells us that there is no other name given among men whereby we must be saved. That Name is Jesus Christ. Only He has conquered death – and He has done so on our behalf, rising back to life to prove His power to forgive sin. |
| 10/2/2024 | For a moment think of the uniqueness of the human body. You, friend, are not a blob of protoplasm but a living organism of some 50 trillion cells. Your brain weighs about a kilo—roughly 2 ½ to 3 pounds. It consists of two hemispheres of gray matter connected by an interface called a corpus collosum. Daily, 10,000 thoughts flit in and out of your brain. A hundred billion neurons process information. Its complexity is something that we are just beginning to understand. Your heart pumps 18,000 gallons of blood daily through 75,000 miles of vessels and arteries. Try building something like that. Then there is the iris of your eye that automatically opens and closes depending on the intensity of light and lubricates itself with fluid called tears. Your hand, though, is perhaps the most amazing part of your body. Dr. Paul Brand, the great hand surgeon of the past century, believed it proved your uniqueness as a human being as does nothing else. Our Magnificent Creator God simply spoke this magnificent creation into existence! |
| 10/1/2024 | The bird of paradise is among the strangest and most beautiful birds in the world. They are so unusual that evolutionary scientists are having difficulty explaining how such creatures could have evolved. It was not until 1824 that the first European saw a bird of paradise. Before that time, the bird was known in Europe only by the skins and feathers that natives had sold to European feather dealers. Since the skins did not include the feet, Europeans thought that the bird of paradise remained in flight its entire life. Its Latin name even means, “of paradise, without feet.” The male bird of paradise is probably one of the most beautiful birds in the world. Its body is a dark maroon, with bright green feathers. The 42 different species have an assortment of bright yellow plumes, tufts and other decorations. At mating time, about all one can make of the bird is a wildly screaming yellow tuft that bounces from branch to branch, zigzags in the air, and hangs upside down from branches. Science has always thought that this odd behavior, and the bright plumage, served to attract female attention. This was the justification for these traits to evolve, according to evolutionists. However, more recent research shows that females do not select males – the males select the females. Evolutionists are left with no way to explain the bird of paradise. However, the beauty and odd behavior of the bird of paradise are not hard to explain for those of us who know that our Magnificent Creator God has unlimited creativity and inventiveness. |
| 9/27/2024 | The water pressure around a human diver increases as he goes into deeper water. As the pressure increases, his blood is able to hold more dissolved oxygen. Our blood also absorbs the nitrogen in the air around us. If a diver were to move toward the surface too quickly, the nitrogen would start to bubble out of his blood. These bubbles can block the flow of blood to muscles, organs, and even the brain, leading to death. This painful condition is called the bends. Scientists have wondered why seals don’t get the bends. Weddell seals dive to far greater depths than human divers would consider, using even the best equipment. The fact that they are breaking every diving rule in the book means that almost every dive should lead to a fatal case of the bends. To find the answer to this mystery, scientists outfitted four seals with scientific backpacks. These allowed scientists to record the seals’ heart rates, sample blood, and record the depths of their dives. The deeper the seals went, the more nitrogen accumulated in their blood. Just before the nitrogen reached a dangerous point, it leveled off. Scientists say that the tiny sacks in the lungs that absorb oxygen and nitrogen shut down. Then the seals’ heart, liver and blubber begin to absorb the nitrogen from the blood. The air exchange sacks in the lungs reactivate as the seal ascends to the surface. Surely the amazing biology that allows the seal to make his living deep in the ocean could only have been designed by our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 9/25/2024 | Did you know that a tree is aerodynamically more sleek than the smoothest jet plane? As the wind blows, the leaves and branches of tree move, allowing the wind to pass. As a result, the tree has less aerodynamic drag than a jet plane. The creation is full of examples of the Creator’s principle that life needs to be resilient to change. This means that, for the sake of survival, life is not rigidly designed but has certain flexibility. Much is said today about an increase in carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, and concern is expressed about global warming. However, man’s production of carbon dioxide is infinitesimal compared to the carbon dioxide from volcanic eruptions. Now science is learning how plants are designed to regulate carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. When carbon dioxide levels increase, many plants increase their absorption of carbon dioxide, at the same time making more oxygen available. With increasing carbon dioxide levels, plants also tend to produce tissue that decays less readily. This ties up the excess carbon for longer periods of time. Our Magnificent Creator God expects us to take care of His creation. However, He knows that we cannot change conditions on planet Earth that are beyond our control. For this reason He has built in mechanisms into the creation that adjust to stabilize changing conditions. How wise He is in His goodness to us! |
| 9/24/2024 | Four or five centuries ago people thought that small animals simply froze solid in the winter and, in the spring, thawed out and resumed life. These ideas were later thought of as a foolish fiction of a previous, ignorant age. Today, science has a growing list of creatures that do, indeed, freeze in the winter, and thaw and resume life in the spring. Scientists recently added three species of tree frog to that list. As the cool, fall weather sets in, these northern tree frogs usually burrow beneath the forest’s leaf litter. However, if there is little snow, the frogs have no protection from freezing. Scientists assumed that the frogs’ bodies manufacture antifreeze, as do some insects and polar fish. When scientists collected some tree frogs for laboratory study in the late fall and winter, they received a surprise. Up to 35 percent of the frogs’ body fluids froze when the frogs were cooled to several degrees below freezing. When thawed, the frogs returned to normal activities. Scientists discovered that the frogs’ bodies produced glycerol. This alcohol acts as an antifreeze. What is more important, it prevents ice crystals from forming in a way that destroys cells. The created world around us is full of surprises. Because God is God, His unlimited wisdom and power allow Him to create anything in any way that He likes. Because God is Creator, science cannot guess how nature might work. It must investigate to learn the surprising designs our Magnificent Creator God built into the creation. |
| 9/23/2024 | We’ve all heard the old saying, “God helps those who help themselves.” It’s usually offered to encourage someone to put in more effort. While there are benefits to hard work, it’s not exactly accurate to say that God helps those who help themselves. Hermit crabs are one of the most industrious creatures you will find at the seashore. They never seem completely happy with the shell they have chosen for their home. They seem constantly to try on new shells. Sometimes a hermit crab will try on the new find, return to its old shell, and try on the new shell again just to see which one offers the most comfortable fit. Obviously there is more to this story than just the fussiness of the hermit crab. God gave hermit crabs the ability to sense calcium – the stuff of which shells are made. Hermit crabs can even sense dissolved calcium from buried shells. Research shows that a hermit crab favors shells that have the most calcium, as long as it’s a comfortable fit. If hermit crabs were unable to find the shells with the most calcium – the strongest shells – hermit crabs could endanger their lives by adopting unsuitable homes. Our Magnificent Creator God gave the hermit crab its special abilities before the hermit crab started using those abilities to help itself. As we review our own accomplishments, we do well to apply the lesson of the hermit crab to ourselves and learn to use the talents He has given us. |
| 9/19/2024 | God did not allow man to eat meat before the Great Flood but gave us permission to do so after the flood. At the same time, God placed the fear of man into the animals so that they would know that they needed to protect themselves. However, those animals we generally refer to as “domesticated” remained in a close relationship with man. Even animals we don’t often think of as pets can offer benefits to man. Researchers have found that when autistic children interact with dolphins the children become more communicative. Researchers say that eye contact with pets is especially valuable. Animals generally find it very important to greet each other after a period of absence. That’s why our pets are so eager to greet us when we come home. It’s an important ritual for them, and we usually enjoy the warmth of the moment. Researchers have also found that when pets are introduced into a family setting, families generally show more signs of closeness and warmth. There is more of healthy playing and less arguing. One of the most surprising findings was that when people give attention to their pets, blood pressure drops. Even gazing into an aquarium lowers blood pressure. People with the highest blood pressure benefit the most from this interaction. The unconditional love offered by our pets is truly a blessing from God. But our Magnificent Creator God’s unconditional love toward us through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ is greater than any other love we can ever experience. |
| 9/18/2024 | Many of God’s creatures are beautiful. However, some of them, like the appropriately named hagfish, strike us as ugly. Not only does the hagfish look like something out of a science fiction movie, it has bad habits. The hagfish looks like an eel with whiskers. It has no scales. When handled, a slippery slime oozes from its skin, which explains its other name, the slime eel. It lives at moderately deep levels of the world’s oceans. Its single eye is beneath its skin. It has no jaw. However, it does have true teeth both in its mouth cavity and barb-like teeth on its tongue. The hagfish eats other fish, sometimes entering them and eating them from the inside out. One wonders why God made such an ugly creature that seems so disgusting. The oldest evidence of the hagfish is a fossil in ancient rocks. While we can discount the inflated evolutionary years that are used to date these rocks, it does appear that the fossilized hagfish died when the world was still young. Yet, this fossilized hagfish is identical to the modern hagfish. To paraphrase one scientist, no evolution has taken place. It appears that God has an important job for the ugly and impolite hagfish. The hagfish shows that evolution has not taken place. Beauty, or lack of it, doesn’t always witness to our Magnificent Creator God, but the truth unfailingly does! |
| 9/17/2024 | One of the most common questions Christians ask is “What about the dinosaurs?” Are dinosaurs proof that the Earth is countless ages old and that life must have evolved? By themselves, dinosaur fossils do not disprove or contradict any history found in the Bible. Vast ages are not needed to form the Earth’s sedimentary rocks and the fossils in them. The flood of Noah’s time formed the rock layers quickly. The fact that fossil bones are found jumbled together in great heaps argues for their deposition during a flood. A global change, resulting in a cooler, wetter climate, probably caused the extinction of most of the survivors of the flood. This means that man and dinosaur lived on earth at the same time. Perhaps we still do. In 1977, a Japanese trawler hauled up the decaying remains of a sea creature that had a long neck and flippers. After taking tissue samples and photographs, they returned the rotting carcass to the sea. The creature was commonly held to be a plesiosaurus, a sea-dwelling dinosaur. Virtually every people on earth have legends about dragons. Those dragons resemble dinosaurs very closely. If man had never seen these great reptiles, why does everyone seem to know about them? The great sea-going dinosaurs were created on day five of creation week with the other great sea creatures. The great land dinosaurs were created on day six. Dinosaurs don’t contradict the Bible; rather, they glorify their Magnificent Creator God. |
| 9/16/2024 | It seems like science fiction to suggest that if someone typed your name into a computer, misspelling your name, the computer would find it and correct it. Yet the genetic code within each of your cells is an even more sophisticated information storage and transmission system. Not only does your genetic code store far more information in a microscopic space than our largest computers can, it has a built-in error correction system. Scientists have found a number of key enzymes in the cell that have just one job—find and correct errors in the genetic code. Those errors can creep in because of radiation, chemicals, or other reasons. These enzymes faithfully correct any errors, preventing mutations. But these are the very ones scientists thought could cause evolution—before they discovered this process. One scientist who studied these enzymes said science has no explanation for how this process could have evolved naturally. Scientists also say they don’t know how life could have continued without this genetic proofreading and correction. Only our Magnificent Creator God could have been wise enough to design an information system that can correct errors within itself. Even we human beings have not figured out how to do this with our simplest computers. Asking us to believe that blind chance and natural law could have done it certainly strains the credibility of science!!! |
| 9/15/2024 | All insects that hear, except one, have two ears. Some insects have ears on their legs, thorax, or abdomen. However, they all follow the same principle. Their ears are separated so that they can locate the source of the sound – except in one insect.Scientists always thought the preying mantis was deaf. The 1,700 species of mantises have no structure that looks like an ear. Only after a long process of detailed study and testing did scientists finally discover that the mantis can hear. Further investigation finally led to the discovery of one of the most bizarre methods of hearing anywhere in the animal kingdom.The mantis’s hearing organ is difficult to call an ear. Unlike any other insect, the mantis has only one hearing organ, located in a groove underneath its thorax. The teardrop‑shaped groove has a thinner cuticle than other parts of the body. Beneath the cuticle there is a relatively large air sac on each side of the groove. These sacs are connected to the insect’s respiratory system. Near the top of the sac are the nerves that carry the sensation of sound to the nervous system. Scientists say that this hearing organ senses ultrasonic frequencies. When researchers played a bat‑like sound to a mantis in flight, it immediately took an evasive flight path to escape the bat it thought it heard.There is no limit to our Magnificent Creator God’s creativity and His ability to make whatever He can imagine. |
| 9/14/2024 | Researchers in the 1950s and ’60s established that the octopus is quite intelligent and can learn different visual patterns. Octopi have very large brains with large areas reserved for storing information. New research has shown that they are even more intelligent than earlier studies revealed. These findings run counter to evolutionary theory, which says that intelligence evolves in social species to help them deal with social relationships. The octopus is not a social animal and operates alone.Unlike other animals, octopi use a variety of strategies to solve the same problem. They can use their eight powerful arms to open clams, or they can drill through the shell and inject a fast-acting poison. In the laboratory, octopi kept in isolation were given a floating plastic bottle. The bored octopuses quickly devised a variety of games to play with the bottle – a sure sign of intelligence.The Creator gave the octopus the ability to learn a lot so it could cope with its unusual way of life. Octopi begin life as tiny plankton that drift with the ocean currents. When they finally settle to the bottom, they may find themselves in any of the many habitats provided by the ocean and face any variety of predators and food sources. Thus, our Magnificent Creator God designed them with the ability to learn how to adapt to a large variety of habitats and situations. Just like He designed us… |
| 9/13/2024 | The Clark’s Nutcracker is an amazing bird. Every year it prepares for winter by hiding tiny caches of four or five whitebark pine seeds, as many as five hundred seeds per hour. Then, months later, it returns to uncover the seeds, even under heavy snow. A Clark’s Nutcracker may remember as many as ten thousand locations where it has hidden seeds—an astounding feat (especially when you consider the difficulty we humans can have remembering the location of our car keys or glasses). But even this incredible act of memory pales in comparison with God’s ability to remember our prayers. He’s able to keep track of every sincere prayer and remember and respond to them even years later. In the book of Revelation, the apostle John describes “four living creatures” and “twenty-four elders” worshiping the Lord in heaven. Each one was “holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of God’s people” (5:8). Just as incense was precious in the ancient world, our prayers are so precious to our Magnificent Creator God that He keeps them before Him continually, treasured in golden bowls! Our prayers matter to God because we matter to Him, and through His undeserved kindness to us in Jesus He offers us uninhibited access (Hebrews 4:14–16). So we can pray boldly! And know that not a word will be forgotten or misplaced because of the amazing love of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 9/11/2024 | We don’t often associate aggressive behavior and the need to fight with butterflies. Rather we think of bright, beautiful creatures that decorate nature and always seem to cheer people up. Scientists have always assumed that the bright-colored wings of butterflies served the purpose of attracting a mate. However, new research on tropical butterflies calls that idea into question. Researchers carefully changed the colors of male butterflies’ wings, even painting patterns on them that were wrong for the species. When it came time for mating, females treated the disguised males the same as other males. It appeared as though the females paid no attention at all to the colors and patterns on the males’ wings. What practical purposes do the patterns serve then? Scientists know that they help predators avoid poisonous butterflies. They know that certain patterns deter birds. Many male butterflies tend to be aggressive with each other and very territorial. However, butterflies are so fragile that almost any injury in a fight would be fatal. Rather than fight, male butterflies assert themselves by showing their wings to each other in something like a ritualized combat. A universal standard of beauty is not something evolution could have produced. Butterflies are lovely, living ornaments with which our Magnificent Creator God and Author of all beauty has adorned His creation. |
| 9/9/2024 | The modern, educated person often tends to look down on previous generations. Many people seem convinced that if we look back 1,000 or 2,000 years, some measurable evolutionary improvement in man must have taken place over so much time. It is this spirit that makes so many today feel that they can pass judgment on the Bible. “After all,” they say, “it comes from an ancient, uneducated time.” They add, “Back then, people didn’t even know the difference between historical fact and a legend designed only to teach a lesson.” This superior attitude of history suggests, since the ancients didn’t have medical labs as good as ours, how could they know something we don’t? This is why medical researchers dismissed a cure for fever that dated to 340 A.D. An ancient Chinese book of herbal remedies recommended that to cure a fever, one should soak a particular weed in about a liter of water and drink the resulting tea. In typical modern fashion, researchers had doubts that this cure would work. However, the weed created by our Magnificent Creator God and named in the folk cure provides a compound that may be an even more effective treatment for malaria than Quinines. It treats cases that Quinines don’t affect and produces no side effects. While our modern age may be advanced in some things, it’s definitely behind past ages in other things – like humility. |
| 9/8/2024 | Why did the Creator bring together so many precise specifications and high intelligence in the honeybee? To glorify Himself and because bees are crucial to the reproductive cycles of so many plants as well as the food chain.The amazing structure of the honeycomb has amazed scientists for thousands of years. As early as the third century AD, the astronomer Pappus of Alexandria offered an explanation for the six-sided or hexagonal shape of the honeycomb. He pointed out that while the triangle, square and hexagon could all be candidates for the shape of the comb, one of these shapes holds more than the others. The most efficient shape for storing the most honey while wasting the least space is the hexagon.There are many variations of the hexagon that are available to the bee. However, the honeybee is always very precise in constructing honeycomb hexagons, with an obtuse angle of 109°23´ and an acute angle of 70°23´. These angles produce the most usable space for the least amount of building material. Humans are unable to use such precision in their designs without sophisticated equipment.Each honeybee is a tiny but powerful computer that could only have been designed and built by an intelligent Magnificent Creator God. Bees and what they do are of central importance to much of the rest of creation. No wonder God has given them so much: the complex structure of their society, their intelligence and industriousness! |
| 9/7/2024 | “And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” Genesis 2:19 It surely wasn’t possible, we are often told, for Adam to have given names to all the millions of species of animals that exist on earth in the space of one day. Obviously, they tell us, this means that the Bible is wrong. In fact, the activity was nowhere near as arduous as this accusation suggests. The number of animals would be far less than the estimated 2 million species. Adam did not have to go looking for these animals. God brought them to him. God brought three classes of animals to Adam – livestock, birds of the heavens, and beasts of the field. All of these are vertebrates, whereas 98% of all species are invertebrates. Of the remaining 2% – or 40,000 species – many have developed from others (note: developed, not evolved) by the process of speciation. It is likely that the creatures were all descended from just a couple of thousand baramins, or created kinds. It would not be that difficult for Adam to assign a name to each of the animals that paraded before him, especially as he was created perfect, and unlikely to get tired. Suppose he took five seconds to name an animal. He could have named 2,000 animals in 2¾ hours. You might think such a task would be boring, but it was not onerous and would easily fit with all the other activities occurring on that sixth day of God’s creation, including our Magnificent Creator God making the land animals and making Eve from Adam! |
| 9/6/2024 | When little or no oxygen is dissolved in the blood of most animals or humans, death quickly follows. The chemistry by which our cells generate energy to stay alive needs oxygen. When oxygen runs short, a second, temporary, energy-producing system kicks in. This system doesn’t need oxygen, but it produces lactic acid that can kill living cells. Therefore, this second energy system is an emergency measure, used only when seriously starved for oxygen. To avoid this dangerous situation, many amphibians and reptiles that hibernate in ponds, lakes and rivers have the ability to remove oxygen directly from the water through special tissue on their throats. However, the painted turtle and the mud slider hibernate as close to the freezing line below the water as possible. As a result, they often hibernate in water where the oxygen is quickly used and have lived completely without oxygen for up to 120 days. How do they do it? During the summer, the turtle stores large amounts of a carbohydrate that can provide energy without using oxygen. The turtle has a unique built-in system that detoxifies the poisonous lactic acid that is built up. As a result, the turtle can live for months with no oxygen in its blood or in the water around it. This unique ability is based on a sophisticated understanding of biochemistry. It’s clearly not the result of a genetic accident. It can only be the work of the unique creativity of our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 9/4/2024 | Not only is the human brain the most complex structure in the universe, it is also one of the busiest. In fact, during intense concentration, your brain can burn as many calories as your muscles do during exercise! Intense thinking can literally be as exhausting as a physical workout! More than 100,000 chemical reactions go on in your brain every second. Among the brain’s many jobs is chemist. The brain produces more than 50 psychoactive drugs. Some of these are associated with memory, others with intelligence, still others are sedatives. Endorphin is the brain’s painkiller and it’s three times more potent than morphine. Serotonin is produced by the brain to help keep our moods under control. The brain also makes dopamine. Dopamine makes people more talkative and excitable. Another hormone regulates hunger. The brain is also a radio transmitter that sends out measurable electrical wave signals. In fact, the brain continues to send these signals for as long as 37 hours after death! Our tiny knowledge of the brain is enough to show us that this incredible organ is no accident. The brain is much more than a powerful testimony to our Creator. Its incredible powers convince us that there is much more to existence than this material life. However, we can learn only from the Word of God about eternal life through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. Put the brain our Magnificent Creator God gave you together with the Word of God today! |
| 9/2/2024 | Scientists who are working on newer and better materials out of which to make things are concentrating their attention on ceramics. Ceramics do not break or wear as easily as other materials, including metals. High temperatures don’t cause them to weaken. Some ceramics have even shown the promise of bringing about another revolution in electronics. Ceramics have one major problem, though. They are difficult to form into usable parts. Sometimes they are also too brittle to work well as machine parts. Nature, on the other hand, regularly custom-forms ceramics for the most-demanding duties. The ceramics made in living bodies include teeth and shells. Living creatures bind inorganic crystals into a hard, custom-fashioned ceramic that is both strong and much less brittle than man-made ceramics. Taking their cue from living things, scientists have successfully made stronger, less-brittle ceramics patterned after biological ceramics. The new ceramics offer great promise in designing radical new electronics. Perhaps most dramatically, one version has served well as artificial bone. The body even accepts the ceramic as though it was true bone! Modern science has gained some wonderful knowledge. However, modern scientists have learned that to solve an engineering problem it is better to learn how our wise Magnificent Creator God solved the same problem in the first place. |
| 8/31/2024 | Over the last couple of centuries many Bible scholars have developed a skeptical approach to the Bible. Their treatment of the Bible as nothing more than a human document stems from their belief in evolution. According to them, Christianity has evolved from earlier religions just as humans evolved.As a result, critics reject the idea that the Bible is God’s inerrant, inspired, trustworthy Word. Because they hold this low view of the Bible, they believe that they have found many errors in the Bible over the years. At one time they said that the Hittites mentioned in the Old Testament never existed. They said that ancient biblical writers invented these people so that Israel could make up pretend victories over them. Eventually the Hittites were discovered, one of the first evidences being hard-to-ignore six-foot-tall jars! Over the years these critics have been consistently proven wrong by new discoveries.Likewise, critics have said that the Israelites could not have entered Canaan when the Old Testament says they did. They reason that because the Old Testament mentions the Ammonites, which critics said didn’t live in Canaan until later, the Bible’s dating is in error. However, in the summer of 1989, biblical archaeologists proved that the Ammonites were in Canaan well before the Bible’s date for the exodus. Again Bible critics have been proven wrong.As one biblical archaeologist wrote, “As usual the absence of evidence is not necessarily the evidence of absence.” When the Bible says something is true, there is no question of its truth.The Bible truly is the inerrant, inspired, trustworthy Word of our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 8/30/2024 | The human brain is like a network in which each brain cell is connected to thousands of other brain cells. Scientists have long suspected that this unique design helps give the human brain its intellectual power. However, the brain is so complex that our most sophisticated mathematics are insufficient to cope with it. As a result, scientists are left with only trial and error as they try to study it in an effort to improve computers. A new step forward was made recently when scientists designed an effective computer neural network chip. The silicon neural network crudely mimics the brain’s neural network. The manmade networks are designed to learn, all by themselves. Scientists wired a number of networks together and gave them a memory of the characteristics of three-dimensional images. They then exposed the neural network to images it had never seen before to see if it could compare the new images with its memory and tell whether the new images were three-dimensional. Scientists report that while it took the network a long time, it eventually learned to judge depth, even if it saw only part of an image. Scientists admit that they are working from the brain’s design to learn how to make better computers. As one of the scientists working on the project said, they are doing “reverse engineering.” They are starting with the genius of our Magnificent Creator, God Who made the human brain, to learn how thinking and learning take place. |
| 8/28/2024 | The White-fronted bee-eater is an East African bird that lives in clans of up to fourteen members. White-fronted bee-eaters have several problems to deal with. Since they nest on the cliffs overlooking riverbanks, youngsters need a great deal of attention until they learn to fly. Once they are on their own, the young birds are often put to work by their parents as helpers. A father may even drive away his sons’ mates in order to keep them as helpers. Helpers bring food for their mother, brothers and sisters. They also clean the nest area and watch for danger. However, the most important job is guarding the nest at egg-laying time. This is necessary because a female who doesn’t have her own nest will sneak into another bee-eater’s nest and lay her eggs there. If the eggs are laid before the owner of the nest starts laying her eggs, she will simply toss out the foreign egg. If there are eggs already in the nest, she will also care for the foreign eggs. The important job of guarding the nest is usually given to a daughter. However, scientists have observed that sometimes it is the daughter, while on guard duty with the mother absent, who sneaks into the nest and adds a few eggs of her own! In His goodness, our Magnificent Creator God has given bee-eaters a way of life in which helping each other is part of their nature. This kindness toward each other improves the quality of life. It can serve as an example to us that the world is not designed to favor the survival of the most selfish or aggressive. |
| 8/24/2024 | In the past we have discussed individual studies that link good health to religious commitment. It’s always easy to find individual studies to prove almost any point. So researchers did a statistical analysis of 42 different studies made since 1977.The 42 studies that were examined involved over 125,000 people, mostly Christian and Jewish. The analysis, conducted by the National Institute for Healthcare Research, distinguished between public and private religious activity. Public religious activity included attending worship services and volunteering time for church activities. Private religious activity included praying alone and “internal spiritual feelings.” While there are some who question these studies, they have consistently shown that religiously involved people live longer, healthier lives. However, the researchers who analyzed these studies arrived at a new conclusion as they analyzed the differences between public and private religious activity. They concluded that public religious involvement, as opposed to private or no involvement, showed a statistically important relationship to higher health and survival rates.Two thousand years ago, the writer of the book of Hebrews encouraged believers not to neglect assembling themselves together for worship on a regular basis. Like burning embers removed from the fire, when believers fail to be a regular part of their faith community, believers’ faith, too, cools to the temperature around it.Our Magnificent Creator God created everyone for a purpose and part of that purpose is to “assemble ourselves together” as He said, that we might love Him and each other and grow spiritually as a body of believers. |
| 8/23/2024 | When they flower, some plants actually generate their own heat. The voodoo lily can raise its temperature by 25 degrees. As it does so, it releases a scent that attracts the beetles that pollinate it. When the voodoo lily generates heat, it burns starch in a way similar to our own bodies. Scientists weren’t sure how voodoo lilies generated their heat and scent until only a couple decades ago. Once they unraveled the complex chemical reactions going on within the plant, they found unexpected surprises. They discovered that a component of aspirin is responsible for raising the lily’s temperature. They remain puzzled about why salicylic acid should lower our temperature, yet raise the temperature of the plant. Scientists were also amazed when they discovered how many separate complex chemical reactions take place to produce a chemical symphony that helps the lily reproduce. Not only does the lily make its own aspirin, it also makes the same chemicals that are found in the rotting meat that its pollinator beetles feed on. The rising temperature of the plant evaporates the chemicals, creating a scent that attracts the beetles. As the beetles look for food in the flower, they become covered with pollen, which will be delivered to the next lily they visit. The voodoo lily is an example of how, even in the plant kingdom, there is no such thing as a simple life form. As this plant duplicates several of the processes taking place in animals, we see that all life was created at about the same time by one Magnificent Creator God! |
| 8/19/2024 | Scientists have been studying the different ways in which insects move, hoping to discover a better way to design mobile robots. In doing this they have inadvertently recognized the wisdom and creativity of the Creator, even though they may not care to admit His existence. Insect locomotion uses a variety of methods to travel over terrain even humans could not cover. Think of how the spider walks up the wall and across the ceiling. Some insects walk on water. Then there’s the inchworm. Stomatopods move by curling up and rolling away backwards. To their amazement, scientists have found that whether a creature has two, four, six, eight or more legs, legs are always designed to attach to the body in a way that puts the least stress on them. Many insects can change their method of locomotion to adapt to different situations. High-speed photography has shown that startled cockroaches race off by standing and running on their two hind legs only. In this position they can reach speeds of over three miles per hour! Because scientists find the wisdom of good design in nature, they search to see how nature has solved the engineering problems they face. However, if everything was truly the accidental consequence of chance, wouldn’t scientists be studying accidents to find solutions to their problems? Though they may be embarrassed to admit it, scientists who look to nature are recognizing the wisdom of the Magnificent Creator God! |
| 8/17/2024 | Everybody loves pandas, don’t they? We must love them because we are trying to save them from extinction, with some success; pandas have been downgraded from endangered to vulnerable. Apparently, their habitat in China is expanding, so that the likelihood of those adorable black-and-white icons of world wildlife may not disappear after all. However, you might recall one British comedian poking ironic fun at the mission to save the pandas by saying that we could do without them. After all, he opined, they seem determined to commit species suicide, so why not just let them go where the dinosaurs and mammoths went? A Christian position is more logical – less sentimental, but more compassionate. If pandas had already gone extinct, then we could clearly live without them. However, given that humanity has a mandate from Genesis 1 of stewardship of the Earth and its resources, it is certainly admirable to attempt to preserve what we have in the way of panda populations. The concept of panda extinction is inconsistent for evolutionists. A hard-line evolutionist should want them to die out because, in the survival of the fittest stakes, pandas have proved themselves less fit. Yet most people, while holding evolutionary philosophy, would rather try to take steps to preserve the cuddly looking giants. It is only those of us taking a biblical worldview who can view the subject with any degree of rationality. Animals are only animals. When they die, their souls return to the ground. Yet, the survival of pandas has only occurred because of massive human effort – effort that is not wrong and can indeed be justified from Scripture. It was a mandate from our Magnificent Creator God that we should always tend the earth and all that He created for it!!! |
| 8/16/2024 | According to evolution, dinosaurs developed tens of millions of years before horses and were extinct long before the first horse galloped across the countryside. According to the Bible, however, horses and the land dinosaurs were made on the same day. This means that it should be possible to find evidence of horses in the same rocks as we find dinosaurs. Such a discovery would be a challenge to evolution! The scientific literature has reported the existence of several examples of apparent horse hoof marks in rock that is supposedly older than most of the dinosaurs. Some of these apparent hoof prints have been found in the Pennsylvanian and Permian rocks of the Grand Canyon. Similar prints have also been reported in Triassic rock in Connecticut and in the New Red Sandstone of Scotland. Evidence of horses living before most of the dinosaurs lived, or even at the same time, damages the theory of evolution beyond repair. Paleontologists gave the creatures that may have made these tracks a variety of names. However, the names frequently contained the word “equus”, which means horse. Nevertheless, this important information has been withheld from the textbooks. Worse, modern evolutionists, aware that they are in serious trouble, have tried to deny the work of earlier paleontologists. What upsets modern evolutionists most about these tracks is that the tracks uphold the Bible’s account of our Magnificent Creator God’s order of creation! |
| 8/14/2024 | The Cassini-Huygens Mission, which ended in 2017, was, by any stretch of the imagination, a remarkable human achievement. Launched on October 15, 1997, the craft was active for nearly 20 years before its final descent into the oblivion of Saturn’s gravity on September 15, 2017. Cassini-Huygens took seven years to reach Saturn. In order to save fuel, an extremely complicated orbit was calculated to use planetary gravitational fields to accelerate the craft enough for its long journey to Saturn. This involved two close approaches to Venus, one to the Earth, and another to Jupiter, which finally whipped the craft off in the right direction for the rendezvous with the ringed planet and its moons. The complexity of the calculations required to power the craft to Saturn relied on the predictability and measurability of gravitational forces elsewhere in the Solar System. Such confidence in calculations was only possible because these universal constants display the wisdom of God. NASA’s brilliant scientists did not assume that their work would be hindered by random evolutionary chance in the way that all these planets behaved. Yet, part of their mission was the vain search for the evolution of life on one of Saturn’s moons. Evolution-minded scientists often cannot see the irony or the inconsistency of such an approach – a reliance on divine design in an attempt to prove such design does not exist! Once again our Magnificent Creator God has blessed many people with intelligence and skill to navigate the vast universe He so carefully planned and built!!! |
| 8/10/2024 | I remember reading in grade school that the human appendix is a useless organ. My textbook said that scientists thought that the appendix was once used to help digest the tree bark that our supposed ape-like ancestors ate. Does the human body have “extra” parts? Do we have organs that we no longer use because we have evolved away from needing them? Atheists have argued that our “useless” organs prove that we weren’t created. No Creator, they said, would make useless organs that can threaten our health. Creationists responded that since our knowledge of the human body is incomplete, we cannot say that an organ is useless simply because we are ignorant of its job. In the 1890s, scientists said that the human body has about 180 organs that are useless leftovers of our past evolution. As a result, doctors used to be quick to remove a child’s tonsils. Today, we know that our tonsils have several jobs and are an important part of our immune system. Our appendix has been found to serve as a backup for other organs. If your spleen is damaged, your appendix will take over some of its functions. Wisdom teeth are important in chewing food, especially when the diet includes more coarse materials. The argument over whether we have extra parts left over from evolution has been completely won by creationists. Today, science recognizes that we have no useless leftovers from evolution. Our Magnificent Creator God made nothing that did not serve an important purpose. |
| 8/8/2024 | We’ve all been taught that fish are cold-blooded. In many people’s thinking, perhaps the most cold-blooded of all is the shark. However, scientists have discovered that four types of sharks can raise their internal body temperatures. Why and how they do this offers a powerful witness to the love and provision of the Creator. There is good reason for sharks to be hungry nearly all the time. They seldom catch a large tuna or other creature to meet their needs. For this reason, a shark can live for weeks on the fat reserves stored in its liver. Amazingly, the shark’s liver can account for up to 20 percent of its body weight. So, when feeding is good, the faster a shark can digest, the more food it can store for lean times. The shark increases its body temperature to speed digestion. When food is plentiful, a great white shark can increase its body temperature above that of the surrounding water by over 13 degrees Fahrenheit. Normally, the heat generated by the shark’s muscles is lost mainly through the gills. However, when the heat is needed to speed digestion, a complex radiator called a “miraculous web” moves into action. The “miraculous web” transfers the heat from the blood going to the gills to the blood coming from the gills. As a result, the shark can more efficiently digest and store food. The shark seems unlovable to us. However, our Magnificent Creator God lovingly designed special features such as the “miraculous web” into the shark because He loves the creatures He made. Most of all, He loved us and sent His Son to die for our salvation when we were unlovable. |
| 8/7/2024 | A large, sophisticated concrete floor has recently been discovered in China. The floor dates to a period that, not long ago, evolutionists called the “Stone Age.” The concrete floor, discovered in northwest China, extends the record of technological man far beyond any age imagined by evolutionists. Concrete of excellent quality was widely used in the Roman Empire. However, according to the evolutionary scenario, when the Chinese floor was built, man had just perfected stone axes and arrowheads. The concrete floor measures 144 square feet. The concrete itself is a greenish black. However, scientists report that when struck with an iron object, it gives the same hollow sound as modern concrete. The concrete is similar to today’s and includes silicon and aluminum. Sand, stone, broken pottery and bones were mixed with the concrete. Obviously, so-called “Stone Age” man was involved in much more industry than some scientists had thought! Scientists who believe the Bible’s view of history are not surprised by this discovery. They know that every human being, from the very first one, has been completely human and quite intelligent. Imagine, on his first day of existence, Adam was smart enough to understand the animals and give them meaningful names! To a man with such understanding of God’s creation, concrete would be a simple technology. The question really is: Are we as smart today as Adam, who knew the Magnificent Creator God face-to-face? |
| 8/6/2024 | Fireflies in southeast Asia regularly put on a show like that seldom seen from fireflies in the rest of the world. These fireflies have an ability found only among humans. As the evening darkness deepens along a riverbank, fireflies in the trees over the riverbank begin to flash. At first the flashing is familiar to anyone who has ever seen fireflies anywhere in the world. Flashes come randomly from different parts of the tree. Within a few minutes, something strange begins to happen. Instead of the flashes appearing randomly, they now appear in groups. Fireflies in one part of the tree flash in unison, then a group in another part of the tree flashes. In less than half an hour, the entire swarm, which may extend over more than one tree, is flashing once per second in perfect unison. This ability to pick up a rhythm to synchronize actions is found otherwise only in human beings. Scientists report that different species have different rates at which they synchronize. They have also discovered that fireflies of one species ignore the synchronized flashing of other species. Some firefly swarms even flash in waves, creating an especially eerie sight along riverbanks. One scientist, who has been trying to understand how fireflies do this, said that this behavior is so complex he has no idea how it works. Whether or not these scientists believe in the Magnificent Creator God, their wonderment is a tribute to His unsurpassed handiwork, even in the lowly firefly. |
| 8/5/2024 | Episodic memory, the ability to remember something that happened in the past is called mental time travel. It has long been thought that only humans are capable of episodic memory. New research suggests that some birds are also capable of mental time travel. Researchers gave captive Western scrub jays wax worms, one of their favorite foods. As they usually do, the jays made their selections and hid the worms in the trays of sand provided. Five days later, the birds were allowed to recover their treats. The jays discovered that after the five days, the worms had begun to decay. The researchers fooled a second batch of jays by replacing their decayed worms with fresh worms just before the birds were allowed to find their treats. Then both batches of birds were again allowed to take and hide a choice of worms. Those birds that had had experience with the decayed worms, would no longer take new worms to hide. But the birds that had been fooled took the worms and buried them, still expecting them to be good later. In other words, the birds remembered what happened in the past and adjusted their behavior. Other tests offered similar results. Our Magnificent Creator God has given all His creatures the abilities they need to make a living without regard to where those creatures are on the manmade evolutionary ladder!!! |
| 8/3/2024 | We have all looked in wonder at the amazing transformation of a caterpillar into a moth. However, did you realize that a moth needs an entirely different kind of brain than a caterpillar? We can truly say that here we have an insect with two brains! In the caterpillar stage, the moth lumbers around in a body that is primarily designed for eating. Its brain must be able to command powerful jaws and a comparatively huge digestive system as well as the complexities of caterpillar locomotion. The world of the caterpillar is very different from the world of the moth. During metamorphosis the caterpillar completely dissolves and the moth is rebuilt from the liquid. The brain, for example, requires new nerve cells and new connections between brain cells, while some brain cells change function, migrate to new locations, or even die. The result is a brain that is 10 times the size of the caterpillar’s and ready to control flight. The moth’s primary purpose in life is to reproduce. So its new brain is able to generate the odors used by moths to identify and communicate with potential mates. It is also equipped to detect the scents of a potential mate. Only our almighty Magnificent Creator God could completely rebuild a caterpillar into a moth. Only He could rebuild and increase its brain ten-fold in only a week or two. Even more amazing is how He remakes people. Through the forgiveness of sins, Jesus Christ turns us from people who wish to escape Him to new creatures who love Him and find joy in Him!!! |
| 8/2/2024 | Mammoths and mastodons were distant relatives to the elephant. There is a great deal of debate over when they became extinct and why. Mammoths and mastodons are less mysterious to us than dinosaurs because we can study their preserved bodies. Several of the creatures have even been found, complete with flesh, frozen in the ice in Siberia, North America and northern Europe. Dogs have even found this flesh good to eat. Much of the ivory available today has been taken from the dead mammoths. Mammoths seem almost, but not quite, part of our world. That could change. Soviet scientists removed living sperm from some mammoths that had fallen into an icy pond and been almost perfectly preserved since their deaths. The sperm was used to fertilize nine elephant eggs. The eggs were then re-implanted in the elephants. Only one of the nine survived until birth. The half mammoth-half elephant was sterile, small and covered with shaggy yellow hair. Soviet scientists are continuing their research. They hope to find and fertilize mammoth eggs with mammoth sperm. Elephants would be used as surrogate mothers. If they are successful, mammoths might again walk our earth! The history of life on earth shows that the further back in time we go, the more kinds of creatures existed. This is the opposite of what we would expect if evolution were true. However, it is exactly what we would expect based on the Bible’s account of creation by our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 8/1/2024 | Many kinds of birds collect and store food for later use. However, scientists recently reported that the female red-cockaded woodpecker collects, stores and appropriately uses a dietary mineral supplement as well. As is true for most birds, the female red-cockaded woodpecker needs additional dietary calcium at egg-laying time. Scientists tracking the female woodpeckers noticed that within a couple days of egg-laying time, the woodpeckers began gathering and hiding bone fragments found on the forest floor. Upon spying a bone fragment, the female would usually consume a few flakes of it on the spot and then carry the rest off to her “pantry” for later use. As she laid her eggs, she would frequently return to her pantry and eat more flakes from the bone. Once egg-laying was completed, the female woodpeckers showed little interest in the bone pieces. Scientists noted that this was the first time a bird had been known to collect and store dietary mineral supplements. They all pointed out that by collecting the bone from the forest floor and storing it in trees near the nest, the female woodpeckers were avoiding the risk of attack by floor-dwelling predators. A healthy life requires planning and maintaining health balances. For this reason, our Magnificent Creator God’s love for all He has made led Him to give even the animals a detailed knowledge of how to stay healthy. |
| 7/31/2024 | When talking about a baby’s expected time of birth, we have all heard someone say, “The baby will come when it’s ready.” While that might not sound very scientific, new research shows that the statement is probably scientifically accurate. The infant, not the mother, seems to control the start of the birth process for mother and infant. Medical researchers are doing more research to confirm their theories. They believe that the brain of the unborn child monitors the infant’s development so that it knows when the infant is ready for birth. As the time for birth approaches, a pea-sized part of the fetal brain signals the adrenal and pituitary glands that it is soon time to be born. These glands respond by producing two hormones. These hormones build up in the infant’s blood. As they build up, they create changes in the mother’s hormones that begin the process of giving birth. A complete understanding of this amazing sequence may help medicine treat the problem of premature labor. What is more important, we see how exquisitely God has designed the process of giving birth. How wise of our Magnificent Creator God to design the process so that when the baby is ready to be born, the mother’s convenience must give way to the baby’s need. Nor does the baby’s birth time depend on the mother’s limited understanding of the developing infant. Perhaps these realities offer some lessons to an age that places so much less value on the unborn child than God clearly does. |
| 7/30/2024 | In Deuteronomy 27:2-8, we read of how Moses instructed Joshua to build an altar on Mt. Ebal after the Israelites had entered the Promised Land. There, the people were to sacrifice and give thanks to the Lord. Bible critics have generally been skeptical of the Bible’s early history of Israel’s conquest of Canaan. However, over the years, a growing number of discoveries have supported the Bible’s account of the earliest history of the Israelites. Perhaps one of the most dramatic recent discoveries is the altar Joshua apparently built on Mt. Ebal after Israel entered Canaan. The ruins of the altar are laid out in a rectangle that measures 25 by 30 feet. The walls of the nine-foot-high structure of uncut stones and rocks are filled with ash, dirt, stones and bones. Over 4,000 bones were found in the fill, all of them bones of the sacrificial animals called for in Moses’ law. Evident, too, is the ramp up to the altar that was used by the priests, as stipulated by Exodus. One discovery at the site seems to tie everything together. It is an Egyptian scarab that was probably among the spoils the Bible says Israel took with them from Egypt. Bible-believing Christians don’t need this proof to accept the Bible as inspired by our Magnificent Creator God. However, it is exciting to identify and learn more about such a historic place as the Mt. Ebal altar. |
| 7/27/2024 | What can be more appealing, than the sight of a cherry tree in full bloom? Cherry blossom seems to enhance every environment, of which it is a part. Even urban areas can play host to cherry trees, and concrete city can be made attractive for a while, when the blossoms appear. Cherry blossom is often fleeting. Many varieties are in bloom for no more than 2 weeks of the year. But for those two weeks, they burst into an explosion of pink, followed by a ground covering of pink snow. It is often forgotten how much energy a plant uses, in producing flowers and blossoms. Though cherry blossoms are small, there are a lot of them. The colors they reflect, and the aromas released, are attractive to the insects necessary for pollination. But what an awkward method of reproduction pollination sometimes seems to be. The male pollen cells need to travel from the anthers of the flowers on one cherry tree, to the stigma of another. To attract the right pollinator, the blossoms must be the right color, and the right size. But why would they have evolved this way, if the insects were not originally pollinating these flowers? Whichever way you cut it, the burst of energy needed to produce the annual cherry blossoms is not explicable without presupposing the truth of God’s word. But God made everything in six days, so the inexplicable becomes logical. Like the stars of the heavens, bright flowers tell forth the glory of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 7/26/2024 | If you are like most people, you may not care whether spiders feel pain. However, because of the way spiders are designed, their ability to feel pain has implications for many other creatures. Like crabs and lizards, spiders are able to drop a leg when attacked. Spiders, too, have enemies. Among them is the poisonous ambush bug. Scientists have always assumed that a spider would drop a leg bitten by the ambush bug to prevent the bug’s venom from spreading to the rest of its body. However, when they were closely watching an ambush bug attack a spider, it seemed to them that the spider might actually be reacting in pain to the bite. This observation led scientists to test the spider’s reaction to various parts of the ambush bug’s venom. Four components of the venom produce both pain in humans and are poisonous. Two other components produce pain, but are harmless. Others cause no pain. Spiders would detach a leg only when it was injected with the components that are both poisonous and painful. Scientists were surprised that spiders could feel pain. They were also surprised that the same substances that cause pain in humans also cause pain in spiders. Science has, for too long, ignored the obvious fact that other living things can feel pain. Some have even taken this so far as to say that the unborn human child cannot feel pain when attacked during an abortion. Our Magnificent Creator God by the spider’s proven ability to feel pain teaches all of us to be less unfeeling about the pain of others. |
| 7/25/2024 | Many creatures have complex and beautiful mating rituals. However, few are more wondrous or dramatic than the firefleas’ ritual. The fireflea is a marine crustacean about the size of a sesame seed. They are found in the Caribbean. Firefleas, as the name implies, are capable of generating light. The light is used to signal danger and for their mating ritual. When attacked, firefleas generate a cloud of light in the water, helping some firefleas escape and drawing the attention of larger predators to the firefleas’ attacker. There is enough light-generating chemicals in one fireflea to give ten minutes of light bright enough to read by. During the mating ritual, only the males emit light. However, this is not simply random lighting. The males produce differing dot and dash patterns in the water as they try to gain a female’s approval. Some species produce vertical lines of dots while others make horizontal lines. One species swims in packs, producing large dotted patterns by coordinating their release of light with each other. The fireflea is a tiny and seemingly unimportant creature. The meaning of its complex light displays went unnoticed until just the last 20 years. Though unknown to man for thousands of years, the fireflea has continued to praise its Magnificent Creator God by doing what He created it to do. Are you doing what your Creator created you to do? |
| 7/24/2024 | Before the Flood people were living hundreds of years. As man grew more evil, God declared that man’s lifespan would be reduced to 120 years. Modern biology has learned that we do indeed have built-in timers in each of our cells that limit the number of times they can divide. When enough cells can no longer divide, we die. We can even do things to speed up the timers. The timers are called telomeres. However, every time a cell divides, a small part of each telomere is lost. When these telomeres are worn down to nothing, the cell no longer divides and soon dies. Researchers studied 58 healthy women between the ages of 20 and 50. All the women had children, but 39 of them had a child that was seriously chronically ill. Stress levels were measured through questionnaires while blood samples provided information about their cell health. Among other things, scientists checked for levels of an enzyme that maintains the health of telomeres. The mothers who saw their stress levels as high proved to have much shorter telomeres than those who reported little stress. They reported that cells from stressed women had telomeres that were as short as unstressed women ten years older. Scripture tells us to cast all our cares on the Lord. Among the many blessings of doing so are healthy telomeres from Our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 7/22/2024 | Despite modern medical advancements, pain management remains a difficult problem today. Man has used various forms of aspirin to manage pain for thousands of years. While more potent drugs can be used today, our primary approach to pain has changed little over the millennia. Recent advancements now promise to show us how to deal directly with many forms of pain. Let’s say that you accidentally get a paper cut. The pain produced by a paper cut is always way out of proportion to the actual injury. Medical researchers tell us that the injured tissue creates a chemical called bradykinin. Bradykinin is the most potent pain-producing substance known. Bradykinin has a greater purpose than simply making your paper cut miserable. Bradykinin sets off a complex chain of chemical reactions that are important in healing your wound. In the process, bradykinin also links to nerve cells, causing them to send pain messages to your brain. Scientists have begun to develop bradykinin blockers. These chemicals are designed to bind to the nerve cells in place of the bradykinin, preventing bradykinin from sending pain messages. As a result, pain is blocked at the source. Pain is a reality in our world because of sin. It not only warns us of injury but it reminds us of the ultimate consequences of sin. But thanks be to our Magnificent Creator God, who sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to bear the pain of our disobedience on the cross so that we might have the forgiveness of sins! |
| 7/21/2024 | A hummingbird heart weighs a fraction of an ounce and beats eight hundred times a minute; a blue whale’s heart weighs half a ton, beats only ten times per minute, and can be heard two miles away. In contrast to either, the human heart seems dully functional, yet it does its job, beating 100,000 times a day [65–70 times a minute] with no time off for rest, to get most of us through seventy years or more. Our Magnificent Creator God’s master design for His master creation is infinite in detail and function!!! |
| 7/20/2024 | According to the claims of evolutionists, the dawn redwood trees lived from the time of the dinosaurs until about two million years ago. Then they became extinct. At the very same time this was the official scientific teaching, Chinese rice farmers were planting the tree because it was a good indicator of fertile rice fields. Evolutionary scientists caught up with the real world in 1944, when they acknowledged the tree’s existence. In 1947, Chinese botanists sent dawn redwood seeds to Harvard University. Today, the dawn redwood is a popular landscape tree across America. This slender tree, with its gently drooping branches and bright green, feathery-looking needles, looks like a living Chinese painting. It grows up to four feet per year. Unlike most conifers, the dawn redwood drops its needles in the fall. You might correctly ask, “Can’t scientists be wrong sometimes?” Yes! Like the rest of us, scientists are only human. That’s exactly the lesson. If scientists can be wrong about the present, they have no business telling us that the history recorded in the Bible cannot possibly be true. If a tree as important as the dawn redwood could escape their notice for so long, how can they tell us that life existed for millions of years before the first human beings? Yes, scientists are human like the rest of us. That means that like the rest of us, their proper place is one of humility and thanksgiving before the Magnificent Creator God and Lord of the universe. |
| 7/18/2024 | Ouch! You’ve just gotten a paper cut on your finger. What’s the first thing you do? If you’re like most people, you’ll probably put your finger in your mouth. If you think about it, you probably have no idea why you put your finger into your mouth. Actually, when a dog licks its wounds or you put your paper cut ravaged finger in your mouth, you are beginning medical treatment. Medical science is only just learning what God knew when He built this reaction into us. The saliva of mammals and human beings contains epidermal growth factor. Studies show that when epidermal growth factor is applied to wounds, healing takes place much faster. Epidermal growth factor increases the number of cells available to grow new skin over a wound. It also encourages capillaries to form near the wound to increase blood supply. Epidermal growth factor doubles the amount of new DNA at the wound site. Finally, it increases the amount of collagen in the wound to give the new tissue the strength to close up and remain closed. Researchers have little idea how epidermal growth factor works. They are still researching this powerful medicine that’s found in our saliva. Only our wise and loving Magnificent Creator God could have provided us with this convenient and powerful medical treatment. Only He could have built into us the natural reaction of putting an injured finger into our mouth. Like so much else in the creation, this is too well designed to be nothing more than a series of unrelated coincidences. |
| 7/16/2024 | It is always as dark as night 2,000 feet beneath the ocean’s surface. Yet, a rich variety of life thrives in the darkness. The strategies for life, however, are quite different far beneath the waves. Even in the deep ocean, predators search for prey, and prey tries to escape predators. The permanent darkness and buoyant water allow for unusually creative strategies in this rhythm of life. Some creatures try to hide in the darkness. Others use light to lure prey close to them. Some creatures even squirt luminescent clouds into the water to make predators think that they are where they’re not. Perhaps the most creative is a species of jellyfish. When a potential predator comes close to the jellyfish, the jellyfish turns off the lights in its bell-shaped body. Then, switching off the lights in its tentacles, the jellyfish scoots away as fast as it can. If the predator wasn’t fooled and continues the chase, the jellyfish switches to plan B. It turns on the blue light in its body and the white lights in its tentacles. When the attacker is very close, the jellyfish turns off the light in its body and takes off, detaching its still-glowing tentacles. The tentacles continue to writhe in the water, distracting the predator. According to evolution, jellyfish are among the most primitive multicelled animals. In this clever survival strategy, we see that jellyfish are neither simple nor primitive. They are a true credit to the Magnificent Creator God’s handiwork! |
| 7/15/2024 | Many people know about the devastating and explosive eruption of Mount St Helens in 1980. Not so many people know that the volcano has erupted since then, but in less spectacular fashion. Throughout the late 1980s and into the 1990s, lava continued to appear in the crater, with a dome of lava growing in the middle of the crater. On October 11th 2004, magma once again erupted from the volcano, causing a new lava dome to grow rapidly south of the existing dome. Many unusual but temporary shapes were formed, such as a large lava formation called the “whaleback”. On July 2nd 2005, the pressure of the magma resulted in an eruption, which broke the whaleback, and sent ash into the air, visible from Seattle. A number of other eruptions occurred during the period from 2004 through 2008. On July 10th 2008, there had been no activity for six months, so the US Geological Survey officially concluded that this eruptive period was over. There has been no significant eruptive activity since then. The lava dome is now quite big. The summit of the lava dome is currently about 7,500 feet above sea level, so it is still below the 8,300 foot high crater walls. However, if the dome grows any larger, it could grow above the crater rim. Basically, the lava dome is a new volcano growing inside the ruins of the old one. It already takes up 6% of the space lost by the big 1980 eruption. One thing is clear. Once again, even in less spectacular fashion, our Magnificent Creator God has used Mount St Helens to prove that the surface of the Earth can change rapidly at times, and that changes do not require millions of years. |
| 7/13/2024 | While staying with some family members in Kentucky, I was delighted one dark evening to see little flashes of light in the air, low over the garden lawn. Although I was too far away to see the insects concerned, these must have been fireflies.Fireflies are not actually flies – they are beetles. Their light-producing organs are in their abdomens. Most species use these bioluminescent displays for courtship.The bioluminescence is caused by a type of luciferin molecule, commonly called firefly luciferin. The name has nothing to do with evil! It comes from the Latin word for light. Firefly luciferin reacts with oxygen, and the reaction is catalyzed by an enzyme, luciferase, as well as the presence of magnesium ions and adenosine triphosphate – the energy-giving molecule ATP. Luciferin first forms another highly tensed molecule called a dioxetane, which releases CO2 to form a ketone. The ketone is in a highly excited electronic state, so it “relaxes” back to normal state by releasing energy. This energy is at exactly the right frequency to be in the visible light range. The fireflies in Kentucky emitted yellow light.If one were an evolutionist, one would have to wonder – what would have been the evolutionary advantage for the beetle to produce luciferase if there was no luciferin, or vice versa?We have a lot more work to do to investigate the chemistry of the process, but we still marvel at the wonder of our Magnificent Creator God’s design for these insects and all of the rest of His Creation!!! |
| 7/11/2024 | Research is showing that we can forget just about everything we ever learned about how we taste food. To begin with, we don’t taste with our tongues but with our brains. Remember those tongue maps that we all learned about in school? They show that we taste sweet on the tips of our tongues, salt and sour flavors on the sides, and bitter tastes at the back of our tongues. In truth, research shows that we taste each of these flavors all over our tongue. And, no, those little bumps on your tongue are not taste buds. Rather, each of those bumps contains many taste buds. Further, the right half of your tongue does not communicate with the left half of your tongue. Each half has its own nerve that runs to the brain that interprets signals from the tongue as taste. These nerves pass right under your eardrum. That’s why a virus infecting your ear can cause you to lose some ability to taste. Dental Novocaine is often administered very close to these nerves, which is why some people experience phantom tastes when the dentist gives them a shot. Most amazing is the part touch plays in taste. If the right half of your tongue is numbed and you drag a flavor from the right half of your tongue to the left, only the left half will taste it. However, if you drag the flavor from the left half of your tongue to the right, your brain concludes that the left half of your tongue should experience the flavor, and it does, despite being numbed. The ability to taste flavors is a blessing from our Magnificent Creator God. He even invites us to Himself by urging us to taste and see that He is good. |
| 7/10/2024 | Evolutionary scientists are often hard-pressed to explain human or even superhuman-like intelligence in animals. For example, let’s say that you last saw your child when she was four months old. It is now four years later. Are you certain you could pick out your child in a room full of a hundred four-year-old little girls? A researcher with the National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C. studied the northern fur seal’s amazing ability to recognize family members. Nursing mothers are the only mothers among mammals that leave their nursing pups for as long as two weeks. They return after they have fed, having no problem finding their own young among the crowded colony. When the young reach the age of four months, they begin their migration south for the winter. The next spring, the young seals migrate back to their place of birth and easily recognize their mothers. After recording the voices of more than two dozen seals, the researcher wanted to prove that recognition was taking place through the sound of an individual seal’s voice. Seals who heard the playback of their mother’s or child’s voice paid attention to the speakers, while others did not. After a year of not hearing a mother’s or child’s voice, each seal still paid attention to the recording of its mother or child. Even after four years, mother and child recognized each other’s voices. Such memory and intelligence can only have intelligence as its source. That source is a loving Magnificent Creator God Who knows us even after our parents are gone. |
| 7/9/2024 | The Bible mentions “the fountains of the deep” several times. During the Flood, we are told, God opened the fountains of the deep, suggesting seismic activity. When God ended the flooding, we are told that God closed the fountains of the deep, suggesting that they continue to exist, albeit with less water than at creation. In 1997, scientists said that they may have found an astonishing reservoir of water deep in the earth. The water they believe they found does not exist in huge underground oceans. The water is tied up in minerals, held there by the tremendous pressures and temperatures deep in the earth. Researchers have shown, for example, that a mineral called wadsleyite – which exists only at temperatures above 1,800 degrees (F) and is found as deep as 400 miles below the earth’s surface – can still hold water. Scientists have figured that if 60 percent of this layer is wadsleyite, as seismic data indicate, it could contain enough water to fill 10 oceans. Researchers have also analyzed the amount of this water that is brought to the surface during volcanic eruptions and concluded from their findings that there could be enough water deep in the earth to fill 30 oceans! Because of the way the water is stored, scientists don’t expect it to all be released at once. There are many more wonders in the creation than we know about. That’s why it is a mistake for anyone to dismiss any of the Bible’s mention of any of these wonders, all of which testify to our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 7/8/2024 | How big is the largest living organism on Earth? We all know that the giant Redwoods of California grow larger than any whale. However, there are other living organisms that dwarf even the Redwoods. The mushrooms that spring up in your yard or the forest are actually only the fruit-bearing part of a larger fungus. The main part of the fungus exists as a mass of filaments that grows underground. In 1992, scientists discovered such a fungal growth in the state of Washington and declared it to be the largest known living thing. It covered 1,500 acres. The only sign of the fungus were the golden mushrooms that popped up each fall. Despite their common name – the honey mushroom – researchers tell us that they are edible but don’t really taste all that good. A decade ago, researchers discovered an even larger fungus of the same species. It extends three feet deep beneath the Malheur National Forest in eastern Oregon. This monster, estimated at 2,400 years old, is three-and-a-half miles across and covers 2,200 acres! No one has taken on the hopeless job of estimating its weight. The problem with this fungus is that as it spreads, it kills trees. That’s why the National Forest Service got involved in trying to learn how to control it. The huge dinosaurs and whales of today reflect the power and creativity of our Magnificent Creator God. Likewise, this huge fungus that produces the honey mushroom reflects the Creator’s unlimited imagination as He formed all living things. |
| 7/6/2024 | The Willow Warbler is a fascinating little bird. It weighs less than half an ounce and measures about four inches from its beak to the tip of its tail. It likes open woodland with small trees and is particularly happy in areas managed by humans, such as coppices and young plantations. An attractive little bird, it is greenish-brown from above, with a yellowish underside. Willow Warblers are part of the Leaf Warbler, or Phylloscopus baramin (or created kind). There are 77 species in this baramin, but we are interested here in the species Phylloscopus trochilu, especially the subspecies Phylloscopus trochilus yakutensi. This remarkable little bird has the most incredible migratory behavior, traveling about 7,500 miles.Between April and August, the birds live and breed in eastern Siberia. But as the breeding season ends, the birds begin their long, exhausting flight to sub Saharan Africa, where they will spend the winter, from October through March. Then they begin the 7,500-mile journey back to Siberia. That’s 15,000 miles per year!The reason why these warblers migrate seems clear. They do not like the extremes of temperatures in either of their homes. But a more interesting question is: How do they know where to migrate?Scientists have speculated that migratory birds are able to sense the Earth’s magnetic field. But those scientists who believe in evolution have to explain how the birds used trial and error to find their routes. A more logical explanation is that our Magnificent Creator God designed them to achieve this remarkable feat!!! |
| 7/5/2024 | Plants make cellulose. Cellulose is a type of natural plastic made of many sugar molecules linked together. Scientists have known for years how to use the natural plastic qualities of cellulose to make things like cellophane and rayon. Scientists have also known that animals generate a similar natural plastic called chitin. Like cellulose, chitin is a carbohydrate made of long chains of sugar molecules. Chitin is found in the shells of all insects and crustaceans, like crabs. Each year the crabmeat industry had thrown away thousands of tons of chitin because scientists couldn’t figure out how to extract chitin from the shells in a usable form. Finally in 1975 scientists discovered how to remove the chitin from shells and change its form so it could be made into whatever forms they needed. Suture thread made from chitin dissolves in the body. This means that stitches don’t have to be removed, and it can be more easily knotted than regular suture thread. Suture thread made from chitin also causes no allergic reaction, and it seems to promote healing. It’s hard to believe that a crab shell, which is usually thrown away, could do so much! Food processing companies are even using a chemical made from chitin to recover protein from wastewater. Almost everything in the creation seems to have numerous uses for human needs. This is testimony that our Magnificent Creator God has made this universe for us and that He cares about our needs. In the Bible we learn that He has provided for our greatest need through His Son, Jesus Christ. |
| 7/4/2024 | Tropical passion vines have a unique defense against insects that would nibble on their leaves. Its leaves contain sealed packets of cyanide that are made active by being linked with sugar molecules. There are other sealed packets with an enzyme that releases the sugar molecules, activating the cyanide. When an insect chews on the leaves, both packets are broken, the cyanide is activated and another predator is gone. However, the caterpillar of the tropical butterfly Heliconius sara can munch away happily on the leaves, oblivious to the cyanide, apparently immune to the powerful poison. Scientists wondered why these caterpillars didn’t die. They found out that the caterpillar has an enzyme that prevents the release of the cyanide. This enzyme changes the cyanide to a harmless sulfur based chemical before the leaf’s enzyme can cause the cyanide to be released. However, the caterpillar still has to be careful because some vines grow special defensive hairs that can impale an unwary caterpillar. Evolutionists would have us believe that these caterpillars, by trial and error, evolved the ability to neutralize the cyanide. Even if we were to grant the ridiculous idea that caterpillars are smart enough to do this, this explanation still doesn’t work. Any caterpillar that would munch the passion leaves would face instant death without a chance to experiment or reproduce. However, the Magnificent Creator God of all chemistry has once again demonstrated His existence by this obvious and clever relationship. |
| 7/3/2024 | Many people have wondered at the abilities of savants. These are people who have very low intelligence, yet they can do seemingly impossible mental tasks. Some savants have been able to instantly name the day of the week when given any date within the last 6,000 years. Others have been able to instantly give a correct solution to tedious mathematical calculations. Could such abilities reflect a throwback to the mental abilities the human race once had? Research suggests another ability that man may have been created with – but which most of us have lost – is the ability to detect when we are being lied to. Researchers suspected that people with brain damage that limits their ability to understand speech might be superior at detecting lies. Such people, who have damage to the left hemisphere of their brain, are called aphasics. The study included aphasics who could understand individual words but not sentences. The study group also included undergraduate students. They were all shown a videotape of ten people, each appearing in two segments. In one segment, each person lied, while in another the person told the truth. The undergraduates did no better than chance would allow at detecting lies. However, the aphasics could accurately detect a lie almost two thirds of the time! Were we created with the ability to detect when we are being lied to? Such ability surely doesn’t arise by chance but is rather a Magnificent Creator God-given gift for our protection. |
| 7/2/2024 | The fact that they must breathe air would seem to limit sea creatures like whales, dolphins and sea turtles. But these creatures are so well designed that their abilities amaze even the most informed scientists. How deep do you think a seagoing air breather can dive while holding its breath? Keep in mind that as the creature descends through the depths, the air supply in its lungs becomes compressed and will not last as long as breath held near the surface. Until about 20 years ago, whales have held the record. Sperm whales have been documented as deep as 3,500 feet beneath the waves. But then a tagged leatherback turtle went down to at least 3,900 feet, nearly three-fourths of a mile! According to the scientists involved in the study, the turtle might have gone deeper, but at 3,900 feet their measuring device went off the scale. In other words, they never expected the leatherback to dive so deep! While all of us are in awe over the ability of the leatherback turtle, those who believe in evolution have a special reason to be surprised at what they are learning. According to evolution, whales and sea turtles evolved from creatures who live on the land. Evolutionists have a difficult time accounting for the extensive specialized changes required to turn a land turtle into a sea turtle capable of operating beneath three-fourths of a mile of water. Those of us who know that all things were created by a wise Magnificent Creator God understand that there is nothing He cannot do. |
| 7/1/2024 | While many people think that the octopus is an ugly creature, the octopus is intelligent. The mother octopus puts a lot of love and effort into the care of her young. Fertilized octopus eggs are about the size of a grain of rice. They are connected in clusters on slender stalks. Once her eggs are ejected and fertilized, the mother octopus hangs the threads containing her eggs from the roof of her home. It could be a rock cave or even a dark, enclosed man made structure. By the time she is done hanging her eggs, she will have almost 20,000 ivory capsules strung around her. But now her real work begins. Until the eggs hatch, mother octopus will give up food, concentrating on nothing but cleaning her eggs of any material that might result in a fungus or parasite infection. She cradles the eggs gently in her arms, brushing each of the 20,000 eggs, and sometimes washing them with jets of water. There is nothing else she can do for her young, but this care receives her single minded attention. It is rightfully said that one cannot create something he doesn’t have. If one does not have love, he cannot create love in others. Therefore, the Creator of the octopus must know a great deal about giving individual love and care to a multitude of individuals. The Bible is our Magnificent Creator’s own personal description of His love for you and me. Whether you know the personal care and love of your Creator or you don’t, you can learn the depth of His care for you through Jesus Christ in the pages of the Bible. |
| 6/29/2024 | Why did the Wise Men bring myrrh as a gift for Jesus, along with their gifts of frankincense and gold? This is an interesting question, and many people have pondered the meanings of all the gifts given to Jesus, but I think it is unlikely that we can give a definitive answer. Myrrh is a resin from the bark of certain varieties of the commiphora tree. When the bark splits (or is deliberately tapped), a fluid is exuded. This hardens in the air into lumps, called tears. The solid tears are reddish or golden brown in color. They are sweet-smelling but bitter to the taste. When consumed, myrrh has a stimulant effect. It is also clear from the Old Testament that myrrh had value. When Joseph was sold to the Ishmaelites by his brothers, that group of travelers was on their way to Egypt “with their camels bearing gum, balm, and myrrh” (Genesis 37:25). Later, when Jacob was sending his sons to Egypt for food (where they would unknowingly meet Joseph again), he urged them to take a number of items of value, including myrrh. In John 19:39, Nicodemus brought myrrh and aloes with him to Jesus’ grave. Its aromatic properties presumably would make it ideal as an embalming material. Therefore, it could be said that myrrh speaks of death. Perhaps the Wise Men were being prophetic, when they brought Jesus gold, for His kingship, frankincense to represent prayers, because Jesus was and is God, and myrrh to represent the fact that He was to die to cleanse repentant sinners of their sins. We praise You, Magnificent Creator God, because You left nothing to chance. You gave us Your Son, Jesus, to be the propitiation for our sins!!! |
| 6/28/2024 | Bee-eaters are birds whose way of life and behavior are both intelligent and unusual. There are 24 species of bee-eaters. Bee-eaters make their living catching and eating bees and wasps with stingers. The poison in many of these stinging insects is powerful enough to kill bee-eaters, but the birds are not only skilled at avoiding stings, they know how to remove the poison from the bee when they eat it. Having captured a bee or wasp, a bee-eater will take it to a branch where he will pound its head and rub its stinging end until all of the poison has been removed from the insect’s venom sac. Once the poison is removed, the bee-eater enjoys lunch. Bee-eaters are described as lively and sociable. You seldom see one roosting all by itself. And when the weather is cool, bee-eaters huddle together to keep each other warm. There are even reports that bee-eaters will roost on each other’s backs, forming a feathered pyramid made out of birds. Now, it’s possible that bee-eaters figured out that they were warmer when huddled together, although even that much intelligence had to come from their Creator. But how could bee-eaters simply “discover” how to detoxify bees? If this ability evolved by trial and error, there would probably be no descendants of the first bee-eaters around today. Obviously, this dangerous behavior would not favor survival. This makes the bee-eater one of our Magnificent Creator God’s own arguments against evolution! |
| 6/26/2024 | The creation is filled with plants and animals which use deception to survive. The glow‑in‑the‑dark cookie-cutter shark is a master at such deception. The cookie-cutter shark is only a foot to a foot‑and‑a‑half long. It doesn’t have powerful muscles and can’t swim very fast. But it doesn’t need to. Lunch serves itself. The shark typically lives between 600 and 3,000 feet below the surface of the water. Looking down from above one of these sharks, you would probably not see it because the top of its body is as dark as the deep waters where it lives. Looking up from below, you wouldn’t see the dark outline of the shark against the light that filters down from the surface. This is because of the shark’s first deception: its underside is completely covered with light‑emitting cells that match the illumination from above. The deception doesn’t stop there, however. A small patch beneath the shark’s jaw doesn’t glow. From beneath, the cookie-cutter shark looks like a small fish, just the kind of dinner a tuna might like. As the tuna speeds toward what it thinks is a small fish, at the last minute the shark turns and takes a bite out of the tuna. Its open, round jaw takes a plug of flesh out of the tuna, hence the name cookie cutter shark. Interestingly, most cookie-cutter shark wounds are not fatal. The fact that the cookie-cutter shark’s form, deceptions and habits all match each other perfectly is not a result of chance, mindless evolution, but of our Magnificent Creator God’s careful design!!! |
| 6/25/2024 | The aspirin tablet has been hailed as the miracle drug of the twentieth century. Although it took the twentieth century to flavor, coat and stamp little letters on aspirin, people have been using aspirin for centuries. The most common form in which aspirin has been taken is as willow bark tea. Aspirin has relieved billions of headaches and brought nearly as many fevers under control over the years. In recent years, aspirin has become even more important since studies have shown that as little as half an aspirin per day can help prevent heart attacks. Despite its long standing use in medicine, physicians had no idea how aspirin worked until a few decades ago. Researchers now know that aspirin does not simply mask the pain of a headache, but it chemically turns off the cause of the average headache. It does this by deactivating the chemical made by the blood vessels that causes them to constrict. Another member of that same family of chemicals, called prostaglandins, prevents blood platelets from sticking together, helping blood to flow more freely and preventing heart attacks. This is also why aspirin can cause stomach bleeding. In His foreknowledge, our Magnificent Creator God knew, regretfully, that the human race would fall into sin. He knew that among the effects of a world changed by sin would be pain and sickness. So in His mercy He provided plants that would make the active ingredient in aspirin. But the greatest expression of His love for us was in providing us with a cure for sin itself in His Son, Jesus Christ. |
| 6/24/2024 | Scientists have found that the usual explanation for lightning is not quite true. School children are taught that as a cloud moves through the air it picks up electrical charge because of turbulence. This eventually causes lightning. But scientists have found that thunderclouds are able to generate only one tenth of the electrical field that is necessary to create a lightning bolt. Without something else, there would be no lightning on Earth. That something else turns out to be cosmic rays. Think of electricity as electrons flowing like water. While the cloud doesn’t generate enough electrons to cause a flow of lightning, cosmic rays penetrating the cloud detach additional electrons from the oxygen and nitrogen in the cloud. These extra electrons are then accelerated in the cloud’s electric fields, producing small avalanches of electrons. These avalanches grow and combine as they flow to the bottom of the cloud, finally to erupt as a stroke of lightning! And so, our Magnificent Creator God displays His handiwork once more. The Bible tells us that Jesus Christ is returning to Earth to judge all mankind. When He does, says the Bible, everyone will know about it because His return will be like a giant bolt of lightning crossing the entire sky. And just as the time to make yourself safe from lightning is before it strikes, so the time to find out how to be prepared to meet Christ is before He appears. The details of how He has made these preparations for you are found in plain and simple language in Scripture – which tells of His work of salvation. Begin your preparations now! |
| 6/22/2024 | We are beginning to discover more about how Neanderthal people were not primitive subhuman cavemen, as popular-style evolutionary documentaries show. Instead, they were actually fully human – and the evidence for this is so conclusive that even serious evolutionists accept the fact today. It appears that Neanderthals cooked. They didn’t just eat raw or burnt meat. It appears that food remains were seasoned with herbs. They also used nuts and legumes, among other plant-based edibles. Perhaps they were familiar with the Keto Diet! Those interested in natural remedies often recommend using certain tree barks as an infusion or just chewed, as a painkiller. This is because such barks – I use willow bark – are a source of salicylic acid, which is closely related to aspirin. It has even been found that Neanderthals consumed the mold penicillium, which we now know produces the well-known antibiotic penicillin. Their clothing included furs, required to combat European conditions during the post-Flood Ice Age. But they also seemed to wear pendants and other jewelry. An excellent, recent article in Creation magazine by Robert Carter and Lita Cosner, gives links to scientific papers on these and other civilizing traits attributed to Neanderthals. Though the authors are not Bible-believing Christians, their article reminds us that Neanderthals, being human, were descended from Adam through Noah, just as we are. |
| 6/21/2024 | Inside your body there is a large and amazing family of chemical workers who, although they usually last less than a minute, make life possible. There are so many different kinds of these chemicals, called prostaglandins, that science is just beginning to learn how important they are to life. Prostaglandins are made by just about every tissue in your body. They are made by tissue cells from stored fatty acids. When triggered, fatty acids swarm out of the cell walls and are quickly changed into the necessary prostaglandin. Prostaglandins are involved in regulating reproduction, breathing and circulation, among other things. Prostaglandins made by the cells lining our blood vessels relax the muscles around them so that more blood can flow through them. And blood platelets also produce another prostaglandin; when triggered, it enables the blood to clot and seal wounds. In the lungs, prostaglandins regulate the openings of air passages. They help protect the inside of your stomach. It is because aspirin inhibits prostaglandin production that it helps headaches and can cause stomach problems in some people. Prostaglandins have been implicated in the swollen, painful joints caused by arthritis. The human body is literally a symphony of thousands of carefully designed systems, each one playing in harmony with the others and all of them working together. This fact alone leaves no justification for the claim that we are designed by genetic accidents but rather by our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 6/19/2024 | Today, lasers do many important jobs in manufacturing and medicine in addition to serving in weapons that once existed only in the minds of science-fiction writers. But if our small imaginations can think of amazing things, we shouldn’t be surprised to learn that our Creator’s limitless imagination can think of even more incredible things. As science studies the handiwork of the Creator, we are learning about His imagination. For example, scientists have recently discovered how to turn hydrogen – the simplest of all elements – into a solid. Hydrogen is technically a metal, even though it is a gas at most temperatures. Yet, scientists have expressed amazement at the complexity of this so called simple element. When compressed under 1.5 million atmospheres, near absolute zero, hydrogen becomes a solid metal – clear as glass! Many people do not know that glass is really a liquid at normal temperatures. Your windows are even now flowing downward because of gravity. It’s just happening so slowly that you would have to compare photographs of the same window taken a century apart to see the effect. And now scientists are working on metal films that are transparent to light. Perhaps someday we’ll look out through windows of aluminum instead of glass! Such amazing discoveries about seemingly simple, everyday materials show us that while humans may have imagination and inventiveness, our Magnificent Creator God has even more imagination than we could ever have! |
| 6/18/2024 | Many people know about the devastating and explosive eruption of Mount St Helens in 1980. Not so many people know that the volcano has erupted since then, but in less spectacular fashion. Throughout the late 1980s and into the 1990s, lava continued to appear in the crater, with a dome of lava growing in the middle of the crater. On October 11th 2004, magma once again erupted from the volcano, causing a new lava dome to grow rapidly south of the existing dome. Many unusual but temporary shapes were formed, such as a large lava formation called the “whaleback”. On July 2nd 2005, the pressure of the magma resulted in an eruption, which broke the whaleback, and sent ash into the air, visible from Seattle. A number of other eruptions occurred during the period from 2004 through 2008. On July 10th 2008, there had been no activity for six months, so the US Geological Survey officially concluded that this eruptive period was over. There has been no significant eruptive activity since then. The lava dome is now quite big. The summit of the lava dome is currently about 7,500 feet above sea level, so it is still below the 8,300 foot high crater walls. However, if the dome grows any larger, it could grow above the crater rim. Basically, the lava dome is a new volcano growing inside the ruins of the old one. It already takes up 6% of the space lost by the big 1980 eruption. One thing is clear. Once again, even in less spectacular fashion, our Magnificent Creator God has used Mount St Helens to prove that the surface of the Earth can change rapidly at times, and that changes do not require millions of years. |
| 6/17/2024 | Can ants count? It seems so! When scout ants find an item of food, they take it back to the nest. If the food item is especially good but too big to carry, the scout will return to the nest to get help. Scientists have discovered that ants apparently size up the task ahead before getting help so they can return with enough help, but not too much. One scientist cut a dead grasshopper into three pieces. The second piece was twice the size of the first, and the third was twice the size of the second. He then left the pieces in different locations where ants were sure to find them. He watched as each piece was discovered by a scout, inspected, and each scout returned to the nest for help. When the scout returned with help, the scientist counted the number of ants working at each piece of the grasshopper. The smallest piece had 28 ants working on it. The piece that was twice its size had 44 ants working on it. And how many ants do you think were working on the piece that was twice the size of the second piece? If you doubled that 44 to 88, you would be within one of being right. There were 89 ants working to return it to the nest! We can’t help but conclude that mathematical ability is part of the ants’ amazing ability to plan and carry out a task! They were doing nothing more than what our Magnificent Creator God taught them as they followed the planning principle Jesus reminds us of in Luke 14:28 – count the cost of the project before you begin it! |
| 6/15/2024 | Evolutionary scientists studying the workings of the human brain are trying to find out what the human “mind” is. The problem is that everyone, including scientists, knows that human beings are conscious people with minds. Yet, strict, materialistic science says that there is no scientific evidence for the mind.Research with people who had brain injuries indicates that the brain and the mind are not the same things. The reality of the human mind seems to have no material basis. This presents a difficult problem for evolutionary scientists who have assumed that evolution, with its materialistic view of reality, is correct. According to the evolutionary view of the world, if something is not measurable by science, that thing is not real. Evolution denies that humans have any nonmaterial part.Some evolutionists have tried to resolve this problem by saying that human beings are not really conscious. They say that we don’t really have minds. We only think we do. It’s a trick played on us by our nervous systems. Entire books have been devoted to this subject. However, this approach creates a new problem. If we really don’t have minds, we cannot trust the truth of anything we might think. We can’t even trust the thought that we don’t have minds.The debate among these strict materialist scientists actually amounts to an admission that there is a greater, nonmaterial reality that cannot be measured by science. Yes, the existence of the immaterial, but undeniably real, human mind (should I say “soul”?) also testifies to our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 6/13/2024 | We know that Noah did not have to fit two of every species of animal on the Ark. The Ark sheltered two of every kind of land and flying vertebrate, not two of every species. For example, modern species like lions and tigers would have developed from the pair from the cat family that were on the Ark. Over time, different species of cats have developed from this pair. It is easy to see how this happened. Environmental conditions favor certain genes over others, so that these features are selected in the offspring. A simplistic example is that creatures with longer hair or fur have developed in colder areas of the world. This has involved no new genetic information; there has simply been selection from existing genetic information. But why did God make this speciation possible? Our Magnificent Creator God knew the different conditions that would arise in different parts of the world!!! Because Scripture shows us that Our Magnificent Creator God actively sustains life, it is possible that He included this ability to diversify in creatures in order to help their offspring to survive in radically different conditions – especially the vastly changed conditions in the aftermath of the Flood. |
| 6/12/2024 | Proverbs 30:25 uses the word “people” in referring to ants. In the Hebrew, this word is the very same word commonly used throughout the Old Testament for people, including the people of Israel. While this might at first seem strange, it is true that in many respects ants do seem like tiny people. Ants love to work and live in sunlight. They will spend hours clearing their little backyards of leaves and even plants and shrubs. Ants are also known to wander far from their local area. One scientist from the University of California tagged ants with colored dyes and then watched their meanderings. No matter how far they wandered, they didn’t seem to get lost. Then the scientist placed tiny ant blinders on the wandering ants. He discovered that when the ants couldn’t see their surroundings, they wandered aimlessly, obviously lost. This and other experiments have shown that ants have incredible memories. Scientists have also marveled at the tricks used by ants to ruin picnics. One of the ants’ most interesting strategies is to climb a tree over a picnic and find a low hanging leaf situated over the picnic basket. The ant then proceeds to chew off the stem of the leaf and glide down into the sandwiches! Only our Magnificent Creator God could have planned such detail capabilities for His Creation! |
| 6/11/2024 | Outer space has a temperature. It has become common to think of space as a vacuum, that has nothing in it, which means it would be at absolute zero temperature. In fact, space is nearly a vacuum, but not quite. And the particles in that near vacuum are in motion, so they have a temperature of 2.73K—the equivalent of 2.73 Celsius degrees above Absolute Zero. This so-called Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (or CMB) has been known about since 1965. It is assumed to be an echo of the Big Bang, and is offered in High School textbooks as a proof of the Big Bang. Yet, it is actually problematic for Big Bang cosmologists. CMB is the same temperature in all directions of space. For this to have occurred, there must have been a transfer of heat energy in the past, by radiation, from hot spot to cold spot, in order to even out temperature differentials. This radiation would travel at the speed of light. Since Big Bang cosmologists assume the universe to be 14.7 billion years old, it follows that this radiation could only travel a maximum of 14.7 billion light years. But the universe is much bigger than that. Therefore, the Big Bang theory cannot explain the regular, even temperature of CMB. The Bible suggests in Genesis 1:6-8 that there is water at the edge of the universe, which could act as a blackbody, absorbing heat radiation, and neatly accounting for the regularity of the temperature of space. The Bible helps provide an explanation for a phenomenon, which remains a mystery for evolutionary cosmologists but was all just a minor part of our Magnificent Creator God’s Master Plan!!! |
| 6/8/2024 | It’s not very pretty, nor is it graceful, but Colombia’s rock-climbing catfish has a unique ability among fish. Perhaps there are days when a salmon, trying to make it up a waterfall, wishes that it could simply climb the rocks.The rock-climbing catfish’s climbing equipment begins with a powerful sucker mouth. Once it attaches itself to a rock, it can stay stuck despite any torrent. The rock-climbing catfish also has a bony plate on its belly that helps it hold its place while it repositions its sucker a little further up the rocks. The plate has fins with tiny, backward-pointing teeth. These teeth dig into the rock and prevent slipping. The catfish’s third special feature is a set of powerful muscles to control the plate.Once the rock-climbing catfish has attached its sucker to the rock, it pulls up its stomach plate and anchors it. With its body anchored, it moves its sucker up the face of the rock and repeats the process. Following this method, the rock-climbing catfish can walk its way up a 20-foot rock wall against the torrent of a waterfall in about 30 minutes!Who gave the rock-climbing catfish that powerful sucker mouth? Who gave it such a clever bony stomach plate and the powerful muscles to control it? And who taught it to climb rocks? It was the work of our Magnificent Creator God of worlds and stars and you and me! |
| 6/7/2024 | The entire forty-first chapter of the book of Job describes a creature called “leviathan.” As in his earlier description of “behemoth,” the Lord is impressing Job with the wisdom and might of His creating power. And “leviathan” is an impressive creature indeed! We are told that he cannot be made to serve humans. Nor would any person make the mistake of fighting “leviathan” a second time. Leviathan is mighty and graceful, yet he regards iron as straw, for iron cannot pierce his armored scales. Even his undersides have sharp, armored scales. What could this fearsome creature be? Some translations suggest that “leviathan” is a river crocodile. But it has been pointed out that this description doesn’t even come close to fitting the most fearsome crocodile. For one thing, crocodiles don’t have sharp scales on their undersides. Rather, their undersides are soft and easily pierced, even with a knife. And even in Old Testament times, some people made their living killing river crocodiles and making leather of their hides. In many places, river crocodiles nearly became extinct because of hunting. No, say many creationists, this is not a river crocodile, nor does it seem to be any other familiar creature. But it is possible that it could be a water dwelling dinosaur – perhaps like a tylosaurus. We can’t be sure, of course. But the creature described in Job 41 does fit what we know about these giant reptiles. Only our Magnificent Creator knows for sure since it was by His Master Plan it was created! |
| 6/5/2024 | Some Christians believe that God’s words in Genesis 1:3, “Let there be light” are a biblical description of the Big Bang that some scientists say created the universe. But, perhaps, we Christians should be a little more careful about assuming that modern science knows very much about the origin of the universe. Several years ago, astronomers announced that they had discovered the largest structure yet to be found in the universe. They described the structure as a great wall made up of high concentrations of galaxies. Just to get our perspective, the average galaxy contains over 1 billion stars. The great wall contains concentrated “clumps” of galaxies! This discovery delivers two apparently fatal blows to the Big Bang theory. If the universe was the result of the Big Bang, scientists would expect to find stars evenly distributed in space – not “clumped” together and certainly not built into giant structures. Second, the clumps of galaxies they found are very precisely and evenly spaced – not the kind of order that results from an explosion. One of the researchers said, “It is safe to say that we understand less than zero about the early universe.” There is another good reason for Christians not to try to find the Big Bang in Genesis. According to the Bible, it is the end of the world and the universe, not its beginning, that could more accurately be described as a “big bang.” Our Magnificent Creator God Himself has completed your preparations for that day. Are you ready? |
| 6/3/2024 | We have all seen it many times. A mother walking in a crowd with a small child loses track of her child and begins calling and searching for the little one. But can you imagine a crowd of 70 million mothers and children all looking for each other? That’s exactly what the Mexican free tailed bat must cope with. Once its pups are born, the bat colony may have as many as 70 million individuals, with up to 40 tiny babies for every 16 square inches. Being mammals, bats nurse their young, and the young bats are very aggressive about getting something to eat. So scientists simply assumed that when the mother bat returned from feeding, she would be facing millions of hungry babies. Most likely, she would simply nurse the closest and most insistent young – unable to find her own. But studies show that when the mother bat returns from feeding, she lands near where she left her baby and begins calling to it, listening for an answer. Her youngster will call back to her, and when she thinks she has found her offspring, she sniffs it to be sure before nursing. Researchers found that in the vast majority of cases, mothers found their own young. Scientists were very surprised to discover how powerful the mother bat’s love is, as well as how intelligent bats really are. Love is but one part of life that evolution cannot explain. But we – who believe that we and all things were made by a Magnificent Creator God who is love – have no trouble explaining where love comes from. |
| 6/1/2024 | The chempedak tree is found in Malaysia. It is closely related to jackfruits in the mulberry family. The chempedak tree that offers edible fruits that are about a foot long. Researchers studying the chempedak were surprised to discover that they bloom irregularly. One tree was watched by researchers for five years before it bloomed! While the flowers smell like watermelon, they offer no nectar to entice pollinating insects. Moreover, the insects that do pollinate the chempedak tree do not eat any of the pollen. What, then, attracts the two species of gall midges that pollinate the flowers? The answer: a fungus that attacks only the male flowers of the tree. The midges like to eat the fungus, so they crawl on the male flowers as they eat the fungus, picking up pollen. Then they go to the clumps of female flowers looking for more fungus, inadvertently pollinating them. This arrangement in which the tree depends entirely on a fungus to attract pollinators is unknown in any other species. This raises the question of how such an arrangement could have evolved. Without both the midges and the fungus, the first chempedak tree would have been the last. All three elements in this interrelated system had to have come into being at the same time. The chempedak tree bears witness to a rapid creation of the interdependent plant and insect world where living things had to wait, at most, mere days for the other creatures it depends on to come into existence, just as Genesis reports. Our Magnificent Creator God developed His Master Plan before He did anything else and it provided not only for the creation of everything but its survival as well!!! |
| 5/31/2024 | We all learned about photosynthesis at school. For this particular chemical reaction to take place, you need the chemical chlorophyll together with the essential ingredient, sunlight. For thousands of years, man has known that for green plants to prosper, they need the sunlight. A few years ago, a team of researchers from the University of British Columbia discovered photosynthesis taking place nearly one-and-a-half miles below the surface of the sea. Of course, no sunlight penetrates to that depth, and that raises an interesting question. The creature performing this amazing task is a bacterium that has been discovered off the coast of Central America. So, how can photosynthesis take place where there is no sunlight? These bacteria live around hydrothermal vents on the floor of the ocean. The vents spew out superheated water at about 570 degrees Fahrenheit. As this water hits the cold ocean water, gas bubbles form and almost immediately collapse, producing a dim flash of light. Chemical reactions can also create a small amount of light, as does the formation of crystals under these conditions. Apparently, these bacteria are able to make enough energy to power their metabolism from these unlikely sources of light. Just another example of our Magnificent Creator God’s master design. |
| 5/30/2024 | While many creatures create structured music – shall we say, songs? – it was thought that only man makes use of objects in the environment to get specific tone qualities. In other words, it was thought only man makes musical instruments. That claim has now been challenged by a frog! Borneo’s tree-hole frog is nowhere close to man on the evolutionary chart. Research shows that this frog searches out specific tree-holes filled with water. It is from such holes that the frog sits in the water and sings its song to attract females. Of course, these cavities and the amount of water in them vary from tree to tree, providing differing resonances from hole to hole. To deal with this, the frogs have been observed raising and lowering their pitch until they get a resonance. Once they find resonance, they begin singing in earnest. To test this, researchers placed a frog inside a pipe where they could change the water level, thus changing the resonance pitch. Every time they changed the water level, the frog would search for and find the new resonance pitch. Evolutionary theory would never predict that a frog would learn how to use something in its environment as a musical instrument. However, the Bible says that music is a gift from our Magnificent Creator God, Who can give it to any creature He wants. |
| 5/29/2024 | Scientists have long known that ants lay down scent trails, using pheromones, to mark the trail to goodies for their nest mates. While this is an efficient method for food gathering, it has been found that when a food source is exhausted, the ants leave a “Do not enter” sign that saves fellow ants from wasting time on this trail. While researchers were studying ant trails in the lab, they began to notice that some ants would make a U-turn about 15 ant-lengths before the fork in the trail that led to an exhausted food source. The researchers, thus, believed that the ants can produce a repellant pheromone. So they set up a special test track that divided into two paths. Each ended at a feeder, but only one of the feeders had food. Each pathway had a removable paper cover. After the ants had used it for awhile, establishing their trails, researchers moved the paper from the trail with no food to a new forked track. The trail that led to food received only a clean piece of paper. When the ants used the new experimental setup, 70 percent of them avoided the no-food trail. Scientists had long rejected claims that ants foraged with this level of efficiency. However, why not admit that this efficiency, which had no reason to evolve, was intelligently designed by our Magnificent Creator God? |
| 5/28/2024 | All green plants, some algae, and even some bacteria are able to make food out of nothing more than air, water, light and a few minerals. The process is called photosynthesis, and without it we would run out of food to eat as well as oxygen to breathe. The green plant takes in the carbon dioxide that we and the animals exhale as waste and some water and, through photosynthesis, produces oxygen and a carbohydrate, and returns three fourths of the water it originally took in for future use. Chemically what happens is that the carbon atom in the carbon dioxide is removed from the oxygen and added to one water molecule, creating a carbohydrate, which is useful to us as food. While this all sounds simple, a more detailed summary of what happens each step of the way would fill a whole page with fine print. Evolutionists marvel at the great good luck involved in the fact that plants make useful things for us out of our waste products. We have grown in our appreciation of photosynthesis because scientists have tried to mimic the process in order to build a new kind of solar cell for use in space. While the plant converts nearly 100% of the light it receives into energy, our best human efforts have reached only 8% efficiency. So, creationists ask, if the best human minds have produced only an 8% efficiency after years of work, how could no mind at all come up with nearly 100% efficiency – no matter how much time was involved? The answer is that only our Magnificent Creator God could have! |
| 5/27/2024 | Each one of us can learn about God’s way of working with us from a fresh water snail that is often preyed upon by crayfish. When life is easy and there are no crayfish around to threaten the snail, it usually lives only three to five months and grows to only one sixteenth of an inch. But if crayfish are around to threaten and eat the snails, they will grow two to three times as large and live two to three times as long. This not only helps ensure that the snail population continues, but it also means that there are more snails reproducing when their population is threatened. Despite their seeming unimportance, our Creator has designed snails to play an important role in maintaining the environment. For this reason, and because He made them, He has provided snails with the ability to prosper under stress. They do not succeed by their own effort; snails do nothing more than what the Creator made them for. The lessons we can learn from these snails are easy to speak but sometimes hard to live. First of all, if the Creator cares this much about snails, then not one of us is so unimportant that our Magnificent Creator God ignores us. And when life is difficult for us, our help does not lie in our own meager powers but in the power of the One who made us and sent His Son for our salvation. |
| 5/26/2024 | Not only is the human brain the most complex structure in the universe, it is also one of the busiest. In fact, during intense concentration, your brain can burn as many calories as your muscles do during exercise! Intense thinking can literally be as exhausting as a physical workout! More than 100,000 chemical reactions go on in your brain every second. Among the brain’s many jobs is chemist. The brain produces more than 50 psychoactive drugs. Some of these are associated with memory, others with intelligence, still others are sedatives. Endorphin is the brain’s painkiller and it’s three times more potent than morphine. Serotonin is produced by the brain to help keep our moods under control. The brain also makes dopamine. Dopamine makes people more talkative and excitable. Another hormone regulates hunger. The brain is also a radio transmitter that sends out measurable electrical wave signals. In fact, the brain continues to send these signals for as long as 37 hours after death! Our tiny knowledge of the brain is enough to show us that this incredible organ is no accident. The brain is much more than a powerful testimony to our Creator. Its incredible powers convince us that there is much more to existence than this material life. However, we can learn only from the Word of God about eternal life through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. Put the brain our Magnificent Creator God gave you together with the Word of God today! |
| 5/25/2024 | You may not think of plants as being super intelligent on any level since it appears that they just sort of sit in the soil and grow. However, there are many instances of plants that try to poison or repel a predator. Now we will see that the lima bean employs an even more sophisticated defense strategy that not only warns surrounding lima beans of the attack, but also calls in defenders. Anyone who has ever worked with plants is familiar with spider mites. There are many varieties, but one of the most dangerous to the lima bean is the two‑spotted spider mite. These mites inject their saliva into a plant’s tissues, dissolving them. One of the mites’ biggest enemies is a carnivorous mite that feeds on these two‑spotted mites. These carnivorous mites are small and travel wherever the winds carry them. When two‑spotted mites attack a lima bean, the plant sends out a special chemical signal. When this distress signal reaches surrounding lima beans, they, too, begin to send the signal even though they are not under attack. The signal carries several messages to different species. Spider mites not on the plant being attacked are repelled from the area. On the other hand, any carnivorous mites that drift into the area will stay to feed on the two-spotted spider mites. As a result, the lima bean defends itself by sending specific messages to three different species! The lima bean’s intelligent defense strategy is difficult for evolutionists to explain but it is easily accounted for by our Magnificent Creator God who cares about all His creatures!!! |
| 5/22/2024 | Most of us have heard a few of the theories that are offered to explain how birds are able to migrate for thousands of miles to an exact spot. The arctic tern migrates 22,000 miles a year to winter in the same spot where it wintered the previous year. But most birds seem to have this amazing ability even if they don’t use it as often or to travel as far. In one study, scientists took a sea bird called the Manx shearwater from its nest on the coast of Wales to Boston and released it. The route back home across the featureless Atlantic is not a familiar one to the shearwater. Yet, twelve and one half days later the shearwater showed up back at its nest, over 3,000 miles from Boston. The most dramatic research in recent years led to the discovery that many birds have a small amount of magnetic material in their brains, which seems to act like a built in compass to help them tell where they are and where they are going. But additional research has shown that birds usually use more than just one method to navigate. They also use the sun, stars, changes in barometric pressure, low frequency sounds made by the wind and sea … and even odors. A bird’s ability to navigate using only one of these methods would be amazing enough. But the fact that birds have several methods available to them is a testimony to our Magnificent Creator God, who provided them with back up methods as well. If no detail of a small bird’s need is too unimportant for His attention, imagine how much more He is concerned about the details of our lives. |
| 5/20/2024 | The eye, with its incredibly sensitive color vision, is increasingly being recognized as a marvel as we learn more about how it works. The eye is able to detect the smallest measure of light known to physicists. These units are called photons. The normal human eye detects color, using principles similar to those used by our color television. Within the eye are three kinds of light absorbing molecules. They are found in the millions of cone shaped cells in the retina. Each one of these three molecules absorbs one of the primary colors – red, green or blue. How could “natural forces” have accidentally stumbled onto the very principal of physics upon which color rests? The sensitivity required for color vision is also astounding. There is only 75 millionths of a meter difference between the wavelengths of blue and green light. This size difference is so small that it could not be noticed even under the most powerful light microscope. Yet, the eye has no trouble at all detecting the difference. In his book On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote, “To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” On this one point we agree most certainly with Charles Darwin. It can only be the work of our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 5/19/2024 | A young student once asked Martin Luther what God was doing before He made the creation. Luther is said to have responded by telling the young man, “He was making switches to use on children who ask foolish questions.” Now some evolutionary physicists are asking what the universe was like before the big bang.Traditional big bang theorists have always said that there was nothing before the big bang. However, all evolutionary physicists know that the big bang theory has some major problems. For instance, in the earliest moments of the big bang, theory says that the universe would have had an infinite density and temperature. Another problem is that no known physics applies to these earliest moments of the universe. A physicist with the European Laboratory for Particle Physics proposed that the universe did exist a long time before the big bang. He theorized that it was just large enough so that it was not infinite in temperature or density and about one sixteenth of an inch across. He further theorized that the universe existed for a long time in this condition. He described the pre-big bang universe as being in the simplest state that you could imagine, a condition he called “the state of triviality”. Traditional physicists point out, however, that the theory is also filled with unprovable assumptions.The real lesson here is that neither the big bang theory nor any other theory that we can conceive can account for the universe. Only our Magnificent Creator God’s hand can explain the universe we see. |
| 5/18/2024 | We want to avoid getting bacteria in our food, don’t we? Bacteria cause illness. Bacteria are bad. Yet, some of the world’s healthiest foods contain deliberately introduced bacteria. One such strain of bacteria is the Lactic Acid Bacterium (LAB). This is used in foods such as kimchi or sauerkraut. Brassicas, such as cabbage, often have low quantities of this bacterium. When sealed in a suitable fermentation jar with salt, the LAB can thrive. LAB is able to withstand high acidity and salinity, so it grows, even in a salty environment. One of the products of LAB’s metabolism is lactic acid. Most other bacteria cannot survive in either acid or salt, so the LAB begins to dominate, while the vast majority of other bacteria die. LAB itself is not harmful to humans, so, paradoxically, the good bacteria have effectively killed off all the bad bacteria, providing a healthy, long-lasting food. When God finished making the world at the end of day six of creation, He looked at all that He had made and declared it to be very good. This must have included bacteria. Since Adam’s sin, many bacteria have mutated (though not evolved, as they have not gained new genetic information) into harmful organisms. Perhaps originally, all bacteria were created to be as useful as LAB in that original perfect world that our Magnificent Creator God gave us and that we so sinfully polluted. |
| 5/17/2024 | Many people know that, despite its appearance, coral is actually a tiny animal. Even a small coral growth may be made up of billions of tiny animals, each living inside its limestone skeleton. What many people don’t know is that coral cannot live without the help of algae – a plant. Thousands of one-celled algae live in the tiny stomach of each coral polyp. The polyp requires the waste products of the algae to complete its nutrition requirements and to get the calcium with which it builds reefs. In return, the polyp’s stomach provides an ideal protected living place for the algae. Incidentally, the wonderful colors in living coral come from the algae in each polyp’s stomach. Evolutionists have said that it must take millions of years for the tiny polyps to build large coral reefs – like the 2,000-kilometer-long Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The Great Barrier Reef, incidentally, is considered the largest structure ever built by living organisms. However, it has now been shown that coral polyps can double their own weight in just over 10 days! As a result, the claim of millions of years for the age of the Great Barrier Reef has been reduced by a factor of 40! Many of the long-age figures claimed by evolutionists have had to be drastically revised downward as we have learned more about the creation. The resulting figures fit the Bible’s account of history much more closely. Our Magnificent Creator God developed His Master Plan – a perfect plan – before anything else and we shall live with it throughout eternity!!! |
| 5/16/2024 | Because we were created by God who values communication and has always desired to communicate with us, we are born with the natural ability to learn and to speak language. Those who believe in evolution usually disbelieve that humans have the natural mental ability to speak, since they think both the ability to speak and language itself evolved. Research has forced evolutionists to change their thinking so that it is more in line with what the Bible says. As one science writer put it, learning to speak is “a miracle”. Instead of being a so called “blank slate”, infants are born into the world with the inborn mental and physical abilities to learn any language on Earth. Researchers have found that the ability to learn language is highest before a child reaches three years of age. Researchers learned that by age three, children from bilingual households have learned the basics of, and the differences between, the two languages. A child’s brain is – to use computer language – specifically wired to learn language. Infants understand language long before they have mastered the breath, mouth and tongue control to speak it. All those baby noises are preprogrammed exercises needed to master control of our speaking abilities. The fact that our Magnificent Creator God built in our ability to communicate helps to show us that we were intended to have a communicating relationship with Him. He speaks to us in the Bible, and we speak to Him in prayer. |
| 5/15/2024 | How would you like to be a dental hygienist for a crocodile? That’s how the crocodile bird makes his living.Of course you do need to know that the crocodile bird doesn’t show up to do his work with any drills or needles. He and the crocodile are on good terms with each other. After eating, the crocodile climbs the river bank and relaxes with his mouth open. The little crocodile bird enter the crocodile’s mouth to clean up the scraps that are left. While the crocodile bird makes most of his living as sort of a crocodile dental hygienist, he also helps keep the crocodile free of pesky insects that lodge in his skin.The crocodile also receives one other service from the crocodile bird. Whenever the bird senses approaching danger, he gives his sharp warning call and flies off. The crocodile, now warned, can quickly roll over into the water where virtually no animal can get the best of him.This is but one of many unlikely cooperative arrangements that we find in the plant and animal kingdoms. Every one of these relationships speaks for a Magnificent Creator God and against the idea that either these creatures, or their cooperation, evolved naturally. Evolutionists have written whole books on the subject. Yet they don’t seem satisfied that they have explained how these relationships could develop through evolution. We agree that they have no explanation. Nor are they likely to find one as long as they deny a Creator who cares for His creation. |
| 5/14/2024 | Can the dead come back to life? While many scientists assure us that they cannot, the empty grave of Christ assures us that in Him everyone who trusts in His saving work on the cross of Calvary will live bodily with Him forever. When modern science tries to raise doubts about the bodily resurrection of Christ, just keep in mind that science cannot even explain the miracle of the seed. Any seed, whether an ordinary bean seed, an acorn or a coconut, is a marvel of life. Consider the oak tree. Within the acorn, weighing less than an ounce, is a tiny embryonic oak tree, enough nutrition to get the young tree started on its own and all of the coded information needed not only to direct the start of growth, but to also guide the design and development of tons and tons of tree! Lotus seeds can remain alive and sprout for up to 1,000 years! If it had been up to the first plant to figure out how to accomplish this miracle by trial and error, we would still be waiting for the first seed to develop! But Scripture solves this problem for us by clearly stating that God is the author of all life! Besides Scripture’s clear statement on the matter, it seems most unscientific to say that the tiny, packaged bundle of life we call a seed was not carefully designed and created but came about by chance. And as the seed in the ground shakes off its old, dry coat to burst forth in vibrant new life, let each of us look to our Magnificent Creator God to shake off the old and decayed and allow Him to place on us the vibrant new life He gives us through His resurrection. |
| 5/13/2024 | From an early age, Charles Darwin’s mother, Sukey, took him to church. That is why so many people assume that Darwin’s background was Christian. But the church to which Sukey Darwin took her children was not just any church. It was a Unitarian Church. And the influence of this church, and its pastor, Rev. William Case, was not just for Sundays. Case operated a small grammar school in the manse, and Sukey sent the young Charles there. Unitarianism takes a strong doctrinal position on not taking doctrinal positions. Its name suggests not only a belief in the singularity of God, but an opposition to the biblical Trinitarian position. Unitarians deny that Jesus is God, even though the Bible says He is. Consequently, they also deny the authority and inspiration of Scripture, except in the vague sense of being “inspired” by any “uplifting” literature. Case’s influence on Darwin’s later life is undeniable. For example, Case’s nature trips to the local quarry instilled a lifelong love of natural history in the boy. It surely must also be that Darwin had no foundation of trusting God’s word from these early experiences – God’s word that reveals to us His triune character and the deity of Christ. Though we do not derive the doctrine of the Trinity from Genesis 1, we can see the doctrine clearly reflected in the Creation by our Magnificent Creator God, by the Word of God and by the Spirit of God!!! |
| 5/12/2024 | Have you ever thought what a strange material water actually is? A water molecule comprises of three atoms – two hydrogens and one oxygen. Oxygen is an element in Group VI of the Periodic Table; Group VI also contains the elements sulfur, selenium, and tellurium, in increasing order of size (oxygen is the smallest. Hydrogen can also form compounds with these elements: H2S, H2Se, H2Te. These have the boiling points -60.7, -41.5, and -2.2deg Celcius. Therefore, all these compounds are gases at room temperature. If we were following the size of the Group VI atom only, then water should have a boiling point considerably lower than that of H2S. But it doesn’t. In fact, the boiling point of water is higher than all those other compounds, at 100 deg C (or 212 deg F). This, of course, is not the only anomalous property of water. The solid form of water – ice – floats on liquid water. So what, you might say. Well, the solid form of every other liquid there is always sinks in its liquid. If you have ever allowed molten candle wax to cool down, for example, you will notice it freezes from the bottom up. Nearly all liquids behave that way – except water! In short, the most common liquid in the world – the one that we require most for life – behaves like no other liquid. It is almost as if it were specially designed! Our Magnificent Creator God designed the Earth – including water – for us to inhabit!!! |
| 5/10/2024 | The Bible tells us that a young shepherd named David killed the giant Philistine, Goliath, with a very accurately sling stone (1 Samuel 17:40, 49).The Bible states that the Israelites used slings as weapons of war (2 Kings 3:25). Sling stones from Khirbet el-Maqatir (West Bank, Israel) are not naturally rounded. They all have evidence of being shaped by man. Archaeologists are finding evidence that confirms these Biblical stories. Sling stones were important weapons in an ancient army’s arsenal.At one excavation site in Israel, 10 miles north of Jerusalem, sling stones have been found in almost every area of the dig. Interestingly, the site is located in the territory given to the tribe of Benjamin. This tribe was known for an elite corps of slingers (Judges 20:15-16; 1 Chronicles 12:2), many of whom were left-handed slingers. 700 of them could each “sling a stone at a hair and not miss.The best method of releasing a stone from a sling is by an underhand motion.It is unclear when men first started slinging stones instead of throwing them. Yet, once known, it did not take long to learn that stones could be slung faster, farther, and more accurately, than they could be thrown. Early slingers also found smoother, rounded, stones were far more effective than any other shape.Ancient hand slings generally consisted of a single long strip of leather or woven wool, with a central “pocket” for the stone. The longer the sling, the greater its range. Long-range slings were about 3 feet long (0.9 meters).Slingers are often visualized as releasing overhead, yet the best way to utilize a sling is by an underhand motion, like a softball pitcher. Elaborate wind-ups were wasted motion. One windup, like a good softball pitcher, was sufficient. Before development of the modern compound bow, ancient slingers were as effective as archers and served as an important part of any military force.Surprisingly, a good slinger hurled a stone as far and accurately as a good archer. Roman military texts recommended archery target practice at about 200 yards (183 meters). Slingers are known to hurl their projectiles even farther, as much as 440 yards (402 meters) (a quarter of a mile / 0.40 km). As for accuracy, one ancient writer noted that the best slingers “would wound not merely the heads of their enemies, but any part of the face at which they might have aimed.”Experiments demonstrate that missiles leave a sling in excess of 60 miles per hour (97 km/h).One Roman writer noted that opponents in leather armor were in far greater danger from sling missiles than arrows. Even if the stone did not penetrate the armor, it was capable of inflicting a fatal internal injury.Unarmored bodies were easily penetrated by sling stones. An ancient medical book included instructions for removing lead and stone sling missiles from the bodies of wounded soldiers.While typical sling stones used by the Greek and Roman armies were the size of golf balls, different cultures liked different sizes.This is just another piece of our Magnificent Creator God’s design before anything existed!!! |
| 5/9/2024 | While the brain weighs only three pounds, it can do the work of 1,000 super computers. It doesn’t need to be connected to a power source, and it doesn’t overheat because it is able to make its own electricity and it operates on only microvolts of power. If your brain’s 10 trillion cells were placed end to end, they would stretch for over 100,000 miles. Your brain has the capacity to store every word of every book on a bookshelf 500 miles long. In order for the human brain to have evolved from a simpler brain in the time that evolutionists claim it has, the brain would have had to evolve millions of new cells every year for millions of years. A.R. Wallace, co discoverer with Charles Darwin of natural selection, once noted that there is a huge gulf between the human brain and that of the ape. Darwin recognized what Wallace’s argument did to their theory and responded, “I hope you have not murdered completely your own and my child.” Our Magnificent Creator God has given you a brain that has wonderful abilities. Don’t waste one of the greatest material gifts the Creator has given you. |
| 5/8/2024 | The Bible tells us that a young shepherd named David killed the giant Philistine, Goliath, with a very accurately sling stone (1 Samuel 17:40, 49).The Bible states that the Israelites used slings as weapons of war (2 Kings 3:25). Sling stones from Khirbet el-Maqatir (West Bank, Israel) are not naturally rounded. They all have evidence of being shaped by man. Archaeologists are finding evidence that confirms these Biblical stories. Sling stones were important weapons in an ancient army’s arsenal.At one excavation site in Israel, 10 miles north of Jerusalem, sling stones have been found in almost every area of the dig. Interestingly, the site is located in the territory given to the tribe of Benjamin. This tribe was known for an elite corps of slingers (Judges 20:15-16; 1 Chronicles 12:2), many of whom were left-handed slingers. 700 of them could each “sling a stone at a hair and not miss.The best method of releasing a stone from a sling is by an underhand motion.It is unclear when men first started slinging stones instead of throwing them. Yet, once known, it did not take long to learn that stones could be slung faster, farther, and more accurately, than they could be thrown. Early slingers also found smoother, rounded, stones were far more effective than any other shape.Ancient hand slings generally consisted of a single long strip of leather or woven wool, with a central “pocket” for the stone. The longer the sling, the greater its range. Long-range slings were about 3 feet long (0.9 meters).Slingers are often visualized as releasing overhead, yet the best way to utilize a sling is by an underhand motion, like a softball pitcher. Elaborate wind-ups were wasted motion. One windup, like a good softball pitcher, was sufficient. Before development of the modern compound bow, ancient slingers were as effective as archers and served as an important part of any military force.Surprisingly, a good slinger hurled a stone as far and accurately as a good archer. Roman military texts recommended archery target practice at about 200 yards (183 meters). Slingers are known to hurl their projectiles even farther, as much as 440 yards (402 meters) (a quarter of a mile / 0.40 km). As for accuracy, one ancient writer noted that the best slingers “would wound not merely the heads of their enemies, but any part of the face at which they might have aimed.”Experiments demonstrate that missiles leave a sling in excess of 60 miles per hour (97 km/h).One Roman writer noted that opponents in leather armor were in far greater danger from sling missiles than arrows. Even if the stone did not penetrate the armor, it was capable of inflicting a fatal internal injury.Unarmored bodies were easily penetrated by sling stones. An ancient medical book included instructions for removing lead and stone sling missiles from the bodies of wounded soldiers.While typical sling stones used by the Greek and Roman armies were the size of golf balls, different cultures liked different sizes. This is just another piece of our Magnificent Creator God’s design before anything existed!!! |
| 5/7/2024 | How would you like to be a dental hygienist for a crocodile? That’s how the crocodile bird makes his living. Of course you do need to know that the crocodile bird doesn’t show up to do his work with any drills or needles. He and the crocodile are on good terms with each other. After eating, the crocodile climbs the river bank and relaxes with his mouth open. The little crocodile bird enters the crocodile’s mouth to clean up the scraps that are left. While the crocodile bird makes most of his living as sort of a crocodile dental hygienist, he also helps keep the crocodile free of pesky insects that lodge in his skin. The crocodile also receives one other service from the crocodile bird. Whenever the bird senses approaching danger, he gives his sharp warning call and flies off. The crocodile, now warned, can quickly roll over into the water where virtually no animal can get the best of him. This is but one of many unlikely cooperative arrangements that we find in the plant and animal kingdoms that our Magnificent Creator God has designed!!! |
| 5/5/2024 | Many people today tend to dismiss the early chapters of Genesis as legend rather than history. However, if the Bible’s story of the Flood and the Tower of Babel are not history there are some established historical facts that have no explanation. According to the Bible, after the great Flood, people multiplied but failed to scatter over the face of the earth as commanded by God. Having one language, most of the people stayed in one location and built a great city. It was not until God confused their language that they scattered across the earth. If these events did not take place, how do we explain the fact that a 6th century B.C. Chinese writer describes the ultimate God Who created all things in much the same way as an ancient Egyptian writer? And why would these descriptions match 8th century B.C. Greek writings? While it is true that each of these cultures had their unique gods, their ancient writings about the Creator use special language. Lao-tzu was an 8th century B.C. writer who described the ultimate God as eternal and self-existing. Likewise, an ancient Egyptian writer described the ultimate God as the source of everything in the heavens and on earth as well as all life. If man was not once of one culture and language, how did all these ancient writers each get the same story to tell? The similarities between these descriptions and those of other cultures bear witness to the historicity of even the earliest parts of Genesis – all performed by our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 5/4/2024 | Imagine a huge living creature covering about one square mile and made up of almost a third of a billion cells. Imagine each of those living cells being able to move about independently of the others. No, it’s not the plot of a new science fiction movie. Some scientists have suggested that ant colonies may be thought of as one large living organism. They suggest this because of the way individual members within ant colonies behave. Ant colonies have many kinds of members, each with its own specific task. The soldier ants in a colony have extra large heads and heavy-duty jaws for fighting. Other ants are concerned only about finding and returning food. Still other workers do nothing but process and store food. Within the colony another caste of ants does nothing but tend the eggs. Others prepare the food for the larvae and deliver it to other specialized ants who do nothing but feed the next generation. If this sounds complex, imagine the largest known ant colony. This Japanese ant colony has an estimated 306 million worker ants, and more than a million queens. The colony occupies 45,000 interconnected underground nests that range over about a square mile! There is obviously intelligent design and control behind ant society—intelligence not found in ants or in nature itself. This intelligence comes from outside nature. Here is yet another witness that no concern of any living thing is too small for our Magnificent Creator God’s complete attention!!! |
| 4/29/2024 | The water flea fills one of the lowest spots on the food chain. What this means is that even though the water flea is concerned about little else than going about his business, just about everyone else in the pond is interested in eating him. Not much larger than a grain of rice, the water flea has been given such a clever defense against predators that even scientists were fooled for a while. Adult water fleas, or Daphnia, are egg shaped except for their legs and are easy to swallow. Newly hatched water fleas are usually egg shaped, too, making them a tender, easy-to-swallow lunch. But as the number of predators in the pond or stream grows, hatchlings begin to develop an odd array of sharp projections on their bodies. Some look so different from their parents that at first scientists misidentified them as a different species. The water fleas’ strategy involves more than just trying to look like something different from a traditional water flea lunch. The sharp projections make them hard to swallow. Anyone would rather swallow an egg than a porcupine! Research shows that these projections reduce mortality of young water fleas by 50 percent. If the Creator takes this personalized care of water fleas, how much more He wishes to take this kind of personalized care of you! None of us need ever feel alone or uncared for. Our Magnificent Creator God seeks a personal relationship with us through His Son, Jesus Christ! |
| 4/28/2024 | Imagine a huge living creature covering about one square mile and made up of almost a third of a billion cells. Imagine each of those living cells being able to move about independently of the others.No, it’s not the plot of a new science fiction movie. Some scientists have suggested that ant colonies may be thought of as one large living organism. They suggest this because of the way individual members within ant colonies behave. Ant colonies have many kinds of members, each with its own specific task. The soldier ants in a colony have extra large heads and heavy-duty jaws for fighting. Other ants are concerned only about finding and returning food. Still other workers do nothing but process and store food.Within the colony another caste of ants does nothing but tend the eggs. Others prepare the food for the larvae and deliver it to other specialized ants who do nothing but feed the next generation.If this sounds complex, imagine the largest known ant colony. This Japanese ant colony has an estimated 306 million worker ants, and more than a million queens. The colony occupies 45,000 interconnected underground nests that range over about a square mile!There is obviously intelligent design and control behind ant society—intelligence not found in ants or in nature itself. This intelligence comes from outside nature. Here is yet another witness that no concern of any living thing is too small for our Magnificent Creator God’s complete attention!!! |
| 4/27/2024 | Con men develop elaborate schemes to cheat people out of their money or other possessions. Successful cons are cleverly and intelligently directed toward the con man’s goal. We would not expect such intelligently directed, albeit sinful, behavior in animals, except that the Bible tells us that deceit is the way of the world since sin has entered the creation. To their surprise, two groups of researchers have discovered a number of animals that try to con their own kind. One group of researchers spent two years standing in ponds, getting to know green frogs. They discovered that when an intruding frog enters a frog community, even the younger males attempt to intimidate him by croaking at a much lower pitch than normal. This makes even the young frog sound like the bigger members of the community, bluffing the intruder. Another team studied Afro-Asian fiddler crabs. When one of the male crabs loses its claw, it will grow back only slowly. So the crab quickly grows a fake claw until the new one grows in. The fake claw is useless for fighting, but works well in aggressive claw waving at other males. It can also be used in the claw waving that is part of the crabs’ mating ritual. Females prefer the fastest waving claws, so the lighter fake claws, which wave faster, are a real advantage. Only our Magnificent Creator God could have planned a universe so complete that even the smallest details were included!!! |
| 4/26/2024 | The Flood began with two geophysical events – the bursting forth of Fountains of the Great Deep and the opening of the Windows of Heaven. But what could these events have actually looked like? Starting with the Fountains of the Great Deep, this would appear to be a reference to volcanic activity. We can envisage cracks opening up in deep points of the pre-Flood ocean. Possibly magma came through these rocks, but also, we expect that a lot of super-heated water would emerge, thrown at supersonic speed high into the atmosphere. In other words, these fountains would have been similar to the ocean floor springs that exist today, but on a larger and more violent scale. This would have been the main source of the overwhelming majority of the floodwaters which covered the Earth. And after the water had been thrown high into the atmosphere, it would have returned to the Earth as torrential rain, so this is probably what is meant by the Windows of Heaven – more correctly, the Floodgates of Heaven. There would not have been enough moisture in the pre-Flood atmosphere to produce the amount of floodwater required, whereas the mechanism suggested, called Catastrophic Plate Tectonics, flows from Scripture, and seems to fit scientific observations. We are humbled when we think of the amazing power of our Magnificent Creator God and of His creation and the truth of His word that He did everything exactly in the way that He said He would!!! |
| 4/25/2024 | Despite the fact that most microorganisms are necessary and good, throughout our lifetimes each of us encounters tens of thousands of different infectious bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites. Even more remarkable is the fact that most of the time our immune systems disable these potentially lethal invaders before we ever show any symptoms of infection. At any given time, more than 100,000 unique sentries posted throughout your body identify invaders, sound the alarm, and even issue specific chemical instructions for their destruction. These sentries may also be thought of as tiny doctors who identify a potential illness, discover the cure and apply it even before the infection gets underway. The immune system has puzzled scientists. Researchers know that our bodies do not keep a set of genetic blueprints for these sentries, which are called B cells. How then does our body make these sentries or develop the genetic information necessary to disable invaders? Researchers have learned that the body has a small library of DNA fragments that are continually being shuffled into new patterns so that the body is almost instantly ready for any invader. The fact that even medical researchers are in awe over our Magnificent Creator God’s design of our immune system, it verifies what the Bible says: “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” |
| 4/24/2024 | Fireflies may help light the way to new medical breakthroughs. The gentle glow of a firefly on a summer evening is produced by the chemical luciferase. The firefly has a gene with the code that makes this chemical. When that gene is added to the genetic information of other plants or animals, the cells begin to glow harmlessly. Researchers have been using the firefly gene to test their ability to add genetic information to a cell. When human heart arteries become clogged, a medicine called TPA is among the treatments doctors use. TPA is a natural clot-dissolving protein that helps prevent heart attacks. The problem is, without a continuous supply of TPA, the artery may reclog. It would help if the artery could make its own TPA 24 hours a day. Since TPA is a natural protein for which there is a genetic code, researchers wanted to know if genetic information could be added to artery cells. To find out, they injected dogs with the genetic code for luciferase. If genetic information could be added to the cells through this method, they would actually see the results in the glowing tissue. Tissue samples taken three days later did, in fact, have the distinctive glow of the firefly proving that the method works. They warn that several years of research lie ahead before artery cells may be able to dissolve their own clots. Those glowing fireflies that delight children and adults show God’s design in the creation in an unexpected way. The chemical that makes the glow is proving to be an important tool of medical science. What a Magnificent Creator God we have to preplan our needs!!! |
| 4/23/2024 | Some things don’t have to be understood to be appreciated. You can enjoy the smell of dinner cooking or the scent of a rose without any idea of how your nose works. And believe it or not, you’re doing just as well as the most brilliant biologist. While your nose knows how it works, science cannot explain just how we sense scents. It is known that inside our noses, behind the bridge of the nose, are cells that can sense smell. These cells are able to detect and identify airborne molecules from an open rose or a cooking roast. But no one knows just how these cells turn those molecules into the sense of smell that we experience. To make matters more complicated, the sense of smell is one of our most complex senses. A single seemingly simple odor may contain more than 1,000 different chemicals. One sniff is likely to start activity all over the brain. Scientists have proven what experience has already shown most of us – a smell can also trigger emotions and memories, depending on an experience related to that smell. In addition, your sense of smell is linked to your sense of taste, which is why food can seem to be tasteless when you have a head cold. A sense of smell has saved countless lives and brought joy and pleasure to all but those few whose sense of smell has malfunctioned. It is so complex that modern science doesn’t know how it works – yet another testimony to the wisdom of our loving and Magnificent Creator God. |
| 4/22/2024 | While scientists often talk about how it takes millions of years to form oil and gas deposits, they say little about the fact that oil and natural gas are forming today in the ocean’s sediments. The sediments of the Gulf of Mexico are well known examples of the rapid natural formation of petroleum deposits. In addition, oil and natural gas are seeping from petroleum deposits under the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. But even more amazing is the discovery that there are sea creatures that actually use crude oil and natural gas for food. Scientists have known that some microbes digest oil. But they have discovered new species of worms, clams, mussels and crabs that cluster around petroleum and natural gas seepages on the floor of the Gulf. So far they have found 30 sites off the coast of Louisiana and Texas where these strange creatures have set up communities around seepages. While doing this deep water research, scientists also discovered lakes under the ocean! They found patches of water much saltier and, therefore, much heavier than sea water resting on the sea floor like under sea lakes. They report that the saltier water lakes actually have ripples on their surfaces, just like a lake on dry land. Despite claims made by some scientists, we humans are still only in the early stages of finding everything there is to find in the creation. Discoveries like this can show us that we are a long, long way from even beginning to understand how things from our Magnificent Creator God actually work. |
| 4/21/2024 | Scientists and manufacturers are studying a new technique that could lead to more durable fibers. This technique manufactures liquid crystals to produce stronger, longer-lasting fibers. The process uses sulfuric acid, temperatures well above the boiling point of water and a high-pressure atmosphere. Meanwhile, another team of researchers finally discovered how orb weaving spiders and silkworms manufacture their silk. Scientists had theorized that silk from spiders and silkworms was stronger by weight than steel because proteins in the silk cross-linked with each other. But after watching silk production and drying in careful lighting under magnification, astonished scientists actually saw what happens. Silk is produced in the silk gland as a thin, watery liquid. Once the protein-rich liquid is released from the gland, the liquid begins to concentrate because of evaporation. As the liquid concentrates, it changes into a liquid crystal state. Scientists have been trying to create fibers in the lab from liquid crystals. They would love to know how the spider does it, using only water at normal temperatures and pressures. This is another example of how God has already solved an engineering problem that we were trying to solve. It is especially interesting that He allowed scientists to discover His solution at the same time that others were trying to solve the problem. This allows us to reemphasize that our world is the work of our Magnificent Creator God and not mindless, natural accidents!!! |
| 4/20/2024 | Many people are aware that evolutionary astrophysicists believe that the Earth came into existence about 4.5 billion years ago. The formation of this planet-size lump of rock allegedly happened by gravitational accretion from the dust that had previously swirled around the Sun. One grain of dust would attract another. Gradually, one lump would attract another. This would keep repeating until a planet-sized object appeared. There are two main problems with this scenario, apart from the fact that it is not described that way in the Bible. First, why would particles of dust or small stones stick together by gravity? If this were a normal thing to happen, then why has it not subsequently happened in the asteroid belt? The second problem is that even if such accretion were possible, it would only produce a planet-sized lump of amorphous rock. But the Earth has structure, with a solid crust, semi-molten mantle, and molten inner and outer core. So evolutionary astrophysicists suppose that about 3.9 billion years ago, another planet, about the size of Mars, crashed into the Earth, and vaporized. This caused the Earth to melt so that it could reset in the “correct” order. Although this model is a lot more sophisticated than this simplified version, it still seems to be something of a fiddle-factor – an invented story to attempt to explain the inexplicable. In contrast, the Bible tells us that the Earth was a direct creation by God and that the rest of the Solar System – and, indeed, the rest of the universe – was formed three days later, again as a direct creative act of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 4/18/2024 | One of the most studied but least understood organs in the human body is the brain. The human brain is the most complex arrangement of matter in the universe. There are many different theories about how the brain works, but one universally recognized fact is that the brain is more sensitive to damage than any other organ. Scientists studying the brain have learned that when the brain is injured, it triggers the release of some very special chemicals called neuronotrophic factors. While researchers aren’t sure how these chemicals actually work, studies show that the chemicals seem to help the brain repair damage to itself. They believe that each of the different chemicals works to repair a specific structure in the brain. Medical researchers are continuing their study of these factors with the hope of using artificially created versions to help those suffering from brain damage due to stroke and trauma. They hope to learn from the body how to help the body do what it now tries to do for itself. Surely the advanced knowledge of biochemistry necessary to create a way for the brain to repair itself does not come from matter itself. Only a powerful and wise Magnificent Creator God – the Creator described in the Bible – could have made this system. But we speak here of more than His wisdom. For His gift of the brain’s ability to repair damage to itself also show that He looks upon us with love. The highest expression of His love to us is found in Jesus Christ. |
| 4/17/2024 | Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species opened the modern era of evolutionary thinking. The very name of his book suggests that as we look back in time, we should see fewer kinds of animals. Darwin led many people to think that there should be a greater variety of plants and animals today than in the distant past. And those plants and animals should be more sophisticated today. But the fossil record tells just the opposite story. The most ancient rocks with identifiable fossils of multi celled creatures in them contain every major family alive today. These creatures just appear fully formed all at once. And both evolutionists and creationists admit that not all the creatures that existed in the day when these fossils were formed have been preserved in the fossil record. When you think of some of the pictures of strange creatures from the early days of Earth history, it seems obvious that, contrary to Darwin’s theory, there was a much greater variety of creatures alive in the past than exists today. And generally they were bigger and stronger than creatures are today. Ferns grew over 100 feet high, and dragonflies had wingspans of six feet. There are fewer kinds of creatures today, and what we have are often smaller and weaker than what we find in the fossil record. These facts don’t present a picture of evolutionary development and improvement at all. It is a picture of a perfect creation by a Magnificent Creator God corrupted by sin and running down. This is the same flow of history revealed in Scripture. But thankfully, Scripture shows us how in Christ Jesus there is escape from all the effects of sin! |
| 4/16/2024 | What has three eyes, lives in the sea and can swim faster than most boats can travel? No, it’s not a creature from another planet. It’s the porpoise. Science has long known that the porpoise navigates using sonar. Now they have learned a little bit more about how well equipped the porpoise is in its use of sound waves. Scientists have found that the porpoise has a fatty, disc shaped organ in the middle of its forehead that is able to shape and focus the sound waves used in the porpoise’s sonar. When the porpoise generates sound waves, they are conducted by bones in the mammal’s forehead to this disc, which then changes shape to focus and aim the sound waves. The returning echo allows the porpoise to literally see an image. Scientists note that the porpoise’s brain is very highly developed so that it can carry out this complex form of navigation. Because of the nature of sound waves, scientists suspect that a porpoise could not only see a fish but very likely make out some details of its internal organs. The porpoise’s sonar system uses a highly sophisticated knowledge of physics, biology and data processing. No scientist can even begin to explain how mutations and chance could have designed this complex and technically impressive navigation system. But there is no mystery if we understand that the porpoise was designed and made by the Magnificent Creator God of all that science studies! |
| 4/15/2024 | How would you like to live in a neighborhood where garbage was never collected and taken away? What if there was no provision in the creation for getting rid of waste? By now the Earth would have become a filthy mess!Our sewage and other waste does not break down all by itself. Without microbes, waste would simply continue to pile up. But if you were designing a world in which waste would have to be “taken away,” how would you do it? It’s hard to imagine a solution to the problem that is better than the solution God provided. The creatures that dispose of our waste are microscopic – an improvement over our big, noisy garbage trucks. But microbes don’t simply break down garbage into harmless materials. In His wisdom, God designed them to turn useless garbage into useful substances.We are now beginning to make more use of what God has designed. A West German corporation now markets a ceramic sponge that is home to countless organisms that not only love highly polluted water, they turn the pollution into useful things like natural gas and alcohol. Scientists say that the bugs eat almost anything, even pollutants that cannot easily be handled by usual sewage treatment.Whether we recognize it or not, we humans continue to learn at the feet of the Magnificent Creator God who made us – which is, itself, an argument against evolution. |
| 4/14/2024 | Fireflies may help light the way to new medical breakthroughs. The gentle glow of a firefly on a summer evening is produced by the chemical luciferase. The firefly has a gene with the code that makes this chemical.When that gene is added to the genetic information of other plants or animals, the cells begin to glow harmlessly. Researchers have been using the firefly gene to test their ability to add genetic information to a cell.When human heart arteries become clogged, a medicine called TPA is among the treatments doctors use. TPA is a natural clot-dissolving protein that helps prevent heart attacks. The problem is, without a continuous supply of TPA, the artery may reclog. It would help if the artery could make its own TPA 24 hours a day.Since TPA is a natural protein for which there is a genetic code, researchers wanted to know if genetic information could be added to artery cells. To find out, they injected dogs with the genetic code for luciferase. If genetic information could be added to the cells through this method, they would actually see the results in the glowing tissue. Tissue samples taken three days later did, in fact, have the distinctive glow of the firefly proving that the method works. They warn that several years of research lie ahead before artery cells may be able to dissolve their own clots.Those glowing fireflies that delight children and adults show God’s design in the creation in an unexpected way. The chemical that makes the glow is proving to be an important tool of medical science.What a Magnificent Creator God we have to preplan our needs!!! |
| 4/13/2024 | While the Bible teaches us that sex is a wonderful gift of God, evolutionists believe that sexual reproduction should not have evolved. According to evolutionists, if sexual reproduction were to develop, evolution is supposed to get rid of it.To make matters worse, immobile plants use sexual reproduction. This creates a problem in transferring the male genes to the female for fertilization. Just to confound things even more, God uses insects and even mammals to transfer the pollen. Since evolutionists believe that plants were around for many millions of years before animals, evolutionists have yet another problem.The European family of the Arum lilies attracts beetles and flies. When one of the insects lands on a flower, he finds a slick, oil-coated surface and ends up sliding down into a chamber filled with small hairs. Imprisoned, he finds a sweet sap that makes good eating. While he is gorging himself on the sap and getting sticky in the process, the male part of the flower showers him with pollen. The next day, the sticky, pollen-coated insect finds that the doors to his prison are open. So he flies off to another flower to unwittingly deliver his load of pollen!It sounds like science fiction to say that a flower figured out how to do this. And it certainly doesn’t sound very scientific to say that nobody designed and made this complex arrangement. As we learn more about these arrangements in nature, it becomes even more clear that an all-wise Magnificent Creator God designed these beautiful, symbiotic relationships between different members of the living kingdom. |
| 4/12/2024 | The first four words of the Bible are incredibly important. “In the beginning, God…” These words boldly declare the truth about how we should view the universe we live in. They tell us that there was a beginning. There was a time when all the things that now are were not. And before all that, before even time itself, was God.The four words refute all naturalistic explanations of the universe. They refute evolution because they make clear that there was a planning intelligence behind the universe rather than blind, random chance.Yet the words also refute a mere theistic intelligent design model because they reveal that the Creator was not an impersonal, unknowable entity but has all the divine attributes on which the remainder of the 66 books of the Bible will expand. These four powerful words suggest that we should go on to learn more about this wonderful God, Who has made all things well, and Who takes the trouble to be mindful even of humans like us.These four powerful words refute atheism by boldly declaring that God does indeed exist. As the title of one of Francis Schaeffer’s books puts it, “He is there, and He is not silent”.The four words also refute agnosticism because the God Who Is There is someone that we can know and learn more about.The four words also refute deism because the God who is declared to have created is described, known, and knowable. He is not an abstract concept, but a reality.Genesis is the foundational book of the Bible. And these four powerful words are the foundation phrase of Genesis.It is to our Magnificent Creator God that we owe all things! |
| 4/11/2024 | One interesting way in which to help young people gain an appreciation for God’s creation is to ask them to solve certain problems that the Creator Himself had to solve.Let’s use the examples of seeds. Plants need seeds to produce the next generation. But what about all the insects that feed on seeds? As Creator, one could decide that insects will not eat seeds. But what will insects eat? Can we get rid of insects? If we do, what will we create to do all the important jobs that insects perform in the ecology? The conclusion must be that we need insects, and they need to eat something. Seeds are a convenient food for them. So how do we design seeds so that both plants and insects can benefit?Left to their own to work out this problem, perhaps in small groups, young people are likely to propose two popular solutions. A plant can be designed to make so many seeds that insects could not possibly eat them all. Or some plants could be designed that produce seeds that have a natural insect repellent.And both of these solutions to the problem are commonly found among seeds. Studies show that plants that produce so many seeds that insects could not possibly eat them all generally do not produce seeds that are poisonous to insects. But plants that produce fewer and larger seeds often produce seeds laced with natural insect repellents. As a result, insects get to eat and plants are allowed to produce the next generation.And again we see that our Magnificent Creator God worked out the best solution for all involved. |
| 4/10/2024 | The first four words of the Bible are incredibly important. “In the beginning, God…” These words boldly declare the truth about how we should view the universe we live in. They tell us that there was a beginning. There was a time when all the things that now are were not. And before all that, before even time itself, was God.The four words refute all naturalistic explanations of the universe. They refute evolution because they make clear that there was a planning intelligence behind the universe rather than blind, random chance.Yet the words also refute a mere theistic intelligent design model because they reveal that the Creator was not an impersonal, unknowable entity but has all the divine attributes on which the remainder of the 66 books of the Bible will expand. These four powerful words suggest that we should go on to learn more about this wonderful God, Who has made all things well, and Who takes the trouble to be mindful even of humans like us.These four powerful words refute atheism by boldly declaring that God does indeed exist. As the title of one of Francis Schaeffer’s books puts it, “He is there, and He is not silent”.The four words also refute agnosticism because the God Who Is There is someone that we can know and learn more about.The four words also refute deism because the God who is declared to have created is described, known, and knowable. He is not an abstract concept, but a reality.Genesis is the foundational book of the Bible. And these four powerful words are the foundation phrase of Genesis.It is to our Magnificent Creator God that we owe all things! |
| 4/9/2024 | Many different creatures, from mice to insects, eat seeds. The tropical forest offers the greatest variety of seeds found anywhere in the world. The problem is that among this great variety are seeds that are poisonous and others that are hard as rocks. Yet, even these seeds are used for food by some creatures.One vine like legume that grows in the jungle produces seeds that are highly poisonous to insects. Yet, there is one beetle that is able to eat these highly nutritious seeds – even gaining extra nutrition for itself from the poison.The Hymenaea protects its seeds another way. Hymenaea seeds are locked within a very tough, woody pod that no one in the tropical forest is interested in eating – if they can even get it open. But one mouse that lives on the jungle floor is up to the task. This small mouse opens the pods and stores the seed in its pouch like cheeks. Back in its nest, the mouse bites a small notch in the hard seed to help it absorb water. He then buries it in his den. Before long, the seed germinates and the mouse has a tasty and tender seedling to eat.Evolutionists tell us that farming was one of the major advances that helped primitive humans become modern. How, then, do they explain mice who not only farm but who know how to improve the germination of their crops? A better explanation is that our Magnificent Creator God shared this bit of farming wisdom with the mouse when He made it. |
| 4/8/2024 | Relationships among creatures who are often very different from one another are so numerous – and so intelligent – that they witness to an overall design for living things. Even evolutionists recognize this when they talk about the “grand design” of the living world. And if design is that evident, there must be a designer. But there’s even more to the matter than seeing a designer.Some of the most ferocious wasps in the world live in the tropical forests of Costa Rica. These wasps are social, building a huge nest that can be two feet long and one foot across. They are short tempered and highly protective of the tree in which they build their nest. Most other creatures give these wasps and their tree plenty of room.But one other creature also calls the tree home – the katydid. These long horned grasshoppers spend much of their day sitting in the wasps’ tree. The wasps don’t bother the katydids because they offer no threat to the wasps. At the same time, none of the katydids’ many predators dare come close to the tree because of the wasps. In one research project, scientists removed the wasp nest from a tree that was home to many katydids. A few days later the katydids were gone from the tree as well.The relationship between these wasps and the katydids is called symbiosis and shows more than intelligence and design in the creation. It shows that our Magnificent Creator God cares about everything He has made, reminding us that He desires a loving relationship with each of us! |
| 4/7/2024 | While the Bible teaches us that sex is a wonderful gift of God, evolutionists believe that sexual reproduction should not have evolved. According to evolutionists, if sexual reproduction were to develop, evolution is supposed to get rid of it.To make matters worse, immobile plants use sexual reproduction. This creates a problem in transferring the male genes to the female for fertilization. Just to confound things even more, God uses insects and even mammals to transfer the pollen. Since evolutionists believe that plants were around for many millions of years before animals, evolutionists have yet another problem.The European family of the Arum lilies attracts beetles and flies. When one of the insects lands on a flower, he finds a slick, oil-coated surface and ends up sliding down into a chamber filled with small hairs. Imprisoned, he finds a sweet sap that makes good eating. While he is gorging himself on the sap and getting sticky in the process, the male part of the flower showers him with pollen. The next day, the sticky, pollen-coated insect finds that the doors to his prison are open. So he flies off to another flower to unwittingly deliver his load of pollen!It sounds like science fiction to say that a flower figured out how to do this. And it certainly doesn’t sound very scientific to say that nobody designed and made this complex arrangement. As we learn more about these arrangements in nature, it becomes even more clear that an all-wise Magnificent Creator God designed these beautiful, symbiotic relationships between different members of the living kingdom. |
| 4/6/2024 | While the Bible teaches us that sex is a wonderful gift of God, evolutionists believe that sexual reproduction should not have evolved. According to evolutionists, if sexual reproduction were to develop, evolution is supposed to get rid of it.To make matters worse, immobile plants use sexual reproduction. This creates a problem in transferring the male genes to the female for fertilization. Just to confound things even more, God uses insects and even mammals to transfer the pollen. Since evolutionists believe that plants were around for many millions of years before animals, evolutionists have yet another problem.The European family of the Arum lilies attracts beetles and flies. When one of the insects lands on a flower, he finds a slick, oil-coated surface and ends up sliding down into a chamber filled with small hairs. Imprisoned, he finds a sweet sap that makes good eating. While he is gorging himself on the sap and getting sticky in the process, the male part of the flower showers him with pollen. The next day, the sticky, pollen-coated insect finds that the doors to his prison are open. So he flies off to another flower to unwittingly deliver his load of pollen!It sounds like science fiction to say that a flower figured out how to do this. And it certainly doesn’t sound very scientific to say that nobody designed and made this complex arrangement. As we learn more about these arrangements in nature, it becomes even more clear that an all-wise Magnificent Creator God designed these beautiful, symbiotic relationships between different members of the living kingdom. |
| 4/5/2024 | If we could harness all of the sun’s energy that reaches the Earth, we would have more than enough energy to fill all our energy needs – even if the entire world became as industrialized as the west. Yet, less than 0.10% of all of the sun’s energy output reaches the Earth! What is going on within the sun to create so much energy?Most people have heard that the sun produces its energy through nuclear fusion. And even though most scientists think this is true, they admit that the real answer isn’t that simple – and the full answer is unknown. If the sun produces its energy by nuclear fusion, one of the results of that process is a tiny particle called a neutrino. But, in fact, the neutrinos that should be coming from the sun are not. Worse, new calculations of the temperature needed for the sun to ignite into the nuclear fusion process show that the evolutionary theory for how the sun formed does not generate enough heat for fusion.An alternate theory says that the sun’s heat is a result of its powerful gravity pulling the sun in on itself – called gravitational collapse. This would explain why the neutrinos are missing. But evolutionists have rejected gravitational collapse because if this is where the sun’s heat comes from, the sun could not be billions of years old.Despite our scientific sophistication, many of our Magnificent Creator God’s works still defy our understanding! |
| 4/4/2024 | Many people today tend to dismiss the early chapters of Genesis as legend rather than history. However, if the Bible’s story of the Flood and the Tower of Babel are not history there are some established historical facts that have no explanation.According to the Bible, after the great Flood, people multiplied but failed to scatter over the face of the earth as commanded by God. Having one language, most of the people stayed in one location and built a great city. It was not until God confused their language that they scattered across the earth. If these events did not take place, how do we explain the fact that a 6th century B.C. Chinese writer describes the ultimate God Who created all things in much the same way as an ancient Egyptian writer? And why would these descriptions match 8th century B.C. Greek writings? While it is true that each of these cultures had their unique gods, their ancient writings about the Creator use special language. Lao-tzu was an 8th century B.C. writer who described the ultimate God as eternal and self-existing. Likewise, an ancient Egyptian writer described the ultimate God as the source of everything in the heavens and on earth as well as all life.If man was not once of one culture and language, how did all these ancient writers each get the same story to tell? The similarities between these descriptions and those of other cultures bear witness to the historicity of even the earliest parts of Genesis – all performed by our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 4/3/2024 | The frogfish is yet another strange creature for which those who believe in evolution can find no history. Not only do evolutionists admit that frogfish are not related by evolution to any other creature, but also they can find no relationship among 35 of the 41 known species of frogfish!Frogfish live in many different shallow sea areas. They are called frogfish because they have a wide mouth and face like a frog. In addition, their front fins are on the ends of what appear to be very fat frog legs. Yet they also have a fleshy lure, suspended on sort of a pole coming out of their forehead, like the deep water angler fish. And like the angler, the frogfish uses this bait to lure lunch close to its mouth.Like the platypus, the frogfish unites very different characteristics of several creatures into one unlikely but imaginative creation. Evolutionists are unable to imagine an evolutionary history for this creature. What’s more, they cannot figure out how most of the 41 different species of frogfish they have designated might be related to one another.The frogfish is a dramatic testimony to the fact that our Magnificent Creator God has created all creatures according to His unlimited creativity, fully formed and so unique that sometimes evolutionists cannot even invent an evolutionary history for them. |
| 4/2/2024 | Nearly everyone is familiar with the way in which the whistle of a train moving toward them lowers in pitch as the train passes. The change in pitch is caused by the change in the movement of the train relative to the listener. First it is moving toward the listener, but after it passes it is moving away. This change in pitch is called Doppler shifting. Now let’s apply this principle to the bat’s echolocation system.Bats are most sensitive to certain frequencies as they listen for the echo of their high pitched squeak. If you are a bat, you listen for echoes from stationary objects around you, like trees, as well as moving objects, such as an insect that is about to become lunch. Because of the differences in the movements of these objects relative to your flight, Doppler shifting changes the pitch of returning echoes. That change could place a returning echo outside the range of frequencies to which you are most sensitive. Scientists have discovered that the bat solves this problem by calculating the expected change in frequency due to Doppler shifting and then altering his squeak so that the returning echo is at the needed frequency! How many of us could do that without a computer and other sophisticated equipment?Amazingly, our Magnificent Creator God has gone so far as to make the bat a bit of a physicist so it can make its living. What an elegant testimony to God’s wisdom and generosity! |
| 4/1/2024 | For many, the existence of so much ice on Antarctica is a grave cause for concern, as they have been told that climate change will cause a lot of this ice to melt and cause the sea level to rise. The worry is that many of the world’s great cities, and many small island nations, could disappear as the Antarctic melts. So why did God make such a troublesome continent which could precipitate the end of the world?Remember that the topography of the world is not the way it was originally created. We have explained previously that there was likely just one main pre-Flood continent, which we call Rodinia. This continent split up during the Flood. The massive deposits of fossil fuels known to exist on the southernmost continent are evidence of pre-Flood forests, probably populated with animals.Every time ice breaks off from an Antarctic glacier, the media worry about flooding – yet God has promised not to flood the world again, nor to bring seasons to an end. Despite seeming to be a homogeneous repository for the 70% of the Earth’s fresh water, locked in as ice, there are considerable variations in climate between different parts of the continent. For every place where ice is melting and breaking up, there are parts where the ice cap gets thicker.Our Magnificent Creator God has all this in balance for His own purposes, and we can be sure He will keep all His promises!!! |
| 3/31/2024 | Imagine a huge living creature covering about one square mile and made up of almost a third of a billion cells. Imagine each of those living cells being able to move about independently of the others.No, it’s not the plot of a new science fiction movie. Some scientists have suggested that ant colonies may be thought of as one large living organism. They suggest this because of the way individual members within ant colonies behave. Ant colonies have many kinds of members, each with its own specific task. The soldier ants in a colony have extra large heads and heavy-duty jaws for fighting. Other ants are concerned only about finding and returning food. Still other workers do nothing but process and store food.Within the colony another caste of ants does nothing but tend the eggs. Others prepare the food for the larvae and deliver it to other specialized ants who do nothing but feed the next generation.If this sounds complex, imagine the largest known ant colony. This Japanese ant colony has an estimated 306 million worker ants, and more than a million queens. The colony occupies 45,000 interconnected underground nests that range over about a square mile!There is obviously intelligent design and control behind ant society—intelligence not found in ants or in nature itself. This intelligence comes from outside nature. Here is yet another witness that no concern of any living thing is too small for our Magnificent Creator God’s complete attention!!! |
| 3/30/2024 | The Clark’s Nutcracker is an amazing bird. Every year it prepares for winter by hiding tiny caches of four or five whitebark pine seeds, as many as five hundred seeds per hour. Then, months later, it returns to uncover the seeds, even under heavy snow. A Clark’s Nutcracker may remember as many as ten thousand locations where it has hidden seeds—an astounding feat (especially when you consider the difficulty we humans can have remembering the location of our car keys or glasses).But even this incredible act of memory pales in comparison with God’s ability to remember our prayers. He’s able to keep track of every sincere prayer and remember and respond to them even years later. In the book of Revelation, the apostle John describes “four living creatures” and “twenty-four elders” worshiping the Lord in heaven. Each one was “holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of God’s people” (5:8).Just as incense was precious in the ancient world, our prayers are so precious to our Magnificent Creator God that He keeps them before Him continually, treasured in golden bowls! Our prayers matter to God because we matter to Him, and through His undeserved kindness to us in Jesus He offers us uninhibited access (Hebrews 4:14–16). So we can pray boldly! And know that not a word will be forgotten or misplaced because of the amazing love of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 3/29/2024 | We hear it often: Christian values are to blame for most of the problems in society. Marriage is ridiculed as “just a piece of paper”. Strongly held convictions of right and wrong are said to be to blame for arguments, fights and wars. And by all means, we must free ourselves from old fashioned attitudes about sex and marriage.Scientific support for these “liberated” values goes back to 1928 when Margaret Mead spent nine months in Samoa, then wrote a book. In it she said that Samoans live a happy, carefree life. Not only is crime virtually unheard of but even young people pass through their teen years without becoming rebellious. Mead, writing as an anthropologist, said this was because Samoans practice complete sexual freedom and avoid having strong convictions about religious and philosophical matters. For more than 50 years, Mead’s writings have been cited as scientific support for anti Christian values.But now an anthropologist who has spent many years in Samoa has come forward with a book that says things in Samoa are almost exactly the opposite of what Mead reported. The Samoans themselves asked him to correct the record because almost nothing Mead wrote about their values was accurate. Samoans are very puritanical about sex, and parents are strict with their children and competitive with each other.How foolish humans are to think they can invent better moral values that produce more happiness than those values their Magnificent Creator God gave them. And what a shame that so many have based their lives on a lie because they wanted to believe that “nature” made them. |
| 3/28/2024 | In Psalm 148:3, the sun, moon and stars are specifically encouraged, along with the rest of creation, to praise God. And truly, God, as our Creator and our Savior through Jesus Christ, is worthy of all praise. But perhaps many Christians have been a little too ready to accept this biblical language as figurative.Based on scientific principles discovered by Isaac Newton, a creationist, a new science has developed today that studies sound waves on the sun. The vibrations on the sun’s surface can be measured as the surface of the sun moves. Scientists studying these movements on the seething surface of the sun have learned with the help of computers that the sun actually rings like a bell! They have found that the sun rings over so many frequencies that there are several million resonances going on all at the same time.Truly, the sun is making a glorious sound to the Lord! Scientists have long known that the Earth does the same thing. And we have learned that the moon, too, has its own song. So next time you read in Scripture about the creation – the sun, moon and Earth – praising God, don’t dismiss the words as figurative!And once more, when the scientists finally arrived at some knowledge, they found that the Bible had already been there – for thousands of years. That alone is a great reason for us to join the sun, moon and Earth in praising our wonderful Magnificent Creator God! |
| 3/27/2024 | The number of different kinds of insects in the world seems almost endless. There are millions. The larva of many of these insects feed on trees and bushes at least until they develop into adults. One would think, then, that we wouldn’t have any trees left, since they are so unfairly outnumbered by such hordes.But we also know from experience that the creation has been designed with careful and intricate balances. In this case, the many different kinds of trees each produce poisons in order to protect themselves from insects. But there is still balance, since insects, too, need to make a living. Not every insecticide produced by a tree is poisonous to every insect. So a tree’s insecticides simply limit the number of insects that can feed on it.Some trees have pockets of gluey fluids that, when opened by insect mandibles, glue the insect’s mouth closed – a very effective way of keeping something from eating you! But most of the insecticides manufactured by trees involve subtle and complex chemistry. One poison fools the insect’s system into thinking that it is an essential amino acid – with fatal results.Where could such advanced knowledge of chemistry come from? For that matter, could such precise balance – that allows for life but keeps it in control – arise all by itself? As our knowledge of science grows, our appreciation of our Magnificent Creator God’s work of creation only increases! |
| 3/26/2024 | Australia has many animals that are not found anywhere else in the world today. One of the most unique is the wombat, which looks like a small bear with brown fur. The wombat is a burrowing animal.Like many of Australia’s animals, the wombat is a marsupial, having a pouch in which its prematurely born young complete their development. The pouches owned by most marsupials are open at the top toward the mother’s head. This works fine for the kangaroo and other marsupials – no one ever saw a kangaroo standing on its head.But the wombat is a burrowing animal. If its pouch opened toward the mother’s head, it would very quickly fill with dirt, which wouldn’t do the young wombat inside the pouch any good. So, unlike most marsupials, the wombat’s pouch opens toward the animal’s hind legs – it points backward!The marsupial’s pouch is a wondrous enough invention all by itself. But this pouch is a clear case of a specialized intelligent design for a unique situation. If the wombat’s backward pouch had been produced by mutations, how would baby wombats have gotten by during the millions of years of trial and error needed to redesign the pouch? It’s easy to see the wombat’s backward pouch as a humorous hint from our Magnificent Creator God that human theories simply cannot replace the account of creation that He has revealed to us in the Bible! |
| 3/25/2024 | Life on Earth began somewhere between 3.7 and 4.5 billion years ago, after meteorites splashed down and leached essential elements into warm little ponds, say scientists.These scientists, from McMaster University, have run probability calculations and reckon that Earth life could have begun as ponds on Earth took in long-chain compounds from meteorites to form a sort of broth from which life could emerge.This is really a new twist on the panspermia model. Panspermia is the idea that life on Earth was seeded from space, and the idea of molecules on meteorites has been a popular supposition for some time. In the current model, these scientists are not suggesting that the meteorites housed living cells, but rather that they added the right ingredient mix to the primordial soup of ancient Earth.This research acknowledges that “DNA is too complex to have been the first aspect of life to emerge. It had to start with something else, and that is RNA.”Many scientists have begun to acknowledge the impossibility of evolution on Earth. But imagining that there was some sort of seeding from space, however vague, merely pushes the problem to another realm. How would the proposed long-chain molecules have developed on these meteorites? Or did the meteorites come from another source, such as Mars?As is so often the case, research papers like these simply point out the fact that evolution has no answer to the problem of where life came from. In contrast, the Bible has a very clear answer.Genesis 1:1 – The very first verse in the very first book of the Bible – clearly reveals that in the beginning our Magnificent Creator God created the heavens and the earth!!! |
| 3/24/2024 | We are all familiar with the concept of the Ice Age – probably due to the eponymous cartoon feature film series. Evolutionists believe that this event took place about 2.6 million years ago. There is considerable evidence around the world of valleys carved by glaciation, and glacial moraines – deposits of rocky debris left at the end of glaciers. In a biblical framework, it is relatively easy to explain how the Ice Age could have happened. Instead of beginning 2.6 million years ago, we think that the Ice Age began in the immediate post-Flood period as oceans warmer than today evaporated into an atmosphere cooler than today.However, evolutionary geologists do not believe in just one Ice Age. They believe that the Earth has been through a cyclical path of continual ice ages and times of more temperate climate. Their evidence for this is found in rocks which bear scratch marks similar to those damaged during the known Ice Age. Indeed, evolutionists suppose that some of these earlier ice ages could have had ice sheets covering nearly the whole Earth.Such a scenario causes a problem. It can be seen that this sort of ice age would perhaps have caused a snowball effect. That is to say that most of the Earth could be covered by a white ice covering which would reflect most of the Sun’s heat away. In that case, it is difficult to see how the ice could ever have melted to return Earth to temperate conditions.Creationist researchers have shown that the effects interpreted as early ice ages could more easily be explained as being caused by landslides and other geological movements created by our Magnificent Creator God during the Flood!!! |
| 3/23/2024 | Some people have the green thumb in their family. Others may complain that they fail with plants because plants don’t tell them when they need care. Of course, most people can do well with family pets, who are enthusiastic about letting their needs be known.Now scientists have learned that plants do indeed cry out when they need attention. We just haven’t heard them because the sounds made by a thirsty plant are about five times higher-pitched than we can hear. But scientists with tiny, specialized microphones have heard corn plants calling for water. During their study, researchers learned that plants make a great deal of noise. Corn leaves and stalks make noises as they slide against each other during growth. We have all heard the sound of plant leaves rattling in the wind. Corn stalks also make noise as they bend in the wind.However, another sound was heard when the corn didn’t have enough water. It was a high-pitched popping noise. Plants have water tubes in them that carry water and nutrients up from the roots to the leaves. Water flows up these tubes under tension. When there is not enough water, the tension becomes too great and the tubes fracture. The popping is the sound of those tubes fracturing. The result of fractured tubes is a wilted plant. When water is restored, the tubes refill, the popping noises stop, and the plant again looks healthy.The purpose of this research was to learn when to water crops and how much water they need. Now that we have learned how plants communicate, crops can tell farmers when to water!Aren’t we blessed to have a Magnificent Creator God that took care of so much minute detail!!! |
| 3/22/2024 | Evolution says that life began with the simplest forms. It took over a billion years just to evolve algae and another billion years for living things to have more than one cell. It took half a billion years of slow development to generate today’s creatures. And evolution says that this story comes from the fossil record.What most people do not know is that there is no such story in the fossil record. And when not writing textbooks or appearing on television, evolutionary scientists will admit that their story of life cannot be found in the fossil record. According to the fossil record, every major family alive today appears suddenly and fully formed in the Cambrian rocks, which contain the first clear evidences of developed life.Charles Darwin was aware of this. Believing his own theory to be true, he called this problem a real mystery and wrote that it is probably a valid argument against evolution. Darwin wrote that he expected the problem to be solved as more fossils were discovered. But today, well over a century later, the problem remains and was written about in recent history in the Scientific American.So, Christians should not feel intimidated by the claims of scientists. We Christians have our faith by which we interpret what we see in the world. But the evolutionary story of life and the fossils is nothing more than the interpretation of the world according to evolutionary faith. We agree that far greater faith is required to believe in the revelation of Charles Darwin than to believe the revelation of our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 3/21/2024 | Some people have the green thumb in their family. Others may complain that they fail with plants because plants don’t tell them when they need care. Of course, most people can do well with family pets, who are enthusiastic about letting their needs be known.Now scientists have learned that plants do indeed cry out when they need attention. We just haven’t heard them because the sounds made by a thirsty plant are about five times higher-pitched than we can hear. But scientists with tiny, specialized microphones have heard corn plants calling for water. During their study, researchers learned that plants make a great deal of noise. Corn leaves and stalks make noises as they slide against each other during growth. We have all heard the sound of plant leaves rattling in the wind. Corn stalks also make noise as they bend in the wind.However, another sound was heard when the corn didn’t have enough water. It was a high-pitched popping noise. Plants have water tubes in them that carry water and nutrients up from the roots to the leaves. Water flows up these tubes under tension. When there is not enough water, the tension becomes too great and the tubes fracture. The popping is the sound of those tubes fracturing. The result of fractured tubes is a wilted plant. When water is restored, the tubes refill, the popping noises stop, and the plant again looks healthy.The purpose of this research was to learn when to water crops and how much water they need. Now that we have learned how plants communicate, crops can tell farmers when to water!Aren’t we blessed to have a Magnificent Creator God that took care of so much minute detail!!! |
| 3/20/2024 | A young student once asked Martin Luther what God was doing before He made the creation. Luther is said to have responded by telling the young man, “He was making switches to use on children who ask foolish questions.” Now some evolutionary physicists are asking what the universe was like before the big bang.Traditional big bang theorists have always said that there was nothing before the big bang. However, all evolutionary physicists know that the big bang theory has some major problems. For instance, in the earliest moments of the big bang, theory says that the universe would have had an infinite density and temperature. Another problem is that no known physics applies to these earliest moments of the universe. A physicist with the European Laboratory for Particle Physics proposed that the universe did exist a long time before the big bang. He theorized that it was just large enough so that it was not infinite in temperature or density and about one sixteenth of an inch across. He further theorized that the universe existed for a long time in this condition. He described the pre-big bang universe as being in the simplest state that you could imagine, a condition he called “the state of triviality”. Traditional physicists point out, however, that the theory is also filled with unprovable assumptions.The real lesson here is that neither the big bang theory nor any other theory that we can conceive can account for the universe. Only our Magnificent Creator God’s hand can explain the universe we see. |
| 3/19/2024 | Over the past several years, scientific studies of women by the Population Research Institute have shown that those who have had abortions increase their risks of infertility, breast cancer and other problems. Now, a study released by the Population Research Institute reveals a whole new category of risks associated with abortion.The researchers learned that among girls from 15 to 18, pregnant or not, for those who have had an abortion, the chance of major depression rises from 31 percent to 78 percent. The same pattern appeared for anxiety, where, for young girls who had had an abortion, the likelihood of anxiety neuroses was doubled. The pattern also showed a doubled rate of thoughts of suicide for girls who had had an abortion as compared with those who became pregnant but had not had an abortion. A similar study of women in New Zealand had the same results. Two studies by the Elliot Institute showed that women who had an abortion were three times as likely as those who had not to be plagued with anxiety and to abuse drugs.These studies show scientifically that it is time to stop accepting the mental health of the mother as justification for abortion. Researchers find that abortion causes mental health problems; it does not prevent them. More than this, of course, abortion is contrary to our Magnificent Creator God’s will because it takes a life. |
| 3/18/2024 | There is nothing our Creator God does that is not intended to bring us closer to Him. Why? Because His purpose in making humans was to make someone to love. We exist because He wanted to love us and be loved by us. There is nothing visible or invisible that is not meant to be of service to us. Consider the invisible angels who protect us. They rejoice when even one person turns to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.Consider the heavens above our heads. There, God placed billions of stars – some much larger than our sun. There are giant pinwheel galaxies with millions of huge stars. Countless billions of stars churn out more energy every second than we can ever hope to measure. What a lavish and beautiful timepiece to tell us when it is time to plant and time to harvest! God has given us more than the necessities of life. He has also hidden medicines within the bark of trees and the sweet-scented flower. He has filled that creation with splendor and beauty.However, I cannot neglect to mention His greatest and most generous gift. When we sought our will instead of His, we withdrew our love from Him. His response was to send His only Son, Jesus Christ, to suffer our punishment for sin on the cross. And He rose from the dead on the third day so that we could have new life with our Creator again. Oh, that our thanksgiving to our Magnificent Creator God could be as unlimited as His generosity! |
| 3/17/2024 | The yellow-and-black striped archer fish shops among the insects that land on branches overhanging his pond in the peaceful waters of the East Indies. Sometimes he will wait under a branch until something that would make a good lunch lands on it.When the archer fish finds a tasty-looking insect, he shoots an accurately aimed stream of water at his prey, knocking the insect into the water. Before the insect has a chance to recover, the archer fish has eaten him and is looking for dessert.The archer fish has a deep groove in his mouth. When he places his tongue against this groove, he ends up with a blow tube that is about 1/16-inch in diameter. Compressing his gills forces pressurized water through the blow pipe. The rounded tip of the archer fish’s tongue acts as a valve so the fish can shoot a few small bursts or one long stream of water at his prey. The archer fish seldom misses if his prey is within four feet.This simple but elegant arrangement is testimony to a wise and skillful Creator. Neither mindless chance evolution nor any fish could be smart enough to design this system. Nor could any fish redesign his normal mouth tissues into this unique tool. Here we see that our Magnificent Creator God even cares about providing the needs of a fish! We know that He cares even more about our lives! In fact, He has said so! |
| 3/16/2024 | Most have heard of the little “cleaner fish” or wrasse that clean the teeth of larger fishes. New research on the behavior of these fishes shows that they are not always honest-business fish. Other fish, including those who might ordinarily consider a meal of “cleaner fish”, actually stand in line for their services. That’s because they need to have parasites and diseased tissue removed. They also know that the little “cleaner fish” offer massages.It’s amazing enough that even potential predators will become clients for a good cleaning and massage. Researchers from the University of Cambridge in England observed 28 cleaning stations and discovered some unexpected behavior. Now and again, as a “cleaner fish” nibbles parasites off a customer, it might also bite out a chunk of healthy flesh. Wisely, they avoid this behavior when cleaning predators that could bite them back. Researchers also observed that potential customers were aware of this risk and closely watched how the current customer was being treated. They were more likely to seek services from a wrasse that didn’t nip any of the customers ahead of them. Of course, the wrasses were also aware of this and were observed to offer those customers they were likely to nip four-star treatment, including a massage.Scripture teaches that man’s sin infected the whole creation. Thankfully, our Magnificent Creator God came to bring us forgiveness. |
| 3/15/2024 | If you enjoy keeping tropical fish, the Mantis shrimp is one creature you may not want to keep in your aquarium. While this creature is related to common shrimp, it has a very unusual and specialized feature.In the wild, if the Mantis shrimp finds a tasty snail, it cocks its spring-loaded forearm and shatters the snail’s shell. The forearm has moved through the water at 50 miles per hour – so fast that it causes cavitation as well as heat and a flash of light as the bubbles collapse. And, yes, the Mantis shrimp can break the glass walls of an aquarium! To do this, the shrimp must generate over two-hundred thousand watts of power per pound of muscle, something no other muscle can do. The shrimp accomplishes this seemingly impossible task by storing the energy generated by the muscles. The shrimp first locks the arm and then contracts its muscles. The energy stored in this way would damage the arm if it weren’t for a very clever spring design. This saddle-shaped spring can accumulate enormous quantities of energy without breaking as it compresses. When the shrimp is ready to strike, it simply releases the spring.The Mantis shrimp’s forearm is only an effective working unit when all of its specialized parts are working together. It is difficult to imagine how or why our Magnificent Creator God chose to include this in His Master Plan but He did and it definitely serves a purpose – we just may not know why until we’re in Heaven. |
| 3/14/2024 | Those who fear global warming blame any climate changes upon man’s activity, including the raising of cattle for food. The digestive system of all ruminants, including cows, produce methane gas as part of the digestive process. Methane is considered one of the greenhouse gases that change the Earth’s climate. Some have even suggested ways of limiting the methane produced by cows.Methane is produced in a chemical reaction that scientists have always believed must take place in the absence of oxygen. That’s why they were surprised to find living plants making methane. It should be added that the researchers took great pains to ensure that the methane they were measuring was produced by the plants and trees and not by microbes in the soil. While they are unsure of the chemistry involved, they did find that more methane was produced with higher atmospheric temperatures. This finding explains large methane plumes that have been identified over tropical forests. Based on their findings, they estimate that 20 percent of all atmospheric methane comes from plants and trees. That’s about 150 million metric tons a year!Since God has created the Earth for life, He has built balances into it that can deal with the by-products of life, including methane. We can trust our Magnificent Creator God’s promises that man will be here on Earth, planting and reaping, until its history ends. |
| 3/13/2024 | Could a plant devise a special growth for itself so that it becomes inviting to its only pollinator? If evolution were true, how could such a plant survive until it could learn enough about its pollinator, and about genetics, to evolve a special growth just for that pollinator.Those sound like silly questions, but if evolution is true, they must be answered, and answered scientifically. A South African plant called the “Rat’s Tail” grows a seemingly purposeless spear that extends near its flowers. Theorizing that the spear might be a bird-perch for a pollinator, scientists closely watched some of the plants in the wild. They learned that the only bird that seems interested in pollinating the plant is a bird called the “Malachite Sunbird”. The scientists then removed the spikes from some of the plants. The result was that male sunbirds were far less likely to visit and pollinate those plants. As a result, perchless-plants only produced half as many seeds as plants with perches. Researchers pointed out that this arrangement makes sense because male sunbirds have long tails that can be damaged by ground landings.However, if we conclude that the Rat’s Tails were created for the sunbirds, and the sunbirds for the Rat’s Tails, we don’t have to find natural explanations for such silly questions. This is simply another of our Magnificent Creator God’s clever designs. |
| 3/12/2024 | Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Matthew 6:26Jesus urged the disciples to “Behold the fowls or the birds of the air…” In a world fraught by worry and fear, His words of advice are good for today. Do you ever consider the sparrows that flit overhead, or the tiny warblers that migrate thousands of miles year after year with a built-in sense of radar?Keith Monroe wrote the following about our feathered friends, and his words bear repeating. He begins by asking the question, “Ever wonder about the mysteries of birds? Take an idle hour and stroll into a public library, browsing through some books on the subject. You will be amazed by these strange creatures.“Long engagements before marriage are common in birdland. English robins pair up in January, but do not mate or start housekeeping until spring. Jackdaws and wild geese get engaged the spring after they are born, although neither species become sexually mature until a year later. Most birds are faithful to their mates for life. Some are as thoughtful as human husbands about saying it with flowers. Starlings carry petals and buds to the female in the nest. A herring gull will pluck a sea pink and lay it solemnly before his betrothed. But the little nuthatch may be the courtliest swain of all birds. He selects choice sunflower seeds and proffers them to his intended. If she scorns him, he becomes even more gallant; he shucks each seed before presentation.“Pliny, the Roman naturalist, formed an expert opinion that swallows turn into frogs. Each year, he noticed, there came a morning when all swallows were gone. Everybody knew that birds do not fly in the dark, so they must become frogs. Not until the 18th Century did ornithologists begin to realize that birds do fly at night, by thousands. Ever since, bird experts have been trying to fathom the avian ‘homing instinct’ and ability to navigate to destinations chosen by previous generations.“Banded Manx shearwaters have been brought in covered boxes to Boston, then released at separate points. Each flew alone over trackless seas for more than 3,000 miles, finding its way home to its little burrow in cliffs along the west coast of Wales. Could any human do as well without maps and instruments?“What inner compass guides the arctic tern each spring as it travels 11,000 miles to near the South Pole to its nesting grounds in Antarctica? How do storks from Copenhagen find their way across the Mediterranean and down the length of Africa to their favorite swamps in Bechuanaland?“Some experts think that birds keep checking their position by the sun, which would give them the equivalent of an inborn sextant and clock for dead reckoning. But what about cloudy days? The answer is that birds’ eyes are so sensitive to ultraviolet rays that they know exactly where the sun is behind the darkest clouds.“On the other hand, tiny warblers migrate long distances at night. If blown off course they adjust as accurately as day-flying birds do. Even those that are born in cages and spend their lives without ever seeing the sky can set off from Germany all alone, travel southeast across the Balkans, then turn due South to reach their winter home in central Africa.”Monroe concludes, “I do not want to disparage mankind, but are we not rather dumb about navigation compared to our feathered friends?” “Consider the birds,” said Jesus. Yes, look at the birds. If our Magnificent Creator God takes care of them, you can trust Him to take care of you. |
| 3/11/2024 | Chickens aren’t the brightest creatures in the animal world, but the mother hen knows to protect her eggs and keep them warm. Many species of snakes also care for their young. Amazingly, scientists have learnt that even some plants have been designed with “motherly” instincts.The plantain is a common North American weed, and when it blooms, the warmer it keeps its developing seeds, the more seeds its offspring will produce. Researchers have found that cooler air temperatures cause the mother plant to produce a darker bloom cluster. The darker color absorbs more radiant energy from the sun, and this gives its offspring a boost in life even before they sprout. The shooter plant, as it is commonly called in America’s southeast, does something similar. It blooms for several months over the southern summer. The leaf-like bracts that sheathe each flower-cluster have a brown pigment. Researchers observed the plants over several months and found that the bracts that formed in cooler April were darker than the bracts that formed in warmer June. The increased levels of brown pigment in April enabled the bracts to absorb more infrared light that helps to warm the flowers.Just where did those plants learn the necessary physics, not to mention the genetics, to produce these motherly provisions? Of course, the answer is our Magnificent Creator God’s Intelligent Design from the very start. |
| 3/10/2024 | “And the LORD God formed man out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”It’s behind your refrigerator and under your bed. It’s part of the air you breathe. While dust is common, it’s not commonplace at all.Much of the dust in our everyday lives is nothing more than tiny particles of skin, clothing, carpeting – just pieces of everyday life floating in the air. Studies of dust particles reveal that most dust is soil.However, a second common dust – even a thousand miles from the sea – is salt, driven into the wind by the waves. This salt helps form the clouds that bring us rain.The next most common forms of natural dust are volcanic eruptions and forest fires. Transatlantic winds pick up the dust of the Sahara and sweep it across the ocean where enough of it lands in Miami to sometimes give the rain a light pink color.Not only does your home have dust from all over the world, there’s probably also some from outer space. Ten thousand tons of disintegrating meteorites and comets rain down on the Earth every year. You can even identify some of this dust by running a magnet through the dust in a rain gutter. Most of the magnetic particles that stick to the magnet are probably from space. In addition, some dust is alive, made up of pollen, fungus spores and even dormant bacteria, hoping to land on a good place to grow.Dust reminds us that the world is smaller than we think and that it won’t last forever. Are you ready for the next world? All your preparations have been made by Jesus Christ. Find out in the Bible what our Magnificent Creator God has done for you today. |
| 3/9/2024 | Green plants are green, mostly because of a green pigment called chlorophyll. Many of us learned in high school that this green pigment is what causes photosynthesis.Photosynthesis is that key process by which a plant can manufacture useful high energy molecules such as sugars. In the photosynthetic process, the plant absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and water transpiring from its roots to create sugar molecules. The byproduct, oxygen, is released into the atmosphere. At first sight, this seems pretty straightforward. But there is, of course, a lot more to it. The process becomes especially difficult to understand if one wants to assume that this is a process which came into existence by evolution.Our first problem is that the reaction requires an input of energy – chemists call this an endothermic reaction. Such reactions are not unusual, though reactions requiring the input of light energy are less common than those inputting heat energy. However, if you fill a jar with water and carbon dioxide, and shine a light into it, you will not make sugar molecules.Therefore, chlorophyll is not just a catalyst for the reaction – it is an essential intermediary without which the reaction cannot happen.In fact, a whole book can be written on the complexity of this whole process, and the inter-dependability of every step. And then we go further to see how animals get their energy from plants, so every energy chain comes back to photosynthesis. It is a process that looks like it was designed by God for a purpose – which is exactly what the Bible says our Magnificent Creator God did!!! |
| 3/8/2024 | Can you imagine a plant that moves so fast that science didn’t know what it was doing until recently? The plant is a forest wild flower found in North America and called the Bunchberry dogwood.A few botanists had noted a strange “poof” associated with the plant, but no one knew what was going on. Researchers at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, were studying the plant when they experienced the “poof.” Wanting to track down what the plant was doing, they got a high-speed video camera that can shoot 1,000 frames per second. Amazingly, that camera was too slow to clearly catch what the plant was doing. So they got a higher-speed camera that could shoot 10,000 frames per second.When they reviewed the video, they discovered that the flower was releasing pollen at an amazing speed. They calculated that the gravitational force on the pollen as it is released is 800 times the force astronauts endure when they blast into space. This wonder is accomplished by the flowers’ very elastic petals which are part of a design that looks like a trebuchet – a medieval catapult.The amazing wonders of our Magnificent Creator God’s creation should lead us to unceasingly praise Him, something which belief in evolution does not allow. Even if you try to add God to evolution, chance and natural forces still get the credit. |
| 3/7/2024 | Ask any evolutionist, and he will tell you that the Venus Flower Basket is one of the least-evolved animals. This animal is actually a sponge that is made up of a colony of creatures, and it does some amazing things.The Venus Flower Basket builds a basket-like skeleton made up of glass-like silica covered only by a thin layer of cells. The intricate internal structure of this skeleton is reinforced to provide the greatest strength using the least amount of material. The resulting skeleton turns out to be a fiber optic network whose sophistication has been compared to modern fiber optics used for telecommunications networks.Symbiotic luminescent microorganisms make a home inside the base of the sponge, sending their light throughout the Flower Basket’s fiber optic skeleton. The Flower Basket traps shrimp inside this skeleton, where they spend their entire lives. The food they drop feeds those luminescent microorganisms at the bottom of the basket. The purpose of the light pulses is to attract prey to feed the shrimp, who, in turn, feed the source of the light pulses! All of this is even more impressive, given the fact that the Flower Basket has no nervous system whatsoever.That this beautiful creature with no nervous system is designed and works in such an intricate manner is a powerful testimony to our Magnificent Creator God, the only One Who could design this. |
| 3/6/2024 | It was first discovered in 1855, but many scientists debated its existence for another 50 years. Once its existence was finally proven to everyone’s satisfaction, it was another 50 years before science had any tools to begin studying it. Finally, in the late 1980s, scientists began to learn a little about the secrets of one of the tiniest, yet most amazing structures in the body.At the back of the eye, between the deepest layer of the retina and the cells beneath it, lies a tiny moat made up of about 10 drops of a mysterious fluid. The entire moat is thinner than a sheet of cellophane.It seems that the clear fluid in the moat serves the surrounding light-sensing tissues of the eye in place of blood, bringing in nutrients and carrying away waste. It also transports light-sensitive chemicals needed by the light-detecting cells in the eye. In addition, it seems to glue the retina in place. More than that, the moat is rich in a growth factor. This fact makes scientists believe that the gel may also be important to repairing injuries to the retina, keeping the cells of the retina young and active, as well as helping in the growth of new cells. As one researcher said, the more they study this tiny structure, the more unexpected abilities they find – something like a bottomless suitcase.Charles Darwin, who didn’t even know about the moat, was right when he said that it was impossible to believe that natural selection could have produced the eye.We should always give our Magnificent Creator God credit when credit is due!!! |
| 3/5/2024 | Homing pigeons are valued because of their highly developed sense of direction, and this includes the ability to read the Earth’s magnetic field. Some other birds, turtles and even a few salamanders have also shown this same ability. However, bees, ants or people are not born with this ability.Until now, those animals classified as “lower animals” on the evolutionary scale were not expected to have such navigation abilities. However, this ability has now been confirmed in – of all things – the Caribbean spiny lobster. Researchers collected more than 100 lobsters from various locations; each lobster was tagged with a number indicating the exact location of their discovery. They were then placed in closed containers and boated about in circuitous routes for an hour so that they would not remember the direction of home. To further confuse the lobsters, some of the containers contained magnets. Each lobster was then fitted with a removable hood so that they were effectively blindfolded. They were then placed in a large tank to see which direction they would naturally seek. Typically, the lobsters would begin trying to walk home, aiming to within three compass degrees of where they were captured.Scientists were surprised that a so-called “lower invertebrate” has a navigation system as sophisticated as a homing pigeon. But they shouldn’t be surprised. The same wise Magnificent Creator God made both creatures. |
| 3/4/2024 | Ethicists who believe in evolution are trying to figure out an evolutionary explanation for why people universally have a sense of right and wrong. This line of study is so new that it doesn’t yet have a name, although some have suggested “neuroethics” or “moral neuroscience”.Much of this study began by looking at the theories of philosophers John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant. Mill taught that moral good is defined by those actions that do the most good for the most people, even if some individuals must suffer in the process. Kant said that moral good could be defined by pure reason. Then they add in philosopher David Hume, who taught that people consider an action to be good if it makes them feel good.However, researchers in this field noted that even monkeys, who don’t read philosophy, have a sense of fair play. In one experiment, monkeys who had been accepting cucumbers as a reward began rejecting the cucumbers after they saw other monkeys getting much tastier grapes. At this point in this new “science”, some researchers have concluded that right and wrong are nothing more than the instinctive firing of brain neurons.Scripture, on the other hand, says that our Magnificent Creator God has written His law on our hearts. This is a much more logical explanation of Man’s universal sense of right and wrong. |
| 3/3/2024 | Scientists and manufacturers are studying a new technique that could lead to more durable fibers. This technique manufactures liquid crystals to produce stronger, longer-lasting fibers. The process uses sulfuric acid, temperatures well above the boiling point of water and a high-pressure atmosphere.Meanwhile, another team of researchers finally discovered how orb weaving spiders and silkworms manufacture their silk. Scientists had theorized that silk from spiders and silkworms was stronger by weight than steel because proteins in the silk cross-linked with each other. But after watching silk production and drying in careful lighting under magnification, astonished scientists actually saw what happens.Silk is produced in the silk gland as a thin, watery liquid. Once the protein-rich liquid is released from the gland, the liquid begins to concentrate because of evaporation. As the liquid concentrates, it changes into a liquid crystal state. Scientists have been trying to create fibers in the lab from liquid crystals. They would love to know how the spider does it, using only water at normal temperatures and pressures.This is another example of how God has already solved an engineering problem that we were trying to solve. It is especially interesting that He allowed scientists to discover His solution at the same time that others were trying to solve the problem. This allows us to reemphasize that our world is the work of our Magnificent Creator God and not mindless, natural accidents. |
| 3/2/2024 | Consider the most amazing part of your body we call the heart and how marvelous it is, something unduplicated by science and technology. Your heart is a muscle about the size of your fist. When you were born, your heart weighed less than one ounce, and if you are an adult male your heart weighs about 11 ounces; 9 ounces if you are a female. That means your life is dependent upon a muscle that weighs less than a pound, or 400 grams.It’s the most critical part of your body, too, one which works day and night, never takes vacations, seldom gets rest, and never goes to sleep. There are four chambers in your heart with valves between them, and these cooperate in pumping blood through a vast network of veins, arteries, and capillaries, bringing oxygen and nourishment to your body.To a far greater degree than we acknowledge or even ponder, we are dependent on this muscle’s silent performance, because if it quits, you do, as well – and very quickly, too. You can get along quite well with just one eye, or still function with the loss of hearing in one ear. Though it’s sad, you can survive with the loss of an arm or leg. But when your heart becomes diseased, unless surgery can correct the situation, you are in grave trouble.Based on a heartbeat of 70 times a minute, your heart beats 4200 times an hour, 100,800 times every 24 hours, and over 36 million times a year. By the time you reach 70 years of age, your heart has beaten over 2.5 trillion times.Connected to your heart is a vast network of veins and arteries–a kind of built-in transportation system for your blood–which, if connected end to end, would stretch between 60,000 and 100,000 miles, or reach up to four times around the world at the equator. The volume of blood pumped by your heart in a year is about 650,000 gallons or 2,460,250 liters. That’s enough to fill more than 81 standard railroad tank cars. Your beating heart generates enough energy in a twelve-hour period to lift one of those tank cars weighing 65 tons, a foot off the ground.Some 3000 years ago the Psalmist said, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well” (Psalms 139:14). And that was long before the days of Dr. Christiaan Barnard of South Africa, who performed the first heart transplant, or before Dr. Tom Fogarty invented the little plastic balloon which smoothes out clogged arteries or doctors knew how to insert little stainless-steel stents which pop against weakened arteries and keep them open, thus ensuring the flow of blood to your heart.Your heart is an awesome marvel which is the key to keeping you alive and healthy. When you take care of it, it takes good care of you, but when you abuse it and fail to nourish it, like anything mechanical it will wear out.We can thank our Magnificent Creator God for this tiny muscle that works powerfully and tirelessly to keep us alive!!! |
| 3/1/2024 | The scientific establishment is firmly convinced that Man evolved from the higher apes millions of years ago. For this reason, rhesus monkeys have long been used not only for pharmaceutical trials but in psychological tests to determine how Man’s intelligence evolved.Researchers at Duke University, North Carolina, wanted to know if rhesus monkeys could count, and they set up an experiment to find out. Using two television screens, one showed two monkeys vocalizing and the other showed three. However, the audio of each television could be controlled so that in some trials two monkeys could be seen but three voices heard and vice versa. Each one of the 20 test monkeys spent more time watching the matching number of monkeys and voices. The researchers concluded that the rhesus monkeys could tell the difference between the numbers two and three.They also pointed out that that the monkeys can count small numbers because this ability relates to their social worlds. Yes, and by the same token, some insects can count to hundreds, but none of this means that Man is related to insects or monkeys! Scripture carefully distinguishes between Man and animals. Our Magnificent Creator God placed Man over the animals and gave him an eternal soul that is saved by His Son, Jesus Christ. |
| 2/29/2024 | For many, the existence of so much ice on Antarctica is a grave cause for concern, as they have been told that climate change will cause a lot of this ice to melt and cause the sea level to rise. The worry is that many of the world’s great cities, and many small island nations, could disappear as the Antarctic melts. So why did God make such a troublesome continent which could precipitate the end of the world?Remember that the topography of the world is not the way it was originally created. We have explained previously that there was likely just one main pre-Flood continent, which we call Rodinia. This continent split up during the Flood. The massive deposits of fossil fuels known to exist on the southernmost continent are evidence of pre-Flood forests, probably populated with animals.Every time ice breaks off from an Antarctic glacier, the media worry about flooding – yet God has promised not to flood the world again, nor to bring seasons to an end. Despite seeming to be a homogeneous repository for the 70% of the Earth’s fresh water, locked in as ice, there are considerable variations in climate between different parts of the continent. For every place where ice is melting and breaking up, there are parts where the ice cap gets thicker.Our Magnificent Creator God has all this in balance for His own purposes, and we can be sure He will keep all His promises!!! |
| 2/28/2024 | The last creature a rattlesnake wants to see is the California ground squirrel.When an adult ground squirrel finds a rattlesnake, it begins to taunt the snake. The squirrel dashes into striking range, whips its tail about, bites the snake’s tail and kicks sand on it. While a rattlesnake can strike with lightning speed, the little ground squirrel is even faster and well able to dart out of the way. Even if it was bitten, the venom wouldn’t kill it since these squirrels have proteins in their blood that detoxify the poison. Frustrated snakes have been known to simply retreat when faced with this treatment.Researchers have learned that the squirrels’ bag of tricks is even deeper. Rattlesnakes can see heat as infrared light. When the ground squirrel is taunting the rattlesnake, it sends additional blood to its tail, causing it to heat up, producing a very obvious infrared image for the snake, further confusing it. Interestingly enough, when the ground squirrel taunts a gopher snake, which cannot detect the infrared, it does not heat its tail.How does the squirrel know that the rattlesnake can be confused with an infrared show while the gopher snake cannot? The only explanation is that our Magnificent Creator God, Who made them both and calls us to saving faith in His Son, Jesus Christ, designed the ground squirrels’ unique display. |
| 2/27/2024 | If it weren’t for mushrooms, there would be so many un-decayed dead trees that there would be no room on Earth for anything else to grow. But mushrooms don’t just recycle dead trees. They help make the trees grow in the first place.The mushrooms that we see are merely the part of the fungus that produces the fruit. Most of the mushroom is unseen. If you were to peel back the bark of a decaying tree, you’ll see white tissue called mycelia. That is the main part of the mushroom plant. Many species of mushrooms combine efforts to help trees grow. Their mycelium forms a sheath around tree roots that help to deliver water and nutrients. In return, they get excess sugar produced by the tree. This relationship is so close that both the fungi and the tree depend upon each other. For example, researchers estimate that the Douglas Fir has about 1,000 species of fungus working together for its support. The fungi will even form underground mycelial networks to move nutrients between different kinds of tree.Clearly, our Magnificent Creator God has designed a finely balanced partnership between trees and fungi for their mutual survival. In the Old Testament, God punished His people through the loss of their planted crops. Is it just possible He tipped the fine balance of other such partnerships to do His bidding? |
| 2/26/2024 | Humpbacks are among the largest whales in the world. A typical humpback weighs about 40 tons and begins its breach deep down in the ocean. Imagine the acceleration required to get this enormous animal out of the water and into the air. The whale leaves the water at an angle of 30° and a speed of 18 mph. Clearly, this monster uses a lot of energy in breaching, yet it is not unknown for the whale to repeat the exercise – the observed record being 130 leaps in 90 minutes!Why does it go to all this trouble? No one really knows. As with all such obscure phenomena, there are those who suggest that the whales are trying to “attract the girls”! Others suggest that the big splash achieved on re-entry rips some of the barnacles off the whale’s surface. There may be truth in either of these suggestions. But Wilson says that he cannot overlook the probability that the whale breaches simply because it gives God pleasure! He is a Magnificent Creator God, and the world He made is not for utility only, but also for beauty!!! |
| 2/25/2024 | There are a number of blurry, indistinct, cloudy-looking objects in the night sky which are not pinpoints of light as the stars are. One hundred ten of these are the so-called Messier objects, which were cataloged by one Charles Messier – a French astronomer who lived from 1730 through 1817. These are a mixture of objects. Some of them we would now call nebulae – quite literally, nebulous clouds of interstellar dust and gas. Examples of these are M8 – the Lagoon Nebula in the constellation of Sagittarius, and M42 – the famous Orion Nebula. Others are star clusters, such as The Pleiades, in Taurus – an object mentioned in the Bible, which is cataloged as M45. Still others are actually other galaxies, such as M104, the Sombrero Galaxy, or M31 – the Andromeda Galaxy.Why did Messier catalog such a wide variety of different objects without commenting on their differentiation? The answer is that he wasn’t actually interested in those objects. He cataloged them, rather, as a police officer catalogs data from a possible suspect in order to eliminate them from the inquiry. Messier was interested in comets – which also, from a distance, look like blurry objects. The difference is that comets, being Solar System objects, move from night to night, whereas his cataloged objects appear fixed relative to the stars.The Hebrew word for star includes what we call stars today and other objects, such as Messier’s objects. All were made by our Magnificent Creator God and declare His glory!!! |
| 2/24/2024 | Over 2,000 years ago, Aristotle wrote about red snow. Today, red, orange and even green snow has been found on every continent. It is typically found in deep mountain snows in the late spring. The snow color is caused by any of 350 species of strange snow algae.The pigments inside the resting algae cysts produce the colors. Even while resting in the nutrient-poor, highly acidic snow the cysts are photosynthesizing. In its cyst form the algae can live even in temperatures of -94°F. As the snow melts in the late mountain spring, the cysts burst open. A single cell with two whip-like tails emerges. It then begins to swim upward, against the draining water from the snow above. At this time of the year, the snow melt water can reach the same acidity as a peat bog, which causes death to most microbes. Those that manage to swim through the snow mate and then return to the cyst stage. These cysts then settle to the ground as the snow melts to remain inactive until the next spring.Researchers have found that the algae have unique fatty acids that enable them to remain flexible in the cold environment in which they spend their entire active lives.Snow algae have been uniquely designed by our Magnificent Creator God to make a living in some of the lowest temperatures on Earth. If our Creator can find a way to enable snow algae to flourish in these conditions, He can find a way to help us out of the most impossible circumstances!!! |
| 2/23/2024 | The last few years have seen a good deal of excitement among astronomers over the possibility of discovering planets orbiting distant stars. Astronomers are looking at stars that are surrounded by disks of dust and debris.The idea is that planets form over millions of years from the dust and rock that orbits a star. This was supposedly how the Earth formed billions of years ago. Hundreds of such stars have so far been identified. Often, these debris fields extend further from the star they orbit than, say, Pluto is from our sun. The question is, are the discovery of planets and debris around other stars proof of evolution’s story of the formation of the Earth?Scientists believe that it takes two or three million years for planets to form out of the orbiting debris. However, they also recognize that it only takes a few thousand years before a star’s gravity draws the dust into itself, or the pressure of its radiation forces the dust away from itself. This leaves the hundreds of stars with dusty debris fields a mystery. Astronomers believe that all these stars still have their dust after millions or billions of years because they are getting fresh dust from somewhere else, but scientists don’t know where.Perhaps a better explanation is that these stars are only about 6,000 years old and that they were spoken into existence by our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 2/22/2024 | The long, cold winters of Scandinavia not only freeze the lakes, but pile so much snow on the lake ice that no light can penetrate to the cold, unfrozen water beneath. This means that the creatures below the ice can use up all the oxygen in the lake water.As a result of the lack of oxygen, lactic acid builds up in the bodies of these creatures as they metabolize sugar to get energy. However, turtles can stand levels of lactic acid in their systems that would kill you or me, and they lower their heartbeat to 10 percent of normal. The Crucian carp, similar to a goldfish, takes a unique approach to this lack of oxygen. As the oxygen disappears, the carp slows its heartbeat. The fish then changes its entire metabolic chemistry to a process that can get energy from sugar without oxygen. This oxygen-free metabolism turns the lactic acid into ethanol, which the fish releases through its gills. The members of this carp family are the only vertebrates that can continue normal life without oxygen.That our Magnificent Creator God’s wonders seem without number and often seem impossible tells us of God’s unlimited creativity and His ability to do anything. His plan of salvation in which His Son, Jesus Christ, carried our sin on the cross makes us thankful for His creativity and wisdom. |
| 2/21/2024 | A real monster prowls the ocean floor from the Aleutian Islands to Southern California. It is a terror to even relatively large bottom dwellers. It eats many things, including hermit crabs, clams, sea cucumbers, sea urchins and even abalone. This monster goes by the seemingly innocent name of the Sunflower Star.The Sunflower Star begins life as a microscopic larva, much like other sea stars. But as it grows, it surpasses anything that other sea stars can achieve. Its five arms become more arms as it grows until it finally has 24 arms. By this time it can be 39 inches across. But its size does not limit its speed. It uses 15,000 tube feet to move over 5 feet per minute. This is possible because, like other sea stars, the Sunflower Star’s skeleton is made up of just a few pieces of skeletal mesh, making it more flexible. It is such a terror to other creatures that when they sense its approach they flee at surprising speed. Even the Northern Abalone, which normally moves sluggishly, flees in the hope that the Sunflower Star will not capture it.Just another wonder by our Magnificent Creator God who made a place in His Master Plan for every creation He brought into this world. |
| 2/20/2024 | What did God have in mind when He created the human male? The world around us offers many images of what it means to be a “real man.” The world offers us the breadwinner, the tough-guy and the workaholic’s unending push for success. Also, it’s becoming increasingly universal that it is the woman who holds the family together. We can be sure that none of these images capture what God had in mind.If we want to learn some practical lessons about what God intended a man to be, we need to begin with God’s original creation of the first man. The first job given to Adam, the first man, was an intellectual task – identifying and naming the animals.Jesus Christ taught us to call God “our Father.” However, we shouldn’t make the mistake of comparing Him to our imperfect human fathers. Human fathers need to learn from God. What kind of father is He? He’s tough. However, toughness does not mean hurling thunderbolts. True toughness is best shown when love persists despite rejection and disobedience. God never tired of patiently seeking Saul of Tarsus, His sworn enemy.However, while He is loving, God is not a wimp. He has established absolutes that we can depend on. He always keeps His Word. We can be thankful for that because when we look at ourselves we know that we have not been the men or women He intended us to be. His Word of grace in the forgiveness of sins through Jesus Christ assures all who cling to Christ that the perfect and almighty Magnificent Creator God is truly our Father! |
| 2/19/2024 | Evolutionary scientists studying the workings of the human brain are trying to find out what the human “mind” is. The problem is that everyone, including scientists, knows that human beings are conscious people with minds. Yet, strict, materialistic science says that there is no scientific evidence for the mind.Research with people who had brain injuries indicates that the brain and the mind are not the same things. The reality of the human mind seems to have no material basis. This presents a difficult problem for evolutionary scientists who have assumed that evolution, with its materialistic view of reality, is correct. According to the evolutionary view of the world, if something is not measurable by science, that thing is not real. Evolution denies that humans have any nonmaterial part.Some evolutionists have tried to resolve this problem by saying that human beings are not really conscious. They say that we don’t really have minds. We only think we do. It’s a trick played on us by our nervous systems. Entire books have been devoted to this subject. However, this approach creates a new problem. If we really don’t have minds, we cannot trust the truth of anything we might think. We can’t even trust the thought that we don’t have minds.The debate among these strict materialist scientists actually amounts to an admission that there is a greater, nonmaterial reality that cannot be measured by science. Yes, the existence of the immaterial, but undeniably real, human mind (should I say “soul”?) also testifies to our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 2/18/2024 | Why did the Creator bring together so many precise specifications and high intelligence in the honeybee? To glorify Himself and because bees are crucial to the reproductive cycles of so many plants as well as the food chain.The amazing structure of the honeycomb has amazed scientists for thousands of years. As early as the third century AD, the astronomer Pappus of Alexandria offered an explanation for the six-sided or hexagonal shape of the honeycomb. He pointed out that while the triangle, square and hexagon could all be candidates for the shape of the comb, one of these shapes holds more than the others. The most efficient shape for storing the most honey while wasting the least space is the hexagon.There are many variations of the hexagon that are available to the bee. However, the honeybee is always very precise in constructing honeycomb hexagons, with an obtuse angle of 109°23´ and an acute angle of 70°23´. These angles produce the most usable space for the least amount of building material. Humans are unable to use such precision in their designs without sophisticated equipment.Each honeybee is a tiny but powerful computer that could only have been designed and built by an intelligent Creator. Bees and what they do are of central importance to much of the rest of creation. No wonder our Magnificent Creator God has given them so much: the complex structure of their society, their intelligence and industriousness! |
| 2/17/2024 | Deserts are inhospitable places with little rain—blazingly hot by day and chillingly cold by night. Few plants can survive, but the rock morning glory can. It has large underground tubers resembling sweet potatoes that store water whenever it rains. In times of drought, it’s sustained by the water stored in its twenty or so underground reserves.Jeremiah 17:8 says of those who put their confidence in our Magnificent Creator God: “They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit”. |
| 2/16/2024 | All cats seem to consume a very high fat meat diet. Unlike other carnivores, cats cannot manufacture their own taurine, so their diet is almost perfectly carnivorous, with very little in the way of plant material.There are many cases where cats of similar size can hybridize. Tigons and ligers are well-known hybrids. They are both hybrids of tigers and lions. Ligers have a lion father and a tiger mother, while tigons are the other way around. Other inter-feline hybrids are possible, such as the blynx – a hybrid of lynx and bobcat. This seems to indicate that all cats are part of the same baramin (created kind).The Ark would not, therefore, have housed two lions, two tigers, two pumas, etc. There would have been two cats. These would have been something like the saber-toothed cats – possibly a smilodon. All the modern species of cat would have developed from these. This, of course, is not evolution, which requires new genetic information to be made, whereas the speciation of cats involves variation of genetic information already existing.Our Magnificent Creator God made cats. They are such a clearly defined group that it is as if God were making a textbook in the animal kingdom to explain how animals got to be as they are! |
| 2/15/2024 | Scientists have known for some time that hummingbirds prefer bright-colored flowers. On the other hand, all of us know that white is most easily seen at night. That means that moths that pollinate flowers will more easily find white flowers. The question is: What is a flower to do when it is pollinated by hummingbirds during part of its flowering season and by night-flying moths later in its flowering season?That’s the problem faced by a flowering plant called the gilia. Hummingbirds arrive to pollinate the flowers in mid-July. However, they leave in late August as the weather cools. Also in late August, the night-flying hawk moth arrives to begin pollinating the flower. This arrangement continues until late September. To attract both hummingbirds and moths during its long flowering season, the gilia provides bright red flowers, favored by the hummingbirds, until late August. Then it offers white flowers to attract the hawk moths.Evolutionary scientists call this an example of evolutionary strategy. Think about that for a moment. How would a flower know what color it is? How would it know which colors are preferred by hummingbirds and which are preferred by moths? A flower could no more decide to change its color than you or I can decide to grow an inch taller.Both logic and science say that the gilia’s special features are intelligently designed by a truly gifted engineer. Why not, then, recognize the work of our all-wise Magnificent Creator God for what it is! |
| 2/14/2024 | Bats are among the most underappreciated creatures in the entire world. Yet, they are most worthy of our appreciation. Nearly all bats eat only insects or fruit. Only one tropical species feeds on blood – usually the blood of cattle.There are thousands of bat species. Incredibly, bats make up one-fourth of all mammal species on Earth. One-half of all mammal species found in the tropics are bats.The smallest bat in the world is the Kitti’s hog-nosed bat, which is no larger than a bumblebee and weighs less than a penny. The largest bats are fruit bats. These completely harmless bats may have a wingspan of several feet. Most bats live in colonies, and some colonies have up to 20 million members.Bats are beneficial to both humans and nature. Many of the bats found in North America, as well as other parts of the world, are responsible for consuming thousands of tons of insects every night. Other bats pollinate flowers. Bats are also an essential link in the ecosystem that makes the rainforest possible.The earliest bats found in the fossil record are like bats today. They are fully formed with fully developed wings for flight. This means that there is not one scrap of fossil evidence to support the claim that bats evolved from some other creature. We can conclude that the scientific evidence says that bats were created pretty much in their present form by our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 2/13/2024 | Picture yourself sitting in a friend’s living room. Can you picture in your mind where the door is located? Scientists call this a thought map. Thought maps are mental pictures of the arrangement of objects relative to one another.Thought maps help us remember where to find a water glass, the gas or brake pedal, and home. Thought maps require intelligence. They help make possible additional intelligent activity, such as finding our way around and conducting an intelligent search. This is why scientists have been surprised to find that many creatures, not just humans, use thought maps.One experimenter carried a chimpanzee on his back while he hid 18 pieces of food in a field. Then the chimp and five others were released in the field to find the food. The chimp who had seen the hiding places found most of the food, following a very different route than that originally taken by the researcher. Bees, likewise, use mental maps. Even if a bee is forced to detour on its way back to the hive, it always reports the food source as though it had used a direct route. Bees are also able to find a food source that has been moved after its discovery. Ants have also been shown to use mental maps.Mental maps help humans and animals think deductively about changes in the environment. Mental mapping ability could not have evolved because even the lowliest creature requires this ability to survive. This ability must have been given to them in the first place by our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 2/12/2024 | An adult human liver is about the size of a small football. It weighs about three pounds, making it the body’s largest internal organ. Tucked neatly beneath the ribs, your liver performs more than 500 different tasks. It is a vital link between your heart, lungs and digestive system.Inside the liver is a bewildering array of microscopic veins in which each drop of blood is processed. Here, blood conditions are constantly monitored to make sure that its chemistry meets strict standards. If more of some substances are needed in the blood, they are supplied. Useless chemicals are broken down into useful chemicals. Your liver makes proteins and corrects blood clotting factors. Your liver also sees to it that hormone balances are maintained and that poisons are neutralized. If substances are needed to fight an infection, your liver makes them and adds them to the bloodstream. Your liver also stores vitamins and minerals and prepares itself to provide your body with quick energy when you need it. In addition, the liver makes bile, which is essential for digestion.Structures like the liver have caused many evolutionists to abandon the idea that life is a result of millions of years of accidents. The liver is just too well-designed and integrated into the body to have been produced by purposelessness and mindlessness. As Scripture says, truly our Magnificent Creator God has formed our inward parts! |
| 2/11/2024 | If, as we are continually told, evolution is a fact, why is it that human technology improves when we copy designs found in nature? If nature is really a giant trial-and-error experiment, we should not only find evidence of less-sophisticated designs in the distant past, but humans today should be able to improve on designs found in nature.Science has long known that an object moving through water or air moves with the least resistance when the ratio of its length to diameter is four to one. This ratio is found in the fastest swimmers in the sea – like the tuna, dolphin and swordfish. A Boeing 707, with a ratio of nine to one, experiences much more resistance than the larger, fatter 747, which has a ratio of six to one – much closer to the tuna and the dolphin.Studies of the vision of the horseshoe crab, supposedly one of the earlier forms of life, have taught engineers how to produce a clearer, sharper television picture. The United States Air Force copied a speed-sensing system from beetles to improve the ground speed indicators of their jets.The optics of a frog’s eye showed them how to improve their radar. The fly’s multifaceted eye taught engineers how to design a lighting system that generates more light with less energy.Humans are learning from and copying design solutions worked out by their Magnificent Creator God. The brilliant designs in our world are not the result of trial and error!!! This reality makes the claim that evolution is a fact of science sound empty! |
| 2/10/2024 | We have all looked in wonder at the amazing transformation of a caterpillar into a moth. However, did you realize that a moth needs an entirely different kind of brain than a caterpillar? We can truly say that here we have an insect with two brains!In the caterpillar stage, the moth lumbers around in a body that is primarily designed for eating. Its brain must be able to command powerful jaws and a comparatively huge digestive system as well as the complexities of caterpillar locomotion. The world of the caterpillar is very different from the world of the moth.During metamorphosis the caterpillar completely dissolves and the moth is rebuilt from the liquid. The brain, for example, requires new nerve cells and new connections between brain cells, while some brain cells change function, migrate to new locations, or even die. The result is a brain that is 10 times the size of the caterpillar’s and ready to control flight. The moth’s primary purpose in life is to reproduce. So its new brain is able to generate the odors used by moths to identify and communicate with potential mates. It is also equipped to detect the scents of a potential mate.Only our Magnificent Creator God could completely rebuild a caterpillar into a moth. Only He could rebuild and increase its brain ten-fold in only a week or two. Even more amazing is how He remakes people. Through the forgiveness of sins, Jesus Christ turns us from people who wish to escape Him to new creatures who love Him and find joy in Him. |
| 2/9/2024 | The amazing structure of the honeycomb has fascinated scientists for thousands of years. In the third century, the astronomer and geometer Pappus of Alexandria became the first to offer an explanation for why the honeycomb has a hexagonal shape.Pappus explained that only three shapes could serve as candidates for a honeycomb cell – the triangle, the square and the hexagon. Any other shape would leave wasteful open spaces between the cells. Pappus noted that the hexagon holds more honey in the same space than either a square or a triangle. It also takes less wax to build, and the shared sides of the hexagonal cells reduce wax usage even further.It was not until the development of modern calculus that scientists could fully appreciate the shape of the caps at the end of the honeycomb cells. Each cell is capped with a pyramid composed of three rhombuses. Complex mathematics shows that this shape, too, requires the least amount of wax for construction. It also allows honeycomb cells to be butted up against each other without wasting space.Modern scientists who accept evolution talk about the design of the honeycomb as a great accomplishment by the bees. However, the more sensible conclusion is obvious. The ten-sided prism of the honeycomb cap is magnificent testimony to the mathematical wisdom of our Magnificent Creator God Himself! |
| 2/7/2024 | Even though it’s a mammal and not a fish, the Weddell seal of the Antarctic is one of the greatest deep-sea divers in the world. Weighing up to 1,200 pounds, the Weddell seal can cruise under water for up to 70 minutes. It is able to reach depths as great as 1,600 feet. For comparison, the record for a human being is a 13-minute, 43-second dive down to 282 feet.Humans are not designed to handle the pressure changes involved in diving to great depths. If humans stay too deep for too long and then return to the surface too quickly, they may die. The rapid change in pressure causes nitrogen to come out of solution in the blood. The result is a potentially fatal condition known as the “bends.”Weddell seals don’t have to worry about this because their blood doesn’t have dissolved nitrogen. Scientists are trying to learn just how the Weddell seals’ lungs prevent this. However, the unique design of the Weddell seal doesn’t stop with its lungs. The Weddell seal is able to withstand pressures up to 750 pounds per square inch. Those pressures on you or me would cause us to have epileptic seizures.What science is learning about the complex and unique designs of the Weddell seals make the evolutionary claims that these seals came from land-living mammals increasingly difficult to believe. Yet, they illustrate the great wisdom of our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 2/6/2024 | In Genesis chapter 5 we read that Adam lived to be 930 years old. One question often asked is, “Could Adam really have lived that long?”Most of the effects of aging are due to genetic mistakes that accumulate over generations. This is in addition to the age limitations God imposed on human beings after the Genesis Flood. These early generations, so close to Adam and Eve, would have accumulated comparatively few genetic mistakes.Before the Genesis Flood, the Earth was probably a very different place. Many creation-scientists believe that the pre-Flood Earth was surrounded by a canopy of water vapor or at least in some way had a greater atmospheric pressure – perhaps about twice what it is now. Medical researchers have been experimenting with the effects of higher atmospheric pressure. Tests in chambers that subject people to similar air pressures show that high atmospheric pressure gets more oxygen to the cells and speeds healing. Hospitals use a hyperbaric chamber for burn victims. Experiments have shown that such chambers can also reverse senility. And higher atmospheric pressure appears to reverse some of the effects of aging on the skin and hair and stimulates the entire body.We can be sure that Adam and the others lived as long as they did because our Magnificent Creator God’s Word says they did. However, science may be discovering some of the conditions in the pre-Flood world that may have helped make these long lives possible. |
| 2/5/2024 | Those light flashes created by fireflies are actually a quite complex language. The more than 200 species of firefly each have their own language. Each species uses a different combination of color, intensity and flash intervals.As the male firefly cruises over the firefly community, he emits an automatic series of flashes. As he “talks” with flashes of light, he is looking for the appropriate response from a female who is ready to mate. Each species has its own light language, helping males to identify members of their own species. Females who are not ready to mate or who have already mated communicate these facts to the overhead male. Evidence indicates that at least one firefly species understands and can speak “foreign” firefly language. Females of this species will lure males of other species down by using the male’s language and pretending to be a female who is ready to mate. When the male comes close for mating, the female captures and eats him.You can “speak” firefly, too, if you have a flashlight. First, you must cover the flashlight so that it emits only a tiny point of light. Then, after carefully watching the patterns of the female fireflies in the area, try to mimic that pattern. If you do this correctly, male fireflies will come to investigate your flashlight.The intelligence that fills all of creation is one of the “fingerprints” of our intelligent Magnificent Creator God. Such intelligence cannot come from accidents. |
| 2/4/2024 | For many people studying the early chapters of Genesis, the account of Babel is a troubling interlude. We like to concentrate on the Creation Week, and then the Flood, and then let’s get on to talking about Abraham. But before we get to Abraham, we have this troubling account of what all these people who were the descendants of Noah and his family were doing at Babel.God had given a very clear and brief command to Noah and his family before making a covenant with them. He said, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 9:1). It is in that context that we need to consider the words of the people at Babel.“Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:4)It is not that there is necessarily anything wrong with building a city. But there were a number of things wrong with their plans for this city. The city was to be designed to prevent themselves from being dispersed over the face of the whole earth. This was clearly in direct contradiction to God’s command to them. In view of this rebellious attitude, we also see that there was something wrong with their desire to build a city and a tower “with its top in the heavens”.An attempt to get to heaven by our own effort, without reference to our Magnificent Creator God, is clearly an act of rebellion and led to the disaster which God brought on them. |
| 2/3/2024 | The Apostle Peter reminds us in 2 Peter 1:20 that “no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation.”In this context, prophecy refers to God’s words told forth by those who wrote Scripture. In that sense, all of the Bible is prophetic because it is all God’s word, breathed out by Him. This general principle, which applies to the whole Bible, clearly applies to Genesis, which is the focus of most of our studies in this ministry.So, when we read in the early chapters of Genesis how God made the world and how He destroyed that first world in a worldwide Flood, we must recognize that the interpretation of these verses is not to be a private matter.Yet, interpreting Genesis has indeed become a private matter for many Christians who refuse to believe that God’s word means what it says at this point.So, Genesis tells us that God made the world in six literal 24-hour days. But we don’t like that because our scientific textbooks tell us that the universe is billions of years old. So we impose the billion years on Genesis in a private interpretation.Genesis tells us that God made plants and animals directly. He made plants two days before the flying insects that can pollinate them. But our high-school textbooks tell us that animals evolved from simpler organisms, so we interpret the Creation Week in a figurative sense – another private interpretation.It is time for Christians to get back to believing that our Magnificent Creator God meant what He said!!! |
| 2/2/2024 | There are more than 200 species of fireflies around the world. Almost everyone has seen these small insects flying about or sitting in the grass. On dark summer nights they can be seen flashing their lights like ships far out at sea. As they flash, they are communicating very specific messages to one another.The light created by fireflies is called cold light because it is produced without creating any heat. To make a flash, the firefly must make and mix a chemical called luciferin with oxygen and an enzyme called luciferase. This mixture is combined with a catalyst to create the flashes of light. The result is a method of producing light that is far more efficient than any source of light in your home. A relatively tiny amount of energy creates a generous amount of light.Fireflies do not make light so they can read a book. Their flashes are used for finding a mate. Fireflies are able to read the light signals of other fireflies. These signals may contain several messages. Some flashes can tell a firefly whether the sender is one of his species. Light flashes are used to identify whether the sender is a male or female. If it’s a female, the flashes can identify whether she has already mated.This is another example of the unlimited creativity and extravagance of our Magnificent Creator God. The same beauty of the firefly that creates wonder in the child should also fill us with wonder at the limitless imagination of God. |
| 2/1/2024 | There is nothing our Creator God does that is not intended to bring us closer to Him. Why? Because His purpose in making humans was to make someone to love. We exist because He wanted to love us and be loved by us. There is nothing visible or invisible that is not meant to be of service to us. Consider the invisible angels who protect us. They rejoice when even one person turns to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.Consider the heavens above our heads. There, God placed billions of stars – some much larger than our sun. There are giant pinwheel galaxies with millions of huge stars. Countless billions of stars churn out more energy every second than we can ever hope to measure. What a lavish and beautiful timepiece to tell us when it is time to plant and time to harvest! God has given us more than the necessities of life. He has also hidden medicines within the bark of trees and the sweet-scented flower. He has filled that creation with splendor and beauty.However, I cannot neglect to mention His greatest and most generous gift. When we sought our will instead of His, we withdrew our love from Him. His response was to send His only Son, Jesus Christ, to suffer our punishment for sin on the cross. And He rose from the dead on the third day so that we could have new life with our Creator again. Oh, that our thanksgiving to our Magnificent Creator God could be as unlimited as His generosity! |
| 1/31/2024 | The ability to smell is one gift we often take for granted. That’s probably because we usually identify things more quickly with one of our other senses. At the same time, Thanksgiving dinner wouldn’t be the same without the smells.Some of the most unlikely creatures have a sense of smell. Believe it or not, even fungi have a sense of smell. Worms have organs on their heads to sense odor. Ticks carry their scent-detecting organs on their feet; this arrangement wouldn’t work well for us! Mollusks smell through their gills! The salmon uses smell to find the same brook in which he was spawned. Lizards and snakes use their tongues to detect scents.The most skilled smellers in the animal world can detect a scent even if there is only one molecule of that scent mixed in with 10 trillion molecules of average air. The modern perfumer’s highly trained nose can identify about 10,000 different odors.Before the days of modern medicine, a doctor’s diagnosis would consist in part of sniffing the patient. For example, the plague had the scent of honey. Scarlet fever often gave its presence away by the smell of hot bread, and measles smelled like fresh-plucked feathers.It takes a keen knowledge of biochemistry to design a system that can detect and identify scents. So next time you smell a wonderful meal or a beautiful flower, you may want to thank your Creator.Ephesians 5:2 “And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour.” |
| 1/30/2024 | Ecclesiastes 3:1,4 “To every [thing there is] a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven . . . A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.”When Scripture talks about laughter, it most often speaks of laughter as a form of derision. God is described as laughing at the pride and plans of the wicked. However, that does not mean that God is against the right kind of humor.After all, He gave us the ability to laugh. In Ecclesiastes 3:4 we read that there is also a time to laugh. Jesus reminds the faithful, in the Beatitudes, that those who weep now will laugh with joy later. When you stop and think about it, anyone who can create the playful kitten cannot be against laughter.Medical researchers are finding out just what a wonderful gift laughter is. Laughter, it has been found, is excellent exercise for the lungs. It clears the respiratory system and is emotionally healthy. Laughter relaxes muscles. It is a proven reliever of emotional tension. Research also suggests that laughter has healing effects, possibly boosting the immune system.Laughter also has been found to have a natural pain-killing effect. In one experiment involving patients viewing funny films, the pain-killing effect of laughter lasted for up to two hours.Laughter has also been identified among chimpanzees and apes. Very possibly, other creatures have their own way of laughing. If we remember that Scripture also encourages us to “avoid foolish talk,” we can also give thanks to our Magnificent Creator God for the gift of humor. |
| 1/29/2024 | Gerbils are those friendly, furry little rodents that many children keep as pets. Gerbils are social animals. They value communication very highly. Researchers have found that those gerbils in a given community that can communicate most clearly have the highest social status.For a long time, researchers were confused about the sounds gerbils make because they were only hearing a small part of the communication. This is because our human ears hear sounds that go up to about 20,000 cycles per second. However, gerbils do most of their talking at as high as 32,000 cycles per second. Their talk is too high-pitched for us to hear.Tape recordings of these ultra-high-frequency sounds have been played back at slower speeds. They reveal that most gerbil communication involves different kinds of whistles. These whistles are different types of speech, depending upon the purpose of the communication. While researchers cannot completely translate gerbil speech, they have learned that gerbils are continually asking where others are and reporting their own positions.Scripture calls the Son of God “the Word.” He is presented in the Bible as the creating and saving Word. This revelation about Him is intended to help us realize that communication is an essential part of God’s nature. Communication is not an evolutionary development. How could it be? Communication is the gift of a loving Magnificent Creator God. Have you read His communication to you in the Bible? |
| 1/28/2024 | They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. While that is often true, they also say that it takes a highly evolved brain to picture objects and remember them. Science is learning that this bit of evolutionary myth is indeed fiction.As far as the honeybee is concerned, not all flowers are created equal. Some flowers are a good source of nectar while others are a waste of time. Alfalfa flowers can kill a honeybee because they are designed for pollination by larger insects. When an insect lands, a central petal in the flower releases the stamen and sweeps pollen upward to aid pollination. Honeybees can be tossed off the flower or trapped inside by this action.Scientists always thought that honeybees solved the problem of finding safe and productive flowers by remembering a list of characteristics. They believed the honeybee was evolutionarily too simple to remember mental pictures of favored flowers. However, recent experiments have convinced scientists that bees actually store a mental picture of productive flowers. In these experiments, bees were rewarded with sugar water for visiting some patterns and not others. Their reactions showed that they remember images, not simply patterns.What’s more, the experiments showed that bees are quite intelligent and good learners. One scientist noted that these experiments showed that evolution’s assumptions about so-called higher and lower creatures are false. Those who believe in evolution are having to rethink their view of the world. Meanwhile, we can give thanks to our Magnificent Creator God for so generously giving the gift of intelligence to so many of His creatures. |
| 1/27/2024 | Some creatures simply try to look uninteresting to hungry predators. Others take their role-playing so seriously that they actually fulfill some of the same roles as their models.Loopers, or inchworms, move along the ground, twigs or branches with the characteristic opening and closing of an upside-down letter U. These creatures are not true worms. Rather, they are caterpillars. As caterpillars, they often look very much like the twigs or branches on which they move. However, their odd form of movement can give them away.Here’s an experiment you can try. If you ever notice a looper on a branch, simply give the branch a gentle tap. Chances are, the looper will suddenly freeze into the same shape as a nearby twig. If you were to carefully touch the looper, you would find that it had become as stiff as a twig. A botanist reports that while studying one looper moving along a branch, an ant happened along. Ants, of course, will eat loopers. The looper froze in a horizontal position between branches. The ant walked across the looper, never noticing that its walkway was actually a potential meal.Many scientists suggest that the looper “just happens” to be the same color as the branches on which it crawls. We ask, does it also accidentally know how to act like a twig to fool predators? The almighty hand of our Magnificent Creator God is evident even in the inchworm! |
| 1/26/2024 | We want to avoid getting bacteria in our food, don’t we? Bacteria cause illness. Bacteria are bad.Yet, some of the world’s healthiest foods contain deliberately introduced bacteria. One such strain of bacteria is the Lactic Acid Bacterium (LAB). This is used in foods such as kimchi or sauerkraut. Brassicas, such as cabbage, often have low quantities of this bacterium. When sealed in a suitable fermentation jar with salt, the LAB can thrive. LAB is able to withstand high acidity and salinity, so it grows, even in a salty environment. One of the products of LAB’s metabolism is lactic acid. Most other bacteria cannot survive in either acid or salt, so the LAB begins to dominate, while the vast majority of other bacteria die. LAB itself is not harmful to humans, so, paradoxically, the good bacteria have effectively killed off all the bad bacteria, providing a healthy, long-lasting food.When God finished making the world at the end of day six of creation, He looked at all that He had made and declared it to be very good. This must have included bacteria. Since Adam’s sin, many bacteria have mutated (though not evolved, as they have not gained new genetic information) into harmful organisms. Perhaps originally, all bacteria were created to be as useful as LAB in that original perfect world that our Magnificent Creator God gave us and that we so sinfully polluted. |
| 1/25/2024 | There are many methods of communication, some of which we human beings don’t often think about. One of these is chemical communication.Take, for example, the female silkworm moth. When she is ready to mate, she releases a very small amount of a chemical. This chemical, called a pheromone, can attract a male silkworm moth from up to two miles away. Even though the female has released only 100-millionth of a gram, the male can sense the chemical. Many other insects use similar pheromones to attract mates.Pheromones are also used for chemical communication by ants to mark their trails. When an ant finds a good source of food, it returns to the nest, leaving an invisible scent trail. Its fellow ants also use this trail to find the food. As long as they still find food they will continue to reinforce the scent. Once the supply is exhausted and ants no longer follow the trail, it disappears within a few minutes. This chemical scent is so specific that another species of ant will not recognize the trail if he stumbles upon it. This helps protect the ants’ food source from being discovered by other ants.Chemical communication allows the communicator to communicate to another of its species, even over long distances. In one sense, pheromones are the animals’ version of radio.Our Magnificent Creator God is also our Magnificent Communicator God! |
| 1/24/2024 | The loop-and-hook fastener called Velcro has come a long way since it first appeared. Velcro goes into space as a light, easy-to-use fastener. Here on Earth, it’s replacing everything from laces in children’s shoes to buttons and zippers on coats.However, humans were not the inventors of the hook-and-loop fastener. Plants were the first to use this principle. Scientists learned about the principle when they were checking out stories of how bean leaves were used to trap bedbugs during World War II. They discovered that the hooked hairs on the underside of bean leaves did indeed trap bedbugs by their feet. The bedbugs stayed stuck to the leaves until they starved to death.In nature, the hooked hairs trap leafhoppers, leaving them unable to munch on the leaves of bean plants. Further research has shown that some varieties of wheat trap the cereal leaf beetle, preventing damage to their leaves.Most amazing of all is the timing of this defense. Plants that use this method to protect themselves don’t start growing the hairs until a few days before the annual attack by their insect enemies!Humans might think their inventions are clever. However, because our Magnificent Creator God is smarter than we are, it is very likely that somewhere, somehow, He has already created nearly every practical invention. This is yet another argument for creation! |
| 1/23/2024 | It occurred to scientists only about 30 years ago that insect pests might be controlled through hormones. If, for example, a hormone that prevented a destructive insect from reaching maturity was applied to a crop, the interrupted lifecycle of the insect might prevent damage to the crop. Yet, the hormone would be a safe, natural substance.However, scientists found that synthesizing such hormones was much more difficult than they thought. Several years into the research, Japanese scientists discovered that certain plants were already making these hormones for self-defense. In fact, many of the plants were manufacturing what they called “super-hormones.” “Super-hormones” are hormones that work in far lower concentrations than the juvenile hormones made by the insects themselves. These juvenile hormones prevent insects from reaching their adult, and usually most destructive, stage. Among those plants that make juvenile insect hormones are ferns and certain evergreens.One result of this research is the development of a mosquito juvenile hormone. This hormone can be time-released from briquettes in swamps, preventing mosquito wigglers from ever maturing to their flying, biting, adult stage.Again, the incredible design and balance that could only have been built into the world by our Magnificent Creator God are evident in the creation. How else could plants have gained such skill in animal chemistry? |
| 1/22/2024 | Every day, all over the Earth, plants engage in chemical warfare against insects and animals that would eat them. When this drama is described by evolutionary scientists, they usually talk about plants as though the plants were skilled chemists who developed their abilities on their own.For example, the leaves of the oak tree contain tannins. Tannins form complexes with proteins so that, when eaten, they have little nutritional value. An evolutionary account of how this arrangement came about describes how the trees supposedly developed this strategy for self-defense. Stories like this make one wonder how oak trees gained so much knowledge about animal digestion and chemistry. Some species of milkweed and dogbane produce powerful muscle relaxants that can be fatal to humans.One might picture, in the far distant past, white-smocked milkweeds working in the chemistry lab. Other “doctor” milkweeds are feeding various concoctions to humans in cages to test their responses. When one tries to account for this without a Creator, the picture can become silly.The Bible provides an answer that makes a great deal more sense. In Job 38 and 39 the Lord – the Creator – asks Job about dozens of aspects of the creation. In His questioning, He asks Job about the source of the knowledge and abilities found in living things. The answer, of course, is that our Magnificent Creator God, and no one else, designed, built and taught the creation. Other answers simply can’t satisfy. |
| 1/21/2024 | “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.”One of the most common arguments against a literal six-day creation is that the structure of the days is a literary device, called the Framework Hypothesis. The hypothesis suggests an almost poetic pattern to the days, which they claim demonstrates that the days are not meant to be taken literally. On day one, God made the universe. On day two, He made the seas and atmosphere, and on day three He made the land, with its plants. Then on day four, He filled the universe, day five filled the sea and atmosphere, and day six filled the land. So there are three days of creating ex nihilo and three days of filling those creations. Again, the advocates of this hypothesis maintain that this pattern shows that Genesis 1 is allegorical literature, proclaiming the truth of God as Creator, but does not give a historical account.A quick answer to this point is that if there is a real pattern of two sets of three days, this does not prove that the days are not literal. God is a God of order. However, their neat pattern breaks down. Day one is not actually the parallel to day four – day two is. How so? On day two, God created the firmament, and the firmament refers not merely to the atmosphere but the entirety of space.A better suggestion is to take our Magnificent Creator God at His word, that He created everything exactly how He said He did!!! |
| 1/20/2024 | Some frogs are regular little drug factories. Their skins produce a wide range of powerful alkaloids, are a large family of chemicals usually produced by plants. Familiar alkaloids include quinine, caffeine and morphine. Different alkaloids have different effects, usually on the nervous system.The poison-arrow frog may be the most famous alkaloid-producing frog. South American natives simply rub their arrows or darts on the frog’s back. One species of this frog contains enough poison to kill about a 100 people! Another frog, native to Ecuador, produces an anesthetic more powerful than morphine. South American natives rub another frog on their wounds.Researchers discovered that the frog’s skin makes a powerful antiseptic. Yet another frog alkaloid will change the colors on parrot feathers. Some of the alkaloids produced by frogs are so complex that it takes years of study, using modern science’s most sophisticated equipment, to discover the active chemical.Researchers in this field are only beginning to learn about the alkaloids produced by frogs. They have yet to research a frog that natives claim to use to heighten their senses for the hunt. What puzzles scientists who believe in evolution is that the frogs’ exotic skin chemistries don’t follow the patterns they anticipated based upon expected evolutionary relationships.This means that these frogs have one more exciting purpose. They provide evidence against evolution and for a Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 1/19/2024 | Did you ever wonder where frogs go in the winter? Yes, frogs hibernate, but there is much more to it than that.Frogs are cold-blooded, meaning that they don’t create their own body heat. The heat they need to maintain life must come from the sun or the heat in the water and air around them. As the weather cools off, a frog’s blood begins to thicken, and life slows down. Frogs begin looking for places to hibernate. The frog must carefully select his winter resting spot. If his body temperature falls more than two degrees below the freezing point of water, ice crystals will begin to form in his blood, and he will die. Some frogs bury themselves deeply enough in the mud to avoid freezing temperatures. Others may crawl inside decaying logs or under leaves, both of which provide heat from decay to avoid freezing temperatures.Scientists have found that frogs have still another trick to help them survive. When the weather is unseasonably cool during the spring or summer, meaning a harder life and more deaths among the frog population, the next generation of frogs will automatically have more females. Additional females means that more eggs can be laid in the spring. As a result, the frog population will more quickly return to normal.Everywhere we look in the creation we find evidence, not only of our Magnificent Creator God’s wisdom, but of His loving care for every living thing. Do you know His loving care in your life? You can be absolutely certain of that care through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. |
| 1/18/2024 | We have often pointed out the many plants and animals that are interrelated. Their lives depend upon one another. Very often they are interrelated in such a way that creation offers the only reasonable explanation for their special features. Evolution can call on “lucky coincidence” just so many times to explain these relationships. It makes far more sense to say that all living things were carefully planned and designed by an all-wise Master Designer.One interesting example is found in the moth family Noctuidae. This family of moths has special organs that detect the ultrasonic sounds made by the bats who eat them. A “lucky coincidence”? The problem with the evolutionary explanation is that this moth is dated by evolutionists to 75 million years ago. (Remember, these are evolutionists’ years, not real years.) This is back during the time of dinosaurs, when there weren’t supposed to be any bats. According to evolution, bats didn’t arrive on the scene until 55 million years after the Noctuidae moth. One wonders whether mindless evolution could see into the future. Or perhaps evolution was able to make moths with an ability to hear bats that would not exist for the supposed tens of millions of years! Neither explanation sounds very scientific!It makes a good deal more sense to throw out the millions of years of inflated evolutionary time. We can view the unique design of the Noctuidae moth as a sign from an all-knowing Magnificent Creator God that all living things were made by Him. Only an intelligent, personal Creator can account for the complex overall plan that we see in the created relationships between vastly different creatures. |
| 1/17/2024 | The hair that you see is nothing more than dead protein that is produced by the cells of the hair follicle anchored inside the layers of the skin. The total number of hair follicles on the adult body is about 5 million; only about 100,000 of them are on the scalp. Each hair grows out of one follicle for about three to five years. Then the hair is shed and the follicle rests for about three months before starting to grow hair again.So, you see, once you know how many hairs are on your head, it’s still no easy job to keep track of their changing number. The average scalp hair grows about one inch every two or three months. This means that each day, your head is growing the equivalent of one hair, 100 feet long – that’s nearly seven miles per year!Yes, it’s true – our Magnificent Creator God cares so much about you that He knows from moment to moment how many hairs are on your head. He has not created our world and then left us to drift through space and life all alone. He has even expressed His love and purpose for you in the words of the Bible. Take a look today at what Scripture says about His Son, who loved you so much He even gave His life for you! |
| 1/16/2024 | The surface of the Earth 50 to 150 feet below the great living canopy of the rainforest is a dark, humid, still world dominated by great columns of tree trunks. Within those trunks and some of the giant hollow branches extending from them lies the secret of the life of the canopy itself.A rainforest typically receives 12 or more feet of rain per year. That much rain washes out of the soil most of the nitrates needed by the trees for growth. What the trees need is a rich source of nitrates that is constantly being replenished. And that’s where the bats come in.Typically, these huge trees are hollow inside. Many different kinds of creatures, including fruit bats, enter the hollow trees through various openings. Fruit bats find ideal daytime sleeping rooms inside the great hollow branches that extend like caverns from the hollow tree trunk. The accumulating layer of bat guano inside the tree itself is one of the richest sources of nitrates known. So the bats provide the tree with the nitrates it needs in exchange for a protected home during the day!In a very real sense, the fruit bats are the collection and transport system for the raw materials that make possible the tropical rain forest canopy with its millions of residents. Our Magnificent Creator God has devised an ingenious way to provide for the needs of many creatures. Truly, the Lord does provide all living things with their food in precisely the way they need it! |
| 1/15/2024 | Much of the world’s surface is covered by rainforest. If you are unfamiliar with the rainforest, you may be tempted to compare it to forests you have seen. But really there is no comparison at all.In a rainforest, the Earth’s living surface is covered by a second living habitat some 50 to 150 feet in the air. Here, thousands of species of plants and animals live and breed for generations without ever touching the ground.The canopy of the rain forest is supported by huge trees that usually have no branches for the first 50 or more feet. They grow so close together and their tops are so dense that sunlight seldom reaches the jungle floor. This canopy can be up to 100 feet thick. While you might expect to find monkeys living in the canopy, you may not expect to find mice, frogs and even earthworms there as well. Here, most of these creatures are born, they live and die without ever touching the ground. The rainforest canopy is truly a second environment for life high above the surface of the Earth!Unusual environments like the rainforest canopy show us that the creativity of our Magnificent Creator God is unlimited. He can create living things to carry on successful lives in any environment. He can create varied communities that interact and depend upon each other within each unique environment. His creation is truly a wonder! |
| 1/14/2024 | Love is one of the necessities of life that is both physical and spiritual. While it doesn’t fit with a strictly materialistic view of life, love and touch, or lack of love and touch, can determine our health and sometimes even life and death.The claim that love and touch are necessary to life and health was considered so outrageous that it wasn’t until relatively recently that scientists began to test such claims. Researchers selected 40 hospitalized infants. These infants were not in intensive care, on oxygen, or intravenous feedings, but they were too tiny to leave the hospital. Researchers randomly selected half the group for attention. These infants were touched for three 15-minute periods a day. The first five minutes were spent stroking the infants’ bodies. The next five minutes were spend lightly moving the infants’ arms and legs. This was followed by five more minutes of stroking.Even though the infants often didn’t seem to notice the attention, it made a difference. After only 10 weekdays of this attention, the stroked infants had gained 47% more weight than the infants that were ignored. This is especially amazing considering the infants that gained less weight had been fed the same number of calories. The stroked infants were also more active, so they should have actually metabolized more of the calories and lost weight rather than increasing in weight.Can we literally live on love? Well, we do need food and other things, but we also need love—especially from our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 1/13/2024 | Language requires some very special designs that are rare in nature and found together only in humans. First, human language requires vocal cords, which none of the apes have. The only animals with vocal tracts are birds, but no one is suggesting that we evolved from birds.Language also seems to require an unusual structure to the brain. The frontal area of the left hemisphere of the brain is connected to an adjacent area of the cortex called the Wernicke area. These two areas are linked by a bundle of nerve fibers. The result is a distinct brain asymmetry that is unique to humans. Even the unborn human has this asymmetry that allows it to absorb language. Development in this area of the brain stops at puberty. That is why it becomes more difficult for adults to learn a new language. Language skills can be learned only by hearing language. So-called “feral” children, who have heard no language at all, cannot be taught language after puberty for the same reason.So where did Adam first hear language? Scripture tells us that it was the Creator God Himself who regularly spoke with Adam. This means that language is not a collection of meaningless sounds to which we have assigned meanings. The meanings and sounds have come from God, just as our unique design that makes language possible comes from God.Therefore, language is not only for worldly purposes. We have also been given language by our Magnificent Creator God to praise our God and Savior and to tell others who He is and what He has done!!! |
| 1/12/2024 | According to evolutionists, coral is one of the earlier creatures on the evolutionary time line. If evolutionary theory were fact, one would expect the corals to be very simple. One would also expect them to have changed a lot in over half a billion years of life.However, corals are not at all simple creatures. The stinger used by coral polyps to immobilize prey is very complex. It is produced by a highly specialized cell in the polyp itself. At one end of the stinging capsule is a poker, covered by a protective cap. At the other end of the capsule there is a hollow tube, coiled like a rope. The capsule itself is filled with a powerful poison.When the poker end of the capsule is touched, a number of complex things happen in a very short time. The cap springs open, the poker rips a hole in the victim and continues in, carrying with it the poison tube, which then pumps the poison into the victim. All of these amazing steps take place in less than five ten-thousandths of a second!Coral is “surprisingly” complex to be so near the bottom of the evolutionary ladder. In addition, the earliest corals in the fossil record – over half a billion years old by inflated evolutionary counting – are the same as those found today! So again, the scientific evidence fits well with the biblical story of creation by our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 1/11/2024 | Honeydew is one of the favorite foods of ants. There are a number of insects, including thorn bugs and aphids, who consume so much honeydew that they cannot digest it all. These insects are designed so that ants can milk them for the excess honeydew, just the way a farmer obtains milk from a cow.Many species of ants will milk the honeydew-collecting insect by stroking its abdomen with its antennae. The tree hopper actually slows its secretion of excess honeydew to the milking ant so that the ant may drink his honeydew “fresh from the cow”, so to speak.Some ants construct clay pens and shelters in which they enclose certain species of aphids, just as a farmer keeps his herd. Like the farmer, the ants move the aphids to better honeydew feeding sites when necessary. They also care for the aphid eggs during the winter.Herding ants are even better able to protect a young tree hopper than its parents. It is not unusual for a tree hopper parent to turn her young over to herding ants because they can do more for the young insect than she can.Such complex relationships between creatures point to a Magnificent Creator God who is both Creator and Teacher – even to insects! |
| 1/10/2024 | Which body structure is a powerful generator of emotions, gives you a sense of direction, and serves as a cannon all at the same time? It’s your nose, of course! It is common knowledge that without our noses the scent of a rose could not give us joy, nor would our food taste like very much. Less well known is the fact that our noses are directly hooked into the brain’s limbic system. Your limbic system plays a central role in generating and controlling emotions. This is why certain scents are able to raise strong emotional memories in us.The nose is also designed to filter out and catch particles that should not get into the lungs. When a particle is taken in through your nose, it is snagged by the tissue inside your nasal passages. Next, this highly special tissue decides the best method of getting rid of the foreign material. If a bacterium is identified, your nose begins to run, bathing the bacteria in powerful chemicals that dissolve most of them. If the particles are larger, like pollen, a sneeze is triggered that can eject particles at speeds of over 100 miles per hour!Perhaps the most remarkable ability associated with the nose is its ability to act as a compass. Human beings have a small amount of iron in the bony part of the nose between the eyes. Scientific experiments have shown that we have an ability, while not foolproof, that can sense direction that is influenced by magnetic fields!Our Magnificent Creator God made your multi-purpose nose not only to bring some pleasure to life but also to help protect your health. |
| 1/9/2024 | God made so many ants because ants are important housekeepers for the earth. Ants, not earthworms, turn most of the world’s soil, drain it and enrich it. Ants dispose of 90 percent of the corpses of small dead animals. As the world’s gardeners, ants spread and plant more seeds than any other creature.Like bees, ants have a sophisticated society, which includes workers, nurses, soldiers, hunters, farmers and even builders. Each of these different classes has specialized organs for their work. The soldier ants of one species are walking bombs. They are loaded with poison and literally explode when under attack, spraying poison on their enemies. Army ants in Central and South America march across the countryside in a line that can be nearly 50 feet long. The solid column sweeps along, flushing out even small animals, as it looks for food.The huge variety of living things around us represents more than simply variety. That variety carefully includes creatures to do every job that needs to be done to maintain life on Earth. This in itself is a witness to both the creativity and wisdom of our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 1/8/2024 | Not every spider can kill you if it bites you! But we never really warm up to the eight-legged monsters. It’s the sheer legginess of spiders that repels most of us. And jumping spiders are the worst.A recent science news article about a particular jumping spider called toxeus magna states that the mother spiders are actually good mothers and carefully look after their babies.This particular species was discovered in a park in Singapore. When scientist Zanqi Chen found the species, he found a female surrounded by babies. Yet, other jumping spiders are loners and sometimes even eat their young. This one was nursing them.Chen’s surprise deepened when he studied them in the lab. The mother spider was observed to be leaving droplets of white secretion around the nest, and the babies drank it up. Sometimes, babies clung to their mother and appeared to be suckling. Closer analysis showed that the baby spiders could not survive without this liquid, which, for a period, provided their only sustenance. Despite not being a mammal, these spiders appear to suckle their young on what is, for all intents and purposes, a liquid acting like milk.Our Magnificent Creator God has made some remarkable creatures and it never ceases to be amazing how many such marvels He has created. |
| 1/7/2024 | We have looked at many plants and animals that use different forms of camouflage to keep from being noticed. Some don’t wish to be noticed so that they can surprise their prey, while others don’t want to be noticed so they can avoid becoming prey. However, what happens when both predator and prey encounter each other in full camouflage?The predator in this drama, witnessed by a naturalist at the edge of a desert, is a yellow crab spider. The spider was waiting on a yellow flower that made him nearly invisible. The potential prey is an inchworm beneath the same flower. The inchworm was tearing off bits of the yellow flower petals and sticking them on its back.Properly camouflaged, the inchworm then worked his way toward the top of the flower where the spider waited. The spider felt the movement and ran around the edge to see whether lunch might be on the way. However, when the spider got around the edge of the flower, he saw nothing. He didn’t even notice the camouflaged inchworm on which he was standing! The spider then returned to the center of the flower, outsmarted by the inchworm who went on about his business.Our wisdom would have said that the inchworm should try to run when he noticed the spider. However, the wisdom given to him by our Magnificent Creator God allowed him to continue about his business on the flower. This offers us a good illustration of how following the Lord’s wisdom often requires us to reject our own. |
| 1/6/2024 | Our senses link us to the world around us and enable us to interact with the world. While most people believe that our sense of sight is the highest of the senses and the most marvelous in design, our sense of hearing is no less marvelous.When a sound strikes your ear, your eardrum vibrates with the sound waves, fast or slow, soft or hard. These variations in vibration provide us with important information about the nature of the sound we are hearing. Some sounds produce a vibration in the eardrum as small as a billionth of a centimeter – only one-tenth the diameter of a hydrogen atom! There are three tiny bones in the middle ear called the hammer, anvil and stirrup. They pick up the vibrations from the eardrum, amplify them and send them on to the cochlea. The cochlea is filled with about 25,000 tiny hair cells that finally turn the vibrations into electrical signals that are sent on to the brain.Our hearing is designed to be more sensitive to high-pitched sounds than to lower sounds. If we had just a little more sensitivity to lower-pitched sounds, we would continuously be distracted by the internal sounds of our body, including the blood rushing through our arteries. In fact, to help prevent this, there are no blood vessels at all in that part of the ear where vibrations are turned into electrical impulses. The body supports life in these tissues by constantly bathing them in dissolved nutrients.While we can hear many things, and decide not to hear other things, our Magnificent Creator God who so marvelously designed our ears invites us to hear His Word to us from the Bible! |
| 1/5/2024 | Some people have the green thumb in their family. Others may complain that they fail with plants because plants don’t tell them when they need care. Of course, most people can do well with family pets, who are enthusiastic about letting their needs be known.Now scientists have learned that plants do indeed cry out when they need attention. We just haven’t heard them because the sounds made by a thirsty plant are about five times higher-pitched than we can hear. But scientists with tiny specialized microphones have heard corn plants calling for water. During their study, researchers learned that plants make a great deal of noise. Corn leaves and stalks make noises as they slide against each other during growth. We have all heard the sound of plant leaves rattling in the wind. Corn stalks also make noise as they bend in the wind.However, another sound was heard when the corn didn’t have enough water. It was a high-pitched popping noise. Plants have water tubes in them that carry water and nutrients up from the roots to the leaves. Water flows up these tubes under tension. When there is not enough water, the tension becomes too great and the tubes fracture. The popping is the sound of those tubes fracturing. The result of fractured tubes is a wilted plant. When water is restored, the tubes refill, the popping noises stop, and the plant again looks healthy.The purpose of this research was to learn when to water crops and how much water they need. Now that we have learned how plants communicate, crops can tell farmers when to water!We can rely on our Magnificent Creator God to allow for every need whether animal, plant, or human. |
| 1/4/2024 | Most of us are familiar with the body’s response to foreign tissue. Transplant patients must be carefully matched and then patients still must be given powerful drugs to prevent destruction of the transplanted tissue. Our bodies’ immune system identifies tissue that’s not its own and then tries to destroy that tissue.As we have learned more about the immune system, doctors began asking themselves why a pregnant mother’s body doesn’t reject the foreign tissue of the baby growing inside her. The answer to this mystery is not fully understood, but research has suggested some answers.From conception, the unborn child is a genetically unique individual. Researchers think that the most important protection the unborn child has is the trophoblast. This tissue, known as the caul, seals the growing infant from its mother. However, the trophoblast itself develops from the same cells as the infant. So why doesn’t the mother’s immune system attack? It appears that under normal conditions the trophoblast is a special set of cells that the body cannot identify as foreign. In addition, the trophoblast makes cells that encourage the mother’s immune system to protect it. Scientists now believe that this amazing feature may actually be provided by the father’s genetic information.In effect, the baby, with the help of the father, immunizes the mother’s system so that it doesn’t reject the baby! So, even before birth, the mother nurtures and the father protects the child.Only our Magnificent Creator God could design such a process as childbirth. |
| 1/3/2024 | In a clever scheme of self-protection, the more poisonous the male rattlebox moth is, the more prized he is by the female rattlebox moth.In the caterpillar stage, the male moth favors the pods of certain legumes. These pods contain a powerful poison that seems to have no effect on the caterpillar. After the caterpillar has become a moth and it’s time for mating, the male releases a scent produced by the poison. Those who have more poison in their bodies release a stronger scent, while those with little poison release only a weak scent. Female rattlebox moths prefer males with a strong scent. During mating, the male coats the eggs with some of the poison, making them unpalatable to predators, like ladybugs, who might eat the eggs. So the more poison a male has, the better protected the female’s eggs will be. Studies have shown that female rattlebox moths will ignore males that have collected no poison.Likewise, the male of the queen butterfly species collects another plant poison in his system. This poison is produced by plants for protection against insects. The butterfly doesn’t attack the plant; rather, he drinks the poison from already injured plants. Here, too, the female queen butterfly favors those males with the most poison.It appears that human beings are not the only creatures who go to the drug store to get needed medicines. Our Magnificent Creator God has provided the animal world with their own drug store and the knowledge of how to use the chemicals He has provided. |
| 1/2/2024 | Fireflies may help light the way to new medical breakthroughs. The gentle glow of a firefly on a summer evening is produced by the chemical luciferase. The firefly has a gene with the code that makes this chemical. When that gene is added to the genetic information of other plants or animals, the cells begin to glow harmlessly. Researchers have been using the firefly gene to test their ability to add genetic information to a cell.When human heart arteries become clogged, a medicine called TPA is among the treatments doctors use. TPA is a natural clot-dissolving protein that helps prevent heart attacks. The problem is, without a continuous supply of TPA, the artery may reclog. It would help if the artery could make its own TPA 24 hours a day.Since TPA is a natural protein for which there is a genetic code, researchers wanted to know if genetic information could be added to artery cells. To find out, they injected dogs with the genetic code for luciferase. If genetic information could be added to the cells through this method, they would actually see the results in the glowing tissue. Tissue samples taken three days later did, in fact, have the distinctive glow of the firefly, proving that the method works. They warn that several years of research lie ahead before artery cells may be able to dissolve their own clots.Those glowing fireflies that delight children and adults show our Magnificent Creator God’s design in the creation in an unexpected way. The chemical that makes the glow is proving to be an important tool of medical science. |
| 1/1/2024 | The world is a frightening place without God. This fear can be seen today in fears that modern people often confuse with science.Several years ago, stories of gloom and doom about a greenhouse heating of the Earth were starting to fill the media. We at Creation Moments looked at the scientific basis for these claims. We wanted to know if the greenhouse warming of the Earth was a true threat or just another fear of a godless people. We then published the conclusion that the thin and conflicting evidence for greenhouse warming most likely came from the heat island effect of growing cities around some of the temperature-measuring sites.Knowing the elegance with which God designed everything in creation, creationists suspected that God probably designed the Earth with built-in thermostats that help keep it from warming up too much. When the Pacific Ocean warms more than normal, it sends increasing amounts of water vapor into the air. If heating continues, the water vapor will actually cause the heating to increase until vapor is forced higher into the atmosphere, creating icy cirrus clouds. These clouds reflect enough incoming sunlight to shut down the temperature increase and return things to normal.We are called to be good stewards of the Earth. We can be good stewards in joyful service, freed from the fears that afflict those who don’t know The Magnificent Creator God. |
| 12/31/2023 | Whalebone was used for all sorts of ornaments and structural purposes as a gently bendable, yet firm material. Today it has been replaced by plastics. But it wasn’t really bone. It came from the mouth of the whale. The structure is known today as baleen, and it is made of keratin, like your fingernails. The whale swallows huge quantities of water, then spits it out, sieving it through the baleen to catch the small krill organisms on which the baleen whale thrives.Evolutionists have to believe that this baleen evolved, as they believe that the ancestors of the whale had teeth – as do non-baleen whales today. A recent article on one popular-style science website stated that “rivaling the evolution of feathers in dinosaurs, one of the most extraordinary transformations in the history of life was the evolution of baleen.” The comparison is appropriate. We have remarked many times on the sheer impossibility of the evolution of feathers, and so it is with the evolution of baleen.The difficulty for evolutionists is working out a possible mechanism for the imaginary intermediate forms. Would the intermediate have had both teeth and baleen, or would there have had to be creatures with neither teeth nor baleen? If the latter, would those animals not have starved to death?As is usual, it makes more sense to suppose that our Magnificent Creator God designed baleen whales exactly as they needed to be so that they can live successfully in the oceans!!! |
| 12/30/2023 | Not only is the human brain the most complex structure in the universe, it is also one of the busiest. In fact, during intense concentration, your brain can burn as many calories as your muscles do during exercise! Intense thinking can literally be as exhausting as a physical workout! More than 100,000 chemical reactions go on in your brain every second.Among the brain’s many jobs is chemist. The brain produces more than 50 psychoactive drugs. Some of these are associated with memory, others with intelligence, still others are sedatives. Endorphin is the brain’s painkiller and it’s three times more potent than morphine. Serotonin is produced by the brain to help keep our moods under control. The brain also makes dopamine. Dopamine makes people more talkative and excitable. Another hormone regulates hunger.The brain is also a radio transmitter that sends out measurable electrical wave signals. In fact, the brain continues to send these signals for as long as 37 hours after death!Our tiny knowledge of the brain is enough to show us that this incredible organ is no accident. The brain is much more than a powerful testimony to our Magnificent Creator God. Its incredible powers convince us that there is much more to existence than this material life. However, we can learn only from the Word of God about eternal life through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ.Put your brain together with the Word of God today! |
| 12/29/2023 | Many textbooks tell young people today that birds are modified reptiles. Suppose, they say, that millions of years ago the scales on some reptiles began to fray along the edges. In time, they say, the frayed scales turned into feathers and birds were born.The elegance and beauty of the feather make this story hard to believe. Can sticking a feather on a lizard produce a peacock? The bird’s feather is only a small part of the complete flying system of the bird. Even with very careful planning and redesigning, a reptile doesn’t have what it takes.A bird needs massive breast muscles for flight. In some birds, 30 percent of the body weight of the bird is breast muscle. By comparison, in humans, breast muscles are only about 1 percent of body weight. A bird also needs an extremely high metabolism and blood pressure to deliver the energy those muscles need for flight. Birds have a higher metabolism than any other creature; they also have the necessary high blood pressure. Finally, as is well known, birds need light skeletons. The man-o’-war has a wingspan of seven feet. But its entire skeleton weighs only a few ounces – less than its feathers!Even the most clever rebuilding of a reptile cannot produce a bird. In fact, birds have very little in common with reptiles. The entire being of the bird, from body to brain, has been specially designed for flight by a Magnificent Creator God who clearly knows everything there is to know about flight. |
| 12/28/2023 | If, of all the millions of living things on Earth, a few creatures happened to look like something they are not and this helped protect them, we might put it down to chance. However, the creation is filled with too many creatures who practice look-alike deception to put it down to chance.Africa’s southern deserts have a plant called living stones. In a desert, any vegetation can be a welcome source of food or moisture. In this setting, a plant that doesn’t look like a plant has an advantage. And living stones look like nothing more than just another rock in the sand.Wasps can be some of the nastiest insects in nature. An insect in Costa Rica called the mantispid looks very much like the feared wasp, even up close. Then again, the hover fly looks like a wasp and sounds like a wasp because the frequency of its wing beats is almost identical to a wasp.Treehoppers have a very odd body shape that comes to a point on top. Not only do they look like thorns, but they usually stay on bushes that have thorns, orienting their bodies on the branches just like true thorns. This effectively hides them from hungry birds. Larval plant hoppers use a different form of deception. They attach themselves in groups on branches, orienting their frilly and feathery bodies together so they look like a flower!The clever forethought and planning involved in nature’s deceptions rule out any thought that these creatures designed themselves but were indeed a work of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 12/27/2023 | Spider silk begins as a liquid protein made by silk glands on the spider’s abdomen. Spiders make many kinds of silk for different uses. As the liquid silk is forced through the spider’s spinnerets, it begins to dry. The spinnerets pull and stretch the silk, creating just the right kind of silk for the spider’s use. Though the result seems thin and weak to us, ounce for ounce, spider silk is stronger than steel.Web-building spiders make two types of silk for their traps. The basic structure of the web is made of strong, non-sticky silk. Then the spider adds a sticky, elastic silk to trap its prey. Some webs are irregular, others are flat and sheet-like, while still others are shaped like funnels. All of us have admired the beautiful orb web.However, spiders also have many other ways in which they use their silk. The ogre-faced spider makes a net that it throws around its intended victim. The European water spider builds its web underwater. It stores its air supply in the web. The lasso spider twirls a single strand of silk over its head. A tiny drop of sticky silk at the end of the lasso captures its prey when the lasso is thrown. Probably the most creative use of silk is by the young of some species. When they hatch, they produce long loops of silk that catch the wind and send them floating off to new places.The spider’s skill in producing and using silk had to come from Someone wiser and more clever than the spider. Clearly, the spider has been well-equipped and instructed by its Magnificent Creator God. |
| 12/26/2023 | The founders of modern science, on the whole, believed in the Creator. The methods they developed were based upon the truth that the creation is voluntary. This means that God was not confined to what we have later defined as “scientific laws.” God could make anything He wanted in any way He wanted. Science cannot be done from the philosopher’s easy chair. Scientists must go out into the field and study how nature works. When science follows this path, it is open to astonishing discoveries.One relatively recent unexpected discovery was the hot water vents deep below the ocean’s surface. Where the earth’s crust has split apart, hot water gushes out. This water reaches temperatures hot enough to, say, cause a piece of paper to burst into flame. Only the tremendous pressure more than a mile below the waves keeps the water in liquid form.It was in this environment that scientists made an even more amazing discovery. They found bacteria that could live in the almost 700-degree water. These amazing creatures find the normal sea-level boiling point of water to be so cold, they can barely survive. Scientists are still trying to learn how these creatures live at temperatures that would destroy the normal biochemistry of life.Each new discovery tells us a little more about the work of our wonderful Magnificent Creator God. That’s what science was originally intended to do. Keep that in mind when you hear someone say that belief in the Creator makes doing science impossible. |
| 12/25/2023 | It’s a challenge, even for the Christian, to get along with lazy, selfish people. This is because they also tend to be quarrelsome, especially when their desires are not met. Now scientists have discovered that the phrase “industrious as an ant” does not apply to all ants. They report that they have found an entire ant society that is lazy, selfish and quarrelsome.Sometimes a society is pleasant to live in and sometimes it’s not. Not all ant societies are harmonious examples of cooperation. One ant society, popularly called the slave-makers, must be a miserable place to live. Slave-making ants make their living by plundering the nests of other species and making slaves of their captives. Slave ants are forced to feed, house and even defend their masters.This leaves the slave-making ants with a great deal of idle time. Most of that idle time is spent in endless squabbles with each other over social status. The higher a slave-maker’s status, the more service from a slave she receives. It would seem that just as idle human hands can lead to strife between people, idle ants tend to fight with each other too.This universal linking of selfishness, laziness and fighting tells us that there are indeed universal moral truths. It shows us that those who say there is no absolute morality are wrong. Perhaps our Magnificent Creator God has allowed this ant society to corrupt itself so we could have a scientific basis to reject today’s moral relativism. |
| 12/24/2023 | Sometimes a headline screams to be noticed even before we have read the article concerned. One such headline declared: “Prehistoric cave art suggests ancient use of complex astronomy.” There are so many presuppositions in that headline. The first is the use of the word prehistoric. The word historic refers to the timescale of human beings, so prehistoric implies something from before there were human beings on the Earth. However, the Bible does not allow for any prehistory – well, except perhaps 5 days. What the headline is getting at is that the art it is about to describe was supposedly done by creatures that were not fully evolved into human beings. Secondly, the headline refers to “complex astronomy”. The astronomy concerned should have been too complex for these primitive cave men.Researchers from the University of Edinburgh, examining yet again the cave drawings at Lascaux, France, determined that these early people understood the precession of the Earth’s orbit, and an ancient comet strike.We have discussed before that the reason these people were living in caves is not because they were primitive, but because they had only just arrived at the area, having migrated after the Tower of Babel incident. The drawings show how highly civilized they were, and their knowledge of complex astronomy confirms this. These astounding examples of cave art and science are fully understandable within a biblical worldview, whereas those using an evolutionary worldview are constantly taken by surprise.We must constantly remind ourselves that it was by the hand of our Magnificent Creator God that all things came to be!!! |
| 12/23/2023 | The red panda has to be one of the world’s most attractive animals, with a cute white face and a ginger red body. As its name suggests, it was once thought to be closely related to the giant panda, with whom it shares a number of traits, including a diet of bamboo. However, the giant panda has been placed in the same family as bears, while the red panda was thought to have been part of raccoon family. Even evolutionists now think the relationship between giant pandas and red pandas is remote, and the red panda has now been placed in a family all of its own, with no other extant species – called ailuridae. Creationists treat ailuridae as a baramin, and it causes us no problem to accept that this baramin is a single stick in the creationist orchard of life – a baramin containing only one species.Red pandas are supposed to be a good proof of evolution. Evolutionists like to class them as meat eaters because of their teeth and claws. However, their diet consists almost entirely of bamboo. If this is supposed to be the result of the upward march of evolutionary natural selection, then it seems to be an unusual route. Their bodies cannot digest bamboo well, so they have to eat a great deal of it in order to get the nutrients that they need.The uniqueness of the red panda is, however, the sort of thing we would expect in a creation made by our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 12/22/2023 | “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” We’ve all heard this familiar saying. In the case of the sun’s fire, scientists expect to find not smoke but tiny particles called neutrinos. The problem is, most of those neutrinos are missing.It was once thought that the sun’s heat was produced as its powerful gravity caused it to collapse in on itself. But as the theory of evolution became popular, this theory fell out of favor. Those who promoted evolution knew that their theory was more believable if they said the sun was millions or billions of years old. However, if the sun’s heat came from gravity collapse, it could not possibly be that old.So when scientists learned about nuclear energy, they proposed the theory that the sun’s energy comes from nuclear forces. This would give them their billions of years. The problem is, the sun’s nuclear engine should be turning out a large number of neutrinos. Scientists find only about one-third to one-fourth of the neutrinos that should be there. This mystery is so troubling that scientists have changed their theories about how the sun produces its energy every year or two for over a quarter of a century! Some of them admit that they really don’t know how the sun produces its energy.The sun is a vital blessing to us. And here we see another blessing, for the sun also keeps us humble. Our Magnificent Creator God has so wonderfully created the sun that even our best scientific minds can’t figure out how it works! |
| 12/21/2023 | Scientists have, for the first time, successfully communicated with honeybees in their own language! Scientists have for some time known how to interpret many of the elements of the bees’ so-called “waggle dance.” This dance is used by scouts to communicate the location of food sources to the food gatherers in the hive.A couple decades ago, researchers decided to see if they could confirm their understanding of bee communication. But how do you talk to a bee and get confirmation that she understood what you said? Scientists decided that the only way to do this was to build a robot bee through which they could communicate. The first attempts at building a robot bee acceptable to real bees did not work well. Early models were viciously attacked.Scientists finally perfected a computer-controlled robot bee that real honeybees accepted. These scientists describe honeybee language as elegant and precise. Yet they found they had learned enough bee language to communicate successfully a food source and its location to real bees. They also discovered that they have much more to learn about bee language. As a result, it may someday be possible for farmers to direct bees to crops that need pollination.Just as bees can best understand other bees, we humans can best understand other humans. That explains why, when our Magnificent Creator God wished to communicate with us, He became a human being. That human, Jesus Christ, taught us about God; and He also made peace with God for us, making possible the forgiveness of our sins. |
| 12/20/2023 | We have long known that the community within a honeybee hive divides the labor among specialized workers. There are scouts who search for food. Nurses tend the young. Some bees specialized in cleaning. There are even undertaker bees who remove and dispose of dead members of the hive.Scientists have now discovered that honeybee colonies also have brigades of specialized “soldiers.” These bees often seem to be sitting around, not doing much. In fact, they have only one duty – attack large intruders. It appears that these bees are fed and cared for by the hive members while they wait for the alarm. Should a raccoon, bear or human threaten the hive, thousands of soldier bees swarm around the enemy and sting.Soldiers have been well-known members of ant and termite colonies. However, up to now, they have never been confirmed in honeybee hives. The universal need for soldiers for protection among social insects reminds us that some things are universal in this world. These soldiers are not responsible for a bear’s attack on the hive. Nor are human soldiers who follow just war principles responsible for human war.Humanity’s greed and lack of love for others cannot be abolished by getting rid of armies. Rather, greed, theft and the need for protection remind us that we are not what God intended us to be. The solution lies not in denying reality, but in returning to our Magnificent Creator God through the forgiveness of our sins as made possible by Jesus Christ. |
| 12/19/2023 | How many different scents do you think your nose is able to smell? The answer is about 10,000. How does your nose tell the difference between a rose and a skunk? Until only recently, scientists really weren’t sure.Now we know that humans and mammals detect smells by using at least 1,000 different genes. These genes are located in every cell in your body, but they are active only in your nose. This discovery, say scientists, gives them their first insight into how smell works. Before this, said one scientist, “We had almost no knowledge of the olfactory system and this really opens up the molecular study of smell in a very fascinating way.”They say that each of the different genes seems designed to respond to a small group of odors. As each group of genes does its part, the entire system is able to recognize everything we can smell. These genes pass signals from the nerve cells in the nose to a small region of the brain called the olfactory bulb. Now that smell genes are identified, researchers say they can begin to understand how odors are detected and how the brain interprets those signals.Our sense of smell relies on a very elegant and sophisticated system. Imagine, 1,000 genes lie at the heart of that system. Each one of those genes is information – a programmed code that is designed to make sense of what we smell. Information, programming and decoding are all terms that assume that we have a highly intelligent Magnificent Creator God who designed our sense of smell! |
| 12/18/2023 | For centuries, Asian cooks have wrapped meat, sushi and candy in bamboo bark. Though the reason for this practice seems to have been forgotten, humans evidently once knew what modern science is rediscovering about bamboo.Chemists have succeeded in extracting the natural chemicals in bamboo bark. What they found was not one or two but four natural chemicals in the bark that inhibit bacteria, especially staph germs. These natural antibacterial agents are now under study for possible use as natural food and cosmetic preservatives. If these natural chemicals can be shown to kill bacteria and yet be harmless to people, the door will be open for an entirely new class of natural food preservatives.The question naturally arises about how Asians originally came to use bamboo in the kitchen. Is it possible that thousands of years ago, when ancestors of today’s Asians headed east from the Tower of Babel, humans knew that bamboo would help keep their food from spoiling?Much of what we are learning today was already known to a humanity that was only a few generations removed from our first and once-perfect parents.Remember that the perfection with which humanity was created by our Magnificent Creator God was more than moral perfection.Because Adam and Eve had a perfect knowledge of God, they also had a perfect understanding of all that He had made. While we cannot be perfect except through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ, it is also true that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom. |
| 12/17/2023 | Some of the most fascinating discoveries in recent years have to do with our growing knowledge of plant communication. New research continues to reveal even more amazing facts about the exquisite intricacy of God’s marvelous work.Naturalists have long noted that plants often choose to grow at precise spacing from each other and plants of other species. Scientists at the University of California at Santa Barbara theorized that this precision might be a result of communication between the roots of these plants. So they devised an experiment to find out. They designed a network of interlocking, partially transparent growth boxes. These boxes allowed them to watch how root growth took place in single plants, two plants of the same species, and plants of different species.They discovered that when burro weed roots neared the roots of the creosote bush, the roots of the creosote bush slowed the growth of the nearing roots. They also discovered that burro weed roots will stop growing when they encounter other burro weed roots. This allows the plants to send their roots out where they will not compete with their own kind. Most astonishing is the discovery that burro weed roots continue to grow if they encounter other roots from their own plant. The amazed scientists noted that this means that even plants may have a sense of self.When the Bible tells us that the whole creation praises its Creator, it certainly suggests that at least every living thing has a sense of itself as well as its Magnificent Creator God. |
| 12/16/2023 | As far as we know, the blue whale is the largest animal that has ever existed. Every statistic that we find about these giants is overwhelming.A blue whale’s tongue is larger than an elephant. Its flipper can be about six feet long – as long as a man is tall. A baby blue whale is the size of two minivans. Their mouths could hold 400 people. Yet the creatures they eat – krill – are only about half an inch long. They swallow vast amounts of water, then filter it back through their baleen – the strange keratin filter-like structure that they have in their mouths.They eat four tons of krill a day. That is 4 million of the tiny creatures. Babies consume 50 to 100 gallons of milk per day. The blue whale’s tail is as wide as a soccer net. One of these whales can dive to nearly 1,000 feet, and they can stay there for 30 minutes, without needing a breath. The water that they blow through their blowhole can jet up to 30 feet high.In short, these are magnificent animals, clearly illustrating the greatness and the beauty of God’s creation. We read in Genesis 1:21 that God made them on the fifth day of creation: “And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly.” The word translated as whales could also refer to other large sea creatures, but it certainly includes these beautiful, amazing giants of the ocean.The blue whale is but one tiny detail our Magnificent Creator God saw fit to be in His Master Design! |
| 12/15/2023 | Could the giant flying fox be a primate? In the 18th century, scientists weren’t quite sure what to do with bats. Some wanted to classify them as primates, while others thought they should have their own category. Since 1780, all 950 known species of bats have been classified in their own category. The bat order is divided into microbats and megabats. Microbats have an average wingspan of less than a foot. Megabats are larger. The giant flying fox has a wingspan of six feet!The evolutionary link between microbats and megabats is dissolving as scientists learn more about them. Although megabats and microbats are very clearly bats, they are constructed in importantly different ways. Microbats rely mainly on echo-location to navigate. Megabats have very large eyes, enabling them to see like owls in low light. The nerves that connect the eyes of microbats to the brain cross. As a result, the image from the right eye goes to the left brain, and the left eye feeds its image to the right brain. However, megabats are wired with both eyes feeding into both sides of the brain. This arrangement is otherwise unique to primates!If bats evolved, these new findings mean that bats must have evolved at least twice! It also means that some bats evolved from monkey-like creatures!It makes far more sense to admire our Magnificent Creator God’s unlimited creativity. We can logically reason that God gave His larger bats eyesight like that of a monkey because their needs are similar.Creation Moments |
| 12/14/2023 | Jesus talked about “the sign of Jonah” when He was being asked about signs. He said it was the only sign that would be given to that generation. He then proceeded to tell them what the sign meant. It refers to the fact that Jonah was inside the big fish for three days and three nights. Jesus related this to Himself by stating that, in the same way, the Son of Man (that is, Jesus) would be in the ground for three days and three nights and then would rise again.By referring this matter to Himself, Jesus was also validating the truthfulness of the account of Jonah and the big fish in Jonah chapter 1. Yet many people prefer to think of the account of Jonah and the big fish as a fairy tale.The Bible has many other examples of God using animals to do His will on different occasions. For example, He made Balaam’s donkey speak in order to get Balaam’s attention and to tell him exactly what he was to say. And He used various animal examples to Job in order to explain how Job had not grasped the purpose of God’s creation.Jonah was taken by the creature to Ninevah – a gentile town, which repented for that time. It is fitting that Jonah was used as a type of the death and resurrection of Christ because it is by Christ’s death and resurrection that all peoples of the world are able to be reconciled to our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 12/13/2023 | A family of fish that live in the depths of the sea actually go fishing – pole, dangling bait and all. This is only natural, since they, like people who go fishing, like to eat fish.This group of fish is collectively called the angler fish. The front dorsal spine in the female angler is located on her head. It is much longer than any of the other dorsal fins and has a fleshy bait on the end. When hungry, she sits very still and dangles the bait in front of her mouth. It doesn’t take long before something swims up to investigate this bait as its possible lunch. But before it can think about taking a sample, the angler has turned the tables and eaten her own lunch.Of course, this system wouldn’t work very well in the pitch darkness one mile below the surface of the ocean without one other special provision. Like many other fish at such depths, the angler is able to generate her own light. In her case, only the bait lights up, so she stays invisible to her victims. The chemical method she uses to create the light is nearly 100% efficient!In His imaginative creativity, God was pleased to place creatures a mile below the surface of the sea. Yet in His mercy He has provided them with everything they need to make their living there. Likewise, you may not know why our Magnificent Creator God has placed you into a particular situation right now. If He so cares for the creatures a mile below the waves, how much more does He care for You. And He has even included a light for you in His Son, Jesus Christ! |
| 12/12/2023 | A revolutionary design in metal-cutting blades is changing the metal-working industry. These blades don’t cut like a knife. Instead, the blade is fixed in one position while the metal to be shaped spins on a lathe. This new-style blade stays sharp six times longer than the old blade design. And where titanium used to make the old-style cutting blades dull almost the second they were used, the new blades last up to 30 minutes.This wonderful new blade was developed by two engineers who got the original idea from a rat. You see, rats’ teeth always have a sharp edge. Engineers learned that this is because their teeth are hard on one side and soft on the other. So as they wear, they always keep a sharp edge. Using this principle for metal-cutting has lowered costs and increased productivity, since the blades don’t have to be changed as often.Beginning in Job 39, God humbles Job with several chapters of questions about the wise designs found in the animal kingdom. God’s message is, “Job, if you think you’re so smart, who created all of this with such wisdom?”Even rats’ teeth are created with such wisdom that, once we learned the principle, our technology was greatly improved. In view of this, it doesn’t seem at all scientific to say that there is no Magnificent Creator God! |
| 12/11/2023 | Evolutionary naturalism paints the picture of life as if it were a haphazard series of accidents that just barely resulted in a range of living things that just manage to survive. This fanciful picture destroys our sense of wonder over the sophisticated engineering designs in nature.Consider the mystery of flight, for example. Some evolutionists suggest that perhaps birds are descended from lizards that fell out of trees a lot. Other evolutionists say that birds came from lizards who grew wings, not for flight but to chase down and catch insects. Yet, they have little to say about the fact that we humans have come by most of our sophisticated knowledge about flight from studying the birds.Then there is the problem, for the evolutionist, of how flight accidentally evolved so many times for so many creatures. Scientists studying the dragonfly are learning even more secrets of flight. Our best high-performance aircraft can barely lift themselves off the ground. However, the dragonfly can lift 15 times his own weight into the air. Scientists have learned that this is because the dragonfly’s wings are designed to create little whirlwinds over their top surfaces. These whirlwinds are the secret to creating incredible lifting power. Ways are now being planned to apply this secret to new aircraft designs.The engineering excellence found in nature and from which we have learned so much even in this day of interplanetary probes is not witness to a mindless process of evolution, but to a wise and mindful Magnificent Creator God. |
| 12/10/2023 | Most people are familiar with the story of Jonah and the whale. However, by calling it a story, some people want to cast doubt upon the key event of the account. Jonah, having run away and boarded a ship bound for Tarshish – probably the same as modern Spain – eventually ends up in the sea, and God sends a whale to swallow him and take him to Ninevah.People throw up all kinds of problems here. How could a large sea creature have swallowed Jonah? Would it not have chewed him first? Would there have been enough room in the creature’s stomach? How did Jonah escape being eaten away by the animal’s digestive juices? And surely there aren’t any large whales of suitable size to be found in the Mediterranean Sea!But I have to throw one big problem back at the naysayers. In Matthew 12:40, Jesus confirms that Jonah was indeed inside the whale for three days and three nights, and then Jesus uses the event to apply to His own death and resurrection to come.The Hebrew word tannin can be translated as large sea creature, as can the Greek word ketos in the Septuagint and New Testament. Therefore, it could apply to a whale, shark or any other large sea creature.The type of creature is not as important as accepting that this event is accurate history because it is in the Bible and its authenticity is underlined by our Magnificent Creator God Himself, Jesus Christ! |
| 12/9/2023 | The strange partnership between the snapping shrimp and the goby is absolutely necessary if both creatures are to survive. The nearly blind shrimp relies on the goby, a small fish, in the same way a blind person relies on his Seeing Eye dog. The goby relies on the safety of the complex tunnel system the shrimp digs.The shrimp is well designed for digging. Once a tunnel is started, the shrimp can dig a burrow large enough for both itself and the goby within a few hours. Each of its five pairs of legs is specialized. The first pair of claws is designed for carrying sediment out of the burrow. The second pair of legs is designed to probe for and clean objects as well as scratching sediment from walls. Pairs three, four and five are walking legs that also work well for scratching material from tunnel walls. On its abdomen, the shrimp has several appendages that allow it to move rapidly to protection. Other appendages can create water currents that shift sand back from the digging site.The snapping shrimp, which is less than two inches long, can dig a system of tunnels covering several square feet within a few days. The burrow will have several entrances, as much as four feet apart. All lead to a chamber at the deepest point of the system.Our Magnificent Creator God has given both the goby and the shrimp different gifts that they both need to live. If they did not share their gifts with each other, neither could survive. |
| 12/8/2023 | The conventional understanding has always been that North America was populated by people who crossed from Asia to Alaska via the Bering Strait and then migrated down the West Coast. Eventually, some of them crossed as far as the eastern coasts of North and South America. Known as the Clovis culture, their descendants produced all the North and South American Indian tribes and nations. The Clovis sites that have been excavated so far have produced distinctive spear points that have become known as Clovis points.That understanding has now been challenged by finds in Virginia. Signs of human habitation have been found at Cactus Hill, which is 45 miles south of Richmond. Researchers have dated the site to be fifty percent older than any known Clovis excavation. Stone points and blades have been found at Cactus Hill which show wear marks typical of hide scraping and butchering. The points and blades are unlike any known Clovis points. However, they do resemble western European blades and points from the same period. These facts have led some researchers to conclude that the site is evidence that ancient Europeans crossed the Atlantic Ocean to begin a settlement in North America. This was long, long before the time of the Vikings or Columbus.When God made Adam and Eve, and again, after the Genesis Flood, God commanded human beings to “fill the earth.” More and more we find evidences that early man obeyed this commandment from our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 12/7/2023 | Late at night, in hundreds of thousands of homes around the country, people are watching a bewildering array of monster movies. In these films, shadowy and not-so-shadowy monsters attack, possess or inhabit their victims. These stories are make-believe. However, in our real world, there is a fungus that does all these things.These fungi grow in and on the bodies of insects. They begin their work when a single fungus spore lands on the body of an insect. The spore germinates by growing thread-like filaments through a weak spot or some other entry point in the insect’s outer shell. Once inside the insect, these thread-like filaments grow into the insect’s nervous system. Scientists have been amazed by the apparent fact that the fungus then seems to take over the insect, actually controlling its movements. It seems that the fungus directs its victim to climb a convenient plant to a height that will make the next generation of spores likely to land on another unsuspecting insect. It is there that the insect dies and the fungus produces its spores.To the evolutionist, the ability of such a so-called “low” form of life to possess and control a more evolved form of life is totally without explanation. To those of us who believe in creation, intelligence is not a matter of evolution. Intelligence is the gift of a Magnificent Creator God. Only He has all intelligence and wisdom. There are no limits to His creativity as He provides His creatures with ways to proclaim Himself as their Creator. |
| 12/6/2023 | Roman Vishniac is a renowned photographer of microscopic scenes. One of his favorite subjects is one of the so-called simplest forms of life. This “simple” life, the protozoan, is supposedly the ancestor of all living things. However, Vishniac has noted that the protozoan is neither simple nor archaic in character. This creature carries out all the functions of life that we require millions of cells to sustain – all within a single cell.There is a parallel in technology. The first adding machines were large and heavy contraptions. As these mechanical adding machines became smaller, they had to be more cleverly designed because they were smaller. The first electronic calculators were even smaller and lighter than their mechanical brothers. But they were still much larger and simpler than calculators today. As calculators have decreased in size, they have had to be more cleverly designed because they are smaller.Vishniac has learned that the so-called “simple” one-celled creatures are not simple at all. This is because they must carry out the business of life within the limits of their small size. This has not swayed him from evolution. However, this fact has convinced him that current theories are wrong. You see, evolution is in trouble if there are no “simple” forms of life. We believe that this clear evidence that there are no simple forms of life – evidence powerful enough to sway the experts – supports the Bible’s claim that all forms of life were created in finished form by a wise Magnificent Creator God! |
| 12/5/2023 | Have you ever wondered why it is that ducks can spend all day in near-freezing water, and it doesn’t seem to bother them? For that matter, birds never seem to be bothered about cold feet. If we ran around in the ice and snow with bare feet, it wouldn’t be very long before we had a good case of frostbite. So why don’t birds need socks?Birds have a network of arteries that take the blood down to their feet. These arteries are interwoven with the veins that return the blood from the feet. This network of arteries and veins is called a “wonder net.” The blood going down the arteries is hot at 106 degrees, but the temperature of the blood returning in the veins may be as cool as 37 degrees as it leaves the foot. The warm blood reheats the cold blood coming from the foot before it enters the body. The result is that the bird loses very little body heat, and the blood going into the foot never becomes dangerously cold in normal winter weather.The wisdom of this design is obvious. Could birds have survived having their feet frozen off before they learned to evolve this special arrangement? Hardly! The most reasonable conclusion is that there is a Magnificent Creator God Who cares for all His creation, including you and me! |
| 12/4/2023 | The exotic Venus flytrap is an insect-catching plant and a wonder of God’s engineering. For example, these meat-eating plants usually live in mineral-poor soils, but by catching their own lunch, they actually provide their own fertilizer.Up until now, scientists have not fully understood what causes the trap of the flytrap to close so rapidly on its victim. They knew that when an insect trips the little trigger hairs inside the trap, those hairs send an electric impulse to the cells on the outside of the trap.Now it has been learned that this impulse almost instantly causes the outer cells of the trap to secrete acid. The acid breaks down the cell walls and they expand at high speed, causing the trap to close. The more the insect fights the trap, the more tightly it closes. Six to twelve hours later, after lunch is digested, the trap receives chemical signals from inside – the carnivorous plant’s version of a burp – and opens to await the next meal.The Venus flytrap is a glowing example of what Scripture is talking about when it says that the works of the Lord are manifold – that He has made so much variety and so many ways of providing for living things. Truly, our Magnificent Creator God’s imagination and creativity are a wonder to behold! |
| 12/3/2023 | There’s an old saying that people seldom remember how rapidly the job was done, but they do appreciate good workmanship. However, the staggering variety and number of things created by God did not limit the elegance of His fine workmanship.The relationship between the snapping shrimp and a fish called the goby is a good example of the Creator’s attention to the finest detail. The snapping shrimp has very poor eyesight, while the goby has excellent eyesight. Both share the same burrow, which is dug by the shrimp and guarded by the goby.The shrimp uses the goby as a blind person uses a Seeing Eye dog. Whenever the shrimp is outside its burrow, it always keeps one antenna on the goby. The shrimp stays hidden inside the burrow if the goby should temporarily swim away. When danger approaches, the goby signals and disappears inside the burrow. The shrimp is right behind him.Neither the goby nor the shrimp can survive without each other, so pairs are established for life when both goby and shrimp are very young. In order for this system to work, both goby and shrimp reproductive systems, which differ greatly, are synchronized so that shrimp and goby youngsters are ready to pair at the same time.This astonishing relationship shows us how our Magnificent Creator God’s standards of excellence bring His love to every corner of the creation. |
| 12/2/2023 | Roman Vishniac is a renowned photographer of microscopic scenes. One of his favorite subjects is one of the so-called simplest forms of life. This “simple” life, the protozoan, is supposedly the ancestor of all living things.However, Vishniac has noted that the protozoan is neither simple nor archaic in character. This creature carries out all the functions of life that we require millions of cells to sustain—all within a single cell.There is a parallel in technology. The first adding machines were large and heavy contraptions. As these mechanical adding machines became smaller, they had to be more cleverly designed because they were smaller. The first electronic calculators were even smaller and lighter than their mechanical brothers. But they were still much larger and simpler than calculators today. As calculators have decreased in size, they have had to be more cleverly designed because they are smaller.Vishniac has learned that the so-called “simple” one-celled creatures are not simple at all. This is because they must carry out the business of life within the limits of their small size. This has not swayed him from evolution. However, this fact has convinced him that current theories are wrong. You see, evolution is in trouble if there are no “simple” forms of life.We believe that this clear evidence that there are no simple forms of life—evidence powerful enough to sway the experts—supports the Bible’s claim that all forms of life were created in finished form by a wise Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 12/1/2023 | The bombardier beetle has a powerful and complex system for protecting himself from enemies. Glands within the beetle produce a mixture of two hydroquinone compounds and hydrogen peroxide. These chemicals must be held in separate chambers because when they come into contact with each other, they react. When the beetle is threatened, the chemicals are mixed in a third chamber, where a third chemical is added and an explosive reaction takes place. This reaction forces the caustic solution out through a special “nozzle.” The beetle is skilled in aiming this nozzle at its enemy.If this system is missing any of its parts, it is more than worthless to the beetle; the chemicals alone are very dangerous. So this sophisticated defense system could not have evolved in stages. Imagine the poor beetle who evolved the ability to produce the chemicals but hadn’t yet evolved the right chambers to mix them without blowing itself up. The first time he became alarmed – poof! – no more beetle at all!The bombardier beetle is such a problem for evolutionists that many of them have challenged claims that an explosion takes place. The fact is, the beetle can give you a nasty burn. Even the popular magazine Science Digest explained the bombardier beetle’s defense with the words “explosive reaction.”Clearly, the bombardier beetle is excellent evidence that creatures were originally created in finished form by a wise Magnificent Creator God, without the need for stages of improvement. |
| 11/30/2023 | Perhaps to get evolutionists to rethink their beliefs, the Creator has provided many inventive and unique structures. There are so many of these that even the longest evolutionary timescale could not account for their evolution.Let’s focus on a few examples among frogs for a moment. Frogs need to keep their eggs moist. Water must be available for their tadpoles. Frogs have many different ways of doing this.The Venezuelan marsupial frog has a skin pouch, just like a kangaroo, except hers is on her back. The female marsupial frog stores her eggs in the pouch. There is plenty of moisture and protection in her pouch for the young frogs. When they are mature, the skin pouch sort of unzips, and out come up to 20 young frogs!The Brazilian tree frog uses a completely different approach. This frog actually builds a pool of mud, near a pond, in which it lays its eggs. This pool is usually built so that by the time the eggs have developed into strong tadpoles, the regular tropical rains wash the pool, along with the swimming tadpoles, into the pond!In Job 38:36, the Lord asks Job, “Who has put wisdom in the mind?” It is obvious to us that only the Lord, the Magnificent Creator God of heaven and earth, could have given frogs these abilities and this knowledge. And it is just as clear that it is nonsense to say that chance and time made these frogs and their abilities. |
| 11/29/2023 | Beavers are widely known for their huge constructions. However, beavers build more than just dams.The beaver is quite an engineer. When building a dam, a beaver first rams poles into the bed of his waterway. The poles are placed on an angle to increase holding power and are then rammed into the waterway bed, thick end first. This basic skeleton is then reinforced with twigs, leaves, mud and stone. It’s not unusual for the beaver to use forked branches to further anchor his construction to trees and boulders.One beaver dam was over 1,800 feet long, 9 feet high and 18 feet wide. It was strong enough for a horse and rider to use as a natural bridge.Large trees brought down for use in construction are not dragged by the beavers to their project. Instead, beavers dig overland channels and float the trees to the main body of water where they are working. These channels can be 1,000 feet long.Our wise Magnificent Creator God gave so much intelligence and wisdom to the animal kingdom that often we can learn some things from the animals. Rather than supporting the idea of evolution, with its claim that there is progressively greater intelligence in higher creatures, the beaver supports the idea that the Creator is the source of all intelligence. |
| 11/28/2023 | Imagine a beetle that can move across the surface of water without any body movement. Some creatures have been given such ability and skill that it should be clear to even the most skeptical person that their Maker and Teacher is greater than any human being.One such creature is the large-eyed rove beetle. Like many other insects, this beetle can walk on water. The surface tension of the water is enough to support the beetle on top of the water, given the special structure of his legs and feet. Should you see the large-eyed rove beetle, you will notice that he moves across the water, stops, turns, and starts up again without moving any part of his body. How does this work?The large-eyed rove beetle has special glands that produce a chemical – something like detergent – that changes the surface tension of the water. When the surface tension of the water near his back feet is different from the surface tension of the water near his front feet, the beetle is pulled forward.Such a unique method of movement requires sophisticated knowledge of both hydrodynamics and chemistry. Since the beetle is obviously not that smart, it is no wonder that evolutionists often speak of evolution as though it were intelligent and able to create such wonders. However, it makes a lot more sense to talk about a wise, personal Magnificent Creator God than it does to speak of the wisdom of a mindless force like evolution. |
| 11/27/2023 | Intelligence – as much as is needed and no more – is generously found throughout the creation. So we cannot say that intelligence alone makes humans special.Consider the weaverbird. The weaverbird nest consists of woven strips of fiber and grass. Using beak and feet, the male weaverbird uses both loops and knots to weave his hanging nest. Then the nest must be inspected by a prospective mate. If she doesn’t like the nest’s construction, she will turn down the hopeful mate. The male must then tear down his work and start over. Some males have been observed constructing and tearing down their nests two dozen times before finding a prospective mate who is satisfied with his work. Some weaverbirds actually build huge cities of nests protected by a woven roof. One roof over a weaverbird city was 15 feet across!Human intelligence spans much more than animal intelligence. However, what sets us apart from animals is the fact that our Magnificent Creator God made us to have a special relationship with Him. And even when Adam and Eve placed their will above God’s Word, He still loved us enough to pay the highest price to restore us to Himself. Jesus Christ lived in perfect obedience to God for us and then suffered the penalty of our disobedience against God. In His resurrection from the dead, all those who embrace Christ in faith receive the promise of being made new creations again – beginning right here in this life! That’s the wide gulf between humans and animals! |
| 11/26/2023 | The Aye-Aye is one of the strangest little monkeys on earth. Its peculiar features bear witness that it was specially designed and created to fill a unique niche in nature, not a chance development of evolution.The Aye-Aye lives in Madagascar. This small creature has huge ears and an extra long middle finger. It crawls on trees, tapping on them to find grubs. The Aye-Aye’s ears are so sensitive that it can tell if there is a grub hole hidden beneath the surface of the wood. Not only can the Aye-Aye sense a grub hole an inch within the wood, it can even tell if there is a grub in the hole. When the Aye-Aye senses a grub, it chews into the wood with forward curving, incisor teeth. However, the Aye-Aye doesn’t have to worry about wearing its teeth down chewing on the tough wood. Its special incisor teeth are unique among primates. They continue to grow throughout the Aye-Aye’s life, just like a rodent’s teeth. Once down to the grub, it uses its elongated middle finger to fish the grub out for lunch. Researchers have noted that the Aye-Aye fills the same niche as the woodpecker in an environment where there are no woodpeckers.The Aye-Aye has clearly been specially designed with unique features so that it can make its living in a niche that is unfilled in its own environment. Our Magnificent Creator God not only made the earth to be inhabited, He designed His creatures to make a living within it!!! |
| 11/25/2023 | Dinosaur fossil hunters and paleontologists have long debated whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or cold-blooded. With reptile characteristics, it was expected that dinosaurs would be cold-blooded. Yet, some evidence indicated that they must have been warm-blooded. The problem is that their soft organs are almost never fossilized.The words “almost never” are important. A dinosaur liver and diaphragm – the soft parts – were recently found fossilized. Fossilization of soft organs is a testimony to the rapidity with which the dinosaurs were encased in the mud that later hardened to rock. Now a fossilized dinosaur heart has been discovered in South Dakota within the chest cavity of a fossilized Thescelosaurus. Once researchers recognized that the stone within the chest cavity might be a heart, they x-rayed it. X-rays revealed a four-chambered heart with one aorta. Reptiles have two aortas. In other words, Thescelosaurus had a heart constructed like the hearts of warm-blooded animals. This kind of heart is more efficient in delivering oxygen to the body. This in turn supports a more active lifestyle and higher metabolic rates. Based on the structure of Thescelosaurus’s heart, many scientists have concluded that it was indeed warm-blooded.The same Magnificent Creator God who made the dinosaur’s heart is able to heal our hearts when they are broken by sorrow. It is He Who heals our broken hearts through the forgiveness of sins that is found in Jesus Christ. |
| 11/24/2023 | “Survival of the fittest” is an essential principle of evolution. This principle has not only been applied to animals, but also to human beings, as a social theory.Scientists, however, are learning that cooperation among animals is more often the rule. Researchers studied seven pairs of unrelated capuchin monkeys in the lab to see if they would cooperate. The monkey pairs were then placed in an enclosure, one on each side of a mesh screen. Two clear bowls of apple slices were placed on trays designed to be accessible to the monkeys when they pulled on a bar.However, the acquired food would be given only to one of the monkeys. When the bar was set so that both monkeys had to pull on it to get the food, the monkey that received the food shared with his helper. When the bar was set so that one monkey could access the apple slices, he generally didn’t share. Clearly, the monkey who came into control of the food with help, felt that it was his duty to reward his helper. Instead of talking about “survival of the fittest,” one researcher spoke about the “deep evolutionary roots of cooperation.” Unfortunately for evolutionary scientists, real science very often gives good evidence that contradicts the theory of evolution, but we seldom hear of this.Our Magnificent Creator God has designed the creation so that we sometimes need help, or have the opportunity to help others. He did this to remind us that He is our ultimate Helper!!! |
| 11/23/2023 | Bees depend on a good memory of their surroundings to make the thousands of trips necessary to keep their hive in operation. Each day a single bee must make trips to hundreds of flowers, some as far as a mile from the hive. Scientists have long wondered how the tiny bee can remember what may be dozens of square miles of territory.When a bee finds a good source of nectar, she returns to the hive and does a dance for the other bees. This dance tells them where a new find is located. Researchers have studied this in detail and can now interpret these dances.Researchers from Princeton University tricked a bee into dancing out a location that turned out to be in the middle of a nearby lake. After receiving the message, the other members of the hive simply ignored their fellow worker. She kept dancing, but no one would believe her. Only later, when the dance clearly said that the flowers were on the opposite side of the lake, did the other bees pay attention and check out the flowers.Researchers are now wondering whether bees keep a mental map of their surroundings. How else could they tell when someone gives them a false location? Evolutionary researchers are trying to figure out how such an “evolutionarily simple” creature as the bee could be so intelligent. However, the Bible makes clear that intelligence is not related to evolution. It is the gift of an all-wise and Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 11/22/2023 | When we compare ourselves with many of the other living things on this Earth, our abilities are not very impressive.A camel can carry 1,000 pounds 30 miles through the desert every day. As a human being, I become tired even thinking about walking 30 miles with empty pockets. The ostrich can run at 30 miles per hour, faster than my car might go during rush hour. The Indian swift can fly at more than 100 miles per hour. The elephant’s trunk has 40,000 muscles. This is 70 times the number of muscles in your entire body. Yet, his trunk can bulldoze a tree or pick up a pin. Many of us can’t do either one on the first try.The flea can jump 350 times its own length, a total of 13 inches. This is equivalent to our jumping 2,000 feet into the air. Most of us can’t jump more than two feet off the ground. As it works out, 13 inches is just about right if you are looking for a nice warm dog on which to raise a family. A tiny insect called the midge beats its wings an amazing 133,000 times per minute. That’s a hundred times faster than you can blink your eye.Humans can use their superior intellect to build the machines they need. With those machines, they can outdo any one of these creatures. But God simply made a gift to the animals of the specialized abilities they needed. God expects us to follow His example and design and build what we need. If we look carefully, we will see that our Magnificent Creator God has given us all the materials and all the ideas we need within the creation. No one can say that He does not care what we do with our lives on Earth. |
| 11/21/2023 | Most mammals in Australia are marsupials. That is one of the things that makes Australia so special to those of us elsewhere in the world who may never have been there. Think of Australia, and most of us think of kangaroos, koalas, and wombats. Placentals, like rats and rabbits, are normally pests, introduced in colonial times.Yet, there is one placental mammal that is associated with Australia, as a typical wild animal. That is the wild dog known as the dingo. Dingoes are widespread across the continent. There are not many competitors to the dingo, as carnivores. Dingoes can, therefore, be a problem for livestock but are also considered useful in their depredation on rabbits.It appears genetically that dingoes contain the mDNA haplotype A29. MDNA refers to mitochondrial DNA, always inherited from the mother, while a haplotype indicates a group of genes inherited from a single parent. Therefore, it can be assumed that all dingoes are descended from a single female. Of course, we know that, biblically, this will apply to all kinds of animals, but in the case of dingoes, this would appear to be a good deal more recent, generationally, than the animals which emerged from the Ark. This first dingo probably came from SE Asia, and was likely brought to Australia with human migration because the same haplotype is found in 70% of domestic dogs.This makes dingoes a case study in miniature of how populations of animals could quickly migrate and establish their place in eco-systems after the Flood and we owe all wonders of creation to our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 11/20/2023 | The human body, according to medical science, contains 37 trillion cells that reproduce themselves every seven years. Each one of the 37 trillion cells performs 10,000 different chemical functions, according to the late Dr. Ralph Byron of the City of Hope Cancer Clinic, yet all of them just work together to produce a healthy body.When you get tired, you cannot say, “All right, cell number 843,291, get to work. You are not pulling your share of the load.” All of these cells are linked together by nerve cells tied into a brain containing 100 billion cells (give or take a few). I hesitate to say that these 100 billion nerve cells are tied into a computer‑like device called the human brain since the human brain is far superior to any computer ever created. The eminent neuroscientist Moshe Abeles of Bar-Ilan University in Israel says, “Our ability to understand all the details of even one brain is practically zero.”Only our Magnificent Creator God in all of His brilliance and magnificence could have thought up such a complex piece of creation!!! |
| 11/19/2023 | Modern researchers are learning that bacteria are not a simple form of life. Rather, a bacterium is a tremendously complex creature that thinks. Scientists have discovered that bacteria actually have molecule-sized sensors. Some of these sensors act as eyes, while others act as ears. A dozen other proteins have been discovered that receive the information gathered by the bacteria’s “eyes” and “ears.” The collected information is then processed the same way your brain gathers and makes sense of information.Bacteria have specialized senses and a brain. In fact, bacteria are better at sensing some things than you and I are. A bacterium can, for example, sense the difference between two parts and one part in 10,000. This is the same as if you could tell the difference between one jar with 9,999 pennies and another jar with 10,000 pennies!The idea that bacteria are just “simple” forms of life comes from evolution. Growing research is showing that even one-celled creatures are not simple at all. Think of it. Every single-celled bacterium must accomplish, within that one cell, all the tasks we accomplish using the trillions of cells in our bodies. Eating, digestion, metabolism, waste removal, reproduction – and even thinking – all take place within a single cell! There is no such thing as a simple form of life.Science certainly argues against the idea that life began by accident. What science is learning urges us to think about the wise and thoughtful Magnificent Creator God Who made us!!! |
| 11/18/2023 | Previously we discussed the fact that the famous scientist and mathematician Isaac Newton believed Genesis to be a true book. We would probably not want to follow Newton’s theological beliefs, given that they were Arian in nature, but it is not often realized that Newton wrote extensively on the subject of history. His views on history were broadly the same as those of Archbishop James Ussher, whose calculations Newton endorsed.The significance of Newton’s historical writings is that he compared biblical timescales to those of other nations and peoples. He started with an important presupposition – that the biblical timescale is correct. He then proceeded into a great deal of detail about historical chronologies, showing that the comparison with a biblical timescale makes sense and works. Newton went to a great deal of effort to describe his calculations for four key dates: the birth of Lycurgus (708 BC), the return of Heraclides (825 BC), the Fall of Troy (904 BC), and the Argonaut (933 BC). He tied in these dates with biblical dates, relating them, for example, to the death of King Solomon in 975 BC.It is notable that Newton’s chronologies do not agree with many of the modern chronologies which are used to undermine faith in the Bible. For example, it is often said that the dating of the Egyptian Pharaohs cannot be reconciled with a biblical timescale. Newton was, however, familiar with these non-biblical timescales and argues strongly and convincingly for the biblical approach.Newton’s writings are not Gospel. But when such a noted figure of genius produces calculations which are consistent with the Bible’s presentation of the works of our Magnificent Creator God, it is time that people took notice. |
| 11/17/2023 | Scientists are learning that even the lowly bacteria have mind and memory. New research is showing that mind, memory, brain, and personality did not evolve. These can be found in the lowliest of creatures, including the bacteria.Another sign of intelligence in a life form is the ability to learn. Using attracting and repelling substances, scientists have found that bacteria can learn about their surroundings and draw conclusions. Follow-up tests showed that they later remember what they learned. Scientists have even found that younger bacteria learn better than older ones. If some things are not learned when young, they never can be learned! It seems that it’s hard to teach an old bacterium new tricks!The biggest surprise of all came when scientists discovered that bacteria have what the researchers called individual personality. They are mystified about how bacteria, each with the same genetic structure and from the same environment, can develop unique quirks in behavior. Because we find individual personality even in the lowly bacteria, we know that did not evolve.That God would give even a bacterium the gift of personality shows us something about His mind toward us. Nothing is so small or unimportant that it escapes His attention. Since He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to rescue us from the decay that is in the world because of sin, there is no force too great for Him to overcome. Surely He is a Magnificent Creator God of details as well as a God of love, Who is concerned about every individual among us. |
| 11/16/2023 | Many plants reproduce simply by cloning. The most obvious example of cloning that comes to mind is the dandelion. Unless you get all of the main dandelion root out of the ground, each piece of the root can sprout another dandelion, identical to the parent.The walking fern reproduces by cloning too. It moves across the countryside, albeit slowly, by producing new plants. A new plant is generated wherever the tips of its leaves touch the ground. Each new plant is identical to the parent.The bamboo reproduces through underground stems. The different species of bamboo live anywhere from 20 to 120 years. During their life spans, they produce only by cloning. Then they flower – once. When it’s time for a particular species to flower, every member of that species, no matter where in the world it grows, flowers gloriously. Each flower can have as many as 100 pollen-producing stamens. Once the seeds are ripe and scattered, every member of that species in the world dies. At this point, the entire species exists only in the scattered seeds.This is brilliant testimony to a recent creation of all bamboos at the same time. If evolution produced them and the forces of change worked on them for millions of years, one would think that all members of the same species would no longer be in perfect synchronization. Bamboo makes a strong testimony for the recent creation reported in Genesis by our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 11/15/2023 | Many plants, especially orchids, offer different ploys to fool insects into pollinating them. Each of these ploys shows planning, design and the ability to create the design that will work. That there are so many examples makes it impossible for any rational person to believe that mindless, impersonal forces could have made these plants.Four different groups of orchids produce flowers that look so much like the female of the insect that pollinates them that pollinators will try to mate with them. The Brassia orchid found in southern Florida produces a flower that mimics the prey of its pollinator, the spider wasp. The flower is so designed that as the wasp stings its supposed prey – really the flower – pollen is deposited on his head. The pollen is then carried to a nearby female flower and deposited in just the right place during another attack.Another orchid imitates an aggressive swarm of bees as it blows in the wind. The strongly territorial bees that live in the area swarm and attack the flowers. In the process, they transfer the pollen from male to female flowers. The female flowers of at least 50 species of Mexican orchids offer fake pollen to lure pollen-eating insects that have been feeding on male flowers. Many of these insect-orchid relationships are so tightly interlocked that neither could survive without the other.This speaks of a planned creation by our Magnificent Creator God. It also bears witness that all forms of life came into being in a relatively short time, not over millions of years as evolutionists would have it. |
| 11/14/2023 | The largest known beetle in the world is the aptly named goliath beetle. This African beetle can become almost as large as a mouse. Dinosaurs were not the largest animals ever to live. The great blue whale holds that honor. The smallest mammal in the world is smaller than many insects. A newly discovered species of bat in Thailand weighs only six one-hundredths of an ounce.Such extremes might lead some to wonder whether those giant insects we see in the movies would ever develop. Could a spider grow to be as large as a house?You will be happy to know that no spider or any other insect could grow as large as a house. We can be sure of this because of the way insects breathe. Insects breathe through small tubes along their bodies. These tubes provide oxygen directly to their internal tissues. If an insect were to grow too large, these tubes could not get enough oxygen to the tissues. This is because the larger the creature, the more internal living tissue that requires oxygen. You and I have lungs that provide a network of surfaces equal to the size of a tennis court. An insect our size would need a body that has the surface area of a tennis court, too, which is an impossibility.Even though different creatures have different organs to supply their needs, each creature has just the right organs for its needs. This is a sign of our Magnificent Creator God’s wisdom. This fact also tells us that living things are not related to each other by evolution. |
| 11/13/2023 | Researchers are learning that bacteria have senses similar to our hearing and sight. Bacteria even have a brain that receives information from their senses. They can make decisions. However, all of this is not enough to explain how bacteria can make the decision to swim toward food.When you want a candy bar, you know where to find one, even if you must go to the nearest store. You might also hope that your dentist doesn’t see you buying candy. All of this involves memory, which has long been considered a basic part of the mind.Researchers, using various solutions of substances that attract or repel bacteria, have now learned that bacteria do indeed have both long-term and short-term memories. They remember where goodies are to be found. Once a bacterium develops a strategy for dealing with the unknown, it will remember what to do next time.This finding shocked researchers. They know that when you or I decide to retreat or advance, at least hundreds and probably thousands of brain cells are involved. The one-celled bacteria can make the same decision based on past memories. Are there really “simple” forms of life that serve as the living traces of evolutionary development? Scientists haven’t found any yet. According to the Bible’s account of creation by our Magnificent Creator God, we don’t expect them to find any simple forms of life from which we can be traced. |
| 11/12/2023 | How does your nose work? Medical researchers admit that they don’t know. Your nose performs an extremely unlikely job. It senses invisible molecules in the air and turns each molecule into a unique sensation that is sent to the brain. If the fact that molecules floating in the air could be detected was a modern discovery, it would be hailed as the scientific discovery of the century!Medical researchers do know that the roof of your nose cavity contains about 10 million cells that are wired directly into the brain. The nervous system that connects your olfactory cells to your brain is so large and complex that its surface area is several times greater than the surface area of your body. Researchers also know that your sense of smell is important to your sense of taste. For example, that’s why – when you have a head cold – chocolate tastes like a flavorless waxy paste. In this case, what you taste in your mouth has more to do with what is happening in your nose than on your tongue.Many creatures, including birds, can sense odors. Farmers who had difficulty with birds eating as much as 20 percent of the food set out in feed lots discovered that birds hate the smell of grapes. When they laced the feed with grape scent, the birds left it alone, but the cattle didn’t seem to mind.Every detail in the creation of everything that has ever existed was planned and created by our Magnificent Creator God who knew that no detail was too small!!! |
| 11/11/2023 | What keeps the big-bodied bumblebee with those little, stubby wings in the air? Scientists are still trying to learn the secret of bumblebee flight. And while they are learning some astonishing things about the bumblebee, they still don’t know how he does it.Scientists have been testing bumblebees by monitoring their energy use, placing them in wind tunnels, and measuring their oxygen use. No, they haven’t been able to make little oxygen masks for the bees – bumblebees have 24 breathing holes.Scientists have learned that a flying bumblebee flaps its wings 160 times per second and consumes the equivalent of 180 candy bars per hour! A flying bee uses the same amount of oxygen for its body weight as a flying bird or a bat. However, unlike birds, the bumblebee uses no more oxygen when hovering than when flying. This is only one of the discoveries that contradict scientists’ theories. In fact, the director of the latest studies on bumblebee flight admits that they still have no idea how the bumblebee stays in the air. He warns other scientists to stop using the current theories on the subject because they are far too simple.Of course, our Magnificent Creator God knows how to make a bumblebee fly, even if the best of modern science can’t figure it out. This should help us to see that when scientists tell us they have figured out how everything could have been made without a Creator, they don’t know what they’re talking about.In His great magnificence God did it and that’s all there is to it!!! |
| 11/10/2023 | There are at least four known types of orchids that effectively pretend to be female insects. They are so good at this ruse that they attract the attentions of male pollinators. That there are four different varieties that do this makes it clear that this trickery isn’t due to chance. The Creator does not want us to make the mistake of thinking that He doesn’t exist.The Ophrys group of orchids are found around the Mediterranean. Ophrys orchids produce flowers that look and smell so much like the insect that pollinates it, the male insect will mate with the flower. In the process, he picks up the pollen. The pollen is then carried to another flower, thus ensuring the next generation. The flowers even mimic the sheen of the female’s wings, the furry fringe on her abdomen, and her antennae.The Cryptostylus orchid, found in New Guinea and Australia, mimics the female of the wasp that pollinates it. The Cryptostylus does this so perfectly that it even moves as a mating female. The same is true of an orchid found in the Andes that is pollinated by a particular species of fly through the same ruse.Our Magnificent Creator God has much more in mind than just letting us know that He is. He wants us to see that He is intimately involved with His creatures. Through the perfect life of Jesus Christ, and His suffering, death and resurrection, He has removed the final barriers between us and Himself. With the barrier of sin removed by forgiveness, He may be even more intimately involved with each of us on a personal basis. |
| 11/9/2023 | Two groups of tropical vines rely for reproduction on the world’s only known species of pollen-eating butterfly. Neither vine has very showy flowers, nor do their flowers have any scent. However, they don’t need to attract pollinators because the Heliconius butterfly depends on the pollen produced by the vines for its food. So the butterflies don’t go far from their food source.Since the butterfly depends on the pollen, the vines produce many more male flowers than female. This keeps its army of pollinators well fed. Being messy eaters, the butterflies end up with pollen all over them.But what would attract the butterfly to the female flower, which can be up to 20 feet away? Two tricks are used. First, a female flower usually grows close to where a male flower has just withered. Second, the female flower, while producing no pollen, looks just like the male flower to invite the butterfly’s attention.Did you see the intelligence in this arrangement? If only chance were involved, why would the only known species of pollen-eating butterfly be found with the only known vines that rely on their services? This is a very big planet! If there is no design in this arrangement, why should these vines offer female flowers that look like the males so that they will be pollinated? It is so clear that these butterflies were custom-made for these vines, and the vines were made for the butterflies. This is a witness to a personal Magnificent Creator God Who is personally involved in life on Earth! |
| 11/8/2023 | When lost in the forest with no clues to where to go, humans tend to go in circles. And we have brains. Amoebas, which don’t have brains, somehow manage not to end up going in circles when they have no clues where to go.Normally, amoebas look for food by picking up its scent. When amoebas detect something good to eat, they move in its direction by extending parts of its body called pseudopods. However, when there are no scents to follow, many single-celled creatures tend to wander aimlessly. This turns out to be a very inefficient strategy for finding food. That’s because, just like humans, they end up wandering in circles. But after careful study, researchers from Princeton University have concluded that amoebas somehow manage to avoid this problem. Somehow, though they have no brain, they appear to remember where they have been. They suggest that forming pseudopods causes a type of temporary scarring on its cell wall which serves as a type of memory.While amoebas are just looking for food, we ultimately seek an eternity with our Creator. Many people do not know of, or do not believe our Magnificent Creator God’s Word and end up with lives that wander in spiritual circles. But God’s Word brings heaven’s light into our lives which lights the way to heaven through our Lord Jesus Christ. |
| 11/7/2023 | Bees depend on a good memory of their surroundings to make the thousands of trips necessary to keep their hive in operation. Each day a single bee must make trips to hundreds of flowers, some as far as a mile from the hive. Scientists have long wondered how the tiny bee can remember what may be dozens of square miles of territory.When a bee finds a good source of nectar, she returns to the hive and does a dance for the other bees. This dance tells them where a new find is located. Researchers have studied this in detail and can now interpret these dances.Researchers from Princeton University tricked a bee into dancing out a location that turned out to be in the middle of a nearby lake. After receiving the message, the other members of the hive simply ignored their fellow worker. She kept dancing, but no one would believe her. Only later, when the dance clearly said that the flowers were on the opposite side of the lake, did the other bees pay attention and check out the flowers.Researchers are now wondering whether bees keep a mental map of their surroundings. How else could they tell when someone gives them a false location? Evolutionary researchers are trying to figure out how such an “evolutionarily simple” creature as the bee could be so intelligent. However, the Bible makes clear that intelligence is not related to evolution. It is the gift of an all-wise Magnificent Creator God. |
| 11/6/2023 | Perhaps no type of animal has been used more in biological research than the fruit fly. Certain biological processes such as reproduction or genetic replication are similar in most eukaryote organisms, so observing these in fruit flies might, unlikely as it may seem, have implications for how the processes work in humans. The great volume of academic research which uses the fruit fly as the subject can be seen by the fact that, to date, eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded to work involving drosophila.There are several reasons why fruit flies make useful research subjects. From the moment a fruit fly egg has been laid to the moment the adult dies is, on average, about 50 days. The adult flies can mate and lay eggs after just 10 days. This means that three generations can have been studied in a month. A year would yield 36 generations. The effects of inherited genetic problems or defects can, therefore, be analyzed within months, as can the probabilities of genetic problems being inherited by future generations.God has surely designed all that there is for our benefit to help us study and improve our lives in this world. God expects us to use His blessings to help ourselves and to not expect Him to do everything for us. We may need a hole in the ground but our Magnificent Creator God might bless us with a shovel and wisdom to know how to dig!!! |
| 11/5/2023 | Even though many frogs live much of their lives out of the water, they need water to reproduce. This can be a problem since some frogs live in trees and some even live in the desert!For a tree frog, the trip from the treetops to a nearby pool is a long and dangerous journey. However, the Creator cares about all of His creatures. The leaves of the bromeliad that grows in the branches of many trees in the tropical forest form a private pool far above the ground. As a result, mama frog can raise her young without ever leaving the treetops!The desert would seem to offer an even greater challenge for a frog. However, since it pleased the Creator to place frogs in the desert – maybe to challenge the evolutionists – He has also provided for their needs. It may rain only once every two years in the deserts of central Australia. When it does rain, the water-holding frogs emerge from their underground hideaways to lay their eggs in the puddles. Before the puddles disappear, not only do the eggs hatch, but the young grow and develop into frogs that are able to store water until the next rain. As the desert again takes over, the frogs dig themselves back into the ground and go into suspended animation until the next rains come. A year or two later, the new generation will emerge after the next rain to raise their young.Neither chance nor the smartest frog in the world could design or create these abilities. Only a wise Creator could. And if the Creator has provided this much care for frogs, just think of how much more He cares about you and me in our everyday lives! What a Magnificent Creator God He is!!! |
| 11/4/2023 | “And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” Genesis 2:19It surely wasn’t possible, we are often told, for Adam to have given names to all the millions of species of animals that exist on earth in the space of one day. Obviously, they tell us, this means that the Bible is wrong.In fact, the activity was nowhere near as arduous as this accusation suggests. The number of animals would be far less than the estimated 2 million species.Adam did not have to go looking for these animals. God brought them to him. God brought three classes of animals to Adam – livestock, birds of the heavens, and beasts of the field. All of these are vertebrates, whereas 98% of all species are invertebrates. Of the remaining 2% – or 40,000 species – many have developed from others (note: developed, not evolved) by the process of speciation. It is likely that the creatures were all descended from just a couple of thousand baramins, or created kinds.It would not be that difficult for Adam to assign a name to each of the animals that paraded before him, especially as he was created perfect, and unlikely to get tired. Suppose he took five seconds to name an animal. He could have named 2,000 animals in 2¾ hours. You might think such a task would be boring, but it was not onerous and would easily fit with all the other activities occurring on that sixth day of our Magnificent Creator God’s creation, including God making the land animals and making Eve from Adam. |
| 11/3/2023 | Modern researchers are learning that bacteria are not a simple form of life. Rather, a bacterium is a tremendously complex creature that thinks. Scientists have discovered that bacteria actually have molecule-sized sensors. Some of these sensors act as eyes, while others act as ears. A dozen other proteins have been discovered that receive the information gathered by the bacteria’s “eyes” and “ears.” The collected information is then processed the same way your brain gathers and makes sense of information.Bacteria have specialized senses and a brain. In fact, bacteria are better at sensing some things than you and I are. A bacterium can, for example, sense the difference between two parts and one part in 10,000. This is the same as if you could tell the difference between one jar with 9,999 pennies and another jar with 10,000 pennies!The idea that bacteria are just “simple” forms of life comes from evolution. Growing research is showing that even one-celled creatures are not simple at all. Think of it. Every single-celled bacterium must accomplish, within that one cell, all the tasks we accomplish using the trillions of cells in our bodies. Eating, digestion, metabolism, waste removal, reproduction – and even thinking – all take place within a single cell! There is no such thing as a simple form of life.Science certainly argues against the idea that life began by accident. What science is learning urges us to think about the wise and thoughtful Magnificent Creator God Who made us! |
| 11/2/2023 | It has long been assumed that the Siberian woolly rhinoceros died out because of hunting by people. Evolutionists have, in the past, assumed that the extinction of the woolly rhino coincided with the migration of humans to Siberia. Now a new theory has emerged, which was headlined on the Science Daily website as “Ancient genomes suggest woolly rhinos went extinct due to climate change”. Analyses of the genetic make-up of woolly rhinos have been compared with alleged evolutionary dates. As creationists, we do not accept such dates because the Bible makes it clear that the world was created about 6,000 years ago, while the Flood occurred about 4,400 years ago.However, we do agree with the article that woolly rhinos had a common ancestor with the extant five species of rhinoceros. This is not evolution; as we have frequently explained, God made animals according to their kind [baramin] so that, after the Flood, they could cope with changing environmental conditions, adapting by a process called speciation.Scientists now suggest that the end of the Ice Age could have created conditions with which the highly cold-adapted woolly rhino would not have been able to cope. The world would have gone through the Ice Age in the centuries immediately following the Flood as water vapor from warm oceans condensed in a cold atmosphere.As is always the case, good modern scientific research on issues, like the extinction of the woolly rhino, is consistent with the biblical account of the world from our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 11/1/2023 | There are five known groups of orchids that throw their pollen. These flowers are designed with mechanical flower structures that work as triggers. Some types use a bee’s back to trigger the pollen discharge. Another uses, yes, the bee’s knees.The Catasetum orchid produces a few male flowers that have a strong scent that attracts a male bee. When the bee lands and trips the pollen trigger, it is showered with that flower’s entire hope for the next generation. Then the flower stops producing any scent and begins to wither and die. Now it’s up to the bee to find a female flower for the pollen.It’s not easy for the bee to find a female flower because the Catasetum orchid produces even fewer females than males. But the female flower has an even stronger scent than the male, and it lives longer. If the bee finds a female flower, the future of this orchid is bright because the fruit that results produces three million seeds! That’s as if nearly half the population of New York City had the same mother and father!Because the designs of the Creator are carried out amid such beauty and with such careful planning, evolutionists often talk about evolution as if it were a living being. However, the truth is clear. Our Magnificent Creator God is not merely a distant God up in His heaven. Think of it for a moment. If He is so concerned about such detail even among plants and insects, how much more concerned is He about the details of our lives! |
| 10/31/2023 | Even though many frogs live much of their lives out of the water, they need water to reproduce. This can be a problem since some frogs live in trees and some even live in the desert!For a tree frog, the trip from the treetops to a nearby pool is a long and dangerous journey. However, the Creator cares about all of His creatures. The leaves of the bromeliad that grows in the branches of many trees in the tropical forest form a private pool far above the ground. As a result, mama frog can raise her young without ever leaving the treetops!The desert would seem to offer an even greater challenge for a frog. However, since it pleased the Creator to place frogs in the desert – maybe to challenge the evolutionists – He has also provided for their needs. It may rain only once every two years in the deserts of central Australia. When it does rain, the water-holding frogs emerge from their underground hideaways to lay their eggs in the puddles. Before the puddles disappear, not only do the eggs hatch, but the young grow and develop into frogs that are able to store water until the next rain. As the desert again takes over, the frogs dig themselves back into the ground and go into suspended animation until the next rains come. A year or two later, the new generation will emerge after the next rain to raise their young.Neither chance nor the smartest frog in the world could design or create these abilities. Only a wise Magnificent Creator God could. And if the Creator has provided this much care for frogs, just think of how much more He cares about you and me in our everyday lives! |
| 10/30/2023 | Hydraulic machines are part of our everyday lives. When you step on the brakes in your car, brake fluid, which cannot be compressed, is forced from a cylinder into the braking mechanism attached to your wheels. Hydraulic mechanisms work because fluid cannot expand, but it will easily flow to areas where there is less pressure.However, humans were not the first to invent uses for this principle. The spider uses it all the time. The spider has his skeleton on the outside of his body and his muscles inside his skeleton. Since our muscles are outside our skeleton, we can use muscles both to bend our legs and stretch them out. However, the spider’s arrangement allows his muscles only to bend his leg. When he wants to straighten out his leg to take another spidery step, he pumps fluid into his leg, and the leg joint hinges open.The North American dwarf mistletoe builds up hydraulic pressure equal to that found in a truck tire. It uses that stored pressure to catapult its seeds up to 50 feet at a speed close to 60 miles per hour. The squirting cucumber, found in the Mediterranean area, uses the same principle to propel its seeds up to 40 feet.Who would believe that the brake system in an automobile came together by chance and natural forces? Neither does it make sense to believe that spiders, other animals and plants came about without a Designer and Magnificent Creator God. |
| 10/29/2023 | A study by the University of Lincoln in England suggested that “global sea level rise of at least 10 centimetres by the end of the 21st century if global warming trends continue”. Their conclusions, they report, are based on 30 years of scientific data in Greenland, looking at the melting of the glaciers on that large ice-covered island. The Greenland ice sheet, say the researchers, could potentially raise the entire world’s sea level by seven meters (about 23 feet). One is reminded of a recent documentary by a well-known politician turned environmental campaigner, which started with film of rapidly running water plunging through holes in the ice of Greenland’s glaciers. The unspoken implication was that this was caused by global warming.In fact, there has been no global warming trend over the last 30 years.Global temperatures rose rapidly in the ‘90s, followed by cooling from 2000 to 2009, with temperatures only picking up again in the last few years. So the idea that the next 80 years of the 21st century will see steady temperature increases is not based on evidence.As is so often the case, we need to recall that God has promised there will be no catastrophic climate change again until the end of the world.Our Magnificent Creator God has plans for every need we will ever have!!! |
| 10/28/2023 | The old joke goes: “What’s gray and has a trunk? A mouse on vacation.” Of course, we know that this is really the description of the world’s favorite animal, the elephant.In another posting, we described Rudyard Kipling’s Just So story about the Elephant Child. But the evolutionary account of how the elephant got its trunk is not really more rational. A look at articles on Wikipedia about the evolution of the elephant reveals that they do not want to discuss the evolutionary appearance of the trunk. But the BBC was not so reticent. On their science pages, they maintain that the evolution of the trunk was essential so that the elephant could get enough food into its mouth to maintain its large size. One biological “law” suggests that the mouth and skull volumes alone are not as large as would be expected on the basis of how much elephants eat. Therefore, the trunk is necessary to get the food into the mouth faster.There are significant problems with simple evolutionary explanations like this. Does the elephant have a trunk because of its large size? In which case, why did the large trunkless elephant not die out? Or did it develop a trunk first, which caused subsequent generations to grow larger? If so, what was the supposed evolutionary advantage of that first trunk if the animal was not large? As we frequently observe, evolution is supposed to proceed one step at a time, not two!We would observe that these features of an elephant are exactly what we would expect since they are designed by our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 10/27/2023 | There are between 10,000 and 15,000 species of orchids. While you surely are not familiar with all of them, it sounds strange to talk about orchid behavior. This huge variety of orchids offers a multitude of different flower shapes, colors and sizes. Each unique shape, color and size is perfectly suited to the bees, butterflies, bats, moths, flies and birds that are involved in that orchid’s pollination.Those orchids that use birds as pollinators have no scent. Instead, they offer the brightest of colors, appealing to the birds’ strongest sense. Evolutionists call this “co-evolution.” However, giving it a name doesn’t explain it. How did these orchids know that the bird’s strongest sense is sight? And how were these orchids able to perform genetic recombination on themselves so that they could develop their bright colors? No, giving something a scientific-sounding name doesn’t make naturalistic claims any more scientific.Or consider the bee orchid. It offers a flower that looks like a female bee. The purpose here is to attract male bees to a position that will load them with pollen. How can it be scientific to suggest that a plant purposely restructured itself to fool bees into pollinating it?Our Magnificent Creator God has purposely made it impossible to explain the creation without Him. He did this not simply so that we would see that He is real. His purpose is much greater. God seeks a personal relationship with you and has made that possible through the saving work of His Son, Jesus Christ, for us. It is to Christ that He would ultimately draw our attention. |
| 10/26/2023 | It sounds silly to ask whether bacteria can think. However, science has known for more than 100 years that the little guys can indeed think. Experiments in 1883 conducted by Wilhelm Pfeffer showed that bacteria will swim toward good food like chicken soup and away from poisons such as mop disinfectant.Pfeffer also learned that bacteria can make decisions. He made sure that his bacteria knew the location of chicken soup. Then he separated them from it with a mild mixture of disinfectant. He found that the little fellows would swim as fast as they could through the disinfectant to get to the soup.This is the same type of decision-making process you and I go through every day. We often tolerate the unpleasant to arrive at the pleasant. As a result of this research, scientists today talk about bacteria actually making decisions.These conclusions amaze most people. That’s because we have been trained to think of intelligence in an evolutionary context. The “higher” or more evolved a creature is, the smarter we expect it to be. However, if we recognize, as the Bible says, that all life is the product of an intelligent Creator, we should not be surprised to find that intelligence has nothing to do with evolution. Every creature has been given as much intelligence as it needs by our Magnificent Creator God Who truly cares for every living creature – even bacteria! |
| 10/25/2023 | While the Bible teaches us that sex is a wonderful gift of God, evolutionists believe that sexual reproduction should not have evolved. According to evolutionists, if sexual reproduction were to develop, evolution is supposed to get rid of it.To make matters worse, immobile plants use sexual reproduction. This creates a problem in transferring the male genes to the female for fertilization. Just to confound things even more, God uses insects and even mammals to transfer the pollen. Since evolutionists believe that plants were around for many millions of years before animals, evolutionists have yet another problem.The European family of the Arum lilies attracts beetles and flies. When one of the insects lands on a flower, he finds a slick, oil-coated surface and ends up sliding down into a chamber filled with small hairs. Imprisoned, he finds a sweet sap that makes good eating. While he is gorging himself on the sap and getting sticky in the process, the male part of the flower showers him with pollen. The next day, the sticky, pollen-coated insect finds that the doors to his prison are open. So he flies off to another flower to unwittingly deliver his load of pollen!It sounds like science fiction to say that a flower figured out how to do this. And it certainly doesn’t sound very scientific to say that nobody designed and made this complex arrangement. As we learn more about these arrangements in nature, it becomes even more clear that an all-wise Magnificent Creator God designed these beautiful, symbiotic relationships between different members of the living kingdom. |
| 10/24/2023 | The Willow Warbler is a fascinating little bird. It weighs less than half an ounce and measures about four inches from its beak to the tip of its tail. It likes open woodland with small trees and is particularly happy in areas managed by humans, such as coppices and young plantations. An attractive little bird, it is greenish-brown from above, with a yellowish underside. Willow Warblers are part of the Leaf Warbler, or Phylloscopus baramin (or created kind). There are 77 species in this baramin, but we are interested here in the species Phylloscopus trochilu, especially the subspecies Phylloscopus trochilus yakutensi. This remarkable little bird has the most incredible migratory behavior, traveling about 7,500 miles.Between April and August, the birds live and breed in eastern Siberia. But as the breeding season ends, the birds begin their long, exhausting flight to sub Saharan Africa, where they will spend the winter, from October through March. Then they begin the 7,500-mile journey back to Siberia. That’s 15,000 miles per year!The reason why these warblers migrate seems clear. They do not like the extremes of temperatures in either of their homes. But a more interesting question is: How do they know where to migrate?Scientists have speculated that migratory birds are able to sense the Earth’s magnetic field. But those scientists who believe in evolution have to explain how the birds used trial and error to find their routes. A more logical explanation is that our Magnificent Creator God designed them to achieve this remarkable feat!!! |
| 10/23/2023 | There are between 10,000 and 15,000 species of orchids. While you surely are not familiar with all of them, it sounds strange to talk about orchid behavior. This huge variety of orchids offers a multitude of different flower shapes, colors and sizes. Each unique shape, color and size is perfectly suited to the bees, butterflies, bats, moths, flies and birds that are involved in that orchid’s pollination.Those orchids that use birds as pollinators have no scent. Instead, they offer the brightest of colors, appealing to the birds’ strongest sense. Evolutionists call this “co-evolution.” However, giving it a name doesn’t explain it. How did these orchids know that the bird’s strongest sense is sight? And how were these orchids able to perform genetic recombination on themselves so that they could develop their bright colors? No, giving something a scientific-sounding name doesn’t make naturalistic claims any more scientific.Or consider the bee orchid. It offers a flower that looks like a female bee. The purpose here is to attract male bees to a position that will load them with pollen. How can it be scientific to suggest that a plant purposely restructured itself to fool bees into pollinating it?God has purposely made it impossible to explain the creation without Him. He did this not simply so that we would see that He is real. His purpose is much greater. Our Magnificent Creator God seeks a personal relationship with you and has made that possible through the saving work of His Son, Jesus Christ, for us. It is to Christ that He would ultimately draw our attention!!! |
| 10/22/2023 | When you look through the Bible, there is one interesting land animal type which is missing. There is nothing to say that a pair of them got on the Ark, but we have to assume that they did so that they survived until after the Flood. Today, we just think of them strutting around the world, vicious killers, waiting for the opportunity to spring on their next prey. I am, of course, referring to that well-known animal kind – the cat. Yes, that’s right. The word “cat” is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. Yet we know they exist, and, as land animals, they must have been created on Day Six.The Bible, however does mention two members of the cat kind – lions and leopards. But these animals can hybridize and are therefore part of the same kind. Therefore, the Ark would not have had a pair of lions and a pair of leopards – just a pair of cats.What sort of cats would have been on the Ark? They would not have been tiny domestic cats which have insufficient genetic material to be responsible for all of today’s cat species. It is more likely that the cats on the Ark were similar to the famous Saber-toothed cats found in the fossil record. Recent scientific studies on a semi-fossilized saber-toothed cat bone found in the North Sea shows that it shared a common ancestor with all other cat species. This DNA research is compelling.Descent and variation happen within a kind, but not from creatures of other kinds – exactly what we expect when we assume the Bible, inspired by our Magnificent Creator God, to be true!!! |
| 10/21/2023 | Honeydew is one of the favorite foods of ants. There are a number of insects, including thorn bugs and aphids, who consume so much honeydew that they cannot digest it all. These insects are designed so that ants can milk them for the excess honeydew, just the way a farmer obtains milk from a cow.Many species of ants will milk the honeydew-collecting insect by stroking its abdomen with its antennae. The tree hopper actually slows its secretion of excess honeydew to the milking ant so that the ant may drink his honeydew “fresh from the cow” so to speak.Some ants construct clay pens and shelters in which they enclose certain species of aphids, just as a farmer keeps his herd. Like the farmer, the ants move the aphids to better honeydew feeding sites when necessary. They also care for the aphid eggs during the winter.Herding ants are even better able to protect a young tree hopper than its parents. It is not unusual for a tree hopper parent to turn her young over to herding ants because they can do more for the young insect than she can.Such complex relationships between creatures points to a God who is both a Magnificent Creator God and Teacher—even to insects!!! |
| 10/20/2023 | Some creatures are so bizarre that they suggest a lesson to us. Yet even in their strangeness we see that they have been perfectly provided for by their Creator.One such example is the three-toed sloth. It rarely moves, spending about 18 hours a day sleeping upside down in a tree. When it does bother to move, it is in ultra-slow motion. It is not unusual for the three-toed sloth to take 30 seconds to shift one leg a few inches.The three-toed sloth doesn’t do well on the ground because he can’t walk or even crawl. If a sloth is placed on the ground it v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y pulls itself along on its belly to a tree. However, sloths hang effortlessly in the trees even when asleep. Their grasp of the tree is so solid that they continue to hang in the trees even after they have died.Even though sloths are hunted for food by the South American Indians, the three-toed sloth is the most abundant tree-dwelling mammal in South America’s forests. Despite the seeming helplessness of the three-toed sloth, it is doing well because it has been perfectly designed for its life. Because its life doesn’t seem to amount to much, it was named after one of the so-called seven deadly sins. This creature, that has a face only a mother could love, presents an image with which neither child nor adult would want to be associated. Yet the sloth still has God’s care. The nearly helpless condition of the sloth reminds us that we are completely helpless when it comes to our relationship with our Magnificent Creator God. Only because of the efforts of our Savior, Jesus Christ, do we have peace with God. Let’s not be slothful about telling others of the forgiveness of sins! |
| 10/19/2023 | Bees depend on a good memory of their surroundings to make the thousands of trips necessary to keep their hive in operation. Each day a single bee must make trips to hundreds of flowers, some as far as a mile from the hive. Scientists have long wondered how the tiny bee can remember what may be dozens of square miles of territory.When a bee finds a good source of nectar, she returns to the hive and does a dance for the other bees. This dance tells them where a new find is located. Researchers have studied this in detail and can now interpret these dances.Researchers from Princeton University tricked a bee into dancing out a location that turned out to be in the middle of a nearby lake. After receiving the message, the other members of the hive simply ignored their fellow worker. She kept dancing, but no one would believe her. Only later, when the dance clearly said that the flowers were on the opposite side of the lake, did the other bees pay attention and check out the flowers.Researchers are now wondering whether bees keep a mental map of their surroundings. How else could they tell when someone gives them a false location? Evolutionary researchers are trying to figure out how such an “evolutionarily simple” creature as the bee could be so intelligent. However, the Bible makes clear that intelligence is not related to evolution. It is the gift of an all-wise and Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 10/18/2023 | You might not think of the crocodile as a particularly loving creature. In reality, the crocodile is among the most gentle and loving of parents. Mama crocodile lays between 40 and 80 eggs in a large nest. For the 90 days they take to hatch, she will keep close watch over them, even foregoing food so as not to leave the nest unattended. Even the father stays close to guard the eggs that are a delicacy to many animals.At the end of this three-month watch the babies begin to chirp from within their eggs. Before long there may be dozens of babies chirping from the nest of buried eggs. This brings the mother who carefully uncovers the eggs, one by one.The young are only nine inches long and weigh just four ounces. Yet the gentle and loving mother picks up each one and with a flip of her head places them in a special pouch in her mouth.When some of the young have trouble breaking out of their shell, mama picks up the eggs and delicately works the eggs inside her mouth with her tongue, freeing the imprisoned baby. Once collected, all the young are taken to a special protected nursery where they will be just as carefully tended for months. Most amazing is that, should the mother not be present to tend to the hatchling chores, the father offers the hatchlings the very same help and care!Our Magnificent Creator God loves even the crocodile! And his acceptance of you and me, because of what Jesus Christ has done for us, is an even greater wonder than the loving crocodile! |
| 10/17/2023 | Imagine a huge living creature covering about one square mile and made up of almost a third of a billion cells. Imagine each of those living cells being able to move about independently of the others.No, it’s not the plot of a new science fiction movie. Some scientists have suggested that ant colonies may be thought of as one large living organism. They suggest this because of the way individual members within ant colonies behave. Ant colonies have many kinds of members, each with its own specific task. The soldier ants in a colony have extra large heads and heavy-duty jaws for fighting. Other ants are concerned only about finding and returning food. Still other workers do nothing but process and store food.Within the colony another caste of ants does nothing but tend the eggs. Others prepare the food for the larvae and deliver it to other specialized ants who do nothing but feed the next generation.If this sounds complex, imagine the largest known ant colony. This Japanese ant colony has an estimated 306 million worker ants, and more than a million queens. The colony occupies 45,000 interconnected underground nests that range over about a square mile!There is obviously intelligent design and control behind ant society—intelligence not found in ants or in nature itself. This intelligence comes from outside nature. Here is yet another witness that no concern of any living thing is too small for our Magnificent Creator God’s complete attention! |
| 10/16/2023 | How would you like to be a dental hygienist for a crocodile? That’s how the crocodile bird makes his living.Of course you do need to know that the crocodile bird doesn’t show up to do his work with any drills or needles. He and the crocodile are on good terms with each other. After eating, the crocodile climbs the river bank and relaxes with his mouth open. The little crocodile bird enter the crocodile’s mouth to clean up the scraps that are left. While the crocodile bird makes most of his living as sort of a crocodile dental hygienist, he also helps keep the crocodile free of pesky insects that lodge in his skin.The crocodile also receives one other service from the crocodile bird. Whenever the bird senses approaching danger, he gives his sharp warning call and flies off. The crocodile, now warned, can quickly roll over into the water where virtually no animal can get the best of him.This is but one of many unlikely cooperative arrangements that we find in the plant and animal kingdoms. Every one of these relationships speaks for a Magnificent Creator God and against the idea that either these creatures, or their cooperation, evolved naturally. Evolutionists have written whole books on the subject. Yet they don’t seem satisfied that they have explained how these relationships could develop through evolution. We agree that they have no explanation. Nor are they likely to find one as long as they deny a Creator who cares for His creation. |
| 10/15/2023 | The human body, according to medical science, contains 37 trillion cells that reproduce themselves every seven years. Each one of the 37 trillion cells performs 10,000 different chemical functions, according to the late Dr. Ralph Byron of the City of Hope Cancer Clinic, yet all of them just work together to produce a healthy body.When you get tired, you cannot say, “All right, cell number 843,291, get to work. You are not pulling your share of the load.” All of these cells are linked together by nerve cells tied into a brain containing 100 billion cells (give or take a few). I hesitate to say that these 100 billion nerve cells are tied into a computer‑like device called the human brain since the human brain is far superior to any computer ever created. The eminent neuroscientist Moshe Abeles of Bar-Ilan University in Israel says, “Our ability to understand all the details of even one brain is practically zero.”Only our Magnificent Creator God in all of His brilliance and magnificence could have thought up such a complex piece of creation!!! |
| 10/14/2023 | Modern researchers are learning that bacteria are not a simple form of life. Rather, a bacterium is a tremendously complex creature that thinks. Scientists have discovered that bacteria actually have molecule-sized sensors. Some of these sensors act as eyes, while others act as ears. A dozen other proteins have been discovered that receive the information gathered by the bacteria’s “eyes” and “ears.” The collected information is then processed the same way your brain gathers and makes sense of information.Bacteria have specialized senses and a brain. In fact, bacteria are better at sensing some things than you and I are. A bacterium can, for example, sense the difference between two parts and one part in 10,000. This is the same as if you could tell the difference between one jar with 9,999 pennies and another jar with 10,000 pennies!The idea that bacteria are just “simple” forms of life comes from evolution. Growing research is showing that even one-celled creatures are not simple at all. Think of it. Every single-celled bacterium must accomplish, within that one cell, all the tasks we accomplish using the trillions of cells in our bodies. Eating, digestion, metabolism, waste removal, reproduction – and even thinking – all take place within a single cell! There is no such thing as a simple form of life.Science certainly argues against the idea that life began by accident. What science is learning urges us to think about the wise and thoughtful Magnificent Creator God Who made us!!! |
| 10/13/2023 | The yellow-and-black striped archer fish shops among the insects that land on branches overhanging his pond in the peaceful waters of the East Indies. Sometimes he will wait under a branch until something that would make a good lunch lands on it.When the archer fish finds a tasty-looking insect, he shoots an accurately aimed stream of water at his prey, knocking the insect into the water. Before the insect has a chance to recover, the archer fish has eaten him and is looking for dessert.The archer fish has a deep groove in his mouth. When he places his tongue against this groove, he ends up with a blow tube that is about 1/16-inch in diameter. Compressing his gills forces pressurized water through the blow pipe. The rounded tip of the archer fish’s tongue acts as a valve so the fish can shoot a few small bursts or one long stream of water at his prey. The archer fish seldom misses if his prey is within four feet.This simple but elegant arrangement is testimony to a wise and skillful Creator. Neither mindless chance evolution nor any fish could be smart enough to design this system. Nor could any fish redesign his normal mouth tissues into this unique tool. Here we see that our Magnificent Creator God even cares about providing the needs of a fish. We know that He cares even more about our lives! In fact, He has said so! |
| 10/12/2023 | Our Creator’s work reflects some of His incredible inventive creativity. In Matthew 6:30 Jesus reminds us how God provides for all the needs of all His creatures. Each creature is perfectly suited for its life, even if that requires special creativity from God.Many of the creatures that live in the deepest and darkest parts of the sea are equipped with lights. One has a very bright headlamp to light its way. Others have lights on their tails, jaws or sides. The light they produce, as the light produced by the firefly, is a cold light. The light is generated when chemicals manufactured by the creatures are mixed together.Or consider the small bird that has an “engine” powerful enough to allow it to fly for 10,000 or more miles. The construction of the bird’s heart differs from yours and mine in important ways. However, we couldn’t get by with the bird’s heart just as it couldn’t get by with ours.While it seems strange to think of the penguin as a bird that flies under water, that’s exactly what it does. The penguin can reach speeds of 30 miles per hour underwater, as fast as the fastest marine mammal, the dolphin.All of us would benefit from looking at the creatures around us a little more closely. If we do, we will learn a little more about our Magnificent Creator God. As we learn about their lives and how they are provided for, we will, as one early scientist put it, learn to think God’s thoughts about the natural world after Him! |
| 10/11/2023 | How does your nose work? Medical researchers admit that they don’t know. Your nose performs an extremely unlikely job. It senses invisible molecules in the air and turns each molecule into a unique sensation that is sent to the brain. If the fact that molecules floating in the air could be detected was a modern discovery, it would be hailed as the scientific discovery of the century!Medical researchers do know that the roof of your nose cavity contains about 10 million cells that are wired directly into the brain. The nervous system that connects your olfactory cells to your brain is so large and complex that its surface area is several times greater than the surface area of your body. Researchers also know that your sense of smell is important to your sense of taste. For example, that’s why – when you have a head cold – chocolate tastes like a flavorless waxy paste. In this case, what you taste in your mouth has more to do with what is happening in your nose than on your tongue.Many creatures, including birds, can sense odors. Farmers who had difficulty with birds eating as much as 20 percent of the food set out in feed lots discovered that birds hate the smell of grapes. When they laced the feed with grape scent, the birds left it alone, but the cattle didn’t seem to mind.Every detail in the creation of everything that has ever existed was planned and created by our Magnificent Creator God who knew that no detail was too small!!! |
| 10/10/2023 | What keeps the big-bodied bumblebee with those little, stubby wings in the air? Scientists are still trying to learn the secret of bumblebee flight. And while they are learning some astonishing things about the bumblebee, they still don’t know how he does it.Scientists have been testing bumblebees by monitoring their energy use, placing them in wind tunnels, and measuring their oxygen use. No, they haven’t been able to make little oxygen masks for the bees – bumblebees have 24 breathing holes.Scientists have learned that a flying bumblebee flaps its wings 160 times per second and consumes the equivalent of 180 candy bars per hour! A flying bee uses the same amount of oxygen for its body weight as a flying bird or a bat. However, unlike birds, the bumblebee uses no more oxygen when hovering than when flying. This is only one of the discoveries that contradict scientists’ theories. In fact, the director of the latest studies on bumblebee flight admits that they still have no idea how the bumblebee stays in the air. He warns other scientists to stop using the current theories on the subject because they are far too simple.Of course, our Magnificent Creator God knows how to make a bumblebee fly, even if the best of modern science can’t figure it out. This should help us to see that when scientists tell us they have figured out how everything could have been made without a Creator, they don’t know what they’re talking about.In His great magnificence God did it and that’s all there is to it!!! |
| 10/9/2023 | Many Christians are willing to accept what Genesis has to say about creation with one exception. They don’t want to accept the six days as literal, natural, approximately 24-hour days. Did you know that there are other important portions of Scripture that depend on those six days being literal and normal days?In Exodus 20:11 the Lord is giving the Ten Commandments to Moses. The Lord is explaining the principle of the Sabbath in this verse. God’s explanation says that man shall work six days and rest on the seventh because God Himself made the heavens and the earth in six days and rested on the seventh. Therefore He blessed the seventh day. This truth is repeated in Deuteronomy 5:13.Surely no Christian would argue that the Ten Commandments are poetry to be taken figuratively. The Lord is confirming here that His work of creation really occupied six normal days and that He rested on the seventh normal day. If these days were actually long ages, then we should work for six long ages before we take some rest. We can be sure that this is not what the Lord has in mind.If the Ten Commandments should not be interpreted literally because of this connection with creation, where does that leave us? Surely the creation days, by our Magnificent Creator God’s own confirmation and commandment to us, are literal, natural, approximately 24-hour days! |
| 10/8/2023 | Perhaps no type of animal has been used more in biological research than the fruit fly. Certain biological processes such as reproduction or genetic replication are similar in most eukaryote organisms, so observing these in fruit flies might, unlikely as it may seem, have implications for how the processes work in humans. The great volume of academic research which uses the fruit fly as the subject can be seen by the fact that, to date, eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded to work involving drosophila.There are several reasons why fruit flies make useful research subjects. From the moment a fruit fly egg has been laid to the moment the adult dies is, on average, about 50 days. The adult flies can mate and lay eggs after just 10 days. This means that three generations can have been studied in a month. A year would yield 36 generations. The effects of inherited genetic problems or defects can, therefore, be analyzed within months, as can the probabilities of genetic problems being inherited by future generations.Our Magnificent Creator God has surely designed all that there is for our benefit to help us study and improve our lives in this world. God expects us to use His blessings to help ourselves and to not expect Him to do everything for us. We may need a hole in the ground but God might bless us with a shovel and wisdom to know how to dig!!! |
| 10/7/2023 | Even though many frogs live much of their lives out of the water, they need water to reproduce. This can be a problem since some frogs live in trees and some even live in the desert!For a tree frog, the trip from the treetops to a nearby pool is a long and dangerous journey. However, the Creator cares about all of His creatures. The leaves of the bromeliad that grows in the branches of many trees in the tropical forest form a private pool far above the ground. As a result, mama frog can raise her young without ever leaving the treetops!The desert would seem to offer an even greater challenge for a frog. However, since it pleased the Creator to place frogs in the desert – maybe to challenge the evolutionists – He has also provided for their needs. It may rain only once every two years in the deserts of central Australia. When it does rain, the water-holding frogs emerge from their underground hideaways to lay their eggs in the puddles. Before the puddles disappear, not only do the eggs hatch, but the young grow and develop into frogs that are able to store water until the next rain. As the desert again takes over, the frogs dig themselves back into the ground and go into suspended animation until the next rains come. A year or two later, the new generation will emerge after the next rain to raise their young.Neither chance nor the smartest frog in the world could design or create these abilities. Only a wise Creator could. And if the Creator has provided this much care for frogs, just think of how much more He cares about you and me in our everyday lives! What a Magnificent Creator God He is!!! |
| 10/6/2023 | “And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” Genesis 2:19It surely wasn’t possible, we are often told, for Adam to have given names to all the millions of species of animals that exist on earth in the space of one day. Obviously, they tell us, this means that the Bible is wrong.In fact, the activity was nowhere near as arduous as this accusation suggests. The number of animals would be far less than the estimated 2 million species.Adam did not have to go looking for these animals. God brought them to him. God brought three classes of animals to Adam – livestock, birds of the heavens, and beasts of the field. All of these are vertebrates, whereas 98% of all species are invertebrates. Of the remaining 2% – or 40,000 species – many have developed from others (note: developed, not evolved) by the process of speciation. It is likely that the creatures were all descended from just a couple of thousand baramins, or created kinds.It would not be that difficult for Adam to assign a name to each of the animals that paraded before him, especially as he was created perfect, and unlikely to get tired. Suppose he took five seconds to name an animal. He could have named 2,000 animals in 2¾ hours. You might think such a task would be boring, but it was not onerous and would easily fit with all the other activities occurring on that sixth day of God’s creation, including Our Magnificent Creator God making the land animals and making Eve from Adam. |
| 10/5/2023 | It has long been assumed that the Siberian woolly rhinoceros died out because of hunting by people. Evolutionists have, in the past, assumed that the extinction of the woolly rhino coincided with the migration of humans to Siberia. Now a new theory has emerged, which was headlined on the Science Daily website as “Ancient genomes suggest woolly rhinos went extinct due to climate change”. Analyses of the genetic make-up of woolly rhinos have been compared with alleged evolutionary dates. As creationists, we do not accept such dates because the Bible makes it clear that the world was created about 6,000 years ago, while the Flood occurred about 4,400 years ago.However, we do agree with the article that woolly rhinos had a common ancestor with the extant five species of rhinoceros. This is not evolution; as we have frequently explained, God made animals according to their kind [baramin] so that, after the Flood, they could cope with changing environmental conditions, adapting by a process called speciation.Scientists now suggest that the end of the Ice Age could have created conditions with which the highly cold-adapted woolly rhino would not have been able to cope. The world would have gone through the Ice Age in the centuries immediately following the Flood as water vapor from warm oceans condensed in a cold atmosphere.As is always the case, good modern scientific research on issues, like the extinction of the woolly rhino, is consistent with the biblical account of the world from our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 10/4/2023 | Nearly 50% of the people in the United States, including many Christians, believe that God did indeed create all things. Unfortunately, they believe He used evolution as His instrument of creation.Christians often adopt this idea because they are unaware that there are thousands of scientists who believe God created the entire universe supernaturally in six days. Many are unaware that good scientific reasons exist to accept God’s work of creating just as it is described in the Bible. While it doesn’t get much media attention, the work being done by these creation scientists is challenging evolutionism. The work of creationists has appeared in scientific journals. Scientists who believe the truth of the Bible’s account of creation are involved in the professional scientific dialogue that continually goes on among science professionals.At seminars conducted by these scientists, I have heard smiling, joyful people telling everyone they saw, “I didn’t know that the Bible offered an intelligent alternative to evolution. I didn’t know there were so many well-educated scientists who were creationists! What I have heard today shows me that I can be a more faithful follower of my Lord Jesus Christ and give up belief in evolution!”There are no ‘facts” that demand that an educated person accept evolution as fact. The testimony of thousands of believing scientists confirms this. The instrument of our Magnificent Creator God’s creation was not natural law, but His Son, who took our form upon Himself in the Person of Jesus Christ for our salvation! |
| 10/3/2023 | A study by the University of Lincoln in England suggested that “global sea level rise of at least 10 centimetres by the end of the 21st century if global warming trends continue”. Their conclusions, they report, are based on 30 years of scientific data in Greenland, looking at the melting of the glaciers on that large ice-covered island. The Greenland ice sheet, say the researchers, could potentially raise the entire world’s sea level by seven meters (about 23 feet). One is reminded of a recent documentary by a well-known politician turned environmental campaigner, which started with film of rapidly running water plunging through holes in the ice of Greenland’s glaciers. The unspoken implication was that this was caused by global warming.In fact, there has been no global warming trend over the last 30 years.Global temperatures rose rapidly in the ‘90s, followed by cooling from 2000 to 2009, with temperatures only picking up again in the last few years. So the idea that the next 80 years of the 21st century will see steady temperature increases is not based on evidence.As is so often the case, we need to recall that God has promised there will be no catastrophic climate change again until the end of the world.Our Magnificent Creator God has plans for every need we will ever have!!! |
| 10/2/2023 | The Willow Warbler is a fascinating little bird. It weighs less than half an ounce and measures about four inches from its beak to the tip of its tail. It likes open woodland with small trees and is particularly happy in areas managed by humans, such as coppices and young plantations. An attractive little bird, it is greenish-brown from above, with a yellowish underside. Willow Warblers are part of the Leaf Warbler, or Phylloscopus baramin (or created kind). There are 77 species in this baramin, but we are interested here in the species Phylloscopus trochilu, especially the subspecies Phylloscopus trochilus yakutensi. This remarkable little bird has the most incredible migratory behavior, traveling about 7,500 miles.Between April and August, the birds live and breed in eastern Siberia. But as the breeding season ends, the birds begin their long, exhausting flight to sub Saharan Africa, where they will spend the winter, from October through March. Then they begin the 7,500-mile journey back to Siberia. That’s 15,000 miles per year!The reason why these warblers migrate seems clear. They do not like the extremes of temperatures in either of their homes. But a more interesting question is: How do they know where to migrate?Scientists have speculated that migratory birds are able to sense the Earth’s magnetic field. But those scientists who believe in evolution have to explain how the birds used trial and error to find their routes. A more logical explanation is that our Magnificent Creator God designed them to achieve this remarkable feat!!! |
| 10/1/2023 | There are between 10,000 and 15,000 species of orchids. While you surely are not familiar with all of them, it sounds strange to talk about orchid behavior. This huge variety of orchids offers a multitude of different flower shapes, colors and sizes. Each unique shape, color and size is perfectly suited to the bees, butterflies, bats, moths, flies and birds that are involved in that orchid’s pollination.Those orchids that use birds as pollinators have no scent. Instead, they offer the brightest of colors, appealing to the birds’ strongest sense. Evolutionists call this “co-evolution.” However, giving it a name doesn’t explain it. How did these orchids know that the bird’s strongest sense is sight? And how were these orchids able to perform genetic recombination on themselves so that they could develop their bright colors? No, giving something a scientific-sounding name doesn’t make naturalistic claims any more scientific.Or consider the bee orchid. It offers a flower that looks like a female bee. The purpose here is to attract male bees to a position that will load them with pollen. How can it be scientific to suggest that a plant purposely restructured itself to fool bees into pollinating it?Our Magnificent Creator God has purposely made it impossible to explain the creation without Him. He did this not simply so that we would see that He is real. His purpose is much greater. God seeks a personal relationship with you and has made that possible through the saving work of His Son, Jesus Christ, for us. It is to Christ that He would ultimately draw our attention. |
| 9/30/2023 | Honeydew is one of the favorite foods of ants. There are a number of insects, including thorn bugs and aphids, who consume so much honeydew that they cannot digest it all. These insects are designed so that ants can milk them for the excess honeydew, just the way a farmer obtains milk from a cow.Many species of ants will milk the honeydew-collecting insect by stroking its abdomen with its antennae. The tree hopper actually slows its secretion of excess honeydew to the milking ant so that the ant may drink his honeydew “fresh from the cow” so to speak.Some ants construct clay pens and shelters in which they enclose certain species of aphids, just as a farmer keeps his herd. Like the farmer, the ants move the aphids to better honeydew feeding sites when necessary. They also care for the aphid eggs during the winter.Herding ants are even better able to protect a young tree hopper than its parents. It is not unusual for a tree hopper parent to turn her young over to herding ants because they can do more for the young insect than she can.Such complex relationships between creatures points to a God who is both a Magnificent Creator God and Teacher—even to insects!!! |
| 9/29/2023 | You might not think of the crocodile as a particularly loving creature. In reality, the crocodile is among the most gentle and loving of parents.Mama crocodile lays between 40 and 80 eggs in a large nest. For the 90 days they take to hatch, she will keep close watch over them, even foregoing food so as not to leave the nest unattended. Even the father stays close to guard the eggs that are a delicacy to many animals.At the end of this three-month watch the babies begin to chirp from within their eggs. Before long there may be dozens of babies chirping from the nest of buried eggs. This brings the mother who carefully uncovers the eggs, one by one.The young are only nine inches long and weigh just four ounces. Yet the gentle and loving mother picks up each one and with a flip of her head places them in a special pouch in her mouth.When some of the young have trouble breaking out of their shell, mama picks up the eggs and delicately works the eggs inside her mouth with her tongue, freeing the imprisoned baby. Once collected, all the young are taken to a special protected nursery where they will be just as carefully tended for months. Most amazing is that, should the mother not be present to tend to the hatchling chores, the father offers the hatchlings the very same help and care!Our Magnificent Creator God loves even the crocodile! And his acceptance of you and me, because of what Jesus Christ has done for us, is an even greater wonder than the loving crocodile! |
| 9/28/2023 | How many ants are there in the world? No one has actually counted them all or asked them to fill out little ant census forms. However, scientists have estimated that there are about 10 million billion ants in the world, waiting for you to have a picnic. That’s more ants than there are mammals, reptiles, birds, and amphibians combined.God made so many ants because ants are important housekeepers for the earth. Ants, not earthworms, turn most of the world’s soil, drain it, and enrich it. Ants dispose of 90% of the corpses of small dead animals. As the world’s gardeners, ants spread and plant more seeds than any other creature.Like bees, ants have a sophisticated society, which includes workers, nurses, soldiers, hunters, farmers, and even builders. Each of these different classes have specialized organs for their work. The soldier ants of one species are walking bombs. They are loaded with poison and literally explode when under attack, spraying poison on their enemies. Army ants in Central and South America march across the countryside in a line that can be nearly 50 feet long. The solid column sweeps along, flushing out even small animals, as it looks for food.The huge variety of living things around us represents more than simply variety. That variety carefully includes creatures to do every job that needs to be done to maintain life on earth. This, in itself, is a witness to both the creativity and wisdom of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 9/27/2023 | If your measuring stick is inaccurate, you could end up with too much wallpaper or too little. If your map tells you that your destination is 200 miles away when it’s really only 50 miles away, you might drive right past it. If your map of the universe is inaccurate and stars are a lot closer than you expect, you will arrive at the wrong age for the universe.Most science textbooks solemnly teach that the universe is 10 to 20 billion years old. A distant galaxy in the Virgo cluster is one of the primary measuring sticks used by astronomers to figure out the distance of other objects in space. Ultimately these distances are used to compute the age of the universe. Recently, though, astronomers were finally able to see individual stars in this distant cluster.Using a new, high-resolution camera, astronomers saw stars that are very much like stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. Since they know how bright these stars are, they were able to check their computations on how far away the measuring-stick galaxy is. Instead of the expected 100 million light-years, their new figures told them that the galaxy was only 50 million light-years away. This means that the universe might only be half as old as they thought.The lesson for us in this is that the millions and billions of years many scientists talk about are mere speculation. Many measuring sticks for the age of the universe are available, and many of them support an age in the biblical range of only thousands of years.The only source for the age of this universe is our Magnificent Creator God himself!!! |
| 9/26/2023 | Scientists and manufacturers are studying a new technique that could lead to more durable fibers. This technique manufactures liquid crystals to produce stronger, longer-lasting fibers. The process uses sulfuric acid, temperatures well above the boiling point of water and a high-pressure atmosphere.Meanwhile, another team of researchers finally discovered how orb weaving spiders and silkworms manufacture their silk. Scientists had theorized that silk from spiders and silkworms was stronger by weight than steel because proteins in the silk cross-linked with each other. But after watching silk production and drying in careful lighting under magnification, astonished scientists actually saw what happens.Silk is produced in the silk gland as a thin, watery liquid. Once the protein-rich liquid is released from the gland, the liquid begins to concentrate because of evaporation. As the liquid concentrates, it changes into a liquid crystal state. Scientists have been trying to create fibers in the lab from liquid crystals. They would love to know how the spider does it, using only water at normal temperatures and pressures.This is another example of how God has already solved an engineering problem that we were trying to solve. It is especially interesting that He allowed scientists to discover His solution at the same time that others were trying to solve the problem. This allows us to reemphasize that our world is the work of a Magnificent Creator God and not mindless, natural accidents. |
| 9/25/2023 | Why did the Creator bring together so many precise specifications and high intelligence in the honeybee? To glorify Himself and because bees are crucial to the reproductive cycles of so many plants as well as the food chain.The amazing structure of the honeycomb has amazed scientists for thousands of years. As early as the third century AD, the astronomer Pappus of Alexandria offered an explanation for the six-sided or hexagonal shape of the honeycomb. He pointed out that while the triangle, square and hexagon could all be candidates for the shape of the comb, one of these shapes holds more than the others. The most efficient shape for storing the most honey while wasting the least space is the hexagon.There are many variations of the hexagon that are available to the bee. However, the honeybee is always very precise in constructing honeycomb hexagons, with an obtuse angle of 109 degrees 23 minutes and an acute angle of 70 degrees 23 minutes. These angles produce the most usable space for the least amount of building material. Humans are unable to use such precision in their designs without sophisticated equipment.Each honeybee is a tiny but powerful computer that could only have been designed and built by an intelligent Magnificent Creator God. Bees and what they do are of central importance to much of the rest of creation. No wonder God has given them so much: the complex structure of their society, their intelligence and industriousness! |
| 9/24/2023 | Picture yourself sitting in a friend’s living room. Can you picture in your mind where the door is located? Scientists call this a thought map. Thought maps are mental pictures of the arrangement of objects relative to one another.Thought maps help us remember where to find a water glass, the gas or brake pedal, and home. Thought maps require intelligence. They help make possible additional intelligent activity, such as finding our way around and conducting an intelligent search. This is why scientists have been surprised to find that many creatures, not just humans, use thought maps.One experimenter carried a chimpanzee on his back while he hid 18 pieces of food in a field. Then the chimp and five others were released in the field to find the food. The chimp who had seen the hiding places found most of the food, following a very different route than that originally taken by the researcher. Bees, likewise, use mental maps. Even if a bee is forced to detour on its way back to the hive, it always reports the food source as though it had used a direct route. Bees are also able to find a food source that has been moved after its discovery. Ants have also been shown to use mental maps.Mental maps help humans and animals think deductively about changes in the environment. Mental mapping ability could not have evolved because even the lowliest creature requires this ability to survive. This ability must have been given to them in the first place by our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 9/23/2023 | The jellyfish almost seems like a creature from a bad science fiction movie. Around 500 species of jellyfish, ranging in size from small marbles to several feet across, inhabit the world’s oceans. Jellyfish have several mouths and will try to eat anything, including each other. Thankfully, the stings of most jellyfish have no effect on human beings.The jellyfish lives two very different lives, each with different lifestyles and methods of reproduction. The familiar jellyfish form is a swimming lifestyle in which the creatures reproduce sexually. However, in another phase of their life, they are called polyps. In the polyp stage, they look like small anemones, cling to rocks and reproduce by cloning.Jellyfish cannot move fast enough to chase prey. However, careful study of jellyfish swimming patterns shows that jellyfish don’t swim at random. The pattern in which they swim produces the greatest mathematical likelihood of encountering prey. Biologically jellyfish have only two internal organs: a stomach and sex organs. Although evolutionists tell us jellyfish were among the earliest creatures, some of them have sophisticated brain functions that – outside of jellyfish – are found only in mammals and human beings!The jellyfish is a tribute to God’s creativity and imagination. Even though the jellyfish appears to be one of the simplest forms of life on Earth, it is also a mathematically precise hunter. Even this living bag of lukewarm Jell-O praises our Magnificent Creator God through its existence. |
| 9/22/2023 | Some people have the green thumb in their family. Others may complain that they fail with plants because plants don’t tell them when they need care. Of course, most people can do well with family pets, who are enthusiastic about letting their needs be known.Now scientists have learned that plants do indeed cry out when they need attention. We just haven’t heard them because the sounds made by a thirsty plant are about five times higher-pitched than we can hear. But scientists with tiny, specialized microphones have heard corn plants calling for water. During their study, researchers learned that plants make a great deal of noise. Corn leaves and stalks make noises as they slide against each other during growth. We have all heard the sound of plant leaves rattling in the wind. Corn stalks also make noise as they bend in the wind.However, another sound was heard when the corn didn’t have enough water. It was a high-pitched popping noise. Plants have water tubes in them that carry water and nutrients up from the roots to the leaves. Water flows up these tubes under tension. When there is not enough water, the tension becomes too great and the tubes fracture. The popping is the sound of those tubes fracturing. The result of fractured tubes is a wilted plant. When water is restored, the tubes refill, the popping noises stop, and the plant again looks healthy.The purpose of this research was to learn when to water crops and how much water they need. Now that we have learned how plants communicate, crops can tell farmers when to water!Aren’t we blessed to have a Magnificent Creator God that took care of so much minute detail!!! |
| 9/21/2023 | Imagine a huge living creature covering about one square mile and made up of almost a third of a billion cells. Imagine each of those living cells being able to move about independently of the others.No, it’s not the plot of a new science fiction movie. Some scientists have suggested that ant colonies may be thought of as one large living organism. They suggest this because of the way individual members within ant colonies behave. Ant colonies have many kinds of members, each with its own specific task. The soldier ants in a colony have extra large heads and heavy-duty jaws for fighting. Other ants are concerned only about finding and returning food. Still other workers do nothing but process and store food.Within the colony another caste of ants does nothing but tend the eggs. Others prepare the food for the larvae and deliver it to other specialized ants who do nothing but feed the next generation.If this sounds complex, imagine the largest known ant colony. This Japanese ant colony has an estimated 306 million worker ants, and more than a million queens. The colony occupies 45,000 interconnected underground nests that range over about a square mile!There is obviously intelligent design and control behind ant society—intelligence not found in ants or in nature itself. This intelligence comes from outside nature. Here is yet another witness that no concern of any living thing is too small for our Magnificent Creator God’s complete attention!!! |
| 9/20/2023 | How would you like to be a dental hygienist for a crocodile? That’s how the crocodile bird makes his living.Of course you do need to know that the crocodile bird doesn’t show up to do his work with any drills or needles. He and the crocodile are on good terms with each other. After eating, the crocodile climbs the river bank and relaxes with his mouth open. The little crocodile bird enters the crocodile’s mouth to clean up the scraps that are left. While the crocodile bird makes most of his living as sort of a crocodile dental hygienist, he also helps keep the crocodile free of pesky insects that lodge in his skin.The crocodile also receives one other service from the crocodile bird. Whenever the bird senses approaching danger, he gives his sharp warning call and flies off. The crocodile, now warned, can quickly roll over into the water where virtually no animal can get the best of him.This is but one of many unlikely cooperative arrangements that we find in the plant and animal kingdoms that our Magnificent Creator God has designed!!! |
| 9/19/2023 | If, as we are continually told, evolution is a fact, why is it that human technology improves when we copy designs found in nature? If nature is really a giant trial-and-error experiment, we should not only find evidence of less-sophisticated designs in the distant past, but humans today should be able to improve on designs found in nature.Science has long known that an object moving through water or air moves with the least resistance when the ratio of its length to diameter is four to one. This ratio is found in the fastest swimmers in the sea – like the tuna, dolphin and swordfish. A Boeing 707, with a ratio of nine to one, experiences much more resistance than the larger, fatter 747, which has a ratio of six to one – much closer to the tuna and the dolphin.Studies of the vision of the horseshoe crab, supposedly one of the earlier forms of life, have taught engineers how to produce a clearer, sharper television picture. The United States Air Force copied a speed-sensing system from beetles to improve the ground speed indicators of their jets. The optics of a frog’s eye showed them how to improve their radar. The fly’s multifaceted eye taught engineers how to design a lighting system that generates more light with less energy.Humans are learning from and copying design solutions worked out by our Magnificent Creator God. The brilliant designs in our world are not the result of trial and error. This reality makes the claim that evolution is a fact of science sound empty! |
| 9/18/2023 | Most of us are familiar with the body’s response to foreign tissue. Transplant patients must be carefully matched and then patients still must be given powerful drugs to prevent destruction of the transplanted tissue. Our bodies’ immune system identifies tissue that’s not its own and then tries to destroy that tissue.As we have learned more about the immune system, doctors began asking themselves why a pregnant mother’s body doesn’t reject the foreign tissue of the baby growing inside her. The answer to this mystery is not fully understood, but research has suggested some answers.From conception the unborn child is a genetically unique individual. Researchers think that the most important protection the unborn child has is the trophoblast. This tissue, known as the caul, seals the growing infant from its mother. However, the trophoblast itself develops from the same cells as the infant. So why doesn’t the mother’s immune system attack? It appears that under normal conditions the trophoblast is a special set of cells that the body cannot identify as foreign. In addition, the trophoblast makes cells that encourage the mother’s immune system to protect it. Scientists now believe that this amazing feature may actually be provided by the father’s genetic information.In effect, the baby, with the help of the father, immunizes the mother’s system so that it doesn’t reject the baby! So, even before birth, the mother nurtures and the father protects the child.What a Magnificent Creator God we have!!! |
| 9/17/2023 | They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. While that is often true, they also say that it takes a highly evolved brain to picture objects and remember them. Science is learning that this bit of evolutionary myth is indeed fiction.As far as the honeybee is concerned, not all flowers are created equal. Some flowers are a good source of nectar while others are a waste of time. Alfalfa flowers can kill a honeybee because they are designed for pollination by larger insects. When an insect lands, a central petal in the flower releases the stamen and sweeps pollen upward to aid pollination. Honeybees can be tossed off the flower or trapped inside by this action.Scientists always thought that honeybees solved the problem of finding safe and productive flowers by remembering a list of characteristics. They believed the honeybee was evolutionarily too simple to remember mental pictures of favored flowers. However, recent experiments have convinced scientists that bees actually store a mental picture of productive flowers. In these experiments, bees were rewarded with sugar water for visiting some patterns and not others. Their reactions showed that they remember images, not simply patterns.What’s more, the experiments showed that bees are quite intelligent and good learners. One scientist noted that these experiments showed that evolution’s assumptions about so-called higher and lower creatures are false. Those who believe in evolution are having to rethink their view of the world. Meanwhile, we can give thanks to our Magnificent Creator God for so generously giving the gift of intelligence to so many of His creatures. |
| 9/16/2023 | In a clever scheme of self-protection, the more poisonous the male rattlebox moth is, the more prized he is by the female rattlebox moth.In the caterpillar stage the male moth favors the pods of certain legumes. These pods contain a powerful poison that seems to have no effect on the caterpillar. After the caterpillar has become a moth and it’s time for mating, the male releases a scent produced by the poison. Those who have more poison in their bodies release a stronger scent, while those with little poison release only a weak scent. Female rattlebox moths prefer males with a strong scent. During mating the male coats the eggs with some of the poison, making them unpalatable to predators, like ladybugs, who might eat the eggs. So the more poison a male has, the better protected the female’s eggs will be. Studies have shown that female rattlebox moths will ignore males that have collected no poison.Likewise, the male of the queen butterfly species collects another plant poison in his system. This poison is produced by plants for protection against insects. The butterfly doesn’t attack the plant; rather he drinks the poison from already injured plants. Here, too, the female queen butterfly favors those males with the most poison.It appears that human beings are not the only creatures who go to the drug store to get needed medicines. Our Magnificent Creator God has provided the animal world with their own drug store and the knowledge of how to use the chemicals He has provided!!! |
| 9/15/2023 | Fireflies may help light the way to new medical breakthroughs. The gentle glow of a firefly on a summer evening is produced by the chemical luciferase. The firefly has a gene with the code that makes this chemical.When that gene is added to the genetic information of other plants or animals, the cells begin to glow harmlessly. Researchers have been using the firefly gene to test their ability to add genetic information to a cell.When human heart arteries become clogged, a medicine called TPA is among the treatments doctors use. TPA is a natural clot-dissolving protein that helps prevent heart attacks. The problem is, without a continuous supply of TPA, the artery may reclog. It would help if the artery could make its own TPA 24 hours a day.Since TPA is a natural protein for which there is a genetic code, researchers wanted to know if genetic information could be added to artery cells. To find out, they injected dogs with the genetic code for luciferase. If genetic information could be added to the cells through this method, they would actually see the results in the glowing tissue. Tissue samples taken three days later did, in fact, have the distinctive glow of the firefly proving that the method works. They warn that several years of research lie ahead before artery cells may be able to dissolve their own clots.Those glowing fireflies that delight children and adults show God’s design in the creation in an unexpected way. The chemical that makes the glow is proving to be an important tool of medical science.What a Magnificent Creator God we have to preplan our needs!!! |
| 9/14/2023 | At first glance, jellyfish may not look like much of a creation. Many are quite beautiful. However, most jellyfish simply look like blobs of jelly, so fragile that what might be a minor blow to one of us could prove fatal to them.There are around 500 species of jellyfish. They live everywhere in the oceans – from the surface down to great depths. Some are as small as a BB. The largest jellyfish is the lion’s mane, which can grow to seven feet in diameter and have tentacles 200 feet long.Despite their apparent simplicity, these insubstantial creatures make their living by capturing and eating fish and crustaceans that could easily tear them apart. To accomplish this seemingly impossible task, the jellyfish trails out its long thread-like tentacles. Each tentacle can have millions of capsules loaded with tiny harpoons. Once touched, the tentacles fire, injecting several deadly toxins. If enough toxin is injected, the victim’s heart stops. If not enough of this poison is injected, another toxin finds its way to the brain where it stops respiration. Yet another toxin bursts red blood cells, disrupting the circulatory system. Thankfully, only a few dozen of the hundreds of species of jellyfish can hurt human beings.Imagine trying to design a creature that is not much more than a bag of Jell-O that can capture and subdue much larger and more powerful creatures. The jellyfish may look simple. However, its specialized design for a seemingly impossible task makes it an elegant witness to our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 9/13/2023 | Some creatures simply try to look uninteresting to hungry predators. Others take their role-playing so seriously that they actually fulfill some of the same roles as their models.Loopers, or inchworms, move along the ground, twigs or branches with the characteristic opening and closing of an upside-down letter U. These creatures are not true worms. Rather, they are caterpillars. As caterpillars, they often look very much like the twigs or branches on which they move. However, their odd form of movement can give them away.Here’s an experiment you can try. If you ever notice a looper on a branch, simply give the branch a gentle tap. Chances are, the looper will suddenly freeze into the same shape as a nearby twig. If you were to carefully touch the looper, you would find that it had become as stiff as a twig. A botanist reports that while studying one looper moving along a branch, an ant happened along. Ants, of course, will eat loopers. The looper froze in a horizontal position between branches. The ant walked across the looper, never noticing that its walkway was actually a potential meal.Many scientists suggest that the looper “just happens” to be the same color as the branches on which it crawls. We ask, does it also accidentally know how to act like a twig to fool predators? The almighty hand of our Magnificent Creator God is evident even in the inchworm! |
| 9/12/2023 | Many people have been taught that evolution is science and creation is religion. However, the origins debate is really a debate between two religions. According to the evolutionist’s own rules of science, evolution is not good science. Consider the claims of evolution in view of what science knows today.Life has never been seen to develop from nonliving materials. Yet, evolutionists say it did. Mutations, said by evolutionists to have created all the kinds of living things, have never been seen to produce one creature that was more complex or better able to survive. The moon has moonquakes, a magnetic field and internal heat. These are all indications that it is far younger than evolutionists care to believe. Geological strata were at one time sediments in water – floodwaters. Evolutionists believe that the multiple layers of sedimentary rock were laid down one after another by local floods with millions of years between each flood. If that is true, how is it that these strata are often found showing the lower strata blending into the strata above it?If language evolved, why are the most ancient languages the most complex? If religions evolved, why do the most ancient forms of religion worship one God – a Magnificent Creator God – while later forms of the same religions have many gods – gods who are much more like human beings?Many more examples show that only the Bible’s account of history makes sense in view of what we know. |
| 9/11/2023 | The world is a frightening place without God. This fear can be seen today in fears that modern people often confuse with science.Several years ago stories of gloom and doom about a greenhouse heating of the earth were starting to fill the media. The people at Creation Moments looked at the scientific basis for these claims. They wanted to know if the greenhouse warming of the earth was a true threat or just another fear of a godless people. They then published the conclusion that the thin and conflicting evidence for greenhouse warming most likely came from the heat island effect of growing cities around some of the temperature measuring sites.Knowing the elegance with which God designed everything in creation, creationists suspected that God probably designed the earth with built-in thermostats that help keep it from warming up too much. When the Pacific Ocean warms more than normal, it sends increasing amounts of water vapor into the air. If heating continues, the water vapor will actually cause the heating to increase until vapor is forced higher into the atmosphere, creating icy cirrus clouds. These clouds reflect enough incoming sunlight to shut down the temperature increase and return things to normal.We are called to be good stewards of the earth. We can be good stewards in joyful service, freed from the fears that afflict those who don’t know God.What a Magnificent Creator we have in our God!! |
| 9/10/2023 | Do you know how to handle a sailboat? If you had to sail to a destination that was not exactly downwind, would you be able to do it?Unlike most jellyfish, velella does not merely drift with the wind. Velella has a triangular sail. However, unlike some jellyfish with sails, velella‘s sail doesn’t simply catch the wind and move velella along with it. Velella‘s triangular sail has an S-shaped base so that it can stand up to winds from any direction. The sail is set on top of velella‘s body at an angle to its length. This makes velella a biological oddity – because its body is not symmetrical.This asymmetry is not without purpose. The unusual body design of this jellyfish allows it to sail as much as 60° off the direction of the wind. This is what sailors call a broad reach. Some velellas have their sails tilted to the right, allowing them to sail up to 60° to the right of downwind. Others have their sails tilted to the left, allowing them to sail up to 60° left of downwind. What’s more, velellas can change their angle of sailing by extending or retracting their tentacles in the water.When scientists noticed that velella‘s body was asymmetrical, they immediately looked for a purpose behind the design. Even though many scientists will not recognize our Magnificent Creator God, they understand enough to realize that nothing in the creation is without purpose or design. So while many deny the Creator, they still recognize the pattern of His handiwork! |
| 9/9/2023 | Many textbooks tell young people today that birds are modified reptiles. Suppose, they say, that millions of years ago the scales on some reptiles began to fray along the edges. In time, they say, the frayed scales turned into feathers and birds were born.The elegance and beauty of the feather make this story hard to believe. Can sticking a feather on a lizard produce a peacock? The bird’s feather is only a small part of the complete flying system of the bird. Even with very careful planning and redesigning, a reptile doesn’t have what it takes.A bird needs massive breast muscles for flight. In some birds, 30% of the body weight of the bird is breast muscle. By comparison, in humans breast muscles are only about 1% of body weight. A bird also needs an extremely high metabolism and blood pressure to deliver the energy those muscles need for flight. Birds have a higher metabolism than any other creature; they also have the necessary high blood pressure. Finally, as is well known, birds need light skeletons. The man-o’-war has a wingspan of seven feet. But its entire skeleton weighs only a few ounces—less than its feathers!Even the most clever rebuilding of a reptile cannot produce a bird. In fact, birds have very little in common with reptiles.The entire being of the bird, from body to brain, has been specially designed for flight by a Creator who clearly knows everything there is to know about flight!!! |
| 9/8/2023 | While the Bible teaches us that sex is a wonderful gift of God, evolutionists believe that sexual reproduction should not have evolved. According to evolutionists, if sexual reproduction were to develop, evolution is supposed to get rid of it.To make matters worse, immobile plants use sexual reproduction. This creates a problem in transferring the male genes to the female for fertilization. Just to confound things even more, God uses insects and even mammals to transfer the pollen. Since evolutionists believe that plants were around for many millions of years before animals, evolutionists have yet another problem.The European family of the Arum lilies attracts beetles and flies. When one of the insects lands on a flower, he finds a slick, oil-coated surface and ends up sliding down into a chamber filled with small hairs. Imprisoned, he finds a sweet sap that makes good eating. While he is gorging himself on the sap and getting sticky in the process, the male part of the flower showers him with pollen. The next day, the sticky, pollen-coated insect finds that the doors to his prison are open. So he flies off to another flower to unwittingly deliver his load of pollen!It sounds like science fiction to say that a flower figured out how to do this. And it certainly doesn’t sound very scientific to say that nobody designed and made this complex arrangement.As we learn more about these arrangements in nature, it becomes even more clear that an all-wise Magnificent Creator God designed these beautiful, symbiotic relationships between different members of the living kingdom!!! |
| 9/7/2023 | One would never expect to find any insect sharing living arrangements with a spider. That’s why scientists were amazed to find a tiny fly in the rain forests of Central America who shares both room and board with a spider!The fly spends most of his time on the back of the golden web spider, who does not seem to object. This spider does not deal with its victims in the same way most spiders do. When a large insect gets caught in the tough web of the spider, the golden web spider injects the victim with digestive juices to prepare it for eating. The fly keeps track of meal preparations from the spider’s back. Just before the meal is liquefied to the spider’s satisfaction, the fly buzzes over and drinks its fill in a few seconds. By the time the spider approaches lunch, the fly is back napping on the spider.Both the spider and the fly are designed with special features to make this most unlikely arrangement work. If the golden web spider’s eating habits were like most spiders’, there would be no liquefied meal for the fly. The fly itself has a mouth that is specially designed to allow it to drink a full meal in seconds. This helps keep him out of the spider’s way.How can a spider and a fly live together? God can design a solution to any problem. Why design an arrangement between a spider and a fly anyway? So that we would know there is a Magnificent Creator God and that He can meet any challenge! There is nothing you cannot take to Him in the name of His Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. |
| 9/6/2023 | Respect for the name Thomas Jefferson reaches far beyond the United States and far beyond the English language.By the time Jefferson was 14, he could read four languages. He later learned three more. Jefferson’s legacy goes far beyond his accomplishments in law and government. He also made his mark in the fields of mathematics, architecture, medicine, agriculture, literature, education, music and science. He earned three doctorates. And he served as president of the American Philosophical Society, America’s leading scientific organization of the time, for nearly 20 years.One might think that Jefferson would have accepted the evolutionary ideas that were being circulated then by such people as Charles Darwin’s grandfather. However, while Jefferson was a deist rather than a Christian, he spoke and wrote against evolutionary ideas and in favor of a Creator. He based his argument that belief in a Creator is more scientific than evolution on the precise and interrelated design that is visible everywhere in the creation. We thank our Magnificent Creator God that His handiwork is so clear in the creation that one does not even have to be a Christian to know that He is The Creator. God’s most earnest desire for all is that seeing this much, we might be drawn to His forgiveness in Jesus Christ. |
| 9/5/2023 | The yellow-and-black striped archer fish shops among the insects that land on branches overhanging his pond in the peaceful waters of the East Indies. Sometimes he will wait under a branch until something that would make a good lunch lands on it.When the archer fish finds a tasty-looking insect, he shoots an accurately aimed stream of water at his prey, knocking the insect into the water. Before the insect has a chance to recover, the archer fish has eaten him and is looking for dessert.The archer fish has a deep groove in his mouth. When he places his tongue against this groove, he ends up with a blow tube that is about 1/16-inch in diameter. Compressing his gills forces pressurized water through the blow pipe. The rounded tip of the archer fish’s tongue acts as a valve so the fish can shoot a few small bursts or one long stream of water at his prey. The archer fish seldom misses if his prey is within four feet.This simple but elegant arrangement is testimony to a wise and skillful Creator. Neither mindless chance evolution nor any fish could be smart enough to design this system. Nor could any fish redesign his normal mouth tissues into this unique tool.Here we see that our Magnificent Creator God even cares about providing the needs of a fish. We know that He cares even more about our lives! In fact, He has said so! |
| 9/4/2023 | Language requires some very special designs that are rare in nature and found together only in humans. First, human language requires vocal cords, which none of the apes have. The only animals with vocal tracts are birds, but no one is suggesting that we evolved from birds.Language also seems to require an unusual structure to the brain. The frontal area of the left hemisphere of the brain is connected to an adjacent area of the cortex called the Wernicke area. These two areas are linked by a bundle of nerve fibers. The result is a distinct brain asymmetry that is unique to humans. Even the unborn human has this asymmetry that allows it to absorb language. Development in this area of the brain stops at puberty. That is why it becomes more difficult for adults to learn a new language. Language skills can be learned only by hearing language. So-called “feral” children, who have heard no language at all, cannot be taught language after puberty for the same reason.So where did Adam first hear language? Scripture tells us that it was our Magnificent Creator God Himself who regularly spoke with Adam. This means that language is not a collection of meaningless sounds to which we have assigned meanings. The meanings and sounds have come from God, just as our unique design that makes language possible comes from God.Therefore, language is not only for worldly purposes. We have also been given language to praise our God and Savior and to tell others who He is and what He has done! |
| 9/3/2023 | Which body structure is a powerful generator of emotions, gives you a sense of direction, and serves as a cannon all at the same time? It’s your nose, of course! It is common knowledge that without our noses the scent of a rose could not give us joy, nor would our food taste like very much.Less well known is the fact that our noses are directly hooked into the brain’s limbic system. Your limbic system plays a central role in generating and controlling emotions. This is why certain scents are able to raise strong emotional memories in us.The nose is also designed to filter out and catch particles that should not get into the lungs. When a particle is taken in through your nose, it is snagged by the tissue inside your nasal passages. Next, this highly special tissue decides the best method of getting rid of the foreign material. If a bacterium is identified, your nose begins to run, bathing the bacteria in powerful chemicals that dissolve most of them. If the particles are larger, like pollen, a sneeze is triggered that can eject particles at speeds of over 100 miles per hour!Perhaps the most remarkable ability associated with the nose is its ability to act as a compass. Human beings have a small amount of iron in the bony part of the nose between the eyes. Scientific experiments have shown that we have an ability, while not foolproof, that can sense direction that is influenced by magnetic fields!Our Magnificent Creator God made your multi-purpose nose not only to bring some pleasure to life but also to help protect your health. |
| 9/2/2023 | “And the LORD God formed man out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”It’s behind your refrigerator and under your bed. It’s part of the air you breathe. While dust is common, it’s not commonplace at all.Much of the dust in our everyday lives is nothing more than tiny particles of skin, clothing, carpeting – just pieces of everyday life floating in the air. Studies of dust particles reveal that most dust is soil.However, a second common dust – even a thousand miles from the sea – is salt, driven into the wind by the waves. This salt helps form the clouds that bring us rain.The next most common forms of natural dust are volcanic eruptions and forest fires. Transatlantic winds pick up the dust of the Sahara and sweep it across the ocean where enough of it lands in Miami to sometimes give the rain a light pink color.Not only does your home have dust from all over the world, there’s probably also some from outer space. Ten thousand tons of disintegrating meteorites and comets rain down on the Earth every year. You can even identify some of this dust by running a magnet through the dust in a rain gutter. Most of the magnetic particles that stick to the magnet are probably from space. In addition, some dust is alive, made up of pollen, fungus spores and even dormant bacteria, hoping to land on a good place to grow.Dust reminds us that the world is smaller than we think and that it won’t last forever. Are you ready for the next world? All your preparations have been made by Jesus Christ. Find out in the Bible what our Magnificent Creator God has done for you today. |
| 9/1/2023 | Spider silk begins as a liquid protein made by silk glands on the spider’s abdomen. Spiders make many kinds of silk for different uses. As the liquid silk is forced through the spider’s spinnerets, it begins to dry. The spinnerets pull and stretch the silk, creating just the right kind of silk for the spider’s use. Though the result seems thin and weak to us, ounce for ounce, spider silk is stronger than steel.Web-building spiders make two types of silk for their traps. The basic structure of the web is made of strong, nonsticky silk. Then the spider adds a sticky, elastic silk to trap its prey. Some webs are irregular, others are flat and sheet-like, while still others are shaped like funnels. All of us have admired the beautiful orb web.However, spiders also have many other ways in which they use their silk. The ogre-faced spider makes a net that it throws around its intended victim. The European water spider builds its web underwater. It stores its air supply in the web. The lasso spider twirls a single strand of silk over its head. A tiny drop of sticky silk at the end of the lasso captures its prey when the lasso is thrown. Probably the most creative use of silk is by the young of some species. When they hatch, they produce long loops of silk that catch the wind and send them floating off to new places.The spider’s skill in producing and using silk had to come from Someone wiser and more clever than the spider. Clearly the spider has been well-equipped and instructed by our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 8/31/2023 | We have looked at many plants and animals that use different forms of camouflage to keep from being noticed. Some don’t wish to be noticed so that they can surprise their prey, while others don’t want to be noticed so they can avoid becoming prey. However, what happens when both predator and prey encounter each other in full camouflage?The predator in this drama, witnessed by a naturalist at the edge of a desert, is a yellow crab spider. The spider was waiting on a yellow flower that made him nearly invisible. The potential prey is an inchworm beneath the same flower. The inchworm was tearing off bits of the yellow flower petals and sticking them on its back.Properly camouflaged, the inchworm then worked his way toward the top of the flower where the spider waited. The spider felt the movement and ran around the edge to see whether lunch might be on the way. However, when the spider got around the edge of the flower, he saw nothing. He didn’t even notice the camouflaged inchworm on which he was standing! The spider then returned to the center of the flower, outsmarted by the inchworm who went on about his business.Our wisdom would have said that the inchworm should try to run when he noticed the spider. However, the wisdom given to him by our Magnificent Creator God allowed him to continue about his business on the flower. This offers us a good illustration of how following the Lord’s wisdom often requires us to reject our own. |
| 8/30/2023 | Squirrels often seem to run about without any purpose. However, a naturalist in the State of Maine recently discovered that the squirrel’s activities are well planned and efficient.It was a cold January day when the naturalist was watching a red squirrel who seemed to be nibbling on a sugar maple. Then the squirrel would run to a tree where some of the sap had leaked out and lap at it with his tongue. The naturalist knew that conventional wisdom said it was too early to tap trees for sugar. He also knew that the sap from the trees is 98 percent water and could not provide enough energy to keep the squirrel going in cold weather. Becoming more curious, he decided to study the squirrels’ activity in detail.He discovered that the red squirrels were systematically tapping the sugar maples with a peculiar bite into the tree. Each bite went through the outer and inner bark and into the xylem where the sap runs. The squirrels were then allowing the running sap to dry until the sugar content was more than 55 percent. Not only were squirrels tapping just the maples, they only tapped them when the weather was right for the sap to run. The mad running up and down the trees actually followed a careful daily schedule of tree visitations that could include over 70 trees!Could it be that humans learned from squirrels to tap sugar maples? Whatever the answer to that question, we know that it was our Magnificent Creator God Himself Who taught the squirrel the processing and use of this sugary winter treat! |
| 8/29/2023 | The founders of modern science, on the whole, believed in the Creator. The methods they developed were based upon the truth that the creation is voluntary. This means that God was not confined to what we have later defined as “scientific laws.” God could make anything He wanted in any way He wanted. Science cannot be done from the philosopher’s easy chair. Scientists must go out into the field and study how nature works. When science follows this path, it is open to astonishing discoveries.One recent unexpected discovery was the hot water vents deep below the ocean’s surface. Where the earth’s crust has split apart, hot water gushes out. This water reaches temperatures hot enough to, say, cause a piece of paper to burst into flame. Only the tremendous pressure more than a mile below the waves keeps the water in liquid form.It was in this environment that scientists made an even more amazing discovery. They found bacteria that could live in the almost 700 degree water. These amazing creatures find the normal, sea level boiling point of water to be so cold they can barely survive. Scientists are still trying to learn how these creatures live at temperatures that would destroy the normal biochemistry of life.Each new discovery tells us a little more about the work of our wonderful Magnificent Creator God. That’s what science was originally intended to do. Keep that in mind when you hear someone say that belief in the Magnificent Creator makes doing science impossible!!! |
| 8/28/2023 | Our senses link us to the world around us and enable us to interact with the world. While most people believe that our sense of sight is the highest of the senses and the most marvelous in design, our sense of hearing is no less marvelous.When a sound strikes your ear, your eardrum vibrates with the sound waves, fast or slow, soft or hard. These variations in vibration provide us with important information about the nature of the sound we are hearing. Some sounds produce a vibration in the eardrum as small as a billionth of a centimeter – only one-tenth the diameter of a hydrogen atom! There are three tiny bones in the middle ear called the hammer, anvil and stirrup. They pick up the vibrations from the eardrum, amplify them and send them on to the cochlea. The cochlea is filled with about 25,000 tiny hair cells that finally turn the vibrations into electrical signals that are sent on to the brain.Our hearing is designed to be more sensitive to high-pitched sounds than to lower sounds. If we had just a little more sensitivity to lower-pitched sounds, we would continuously be distracted by the internal sounds of our body, including the blood rushing through our arteries. In fact, to help prevent this, there are no blood vessels at all in that part of the ear where vibrations are turned into electrical impulses. The body supports life in these tissues by constantly bathing them in dissolved nutrients.While we can hear many things, and decide not to hear other things, our Magnificent Creator God who so marvelously designed our ears invites us to hear His Word to us from the Bible. |
| 8/27/2023 | Many plants and animals disguise themselves as something they are not in the hope of protecting themselves. However, a true master of disguise must have many disguises. The tiger swallowtail offers no less than three disguises as it grows through its various stages toward adulthood.The newly hatched larva looks for all the world like a bird dropping. This appearance makes the larva of no interest to birds that might otherwise eat it. Three molts later the caterpillar has turned green to match the leaves on which it feeds. In case he is spotted by some birds looking for a nice fat caterpillar for lunch, the caterpillar also has two large spots on its head that look like the eyes of a snake. Birds who are interested in caterpillars usually try to stay as far from snakes as possible. Finally, in the pupal stage, the tiger swallowtail has again radically altered its appearance. The pupa now looks like nothing more than just another broken twig on a tree trunk.The immature tiger swallowtail’s bag of disguises reflects a great deal of knowledge about the behavior of those creatures that threaten it. Each of its three disguises uses a different method to fool those birds that would be interested in the larva. Each disguise has the same specific goal. This master of disguise is no accident of biology.Our Magnificent Creator God’s purpose in making Himself evident in the creation is ultimately aimed at bringing each of us into a relationship with Himself. That relationship is based on the forgiveness of our sin through His Son, Jesus Christ. |
| 8/26/2023 | It was first discovered in 1855, but many scientists debated its existence for another 50 years. Once its existence was finally proven to everyone’s satisfaction, it was another 50 years before science had any tools to begin studying it. Finally, in the late 1980s, scientists began to learn a little about the secrets of one of the tiniest, yet most amazing structures in the body.At the back of the eye, between the deepest layer of the retina and the cells beneath it, lies a tiny moat made up of about 10 drops of a mysterious fluid. The entire moat is thinner than a sheet of cellophane.It seems that the clear fluid in the moat serves the surrounding light-sensing tissues of the eye in place of blood, bringing in nutrients and carrying away waste. It also transports light-sensitive chemicals needed by the light-detecting cells in the eye. In addition, it seems to glue the retina in place. More than that, the moat is rich in a growth factor. This fact makes scientists believe that the gel may also be important to repairing injuries to the retina, keeping the cells of the retina young and active, as well as helping in the growth of new cells. As one researcher said, the more they study this tiny structure, the more unexpected abilities they find – something like a bottomless suitcase.Charles Darwin, who didn’t even know about the moat, was right when he said that it was impossible to believe that natural selection could have produced the eye. As Christians we believe that only Our Magnificent Creator God could have produced the eye!!! |
| 8/25/2023 | “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” We’ve all heard this familiar saying. In the case of the sun’s fire, scientists expect to find not smoke but tiny particles called neutrinos. The problem is, most of those neutrinos are missing.It was once thought that the sun’s heat was produced as it’s powerful gravity caused it to collapse in on itself. But as the theory of evolution became popular, this theory fell out of favor. Those who promoted evolution knew that their theory was more believable if they said the sun was millions or billions of years old. However, if the sun’s heat came from gravity collapse, it could not possibly be that old.So when scientists learned about nuclear energy, they proposed the theory that the sun’s energy comes from nuclear forces. This would give them their billions of years. The problem is, the sun’s nuclear engine should be turning out a large number of neutrinos. Scientists find only about one-third to one-fourth of the neutrinos that should be there. This mystery is so troubling that scientists have changed their theories about how the sun produces its energy every year or two over the last 25 years! Some of them admit that they really don’t know how the sun produces its energy.The sun is a vital blessing to us. And here we see another blessing, for the sun also keeps us humble. Our Magnificent Creator God has so wonderfully created the sun that even our best scientific minds can’t figure out how it works!!! |
| 8/24/2023 | The strange and nasty plant called witchweed is found mainly in Africa and Asia, but some has been reported in North America as well. This parasitic plant can prevent crop plants from producing yields and is said to be responsible for intensifying the results of famine in Ethiopia.Not long after germination, witchweed sends an enzyme “feeler” through the soil around it to find nearby roots. If the enzyme finds a root system, it will digest a few of the cells on the root surface. The damaged roots actually help the witchweed by sending out a chemical response that confirms their presence to the witchweed. The witchweed then grows an attachment organ to penetrate the neighbor’s root system. However, witchweed cannot penetrate many root systems. If attachment is not made within four days, the witchweed grows aimlessly and dies in less than a week.If the witchweed successfully attaches to a neighbor’s root system, witchweed can enjoy a long and full life, being fed by its neighbor’s roots. In fact, witchweed changes the hormones produced by its neighbor so that the neighbor’s root system grows ever larger at the expense of the stem growth of the victim. While the victim may live its normal span, it will not be allowed enough strength to reproduce.Witchweed is no simple plant. We learn from the witchweed that our Magnificent Creator God’s unlimited imagination not only created some very strange living things, but also created some unique solutions to providing a means of living for them. |
| 8/23/2023 | Not only is the human brain the most complex structure in the universe, it is also one of the busiest. In fact, during intense concentration, your brain can burn as many calories as your muscles do during exercise! Intense thinking can literally be as exhausting as a physical workout! More than 100,000 chemical reactions go on in your brain every second.Among the brain’s many jobs is chemist. The brain produces more than 50 psychoactive drugs. Some of these are associated with memory, others with intelligence, still others are sedatives. Endorphin is the brain’s painkiller and it’s three times more potent than morphine. Serotonin is produced by the brain to help keep our moods under control. The brain also makes dopamine. Dopamine makes people more talkative and excitable. Another hormone regulates hunger.The brain is also a radio transmitter that sends out measurable electrical wave signals. In fact, the brain continues to send these signals for as long as 37 hours after death!Our tiny knowledge of the brain is enough to show us that this incredible organ is no accident. The brain is much more than a powerful testimony to our Magnificent Creator God. Its incredible powers convince us that there is much more to existence than this material life. However, we can learn only from the Word of God about eternal life through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. |
| 8/22/2023 | If, of all the millions of living things on Earth, a few creatures happened to look like something they are not and this helped protect them, we might put it down to chance. However, the creation is filled with too many creatures who practice look-alike deception to put it down to chance.Africa’s southern deserts have a plant called living stones. In a desert, any vegetation can be a welcome source of food or moisture. In this setting, a plant that doesn’t look like a plant has an advantage. And living stones look like nothing more than just another rock in the sand.Wasps can be some of the nastiest insects in nature. An insect in Costa Rica called the mantispid looks very much like the feared wasp, even up close. Then again, the hover fly looks like a wasp and sounds like a wasp because the frequency of its wing beats is almost identical to a wasp.Treehoppers have a very odd body shape that comes to a point on top. Not only do they look like thorns, but they usually stay on bushes that have thorns, orienting their bodies on the branches just like true thorns. This effectively hides them from hungry birds. Larval plant hoppers use a different form of deception. They attach themselves in groups on branches, orienting their frilly and feathery bodies together so they look like a flower!The clever forethought and planning involved in nature’s deceptions rule out any thought that these creatures were not designed by our Magnificent Creator God Himself! |
| 8/21/2023 | One of the spider’s virtues is that it loves to eat flies. However, not all spiders catch flies in their webs.The jumping spider stalks its prey until, like a tiny tiger, it is close enough to pounce. Rather than defining its territory with a web, the jumping spider takes its territory with it in a manner of speaking. Wherever the jumping spider is becomes its territory, When one jumping spider encounters another, they wave their legs at each other, warning each other to back off.Herein lies the tale of how one species of fruit fly is able to outsmart the spider. Unlike most fruit flies, this particular species has stripes on its wings. When it waves its wings over its head, it looks something like a jumping spider declaring its territory. When stalked by a jumping spider, the fly is able to convince the spider that it’s another jumping spider protecting its territory.Researchers have discovered why this trick works even though the fly doesn’t look much like a spider. The spider’s response to the pattern is pre-wired into its brain and is triggered by certain cells in its eyes. These cells are only activated by a display of the pattern. The spider automatically reacts to the pattern. All the fly has to do is fake the pattern and it’s safe!The fruit fly’s strategy requires a sophisticated knowledge of the jumping spider’s nervous system as well as its behavior. It’s safe to say that no fruit fly was able to create this strategy. It could have been authored only by the Magnificent Creator God who created them both. |
| 8/20/2023 | Over the last couple of centuries many Bible scholars have developed a skeptical approach to the Bible. Their treatment of the Bible as nothing more than a human document stems from their belief in evolution. According to them, Christianity has evolved from earlier religions just as humans evolved.As a result, critics reject the idea that the Bible is God’s inerrant, inspired, trustworthy Word. Because they hold this low view of the Bible, they believe that they have found many errors in the Bible over the years. At one time they said that the Hittites mentioned in the Old Testament never existed. They said that ancient biblical writers invented these people so that Israel could make up pretend victories over them. Eventually the Hittites were discovered, one of the first evidences being hard-to-ignore six-foot-tall jars! Over the years these critics have been consistently proven wrong by new discoveries.Likewise, critics have said that the Israelites could not have entered Canaan when the Old Testament says they did. They reason that because the Old Testament mentions the Ammonites, which critics said didn’t live in Canaan until later, the Bible’s dating is in error. However, in the summer of 1989, biblical archaeologists proved that the Ammonites were in Canaan well before the Bible’s date for the exodus. Again Bible critics have been proven wrong.As one biblical archaeologist wrote, “As usual the absence of evidence is not necessarily the evidence of absence.” When the Bible says something is true, there is no question of its truth.The Bible truly is the inerrant, inspired, trustworthy Word of our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 8/19/2023 | Scientists and manufacturers are studying a new technique that could lead to more durable fibers. This technique manufactures liquid crystals to produce stronger, longer-lasting fibers. The process uses sulfuric acid, temperatures well above the boiling point of water and a high-pressure atmosphere.Meanwhile, another team of researchers finally discovered how orb weaving spiders and silkworms manufacture their silk. Scientists had theorized that silk from spiders and silkworms was stronger by weight than steel because proteins in the silk cross-linked with each other. But after watching silk production and drying in careful lighting under magnification, astonished scientists actually saw what happens.Silk is produced in the silk gland as a thin, watery liquid. Once the protein-rich liquid is released from the gland, the liquid begins to concentrate because of evaporation. As the liquid concentrates, it changes into a liquid crystal state. Scientists have been trying to create fibers in the lab from liquid crystals. They would love to know how the spider does it, using only water at normal temperatures and pressures.This is another example of how our Magnificent Creator God has already solved an engineering problem that we were trying to solve. It is especially interesting that He allowed scientists to discover His solution at the same time that others were trying to solve the problem. This allows us to reemphasize that our world is the work of a Creator and not mindless, natural accidents!!! |
| 8/18/2023 | For many, the existence of so much ice on Antarctica is a grave cause for concern, as they have been told that climate change will cause a lot of this ice to melt and cause the sea level to rise. The worry is that many of the world’s great cities, and many small island nations, could disappear as the Antarctic melts. So why did God make such a troublesome continent which could precipitate the end of the world?Remember that the topography of the world is not the way it was originally created. We have explained previously that there was likely just one main pre-Flood continent, which we call Rodinia. This continent split up during the Flood. The massive deposits of fossil fuels known to exist on the southernmost continent are evidence of pre-Flood forests, probably populated with animals.Every time ice breaks off from an Antarctic glacier, the media worry about flooding – yet God has promised not to flood the world again, nor to bring seasons to an end. Despite seeming to be a homogeneous repository for the 70% of the Earth’s fresh water, locked in as ice, there are considerable variations in climate between different parts of the continent. For every place where ice is melting and breaking up, there are parts where the ice cap gets thicker. Our Magnificent Creator God has all this in balance for His own purposes, and we can be sure He will keep all His promises!!! |
| 8/17/2023 | Humpbacks are among the largest whales in the world. A typical humpback weighs about 40 tons and begins its breach deep down in the ocean.Imagine the acceleration required to get this enormous animal out of the water and into the air. The whale leaves the water at an angle of 30° and a speed of 18 mph. Clearly, this monster uses a lot of energy in breaching, yet it is not unknown for the whale to repeat the exercise – the observed record being 130 leaps in 90 minutes!Why does it go to all this trouble? No one really knows. As with all such obscure phenomena, there are those who suggest that the whales are trying to “attract the girls”! Others suggest that the big splash achieved on re-entry rips some of the barnacles off the whale’s surface. There may be truth in either of these suggestions. But Wilson says that he cannot overlook the probability that the whale breaches simply because it gives God pleasure! He is a Magnificent Creator God, and the world He made is not for utility only, but also for beauty!!! |
| 8/16/2023 | In 1981 it was only a theory—one that seemed to go against all logic. The theory said that if you have a signal, say a sound that was too weak to be heard, adding a little noise would make it easier to hear. If you added too much noise, you would drown out the weak signal. Add too little noise and it wouldn’t help at all. But add just the right amount of noise and a sound signal too weak to be heard could be heard.The theory was shown to be a scientific fact in 1983. This illogical effect was given the name “stochastic resonance.” Since the 1980s, scientists have discovered numerous examples of stochastic resonance and have researched various uses for it. Radio static makes it hard to listen to a station, especially if the signal is weak. However, researchers are building unique radios that add just the right amount of static to make impossible-to-receive stations understandable.Now for the surprise! Did you ever wonder how you are able to select a single voice in a noisy, crowded room and hear what it was saying? Scientists now believe that our brains have built-in stochastic resonance processors much more sophisticated than the units they hope to build someday. As one scientist said, “Nature may have understood stochastic resonance long before we did.”What seems illogical—to add noise to a sound to make it clear—is actually an astonishing piece of wisdom. The wisdom in the way this advanced technical knowledge is used is yet one more witness, not to impersonal “nature,” but to our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 8/15/2023 | Many people know that, despite its appearance, coral is actually a tiny animal. Even a small coral growth may be made up of billions of tiny animals, each living inside its limestone skeleton.What many people don’t know is that coral cannot live without the help of algae—a plant. Thousands of one-celled algae live in the tiny stomach of each coral polyp. The polyp requires the waste products of the algae to complete its nutrition requirements and to get the calcium with which it builds reefs. In return, the polyp’s stomach provides an ideal protected living place for the algae. Incidentally, the wonderful colors in living coral come from the algae in each polyp’s stomach.Evolutionists have said that it must take millions of years for the tiny polyps to build large coral reefs, like the 2,000-kilometer-long Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The Great Barrier Reef, incidentally, is considered the largest structure ever built by living organisms. However, it has now been shown that coral polyps can double their own weight in just over 10 days! As a result, the claim of millions of years for the age of the Great Barrier Reef has been reduced by a factor of 40!Many of the long age figures claimed by evolutionists have had to be drastically revised downward as we have learned more about the work of our Magnificent Creator God. The resulting figures fit the Bible’s account of history much more closely. |
| 8/14/2023 | One unusual argument that the universe is the work of the Creator rather than aimless chance goes like this: only with the highest quality research and work, often over many years, can humans begin to approach the excellence of things in nature.One would think, for example, that it would be a simple job for modern science to create a fireproof fabric better than anything found in nature. After all, no living things in nature— besides humans—crash and burn. However, 80% of those who die in airplane crash fires are killed by the blinding, poisonous smoke, much of which comes from their seat cushions. The foam in the cushion begins to produce toxic smoke when the treated upholstery fabric gives out at 1,300° and allows the flames through.It took two years of work before an upholstery manufacturer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, came up with something better. The new fabric, which has since been used on some airline seats, has stood up to a 5,000° blowtorch flame for several minutes without catching fire! Amazingly, the fabric itself is a very dense weave of wool backed with flame resistant yarns. Its inventor says “It’s one of God’s ideas…There are things about wool that are beyond what man can do.”Sheep have no need to produce wool with properties that could help protect them in a place crash—as would have to be the case if evolution were correct. However, since sheep are part of a larger design in our Magnificent Creator God’s provision for humans, He has given their wool qualities needed by humans as well as by sheep. |
| 8/13/2023 | Scientists have, for the first time, successfully communicated with honeybees in their own language! Scientists have for some time known how to interpret many of the elements of the bees’ so-called “waggle dance.” This dance is used by scouts to communicate the location of food sources to the food gatherers in the hive.A couple years ago researchers decided to see if they could confirm their understanding of bee communication. But how do you talk to a bee and get confirmation that she understood what you said? Scientists decided that the only way to do this was to build a robot bee through which they could communicate. The first attempts at building a robot bee acceptable to real bees did not work well. Early models were viciously attacked.Scientists finally perfected a computer-controlled robot bee that real honeybees accepted. These scientists describe honeybee language as elegant and precise. Yet they found they had learned enough bee language to communicate successfully a food source and its location to real bees. They also discovered that they have much more to learn about bee language. As a result, it may someday be possible for farmers to direct bees to crops that need pollination.Just as bees can best understand other bees, we humans can best understand other humans. That explains why, when our Magnificent Creator God wished to communicate with us, He became a human being. That human, Jesus Christ, taught us about God; and He also made peace with God for us, making possible the forgiveness of our sins!!! |
| 8/12/2023 | There are a number of blurry, indistinct, cloudy-looking objects in the night sky which are not pinpoints of light as the stars are. One hundred ten of these are the so-called Messier objects, which were cataloged by one Charles Messier – a French astronomer who lived from 1730 through 1817. These are a mixture of objects. Some of them we would now call nebulae – quite literally, nebulous clouds of interstellar dust and gas. Examples of these are M8 – the Lagoon Nebula in the constellation of Sagittarius, and M42 – the famous Orion Nebula. Others are star clusters, such as The Pleiades, in Taurus – an object mentioned in the Bible, which is cataloged as M45. Still others are actually other galaxies, such as M104, the Sombrero Galaxy, or M31 – the Andromeda Galaxy.Why did Messier catalog such a wide variety of different objects without commenting on their differentiation? The answer is that he wasn’t actually interested in those objects. He cataloged them, rather, as a police officer catalogs data from a possible suspect in order to eliminate them from the inquiry. Messier was interested in comets – which also, from a distance, look like blurry objects. The difference is that comets, being Solar System objects, move from night to night, whereas his cataloged objects appear fixed relative to the stars.The Hebrew word for star includes what we call stars today and other objects, such as Messier’s objects. All were made by our Magnificent Creator God and declare His glory. All of God’s creation is magnificent in every way!!! |
| 8/11/2023 | What did God have in mind when He created the human male? The world around us offers many images of what it means to be a “real man.” The world offers us the breadwinner, the tough-guy and the workaholic’s unending push for success. Also, it’s becoming increasingly universal that it is the woman who holds the family together. We can be sure that none of these images capture what God had in mind.If we want to learn some practical lessons about what God intended a man to be, we need to begin with God’s original creation of the first man. The first job given to Adam, the first man, was an intellectual task – identifying and naming the animals.Jesus Christ taught us to call God “our Father.” However, we shouldn’t make the mistake of comparing Him to our imperfect human fathers. Human fathers need to learn from God. What kind of father is He? He’s tough. However, toughness does not mean hurling thunderbolts. True toughness is best shown when love persists despite rejection and disobedience. God never tired of patiently seeking Saul of Tarsus, His sworn enemy.However, while He is loving, God is not a wimp. He has established absolutes that we can depend on. He always keeps His Word. We can be thankful for that because when we look at ourselves we know that we have not been the men or women He intended us to be. His Word of grace in the forgiveness of sins through Jesus Christ assures all who cling to Christ that the perfect and almighty Magnificent Creator God is truly our Father!!! |
| 8/10/2023 | Infants will often look ever so serious as they babble away, as if they’re actually saying something of great importance. Most of us have assumed that they do this because they see others talking and they want to join in.The clue to the fact that there is more to speech than simple imitations came when scientists discovered that infants can babble without ever making a sound. Researchers studied five infants, two of whom were deaf and had deaf parents. In the deaf households, communication took place through American Sign Language.Scientists found that both hearing and deaf children babbled in the language used in their homes. Hearing infants produced sounds, then syllables, and eventually meaningful words. The deaf infants did the same with their hands. At first they would make the hand signs for basic letters and numbers, stringing them together without meaning. Just as the hearing infants were beginning to offer meaningful communication by their first birthday, the deaf infants’ signing had reached the same point by their first birthday.Researchers were shocked when they realized what this means. It means that the brain has some type of unified ability built into it for learning language. This conclusion goes against everything evolution says about who and what humans are. However, it fits perfectly with the Bible when it tells us that men and women were made for fellowship and communication with their Magnificent Creator God. |
| 8/9/2023 | For centuries Asian cooks have wrapped meat, sushi and candy in bamboo bark. Though the reason for this practice seems to have been forgotten, humans evidently once knew what modern science is rediscovering about bamboo.Chemists have succeeded in extracting the natural chemicals in bamboo bark. What they found was not one or two but four natural chemicals in the bark that inhibit bacteria, especially staph germs. These natural antibacterial agents are now under study for possible use as natural food and cosmetic preservatives. If these natural chemicals can be shown to kill bacteria and yet be harmless to people, the door will be open for an entirely new class of natural food preservatives.The question naturally arises about how Asians originally came to use bamboo in the kitchen. Is it possible that thousands of years ago, when ancestors of today’s Asians headed east from the Tower of Babel, humans knew that bamboo would help keep their food from spoiling?Much of what we are learning today was already known to a humanity that was only a few generations removed from our first and once-perfect parents. Remember that the perfection with which humanity was created was more than moral perfection. Because Adam and Eve had a perfect knowledge of God, they also had a perfect understanding of all that He had made. While we cannot be perfect except through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ, it is also true that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom.By the grace of our Magnificent Creator God we are still discovering the many wonders of this world that He spoke into existence in The Beginning. |
| 8/8/2023 | Medical researchers are learning that your thoughts can affect your health.The cells that make white blood cells can be directly controlled by the brain through nerves.Using the language of hormones the brain, as well as individual nerve cells, can direct the abilities of immune cells to kill invaders. Immune cells also communicate back to the brain using hormones. It has been shown that stress and highly emotional states can make this communication less efficient, hampering the immune system.Macrophages are large amoeba-like cells that rebuild injured tissue and devour bacteria, viruses and anything else that should not be in wounded tissue. These amazing little cells can even eat iron filings. But chemicals produced by the body during times of stress, for example during prolonged periods of feeling helpless, actually make macrophages very sluggish.A word of caution. While many New Agers have selectively used some of these findings to promote their pagan ideas about medicine and health, there is nothing mystical going on here. Not only does this link between our brain and our health once again glorify our Magnificent Creator God, it supports biblical truth. In Philippians 4:8 the Apostle Paul advises, “Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, what-ever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things.” Not only is this advice good for the soul, it is good for the body. |
| 8/7/2023 | Some of the most fascinating discoveries in recent years have to do with our growing knowledge of plant communication. New research continues to reveal even more amazing facts about the exquisite intricacy of God’s marvelous work.Naturalists have long noted that plants often choose to grow at precise spacing from each other and plants of other species. Scientists at the University of California at Santa Barbara theorized that this precision might be a result of communication between the roots of these plants. So they devised an experiment to find out. They designed a network of interlocking, partially transparent growth boxes. These boxes allowed them to watch how root growth took place in single plants, two plants of the same species, and plants of different species.They discovered that when burro weed roots neared the roots of the creosote bush, the roots of the creosote bush slowed the growth of the nearing roots. They also discovered that burro weed roots will stop growing when they encounter other burro weed roots. This allows the plants to send their roots out where they will not compete with their own kind. Most astonishing is the discovery that burro weed roots continue to grow if they encounter other roots from their own plant. The amazed scientists noted that this means that even plants may have a sense of self.When the Bible tells us that the whole creation praises its Creator, it certainly suggests that at least every living thing has a sense of itself as well as its Magnificent Creator God. |
| 8/6/2023 | The strange partnership between the snapping shrimp and the goby is absolutely necessary if both creatures are to survive. The nearly blind shrimp relies on the goby, a small fish, in the same way a blind person relies on his Seeing Eye dog. The goby relies on the safety of the complex tunnel system the shrimp digs.The shrimp is well designed for digging. Once a tunnel is started, the shrimp can dig a burrow large enough for both itself and the goby within a few hours. Each of its five pairs of legs is specialized. The first pair of claws is designed for carrying sediment out of the burrow. The second pair of legs is designed to probe for and clean objects as well as scratching sediment from walls. Pairs three, four and five are walking legs that also work well for scratching material from tunnel walls. On its abdomen the shrimp has several appendages that allow it to move rapidly to protection. Other appendages can create water currents that shift sand back from the digging site.The snapping shrimp, which is less than two inches long, can dig a system of tunnels covering several square feet within a few days. The burrow will have several entrances, as much as four feet apart. All lead to a chamber at the deepest point of the system.The Creator has given both the goby and the shrimp different gifts that they both need to live. If they did not share their gifts with each other, neither could survive. Our Magnificent Creator God has given us all special gifts to share! |
| 8/5/2023 | While staying with some family members in Kentucky, I was delighted one dark evening to see little flashes of light in the air, low over the garden lawn. Although I was too far away to see the insects concerned, these must have been fireflies.Fireflies are not actually flies – they are beetles. Their light-producing organs are in their abdomens. Most species use these bioluminescent displays for courtship.The bioluminescence is caused by a type of luciferin molecule, commonly called firefly luciferin. The name has nothing to do with evil! It comes from the Latin word for light. Firefly luciferin reacts with oxygen, and the reaction is catalyzed by an enzyme, luciferase, as well as the presence of magnesium ions and adenosine triphosphate – the energy-giving molecule ATP. Luciferin first forms another highly tensed molecule called a dioxetane, which releases CO2 to form a ketone. The ketone is in a highly excited electronic state, so it “relaxes” back to normal state by releasing energy. This energy is at exactly the right frequency to be in the visible light range. The fireflies in Kentucky emitted yellow light.If one were an evolutionist, one would have to wonder – what would have been the evolutionary advantage for the beetle to produce luciferase if there was no luciferin, or vice versa?We have a lot more work to do to investigate the chemistry of the process, but we still marvel at the wonder of our Magnificent Creator God’s design for these insects and all of the rest of His Creation!!! |
| 8/4/2023 | Why did the Creator bring together so many precise specifications and high intelligence in the honeybee? To glorify Himself and because bees are crucial to the reproductive cycles of so many plants as well as the food chain.The amazing structure of the honeycomb has amazed scientists for thousands of years. As early as the third century AD, the astronomer Pappus of Alexandria offered an explanation for the six-sided or hexagonal shape of the honeycomb. He pointed out that while the triangle, square and hexagon could all be candidates for the shape of the comb, one of these shapes holds more than the others. The most efficient shape for storing the most honey while wasting the least space is the hexagon.There are many variations of the hexagon that are available to the bee. However, the honeybee is always very precise in constructing honeycomb hexagons, with an obtuse angle of 109°23´ and an acute angle of 70°23´. These angles produce the most usable space for the least amount of building material. Humans are unable to use such precision in their designs without sophisticated equipment.Each honeybee is a tiny but powerful computer that could only have been designed and built by an intelligent Magnificent Creator God. Bees and what they do are of central importance to much of the rest of creation. No wonder God has given them so much: the complex structure of their society, their intelligence and industriousness! |
| 8/3/2023 | There’s an old saying that people seldom remember how rapidly the job was done, but they do appreciate good workmanship. However, the staggering variety and number of things created by God did not limit the elegance of His fine workman-ship.The relationship between the snapping shrimp and a fish called the goby is a good example of the Creator’s attention to the finest detail. The snapping shrimp has very poor eyesight, while the goby has excellent eyesight. Both share the same burrow, which is dug by the shrimp and guarded by the goby.The shrimp uses the goby as a blind person uses a Seeing Eye dog. Whenever the shrimp is outside its burrow, it always keeps one antenna on the goby. The shrimp stays hidden inside the burrow if the goby should temporarily swim away. When danger approaches, the goby signals and disappears inside the burrow. The shrimp is right behind him.Neither the goby nor the shrimp can survive without each other, so pairs are established for life when both goby and shrimp are very young. In order for this system to work, both goby and shrimp reproductive systems, which differ greatly, are synchronized so that shrimp and goby youngsters are ready to pair at the same time.This astonishing relationship shows us how our Magnificent Creator God’s standards of excellence bring His love to every corner of the creation. |
| 8/2/2023 | Which of your five senses is most important? Which sense could be lost with the least threat to your life?Most people consider their sense of sight the most important. While the loss of sight is a terrible tragedy, life can go on. Lose your sense of smell and food will be flavorless, but you can get by. Loss of hearing, too, is a great loss, but the loss can be adjusted to. And few people’s lives are threatened by the loss of the sense of taste. However, if you lose your sense of touch, you lose your sense of pain and therefore any warning that you might be injuring yourself. Unfortunately there are people who have no sense of touch. Sometimes they receive life-threatening injuries because they cannot feel pain.Science has shown that touching is necessary for life. Newborn animals that are licked by their mothers have a higher resistance to disease. They are also more likely to live to adulthood than newborns who are untouched by their mothers. Chihuahua pups have a notoriously high rate of death because their mothers are often unwilling to lick them. Lambs will die after birth if their mothers do not lick and nuzzle them. Even human infants who are not lovingly touched enough will suffer from depression, poor sleep, weight loss, poor immunity and, in extreme cases, even death.Our wise Magnificent Creator God has built into us the need for touch. Though we take it for granted, without touch, life would be impossible. |
| 8/1/2023 | If you had painful skin, one of the last things you would apply to it would be hot peppers. Not only do hot peppers burn the mouth, some can even blister the skin.Yet in South America ground hot peppers have been used for centuries to help relieve pain. Scientists have discovered the active ingredient in peppers that relieves skin pain. This sub-stance blocks the pain signals that come from the nerves just under the surface of the skin. The “hot pepper” sauce for skin not only causes no pain, it relieves pain that doesn’t respond to any other treatment. It’s available in creams and ointments that, tests show, relieve pain in two out of three people.Conventional wisdom says that medicines that are found in natural plants were discovered by accident. Someone might accidentally discover a relationship between a person’s having eaten a certain plant and then getting well. They would try the same plants on others with the same disease. If they found that there were more cures, the plant would be remembered as a folk medicine.The “hot pepper” pain reliever for skin tells us that there’s a problem with this theory. People who have a painful skin condition are not likely to apply a pepper sauce. Doing that would be expected to make their skin more painful and cause it to blister. However, it’s possible that our Magnificent Creator God originally gave humans some knowledge of the cures for our ills—cures that He wisely built into creation. |
| 7/31/2023 | Plants make cellulose. Cellulose is a type of natural plastic made of many sugar molecules linked together. Scientists have known for years how to use the natural plastic qualities of cellulose to make things like cellophane and rayon.Scientists have also known that animals generate a similar natural plastic called chitin. Like cellulose, chitin is a carbohydrate made of long chains of sugar molecules. Chitin is found in the shells of all insects and crustaceans, like crabs. Each year the crabmeat industry had thrown away thousands of tons of chitin because scientists couldn’t figure out how to extract chitin from the shells in a usable form.Finally in 1975 scientists discovered how to remove the chitin from shells and change its form so it could be made into whatever forms they needed. Suture thread made from chitin dissolves in the body. This means that stitches don’t have to be removed, and it can be more easily knotted than regular suture thread. Suture thread made from chitin also causes no allergic reaction and it seems to promote healing. It’s hard to believe that a crab shell, which is usually thrown away, could do so much! Food processing companies are even using a chemical made from chitin to recover protein from wastewater.Almost everything in the creation seems to have numerous uses for human needs. This is testimony that our Magnificent Creator God has made this universe for us and that He cares about our needs. In the Bible we learn that He has provided for our greatest need through His Son Jesus Christ. |
| 7/30/2023 | Many cultures around the world have legends about creation and a great Flood that have been handed down from generations in the distant past. Most of these creation and Flood stories sup-port the biblical story of creation and the Flood.The Wallam Olum is the story of creation and the history of the Delaware Indians. It predates the coming of white people or Christianity to North America. The Delaware creation legend reveals an all-powerful creator, who began by creating an earth without dry land, and the heavens including the sun, moon and stars. After dividing the waters from the land, he made all living things, including the first mother. This world was full of joy and had no sorrow until the snake brought wickedness. It concludes by saying that all this happened beyond the great ocean.The Delaware story of the Flood begins with the world filled with evil because of the activity of the evil snake. While the Delaware legend blames the Flood on the snake, a few were saved through the Flood at an island called “Nana,” a name very similar to Noah.While the Wallam Olum is not Genesis, the similarities with Genesis are too many and too exact to be accidental. Similar legends from all over the globe have the same or similar details that they, too, share with Genesis. This can only be explained by the fact that the Bible is accurate in describing how all cultures have shared this common history together.Regardless of what we call Him, it was our Magnificent Creator God to whom we owe it all. |
| 7/29/2023 | Deserts are inhospitable places with little rain—blazingly hot by day and chillingly cold by night. Few plants can survive, but the rock morning glory can. It has large underground tubers resembling sweet potatoes that store water whenever it rains. In times of drought, it’s sustained by the water stored in its twenty or so underground reserves.Jeremiah 17:8 says of those who put their confidence in God: “They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit”.Our Magnificent Creator God’s provisions are always sufficient! |
| 7/28/2023 | Solar Cycle 10 – a typical 11-year sunspot cycle, from late 1855 to 1867 – was one of the busiest ever observed for solar activity. British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington had noticed a great deal of activity on the surface of the Sun from August 28th, 1859. On the morning of Thursday, September 1st, he once again pointed his brass telescope at the Sun, and he hurriedly made dozens of rapid sketches of the projected images.Suddenly, he reported that he saw “two patches of intensely bright and white light”. He had just witnessed the largest ever recorded solar event – now named the Carrington Event.Within 18 hours, the Earth was experiencing massive Aurora displays – the northern lights seen at latitudes as far south as Cuba. More interesting was the effect on the telegraph systems. All around the world, telegraph systems failed, operators experienced shocks and telegraph papers caught fire.What would happen if a solar storm the size of the Carrington Event happened today? Earth is surrounded by communication satellites, and most countries of the world rely on computer networks and the Internet. All of these could be damaged or destroyed by another Carrington.The Carrington Event at least shows why our Magnificent Creator God created a magnetic field around the Earth. The Aurora displays at least showed that Earth has some protection against such an unusual event. And no event is truly random! |
| 7/27/2023 | For many people bats bring to mind words like “creepy,” “fangs,” “rabies,” and even “ugly.” However, over 450 years ago Martin Luther marveled at the delicate beauty of the bat. He pronounced the creature an excellent witness to the skill and wisdom of the Creator.God must also like bats. Almost one-fourth of all mammals He created are bats! The flying fox bat has a wingspan of nearly six feet. Bumblebee bats, native to Thailand, are the smallest mammals known, weighing less than a penny. There are brilliantly patterned tropical bats called butterfly bats. And hundreds of species of tropical plants depend on bats as pollinators.Popular legend considers bats a serious part of the rabies problem. The truth is that raccoons, skunks, foxes, and even dogs and cats are more likely to have rabies. In fact, one study shows that in Pennsylvania you are more likely to find a rabid cow than a rabid bat. In reality bats are delicate, helpful and intelligent creatures. A typical North American bat will eat about 600 mosquitoes an hour. Large colonies will consume between 250,000 and 500,000 pounds of insects per night! Bats can be trained, demonstrating their intelligence. And finally, an important warning. If you find sleeping bats, don’t disturb them. Even one such disturbance during sleep can be fatal, since stored nutrition may be consumed by the disturbance before the next feeding cycle.So next time you see a bat, don’t recoil in fear. Rather, say a prayer of thanksgiving to the Magnificent Creator God who made both of you. |
| 7/26/2023 | Some people talk to their plants. But what do you say to a bacterium? Evidently the soybean plant knows just what to say to make bacteria its close friend and helper.Symbiosis means a relationship between two different creatures in which they both help each other. Plants need nitrogen for healthy growth. However, while there is more than enough nitrogen in the air, plants normally can’t make use of that nitrogen. Legumes, like soybeans, link up with bacteria that are able to take nitrogen from the air and turn it into a form of nitrogen that plants, including the soybean, can use. In return, the plant creates a nice home for the bacteria in nodes in its roots and provides the bacteria with food.The bacteria need a great deal of oxygen and energy to fix nitrogen into the soil. The oxygen is supplied by heme. If that name reminds you of the hemoglobin that carries oxygen in blood, you’re on the right track. That’s why the heme in the nodules turns them reddish. Who makes the heme, the soybean or the bacteria? When alone, neither creature has any heme. Researchers have learned that the plant performs the first part of the chemistry needed to make heme and the bacterium finishes the job. The plant and the bacterium actually communicate chemically with each other so that production goes smoothly!Communication between such different creatures, allowing them to perform sophisticated chemistry to improve both of their lives, shows how inadequate evolution is to explain life. This arrangement surely glorifies our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 7/25/2023 | Previously we talked about the Perseverance Mars 2020 mission, which included a helicopter named Ingenuity.Another technology demonstration taken with Perseverance is an instrument for collecting oxygen. The atmosphere on Mars is very thin; its surface pressure is only 1% of Earth’s atmosphere. Of this tenuous Martian atmosphere, 95.3% is carbon dioxide, which is only a trace gas on Earth.There is 2.6% nitrogen and 1.9% argon, with trace amounts of water vapor, oxygen, carbon monoxide, hydrogen and noble gases. Despite the rarity of oxygen, NASA engineers believe that their equipment can extract oxygen in sufficient quantities to make human exploration of Mars possible.Which brings us to the subject of life. Previous missions – and indeed photographs – have provided evidence that there was once water on Mars.Even Perseverance’s landing site – the Jezero Crater – appears surrounded by dried water channels. But water and atmospheric carbon dioxide do not make life. Says one NASA scientist, “If we found a microbe that arose on the next planet over, if lightning struck twice in this one corner of the solar system, it would suggest that our whole universe could have life on lots and lots of planets and it’s not just us alone in the dark night.” But his “lightning” did not strike once. Chemicals in lifeforms are not produced by mixtures or even simple reactions. They contain codes and information which could only have been put there by the Magnificent Creator God of the Bible!!! |
| 7/24/2023 | Garlic. Even say the word and some people move away to give you some distance. Others gather around, because to them, garlic helps make the meal. Garlic has begun to attract the attention of medical researchers as well.At the Tagore Medical College in India, researcher Arun Bordia kept track of 432 heart attack survivors for three years. During that time half of the survivors drank the juice from six to ten cloves of fresh garlic each day while others took a garlic scented drink with no garlic in it. Over the three-year period the garlic group had 32% fewer heart attacks and 45% fewer deaths than the other group. Research in the United States with chickens, who metabolize cholesterol in much the same way as humans, suggests a reason for these results. Chickens that were fed aged garlic extract showed a 50% reduction in the kind of cholesterol that clogs arteries.Medical researchers are also looking at some interesting evidence that garlic may help prevent some forms of cancer, especially stomach cancer.When our Magnificent Creator God made the heavens and earth, He knew that humans would disobey Him, destroying the creation with sin. He also knew that in doing so we would bring disease and death into the world. We can thank Him that He stocked the earth with substances that could be used to treat some of the earthly effects of sin. However, we can thank Him even more joyfully that He provided the full cure for sin for each of us in the life, death and resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ! |
| 7/23/2023 | They are the only cells in the human body that repeatedly die and self-regenerate throughout life. And science considers them so interesting that several branches of science are studying them. I am talking about hair cells.As scientists are learning more about hair, they are coming to greater appreciation of, as one researcher put it, hair’s bewildering biology. A Harvard molecular biologist admitted that one of the reasons we know so little about hair is that scientists have avoided studying this complex structure.The average scalp has about 100,000 hairs growing at any one time. Each hair follicle produces hair for about two to five years, followed by a rest period of four to six months. A miniature assembly line of cells divides within the follicle, pushing older hair cells upward through the skin. Pigmentation is added as each new cell is produced. When the follicle is at rest, it shrivels and many of its cells die. However, seed cells, promising new life to the follicle, hide within it waiting for the signal to spring back to life. As humans grow older the resting time of the follicles increases and growing time decreases, especially in men. So if you find yourself balding, you’re not necessarily losing your hair. It’s just that your hair is spending more time resting than it used to.Our Magnificent Creator God tells us that He cares so much about each one of us that He even knows how many hairs we have on our head! |
| 7/22/2023 | David Bowie sang about the Spiders from Mars, but by the time you hear this Creation Moment, the sky above the Red Planet could be buzzing with helicopters; well, one helicopter at least. NASA’s Perseverance mission was launched successfully on July 30th, 2020 and was scheduled to land in the Jezero Crater on February 18th, 2021. We probably know much more about this landing site for a robotic spacecraft than we did about the Mare Tranquilitatis Apollo 11 landing site on the Moon in 1969. The surface of Mars has been extensively mapped by orbiting craft. Many landings have taken so-called rovers with them. Perseverance is another such rover and carries seven different sensing instruments. It will even collect a number of samples for returning to Earth, though the Perseverance mission itself will not return; NASA hopes that a mission in 2026 will be able to retrieve the samples.One very interesting extra feature of Perseverance is that it carries with it the very first aircraft to operate in another planet’s atmosphere. Ingenuity is a sort-of helicopter, or perhaps a drone, designed to be able to fly in the tenuous Martian atmosphere. Seven flights of this robotic drone will provide much new information.Unfortunately, the focus of the mission is, once again, the fruitless search for extraterrestrial life. But we will still follow the mission with interest because God made Mars, and what we find there will cause us to praise our Magnificent Creator God all the more! |
| 7/21/2023 | The headline “Scientist Sees Planets with Very Large Telescope” might not excite the imagination until you realize that the Very Large Telescope, or VLT, is actually a thing! It is a huge reflecting telescope, built by the European Southern Observatory in the desert in Chile. It is actually comprised of four telescopes, each of which has a primary hyperbolic mirror about 27 feet across. The result is that the instrument can “see” objects millions of times fainter than those detected by the human eye.Recently, the VLT was pointed at a star rejoicing in the name TYC 8998-760-1, about 300 light years away. It was already known, from calculations, that the star had two planets orbiting it. So the VLT was able to take a magnificent photograph of the stellar system, clearly showing these planets.Both planets are gas giants. The one closer to the star is 14 times more massive than Jupiter, while the other is six times bigger. The planets are 160 and 320 times further from their star than the Earth is from the Sun, compared with just five and ten times the Earth-Sun distance for Jupiter and Saturn.And all of this fits perfectly into the master plan of our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 7/20/2023 | We don’t often think about our sense of smell. While our noses are on the job all the time, we note an odor only when it is unusual. Most of the time the scents around us contribute, unnoticed, to our overall impression of our surroundings.It’s hard to remain tense at the beach. Simply the mention of the water and waves, the sand and sun, brings back the last trip to the beach and starts relaxing a person. However therapeutic these elements of the beach are, scientists have found that the one beach fixture that is probably most responsible for relaxing us is the smell.The smelly chemical that utility companies put in natural gas so that we can smell leaks is methyl mercaptan. This chemical is also produced by rotting meat. The human nose is extremely sensitive to this smell. We can detect as little as one 400-billionth of a gram of it in a quart of air.Doctors have long known that their noses are helpful in diagnosing disease. A person is brought into the emergency room in a coma. It’s very likely that the doctor will smell the patient’s breath as he tries to discover the problem. A sweet smell could indicate diabetes. The smell of ammonia could indicate a kidney malfunction. Arsenic poisoning smells like garlic. Diphtheria can be identified by a sickeningly sweet odor, and people with the plague smell like apples. A patient who smells like freshly baked bread may have typhoid.While we seldom think about our sense of smell, it’s a wonderful gift from our Magnificent Creator God for which we owe Him thanks. |
| 7/19/2023 | When you are ill, you need sleep. And when you are sick you are usually sleepy. Medical researchers are now learning that it’s not accidental that illness and sleepiness go together. In fact, the relationship is one of God’s ingenious designs.Early in this century scientists isolated what they called the S factor—the S being for sleep. Modern biochemists have identified the S factor as a biochemical that is released from the cell walls of bacteria when our bodies destroy them. This chemical finds its way to the brain where it induces sleep. It also stimulates the immune system. Normally the body breaks down some of the harmless bacteria that live in our digestive systems every day. By the end of the day enough sleep factor has collected in our blood to make bedtime welcome.However, when we are fighting a bacterial infection, our body is destroying many additional bacteria and releasing a lot more sleep factor. That sleep factor is also stimulating our immune system to higher levels of activity. Researchers recommend that we give in to our desire to sleep when we are ill. Our immune system and non-dreaming sleep are closely related. In other words, grandma was right when she told us that we would avoid getting sick if we got enough sleep.It’s no accident that bacterial infections trigger the body to react not only to rid itself of bacteria but also to strengthen itself for the fight. This ingenious design is yet another indication that our Magnificent Creator God does care about what happens to us. That love is why He sent His Son to win our salvation on the cross of Calvary. |
| 7/18/2023 | Picture yourself sitting in a friend’s living room. Can you picture in your mind where the door is located? Scientists call this a thought map. Thought maps are mental pictures of the arrangement of objects relative to one another.Thought maps help us remember where to find a water glass, the gas or brake pedal, and home. Thought maps require intelligence. They help make possible additional intelligent activity, such as finding our way around and conducting an intelligent search. This is why scientists have been surprised to find that many creatures, not just humans, use thought maps.One experimenter carried a chimpanzee on his back while he hid 18 pieces of food in a field. Then the chimp and five others were released in the field to find the food. The chimp who had seen the hiding places found most of the food, following a very different route than that originally taken by the researcher. Bees, likewise, use mental maps. Even if a bee is forced to detour on its way back to the hive, it always reports the food source as though it had used a direct route. Bees are also able to find a food source that has been moved after its discovery. Ants have also been shown to use mental maps.Mental maps help humans and animals think deductively about changes in the environment. Mental mapping ability could not have evolved because even the lowliest creature requires this ability to survive. This ability must have been given to them in the first place by their Magnificent Creator God! |
| 7/17/2023 | If, as we are continually told, evolution is a fact, why is it that human technology improves when we copy designs found in nature? If nature is really a giant trial-and-error experiment, we should not only find evidence of less-sophisticated designs in the distant past, but humans today should be able to improve on designs found in nature.Science has long known that an object moving through water or air moves with the least resistance when the ratio of its length to diameter is four to one. This ratio is found in the fastest swimmers in the sea – like the tuna, dolphin and swordfish. A Boeing 707, with a ratio of nine to one, experiences much more resistance than the larger, fatter 747, which has a ratio of six to one – much closer to the tuna and the dolphin.Studies of the vision of the horseshoe crab, supposedly one of the earlier forms of life, have taught engineers how to produce a clearer, sharper television picture. The United States Air Force copied a speed-sensing system from beetles to improve the ground speed indicators of their jets.The optics of a frog’s eye showed them how to improve their radar. The fly’s multifaceted eye taught engineers how to design a lighting system that generates more light with less energy.Humans are learning from and copying design solutions worked out by their Magnificent Creator God. The brilliant designs in our world are not the result of trial and error. This reality makes the claim that evolution is a fact of science sound empty! |
| 7/16/2023 | Though God created the entire living kingdom in only a few days, the variety and creativity of what He made seems nearly unlimited by our standards. One of the more unusual creatures He made was thought extinct until it was rediscovered in 1958.The kakapo parrot lives in New Zealand. The most unusual parrot on earth, it is one of only a few known parrots that prefers to sleep during the day and becomes active at night. Weighing in at five pounds, it is also the world’s heaviest parrot. It is, perhaps not surprisingly, the world’s only non-flying parrot.The Creator’s unusual expression of inventive creativity in designing the kakapo did not end here. The mating habits of the kakapo are especially peculiar for birds. In mating season the males gather in locations that are used year after year for mate selection. Female parrots come to these places to inspect the males to select a mate. However, in most un-bird-like fashion, the males provide absolutely no help building the nest or rearing the young.The kakapo is remarkable because of its many strange traits, most of which would make it least fit for survival. In other words, not only is it an unusual creature, but its more unusual characteristics seem to put it at a disadvantage as far as evolution is concerned. So while evolution would not have made the kakapo, our inventive Magnificent Creator God did, perhaps as a witness against evolution. |
| 7/15/2023 | We have all looked in wonder at the amazing transformation of a caterpillar into a moth. However, did you realize that a moth needs an entirely different kind of brain than a caterpillar? We can truly say that here we have an insect with two brains!In the caterpillar stage, the moth lumbers around in a body that is primarily designed for eating. Its brain must be able to command powerful jaws and a comparatively huge digestive system as well as the complexities of caterpillar locomotion. The world of the caterpillar is very different from the world of the moth.During metamorphosis the caterpillar completely dissolves and the moth is rebuilt from the liquid. The brain, for example, requires new nerve cells and new connections between brain cells, while some brain cells change function, migrate to new locations, or even die. The result is a brain that is 10 times the size of the caterpillar’s and ready to control flight. The moth’s primary purpose in life is to reproduce. So its new brain is able to generate the odors used by moths to identify and communicate with potential mates. It is also equipped to detect the scents of a potential mate.Only our almighty Magnificent Creator God could completely rebuild a caterpillar into a moth. Only He could rebuild and increase its brain ten-fold in only a week or two. Even more amazing is how He remakes people. Through the forgiveness of sins, Jesus Christ turns us from people who wish to escape Him to new creatures who love Him and find joy in Him. |
| 7/14/2023 | They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. While that is often true, they also say that it takes a highly evolved brain to picture objects and remember them. Science is learning that this bit of evolutionary myth is indeed fiction.As far as the honeybee is concerned, not all flowers are created equal. Some flowers are a good source of nectar while others are a waste of time. Alfalfa flowers can kill a honeybee because they are designed for pollination by larger insects. When an insect lands, a central petal in the flower releases the stamen and sweeps pollen upward to aid pollination. Honeybees can be tossed off the flower or trapped inside by this action.Scientists always thought that honeybees solved the problem of finding safe and productive flowers by remembering a list of characteristics. They believed the honeybee was evolutionarily too simple to remember mental pictures of favored flowers. However, recent experiments have convinced scientists that bees actually store a mental picture of productive flowers. In these experiments, bees were rewarded with sugar water for visiting some patterns and not others. Their reactions showed that they remember images, not simply patterns.What’s more, the experiments showed that bees are quite intelligent and good learners. One scientist noted that these experiments showed that evolution’s assumptions about so-called higher and lower creatures are false. Those who believe in evolution are having to rethink their view of the world. Meanwhile, we can give thanks to our Magnificent Creator God for so generously giving the gift of intelligence to so many of His creatures. |
| 7/13/2023 | Some creatures simply try to look uninteresting to hungry predators. Others take their role-playing so seriously that they actually fulfill some of the same roles as their models.Loopers, or inchworms, move along the ground, twigs or branches with the characteristic opening and closing of an upside-down letter U. These creatures are not true worms. Rather, they are caterpillars. As caterpillars, they often look very much like the twigs or branches on which they move. However, their odd form of movement can give them away.Here’s an experiment you can try. If you ever notice a looper on a branch, simply give the branch a gentle tap. Chances are, the looper will suddenly freeze into the same shape as a nearby twig. If you were to carefully touch the looper, you would find that it had become as stiff as a twig. A botanist reports that while studying one looper moving along a branch, an ant happened along. Ants, of course, will eat loopers. The looper froze in a horizontal position between branches. The ant walked across the looper, never noticing that its walkway was actually a potential meal.Many scientists suggest that the looper “just happens” to be the same color as the branches on which it crawls. We ask, does it also accidentally know how to act like a twig to fool predators? The almighty hand of our Magnificent Creator God is evident even in the inchworm! |
| 7/12/2023 | It is unfortunate that we so often have the sense that nothing technologically important has happened in human history until modern times. This helps maintain the illusion that humans are indeed progressing and evolving upward.Differential gears, allowing a machine to perform two functions simultaneously, were not used in modern times until 1575. However, a model planetarium using differential gears was found in a ship that sank off Greece in 78 BC. While Ben Franklin is given credit for discovering electricity, electric batteries dating from 100 BC have been found in Iraq.The Gate of the Sun is a ten-ton intricately carved stone gate in Bolivia, 13,000 feet above sea level. In Mexico there are boulders with faces carved on them. They were erected between 1250 and 400 BC, carved out of boulders weighing up to 24 tons that were quarried 45 miles away from their present location. How were these giants moved and erected? Joseph Davidovits, a scientist at the Geopolymer Institute in France, believes he may know. He suggests that the builders chemically broke down the stone with acid. Then they carried the liquid stone to the present sites and poured the liquid into molds. In support of his theory, Davidovits points out that some Indians still use this method now, while traces of the acid can still be found in some ancient stone structures.Despite all of our modern gadgets, there is no evidence that humans are any more clever today than they were on the first day they walked the earth when they were placed there by our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 7/11/2023 | All insects that hear, except one, have two ears. Some insects have ears on their legs, thorax, or abdomen. However, they all follow the same principle. Their ears are separated so that they can locate the source of the sound – except in one insect.Scientists always thought the preying mantis was deaf. The 1,700 species of mantises have no structure that looks like an ear. Only after a long process of detailed study and testing did scientists finally discover that the mantis can hear. Further investigation finally led to the discovery of one of the most bizarre methods of hearing anywhere in the animal kingdom.The mantis’s hearing organ is difficult to call an ear. Unlike any other insect, the mantis has only one hearing organ, located in a groove underneath its thorax. The teardrop‑shaped groove has a thinner cuticle than other parts of the body. Beneath the cuticle there is a relatively large air sac on each side of the groove. These sacs are connected to the insect’s respiratory system. Near the top of the sac are the nerves that carry the sensation of sound to the nervous system. Scientists say that this hearing organ senses ultrasonic frequencies. When researchers played a bat‑like sound to a mantis in flight, it immediately took an evasive flight path to escape the bat it thought it heard.There is no limit to our Magnificent Creator God’s creativity and His ability to make whatever He can imagine. |
| 7/10/2023 | We want to avoid getting bacteria in our food, don’t we? Bacteria cause illness. Bacteria are bad.Yet, some of the world’s healthiest foods contain deliberately introduced bacteria. One such strain of bacteria is the Lactic Acid Bacterium (LAB). This is used in foods such as kimchi or sauerkraut. Brassicas, such as cabbage, often have low quantities of this bacterium. When sealed in a suitable fermentation jar with salt, the LAB can thrive. LAB is able to withstand high acidity and salinity, so it grows, even in a salty environment. One of the products of LAB’s metabolism is lactic acid. Most other bacteria cannot survive in either acid or salt, so the LAB begins to dominate, while the vast majority of other bacteria die. LAB itself is not harmful to humans, so, paradoxically, the good bacteria have effectively killed off all the bad bacteria, providing a healthy, long-lasting food.When God finished making the world at the end of day six of creation, He looked at all that He had made and declared it to be very good. This must have included bacteria. Since Adam’s sin, many bacteria have mutated (though not evolved, as they have not gained new genetic information) into harmful organisms. Perhaps originally, all bacteria were created to be as useful as LAB in that original perfect world that our Magnificent Creator God gave us and that we so sinfully polluted. |
| 7/9/2023 | It’s commonly known that many animals are able to detect extraordinarily weak odors. The real mystery is how they can smell scents that are 1,000 times too weak to produce the chemical reactions necessary to make a scent signal.From the chemist’s point of view, our sense of smell shouldn’t work as well as it does. When you smelled that wonderful dinner a few days ago, a marvel of chemical reactions was taking place in your nose. Scientists still aren’t sure how we sense such a wide range of smells. It was while investigating this question that scientists may have stumbled across the answer to another question.The receptors in our noses have to detect a certain number of scent molecules before they can trigger the chemical response that makes the signal that tells us we have smelled something. When air is drawn into your nose, an organ called Steno’s duct sprays a fine mist. Scientists always thought this mist simply humidified the incoming air. Now they’ve discovered that the duct also makes proteins that grab onto odor molecules. Sprayed into the incoming air, the proteins collect odor molecules. Then, with their load of odor molecules, they settle onto receptors that trigger your sense of smell. As a result, even scents that are too weak to smell are concentrated by this ingenious system so that we can sense them.Our sense of smell helps protect us, gives our food flavor, and adds richness to the experience of living. It’s truly a marvel of our Magnificent Creator God’s design. |
| 7/8/2023 | “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.”One of the most common arguments against a literal six-day creation is that the structure of the days is a literary device, called the Framework Hypothesis. The hypothesis suggests an almost poetic pattern to the days, which they claim demonstrates that the days are not meant to be taken literally. On day one, God made the universe. On day two, He made the seas and atmosphere, and on day three He made the land, with its plants. Then on day four, He filled the universe, day five filled the sea and atmosphere, and day six filled the land. So there are three days of creating ex nihilo and three days of filling those creations. Again, the advocates of this hypothesis maintain that this pattern shows that Genesis 1 is allegorical literature, proclaiming the truth of God as Creator, but does not give a historical account.A quick answer to this point is that if there is a real pattern of two sets of three days, this does not prove that the days are not literal. God is a God of order. However, their neat pattern breaks down. Day one is not actually the parallel to day four – day two is. How so? On day two, God created the firmament, and the firmament refers not merely to the atmosphere but the entirety of space.A better suggestion is to take our Magnificent Creator God at His word, that He created everything exactly how He said He did!!! |
| 7/7/2023 | Language requires some very special designs that are rare in nature and found together only in humans. First, human language requires vocal cords, which none of the apes have. The only animals with vocal tracts are birds, but no one is suggesting that we evolved from birds.Language also seems to require an unusual structure to the brain. The frontal area of the left hemisphere of the brain is connected to an adjacent area of the cortex called the Wernicke area. These two areas are linked by a bundle of nerve fibers. The result is a distinct brain asymmetry that is unique to humans. Even the unborn human has this asymmetry that allows it to absorb language. Development in this area of the brain stops at puberty. That is why it becomes more difficult for adults to learn a new language. Language skills can be learned only by hearing language. So-called “feral” children, who have heard no language at all, cannot be taught language after puberty for the same reason.So where did Adam first hear language? Scripture tells us that it was the Creator God Himself who regularly spoke with Adam. This means that language is not a collection of meaningless sounds to which we have assigned meanings. The meanings and sounds have come from God, just as our unique design that makes language possible comes from God.Therefore, language is not only for worldly purposes. We have also been given language to praise our Magnificent Creator God and Savior and to tell others who He is and what He has done! |
| 7/6/2023 | Tropical beauty has inspired many Hawaiian love songs. However, none is more unusual than the love song of Hawaiian fruit flies.There are more than 100 species of Hawaiian Drosophila, or fruit fly. Just like everything else in that tropical paradise, these fruit flies are not the drab creatures known in mainland biology labs. Hawaiian fruit flies are larger and more brightly colored. And while mainland fruit flies do sing, Hawaiian fruit flies offer more variety in their songs and in the way they make the sounds. One of their unique songs is called the click song. Its high‑pitched clicks sound something like a fingernail being dragged across a comb. Another song is made up of a complex pattern that includes pulses and trills. A third song pattern is a steady purr. A fourth pattern is made up of a low hum. Scientists describe the singing patterns as elaborate for a fly.Scientists suspect that the fruit flies use singing as part of their mating ritual. In one encounter, a male stood behind a female with his head under her wing. He then hummed until she either accepted his advance or flew off. It may be, scientists speculate, that the female feels the male’s song rather than hears it. Songs and rituals seem to vary between the species.Scripture tells us that everything in the creation sings praise to our Magnificent Creator God. Often that truth is taken as figurative. However, as we learn more about His creatures, we see that the complexity of music is a gift that has been given to many things in the creation. |
| 7/5/2023 | Which body structure is a powerful generator of emotions, gives you a sense of direction, and serves as a cannon all at the same time? It’s your nose, of course! It is common knowledge that without our noses the scent of a rose could not give us joy, nor would our food taste like very much. Less well known is the fact that our noses are directly hooked into the brain’s limbic system. Your limbic system plays a central role in generating and controlling emotions. This is why certain scents are able to raise strong emotional memories in us.The nose is also designed to filter out and catch particles that should not get into the lungs. When a particle is taken in through your nose, it is snagged by the tissue inside your nasal passages. Next, this highly special tissue decides the best method of getting rid of the foreign material. If a bacterium is identified, your nose begins to run, bathing the bacteria in powerful chemicals that dissolve most of them. If the particles are larger, like pollen, a sneeze is triggered that can eject particles at speeds of over 100 miles per hour!Perhaps the most remarkable ability associated with the nose is its ability to act as a compass. Human beings have a small amount of iron in the bony part of the nose between the eyes. Scientific experiments have shown that we have an ability, while not foolproof, that can sense direction that is influenced by magnetic fields!Our Magnificent Creator God made your multi-purpose nose not only to bring some pleasure to life but also to help protect your health. |
| 7/4/2023 | Normally they bother no one. The creatures, called protozoan ciliates, quietly go about their business in water‑filled tree holes, eating other microorganisms. The protozoans themselves are an important food for mosquito larvae.However, as mosquito wigglers begin to populate the water, the protozoans turn into deadly monsters. Secretions from the mosquito larvae alert the protozoans to the presence of the larvae. They begin rapidly growing cells and their appearance changes. The result is a completely different creature that is well‑designed to infect mosquito larvae and kill them. In other words, for self‑protection, the prey becomes parasite, making the would‑be predator its prey. Scientists are seeking better understanding of this in the hope of developing better natural mosquito controls.Scientists have known for some time that some microorganisms respond to predators. The most common protective response is to grow spines or some other projection. This makes the prey difficult to eat. But the strategy used by the protozoan ciliates is the most extreme self‑protective response known.There is no creature in God’s creation that is so unimportant that God has failed to give it ways to make its living. Many creatures have been given what seem to be very uncreative ways to live. However, the fact that even these seemingly unimportant creatures have special gifts from our Magnificent Creator God gives witness to His care for everything He has made. |
| 7/3/2023 | We have looked at many plants and animals that use different forms of camouflage to keep from being noticed. Some don’t wish to be noticed so that they can surprise their prey, while others don’t want to be noticed so they can avoid becoming prey. However, what happens when both predator and prey encounter each other in full camouflage?The predator in this drama, witnessed by a naturalist at the edge of a desert, is a yellow crab spider. The spider was waiting on a yellow flower that made him nearly invisible. The potential prey is an inchworm beneath the same flower. The inchworm was tearing off bits of the yellow flower petals and sticking them on its back.Properly camouflaged, the inchworm then worked his way toward the top of the flower where the spider waited. The spider felt the movement and ran around the edge to see whether lunch might be on the way. However, when the spider got around the edge of the flower, he saw nothing. He didn’t even notice the camouflaged inchworm on which he was standing! The spider then returned to the center of the flower, outsmarted by the inchworm who went on about his business.Our wisdom would have said that the inchworm should try to run when he noticed the spider. However, the wisdom given to him by our Magnificent Creator God allowed him to continue about his business on the flower. This offers us a good illustration of how following the Lord’s wisdom often requires us to reject our own. |
| 7/2/2023 | We have long known that the community within a honeybee hive divides the labor among specialized workers. There are scouts who search for food. Nurses tend the young. Some bees specialized in cleaning. There are even undertaker bees who remove and dispose of dead members of the hive.Scientists have now discovered that honeybee colonies also have brigades of specialized “soldiers.” These bees often seem to be sitting around, not doing much. In fact, they have only one duty—attack large intruders. It appears that these bees are fed and cared for by the hive members while they wait for the alarm. Should a raccoon, bear or human threaten the hive, thousands of soldier bees swarm around the enemy and sting.Soldiers have been well-known members of ant and termite colonies. However, up to now, they have never been confirmed in honeybee hives.The universal need for soldiers for protection among social insects reminds us that some things are universal in this world. These soldiers are not responsible for a bear’s attack on the hive. Nor are human soldiers who follow just war principles responsible for human war.Humanity’s greed and lack of love for others cannot be abolished by getting rid of armies. Rather, greed, theft and the need for protection remind us that we are not what God intended us to be. The solution lies not in denying reality, but in returning to our Magnificent Creator God through the forgiveness of our sins as made possible by Jesus Christ. |
| 7/1/2023 | How many different scents do you think your nose is able to smell? The answer is about 10,000. How does your nose tell the difference between a rose and a skunk? Until only recently, scientists really weren’t sure.Now we know that humans and mammals detect smells by using at least 1,000 different genes. These genes are located in every cell in your body, but they are active only in your nose. This discovery, say scientists, gives them their first insight into how smell works. Before this, said one scientist, “We had almost no knowledge of the olfactory system and this really opens up the molecular study of smell in a very fascinating way.”They say that each of the different genes seems designed to respond to a small group of odors. As each group of genes does its part, the entire system is able to recognize everything we can smell. These genes pass signals from the nerve cells in the nose to a small region of the brain called the olfactory bulb. Now that smell genes are identified, researchers say they can begin to understand how odors are detected and how the brain interprets those signals.Our sense of smell relies on a very elegant and sophisticated system. Imagine, 1,000 genes lie at the heart of that system. Each one of those genes is information—a programmed code that is designed to make sense of what we smell. Information, programming and decoding are all terms that assume that we have a highly intelligent Magnificent Creator God who designed our sense of smell!!! |
| 6/30/2023 | Our senses link us to the world around us and enable us to interact with the world. While most people believe that our sense of sight is the highest of the senses and the most marvelous in design, our sense of hearing is no less marvelous.When a sound strikes your ear, your eardrum vibrates with the sound waves, fast or slow, soft or hard. These variations in vibration provide us with important information about the nature of the sound we are hearing. Some sounds produce a vibration in the eardrum as small as a billionth of a centimeter – only one-tenth the diameter of a hydrogen atom! There are three tiny bones in the middle ear called the hammer, anvil and stirrup. They pick up the vibrations from the eardrum, amplify them and send them on to the cochlea. The cochlea is filled with about 25,000 tiny hair cells that finally turn the vibrations into electrical signals that are sent on to the brain.Our hearing is designed to be more sensitive to high-pitched sounds than to lower sounds. If we had just a little more sensitivity to lower-pitched sounds, we would continuously be distracted by the internal sounds of our body, including the blood rushing through our arteries. In fact, to help prevent this, there are no blood vessels at all in that part of the ear where vibrations are turned into electrical impulses. The body supports life in these tissues by constantly bathing them in dissolved nutrients.While we can hear many things, and decide not to hear other things, the Magnificent Creator God who so marvelously designed our ears invites us to hear His Word to us from the Bible. |
| 6/29/2023 | Not only is the human brain the most complex structure in the universe, it is also one of the busiest. In fact, during intense concentration, your brain can burn as many calories as your muscles do during exercise! Intense thinking can literally be as exhausting as a physical workout! More than 100,000 chemical reactions go on in your brain every second.Among the brain’s many jobs is chemist. The brain produces more than 50 psychoactive drugs. Some of these are associated with memory, others with intelligence, still others are sedatives. Endorphin is the brain’s painkiller and it’s three times more potent than morphine. Serotonin is produced by the brain to help keep our moods under control. The brain also makes dopamine. Dopamine makes people more talkative and excitable. Another hormone regulates hunger.The brain is also a radio transmitter that sends out measurable electrical wave signals. In fact, the brain continues to send these signals for as long as 37 hours after death!Our tiny knowledge of the brain is enough to show us that this incredible organ is no accident. The brain is much more than a powerful testimony to our Creator. Its incredible powers convince us that there is much more to existence than this material life. However, we can learn only from the Word of God about eternal life through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ.Put your brain together with the Word of our Magnificent Creator God today! |
| 6/28/2023 | If, of all the millions of living things on Earth, a few creatures happened to look like something they are not and this helped protect them, we might put it down to chance. However, the creation is filled with too many creatures who practice look-alike deception to put it down to chance.Africa’s southern deserts have a plant called living stones. In a desert, any vegetation can be a welcome source of food or moisture. In this setting, a plant that doesn’t look like a plant has an advantage. And living stones look like nothing more than just another rock in the sand.Wasps can be some of the nastiest insects in nature. An insect in Costa Rica called the mantispid looks very much like the feared wasp, even up close. Then again, the hover fly looks like a wasp and sounds like a wasp because the frequency of its wing beats is almost identical to a wasp.Treehoppers have a very odd body shape that comes to a point on top. Not only do they look like thorns, but they usually stay on bushes that have thorns, orienting their bodies on the branches just like true thorns. This effectively hides them from hungry birds. Larval plant hoppers use a different form of deception. They attach themselves in groups on branches, orienting their frilly and feathery bodies together so they look like a flower!The clever forethought and planning involved in nature’s deceptions rule out any thought that these creatures designed themselves. Only our Magnificent Creator God could have created such a Master Plan for His Master Creation! |
| 6/27/2023 | New research shows that, when attacked, many plants make chemicals that will give munching insects a bad case of indigestion. They also seem to warn their neighbors about the attack so that they, too, start up their defenses. Some plants even call in air defenses.Some plants, when attacked by caterpillars, release a scent that scientists simply describe as “green leaf odors.” These odors attract certain female wasps, who home in on the plant. The wasp will sting the caterpillar, leaving him paralyzed. She then lays her eggs in the pest, who remains paralyzed until the hatching young wasps consume it. That “green leaf odor” is a plant’s way of calling in air defenses. It is communication between plant and insect!Only our Magnificent Creator God can design a plan so complete that every minute piece of His creation is provided for. |
| 6/26/2023 | The study of plants’ abilities to protect themselves from insect attackers is a fairly new and rapidly growing area of research. It seems that new and even more amazing discoveries are appearing every month.Let’s imagine that you are a nice little beetle looking for a tasty tomato plant. Soon after spotting a juicy looking tomato, you are happily munching away. However, before you can finish your meal you are in trouble. Every leaf on the tomato has started turning out chemicals that will, at the least, give you serious indigestion and possibly kill you. At the same time, the plant has warned its neighbors of your presence, and the other tomatoes, too, are turning out the same nasty chemicals. Your very act of eating has made it impossible to get a decent meal in this garden!The latest research suggests that the tomato under attack communicates with its neighbors by releasing a chemical called methyl jasmonate. (This chemical is commonly found in perfumes.) Methyl Jasmonate warns neighboring plants that hungry insects are in the neighborhood. On receiving the news, they begin producing the two chemicals that prevented you from digesting the protein in your lunch. This reaction has been seen among a number of plants, including cotton plants and various trees.Who would ever have imagined that plants warn each other about attack?Who would have guessed that they know enough chemistry and insect biochemistry to mount such a clever defense?While even we who believe in creation are amazed, we know that our Magnificent Creator God can and did equip plants with these abilities. |
| 6/25/2023 | For centuries, Asian cooks have wrapped meat, sushi and candy in bamboo bark. Though the reason for this practice seems to have been forgotten, humans evidently once knew what modern science is rediscovering about bamboo.Chemists have succeeded in extracting the natural chemicals in bamboo bark. What they found was not one or two but four natural chemicals in the bark that inhibit bacteria, especially staph germs. These natural antibacterial agents are now under study for possible use as natural food and cosmetic preservatives. If these natural chemicals can be shown to kill bacteria and yet be harmless to people, the door will be open for an entirely new class of natural food preservatives.The question naturally arises about how Asians originally came to use bamboo in the kitchen. Is it possible that thousands of years ago, when ancestors of today’s Asians headed east from the Tower of Babel, humans knew that bamboo would help keep their food from spoiling?Much of what we are learning today was already known to a humanity that was only a few generations removed from our first and once-perfect parents.Remember that the perfection with which humanity was created was more than moral perfection. Because Adam and Eve had a perfect knowledge of God, they also had a perfect understanding of all that our Magnificent Creator God had made. While we cannot be perfect except through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ, it is also true that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom. |
| 6/24/2023 | Some of the most fascinating discoveries in recent years have to do with our growing knowledge of plant communication. New research continues to reveal even more amazing facts about the exquisite intricacy of God’s marvelous work.Naturalists have long noted that plants often choose to grow at precise spacing from each other and plants of other species. Scientists at the University of California at Santa Barbara theorized that this precision might be a result of communication between the roots of these plants. So they devised an experiment to find out. They designed a network of interlocking, partially transparent growth boxes. These boxes allowed them to watch how root growth took place in single plants, two plants of the same species, and plants of different species.They discovered that when burro weed roots neared the roots of the creosote bush, the roots of the creosote bush slowed the growth of the nearing roots. They also discovered that burro weed roots will stop growing when they encounter other burro weed roots. This allows the plants to send their roots out where they will not compete with their own kind. Most astonishing is the discovery that burro weed roots continue to grow if they encounter other roots from their own plant. The amazed scientists noted that this means that even plants may have a sense of self.When the Bible tells us that the whole creation praises its Creator, it certainly suggests that at least every living thing has a sense of itself as well as its Magnificent Creator God! |
| 6/23/2023 | A family of fish that live in the depths of the sea actually go fishing—pole, dangling bait, and all. This is only natural, since they, like people who go fishing, like to eat fish.This group of fish is collectively called the angler fish. The front dorsal spine in the female angler is located on her head. It is much longer than any of the other dorsal fins and has a fleshy bait on the end. When hungry, she sits very still and dangles the bait in front of her mouth. It doesn’t take long before something swims up to investigate this bait as its possible lunch. But before it can think about taking a sample, the angler has turned the tables and eaten her own lunch.Of course this system wouldn’t work very well in the pitch darkness one mile below the surface of the ocean without one other special provision. Like many other fish at such depths, the angler is able to generate her own light. In her case, only the bait lights up, so she stays invisible to her victims. The chemical method she uses to create the light is nearly 100% efficient!In His imaginative creativity, God was pleased to place creatures a mile below the surface of the sea. Yet in His mercy He has provided them with everything they need to make their living there. Likewise, you may not know why God has placed you into a particular situation right now. If He so cares for the creatures a mile below the waves, how much more does He care for You. And He has even included a light for you in His Son Jesus Christ! How wonderful is our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 6/22/2023 | A revolutionary design in metal-cutting blades is changing the metal-working industry. These blades don’t cut like a knife. Instead, the blade is fixed in one position while the metal to be shaped spins on a lathe. This new-style blade stays sharp six times longer than the old blade design.And where titanium used to make the old-style cutting blades dull almost the second they were used, the new blades last up to 30 minutes. This wonderful new blade was developed by two engineers who got the original idea from a rat. You see, rats’ teeth always have a sharp edge.Engineers learned that this is because their teeth are hard on one side and soft on the other. So as they wear, they always keep a sharp edge. Using this principle for metal-cutting has lowered costs and increased productivity, since the blades don’t have to be changed as often.Beginning in Job 39 God humbles Job with several chapters of questions about the wise designs found in the animal kingdom. God’s message is, “Job, if you think you’re so smart, who created all of this with such wisdom?”Even rats’ teeth are created with such wisdom that, once we learned the principle, our technology was greatly improved.Our Magnificent Creator God left nothing out of His creation that would help us live and learn in this magnificent world He made just for us!!! |
| 6/21/2023 | After suffering a stroke, a man in Baltimore suddenly began speaking with a Scandinavian accent. Though he had no experience with languages other than English, he suddenly sounded Nordic and appeared unfamiliar with English! In the weeks after the stroke his speech gradually returned to normal. After three and one-half months, he again spoke with no trace of accent.This affliction is real. It’s called “foreign-accent syndrome.” It’s a rare condition in which a brain malfunction causes speech to sound as if the speaker has a foreign accent. Americans have also reportedly developed apparent German, Welsh, Scottish, Irish and Italian accents.Scientists say the fact that speech follows certain patterns in this way suggests something about the way the human brain is wired. A growing number of studies and experiences—such as “foreign-accent syndrome”—suggest that humans have been programmed with much more than just language ability. Some of the unique features of specific languages may actually be programmed into our brains.The Bible tells us that everyone on earth spoke the same language until God confused the languages of rebellious people at Babel. “Foreign-accent syndrome” suggests that many of the detailed characteristics of language may have been originally wired into the brain. It also helps us see that language is more that just noises to which we have given meaning.Language is our Magnificent Creator God’s gift. |
| 6/20/2023 | It’s not very pretty, nor is it graceful, but Colombia’s rock-climbing catfish has a unique ability among fish. Perhaps there are days when a salmon, trying to make it up a waterfall, wishes that it could simply climb the rocks.The rock-climbing catfish’s climbing equipment begins with a powerful sucker mouth. Once it attaches itself to a rock, it can stay stuck despite any torrent. The rock-climbing catfish also has a bony plate on its belly that helps it hold its place while it repositions its sucker a little further up the rocks. The plate has fins with tiny, backward-pointing teeth. These teeth dig into the rock and prevent slipping. The catfish’s third special feature is a set of powerful muscles to control the plate.Once the rock-climbing catfish has attached its sucker to the rock, it pulls up its stomach plate and anchors it. With its body anchored, it moves its sucker up the face of the rock and repeats the process. Following this method, the rock-climbing catfish can walk its way up a 20-foot rock wall against the torrent of a waterfall in about 30 minutes!Who gave the rock-climbing catfish that powerful sucker mouth? Who gave it such a clever bony stomach plate and the powerful muscles to control it? And who taught it to climb rocks? It was the work of our Magnificent Creator God of worlds and stars and you and me! |
| 6/19/2023 | How smart is the smartest tree you ever met? Does it sound silly to speak of trees as being smart? Botanists are learning that some trees have elaborate defenses against insect pests.Studies have shown that a cottonwood tree sets up an elaborate zone defense when attacked by aphids. Some branches will manufacture poisons to resist the aphids while others use a different strategy. Branches that offer the aphids poisons can be dozens of times more resistant to aphids than neighboring branches. Should an aphid land on a leaf that is not manufacturing poisons, that leaf is very likely to be shed by the tree. This squeeze play by the tree keeps both strategies viable in resisting aphids.However, sometimes insects are almost as clever as trees. The eastern tent caterpillar eats a fatal dose of cyanide with each mouthful of cherry tree leaves without harm. The poison is combined with two sugar molecules in the leaves. Normally an insect’s digestive system would separate those sugars, releasing the cyanide. However, the tent caterpillar’s digestive system releases only one sugar, leaving the cyanide bound and harmless.On the other hand the pink sawfly larva concentrates and stores the toxic oils of the eucalyptus leaves it eats. When threatened, the worm-like larva rears up and spits droplets of the poisonous oils at its attackers.There is no level at which the creation fails to show forth intelligence and planning. Every level of creation glorifies our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 6/18/2023 | One good method of avoiding attack in nature is to pretend that you are somebody who should not be attacked. In the insect world one of the most feared creatures is the ant. Not only are ants ferocious, they also taste bad.As a result, many insects mimic ants to avoid predators. One of the most interesting groups of ant mimics is spiders. Of course, even insects can count, so they know that ants have six legs while spiders have eight. To solve this problem, some ant-mimicking spiders wave their front two legs over their heads so they look like antenna. The ants don’t seem to be fooled, however. Nevertheless, they will allow the spiders to hang around so long as they stay out of trouble.Some red ants have red spiders who mimic them and black ants have some black spiders who mimic them. This suggests that many insects can see color. Wasps that prey on one African red spider are no match for the vicious red ant the spider sometimes mimics. The African red ant can easily kill the wasp. This wasp also preys on a black spider. So the black spiders are often found among black ants that are almost as dangerous as the African red ants.Some modern scientists tell us that this appearance of intelligence in insect behavior is nothing more than appearance. However, we should not be as easily fooled as these wasps are by the spiders. There are millions of similar evidences of intelligence in the creation, and they can’t all be deceptive appearance!Only our Magnificent Creator God could have created such intelligence to allow even the smallest of the creatures on this planet to exist together and survive. |
| 6/17/2023 | Evolutionary naturalism paints the picture of life as if it were a haphazard series of accidents that just barely resulted in a range of living things that just manage to survive. This fanciful picture destroys our sense of wonder over the sophisticated engineering designs in nature.Consider the mystery of flight, for example. Some evolutionists suggest that perhaps birds are descended from lizards that fell out of trees a lot. Other evolutionists say that birds came from lizards who grew wings—not for flight, but to chase down and catch insects. Yet, they have little to say about the fact that we humans have come by most of our sophisticated knowledge about flight from studying the birds.Then there is the problem, for the evolutionist, of how flight accidentally evolved so many times for so many creatures. Scientists studying the dragonfly are learning even more secrets of flight. Our best high-performance aircraft can barely lift themselves off the ground. However, the dragonfly can lift 15 times his own weight into the air. Scientists have learned that this is because the dragonfly’s wings are designed to create little whirlwinds over their top surfaces. These whirlwinds are the secret to creating incredible lifting power. Ways are now being planned to apply this secret to new aircraft designs.The engineering excellence found in nature and from which we have learned so much even in this day of interplanetary probes, is not witness to a mindless process of evolution, but to a wise and mindful and Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 6/16/2023 | It seems like science fiction to suggest that if someone typed your name into a computer, misspelling your name, the computer would find it and correct it.Yet the genetic code within each of your cells is an even more sophisticated information storage and transmission system. Not only does your genetic code store far more information in a microscopic space than our largest computers can, it has a built-in error correction system.Scientists have found a number of key enzymes in the cell that have just one job—find and correct errors in the genetic code. Those errors can creep in because of radiation, chemicals, or other reasons. These enzymes faithfully correct any errors, preventing mutations.But these are the very ones scientists thought could cause evolution—before they discovered this process. One scientist who studied these enzymes said science has no explanation for how this process could have evolved naturally. Scientists also say they don’t know how life could have continued without this genetic proofreading and correction.Only our Magnificent Creator God could have been wise enough to design an information system that can correct errors within itself. Even we human beings have not figured out how to do this with our simplest computers.Asking us to believe that blind chance and natural law could have done it certainly strains the credibility of science!!! |
| 6/15/2023 | Genesis uses only a few words and simple language to describe the creation of trees. That hardly seems fair, considering the importance, variety and complexity of the largest and longest-living things on earth.The largest Sequoias in northern California weigh more than six blue whales. The tallest Australian eucalyptus trees and redwoods tower as high as a 30-story building. Some of the Bristlecone pines in the American west are 4,000 years old.Trees do more than provide us with building materials, food and medicine. Like other green plants, trees take the waste carbon dioxide produced by animals and humans and turn it into oxygen. As a bonus, trees produce sugar. The cellulose fiber we call wood is actually only thousands of sugar molecules linked into long chains. In recent years scientists have also learned that trees communicate with each other. They cool the air and pump enough moisture into the air to transform a dry desert-like climate. If it were not for the mycorrhiza fungi, trees would battle through their roots for control of moisture and soil resources. However, when this fungus is present in the root systems, trees will link roots with each other and share water and nutrients.Scripture’s simple statement that God created trees expands into volumes of information as we learn more about them. This is how science done in faith—that is, as our search for knowledge about what God has made—serves to glorify our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 6/14/2023 | It’s a warm day on the Amazon River. A small fish swims near the surface looking among the natural floating river debris for some food. As he looks among the occasional leaf or twig in the water he sees no danger. At the same time, one of the floating “leaves” is waiting for the little fish to move just a bit closer. Then, without warning, the floating “leaf” comes to life, grabs the fish and eats it!What the little fish thought was simply another floating leaf was actually another fish. The Amazonian leaf fish is carefully designed not only to look like a leaf, but to act like one as well. It has a flat body, very much like a leaf. A black line runs the length of its body, giving the appearance of the midrib of a leaf. A fleshy growth in its lower jaw looks like a leaf stem.Beyond looking like a leaf, the leaf fish also acts like a leaf. It lies still in the water, drifting with the current. To hide its identity further, it draws its fins close to its body, removing any last hint that it is indeed a hungry fish looking for lunch.The leaf fish combines deceptive coloring, appearance and behavior into one design so that it, too, can make its living. In this the leaf fish shows that the Creator makes nothing without also designing a special purpose for that creature. According to the Bible, the same can be said even more emphatically for each human being He has made. Our Magnificent Creator God has a special purpose for us, too, and it begins with His plan of salvation for us through His Son Jesus Christ. |
| 6/13/2023 | Are you a musician? From the standpoint of evolution, human musical ability serves no purpose. Assuming that the laws of nature could even invent musical ability, they would have no reason to do so. However, from the standpoint of creation, music serves to praise our Creator.Unfortunately, some of us who enjoy music cannot carry a tune, while other people can play or sing a piece without even looking at any music after hearing it once. The scientific study of musical ability has become an important area of study as a result of some recent discoveries. Researchers have discovered that it’s true that some people have natural musical ability and some don’t. They have found that some people have perfect pitch, even if they have no musical training, while those who are tone-deaf remain tone-deaf despite musical training. Studies show that only about one person in 2,000 has perfect pitch.Researchers were shocked to find solid evidence that musical ability is genetically inherited. Studying musical ability in both musically trained and untrained families, they found that musical ability follows a dominant inheritance pattern. Sons or daughters have a 50% chance of inheriting the gene from a parent who carries it.How could mindless evolution develop a gene that codes for musical ability? Even evolutionists appear to be puzzled by this. But those of us who believe in the Magnificent Creator God praise Him whether we have musical ability or not! |
| 6/12/2023 | Late at night, in hundreds of thousands of homes around the country, people are watching a bewildering array of monster movies. In these films, shadowy and not-so-shadowy monsters attack, possess or inhabit their victims. These stories are make-believe. However, in our real world, there is a fungus that does all these things.These fungi grow in and on the bodies of insects. They begin their work when a single fungus spore lands on the body of an insect. The spore germinates by growing thread-like filaments through a weak spot or some other entry point in the insect’s outer shell. Once inside the insect, these thread-like filaments grow into the insect’s nervous system. Scientists have been amazed by the apparent fact that the fungus then seems to take over the insect, actually controlling its movements. It seems that the fungus directs its victim to climb a convenient plant to a height that will make the next generation of spores likely to land on another unsuspecting insect. It is there that the insect dies and the fungus produces its spores.To the evolutionist, the ability of such a so-called “low” form of life to possess and control a more evolved form of life is totally without explanation. To those of us who believe in creation, intelligence is not a matter of evolution. Intelligence is the gift of our Magnificent Creator God. Only He has all intelligence and wisdom. There are no limits to His creativity as He provides His creatures with ways to proclaim Himself as their Creator!!! |
| 6/11/2023 | The strange partnership between the snapping shrimp and the goby is absolutely necessary if both creatures are to survive. The nearly blind shrimp relies on the goby, a small fish, in the same way a blind person relies on his Seeing Eye dog. The goby relies on the safety of the complex tunnel system the shrimp digs.The shrimp is well designed for digging. Once a tunnel is started, the shrimp can dig a burrow large enough for both itself and the goby within a few hours. Each of its five pairs of legs is specialized. The first pair of claws is designed for carrying sediment out of the burrow. The second pair of legs is designed to probe for and clean objects as well as scratching sediment from walls. Pairs three, four and five are walking legs that also work well for scratching material from tunnel walls. On its abdomen, the shrimp has several appendages that allow it to move rapidly to protection. Other appendages can create water currents that shift sand back from the digging site.The snapping shrimp, which is less than two inches long, can dig a system of tunnels covering several square feet within a few days. The burrow will have several entrances, as much as four feet apart. All lead to a chamber at the deepest point of the system.The Creator has given both the goby and the shrimp different gifts that they both need to live. If they did not share their gifts with each other, neither could survive. |
| 6/10/2023 | There’s an old saying that people seldom remember how rapidly the job was done, but they do appreciate good workmanship. However, the staggering variety and number of things created by God did not limit the elegance of His fine workmanship.The relationship between the snapping shrimp and a fish called the goby is a good example of the Creator’s attention to the finest detail. The snapping shrimp has very poor eyesight, while the goby has excellent eyesight. Both share the same burrow, which is dug by the shrimp and guarded by the goby.The shrimp uses the goby as a blind person uses a Seeing Eye dog. Whenever the shrimp is outside its burrow, it always keeps one antenna on the goby. The shrimp stays hidden inside the burrow if the goby should temporarily swim away. When danger approaches, the goby signals and disappears inside the burrow. The shrimp is right behind him.Neither the goby nor the shrimp can survive without each other, so pairs are established for life when both goby and shrimp are very young. In order for this system to work, both goby and shrimp reproductive systems, which differ greatly, are synchronized so that shrimp and goby youngsters are ready to pair at the same time.This astonishing relationship shows us how our Magnificent Creator God’s standards of excellence bring His love to every corner of the creation. |
| 6/9/2023 | Roman Vishniac is a renowned photographer of microscopic scenes. One of his favorite subjects is one of the so-called simplest forms of life. This “simple” life, the protozoan, is supposedly the ancestor of all living things.However, Vishniac has noted that the protozoan is neither simple nor archaic in character. This creature carries out all the functions of life that we require millions of cells to sustain—all within a single cell.There is a parallel in technology. The first adding machines were large and heavy contraptions. As these mechanical adding machines became smaller, they had to be more cleverly designed because they were smaller. The first electronic calculators were even smaller and lighter than their mechanical brothers. But they were still much larger and simpler than calculators today. As calculators have decreased in size, they have had to be more cleverly designed because they are smaller.Vishniac has learned that the so-called “simple” one-celled creatures are not simple at all. This is because they must carry out the business of life within the limits of their small size. This has not swayed him from evolution. However, this fact has convinced him that current theories are wrong. You see, evolution is in trouble if there are no “simple” forms of life. We believe that this clear evidence that there are no simple forms of life—evidence powerful enough to sway the experts—supports the Bible’s claim that all forms of life were created in finished form by a wise Magnificent Creator God. |
| 6/8/2023 | You’re not feeling well and you have a fever. Is your increased body temperature good for you or should you try to lower it?Medical researchers are learning what happens in the body when we develop a fever. They say that the body’s fever response is usually a very important part of our body’s defense against disease. Normally the body’s temperature varies through the day. If the body’s temperature drops below 80° or climbs higher than 108° for a prolonged period, death usually results. Your body has a thermostat, called the hypothalamus, to keep its temperature within that range.When disease germs are detected in your bloodstream, your white blood cells release a chemical called EP. EP quickly makes its way to the hypothalamus, where it raises the setting of your thermostat. This increase in temperature can make your body increase its production of T cells by 20 times or more to fight bacterial infection. It also increases the production of blood chemicals that fight viruses. EP also blocks bacteria’s ability to make use of the free iron in your blood at just the time bacteria are most in need of that iron. Even iguanas and fish are known to raise their body temperature when ill by moving into warmer environments.Does the fever response just accidentally happen to help fight infection, or was it designed to work the way it does?Clearly we must thank our Magnificent Creator God for this cleverly designed defense against disease! |
| 6/7/2023 | We live in a world—indeed a universe—that is in continual change. Things have been designed that way for a very important reason. Unfortunately, some people choose to define evolution as simply change. However, that’s not the kind of continuous change that surrounds us.The change we see around us serves to keep things the same. Biologists call this stasis. That might sound contradictory, but think about it for a moment. A baby is born—that’s change. The baby grows into a child and then a young adult. That’s more change. In the end, though, a new generation is born to replace the last generation, and things are as they were. It’s the cycle of life, common to all living things.What’s more, the interrelated life cycles of all living things complement each other. Plants use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make oxygen and food, which are needed by the animal kingdom and human beings. Each generation of living things reproduces after its own kind, helping to keep this balance in tune.The change we see all around us was designed by our Magnificent Creator God to renew the creation so that it might remain stable—the same. We can truly say that the more things change, the more they stay the same. However, this state of affairs will not go on forever. One day—and perhaps soon—the world will end. The Son of God who was the instrument of our creation and the instrument of our salvation will return. Are you ready to meet Him? |
| 6/6/2023 | Is it possible that your pharmacist could be a chimpanzee? That’s not such a silly question. Naturalists are discovering that many animals use a variety of plants and other items to treat their illnesses. Animals often know about the medicinal properties of plants when modern medicine has yet to learn about them.Recently naturalists noticed that one of the monkeys in the African preserve under their care had become lethargic, lost her appetite, and obviously had a severe gastric upset. A few hours after she became sick, she started munching on a native shrub that is not a normal part of the monkey’s diet. She chewed the plant, swallowed the bitter juice and spit out the pulp. By the next afternoon her symptoms were gone and she was feeling better. After a little research, scientists discovered that local tribes use juices from the same plant to treat intestinal upset and loss of appetite.Studies of the juices of a root that bears rub into their coats show that the bears are using an effective insecticide. Scientists have observed elephants, monkeys, birds and bears eating a variety of things that were not a normal part of their diet only to discover that the things being eaten had medicinal properties. Most amazing is that the animals know how best to take their medicine. If a leaf is best swallowed whole to kill intestinal parasites, it will be swallowed unchewed!Who other than our Magnificent Creator God and Great Physician Himself could have taught the animals this medicine? |
| 6/5/2023 | Have you ever watched ducks out on an icy lake paddling around in the near-freezing water. They will spend much of the day in that one spot with the temperature well below freezing, and yet the cold doesn’t seem to bother them. Perhaps on shore there are some sparrows hopping around in the snow. One wonders: why don’t birds need shoes and socks?If you or I ran around with bare feet and legs when the temperature was below freezing, it would not be very long before we had a good case of frostbite. We could even lose so much body heat that our very lives would be threatened.Birds have a network of arteries that all blood going into their legs must enter. These arteries are interwoven with the veins returning from the foot. When the blood going to the foot enters this structure, called a “wonder net,” its temperature is 106° F. The blood returning from the foot at the same time is only 37°F. The warm blood passing through the net reheats the cold blood coming from the foot before it enters the body. The result is that the bird loses very little body heat. So the blood going into the foot never becomes dangerously cold in normal winter weather.The wisdom of this design is obvious. Could birds have survived having their feet frozen off before they learned to evolve this special arrangement? Our only conclusion can be that there is a Magnificent Creator God who cares for all of His creation, including you and me!!! |
| 6/4/2023 | We are beginning to discover more about how Neanderthal people were not primitive subhuman cavemen, as popular-style evolutionary documentaries show. Instead, they were actually fully human – and the evidence for this is so conclusive that even serious evolutionists accept the fact today.It appears that Neanderthals cooked. They didn’t just eat raw or burnt meat. It appears that food remains were seasoned with herbs. They also used nuts and legumes, among other plant-based edibles. Perhaps they were familiar with the Keto Diet!Those interested in natural remedies often recommend using certain tree barks as an infusion or just chewed, as a painkiller. This is because such barks – I use willow bark – are a source of salicylic acid, which is closely related to aspirin. It has even been found that Neanderthals consumed the mold penicillium, which we now know produces the well-known antibiotic penicillin.Their clothing included furs, required to combat European conditions during the post-Flood Ice Age. But they also seemed to wear pendants and other jewelry.An excellent, recent article in Creation magazine by Robert Carter and Lita Cosner, gives links to scientific papers on these and other civilizing traits attributed to Neanderthals. Though the authors are not Bible-believing Christians, their article reminds us that Neanderthals, being human, were descended from Adam through Noah, just as we are.All things were made by our Magnificent Creator God for a specific reason and for a specific purpose. |
| 6/3/2023 | When we compare ourselves with many of the other living things on this Earth, our abilities are not very impressive.A camel can carry 1,000 pounds 30 miles through the desert every day. As a human being, I become tired even thinking about walking 30 miles with empty pockets.The ostrich can run at 30 miles per hour, faster than my car might go during rush hour.The Indian swift can fly at more than 100 miles per hour.The elephant’s trunk has 40,000 muscles. This is 70 times the number of muscles in your entire body. Yet, his trunk can bulldoze a tree or pick up a pin. Many of us can’t do either one on the first try.The flea can jump 350 times its own length, a total of 13 inches. This is equivalent to our jumping 2,000 feet into the air. Most of us can’t jump more than two feet off the ground. As it works out, 13 inches is just about right if you are looking for a nice warm dog on which to raise a family.A tiny insect called the midge beats its wings an amazing 133,000 times per minute. That’s a hundred times faster than you can blink your eye.Humans can use their superior intellect to build the machines they need. With those machines, they can outdo any one of these creatures. But God simply made a gift to the animals of the specialized abilities they needed. God expects us to follow His example and design and build what we need.If we look carefully, we will see that our Magnificent Creator God has given us all the materials and all the ideas we need within the creation. No one can say that He does not care what we do with our lives on Earth!!! |
| 6/2/2023 | Have you ever thought what a strange material water actually is? A water molecule comprises of three atoms – two hydrogens and one oxygen.Oxygen is an element in Group VI of the Periodic Table; Group VI also contains the elements sulfur, selenium, and tellurium, in increasing order of size (oxygen is the smallest. Hydrogen can also form compounds with these elements: H2S, H2Se, H2Te. These have the boiling points -60.7, -41.5, and -2.2deg Celcius.Therefore, all these compounds are gases at room temperature. If we were following the size of the Group VI atom only, then water should have a boiling point considerably lower than that of H2S. But it doesn’t. In fact, the boiling point of water is higher than all those other compounds, at 100 deg C (or 212 deg F).This, of course, is not the only anomalous property of water. The solid form of water – ice – floats on liquid water. So what, you might say. Well, the solid form of every other liquid there is always sinks in its liquid. If you have ever allowed molten candle wax to cool down, for example, you will notice it freezes from the bottom up. Nearly all liquids behave that way – except water! In short, the most common liquid in the world – the one that we require most for life – behaves like no other liquid. It is almost as if it were specially designed!It was our Magnificent Creator God who designed the Earth – including water – for us to inhabit. |
| 6/1/2023 | The relatively rare bucket orchid, Coryanthes, behaves almost like an animal at pollination time. This remarkable ability is essential to its survival.Coryanthes has a steep-sided flower. Two glands extend over the center of the “bucket” and secrete a clear fluid into the flower after it opens. Just above the pool of fluid inside the bucket, a tunnel opens to the outside of the bucket. At the end of the tunnel are the flower’s pollen and stigma.When it opens, the flower sends out a strong sweet odor that can attract male bees from over five miles away. The male bees collect a waxy material on the flower’s surface that they later use in mating rituals. As the number of bees collecting this substance off the flower’s surface increases, so does the likelihood that in the excitement one of them will fall into the pool below. When this happens, the sticky fluid makes it impossible for the bee to make it out of the “top” of the bucket-shaped flower. However, the tunnel provides an easy exit. But as the bee nears the tunnel’s end, the flower drops down a projection from the tunnel’s ceiling, holding the bee for about ten minutes before freeing him. While the bee is held, the flower glues two packets of pollen to the bee. If it should happen that the bee already has pollen packets, this activity delivers the pollen to the stigma, and pollination is complete.The Coryanthes orchid not only shows us the Magnificent Creator God, but it shows us how unlimited His creativity and imagination are. |
| 5/31/2023 | How does your nose work? Medical researchers admit that they don’t know. Your nose performs an extremely unlikely job. It senses invisible molecules in the air and turns each molecule into a unique sensation that is sent to the brain. If the fact that molecules floating in the air could be detected was a modern discovery, it would be hailed as the scientific discovery of the century!Medical researchers do know that the roof of your nose cavity contains about 10 million cells that are wired directly into the brain. The nervous system that connects your olfactory cells to your brain is so large and complex that its surface area is several times greater than the surface area of your body. Researchers also know that your sense of smell is important to your sense of taste. For example, that’s why, when you have a head cold, chocolate tastes like a flavorless waxy paste. In this case what you taste in your mouth has more to do with what is happening in your nose than on your tongue.Many creatures, including birds, can sense odors. Farmers who had difficulty with birds eating as much as 20% of the food set out in feed lots discovered that birds hate the smell of grapes. When they laced the feed with grape scent, the birds left it alone, but the cattle didn’t seem to mind.Researchers have also learned that each of us has a unique “odor print.” This reminds us that each of us is a unique being, made by our Magnificent Creator God because He wanted to have a relationship with us. |
| 5/30/2023 | You have 30,000,000,000,000 individual cells in your body. That’s thirty trillion, and you have about two hundred different types of cells, including red blood cells, skin cells, nerve cells (neurons), and fat cells. Each type of cell performs a vital role in keeping your body healthy. As amazing as it seems, the average human body makes between two and three million new red blood cells every second.Oh, how we want each of our thirty trillion cells to be devoted to Jesus. We’re to love the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. As amazing as our incredibly-designed bodies are, we also have minds, personalities, and spirits. And we have gifts, talents, abilities, and strengths.The Lord gave you the wonderful workmanship of YOU so you could serve Him. Today, present your body to Him as a living sacrifice and let your life be transformed by the renewing of your mind, which happens as you meditate on His Word. Let Him be Lord of all there is of you.We are more than the chemicals that form our body. We are a special creation of God. Man is our Magnificent Creator God’s masterpiece—His workmanship, the crown of creation. |
| 5/29/2023 | Blessings can become curses. For example, a painkiller may be used to cover up an injury that needs immediate treatment. Pain is unpleasant. However, when pain tells us to move our hand from the hot stovetop, it helps us prevent worse injury.When God created the universe and placed humans on this earth, there was no disease, no pain, and no death. The Bible tells us that God also knew that our freedom to withdraw our love from Him would also result in the consequences of withdrawing that love—that is, disease, pain and death. In His wisdom, God filled the creation with chemical factories that could provide temporary help for pain and disease.Foxglove, or digitalis, offers a treatment for heart failure. Quinine, from a South American tree, is used to treat malaria. Steroids come from a Mexican yam. A treatment for gout is made from the autumn crocus. A fungus that grows on the rye plant and caffeine from coffee beans are used to treat migraine headaches. White willow bark, which contains a form of aspirin, has been used for thousands of years as a natural treatment for pain and fever.Pain, disease and death call our attention to our much more serious spiritual condition. If we did not have to face death in this life, we would be condemned to spend eternity in an imperfect world. We can thank our Magnificent Creator God that He has provided the remedy for our sin in the forgiveness of sins through His Son, Jesus Christ. |
| 5/28/2023 | We all have a number of clocks within us that help keep life constant in changing surroundings. The pineal gland is one clock that helps us adjust to our surroundings like the changing lengths of daylight through the year.Earlier in this century many scientists, having no understanding of the pineal, decided that it had no purpose and was left over as a vestige from our evolution. Creationists knew it must have a purpose because they knew we have not evolved.If you are one of those people who typically feel a bit more lethargic or even depressed during the darkest months of winter, you might be able to blame your pineal, which is located near the center of your brain. How can a gland deep in the center of the brain know how long the days are? Light causes our bodies to make certain chemicals. When days are short, those chemicals are scarce, so the pineal cannot make from these chemicals the hormones that encourage the alertness we feel in the spring and summer. In addition, your pineal has a private nerve hookup to your eyes, so it can literally see for itself how much light is available! Scientists have found that adding artificial light during winter can sometimes help the winter blues.Our bodies are a network of complex control systems and chemical factories—a complex union of systems that go beyond the abilities of the best human designers, but which testify to the wisdom of our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 5/27/2023 | In the tiny museum of Isma’ilya, northeast of Cairo, is an artifact that corroborates the Biblical Exodus.. It’s known as the “El Arish Stone”. It is a piece of black granite weighing two tons, measuring 4 feet in length, and 2.5 feet in width. It was found in 1887 on a farm at El Arish, lying on its side. At the time, it was being used as a water trough for cattle. When archaeologist Frances Llewellyn Griffith found the slab of granite, his clue to its value was the hieroglyphics. By the writing, he dated the object to the Ptolemaic period, specifically the 30th Dynasty (380-360 BC), when it was probably used as a shrine. The inscriptions seem to refer to events some 1200 years earlier (c. 1500 BC) and appear to tell the story of the Exodus, but with a twist: this story is told from Pharaoh’s point of view.The black granite inscription corroborates the story of the parting of the sea, as told in Exodus 14. There is a unique hieroglyph on it: three waves and two knives.Egyptologist James Hoffmeier has suggested that we look at the hieroglyphic literally. Seen in this way, the obvious translation is the “parting of the sea” or the “parted sea”.Because the El Arish stone was being used for water for cattle, some of the inscriptions have been eroded, leaving the ones on the right and back sides of the monument mostly intact. In all, 74 lines are still legible. One line seems to be referencing Moses: he is referred to as the “Prince of the Desert” and his Israelite followers are called the “evil ones” or “evil-doers”. The Egyptian text also tells about how Pharaoh chased the Queen Mother, Tefnut, presumably the royal princess that once raised Moses, as she was leaving with the departing Israelites. This corroborates the Talmud (Sotah 12a) which states that the princess left on the Exodus, marrying the Israelite leader, Caleb son of Yefuneh.The stone also seems to be reporting some of the Biblical plagues, including prolonged darkness and a terrible tempest. Furthermore, it mentions a specific location next to where the sea parted. The place is called “Pekharti”. Remarkably, this exact place is mentioned in Exodus 14:2,9 as the location where the Israelites camped just prior to the parting of the sea. In the Book of Exodus, it is called “Pi-hahiroth”.If all this is not enough the Torah states that, as he was dying, the Biblical patriarch Jacob/Israel blessed his son Joseph wishing for Joseph’s children to “fishify” i.e., that they ”increase in the land like fish”. For this blessing, he made up a new word; “fishify”, “Idgu” in Hebrew (Genesis 48:16). Later, when the Israelites are leaving on the Exodus they take the bones of Joseph with them to the Promised Land (Exodus 13:19). Shockingly, the El Arish stone says that when the “evildoers” left Egypt, they took “Dagai” with them. The exact nickname given by the Torah to Joseph!Isn’t is curious how academics can ignore inconvenient archaeology that proves the Bible as inspired by our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 5/26/2023 | Both archaeology and the Bible suggest that the world was once quite different from the world we know today. Each agrees that the earth’s climate was once much more uniform than it is today.At one time the tropics may have extended into what are today polar regions. However, the Bible and evolutionary geology don’t agree on how long ago that was. Bible-believing geologists, on the other hand, are reporting evidence to support the Bible’s story of history.In the last few years scientists have been surprised to discover dinosaur fossils in Alaska. Dinosaurs need warm temperatures—warmer than Alaska was thought to have been. In 1986, on Canada’s Axel Heiberg Island, only 600 miles from the North Pole, scientists found a huge, dense forest. Some of the trees were well over 125 feet tall. They have been snapped off at the stump and are neither fossilized nor petrified, but remain as fresh wood. Even some of the leaves are still intact. The area was filled with spruce, hickory, dawn redwood and cypress trees and was evidently a swamp, since tropical turtle and alligator remains have also been found. Tree rings show that the area was warmer in the recent past, while the size of the rings tell us that there were short, hot summers during which rapid growth occurred, followed by long, dark winters as there are today.The most interesting conclusion reached by the scientific team is that the entire region must have been subjected to a huge flood! This discovery tells us that all of geology must be restructured to present a history that agrees with the Bible’s story of the earth’s past as told by our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 5/25/2023 | The swiftly moving bat cuts almost invisibly through the darkness, silent to all but those who can hear its ultrasonic radar. What chance does a poor night-flying cricket—prized as a tasty bat snack—have?Let’s treat this problem as if you were the Creator, faced with the problem of giving your night-flying cricket a chance against its predator. Of course, you could design the cricket so that it would stay in its hiding place at night, but then you wouldn’t have a night-flying cricket. You could give the cricket the ability to hear the bat’s radar, but that alone won’t help the cricket if he can’t get to safety.The solution our true Creator has invented to help the cricket preserve its life is another example of His engineering excellence. He has built the cricket with a single-celled bat detector that is wired into the cricket’s nervous system. The detector is triggered by the frequency that bats use for navigation. When triggered, the cell fires off up to 500 impulses per second. These impulses automatically cause the cricket to steer away from the source of the ultrasound. The most impressive engineering fact about this bat detector is that it only works if the cricket is in flight and therefore vulnerable to bats. When crickets are safe from bats—resting, hiding, eating or preening—the bat detector cell doesn’t fire any warning at all!The precise elegance that our Magnificent Creator God has designed into the cricket for its protection is a witness to His wisdom in caring for all He that has created. |
| 5/24/2023 | God determined the exact number of stars that He spoke into existence. He identified each star with a name (Psalm 147:4), an intimate act that demonstrates His attention to the smallest details. His strength—insight, discernment, and knowledge—have “no limit” in the past, present, or future (v. 5).God hears each desperate cry and sees each silent tear as clearly as He notices each sigh of contentment and belly laugh. He sees when we’re stumbling and when we’re standing in triumph. He understands our deepest fears, our innermost thoughts, and our wildest dreams. He knows where we’ve been and where we’re going.As our Magnificent Creator God helps us see, hear, and love our neighbors, we can trust Him to see, understand, and care for us. |
| 5/23/2023 | What keeps the big-bodied bumblebee with those little stubby wings in the air? Scientists are still trying to learn the secret of bumblebee flight. And while they are learning some astonishing things about the bumblebee, they still don’t know how he does it.Scientists have been testing bumblebees by monitoring their energy use, placing them in wind tunnels, and measuring their oxygen use. No, they haven’t been able to make little oxygen masks for the bees—bumblebees have 24 breathing holes.Scientists have learned that a flying bumblebee flaps its wings 160 times per second and consumes the equivalent of 180 candy bars per hour! A flying bee uses the same amount of oxygen for its body weight as a flying bird or a bat. However, unlike birds, the bumblebee uses no more oxygen when hovering than when flying. This is only one of the discoveries that contradict scientists’ theories. In fact, the director of the latest studies on bumblebee flight admits that they still have no idea how the bumblebee stays in the air. He warns other scientists to stop using the current theories on the subject because they are far too simple.Of course, our Magnificent Creator God knows how to make a bumblebee fly, even if the best of modern science can’t figure it out.This should help us to see that when scientists tell us they have figured out how everything could have been made without a Creator, they don’t know what they’re talking about. |
| 5/22/2023 | The silk produced by spiders is very different from the silk produced by silkworms in some very important ways. While silkworm silk is strong yet not prone to stretching, spiders make silk that is both strong and stretchy. They also make several different kinds of silk, each with its own purpose.In fact, spider silk is stronger than an equal amount of steel and yet it stretches. Spider silk is made of nothing more than proteins. However, scientists are finding it extremely difficult to study the chemical structure of spider silk because it resists most of their efforts to break it down into its chemical parts. Scientists have finally resorted to hot, concentrated acids to break down the silk. They are learning that one type of spider silk is made up of lengths of very stiff amino acids, separated by segments of amino acids that form a springy helix. Together they contribute to the strength and stretchiness of spider silk.Scientists are exploring how spider silk is made, because this wonderful material promises new methods for creating stronger and lighter materials for human use. One possible use would be making cloth that is both comfortable and bulletproof.Our Magnificent Creator God has done all things well. The fact that we can learn to design better things by learning how He designed things is a witness for His wisdom as well as a witness against claims that the creation designed itself by trial and error. However, there is much more to God’s plans for us, as you can learn from the Bible. |
| 5/21/2023 | It comes as quite a surprise to discover that the word locust does not actually indicate any separate species. Locusts are really just grasshoppers, but the term refers to their well-known swarming behavior. Under normal conditions, locusts are solitary insects. In normal times, they cause little or no problem to agriculture. But sometimes, conditions are not normal.After times of drought, the locusts seem to produce far more nymphs than would be normal. These then begin to swarm as the insects suddenly become gregarious. These swarms of locusts cause terrible problems for agriculture. In swarming conditions, the insects turn to eating crops and can devastate whole fields in short order. The transformation seems to be caused by increased body concentrations of serotonin, and this, in turn, is produced when there are multiple touches of the hind legs by other locusts, caused by overcrowding. Towards the end of 2019 and into 2020, large swarms of locusts affected parts of Africa and Asia, and these were so large that they brought to mind the plague of locusts in Egypt, mentioned in Exodus.For these reasons, locusts were, in the Bible, a symbol of destruction. In Joel 2:25, we read: “I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent among you” (Joel 2:25). The destruction caused is to be reversed by the blessing and favor of our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 5/20/2023 | If you had painful skin, one of the last things you would apply to it would be hot peppers. Not only do hot peppers burn the mouth, some can even blister the skin.Yet in South America, ground hot peppers have been used for centuries to help relieve pain. Scientists have discovered the active ingredient in peppers that relieves skin pain. This substance blocks the pain signals that come from the nerves just under the surface of the skin. The “hot pepper” sauce for skin not only causes no pain, it relieves pain that doesn’t respond to any other treatment. It’s available in creams and ointments that, tests show, relieve pain in two out of three people.Conventional wisdom says that medicines that are found in natural plants were discovered by accident. Someone might accidentally discover a relationship between a person’s having eaten a certain plant and then getting well. They would try the same plants on others with the same disease. If they found that there were more cures, the plant would be remembered as a folk medicine.The “hot pepper” pain reliever for skin tells us that there’s a problem with this theory. People who have a painful skin condition are not likely to apply a pepper sauce. Doing that would be expected to make their skin more painful and cause it to blister. However, it’s possible that our Magnificent Creator God originally gave humans some knowledge of the cures for our ills – cures that He wisely built into creation. |
| 5/19/2023 | Scientists are learning that even the lowly bacteria have mind and memory. New research is showing that mind, memory, brain, and personality did not evolve. These can be found in the lowliest of creatures, including the bacteria.Another sign of intelligence in a life form is the ability to learn. Using attracting and repelling substances, scientists have found that bacteria can learn about their surroundings and draw conclusions. Follow-up tests showed that they later remember what they learned. Scientists have even found that younger bacteria learn better than older ones. If some things are not learned when young, they never can be learned! It seems that it’s hard to teach an old bacterium new tricks!The biggest surprise of all came when scientists discovered that bacteria have what the researchers called individual personality. They are mystified about how bacteria, each with the same genetic structure and from the same environment, can develop unique quirks in behavior. Because we find individual personality even in the lowly bacteria, we know that did not evolve.That God would give even a bacterium the gift of personality shows us something about His mind toward us. Nothing is so small or unimportant that it escapes His attention. Since He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to rescue us from the decay that is in the world because of sin, there is no force too great for Him to overcome. Surely He is a Magnificent Creator God of details as well as a God of love, Who is concerned about every individual among us!!! |
| 5/18/2023 | Most of us were amazed when we first learned that physicians in ancient Egypt did brain surgery. Even more amazing is that the skulls of their patients showed healing: they accomplished such complicated surgery without killing their patients. That physicians had the knowledge to do such delicate operations thousands of years ago challenges the modern, evolutionary view that humans began as primitives.Where did such knowledge come from? How did man learn that relieving fluid pressure on an injured brain prevented further damage and promoted healing? Obviously, according to the modern view, the first would‑be physician to try brain surgery had no idea what he was doing. However, history paints a very different picture. Recently, archaeologists in west central China discovered a skull of someone who had brain surgery over 4,000 years ago. A large hole in the center of a series of cracks had been made by scraping through the bone. The skull shows that healing took place after the surgery, indicating some degree of success. Even older examples of successful brain surgery have also been found in eastern Europe. Creationist dating would place these examples to within several centuries after the Flood.That the knowledge and skill to do successful brain surgery was so widespread so long ago suggests that man had such knowledge and skill even before the Flood. Noah may even have passed on knowledge that had been passed down to him from Adam himself!Our Magnificent Creator God is not called The Great Physician without merit!!! |
| 5/17/2023 | “For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof.” Psalm 50:10-12“If God exists, why is there so much suffering in the world?” Many of us are used to such accusations from atheists, but, unfortunately, many Christians do not know how to answer the point.Christians would be right to point to Genesis 3 and show that evil came into the world by disobedience – the disobedience of Adam – which polluted the entire world.However, there are some who object to this presentation of the Eden account on the grounds that, if God is a God of love and righteousness, how could He allow evil to happen in this way? This question leads some, incorrectly, to assume that God cannot know for sure what is going to happen in the future.The problem, if such it is, is better resolved by reasoning in biblical categories. Thinking in categories appears to be a lost art. Our error is in judging God by human standards even though God rebukes us, in Psalm 50, declaring: “You thought that I was just like you.”God is not like us, even though we are made in His image. We understand events through the passage of time, but God is transcendent over time.Therefore, to us it appears that God, in His Sovereignty, wills two different things; He permits evil but is not responsible for it – we are. If we do not fully understand this, we remind ourselves that His thoughts are so much higher than ours.The wonders of our Magnificent Creator God exceeds anything we can comprehend with our human minds which is why we have faith in an omniscient and omnipotent Father!!! |
| 5/16/2023 | According to the Bible, Noah’s Ark was 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. It was built of a type of wood called “gopher wood.” This may have been laminated wood, but it was wood. However, skeptics claim that even today wooden boats cannot be made that large simply because wood is not strong enough to endure the huge stresses generated by such a large structure; they say only iron can endure these stresses.That is, of course, not true. Ancient writers tell us of a sea battle in 280 B.C. in which the Leontifera participated. They describe the Leontifera in some detail. They tell us that she carried 1,600 rowers and 1,200 additional fighting men. From these and other details, the Leontifera has been estimated to have been between 400 and 500 feet long. Plutarch tells us of another ship built around 294 B.C. that had twice as many banks of oars as the Leontifera. In the late third century B.C., Ptolemy Philopator built a ship that took 400 sailors to run, in addition to 4,000 rowers. With additional soldiers on board, the ship carried 7,250 men. This battleship was 420 feet long, wider than Noah’s Ark and about the same height.Again, recorded history proves that The Bible is trustworthy in all that it teaches, even when it talks about historical fact or the natural world that science studies. The world and all that it contains were created by our Magnificent Creator God and the facts cannot be denied. |
| 5/15/2023 | We do not want dandelions in our gardens. They are classed as weeds, and they have a tendency to take over large areas, especially in flower beds and also among the grass in a lawn. But when we come across them in the countryside, they are much more welcome. Pretty much every part of a dandelion plant can be put to some useful purpose.Dandelion leaves can be eaten as part of a salad. They have a mild, peppery taste. Many collect them together to make a woodland salad, with finely chopped dandelion leaves, wild garlic, and blanched nettle leaves.An infusion of the flowers in olive oil makes a fine remedy for aching muscles. A jar can be filled with flower heads, lightly pressed down, then filled with oil, sealed, and left for two to four weeks. Alternatively, the flowers can be treated with gently melted coconut oil, then solidified to make semi-solid balm.The roots can be cleaned and used in one of two ways. They can be finely sliced and sautéed as a vegetable. Or you can roast them on a very low heat. The dried roots are then put into a coffee grinder and powdered. The resultant powder is brewed like coffee, and tastes similar.It is very evident that our Magnificent Creator God has made a lot of very useful plants for us, like the dandelion. It makes little sense to suppose that so many uses could all have evolved. This is an example of God’s Master Plan for how we use the wonders of His creative power. |
| 5/14/2023 | When Isaac Asimov wrote his famous robot stories, we all thought we knew what robots looked like. They looked like us. Indeed, many of Asimov’s robots began to look indistinguishable from human beings, such as the iconic R Daneel Olivaw, who partnered with detective Elijah Baley in the sci-fi crime novel The Caves of Steel.As real-life robots began to appear in industry, making cars and operating other machinery, they did not look quite so anthropomorphic. Now in the 21st century, self-mobile robots are not necessarily built to walk like people. For example, we have already seen tiny flying robots about the size and shape of a cockroach – and liable to be just as beloved!A more recent robotic development has seen soft robots built to imitate jellyfish. Two layers of elastic polymer are joined – one stressed and one unstressed. Between the layers, air can be pumped, reversing the stressing and enabling the robot to swim through water. A third stress-free layer provides direction, and the whole machine is able to lift and carry fairly large cargos.The video accompanying the research shows strips of this robotic material being used out of water as a prehensile grip that would have sensitivity approaching that of human hands.As with all new technologies, it is to be hoped that good uses are found for it. God has given us dominion over this world, and technological developments, such as the soft robot, are methods by which humans can operate under this divine mandate.What a Magnificent Creator God we serve using the vast array of inventions He has taught us to make! |
| 5/13/2023 | In the early 1960s, some unusually blue star-like objects were observed in the universe, giving out radio frequencies along with visible light. There were a number of them. Through telescopes, they appeared to have fuzzy boundaries. They were given the name Quasi-Stellar Radio Sources – and this was quickly abbreviated to quasars.Another odd feature of these objects was the existence, in their spectra, of emission lines, similar to those of stars, but at the “wrong” frequencies. The emission lines in normal stars were known to be due to hydrogen, but the lines in the quasar’s spectrum had a wavelength about 15% longer than that of hydrogen in other stars, or in the laboratory. It was eventually realized that this effect must be due to red shift – but a red shift bigger than anything that had previously been seen. An application of Hubble’s Law – which shows that the red shift is proportional to the object’s distance – showed that the quasar 3C 273 was over 2 billion light years away and was therefore over 100 times more luminous than typical stars within the same cluster.The existence of such amazing objects once again underlines for us how true it is that the heavens declare the glory of our Magnificent Creator God.So many objects have now been discovered that astronomers give them numbers like 3C 273. How interesting it is, then, that the Bible tells us that our Magnificent Creator God knows the actual name of every single astronomical object!!! |
| 5/12/2023 | Plants make cellulose. Cellulose is a type of natural plastic made of many sugar molecules linked together. Scientists have known for years how to use the natural plastic qualities of cellulose to make things like cellophane and rayon.Scientists have also known that animals generate a similar natural plastic called chitin. Like cellulose, chitin is a carbohydrate made of long chains of sugar molecules. Chitin is found in the shells of all insects and crustaceans, like crabs. Each year the crabmeat industry had thrown away thousands of tons of chitin because scientists couldn’t figure out how to extract chitin from the shells in a usable form.Finally in 1975 scientists discovered how to remove the chitin from shells and change its form so it could be made into whatever forms they needed.Suture thread made from chitin dissolves in the body. This means that stitches don’t have to be removed, and it can be more easily knotted than regular suture thread. Suture thread made from chitin also causes no allergic reaction, and it seems to promote healing. It’s hard to believe that a crab shell, which is usually thrown away, could do so much! Food processing companies are even using a chemical made from chitin to recover protein from wastewater.Almost everything in the creation seems to have numerous uses for human needs. This is testimony that our Magnificent Creator God has made this universe for us and that He cares about our needs. In the Bible we learn that He has provided for our greatest need through His Son, Jesus Christ. |
| 5/11/2023 | For many people, bats bring to mind words like “creepy,” “fangs,” “rabies,” and even “ugly.” However, over 450 years ago, Martin Luther marveled at the delicate beauty of the bat. He pronounced the creature an excellent witness to the skill and wisdom of the Creator.God must also like bats. Almost one-fourth of all mammals He created are bats! The flying fox bat has a wingspan of nearly six feet. Bumblebee bats, native to Thailand, are the smallest mammals known, weighing less than a penny. There are brilliantly patterned tropical bats called butterfly bats.And hundreds of species of tropical plants depend on bats as pollinators.Popular legend considers bats a serious part of the rabies problem. The truth is that raccoons, skunks, foxes, and even dogs and cats are more likely to have rabies. In fact, one study shows that in Pennsylvania you are more likely to find a rabid cow than a rabid bat. In reality, bats are delicate, helpful and intelligent creatures. A typical North American bat will eat about 600 mosquitoes an hour. Large colonies will consume between 250,000 and 500,000 pounds of insects per night! Bats can be trained, demonstrating their intelligence. And finally, an important warning. If you find sleeping bats, don’t disturb them. Even one such disturbance during sleep can be fatal since stored nutrition may be consumed by the disturbance before the next feeding cycle.So next time you see a bat, don’t recoil in fear. Rather, say a prayer of thanksgiving to the Magnificent Creator God who made both of you. |
| 5/10/2023 | One of the criticisms of solar power is that it is so variable. Clearly, a solar plant is going to produce no energy at night and an inadequate supply when the sky is cloudy. On the other hand, a suitable size plant could over-produce when sunlight is intense.Plants have a similar problem. The rapidly changing incidence of sunlight on their leaves could, conceivably, cause problems within the plant. However, researchers have discovered that plants have mechanisms to cope with these variations, and one such mechanism could answer the old question: “Why are plants green?”Plants produce high energy carbohydrate molecules from water vapor and carbon dioxide by the well-known process of photosynthesis. This endothermic reaction requires the input of energy in the form of light, and the reaction is catalyzed by the green dye chlorophyll. What many of us have not considered is why chlorophyll is green.White light is a mixture of all three primary colors – red, green and blue – which have increasing frequency and, hence, increasing energy, in that order. The remarkable thing about plants, therefore, is that they are absorbing light energy only at either end of the visible spectrum while rejecting – and reflecting – the middle of the spectrum, which is green.Researchers have shown that this selective absorption of certain frequencies minimizes “noise” and, therefore, enables the plant to cope with rapidly changing conditions of sunshine.Our Magnificent Creator God, in His Creation, has literally thought of everything. No wonder He said “and it was good”! |
| 5/9/2023 | As creationists, we spend a lot of time working on our models about how we think the Flood could have happened, developing new models. The old vapor canopy model has long since been superseded by more biblical and more scientific models, such as Catastrophic Plate Tectonics or the newer Vertical Impact Tectonics.What we should not lose sight of is the reason why God sent the Flood. The reason for the coming of the Flood is given in Genesis 6:5. “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” If God had chosen to destroy everyone and everything, He would have been just to do so. But God also had a plan of salvation, which we read about in Genesis 6:8, which, in my opinion, is the most beautiful verse of the early chapters of Genesis.Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.Hebrews 11 tells us: “By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.” It follows, then, that Noah was saved by grace through faith. And in Ephesians 2:8 reminds Christians: “By grace you have been saved through faith”. There has only ever been one method of salvation – by grace, through faith. We just have that little bit more knowledge than Noah, so that we know Who bought that salvation, and how.We owe thanks to our Magnificent Creator God for this world and all that is in it and for the everlasting life we have because of Him. |
| 5/8/2023 | Garlic. Even say the word and some people move away to give you some distance. Others gather around because, to them, garlic helps make the meal. Garlic has begun to attract the attention of medical researchers as well.At the Tagore Medical College in India, researcher Arun Bordia kept track of 432 heart attack survivors for three years. During that time, half of the survivors drank the juice from six to ten cloves of fresh garlic each day, while others took a garlic-scented drink with no garlic in it. Over the three-year period, the garlic group had 32% fewer heart attacks and 45% fewer deaths than the other group. Research in the United States with chickens, who metabolize cholesterol in much the same way as humans, suggests a reason for these results. Chickens that were fed aged garlic extract showed a 50% reduction in the kind of cholesterol that clogs arteries.Medical researchers are also looking at some interesting evidence that garlic may help prevent some forms of cancer, especially stomach cancer.When the Creator made the heavens and Earth, He knew that humans would disobey Him, destroying the creation with sin. He also knew that in doing so we would bring disease and death into the world. We can thank our Magnificent Creator God that He stocked the Earth with substances that could be used to treat some of the earthly effects of sin. However, we can thank Him even more joyfully that He provided the full cure for sin for each of us in the life, death and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ! |
| 5/7/2023 | Our eyes do more work and tell more about us than many people realize. These amazing organs are so closely tied into the brain that they have been referred to as part of the brain.Your eyes were among your first organs to form. Within four weeks of fertilization, an unborn infant’s eyes begin to form. Interestingly enough, many newborns can move their eyes independently of each other, which can be a shock to unsuspecting parents. Usually the eyes are working together within a few months. However, those eye muscles will get more of a workout during our lifetimes than any other voluntary muscle. During any 24-hour period, our eyes will move about 100,000 times. That’s equivalent to walking 50 miles every day!Studies have shown that people with dark eyes generally have faster reaction times than people with light-colored eyes. Brown-eyed people generally are better at tennis while blue-eyed people generally do better at golf. Our eyes secrete different kinds of tears. Normal tears contain bacteria-fighting chemicals produced by cells in the lining of the eyelid. Emotional tears contain hormones released by the body in response to stress, including a natural painkiller. One more eye fact: The vitamin A in carrots is necessary for the proper working of the rods in your eye. The rods themselves are responsible for night vision. On a clear, dark night a healthy eye can see the light from a single candle 25 miles away!Only our Magnificent Creator God could have designed and made such a unique organ as the human eye!!! |
| 5/6/2023 | “Dog bites man” is not an unusual headline. However, “Man bites dog” would usually get people’s attention. If that’s true, the headline “Leeches teach physicians” should capture everyone’s attention.Physicians used leeches in bloodletting treatments well into the 19th century. They were used to treat everything from headaches to heart disease. As the 20th century matured, the medical use of leeches became not only a memory but a symbol of how backward medicine used to be. Now, as the 21st century is underway, leeches are again a part of modern medicine.To obtain their food, leeches inject a powerful blood thinner called hirudin. This hirudin is what interests modern medical researchers in leeches.Doctors have for many years been using a blood thinner called heparin to dissolve blood clots, such as those associated with heart attacks. But researchers are finding that hirudin is ten times as effective as heparin in dissolving clots, and in addition it works directly to prevent clotting. The studies continue. However, medical researchers are convinced that the blood thinner which leeches taught them how to make offers a powerful medicine. Should the possibilities presented by this modern medicine be realized, many lives that are now lost due to blood clotting may soon be routinely saved.Our Magnificent Creator God of the heavens and Earth is so wise and generous that He can teach even modern science some new things through a seemingly simple creature like the leech. |
| 5/5/2023 | They are the only cells in the human body that repeatedly die and self-regenerate throughout life. They are probably the only cells in the body that inspired a Broadway play named after them. And science considers them so interesting that several branches of science are studying them. I am talking about hair cells.As scientists are learning more about hair, they are coming to greater appreciation of, as one researcher put it, hair’s bewildering biology. A Harvard molecular biologist admitted that one of the reasons we know so little about hair is that scientists have avoided studying this complex structure.The average scalp has about 100,000 hairs growing at any one time. Each hair follicle produces hair for about two to five years, followed by a rest period of four to six months. A miniature assembly line of cells divides within the follicle, pushing older hair cells upward through the skin. Pigmentation is added as each new cell is produced. When the follicle is at rest, it shrivels and many of its cells die. However, seed cells, promising new life to the follicle, hide within it waiting for the signal to spring back to life. As humans grow older, the resting time of the follicles increases and growing time decreases, especially in men. So if you find yourself balding, you’re not necessarily losing your hair. It’s just that your hair is spending more time resting than it used to.Our Magnificent Creator God tells us that He cares so much about each one of us that He even knows how many hairs we have on our head! |
| 5/4/2023 | We don’t often think about our sense of smell. While our noses are on the job all the time, we note an odor only when it is unusual. Most of the time, the scents around us contribute, unnoticed, to our overall impression of our surroundings.It’s hard to remain tense at the beach. Simply the mention of the water and waves, the sand and sun brings back to memory the last trip to the beach and starts relaxing a person. However therapeutic these elements of the beach are, scientists have found that the one beach fixture that is probably most responsible for relaxing us is the smell.The smelly chemical that utility companies put in natural gas so that we can smell leaks is methyl mercaptan. This chemical is also produced by rotting meat. The human nose is extremely sensitive to this smell. We can detect as little as one 400-billionth of a gram of it in a quart of air.Doctors have long known that their noses are helpful in diagnosing disease. A person is brought into the emergency room in a coma. It’s very likely that the doctor will smell the patient’s breath as he tries to discover the problem. A sweet smell could indicate diabetes. The smell of ammonia could indicate a kidney malfunction. Arsenic poisoning smells like garlic. Diphtheria can be identified by a sickeningly sweet odor, and people with the plague smell like apples. A patient who smells like freshly baked bread may have typhoid.While we seldom think about our sense of smell, it’s a wonderful gift from our Magnificent Creator God for which we owe Him thanks. |
| 5/3/2023 | Do your eyes ever play tricks on you? Our eyes regularly play tricks on us with the help of our brains.Repeated research has shown that the images we see are not exactly what our eyes see. Our eyes and brains work together to construct the images we call sight. It’s not that our eyes are out to hoodwink us. Most of the time our eyes are working to help us. Working together, our brain and eyes add logical details to the images we see. Each of us has a blind spot in our vision because there are no vision cells where the optic nerve is. Instead of showing us a spot of nothing at the blind point in our field of vision, our brain invents an image from surrounding details. Your brain pulls the same trick on you when you proofread your completed manuscript. While others can still find typos, you may not.Your brain knows what you are saying and so it automatically shows you a repaired version, making many of your typing errors invisible.Your pupils can reveal your thoughts. Studies show that when seeing unpleasant scenes the pupils retract. Pleasant or interesting scenes cause the pupils to open wider.Charles Darwin wrote, “To suppose that the eye, with all of its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.” We don’t often agree with Charles Darwin, but this time we do!Our Magnificent Creator God once more demonstrates that His Wisdom is above all wisdom!!! |
| 5/2/2023 | In recent years, our knowledge about Pluto has multiplied over and over again. Despite its status being downgraded to that of a mere Dwarf Planet rather than a planet proper, NASA determined to send out a space probe called New Horizons in January 2006. New Horizons finally reached Pluto in January 2015 and sent back invaluable data for about 18 months, with the result that we now probably know more about the surface of Pluto than that of parts of Earth’s ocean floor.Some surface evidence has caused scientists to think that maybe Pluto was a hot body when it came into existence. This heat could still be there, prompting speculation that there could be a liquid ocean beneath the icy frozen surface.Whenever water is discovered in the Solar System, thoughts turn to the possibility of life having evolved – especially as Pluto’s surface shows evidence of the existence of methane and ammonia molecules, which scientists always think could provide a synthetic route to organic compounds.Such interpretations ignore the fact that Earth was created separately from, and three days before, the creation of the other stars and planets.God in His wisdom chose the Earth to be the sole focus of life. |
| 5/1/2023 | In the past we have discussed individual studies that link good health to religious commitment. It’s always easy to find individual studies to prove almost any point. So researchers did a statistical analysis of 42 different studies made since 1977.The 42 studies that were examined involved over 125,000 people, mostly Christian and Jewish. The analysis, conducted by the National Institute for Healthcare Research, distinguished between public and private religious activity. Public religious activity included attending worship services and volunteering time for church activities. Private religious activity included praying alone and “internal spiritual feelings.” While there are some who question these studies, they have consistently shown that religiously involved people live longer, healthier lives. However, the researchers who analyzed these studies arrived at a new conclusion as they analyzed the differences between public and private religious activity. They concluded that public religious involvement, as opposed to private or no involvement, showed a statistically important relationship to higher health and survival rates.Two thousand years ago, the writer of the book of Hebrews encouraged believers not to neglect assembling themselves together for worship on a regular basis. Like burning embers removed from the fire, when believers fail to be a regular part of their faith community, believers’ faith, too, cools to the temperature around it.Our Magnificent Creator God created everyone for a purpose and part of that purpose is to “assemble ourselves together” as He said, that we might love Him and each other and grow spiritually as a body of believers. |
| 4/30/2023 | The closest star to Earth is Alpha Centauri 26 trillion miles away. That is 26 with 12 zeros after it. 26,000,000,000,000. When our Magnificent Creator God in His awesome power creates something, distance is of no concern. |
| 4/29/2023 | Many people know that, despite its appearance, coral is actually a tiny animal. Even a small coral growth may be made up of billions of tiny animals, each living inside its limestone skeleton.What many people don’t know is that coral cannot live without the help of algae – a plant. Thousands of one-celled algae live in the tiny stomach of each coral polyp. The polyp requires the waste products of the algae to complete its nutrition requirements and to get the calcium with which it builds reefs. In return, the polyp’s stomach provides an ideal protected living place for the algae. Incidentally, the wonderful colors in living coral come from the algae in each polyp’s stomach.Evolutionists have said that it must take millions of years for the tiny polyps to build large coral reefs – like the 2,000-kilometer-long Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The Great Barrier Reef, incidentally, is considered the largest structure ever built by living organisms. However, it has now been shown that coral polyps can double their own weight in just over 10 days! As a result, the claim of millions of years for the age of the Great Barrier Reef has been reduced by a factor of 40!Many of the long-age figures claimed by evolutionists have had to be drastically revised downward as we have learned more about our Magnificent Creator God’s creation. The resulting figures fit the Bible’s account of history much more closely. |
| 4/28/2023 | It’s not very pretty, nor is it graceful, but Colombia’s rock-climbing catfish has a unique ability among fish. Perhaps there are days when a salmon, trying to make it up a waterfall, wishes that it could simply climb the rocks.The rock-climbing catfish’s climbing equipment begins with a powerful sucker mouth. Once it attaches itself to a rock, it can stay stuck despite any torrent. The rock-climbing catfish also has a bony plate on its belly that helps it hold its place while it repositions its sucker a little further up the rocks. The plate has fins with tiny, backward-pointing teeth. These teeth dig into the rock and prevent slipping. The catfish’s third special feature is a set of powerful muscles to control the plate.Once the rock-climbing catfish has attached its sucker to the rock, it pulls up its stomach plate and anchors it. With its body anchored, it moves its sucker up the face of the rock and repeats the process. Following this method, the rock-climbing catfish can walk its way up a 20-foot rock wall against the torrent of a waterfall in about 30 minutes! Our Magnificent Creator God thought of everything in His Master Design for every creature! |
| 4/27/2023 | By the time she had returned from her adventures in Oz, Dorothy had learned that “There’s no place like home.” As we discover more planets outside the solar system, we are learning that there’s no place like Earth or even the solar system. While we usually think of planets orbiting a star, astronomers are now finding planets that simply float through space without a home star.Of the 15 known homeless planets, 13 of them were recently found in the Orion Nebula. These most recent discoveries were made using a specialized camera that examines the heavens for infrared and near infrared light. Scientists speculate that the planets might have escaped from orbit around some star. Others speculate that the planets are failed brown dwarf stars. To become a brown dwarf, a body has to be at least as big as 13 Jupiters. The smallest of these planets is as big as 8 Jupiters, making its gravity far too strong for any life that we know about. To make matters worse, temperatures on these planets would not support life, either. Analysis of the light coming from these planets reveals that their surface temperatures are nearly 5000° F.These homeless planets are part of God’s illustration to us of how He specially designed our solar system and Earth just for us.The Bible tells us that the Word made flesh, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ Who gave His life for us, was also the Instrument our Magnificent Creator God used to create the entire universe. |
| 4/26/2023 | A hummingbird heart weighs a fraction of an ounce and beats eight hundred times a minute; a blue whale’s heart weighs half a ton, beats only ten times per minute, and can be heard two miles away. In contrast to either, the human heart seems dully functional, yet it does its job, beating 100,000 times a day [65–70 times a minute] with no time off for rest, to get most of us through seventy years or more. Our Magnificent Creator God’s master design for His master creation is infinite in detail and function. |
| 4/25/2023 | We take the sky for granted. It is just there. Yet, whether it is covered with cloud, or clear, we do not consider the fact that, during the daytime, all of the sky is somewhat light. In particular, on a clear day, the sky appears blue. The blueness itself is remarkable, given that the sun is yellow, but why is the sky any color at all?Having seen photographs from the Moon, taken by the Apollo Astronauts, we know that even when the sun is out, the rest of the sky is black. Sunlight comes from the Sun, so the blueness of the sky on Earth must be because of light coming from elsewhere.Of course, all the light is from the Sun originally. But that light has been scattered. So there is scattered light coming at us from many different directions when we look at the sky. The reason for this scattering of light is a phenomenon known as Raleigh scattering – named for British physicist Lord Raleigh.Sunlight is scattered by molecules and particles in the atmosphere. It turns out that the mix of molecules and particles that we have in Earth’s atmosphere scatters light more strongly at shorter wavelengths than at longer wavelengths. Of the colors of visible light, blue has a shorter wavelength than red. So it appears to us that blue light is coming to us from all directions of the sky because that light has been scattered.When we learn the mechanism for something, it should not spoil our wonder at it but should cause us all the more to praise our Magnificent Creator God for His attention to detail! |
| 4/24/2023 | A gypsy moth caterpillar infestation can strip the leaves from large numbers of trees, threatening the trees’ lives. Since they don’t have a means of escape, it doesn’t seem as if the poor trees have much of a chance.But botanists were tipped off to the possibility that trees may not be all that defenseless when they began to investigate why only a few trees were badly damaged by insects in an infected grove while most stood unharmed. They discovered that when facing a threat like gypsy moth caterpillars, trees begin to defend themselves by sounding the alarm. A large variety of trees – including beeches, poplars, sugar maples and red oaks – communicate with each other. Scientists believe the trees communicate by releasing chemicals called pheromones into the air. What they now know is that before insects attacking one tree can get to the tree next door, the second tree has already begun defending itself.How do they defend themselves? When under attack or notified by other trees of attack, most trees begin to manufacture an array of poisons. Some of the poisons make leaves impossible to digest, while others kill the insects outright. Some make as many as eight poisons at once, and many can change the poisons that are made from year to year.Our Magnificent Creator God’s concern for living things extends even to plants. If He sees to this detailed level of care for trees, can there be anything in our lives that is too small for His loving concern? |
| 4/23/2023 | During World War II, Hitler and his Nazi Army killed one third of all of the then living Jews, six million of them. God’s magnificent plan of salvation is so perfect it would even have allowed Hitler to go to heaven if he had accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior. When our Magnificent Creator God said that all who call on the name of The Lord would be saved He meant ALL! |
| 4/22/2023 | Many plants reproduce simply by cloning. The most obvious example of cloning that comes to mind is the dandelion. Unless you get all of the main dandelion root out of the ground, each piece of the root can sprout another dandelion, identical to the parent.The walking fern reproduces by cloning too. It moves across the countryside, albeit slowly, by producing new plants. A new plant is generated wherever the tips of its leaves touch the ground. Each new plant is identical to the parent.The bamboo reproduces through underground stems. The different species of bamboo live anywhere from 20 to 120 years. During their life spans, they produce only by cloning. Then they flower – once. When it’s time for a particular species to flower, every member of that species, no matter where in the world it grows, flowers gloriously. Each flower can have as many as 100 pollen-producing stamens. Once the seeds are ripe and scattered, every member of that species in the world dies. At this point, the entire species exists only in the scattered seeds.This is brilliant testimony to a recent creation of all bamboos at the same time. If evolution produced them and the forces of change worked on them for millions of years, one would think that all members of the same species would no longer be in perfect synchronization. Bamboo makes a strong testimony for the recent creation by our Magnificent Creator God reported in Genesis! |
| 4/21/2023 | Many plants, especially orchids, offer different ploys to fool insects into pollinating them. Each of these ploys shows planning, design and the ability to create the design that will work. That there are so many examples makes it impossible for any rational person to believe that mindless, impersonal forces could have made these plants.Four different groups of orchids produce flowers that look so much like the female of the insect that pollinates them that pollinators will try to mate with them. The Brassia orchid found in southern Florida produces a flower that mimics the prey of its pollinator, the spider wasp. The flower is so designed that as the wasp stings its supposed prey – really the flower – pollen is deposited on his head. The pollen is then carried to a nearby female flower and deposited in just the right place during another attack.Another orchid imitates an aggressive swarm of bees as it blows in the wind. The strongly territorial bees that live in the area swarm and attack the flowers. In the process, they transfer the pollen from male to female flowers. The female flowers of at least 50 species of Mexican orchids offer fake pollen to lure pollen-eating insects that have been feeding on male flowers. Many of these insect-orchid relationships are so tightly interlocked that neither could survive without the other.This speaks of a planned creation. It also bears witness that all forms of life came into being in a relatively short time, not over millions of years as evolutionists would have it.Our Magnificent Creator God had all of this planned before the beginning of time – before the world existed! |
| 4/20/2023 | There has been a considerable amount of interest over exoplanets recently. This is due, in large part, to information gleaned from the Kepler spacecraft, which was launched in 2009. Data started being made available from the spacecraft in 2014. There is too much data to be studied quickly by NASA or anyone else, so the data has been made freely available, and anyone with the expertise to analyze the data can do so. This has led to the discovery of a lot of new exoplanets. My friend and fellow creation speaker, Dr. Jason Lisle, discovered a planet using this data and made that discovery known in May 2017.What is an exoplanet? An exoplanet is a planet orbiting a star other than our own sun. You might suppose that they were discovered by peering through a telescope in the same way that planets like Uranus and Neptune and the dwarf planet Pluto were discovered. However, this is not the case. The data released by Kepler, orbiting beyond the haze of the atmosphere, comprises of readings of brightness from many stars. If a planet orbits across the surface of that star, then the brightness of the star will be imperceptibly, but measurably, diminished. If observed dips in the stellar brightness are observed regularly, then it can be assumed that this regularity is due to the regularity of an orbiting planet.In considering these discoveries, one is impressed by the beauty and majesty of God’s creation. One is also impressed by the talents that He has given to those who analyze such data for these discoveries.The key word herein is “Discovery”. We are always amazed at what our Magnificent Creator God has created – but that’s just what we know about today – there is no way to imagine just what remains for us to discover – we may never know in this life just what is really “out there”. |
| 4/19/2023 | The largest known beetle in the world is the aptly named goliath beetle. This African beetle can become almost as large as a mouse. Dinosaurs were not the largest animals ever to live. The great blue whale holds that honor. The smallest mammal in the world is smaller than many insects. A newly discovered species of bat in Thailand weighs only six one-hundredths of an ounce.Such extremes might lead some to wonder whether those giant insects we see in the movies would ever develop. Could a spider grow to be as large as a house?You will be happy to know that no spider or any other insect could grow as large as a house. We can be sure of this because of the way insects breathe. Insects breathe through small tubes along their bodies. These tubes provide oxygen directly to their internal tissues. If an insect were to grow too large, these tubes could not get enough oxygen to the tissues. This is because the larger the creature, the more internal living tissue that requires oxygen. You and I have lungs that provide a network of surfaces equal to the size of a tennis court. An insect our size would need a body that has the surface area of a tennis court, too, which is an impossibility.Even though different creatures have different organs to supply their needs, each creature has just the right organs for its needs. This is just another sign of our Magnificent Creator God’s wisdom. |
| 4/18/2023 | Researchers in the 1950s and ’60s established that the octopus is quite intelligent and can learn different visual patterns. Octopi have very large brains with large areas reserved for storing information. New research has shown that they are even more intelligent than earlier studies revealed. These findings run counter to evolutionary theory, which says that intelligence evolves in social species to help them deal with social relationships. The octopus is not a social animal and operates alone.Unlike other animals, octopi use a variety of strategies to solve the same problem. They can use their eight powerful arms to open clams, or they can drill through the shell and inject a fast-acting poison. In the laboratory, octopi kept in isolation were given a floating plastic bottle. The bored octopuses quickly devised a variety of games to play with the bottle – a sure sign of intelligence.The Creator gave the octopus the ability to learn a lot so it could cope with its unusual way of life. Octopi begin life as tiny plankton that drift with the ocean currents. When they finally settle to the bottom, they may find themselves in any of the many habitats provided by the ocean and face any variety of predators and food sources. Thus, our Magnificent Creator God designed them with the ability to learn how to adapt to a large variety of habitats and situations. Just like He designed us… |
| 4/17/2023 | New research is revealing the health benefits of eating nuts. While eating peanuts has been shown to reduce heart disease risks by lowering triglycerides, tree nuts offer many more benefits.People often worry about the fat in nuts. However, most of that fat is the good kind that protects hearts, while at the same time satisfying the body’s need for fat. The result is that nut eaters can lose weight and keep it off. In one Canadian study, those trying to lose weight while satisfying their fat needs with nuts lost an average of nine pounds over 18 months. Over the same trial period, those trying to lose weight with a low-fat diet actually gained an average of six pounds. Another study showed that people who ate two ounces of nuts four or five times a week lowered their risk of heart attack by 50 percent. Yet another study showed that women who ate only five ounces of nuts per week were one-third less likely to have a heart attack than those who ate nuts infrequently. Several studies have shown that almonds, macadamia nuts, or walnuts lowered high cholesterol by ten percent. Other studies have shown that nut eating can lower the risk of prostate cancer by 30 percent and may lower the risk of colon and stomach cancers.Nuts are a great gift from God and truly are among the best fruits of the land. Chance would not have evolved all these health benefits in a food clearly designed for us to eat. A loving Magnificent Creator God made them for our good!!! |
| 4/16/2023 | The Bible tells us that a young shepherd named David killed the giant Philistine, Goliath, with a very accurately sling stone (1 Samuel 17:40, 49).The Bible states that the Israelites used slings as weapons of war (2 Kings 3:25). Sling stones from Khirbet el-Maqatir (West Bank, Israel) are not naturally rounded. They all have evidence of being shaped by man. Archaeologists are finding evidence that confirms these Biblical stories. Sling stones were important weapons in an ancient army’s arsenal.At one excavation site in Israel, 10 miles north of Jerusalem, sling stones have been found in almost every area of the dig. Interestingly, the site is located in the territory given to the tribe of Benjamin. This tribe was known for an elite corps of slingers (Judges 20:15-16; 1 Chronicles 12:2), many of whom were left-handed slingers. 700 of them could each “sling a stone at a hair and not miss.The best method of releasing a stone from a sling is by an underhand motion.It is unclear when men first started slinging stones instead of throwing them. Yet, once known, it did not take long to learn that stones could be slung faster, farther, and more accurately, than they could be thrown. Early slingers also found smoother, rounded, stones were far more effective than any other shape.Ancient hand slings generally consisted of a single long strip of leather or woven wool, with a central “pocket” for the stone. The longer the sling, the greater its range. Long-range slings were about 3 feet long (0.9 meters).Slingers are often visualized as releasing overhead, yet the best way to utilize a sling is by an underhand motion, like a softball pitcher. Elaborate wind-ups were wasted motion. One windup, like a good softball pitcher, was sufficient. Before development of the modern compound bow, ancient slingers were as effective as archers and served as an important part of any military force.Surprisingly, a good slinger hurled a stone as far and accurately as a good archer. Roman military texts recommended archery target practice at about 200 yards (183 meters). Slingers are known to hurl their projectiles even farther, as much as 440 yards (402 meters) (a quarter of a mile / 0.40 km). As for accuracy, one ancient writer noted that the best slingers “would wound not merely the heads of their enemies, but any part of the face at which they might have aimed.”Experiments demonstrate that missiles leave a sling in excess of 60 miles per hour (97 km/h).One Roman writer noted that opponents in leather armor were in far greater danger from sling missiles than arrows. Even if the stone did not penetrate the armor, it was capable of inflicting a fatal internal injury.Unarmored bodies were easily penetrated by sling stones. An ancient medical book included instructions for removing lead and stone sling missiles from the bodies of wounded soldiers.While typical sling stones used by the Greek and Roman armies were the size of golf balls, different cultures liked different sizes.This is just another piece of our Magnificent Creator God’s design before anything existed!!! |
| 12/31/2023 | How would you like to live in a neighborhood where garbage was never collected and taken away? What if there was no provision in the creation for getting rid of waste? By now the Earth would have become a filthy mess!Our sewage and other waste does not break down all by itself. Without microbes, waste would simply continue to pile up. But if you were designing a world in which waste would have to be “taken away,” how would you do it? It’s hard to imagine a solution to the problem that is better than the solution God provided. The creatures that dispose of our waste are microscopic – an improvement over our big, noisy garbage trucks. But microbes don’t simply break down garbage into harmless materials. In His wisdom, God designed them to turn useless garbage into useful substances.We are now beginning to make more use of what God has designed. A West German corporation now markets a ceramic sponge that is home to countless organisms that not only love highly polluted water, they turn the pollution into useful things like natural gas and alcohol. Scientists say that the bugs eat almost anything, even pollutants that cannot easily be handled by usual sewage treatment.Whether we recognize it or not, we humans continue to learn at the feet of the Magnificent Creator God who made us – which is, itself, an argument against evolution. |
| 12/30/2023 | Fireflies may help light the way to new medical breakthroughs. The gentle glow of a firefly on a summer evening is produced by the chemical luciferase. The firefly has a gene with the code that makes this chemical.When that gene is added to the genetic information of other plants or animals, the cells begin to glow harmlessly. Researchers have been using the firefly gene to test their ability to add genetic information to a cell.When human heart arteries become clogged, a medicine called TPA is among the treatments doctors use. TPA is a natural clot-dissolving protein that helps prevent heart attacks. The problem is, without a continuous supply of TPA, the artery may reclog. It would help if the artery could make its own TPA 24 hours a day.Since TPA is a natural protein for which there is a genetic code, researchers wanted to know if genetic information could be added to artery cells. To find out, they injected dogs with the genetic code for luciferase. If genetic information could be added to the cells through this method, they would actually see the results in the glowing tissue. Tissue samples taken three days later did, in fact, have the distinctive glow of the firefly proving that the method works. They warn that several years of research lie ahead before artery cells may be able to dissolve their own clots.Those glowing fireflies that delight children and adults show God’s design in the creation in an unexpected way. The chemical that makes the glow is proving to be an important tool of medical science.What a Magnificent Creator God we have to preplan our needs!!! |
| 12/29/2023 | While the Bible teaches us that sex is a wonderful gift of God, evolutionists believe that sexual reproduction should not have evolved. According to evolutionists, if sexual reproduction were to develop, evolution is supposed to get rid of it.To make matters worse, immobile plants use sexual reproduction. This creates a problem in transferring the male genes to the female for fertilization. Just to confound things even more, God uses insects and even mammals to transfer the pollen. Since evolutionists believe that plants were around for many millions of years before animals, evolutionists have yet another problem.The European family of the Arum lilies attracts beetles and flies. When one of the insects lands on a flower, he finds a slick, oil-coated surface and ends up sliding down into a chamber filled with small hairs. Imprisoned, he finds a sweet sap that makes good eating. While he is gorging himself on the sap and getting sticky in the process, the male part of the flower showers him with pollen. The next day, the sticky, pollen-coated insect finds that the doors to his prison are open. So he flies off to another flower to unwittingly deliver his load of pollen!It sounds like science fiction to say that a flower figured out how to do this. And it certainly doesn’t sound very scientific to say that nobody designed and made this complex arrangement. As we learn more about these arrangements in nature, it becomes even more clear that an all-wise Magnificent Creator God designed these beautiful, symbiotic relationships between different members of the living kingdom. |
| 12/28/2023 | The first four words of the Bible are incredibly important. “In the beginning, God…” These words boldly declare the truth about how we should view the universe we live in. They tell us that there was a beginning. There was a time when all the things that now are were not. And before all that, before even time itself, was God.The four words refute all naturalistic explanations of the universe. They refute evolution because they make clear that there was a planning intelligence behind the universe rather than blind, random chance.Yet the words also refute a mere theistic intelligent design model because they reveal that the Creator was not an impersonal, unknowable entity but has all the divine attributes on which the remainder of the 66 books of the Bible will expand. These four powerful words suggest that we should go on to learn more about this wonderful God, Who has made all things well, and Who takes the trouble to be mindful even of humans like us.These four powerful words refute atheism by boldly declaring that God does indeed exist. As the title of one of Francis Schaeffer’s books puts it, “He is there, and He is not silent”.The four words also refute agnosticism because the God Who Is There is someone that we can know and learn more about.The four words also refute deism because the God who is declared to have created is described, known, and knowable. He is not an abstract concept, but a reality.Genesis is the foundational book of the Bible. And these four powerful words are the foundation phrase of Genesis.It is to our Magnificent Creator God that we owe all things! |
| 12/27/2023 | One interesting way in which to help young people gain an appreciation for God’s creation is to ask them to solve certain problems that the Creator Himself had to solve.Let’s use the examples of seeds. Plants need seeds to produce the next generation. But what about all the insects that feed on seeds? As Creator, one could decide that insects will not eat seeds. But what will insects eat? Can we get rid of insects? If we do, what will we create to do all the important jobs that insects perform in the ecology? The conclusion must be that we need insects, and they need to eat something. Seeds are a convenient food for them. So how do we design seeds so that both plants and insects can benefit?Left to their own to work out this problem, perhaps in small groups, young people are likely to propose two popular solutions. A plant can be designed to make so many seeds that insects could not possibly eat them all. Or some plants could be designed that produce seeds that have a natural insect repellent.And both of these solutions to the problem are commonly found among seeds. Studies show that plants that produce so many seeds that insects could not possibly eat them all generally do not produce seeds that are poisonous to insects. But plants that produce fewer and larger seeds often produce seeds laced with natural insect repellents. As a result, insects get to eat and plants are allowed to produce the next generation.And again we see that our Magnificent Creator God worked out the best solution for all involved. |
| 12/26/2023 | The first four words of the Bible are incredibly important. “In the beginning, God…” These words boldly declare the truth about how we should view the universe we live in. They tell us that there was a beginning. There was a time when all the things that now are were not. And before all that, before even time itself, was God.The four words refute all naturalistic explanations of the universe. They refute evolution because they make clear that there was a planning intelligence behind the universe rather than blind, random chance.Yet the words also refute a mere theistic intelligent design model because they reveal that the Creator was not an impersonal, unknowable entity but has all the divine attributes on which the remainder of the 66 books of the Bible will expand. These four powerful words suggest that we should go on to learn more about this wonderful God, Who has made all things well, and Who takes the trouble to be mindful even of humans like us.These four powerful words refute atheism by boldly declaring that God does indeed exist. As the title of one of Francis Schaeffer’s books puts it, “He is there, and He is not silent”.The four words also refute agnosticism because the God Who Is There is someone that we can know and learn more about.The four words also refute deism because the God who is declared to have created is described, known, and knowable. He is not an abstract concept, but a reality.Genesis is the foundational book of the Bible. And these four powerful words are the foundation phrase of Genesis.It is to our Magnificent Creator God that we owe all things! |
| 12/25/2023 | Many different creatures, from mice to insects, eat seeds. The tropical forest offers the greatest variety of seeds found anywhere in the world. The problem is that among this great variety are seeds that are poisonous and others that are hard as rocks. Yet, even these seeds are used for food by some creatures.One vine like legume that grows in the jungle produces seeds that are highly poisonous to insects. Yet, there is one beetle that is able to eat these highly nutritious seeds – even gaining extra nutrition for itself from the poison.The Hymenaea protects its seeds another way. Hymenaea seeds are locked within a very tough, woody pod that no one in the tropical forest is interested in eating – if they can even get it open. But one mouse that lives on the jungle floor is up to the task. This small mouse opens the pods and stores the seed in its pouch like cheeks. Back in its nest, the mouse bites a small notch in the hard seed to help it absorb water. He then buries it in his den. Before long, the seed germinates and the mouse has a tasty and tender seedling to eat.Evolutionists tell us that farming was one of the major advances that helped primitive humans become modern. How, then, do they explain mice who not only farm but who know how to improve the germination of their crops? A better explanation is that our Magnificent Creator God shared this bit of farming wisdom with the mouse when He made it. |
| 12/24/2023 | Relationships among creatures who are often very different from one another are so numerous – and so intelligent – that they witness to an overall design for living things. Even evolutionists recognize this when they talk about the “grand design” of the living world. And if design is that evident, there must be a designer. But there’s even more to the matter than seeing a designer.Some of the most ferocious wasps in the world live in the tropical forests of Costa Rica. These wasps are social, building a huge nest that can be two feet long and one foot across. They are short tempered and highly protective of the tree in which they build their nest. Most other creatures give these wasps and their tree plenty of room.But one other creature also calls the tree home – the katydid. These long horned grasshoppers spend much of their day sitting in the wasps’ tree. The wasps don’t bother the katydids because they offer no threat to the wasps. At the same time, none of the katydids’ many predators dare come close to the tree because of the wasps. In one research project, scientists removed the wasp nest from a tree that was home to many katydids. A few days later the katydids were gone from the tree as well.The relationship between these wasps and the katydids is called symbiosis and shows more than intelligence and design in the creation. It shows that our Magnificent Creator God cares about everything He has made, reminding us that He desires a loving relationship with each of us! |
| 12/23/2023 | While the Bible teaches us that sex is a wonderful gift of God, evolutionists believe that sexual reproduction should not have evolved. According to evolutionists, if sexual reproduction were to develop, evolution is supposed to get rid of it.To make matters worse, immobile plants use sexual reproduction. This creates a problem in transferring the male genes to the female for fertilization. Just to confound things even more, God uses insects and even mammals to transfer the pollen. Since evolutionists believe that plants were around for many millions of years before animals, evolutionists have yet another problem.The European family of the Arum lilies attracts beetles and flies. When one of the insects lands on a flower, he finds a slick, oil-coated surface and ends up sliding down into a chamber filled with small hairs. Imprisoned, he finds a sweet sap that makes good eating. While he is gorging himself on the sap and getting sticky in the process, the male part of the flower showers him with pollen. The next day, the sticky, pollen-coated insect finds that the doors to his prison are open. So he flies off to another flower to unwittingly deliver his load of pollen!It sounds like science fiction to say that a flower figured out how to do this. And it certainly doesn’t sound very scientific to say that nobody designed and made this complex arrangement. As we learn more about these arrangements in nature, it becomes even more clear that an all-wise Magnificent Creator God designed these beautiful, symbiotic relationships between different members of the living kingdom. |
| 12/22/2023 | While the Bible teaches us that sex is a wonderful gift of God, evolutionists believe that sexual reproduction should not have evolved. According to evolutionists, if sexual reproduction were to develop, evolution is supposed to get rid of it.To make matters worse, immobile plants use sexual reproduction. This creates a problem in transferring the male genes to the female for fertilization. Just to confound things even more, God uses insects and even mammals to transfer the pollen. Since evolutionists believe that plants were around for many millions of years before animals, evolutionists have yet another problem.The European family of the Arum lilies attracts beetles and flies. When one of the insects lands on a flower, he finds a slick, oil-coated surface and ends up sliding down into a chamber filled with small hairs. Imprisoned, he finds a sweet sap that makes good eating. While he is gorging himself on the sap and getting sticky in the process, the male part of the flower showers him with pollen. The next day, the sticky, pollen-coated insect finds that the doors to his prison are open. So he flies off to another flower to unwittingly deliver his load of pollen!It sounds like science fiction to say that a flower figured out how to do this. And it certainly doesn’t sound very scientific to say that nobody designed and made this complex arrangement. As we learn more about these arrangements in nature, it becomes even more clear that an all-wise Magnificent Creator God designed these beautiful, symbiotic relationships between different members of the living kingdom. |
| 12/21/2023 | If we could harness all of the sun’s energy that reaches the Earth, we would have more than enough energy to fill all our energy needs – even if the entire world became as industrialized as the west. Yet, less than 0.10% of all of the sun’s energy output reaches the Earth! What is going on within the sun to create so much energy?Most people have heard that the sun produces its energy through nuclear fusion. And even though most scientists think this is true, they admit that the real answer isn’t that simple – and the full answer is unknown. If the sun produces its energy by nuclear fusion, one of the results of that process is a tiny particle called a neutrino. But, in fact, the neutrinos that should be coming from the sun are not. Worse, new calculations of the temperature needed for the sun to ignite into the nuclear fusion process show that the evolutionary theory for how the sun formed does not generate enough heat for fusion.An alternate theory says that the sun’s heat is a result of its powerful gravity pulling the sun in on itself – called gravitational collapse. This would explain why the neutrinos are missing. But evolutionists have rejected gravitational collapse because if this is where the sun’s heat comes from, the sun could not be billions of years old.Despite our scientific sophistication, many of our Magnificent Creator God’s works still defy our understanding! |
| 12/20/2023 | Many people today tend to dismiss the early chapters of Genesis as legend rather than history. However, if the Bible’s story of the Flood and the Tower of Babel are not history there are some established historical facts that have no explanation.According to the Bible, after the great Flood, people multiplied but failed to scatter over the face of the earth as commanded by God. Having one language, most of the people stayed in one location and built a great city. It was not until God confused their language that they scattered across the earth. If these events did not take place, how do we explain the fact that a 6th century B.C. Chinese writer describes the ultimate God Who created all things in much the same way as an ancient Egyptian writer? And why would these descriptions match 8th century B.C. Greek writings? While it is true that each of these cultures had their unique gods, their ancient writings about the Creator use special language. Lao-tzu was an 8th century B.C. writer who described the ultimate God as eternal and self-existing. Likewise, an ancient Egyptian writer described the ultimate God as the source of everything in the heavens and on earth as well as all life.If man was not once of one culture and language, how did all these ancient writers each get the same story to tell? The similarities between these descriptions and those of other cultures bear witness to the historicity of even the earliest parts of Genesis – all performed by our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 12/19/2023 | The frogfish is yet another strange creature for which those who believe in evolution can find no history. Not only do evolutionists admit that frogfish are not related by evolution to any other creature, but also they can find no relationship among 35 of the 41 known species of frogfish!Frogfish live in many different shallow sea areas. They are called frogfish because they have a wide mouth and face like a frog. In addition, their front fins are on the ends of what appear to be very fat frog legs. Yet they also have a fleshy lure, suspended on sort of a pole coming out of their forehead, like the deep water angler fish. And like the angler, the frogfish uses this bait to lure lunch close to its mouth.Like the platypus, the frogfish unites very different characteristics of several creatures into one unlikely but imaginative creation. Evolutionists are unable to imagine an evolutionary history for this creature. What’s more, they cannot figure out how most of the 41 different species of frogfish they have designated might be related to one another.The frogfish is a dramatic testimony to the fact that our Magnificent Creator God has created all creatures according to His unlimited creativity, fully formed and so unique that sometimes evolutionists cannot even invent an evolutionary history for them. |
| 12/18/2023 | Nearly everyone is familiar with the way in which the whistle of a train moving toward them lowers in pitch as the train passes. The change in pitch is caused by the change in the movement of the train relative to the listener. First it is moving toward the listener, but after it passes it is moving away. This change in pitch is called Doppler shifting. Now let’s apply this principle to the bat’s echolocation system.Bats are most sensitive to certain frequencies as they listen for the echo of their high pitched squeak. If you are a bat, you listen for echoes from stationary objects around you, like trees, as well as moving objects, such as an insect that is about to become lunch. Because of the differences in the movements of these objects relative to your flight, Doppler shifting changes the pitch of returning echoes. That change could place a returning echo outside the range of frequencies to which you are most sensitive.Scientists have discovered that the bat solves this problem by calculating the expected change in frequency due to Doppler shifting and then altering his squeak so that the returning echo is at the needed frequency! How many of us could do that without a computer and other sophisticated equipment?Amazingly, our Magnificent Creator God has gone so far as to make the bat a bit of a physicist so it can make its living. What an elegant testimony to God’s wisdom and generosity! |
| 12/17/2023 | For many, the existence of so much ice on Antarctica is a grave cause for concern, as they have been told that climate change will cause a lot of this ice to melt and cause the sea level to rise. The worry is that many of the world’s great cities, and many small island nations, could disappear as the Antarctic melts. So why did God make such a troublesome continent which could precipitate the end of the world?Remember that the topography of the world is not the way it was originally created. We have explained previously that there was likely just one main pre-Flood continent, which we call Rodinia. This continent split up during the Flood. The massive deposits of fossil fuels known to exist on the southernmost continent are evidence of pre-Flood forests, probably populated with animals.Every time ice breaks off from an Antarctic glacier, the media worry about flooding – yet God has promised not to flood the world again, nor to bring seasons to an end. Despite seeming to be a homogeneous repository for the 70% of the Earth’s fresh water, locked in as ice, there are considerable variations in climate between different parts of the continent. For every place where ice is melting and breaking up, there are parts where the ice cap gets thicker.Our Magnificent Creator God has all this in balance for His own purposes, and we can be sure He will keep all His promises!!! |
| 12/16/2023 | Imagine a huge living creature covering about one square mile and made up of almost a third of a billion cells. Imagine each of those living cells being able to move about independently of the others.No, it’s not the plot of a new science fiction movie. Some scientists have suggested that ant colonies may be thought of as one large living organism. They suggest this because of the way individual members within ant colonies behave. Ant colonies have many kinds of members, each with its own specific task. The soldier ants in a colony have extra large heads and heavy-duty jaws for fighting. Other ants are concerned only about finding and returning food. Still other workers do nothing but process and store food.Within the colony another caste of ants does nothing but tend the eggs. Others prepare the food for the larvae and deliver it to other specialized ants who do nothing but feed the next generation.If this sounds complex, imagine the largest known ant colony. This Japanese ant colony has an estimated 306 million worker ants, and more than a million queens. The colony occupies 45,000 interconnected underground nests that range over about a square mile!There is obviously intelligent design and control behind ant society—intelligence not found in ants or in nature itself. This intelligence comes from outside nature. Here is yet another witness that no concern of any living thing is too small for our Magnificent Creator God’s complete attention!!! |
| 12/15/2023 | The Clark’s Nutcracker is an amazing bird. Every year it prepares for winter by hiding tiny caches of four or five whitebark pine seeds, as many as five hundred seeds per hour. Then, months later, it returns to uncover the seeds, even under heavy snow. A Clark’s Nutcracker may remember as many as ten thousand locations where it has hidden seeds—an astounding feat (especially when you consider the difficulty we humans can have remembering the location of our car keys or glasses).But even this incredible act of memory pales in comparison with God’s ability to remember our prayers. He’s able to keep track of every sincere prayer and remember and respond to them even years later. In the book of Revelation, the apostle John describes “four living creatures” and “twenty-four elders” worshiping the Lord in heaven. Each one was “holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of God’s people” (5:8).Just as incense was precious in the ancient world, our prayers are so precious to our Magnificent Creator God that He keeps them before Him continually, treasured in golden bowls! Our prayers matter to God because we matter to Him, and through His undeserved kindness to us in Jesus He offers us uninhibited access (Hebrews 4:14–16). So we can pray boldly! And know that not a word will be forgotten or misplaced because of the amazing love of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 12/14/2023 | We hear it often: Christian values are to blame for most of the problems in society. Marriage is ridiculed as “just a piece of paper”. Strongly held convictions of right and wrong are said to be to blame for arguments, fights and wars. And by all means, we must free ourselves from old fashioned attitudes about sex and marriage.Scientific support for these “liberated” values goes back to 1928 when Margaret Mead spent nine months in Samoa, then wrote a book. In it she said that Samoans live a happy, carefree life. Not only is crime virtually unheard of but even young people pass through their teen years without becoming rebellious. Mead, writing as an anthropologist, said this was because Samoans practice complete sexual freedom and avoid having strong convictions about religious and philosophical matters. For more than 50 years, Mead’s writings have been cited as scientific support for anti Christian values.But now an anthropologist who has spent many years in Samoa has come forward with a book that says things in Samoa are almost exactly the opposite of what Mead reported. The Samoans themselves asked him to correct the record because almost nothing Mead wrote about their values was accurate. Samoans are very puritanical about sex, and parents are strict with their children and competitive with each other.How foolish humans are to think they can invent better moral values that produce more happiness than those values their Magnificent Creator God gave them. And what a shame that so many have based their lives on a lie because they wanted to believe that “nature” made them. |
| 12/13/2023 | In Psalm 148:3, the sun, moon and stars are specifically encouraged, along with the rest of creation, to praise God. And truly, God, as our Creator and our Savior through Jesus Christ, is worthy of all praise. But perhaps many Christians have been a little too ready to accept this biblical language as figurative.Based on scientific principles discovered by Isaac Newton, a creationist, a new science has developed today that studies sound waves on the sun. The vibrations on the sun’s surface can be measured as the surface of the sun moves. Scientists studying these movements on the seething surface of the sun have learned with the help of computers that the sun actually rings like a bell! They have found that the sun rings over so many frequencies that there are several million resonances going on all at the same time.Truly, the sun is making a glorious sound to the Lord! Scientists have long known that the Earth does the same thing. And we have learned that the moon, too, has its own song. So next time you read in Scripture about the creation – the sun, moon and Earth – praising God, don’t dismiss the words as figurative!And once more, when the scientists finally arrived at some knowledge, they found that the Bible had already been there – for thousands of years. That alone is a great reason for us to join the sun, moon and Earth in praising our wonderful Magnificent Creator God! |
| 12/12/2023 | The number of different kinds of insects in the world seems almost endless. There are millions. The larva of many of these insects feed on trees and bushes at least until they develop into adults. One would think, then, that we wouldn’t have any trees left, since they are so unfairly outnumbered by such hordes.But we also know from experience that the creation has been designed with careful and intricate balances. In this case, the many different kinds of trees each produce poisons in order to protect themselves from insects. But there is still balance, since insects, too, need to make a living. Not every insecticide produced by a tree is poisonous to every insect. So a tree’s insecticides simply limit the number of insects that can feed on it.Some trees have pockets of gluey fluids that, when opened by insect mandibles, glue the insect’s mouth closed – a very effective way of keeping something from eating you! But most of the insecticides manufactured by trees involve subtle and complex chemistry. One poison fools the insect’s system into thinking that it is an essential amino acid – with fatal results.Where could such advanced knowledge of chemistry come from? For that matter, could such precise balance – that allows for life but keeps it in control – arise all by itself? As our knowledge of science grows, our appreciation of our Magnificent Creator God’s work of creation only increases! |
| 12/11/2023 | Australia has many animals that are not found anywhere else in the world today. One of the most unique is the wombat, which looks like a small bear with brown fur. The wombat is a burrowing animal.Like many of Australia’s animals, the wombat is a marsupial, having a pouch in which its prematurely born young complete their development. The pouches owned by most marsupials are open at the top toward the mother’s head. This works fine for the kangaroo and other marsupials – no one ever saw a kangaroo standing on its head.But the wombat is a burrowing animal. If its pouch opened toward the mother’s head, it would very quickly fill with dirt, which wouldn’t do the young wombat inside the pouch any good. So, unlike most marsupials, the wombat’s pouch opens toward the animal’s hind legs – it points backward!The marsupial’s pouch is a wondrous enough invention all by itself. But this pouch is a clear case of a specialized intelligent design for a unique situation. If the wombat’s backward pouch had been produced by mutations, how would baby wombats have gotten by during the millions of years of trial and error needed to redesign the pouch? It’s easy to see the wombat’s backward pouch as a humorous hint from our Magnificent Creator God that human theories simply cannot replace the account of creation that He has revealed to us in the Bible! |
| 12/10/2023 | Life on Earth began somewhere between 3.7 and 4.5 billion years ago, after meteorites splashed down and leached essential elements into warm little ponds, say scientists.These scientists, from McMaster University, have run probability calculations and reckon that Earth life could have begun as ponds on Earth took in long-chain compounds from meteorites to form a sort of broth from which life could emerge.This is really a new twist on the panspermia model. Panspermia is the idea that life on Earth was seeded from space, and the idea of molecules on meteorites has been a popular supposition for some time. In the current model, these scientists are not suggesting that the meteorites housed living cells, but rather that they added the right ingredient mix to the primordial soup of ancient Earth.This research acknowledges that “DNA is too complex to have been the first aspect of life to emerge. It had to start with something else, and that is RNA.”Many scientists have begun to acknowledge the impossibility of evolution on Earth. But imagining that there was some sort of seeding from space, however vague, merely pushes the problem to another realm. How would the proposed long-chain molecules have developed on these meteorites? Or did the meteorites come from another source, such as Mars?As is so often the case, research papers like these simply point out the fact that evolution has no answer to the problem of where life came from. In contrast, the Bible has a very clear answer.Genesis 1:1 – The very first verse in the very first book of the Bible – clearly reveals that in the beginning our Magnificent Creator God created the heavens and the earth!!! |
| 12/9/2023 | We are all familiar with the concept of the Ice Age – probably due to the eponymous cartoon feature film series. Evolutionists believe that this event took place about 2.6 million years ago. There is considerable evidence around the world of valleys carved by glaciation, and glacial moraines – deposits of rocky debris left at the end of glaciers. In a biblical framework, it is relatively easy to explain how the Ice Age could have happened. Instead of beginning 2.6 million years ago, we think that the Ice Age began in the immediate post-Flood period as oceans warmer than today evaporated into an atmosphere cooler than today.However, evolutionary geologists do not believe in just one Ice Age. They believe that the Earth has been through a cyclical path of continual ice ages and times of more temperate climate. Their evidence for this is found in rocks which bear scratch marks similar to those damaged during the known Ice Age. Indeed, evolutionists suppose that some of these earlier ice ages could have had ice sheets covering nearly the whole Earth.Such a scenario causes a problem. It can be seen that this sort of ice age would perhaps have caused a snowball effect. That is to say that most of the Earth could be covered by a white ice covering which would reflect most of the Sun’s heat away. In that case, it is difficult to see how the ice could ever have melted to return Earth to temperate conditions.Creationist researchers have shown that the effects interpreted as early ice ages could more easily be explained as being caused by landslides and other geological movements created by our Magnificent Creator God during the Flood!!! |
| 12/8/2023 | Some people have the green thumb in their family. Others may complain that they fail with plants because plants don’t tell them when they need care. Of course, most people can do well with family pets, who are enthusiastic about letting their needs be known.Now scientists have learned that plants do indeed cry out when they need attention. We just haven’t heard them because the sounds made by a thirsty plant are about five times higher-pitched than we can hear. But scientists with tiny, specialized microphones have heard corn plants calling for water. During their study, researchers learned that plants make a great deal of noise. Corn leaves and stalks make noises as they slide against each other during growth. We have all heard the sound of plant leaves rattling in the wind. Corn stalks also make noise as they bend in the wind.However, another sound was heard when the corn didn’t have enough water. It was a high-pitched popping noise. Plants have water tubes in them that carry water and nutrients up from the roots to the leaves. Water flows up these tubes under tension. When there is not enough water, the tension becomes too great and the tubes fracture. The popping is the sound of those tubes fracturing. The result of fractured tubes is a wilted plant. When water is restored, the tubes refill, the popping noises stop, and the plant again looks healthy.The purpose of this research was to learn when to water crops and how much water they need. Now that we have learned how plants communicate, crops can tell farmers when to water!Aren’t we blessed to have a Magnificent Creator God that took care of so much minute detail!!! |
| 12/7/2023 | Evolution says that life began with the simplest forms. It took over a billion years just to evolve algae and another billion years for living things to have more than one cell. It took half a billion years of slow development to generate today’s creatures. And evolution says that this story comes from the fossil record.What most people do not know is that there is no such story in the fossil record. And when not writing textbooks or appearing on television, evolutionary scientists will admit that their story of life cannot be found in the fossil record. According to the fossil record, every major family alive today appears suddenly and fully formed in the Cambrian rocks, which contain the first clear evidences of developed life.Charles Darwin was aware of this. Believing his own theory to be true, he called this problem a real mystery and wrote that it is probably a valid argument against evolution. Darwin wrote that he expected the problem to be solved as more fossils were discovered. But today, well over a century later, the problem remains and was written about in recent history in the Scientific American.So, Christians should not feel intimidated by the claims of scientists. We Christians have our faith by which we interpret what we see in the world. But the evolutionary story of life and the fossils is nothing more than the interpretation of the world according to evolutionary faith. We agree that far greater faith is required to believe in the revelation of Charles Darwin than to believe the revelation of our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 12/6/2023 | Some people have the green thumb in their family. Others may complain that they fail with plants because plants don’t tell them when they need care. Of course, most people can do well with family pets, who are enthusiastic about letting their needs be known.Now scientists have learned that plants do indeed cry out when they need attention. We just haven’t heard them because the sounds made by a thirsty plant are about five times higher-pitched than we can hear. But scientists with tiny, specialized microphones have heard corn plants calling for water. During their study, researchers learned that plants make a great deal of noise. Corn leaves and stalks make noises as they slide against each other during growth. We have all heard the sound of plant leaves rattling in the wind. Corn stalks also make noise as they bend in the wind.However, another sound was heard when the corn didn’t have enough water. It was a high-pitched popping noise. Plants have water tubes in them that carry water and nutrients up from the roots to the leaves. Water flows up these tubes under tension. When there is not enough water, the tension becomes too great and the tubes fracture. The popping is the sound of those tubes fracturing. The result of fractured tubes is a wilted plant. When water is restored, the tubes refill, the popping noises stop, and the plant again looks healthy.The purpose of this research was to learn when to water crops and how much water they need. Now that we have learned how plants communicate, crops can tell farmers when to water!Aren’t we blessed to have a Magnificent Creator God that took care of so much minute detail!!! |
| 12/5/2023 | A young student once asked Martin Luther what God was doing before He made the creation. Luther is said to have responded by telling the young man, “He was making switches to use on children who ask foolish questions.” Now some evolutionary physicists are asking what the universe was like before the big bang.Traditional big bang theorists have always said that there was nothing before the big bang. However, all evolutionary physicists know that the big bang theory has some major problems. For instance, in the earliest moments of the big bang, theory says that the universe would have had an infinite density and temperature. Another problem is that no known physics applies to these earliest moments of the universe. A physicist with the European Laboratory for Particle Physics proposed that the universe did exist a long time before the big bang. He theorized that it was just large enough so that it was not infinite in temperature or density and about one sixteenth of an inch across. He further theorized that the universe existed for a long time in this condition. He described the pre-big bang universe as being in the simplest state that you could imagine, a condition he called “the state of triviality”. Traditional physicists point out, however, that the theory is also filled with unprovable assumptions.The real lesson here is that neither the big bang theory nor any other theory that we can conceive can account for the universe. Only our Magnificent Creator God’s hand can explain the universe we see. |
| 12/4/2023 | Over the past several years, scientific studies of women by the Population Research Institute have shown that those who have had abortions increase their risks of infertility, breast cancer and other problems. Now, a study released by the Population Research Institute reveals a whole new category of risks associated with abortion.The researchers learned that among girls from 15 to 18, pregnant or not, for those who have had an abortion, the chance of major depression rises from 31 percent to 78 percent. The same pattern appeared for anxiety, where, for young girls who had had an abortion, the likelihood of anxiety neuroses was doubled. The pattern also showed a doubled rate of thoughts of suicide for girls who had had an abortion as compared with those who became pregnant but had not had an abortion. A similar study of women in New Zealand had the same results. Two studies by the Elliot Institute showed that women who had an abortion were three times as likely as those who had not to be plagued with anxiety and to abuse drugs.These studies show scientifically that it is time to stop accepting the mental health of the mother as justification for abortion. Researchers find that abortion causes mental health problems; it does not prevent them. More than this, of course, abortion is contrary to our Magnificent Creator God’s will because it takes a life. |
| 12/3/2023 | There is nothing our Creator God does that is not intended to bring us closer to Him. Why? Because His purpose in making humans was to make someone to love. We exist because He wanted to love us and be loved by us. There is nothing visible or invisible that is not meant to be of service to us. Consider the invisible angels who protect us. They rejoice when even one person turns to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.Consider the heavens above our heads. There, God placed billions of stars – some much larger than our sun. There are giant pinwheel galaxies with millions of huge stars. Countless billions of stars churn out more energy every second than we can ever hope to measure. What a lavish and beautiful timepiece to tell us when it is time to plant and time to harvest! God has given us more than the necessities of life. He has also hidden medicines within the bark of trees and the sweet-scented flower. He has filled that creation with splendor and beauty.However, I cannot neglect to mention His greatest and most generous gift. When we sought our will instead of His, we withdrew our love from Him. His response was to send His only Son, Jesus Christ, to suffer our punishment for sin on the cross. And He rose from the dead on the third day so that we could have new life with our Creator again. Oh, that our thanksgiving to our Magnificent Creator God could be as unlimited as His generosity! |
| 12/2/2023 | The yellow-and-black striped archer fish shops among the insects that land on branches overhanging his pond in the peaceful waters of the East Indies. Sometimes he will wait under a branch until something that would make a good lunch lands on it.When the archer fish finds a tasty-looking insect, he shoots an accurately aimed stream of water at his prey, knocking the insect into the water. Before the insect has a chance to recover, the archer fish has eaten him and is looking for dessert.The archer fish has a deep groove in his mouth. When he places his tongue against this groove, he ends up with a blow tube that is about 1/16-inch in diameter. Compressing his gills forces pressurized water through the blow pipe. The rounded tip of the archer fish’s tongue acts as a valve so the fish can shoot a few small bursts or one long stream of water at his prey. The archer fish seldom misses if his prey is within four feet.This simple but elegant arrangement is testimony to a wise and skillful Creator. Neither mindless chance evolution nor any fish could be smart enough to design this system. Nor could any fish redesign his normal mouth tissues into this unique tool. Here we see that our Magnificent Creator God even cares about providing the needs of a fish! We know that He cares even more about our lives! In fact, He has said so! |
| 12/1/2023 | Most have heard of the little “cleaner fish” or wrasse that clean the teeth of larger fishes. New research on the behavior of these fishes shows that they are not always honest-business fish. Other fish, including those who might ordinarily consider a meal of “cleaner fish”, actually stand in line for their services. That’s because they need to have parasites and diseased tissue removed. They also know that the little “cleaner fish” offer massages.It’s amazing enough that even potential predators will become clients for a good cleaning and massage. Researchers from the University of Cambridge in England observed 28 cleaning stations and discovered some unexpected behavior. Now and again, as a “cleaner fish” nibbles parasites off a customer, it might also bite out a chunk of healthy flesh. Wisely, they avoid this behavior when cleaning predators that could bite them back. Researchers also observed that potential customers were aware of this risk and closely watched how the current customer was being treated. They were more likely to seek services from a wrasse that didn’t nip any of the customers ahead of them. Of course, the wrasses were also aware of this and were observed to offer those customers they were likely to nip four-star treatment, including a massage.Scripture teaches that man’s sin infected the whole creation. Thankfully, our Magnificent Creator God came to bring us forgiveness. |
| 11/30/2023 | If you enjoy keeping tropical fish, the Mantis shrimp is one creature you may not want to keep in your aquarium. While this creature is related to common shrimp, it has a very unusual and specialized feature.In the wild, if the Mantis shrimp finds a tasty snail, it cocks its spring-loaded forearm and shatters the snail’s shell. The forearm has moved through the water at 50 miles per hour – so fast that it causes cavitation as well as heat and a flash of light as the bubbles collapse. And, yes, the Mantis shrimp can break the glass walls of an aquarium! To do this, the shrimp must generate over two-hundred thousand watts of power per pound of muscle, something no other muscle can do. The shrimp accomplishes this seemingly impossible task by storing the energy generated by the muscles. The shrimp first locks the arm and then contracts its muscles. The energy stored in this way would damage the arm if it weren’t for a very clever spring design. This saddle-shaped spring can accumulate enormous quantities of energy without breaking as it compresses. When the shrimp is ready to strike, it simply releases the spring.The Mantis shrimp’s forearm is only an effective working unit when all of its specialized parts are working together. It is difficult to imagine how or why our Magnificent Creator God chose to include this in His Master Plan but He did and it definitely serves a purpose – we just may not know why until we’re in Heaven. |
| 11/29/2023 | Those who fear global warming blame any climate changes upon man’s activity, including the raising of cattle for food. The digestive system of all ruminants, including cows, produce methane gas as part of the digestive process. Methane is considered one of the greenhouse gases that change the Earth’s climate. Some have even suggested ways of limiting the methane produced by cows.Methane is produced in a chemical reaction that scientists have always believed must take place in the absence of oxygen. That’s why they were surprised to find living plants making methane. It should be added that the researchers took great pains to ensure that the methane they were measuring was produced by the plants and trees and not by microbes in the soil. While they are unsure of the chemistry involved, they did find that more methane was produced with higher atmospheric temperatures. This finding explains large methane plumes that have been identified over tropical forests. Based on their findings, they estimate that 20 percent of all atmospheric methane comes from plants and trees. That’s about 150 million metric tons a year!Since God has created the Earth for life, He has built balances into it that can deal with the by-products of life, including methane. We can trust our Magnificent Creator God’s promises that man will be here on Earth, planting and reaping, until its history ends. |
| 11/28/2023 | Could a plant devise a special growth for itself so that it becomes inviting to its only pollinator? If evolution were true, how could such a plant survive until it could learn enough about its pollinator, and about genetics, to evolve a special growth just for that pollinator.Those sound like silly questions, but if evolution is true, they must be answered, and answered scientifically. A South African plant called the “Rat’s Tail” grows a seemingly purposeless spear that extends near its flowers. Theorizing that the spear might be a bird-perch for a pollinator, scientists closely watched some of the plants in the wild. They learned that the only bird that seems interested in pollinating the plant is a bird called the “Malachite Sunbird”. The scientists then removed the spikes from some of the plants. The result was that male sunbirds were far less likely to visit and pollinate those plants. As a result, perchless-plants only produced half as many seeds as plants with perches. Researchers pointed out that this arrangement makes sense because male sunbirds have long tails that can be damaged by ground landings.However, if we conclude that the Rat’s Tails were created for the sunbirds, and the sunbirds for the Rat’s Tails, we don’t have to find natural explanations for such silly questions. This is simply another of our Magnificent Creator God’s clever designs. |
| 11/27/2023 | Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Matthew 6:26Jesus urged the disciples to “Behold the fowls or the birds of the air…” In a world fraught by worry and fear, His words of advice are good for today. Do you ever consider the sparrows that flit overhead, or the tiny warblers that migrate thousands of miles year after year with a built-in sense of radar?Keith Monroe wrote the following about our feathered friends, and his words bear repeating. He begins by asking the question, “Ever wonder about the mysteries of birds? Take an idle hour and stroll into a public library, browsing through some books on the subject. You will be amazed by these strange creatures.“Long engagements before marriage are common in birdland. English robins pair up in January, but do not mate or start housekeeping until spring. Jackdaws and wild geese get engaged the spring after they are born, although neither species become sexually mature until a year later. Most birds are faithful to their mates for life. Some are as thoughtful as human husbands about saying it with flowers. Starlings carry petals and buds to the female in the nest. A herring gull will pluck a sea pink and lay it solemnly before his betrothed. But the little nuthatch may be the courtliest swain of all birds. He selects choice sunflower seeds and proffers them to his intended. If she scorns him, he becomes even more gallant; he shucks each seed before presentation.“Pliny, the Roman naturalist, formed an expert opinion that swallows turn into frogs. Each year, he noticed, there came a morning when all swallows were gone. Everybody knew that birds do not fly in the dark, so they must become frogs. Not until the 18th Century did ornithologists begin to realize that birds do fly at night, by thousands. Ever since, bird experts have been trying to fathom the avian ‘homing instinct’ and ability to navigate to destinations chosen by previous generations.“Banded Manx shearwaters have been brought in covered boxes to Boston, then released at separate points. Each flew alone over trackless seas for more than 3,000 miles, finding its way home to its little burrow in cliffs along the west coast of Wales. Could any human do as well without maps and instruments?“What inner compass guides the arctic tern each spring as it travels 11,000 miles to near the South Pole to its nesting grounds in Antarctica? How do storks from Copenhagen find their way across the Mediterranean and down the length of Africa to their favorite swamps in Bechuanaland?“Some experts think that birds keep checking their position by the sun, which would give them the equivalent of an inborn sextant and clock for dead reckoning. But what about cloudy days? The answer is that birds’ eyes are so sensitive to ultraviolet rays that they know exactly where the sun is behind the darkest clouds.“On the other hand, tiny warblers migrate long distances at night. If blown off course they adjust as accurately as day-flying birds do. Even those that are born in cages and spend their lives without ever seeing the sky can set off from Germany all alone, travel southeast across the Balkans, then turn due South to reach their winter home in central Africa.”Monroe concludes, “I do not want to disparage mankind, but are we not rather dumb about navigation compared to our feathered friends?” “Consider the birds,” said Jesus. Yes, look at the birds. If our Magnificent Creator God takes care of them, you can trust Him to take care of you. |
| 11/26/2023 | Chickens aren’t the brightest creatures in the animal world, but the mother hen knows to protect her eggs and keep them warm. Many species of snakes also care for their young. Amazingly, scientists have learnt that even some plants have been designed with “motherly” instincts.The plantain is a common North American weed, and when it blooms, the warmer it keeps its developing seeds, the more seeds its offspring will produce. Researchers have found that cooler air temperatures cause the mother plant to produce a darker bloom cluster. The darker color absorbs more radiant energy from the sun, and this gives its offspring a boost in life even before they sprout. The shooter plant, as it is commonly called in America’s southeast, does something similar. It blooms for several months over the southern summer. The leaf-like bracts that sheathe each flower-cluster have a brown pigment. Researchers observed the plants over several months and found that the bracts that formed in cooler April were darker than the bracts that formed in warmer June. The increased levels of brown pigment in April enabled the bracts to absorb more infrared light that helps to warm the flowers.Just where did those plants learn the necessary physics, not to mention the genetics, to produce these motherly provisions? Of course, the answer is our Magnificent Creator God’s Intelligent Design from the very start. |
| 11/25/2023 | “And the LORD God formed man out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”It’s behind your refrigerator and under your bed. It’s part of the air you breathe. While dust is common, it’s not commonplace at all.Much of the dust in our everyday lives is nothing more than tiny particles of skin, clothing, carpeting – just pieces of everyday life floating in the air. Studies of dust particles reveal that most dust is soil.However, a second common dust – even a thousand miles from the sea – is salt, driven into the wind by the waves. This salt helps form the clouds that bring us rain.The next most common forms of natural dust are volcanic eruptions and forest fires. Transatlantic winds pick up the dust of the Sahara and sweep it across the ocean where enough of it lands in Miami to sometimes give the rain a light pink color.Not only does your home have dust from all over the world, there’s probably also some from outer space. Ten thousand tons of disintegrating meteorites and comets rain down on the Earth every year. You can even identify some of this dust by running a magnet through the dust in a rain gutter. Most of the magnetic particles that stick to the magnet are probably from space. In addition, some dust is alive, made up of pollen, fungus spores and even dormant bacteria, hoping to land on a good place to grow.Dust reminds us that the world is smaller than we think and that it won’t last forever. Are you ready for the next world? All your preparations have been made by Jesus Christ. Find out in the Bible what our Magnificent Creator God has done for you today. |
| 11/24/2023 | Green plants are green, mostly because of a green pigment called chlorophyll. Many of us learned in high school that this green pigment is what causes photosynthesis.Photosynthesis is that key process by which a plant can manufacture useful high energy molecules such as sugars. In the photosynthetic process, the plant absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and water transpiring from its roots to create sugar molecules. The byproduct, oxygen, is released into the atmosphere. At first sight, this seems pretty straightforward. But there is, of course, a lot more to it. The process becomes especially difficult to understand if one wants to assume that this is a process which came into existence by evolution.Our first problem is that the reaction requires an input of energy – chemists call this an endothermic reaction. Such reactions are not unusual, though reactions requiring the input of light energy are less common than those inputting heat energy. However, if you fill a jar with water and carbon dioxide, and shine a light into it, you will not make sugar molecules.Therefore, chlorophyll is not just a catalyst for the reaction – it is an essential intermediary without which the reaction cannot happen.In fact, a whole book can be written on the complexity of this whole process, and the inter-dependability of every step. And then we go further to see how animals get their energy from plants, so every energy chain comes back to photosynthesis. It is a process that looks like it was designed by God for a purpose – which is exactly what the Bible says our Magnificent Creator God did!!! |
| 11/23/2023 | Can you imagine a plant that moves so fast that science didn’t know what it was doing until recently? The plant is a forest wild flower found in North America and called the Bunchberry dogwood.A few botanists had noted a strange “poof” associated with the plant, but no one knew what was going on. Researchers at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, were studying the plant when they experienced the “poof.” Wanting to track down what the plant was doing, they got a high-speed video camera that can shoot 1,000 frames per second. Amazingly, that camera was too slow to clearly catch what the plant was doing. So they got a higher-speed camera that could shoot 10,000 frames per second.When they reviewed the video, they discovered that the flower was releasing pollen at an amazing speed. They calculated that the gravitational force on the pollen as it is released is 800 times the force astronauts endure when they blast into space. This wonder is accomplished by the flowers’ very elastic petals which are part of a design that looks like a trebuchet – a medieval catapult.The amazing wonders of our Magnificent Creator God’s creation should lead us to unceasingly praise Him, something which belief in evolution does not allow. Even if you try to add God to evolution, chance and natural forces still get the credit. |
| 11/22/2023 | Ask any evolutionist, and he will tell you that the Venus Flower Basket is one of the least-evolved animals. This animal is actually a sponge that is made up of a colony of creatures, and it does some amazing things.The Venus Flower Basket builds a basket-like skeleton made up of glass-like silica covered only by a thin layer of cells. The intricate internal structure of this skeleton is reinforced to provide the greatest strength using the least amount of material. The resulting skeleton turns out to be a fiber optic network whose sophistication has been compared to modern fiber optics used for telecommunications networks.Symbiotic luminescent microorganisms make a home inside the base of the sponge, sending their light throughout the Flower Basket’s fiber optic skeleton. The Flower Basket traps shrimp inside this skeleton, where they spend their entire lives. The food they drop feeds those luminescent microorganisms at the bottom of the basket. The purpose of the light pulses is to attract prey to feed the shrimp, who, in turn, feed the source of the light pulses! All of this is even more impressive, given the fact that the Flower Basket has no nervous system whatsoever.That this beautiful creature with no nervous system is designed and works in such an intricate manner is a powerful testimony to our Magnificent Creator God, the only One Who could design this. |
| 11/21/2023 | It was first discovered in 1855, but many scientists debated its existence for another 50 years. Once its existence was finally proven to everyone’s satisfaction, it was another 50 years before science had any tools to begin studying it. Finally, in the late 1980s, scientists began to learn a little about the secrets of one of the tiniest, yet most amazing structures in the body.At the back of the eye, between the deepest layer of the retina and the cells beneath it, lies a tiny moat made up of about 10 drops of a mysterious fluid. The entire moat is thinner than a sheet of cellophane.It seems that the clear fluid in the moat serves the surrounding light-sensing tissues of the eye in place of blood, bringing in nutrients and carrying away waste. It also transports light-sensitive chemicals needed by the light-detecting cells in the eye. In addition, it seems to glue the retina in place. More than that, the moat is rich in a growth factor. This fact makes scientists believe that the gel may also be important to repairing injuries to the retina, keeping the cells of the retina young and active, as well as helping in the growth of new cells. As one researcher said, the more they study this tiny structure, the more unexpected abilities they find – something like a bottomless suitcase.Charles Darwin, who didn’t even know about the moat, was right when he said that it was impossible to believe that natural selection could have produced the eye.We should always give our Magnificent Creator God credit when credit is due!!! |
| 11/20/2023 | Homing pigeons are valued because of their highly developed sense of direction, and this includes the ability to read the Earth’s magnetic field. Some other birds, turtles and even a few salamanders have also shown this same ability. However, bees, ants or people are not born with this ability.Until now, those animals classified as “lower animals” on the evolutionary scale were not expected to have such navigation abilities. However, this ability has now been confirmed in – of all things – the Caribbean spiny lobster. Researchers collected more than 100 lobsters from various locations; each lobster was tagged with a number indicating the exact location of their discovery. They were then placed in closed containers and boated about in circuitous routes for an hour so that they would not remember the direction of home. To further confuse the lobsters, some of the containers contained magnets. Each lobster was then fitted with a removable hood so that they were effectively blindfolded. They were then placed in a large tank to see which direction they would naturally seek. Typically, the lobsters would begin trying to walk home, aiming to within three compass degrees of where they were captured.Scientists were surprised that a so-called “lower invertebrate” has a navigation system as sophisticated as a homing pigeon. But they shouldn’t be surprised. The same wise Magnificent Creator God made both creatures. |
| 11/19/2023 | Ethicists who believe in evolution are trying to figure out an evolutionary explanation for why people universally have a sense of right and wrong. This line of study is so new that it doesn’t yet have a name, although some have suggested “neuroethics” or “moral neuroscience”.Much of this study began by looking at the theories of philosophers John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant. Mill taught that moral good is defined by those actions that do the most good for the most people, even if some individuals must suffer in the process. Kant said that moral good could be defined by pure reason. Then they add in philosopher David Hume, who taught that people consider an action to be good if it makes them feel good.However, researchers in this field noted that even monkeys, who don’t read philosophy, have a sense of fair play. In one experiment, monkeys who had been accepting cucumbers as a reward began rejecting the cucumbers after they saw other monkeys getting much tastier grapes. At this point in this new “science”, some researchers have concluded that right and wrong are nothing more than the instinctive firing of brain neurons.Scripture, on the other hand, says that our Magnificent Creator God has written His law on our hearts. This is a much more logical explanation of Man’s universal sense of right and wrong. |
| 11/18/2023 | Scientists and manufacturers are studying a new technique that could lead to more durable fibers. This technique manufactures liquid crystals to produce stronger, longer-lasting fibers. The process uses sulfuric acid, temperatures well above the boiling point of water and a high-pressure atmosphere.Meanwhile, another team of researchers finally discovered how orb weaving spiders and silkworms manufacture their silk. Scientists had theorized that silk from spiders and silkworms was stronger by weight than steel because proteins in the silk cross-linked with each other. But after watching silk production and drying in careful lighting under magnification, astonished scientists actually saw what happens.Silk is produced in the silk gland as a thin, watery liquid. Once the protein-rich liquid is released from the gland, the liquid begins to concentrate because of evaporation. As the liquid concentrates, it changes into a liquid crystal state. Scientists have been trying to create fibers in the lab from liquid crystals. They would love to know how the spider does it, using only water at normal temperatures and pressures.This is another example of how God has already solved an engineering problem that we were trying to solve. It is especially interesting that He allowed scientists to discover His solution at the same time that others were trying to solve the problem. This allows us to reemphasize that our world is the work of our Magnificent Creator God and not mindless, natural accidents. |
| 11/17/2023 | Consider the most amazing part of your body we call the heart and how marvelous it is, something unduplicated by science and technology. Your heart is a muscle about the size of your fist. When you were born, your heart weighed less than one ounce, and if you are an adult male your heart weighs about 11 ounces; 9 ounces if you are a female. That means your life is dependent upon a muscle that weighs less than a pound, or 400 grams.It’s the most critical part of your body, too, one which works day and night, never takes vacations, seldom gets rest, and never goes to sleep. There are four chambers in your heart with valves between them, and these cooperate in pumping blood through a vast network of veins, arteries, and capillaries, bringing oxygen and nourishment to your body.To a far greater degree than we acknowledge or even ponder, we are dependent on this muscle’s silent performance, because if it quits, you do, as well – and very quickly, too. You can get along quite well with just one eye, or still function with the loss of hearing in one ear. Though it’s sad, you can survive with the loss of an arm or leg. But when your heart becomes diseased, unless surgery can correct the situation, you are in grave trouble.Based on a heartbeat of 70 times a minute, your heart beats 4200 times an hour, 100,800 times every 24 hours, and over 36 million times a year. By the time you reach 70 years of age, your heart has beaten over 2.5 trillion times.Connected to your heart is a vast network of veins and arteries–a kind of built-in transportation system for your blood–which, if connected end to end, would stretch between 60,000 and 100,000 miles, or reach up to four times around the world at the equator. The volume of blood pumped by your heart in a year is about 650,000 gallons or 2,460,250 liters. That’s enough to fill more than 81 standard railroad tank cars. Your beating heart generates enough energy in a twelve-hour period to lift one of those tank cars weighing 65 tons, a foot off the ground.Some 3000 years ago the Psalmist said, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well” (Psalms 139:14). And that was long before the days of Dr. Christiaan Barnard of South Africa, who performed the first heart transplant, or before Dr. Tom Fogarty invented the little plastic balloon which smoothes out clogged arteries or doctors knew how to insert little stainless-steel stents which pop against weakened arteries and keep them open, thus ensuring the flow of blood to your heart.Your heart is an awesome marvel which is the key to keeping you alive and healthy. When you take care of it, it takes good care of you, but when you abuse it and fail to nourish it, like anything mechanical it will wear out.We can thank our Magnificent Creator God for this tiny muscle that works powerfully and tirelessly to keep us alive!!! |
| 11/16/2023 | The scientific establishment is firmly convinced that Man evolved from the higher apes millions of years ago. For this reason, rhesus monkeys have long been used not only for pharmaceutical trials but in psychological tests to determine how Man’s intelligence evolved.Researchers at Duke University, North Carolina, wanted to know if rhesus monkeys could count, and they set up an experiment to find out. Using two television screens, one showed two monkeys vocalizing and the other showed three. However, the audio of each television could be controlled so that in some trials two monkeys could be seen but three voices heard and vice versa. Each one of the 20 test monkeys spent more time watching the matching number of monkeys and voices. The researchers concluded that the rhesus monkeys could tell the difference between the numbers two and three.They also pointed out that that the monkeys can count small numbers because this ability relates to their social worlds. Yes, and by the same token, some insects can count to hundreds, but none of this means that Man is related to insects or monkeys! Scripture carefully distinguishes between Man and animals. Our Magnificent Creator God placed Man over the animals and gave him an eternal soul that is saved by His Son, Jesus Christ. |
| 11/15/2023 | For many, the existence of so much ice on Antarctica is a grave cause for concern, as they have been told that climate change will cause a lot of this ice to melt and cause the sea level to rise. The worry is that many of the world’s great cities, and many small island nations, could disappear as the Antarctic melts. So why did God make such a troublesome continent which could precipitate the end of the world?Remember that the topography of the world is not the way it was originally created. We have explained previously that there was likely just one main pre-Flood continent, which we call Rodinia. This continent split up during the Flood. The massive deposits of fossil fuels known to exist on the southernmost continent are evidence of pre-Flood forests, probably populated with animals.Every time ice breaks off from an Antarctic glacier, the media worry about flooding – yet God has promised not to flood the world again, nor to bring seasons to an end. Despite seeming to be a homogeneous repository for the 70% of the Earth’s fresh water, locked in as ice, there are considerable variations in climate between different parts of the continent. For every place where ice is melting and breaking up, there are parts where the ice cap gets thicker.Our Magnificent Creator God has all this in balance for His own purposes, and we can be sure He will keep all His promises!!! |
| 11/14/2023 | The last creature a rattlesnake wants to see is the California ground squirrel.When an adult ground squirrel finds a rattlesnake, it begins to taunt the snake. The squirrel dashes into striking range, whips its tail about, bites the snake’s tail and kicks sand on it. While a rattlesnake can strike with lightning speed, the little ground squirrel is even faster and well able to dart out of the way. Even if it was bitten, the venom wouldn’t kill it since these squirrels have proteins in their blood that detoxify the poison. Frustrated snakes have been known to simply retreat when faced with this treatment.Researchers have learned that the squirrels’ bag of tricks is even deeper. Rattlesnakes can see heat as infrared light. When the ground squirrel is taunting the rattlesnake, it sends additional blood to its tail, causing it to heat up, producing a very obvious infrared image for the snake, further confusing it. Interestingly enough, when the ground squirrel taunts a gopher snake, which cannot detect the infrared, it does not heat its tail.How does the squirrel know that the rattlesnake can be confused with an infrared show while the gopher snake cannot? The only explanation is that our Magnificent Creator God, Who made them both and calls us to saving faith in His Son, Jesus Christ, designed the ground squirrels’ unique display. |
| 11/13/2023 | If it weren’t for mushrooms, there would be so many un-decayed dead trees that there would be no room on Earth for anything else to grow. But mushrooms don’t just recycle dead trees. They help make the trees grow in the first place.The mushrooms that we see are merely the part of the fungus that produces the fruit. Most of the mushroom is unseen. If you were to peel back the bark of a decaying tree, you’ll see white tissue called mycelia. That is the main part of the mushroom plant. Many species of mushrooms combine efforts to help trees grow. Their mycelium forms a sheath around tree roots that help to deliver water and nutrients. In return, they get excess sugar produced by the tree. This relationship is so close that both the fungi and the tree depend upon each other. For example, researchers estimate that the Douglas Fir has about 1,000 species of fungus working together for its support. The fungi will even form underground mycelial networks to move nutrients between different kinds of tree.Clearly, our Magnificent Creator God has designed a finely balanced partnership between trees and fungi for their mutual survival. In the Old Testament, God punished His people through the loss of their planted crops. Is it just possible He tipped the fine balance of other such partnerships to do His bidding? |
| 11/12/2023 | Humpbacks are among the largest whales in the world. A typical humpback weighs about 40 tons and begins its breach deep down in the ocean. Imagine the acceleration required to get this enormous animal out of the water and into the air. The whale leaves the water at an angle of 30° and a speed of 18 mph. Clearly, this monster uses a lot of energy in breaching, yet it is not unknown for the whale to repeat the exercise – the observed record being 130 leaps in 90 minutes!Why does it go to all this trouble? No one really knows. As with all such obscure phenomena, there are those who suggest that the whales are trying to “attract the girls”! Others suggest that the big splash achieved on re-entry rips some of the barnacles off the whale’s surface. There may be truth in either of these suggestions. But Wilson says that he cannot overlook the probability that the whale breaches simply because it gives God pleasure! He is a Magnificent Creator God, and the world He made is not for utility only, but also for beauty!!! |
| 11/11/2023 | There are a number of blurry, indistinct, cloudy-looking objects in the night sky which are not pinpoints of light as the stars are. One hundred ten of these are the so-called Messier objects, which were cataloged by one Charles Messier – a French astronomer who lived from 1730 through 1817. These are a mixture of objects. Some of them we would now call nebulae – quite literally, nebulous clouds of interstellar dust and gas. Examples of these are M8 – the Lagoon Nebula in the constellation of Sagittarius, and M42 – the famous Orion Nebula. Others are star clusters, such as The Pleiades, in Taurus – an object mentioned in the Bible, which is cataloged as M45. Still others are actually other galaxies, such as M104, the Sombrero Galaxy, or M31 – the Andromeda Galaxy.Why did Messier catalog such a wide variety of different objects without commenting on their differentiation? The answer is that he wasn’t actually interested in those objects. He cataloged them, rather, as a police officer catalogs data from a possible suspect in order to eliminate them from the inquiry. Messier was interested in comets – which also, from a distance, look like blurry objects. The difference is that comets, being Solar System objects, move from night to night, whereas his cataloged objects appear fixed relative to the stars.The Hebrew word for star includes what we call stars today and other objects, such as Messier’s objects. All were made by our Magnificent Creator God and declare His glory!!! |
| 11/10/2023 | Over 2,000 years ago, Aristotle wrote about red snow. Today, red, orange and even green snow has been found on every continent. It is typically found in deep mountain snows in the late spring. The snow color is caused by any of 350 species of strange snow algae.The pigments inside the resting algae cysts produce the colors. Even while resting in the nutrient-poor, highly acidic snow the cysts are photosynthesizing. In its cyst form the algae can live even in temperatures of -94°F. As the snow melts in the late mountain spring, the cysts burst open. A single cell with two whip-like tails emerges. It then begins to swim upward, against the draining water from the snow above. At this time of the year, the snow melt water can reach the same acidity as a peat bog, which causes death to most microbes. Those that manage to swim through the snow mate and then return to the cyst stage. These cysts then settle to the ground as the snow melts to remain inactive until the next spring.Researchers have found that the algae have unique fatty acids that enable them to remain flexible in the cold environment in which they spend their entire active lives.Snow algae have been uniquely designed by our Magnificent Creator God to make a living in some of the lowest temperatures on Earth. If our Creator can find a way to enable snow algae to flourish in these conditions, He can find a way to help us out of the most impossible circumstances!!! |
| 11/9/2023 | The last few years have seen a good deal of excitement among astronomers over the possibility of discovering planets orbiting distant stars. Astronomers are looking at stars that are surrounded by disks of dust and debris.The idea is that planets form over millions of years from the dust and rock that orbits a star. This was supposedly how the Earth formed billions of years ago. Hundreds of such stars have so far been identified. Often, these debris fields extend further from the star they orbit than, say, Pluto is from our sun. The question is, are the discovery of planets and debris around other stars proof of evolution’s story of the formation of the Earth?Scientists believe that it takes two or three million years for planets to form out of the orbiting debris. However, they also recognize that it only takes a few thousand years before a star’s gravity draws the dust into itself, or the pressure of its radiation forces the dust away from itself. This leaves the hundreds of stars with dusty debris fields a mystery. Astronomers believe that all these stars still have their dust after millions or billions of years because they are getting fresh dust from somewhere else, but scientists don’t know where.Perhaps a better explanation is that these stars are only about 6,000 years old and that they were spoken into existence by our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 11/8/2023 | The long, cold winters of Scandinavia not only freeze the lakes, but pile so much snow on the lake ice that no light can penetrate to the cold, unfrozen water beneath. This means that the creatures below the ice can use up all the oxygen in the lake water.As a result of the lack of oxygen, lactic acid builds up in the bodies of these creatures as they metabolize sugar to get energy. However, turtles can stand levels of lactic acid in their systems that would kill you or me, and they lower their heartbeat to 10 percent of normal. The Crucian carp, similar to a goldfish, takes a unique approach to this lack of oxygen. As the oxygen disappears, the carp slows its heartbeat. The fish then changes its entire metabolic chemistry to a process that can get energy from sugar without oxygen. This oxygen-free metabolism turns the lactic acid into ethanol, which the fish releases through its gills. The members of this carp family are the only vertebrates that can continue normal life without oxygen.That our Magnificent Creator God’s wonders seem without number and often seem impossible tells us of God’s unlimited creativity and His ability to do anything. His plan of salvation in which His Son, Jesus Christ, carried our sin on the cross makes us thankful for His creativity and wisdom. |
| 11/7/2023 | A real monster prowls the ocean floor from the Aleutian Islands to Southern California. It is a terror to even relatively large bottom dwellers. It eats many things, including hermit crabs, clams, sea cucumbers, sea urchins and even abalone. This monster goes by the seemingly innocent name of the Sunflower Star.The Sunflower Star begins life as a microscopic larva, much like other sea stars. But as it grows, it surpasses anything that other sea stars can achieve. Its five arms become more arms as it grows until it finally has 24 arms. By this time it can be 39 inches across. But its size does not limit its speed. It uses 15,000 tube feet to move over 5 feet per minute. This is possible because, like other sea stars, the Sunflower Star’s skeleton is made up of just a few pieces of skeletal mesh, making it more flexible. It is such a terror to other creatures that when they sense its approach they flee at surprising speed. Even the Northern Abalone, which normally moves sluggishly, flees in the hope that the Sunflower Star will not capture it.Just another wonder by our Magnificent Creator God who made a place in His Master Plan for every creation He brought into this world. |
| 11/6/2023 | What did God have in mind when He created the human male? The world around us offers many images of what it means to be a “real man.” The world offers us the breadwinner, the tough-guy and the workaholic’s unending push for success. Also, it’s becoming increasingly universal that it is the woman who holds the family together. We can be sure that none of these images capture what God had in mind.If we want to learn some practical lessons about what God intended a man to be, we need to begin with God’s original creation of the first man. The first job given to Adam, the first man, was an intellectual task – identifying and naming the animals.Jesus Christ taught us to call God “our Father.” However, we shouldn’t make the mistake of comparing Him to our imperfect human fathers. Human fathers need to learn from God. What kind of father is He? He’s tough. However, toughness does not mean hurling thunderbolts. True toughness is best shown when love persists despite rejection and disobedience. God never tired of patiently seeking Saul of Tarsus, His sworn enemy.However, while He is loving, God is not a wimp. He has established absolutes that we can depend on. He always keeps His Word. We can be thankful for that because when we look at ourselves we know that we have not been the men or women He intended us to be. His Word of grace in the forgiveness of sins through Jesus Christ assures all who cling to Christ that the perfect and almighty Magnificent Creator God is truly our Father! |
| 11/5/2023 | Evolutionary scientists studying the workings of the human brain are trying to find out what the human “mind” is. The problem is that everyone, including scientists, knows that human beings are conscious people with minds. Yet, strict, materialistic science says that there is no scientific evidence for the mind.Research with people who had brain injuries indicates that the brain and the mind are not the same things. The reality of the human mind seems to have no material basis. This presents a difficult problem for evolutionary scientists who have assumed that evolution, with its materialistic view of reality, is correct. According to the evolutionary view of the world, if something is not measurable by science, that thing is not real. Evolution denies that humans have any nonmaterial part.Some evolutionists have tried to resolve this problem by saying that human beings are not really conscious. They say that we don’t really have minds. We only think we do. It’s a trick played on us by our nervous systems. Entire books have been devoted to this subject. However, this approach creates a new problem. If we really don’t have minds, we cannot trust the truth of anything we might think. We can’t even trust the thought that we don’t have minds.The debate among these strict materialist scientists actually amounts to an admission that there is a greater, nonmaterial reality that cannot be measured by science. Yes, the existence of the immaterial, but undeniably real, human mind (should I say “soul”?) also testifies to our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 11/4/2023 | Why did the Creator bring together so many precise specifications and high intelligence in the honeybee? To glorify Himself and because bees are crucial to the reproductive cycles of so many plants as well as the food chain.The amazing structure of the honeycomb has amazed scientists for thousands of years. As early as the third century AD, the astronomer Pappus of Alexandria offered an explanation for the six-sided or hexagonal shape of the honeycomb. He pointed out that while the triangle, square and hexagon could all be candidates for the shape of the comb, one of these shapes holds more than the others. The most efficient shape for storing the most honey while wasting the least space is the hexagon.There are many variations of the hexagon that are available to the bee. However, the honeybee is always very precise in constructing honeycomb hexagons, with an obtuse angle of 109°23´ and an acute angle of 70°23´. These angles produce the most usable space for the least amount of building material. Humans are unable to use such precision in their designs without sophisticated equipment.Each honeybee is a tiny but powerful computer that could only have been designed and built by an intelligent Creator. Bees and what they do are of central importance to much of the rest of creation. No wonder our Magnificent Creator God has given them so much: the complex structure of their society, their intelligence and industriousness! |
| 11/3/2023 | Deserts are inhospitable places with little rain—blazingly hot by day and chillingly cold by night. Few plants can survive, but the rock morning glory can. It has large underground tubers resembling sweet potatoes that store water whenever it rains. In times of drought, it’s sustained by the water stored in its twenty or so underground reserves.Jeremiah 17:8 says of those who put their confidence in our Magnificent Creator God: “They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit”. |
| 11/2/2023 | All cats seem to consume a very high fat meat diet. Unlike other carnivores, cats cannot manufacture their own taurine, so their diet is almost perfectly carnivorous, with very little in the way of plant material.There are many cases where cats of similar size can hybridize. Tigons and ligers are well-known hybrids. They are both hybrids of tigers and lions. Ligers have a lion father and a tiger mother, while tigons are the other way around. Other inter-feline hybrids are possible, such as the blynx – a hybrid of lynx and bobcat. This seems to indicate that all cats are part of the same baramin (created kind).The Ark would not, therefore, have housed two lions, two tigers, two pumas, etc. There would have been two cats. These would have been something like the saber-toothed cats – possibly a smilodon. All the modern species of cat would have developed from these. This, of course, is not evolution, which requires new genetic information to be made, whereas the speciation of cats involves variation of genetic information already existing.Our Magnificent Creator God made cats. They are such a clearly defined group that it is as if God were making a textbook in the animal kingdom to explain how animals got to be as they are! |
| 11/1/2023 | Scientists have known for some time that hummingbirds prefer bright-colored flowers. On the other hand, all of us know that white is most easily seen at night. That means that moths that pollinate flowers will more easily find white flowers. The question is: What is a flower to do when it is pollinated by hummingbirds during part of its flowering season and by night-flying moths later in its flowering season?That’s the problem faced by a flowering plant called the gilia. Hummingbirds arrive to pollinate the flowers in mid-July. However, they leave in late August as the weather cools. Also in late August, the night-flying hawk moth arrives to begin pollinating the flower. This arrangement continues until late September. To attract both hummingbirds and moths during its long flowering season, the gilia provides bright red flowers, favored by the hummingbirds, until late August. Then it offers white flowers to attract the hawk moths.Evolutionary scientists call this an example of evolutionary strategy. Think about that for a moment. How would a flower know what color it is? How would it know which colors are preferred by hummingbirds and which are preferred by moths? A flower could no more decide to change its color than you or I can decide to grow an inch taller.Both logic and science say that the gilia’s special features are intelligently designed by a truly gifted engineer. Why not, then, recognize the work of our all-wise Magnificent Creator God for what it is! |
| 10/31/2023 | Bats are among the most underappreciated creatures in the entire world. Yet, they are most worthy of our appreciation. Nearly all bats eat only insects or fruit. Only one tropical species feeds on blood – usually the blood of cattle.There are thousands of bat species. Incredibly, bats make up one-fourth of all mammal species on Earth. One-half of all mammal species found in the tropics are bats.The smallest bat in the world is the Kitti’s hog-nosed bat, which is no larger than a bumblebee and weighs less than a penny. The largest bats are fruit bats. These completely harmless bats may have a wingspan of several feet. Most bats live in colonies, and some colonies have up to 20 million members.Bats are beneficial to both humans and nature. Many of the bats found in North America, as well as other parts of the world, are responsible for consuming thousands of tons of insects every night. Other bats pollinate flowers. Bats are also an essential link in the ecosystem that makes the rainforest possible.The earliest bats found in the fossil record are like bats today. They are fully formed with fully developed wings for flight. This means that there is not one scrap of fossil evidence to support the claim that bats evolved from some other creature. We can conclude that the scientific evidence says that bats were created pretty much in their present form by our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 10/30/2023 | Picture yourself sitting in a friend’s living room. Can you picture in your mind where the door is located? Scientists call this a thought map. Thought maps are mental pictures of the arrangement of objects relative to one another.Thought maps help us remember where to find a water glass, the gas or brake pedal, and home. Thought maps require intelligence. They help make possible additional intelligent activity, such as finding our way around and conducting an intelligent search. This is why scientists have been surprised to find that many creatures, not just humans, use thought maps.One experimenter carried a chimpanzee on his back while he hid 18 pieces of food in a field. Then the chimp and five others were released in the field to find the food. The chimp who had seen the hiding places found most of the food, following a very different route than that originally taken by the researcher. Bees, likewise, use mental maps. Even if a bee is forced to detour on its way back to the hive, it always reports the food source as though it had used a direct route. Bees are also able to find a food source that has been moved after its discovery. Ants have also been shown to use mental maps.Mental maps help humans and animals think deductively about changes in the environment. Mental mapping ability could not have evolved because even the lowliest creature requires this ability to survive. This ability must have been given to them in the first place by our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 10/29/2023 | An adult human liver is about the size of a small football. It weighs about three pounds, making it the body’s largest internal organ. Tucked neatly beneath the ribs, your liver performs more than 500 different tasks. It is a vital link between your heart, lungs and digestive system.Inside the liver is a bewildering array of microscopic veins in which each drop of blood is processed. Here, blood conditions are constantly monitored to make sure that its chemistry meets strict standards. If more of some substances are needed in the blood, they are supplied. Useless chemicals are broken down into useful chemicals. Your liver makes proteins and corrects blood clotting factors. Your liver also sees to it that hormone balances are maintained and that poisons are neutralized. If substances are needed to fight an infection, your liver makes them and adds them to the bloodstream. Your liver also stores vitamins and minerals and prepares itself to provide your body with quick energy when you need it. In addition, the liver makes bile, which is essential for digestion.Structures like the liver have caused many evolutionists to abandon the idea that life is a result of millions of years of accidents. The liver is just too well-designed and integrated into the body to have been produced by purposelessness and mindlessness. As Scripture says, truly our Magnificent Creator God has formed our inward parts! |
| 10/28/2023 | If, as we are continually told, evolution is a fact, why is it that human technology improves when we copy designs found in nature? If nature is really a giant trial-and-error experiment, we should not only find evidence of less-sophisticated designs in the distant past, but humans today should be able to improve on designs found in nature.Science has long known that an object moving through water or air moves with the least resistance when the ratio of its length to diameter is four to one. This ratio is found in the fastest swimmers in the sea – like the tuna, dolphin and swordfish. A Boeing 707, with a ratio of nine to one, experiences much more resistance than the larger, fatter 747, which has a ratio of six to one – much closer to the tuna and the dolphin.Studies of the vision of the horseshoe crab, supposedly one of the earlier forms of life, have taught engineers how to produce a clearer, sharper television picture. The United States Air Force copied a speed-sensing system from beetles to improve the ground speed indicators of their jets.The optics of a frog’s eye showed them how to improve their radar. The fly’s multifaceted eye taught engineers how to design a lighting system that generates more light with less energy.Humans are learning from and copying design solutions worked out by their Magnificent Creator God. The brilliant designs in our world are not the result of trial and error!!! This reality makes the claim that evolution is a fact of science sound empty! |
| 10/27/2023 | We have all looked in wonder at the amazing transformation of a caterpillar into a moth. However, did you realize that a moth needs an entirely different kind of brain than a caterpillar? We can truly say that here we have an insect with two brains!In the caterpillar stage, the moth lumbers around in a body that is primarily designed for eating. Its brain must be able to command powerful jaws and a comparatively huge digestive system as well as the complexities of caterpillar locomotion. The world of the caterpillar is very different from the world of the moth.During metamorphosis the caterpillar completely dissolves and the moth is rebuilt from the liquid. The brain, for example, requires new nerve cells and new connections between brain cells, while some brain cells change function, migrate to new locations, or even die. The result is a brain that is 10 times the size of the caterpillar’s and ready to control flight. The moth’s primary purpose in life is to reproduce. So its new brain is able to generate the odors used by moths to identify and communicate with potential mates. It is also equipped to detect the scents of a potential mate.Only our Magnificent Creator God could completely rebuild a caterpillar into a moth. Only He could rebuild and increase its brain ten-fold in only a week or two. Even more amazing is how He remakes people. Through the forgiveness of sins, Jesus Christ turns us from people who wish to escape Him to new creatures who love Him and find joy in Him. |
| 10/26/2023 | The amazing structure of the honeycomb has fascinated scientists for thousands of years. In the third century, the astronomer and geometer Pappus of Alexandria became the first to offer an explanation for why the honeycomb has a hexagonal shape.Pappus explained that only three shapes could serve as candidates for a honeycomb cell – the triangle, the square and the hexagon. Any other shape would leave wasteful open spaces between the cells. Pappus noted that the hexagon holds more honey in the same space than either a square or a triangle. It also takes less wax to build, and the shared sides of the hexagonal cells reduce wax usage even further.It was not until the development of modern calculus that scientists could fully appreciate the shape of the caps at the end of the honeycomb cells. Each cell is capped with a pyramid composed of three rhombuses. Complex mathematics shows that this shape, too, requires the least amount of wax for construction. It also allows honeycomb cells to be butted up against each other without wasting space.Modern scientists who accept evolution talk about the design of the honeycomb as a great accomplishment by the bees. However, the more sensible conclusion is obvious. The ten-sided prism of the honeycomb cap is magnificent testimony to the mathematical wisdom of our Magnificent Creator God Himself! |
| 10/25/2023 | Even though it’s a mammal and not a fish, the Weddell seal of the Antarctic is one of the greatest deep-sea divers in the world. Weighing up to 1,200 pounds, the Weddell seal can cruise under water for up to 70 minutes. It is able to reach depths as great as 1,600 feet. For comparison, the record for a human being is a 13-minute, 43-second dive down to 282 feet.Humans are not designed to handle the pressure changes involved in diving to great depths. If humans stay too deep for too long and then return to the surface too quickly, they may die. The rapid change in pressure causes nitrogen to come out of solution in the blood. The result is a potentially fatal condition known as the “bends.”Weddell seals don’t have to worry about this because their blood doesn’t have dissolved nitrogen. Scientists are trying to learn just how the Weddell seals’ lungs prevent this. However, the unique design of the Weddell seal doesn’t stop with its lungs. The Weddell seal is able to withstand pressures up to 750 pounds per square inch. Those pressures on you or me would cause us to have epileptic seizures.What science is learning about the complex and unique designs of the Weddell seals make the evolutionary claims that these seals came from land-living mammals increasingly difficult to believe. Yet, they illustrate the great wisdom of our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 10/24/2023 | In Genesis chapter 5 we read that Adam lived to be 930 years old. One question often asked is, “Could Adam really have lived that long?”Most of the effects of aging are due to genetic mistakes that accumulate over generations. This is in addition to the age limitations God imposed on human beings after the Genesis Flood. These early generations, so close to Adam and Eve, would have accumulated comparatively few genetic mistakes.Before the Genesis Flood, the Earth was probably a very different place. Many creation-scientists believe that the pre-Flood Earth was surrounded by a canopy of water vapor or at least in some way had a greater atmospheric pressure – perhaps about twice what it is now. Medical researchers have been experimenting with the effects of higher atmospheric pressure. Tests in chambers that subject people to similar air pressures show that high atmospheric pressure gets more oxygen to the cells and speeds healing. Hospitals use a hyperbaric chamber for burn victims. Experiments have shown that such chambers can also reverse senility. And higher atmospheric pressure appears to reverse some of the effects of aging on the skin and hair and stimulates the entire body.We can be sure that Adam and the others lived as long as they did because our Magnificent Creator God’s Word says they did. However, science may be discovering some of the conditions in the pre-Flood world that may have helped make these long lives possible. |
| 10/23/2023 | Those light flashes created by fireflies are actually a quite complex language. The more than 200 species of firefly each have their own language. Each species uses a different combination of color, intensity and flash intervals.As the male firefly cruises over the firefly community, he emits an automatic series of flashes. As he “talks” with flashes of light, he is looking for the appropriate response from a female who is ready to mate. Each species has its own light language, helping males to identify members of their own species. Females who are not ready to mate or who have already mated communicate these facts to the overhead male. Evidence indicates that at least one firefly species understands and can speak “foreign” firefly language. Females of this species will lure males of other species down by using the male’s language and pretending to be a female who is ready to mate. When the male comes close for mating, the female captures and eats him.You can “speak” firefly, too, if you have a flashlight. First, you must cover the flashlight so that it emits only a tiny point of light. Then, after carefully watching the patterns of the female fireflies in the area, try to mimic that pattern. If you do this correctly, male fireflies will come to investigate your flashlight.The intelligence that fills all of creation is one of the “fingerprints” of our intelligent Magnificent Creator God. Such intelligence cannot come from accidents. |
| 10/22/2023 | For many people studying the early chapters of Genesis, the account of Babel is a troubling interlude. We like to concentrate on the Creation Week, and then the Flood, and then let’s get on to talking about Abraham. But before we get to Abraham, we have this troubling account of what all these people who were the descendants of Noah and his family were doing at Babel.God had given a very clear and brief command to Noah and his family before making a covenant with them. He said, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 9:1). It is in that context that we need to consider the words of the people at Babel.“Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:4)It is not that there is necessarily anything wrong with building a city. But there were a number of things wrong with their plans for this city. The city was to be designed to prevent themselves from being dispersed over the face of the whole earth. This was clearly in direct contradiction to God’s command to them. In view of this rebellious attitude, we also see that there was something wrong with their desire to build a city and a tower “with its top in the heavens”.An attempt to get to heaven by our own effort, without reference to our Magnificent Creator God, is clearly an act of rebellion and led to the disaster which God brought on them. |
| 10/21/2023 | The Apostle Peter reminds us in 2 Peter 1:20 that “no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation.”In this context, prophecy refers to God’s words told forth by those who wrote Scripture. In that sense, all of the Bible is prophetic because it is all God’s word, breathed out by Him. This general principle, which applies to the whole Bible, clearly applies to Genesis, which is the focus of most of our studies in this ministry.So, when we read in the early chapters of Genesis how God made the world and how He destroyed that first world in a worldwide Flood, we must recognize that the interpretation of these verses is not to be a private matter.Yet, interpreting Genesis has indeed become a private matter for many Christians who refuse to believe that God’s word means what it says at this point.So, Genesis tells us that God made the world in six literal 24-hour days. But we don’t like that because our scientific textbooks tell us that the universe is billions of years old. So we impose the billion years on Genesis in a private interpretation.Genesis tells us that God made plants and animals directly. He made plants two days before the flying insects that can pollinate them. But our high-school textbooks tell us that animals evolved from simpler organisms, so we interpret the Creation Week in a figurative sense – another private interpretation.It is time for Christians to get back to believing that our Magnificent Creator God meant what He said!!! |
| 10/20/2023 | There are more than 200 species of fireflies around the world. Almost everyone has seen these small insects flying about or sitting in the grass. On dark summer nights they can be seen flashing their lights like ships far out at sea. As they flash, they are communicating very specific messages to one another.The light created by fireflies is called cold light because it is produced without creating any heat. To make a flash, the firefly must make and mix a chemical called luciferin with oxygen and an enzyme called luciferase. This mixture is combined with a catalyst to create the flashes of light. The result is a method of producing light that is far more efficient than any source of light in your home. A relatively tiny amount of energy creates a generous amount of light.Fireflies do not make light so they can read a book. Their flashes are used for finding a mate. Fireflies are able to read the light signals of other fireflies. These signals may contain several messages. Some flashes can tell a firefly whether the sender is one of his species. Light flashes are used to identify whether the sender is a male or female. If it’s a female, the flashes can identify whether she has already mated.This is another example of the unlimited creativity and extravagance of our Magnificent Creator God. The same beauty of the firefly that creates wonder in the child should also fill us with wonder at the limitless imagination of God. |
| 10/19/2023 | There is nothing our Creator God does that is not intended to bring us closer to Him. Why? Because His purpose in making humans was to make someone to love. We exist because He wanted to love us and be loved by us. There is nothing visible or invisible that is not meant to be of service to us. Consider the invisible angels who protect us. They rejoice when even one person turns to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.Consider the heavens above our heads. There, God placed billions of stars – some much larger than our sun. There are giant pinwheel galaxies with millions of huge stars. Countless billions of stars churn out more energy every second than we can ever hope to measure. What a lavish and beautiful timepiece to tell us when it is time to plant and time to harvest! God has given us more than the necessities of life. He has also hidden medicines within the bark of trees and the sweet-scented flower. He has filled that creation with splendor and beauty.However, I cannot neglect to mention His greatest and most generous gift. When we sought our will instead of His, we withdrew our love from Him. His response was to send His only Son, Jesus Christ, to suffer our punishment for sin on the cross. And He rose from the dead on the third day so that we could have new life with our Creator again. Oh, that our thanksgiving to our Magnificent Creator God could be as unlimited as His generosity! |
| 10/18/2023 | The ability to smell is one gift we often take for granted. That’s probably because we usually identify things more quickly with one of our other senses. At the same time, Thanksgiving dinner wouldn’t be the same without the smells.Some of the most unlikely creatures have a sense of smell. Believe it or not, even fungi have a sense of smell. Worms have organs on their heads to sense odor. Ticks carry their scent-detecting organs on their feet; this arrangement wouldn’t work well for us! Mollusks smell through their gills! The salmon uses smell to find the same brook in which he was spawned. Lizards and snakes use their tongues to detect scents.The most skilled smellers in the animal world can detect a scent even if there is only one molecule of that scent mixed in with 10 trillion molecules of average air. The modern perfumer’s highly trained nose can identify about 10,000 different odors.Before the days of modern medicine, a doctor’s diagnosis would consist in part of sniffing the patient. For example, the plague had the scent of honey. Scarlet fever often gave its presence away by the smell of hot bread, and measles smelled like fresh-plucked feathers.It takes a keen knowledge of biochemistry to design a system that can detect and identify scents. So next time you smell a wonderful meal or a beautiful flower, you may want to thank your Creator.Ephesians 5:2 “And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour.” |
| 10/17/2023 | Ecclesiastes 3:1,4 “To every [thing there is] a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven . . . A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.”When Scripture talks about laughter, it most often speaks of laughter as a form of derision. God is described as laughing at the pride and plans of the wicked. However, that does not mean that God is against the right kind of humor.After all, He gave us the ability to laugh. In Ecclesiastes 3:4 we read that there is also a time to laugh. Jesus reminds the faithful, in the Beatitudes, that those who weep now will laugh with joy later. When you stop and think about it, anyone who can create the playful kitten cannot be against laughter.Medical researchers are finding out just what a wonderful gift laughter is. Laughter, it has been found, is excellent exercise for the lungs. It clears the respiratory system and is emotionally healthy. Laughter relaxes muscles. It is a proven reliever of emotional tension. Research also suggests that laughter has healing effects, possibly boosting the immune system.Laughter also has been found to have a natural pain-killing effect. In one experiment involving patients viewing funny films, the pain-killing effect of laughter lasted for up to two hours.Laughter has also been identified among chimpanzees and apes. Very possibly, other creatures have their own way of laughing. If we remember that Scripture also encourages us to “avoid foolish talk,” we can also give thanks to our Magnificent Creator God for the gift of humor. |
| 10/16/2023 | Gerbils are those friendly, furry little rodents that many children keep as pets. Gerbils are social animals. They value communication very highly. Researchers have found that those gerbils in a given community that can communicate most clearly have the highest social status.For a long time, researchers were confused about the sounds gerbils make because they were only hearing a small part of the communication. This is because our human ears hear sounds that go up to about 20,000 cycles per second. However, gerbils do most of their talking at as high as 32,000 cycles per second. Their talk is too high-pitched for us to hear.Tape recordings of these ultra-high-frequency sounds have been played back at slower speeds. They reveal that most gerbil communication involves different kinds of whistles. These whistles are different types of speech, depending upon the purpose of the communication. While researchers cannot completely translate gerbil speech, they have learned that gerbils are continually asking where others are and reporting their own positions.Scripture calls the Son of God “the Word.” He is presented in the Bible as the creating and saving Word. This revelation about Him is intended to help us realize that communication is an essential part of God’s nature. Communication is not an evolutionary development. How could it be? Communication is the gift of a loving Magnificent Creator God. Have you read His communication to you in the Bible? |
| 10/15/2023 | They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. While that is often true, they also say that it takes a highly evolved brain to picture objects and remember them. Science is learning that this bit of evolutionary myth is indeed fiction.As far as the honeybee is concerned, not all flowers are created equal. Some flowers are a good source of nectar while others are a waste of time. Alfalfa flowers can kill a honeybee because they are designed for pollination by larger insects. When an insect lands, a central petal in the flower releases the stamen and sweeps pollen upward to aid pollination. Honeybees can be tossed off the flower or trapped inside by this action.Scientists always thought that honeybees solved the problem of finding safe and productive flowers by remembering a list of characteristics. They believed the honeybee was evolutionarily too simple to remember mental pictures of favored flowers. However, recent experiments have convinced scientists that bees actually store a mental picture of productive flowers. In these experiments, bees were rewarded with sugar water for visiting some patterns and not others. Their reactions showed that they remember images, not simply patterns.What’s more, the experiments showed that bees are quite intelligent and good learners. One scientist noted that these experiments showed that evolution’s assumptions about so-called higher and lower creatures are false. Those who believe in evolution are having to rethink their view of the world. Meanwhile, we can give thanks to our Magnificent Creator God for so generously giving the gift of intelligence to so many of His creatures. |
| 10/14/2023 | Some creatures simply try to look uninteresting to hungry predators. Others take their role-playing so seriously that they actually fulfill some of the same roles as their models.Loopers, or inchworms, move along the ground, twigs or branches with the characteristic opening and closing of an upside-down letter U. These creatures are not true worms. Rather, they are caterpillars. As caterpillars, they often look very much like the twigs or branches on which they move. However, their odd form of movement can give them away.Here’s an experiment you can try. If you ever notice a looper on a branch, simply give the branch a gentle tap. Chances are, the looper will suddenly freeze into the same shape as a nearby twig. If you were to carefully touch the looper, you would find that it had become as stiff as a twig. A botanist reports that while studying one looper moving along a branch, an ant happened along. Ants, of course, will eat loopers. The looper froze in a horizontal position between branches. The ant walked across the looper, never noticing that its walkway was actually a potential meal.Many scientists suggest that the looper “just happens” to be the same color as the branches on which it crawls. We ask, does it also accidentally know how to act like a twig to fool predators? The almighty hand of our Magnificent Creator God is evident even in the inchworm! |
| 10/13/2023 | We want to avoid getting bacteria in our food, don’t we? Bacteria cause illness. Bacteria are bad.Yet, some of the world’s healthiest foods contain deliberately introduced bacteria. One such strain of bacteria is the Lactic Acid Bacterium (LAB). This is used in foods such as kimchi or sauerkraut. Brassicas, such as cabbage, often have low quantities of this bacterium. When sealed in a suitable fermentation jar with salt, the LAB can thrive. LAB is able to withstand high acidity and salinity, so it grows, even in a salty environment. One of the products of LAB’s metabolism is lactic acid. Most other bacteria cannot survive in either acid or salt, so the LAB begins to dominate, while the vast majority of other bacteria die. LAB itself is not harmful to humans, so, paradoxically, the good bacteria have effectively killed off all the bad bacteria, providing a healthy, long-lasting food.When God finished making the world at the end of day six of creation, He looked at all that He had made and declared it to be very good. This must have included bacteria. Since Adam’s sin, many bacteria have mutated (though not evolved, as they have not gained new genetic information) into harmful organisms. Perhaps originally, all bacteria were created to be as useful as LAB in that original perfect world that our Magnificent Creator God gave us and that we so sinfully polluted. |
| 10/12/2023 | There are many methods of communication, some of which we human beings don’t often think about. One of these is chemical communication.Take, for example, the female silkworm moth. When she is ready to mate, she releases a very small amount of a chemical. This chemical, called a pheromone, can attract a male silkworm moth from up to two miles away. Even though the female has released only 100-millionth of a gram, the male can sense the chemical. Many other insects use similar pheromones to attract mates.Pheromones are also used for chemical communication by ants to mark their trails. When an ant finds a good source of food, it returns to the nest, leaving an invisible scent trail. Its fellow ants also use this trail to find the food. As long as they still find food they will continue to reinforce the scent. Once the supply is exhausted and ants no longer follow the trail, it disappears within a few minutes. This chemical scent is so specific that another species of ant will not recognize the trail if he stumbles upon it. This helps protect the ants’ food source from being discovered by other ants.Chemical communication allows the communicator to communicate to another of its species, even over long distances. In one sense, pheromones are the animals’ version of radio.Our Magnificent Creator God is also our Magnificent Communicator God! |
| 10/11/2023 | The loop-and-hook fastener called Velcro has come a long way since it first appeared. Velcro goes into space as a light, easy-to-use fastener. Here on Earth, it’s replacing everything from laces in children’s shoes to buttons and zippers on coats.However, humans were not the inventors of the hook-and-loop fastener. Plants were the first to use this principle. Scientists learned about the principle when they were checking out stories of how bean leaves were used to trap bedbugs during World War II. They discovered that the hooked hairs on the underside of bean leaves did indeed trap bedbugs by their feet. The bedbugs stayed stuck to the leaves until they starved to death.In nature, the hooked hairs trap leafhoppers, leaving them unable to munch on the leaves of bean plants. Further research has shown that some varieties of wheat trap the cereal leaf beetle, preventing damage to their leaves.Most amazing of all is the timing of this defense. Plants that use this method to protect themselves don’t start growing the hairs until a few days before the annual attack by their insect enemies!Humans might think their inventions are clever. However, because our Magnificent Creator God is smarter than we are, it is very likely that somewhere, somehow, He has already created nearly every practical invention. This is yet another argument for creation! |
| 10/10/2023 | It occurred to scientists only about 30 years ago that insect pests might be controlled through hormones. If, for example, a hormone that prevented a destructive insect from reaching maturity was applied to a crop, the interrupted lifecycle of the insect might prevent damage to the crop. Yet, the hormone would be a safe, natural substance.However, scientists found that synthesizing such hormones was much more difficult than they thought. Several years into the research, Japanese scientists discovered that certain plants were already making these hormones for self-defense. In fact, many of the plants were manufacturing what they called “super-hormones.” “Super-hormones” are hormones that work in far lower concentrations than the juvenile hormones made by the insects themselves. These juvenile hormones prevent insects from reaching their adult, and usually most destructive, stage. Among those plants that make juvenile insect hormones are ferns and certain evergreens.One result of this research is the development of a mosquito juvenile hormone. This hormone can be time-released from briquettes in swamps, preventing mosquito wigglers from ever maturing to their flying, biting, adult stage.Again, the incredible design and balance that could only have been built into the world by our Magnificent Creator God are evident in the creation. How else could plants have gained such skill in animal chemistry? |
| 10/9/2023 | Every day, all over the Earth, plants engage in chemical warfare against insects and animals that would eat them. When this drama is described by evolutionary scientists, they usually talk about plants as though the plants were skilled chemists who developed their abilities on their own.For example, the leaves of the oak tree contain tannins. Tannins form complexes with proteins so that, when eaten, they have little nutritional value. An evolutionary account of how this arrangement came about describes how the trees supposedly developed this strategy for self-defense. Stories like this make one wonder how oak trees gained so much knowledge about animal digestion and chemistry. Some species of milkweed and dogbane produce powerful muscle relaxants that can be fatal to humans.One might picture, in the far distant past, white-smocked milkweeds working in the chemistry lab. Other “doctor” milkweeds are feeding various concoctions to humans in cages to test their responses. When one tries to account for this without a Creator, the picture can become silly.The Bible provides an answer that makes a great deal more sense. In Job 38 and 39 the Lord – the Creator – asks Job about dozens of aspects of the creation. In His questioning, He asks Job about the source of the knowledge and abilities found in living things. The answer, of course, is that our Magnificent Creator God, and no one else, designed, built and taught the creation. Other answers simply can’t satisfy. |
| 10/8/2023 | “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.”One of the most common arguments against a literal six-day creation is that the structure of the days is a literary device, called the Framework Hypothesis. The hypothesis suggests an almost poetic pattern to the days, which they claim demonstrates that the days are not meant to be taken literally. On day one, God made the universe. On day two, He made the seas and atmosphere, and on day three He made the land, with its plants. Then on day four, He filled the universe, day five filled the sea and atmosphere, and day six filled the land. So there are three days of creating ex nihilo and three days of filling those creations. Again, the advocates of this hypothesis maintain that this pattern shows that Genesis 1 is allegorical literature, proclaiming the truth of God as Creator, but does not give a historical account.A quick answer to this point is that if there is a real pattern of two sets of three days, this does not prove that the days are not literal. God is a God of order. However, their neat pattern breaks down. Day one is not actually the parallel to day four – day two is. How so? On day two, God created the firmament, and the firmament refers not merely to the atmosphere but the entirety of space.A better suggestion is to take our Magnificent Creator God at His word, that He created everything exactly how He said He did!!! |
| 10/7/2023 | Some frogs are regular little drug factories. Their skins produce a wide range of powerful alkaloids, are a large family of chemicals usually produced by plants. Familiar alkaloids include quinine, caffeine and morphine. Different alkaloids have different effects, usually on the nervous system.The poison-arrow frog may be the most famous alkaloid-producing frog. South American natives simply rub their arrows or darts on the frog’s back. One species of this frog contains enough poison to kill about a 100 people! Another frog, native to Ecuador, produces an anesthetic more powerful than morphine. South American natives rub another frog on their wounds.Researchers discovered that the frog’s skin makes a powerful antiseptic. Yet another frog alkaloid will change the colors on parrot feathers. Some of the alkaloids produced by frogs are so complex that it takes years of study, using modern science’s most sophisticated equipment, to discover the active chemical.Researchers in this field are only beginning to learn about the alkaloids produced by frogs. They have yet to research a frog that natives claim to use to heighten their senses for the hunt. What puzzles scientists who believe in evolution is that the frogs’ exotic skin chemistries don’t follow the patterns they anticipated based upon expected evolutionary relationships.This means that these frogs have one more exciting purpose. They provide evidence against evolution and for a Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 10/6/2023 | Did you ever wonder where frogs go in the winter? Yes, frogs hibernate, but there is much more to it than that.Frogs are cold-blooded, meaning that they don’t create their own body heat. The heat they need to maintain life must come from the sun or the heat in the water and air around them. As the weather cools off, a frog’s blood begins to thicken, and life slows down. Frogs begin looking for places to hibernate. The frog must carefully select his winter resting spot. If his body temperature falls more than two degrees below the freezing point of water, ice crystals will begin to form in his blood, and he will die. Some frogs bury themselves deeply enough in the mud to avoid freezing temperatures. Others may crawl inside decaying logs or under leaves, both of which provide heat from decay to avoid freezing temperatures.Scientists have found that frogs have still another trick to help them survive. When the weather is unseasonably cool during the spring or summer, meaning a harder life and more deaths among the frog population, the next generation of frogs will automatically have more females. Additional females means that more eggs can be laid in the spring. As a result, the frog population will more quickly return to normal.Everywhere we look in the creation we find evidence, not only of our Magnificent Creator God’s wisdom, but of His loving care for every living thing. Do you know His loving care in your life? You can be absolutely certain of that care through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. |
| 10/5/2023 | We have often pointed out the many plants and animals that are interrelated. Their lives depend upon one another. Very often they are interrelated in such a way that creation offers the only reasonable explanation for their special features. Evolution can call on “lucky coincidence” just so many times to explain these relationships. It makes far more sense to say that all living things were carefully planned and designed by an all-wise Master Designer.One interesting example is found in the moth family Noctuidae. This family of moths has special organs that detect the ultrasonic sounds made by the bats who eat them. A “lucky coincidence”? The problem with the evolutionary explanation is that this moth is dated by evolutionists to 75 million years ago. (Remember, these are evolutionists’ years, not real years.) This is back during the time of dinosaurs, when there weren’t supposed to be any bats. According to evolution, bats didn’t arrive on the scene until 55 million years after the Noctuidae moth. One wonders whether mindless evolution could see into the future. Or perhaps evolution was able to make moths with an ability to hear bats that would not exist for the supposed tens of millions of years! Neither explanation sounds very scientific!It makes a good deal more sense to throw out the millions of years of inflated evolutionary time. We can view the unique design of the Noctuidae moth as a sign from an all-knowing Magnificent Creator God that all living things were made by Him. Only an intelligent, personal Creator can account for the complex overall plan that we see in the created relationships between vastly different creatures. |
| 10/4/2023 | The hair that you see is nothing more than dead protein that is produced by the cells of the hair follicle anchored inside the layers of the skin. The total number of hair follicles on the adult body is about 5 million; only about 100,000 of them are on the scalp. Each hair grows out of one follicle for about three to five years. Then the hair is shed and the follicle rests for about three months before starting to grow hair again.So, you see, once you know how many hairs are on your head, it’s still no easy job to keep track of their changing number. The average scalp hair grows about one inch every two or three months. This means that each day, your head is growing the equivalent of one hair, 100 feet long – that’s nearly seven miles per year!Yes, it’s true – our Magnificent Creator God cares so much about you that He knows from moment to moment how many hairs are on your head. He has not created our world and then left us to drift through space and life all alone. He has even expressed His love and purpose for you in the words of the Bible. Take a look today at what Scripture says about His Son, who loved you so much He even gave His life for you! |
| 10/3/2023 | The surface of the Earth 50 to 150 feet below the great living canopy of the rainforest is a dark, humid, still world dominated by great columns of tree trunks. Within those trunks and some of the giant hollow branches extending from them lies the secret of the life of the canopy itself.A rainforest typically receives 12 or more feet of rain per year. That much rain washes out of the soil most of the nitrates needed by the trees for growth. What the trees need is a rich source of nitrates that is constantly being replenished. And that’s where the bats come in.Typically, these huge trees are hollow inside. Many different kinds of creatures, including fruit bats, enter the hollow trees through various openings. Fruit bats find ideal daytime sleeping rooms inside the great hollow branches that extend like caverns from the hollow tree trunk. The accumulating layer of bat guano inside the tree itself is one of the richest sources of nitrates known. So the bats provide the tree with the nitrates it needs in exchange for a protected home during the day!In a very real sense, the fruit bats are the collection and transport system for the raw materials that make possible the tropical rain forest canopy with its millions of residents. Our Magnificent Creator God has devised an ingenious way to provide for the needs of many creatures. Truly, the Lord does provide all living things with their food in precisely the way they need it! |
| 10/2/2023 | Much of the world’s surface is covered by rainforest. If you are unfamiliar with the rainforest, you may be tempted to compare it to forests you have seen. But really there is no comparison at all.In a rainforest, the Earth’s living surface is covered by a second living habitat some 50 to 150 feet in the air. Here, thousands of species of plants and animals live and breed for generations without ever touching the ground.The canopy of the rain forest is supported by huge trees that usually have no branches for the first 50 or more feet. They grow so close together and their tops are so dense that sunlight seldom reaches the jungle floor. This canopy can be up to 100 feet thick. While you might expect to find monkeys living in the canopy, you may not expect to find mice, frogs and even earthworms there as well. Here, most of these creatures are born, they live and die without ever touching the ground. The rainforest canopy is truly a second environment for life high above the surface of the Earth!Unusual environments like the rainforest canopy show us that the creativity of our Magnificent Creator God is unlimited. He can create living things to carry on successful lives in any environment. He can create varied communities that interact and depend upon each other within each unique environment. His creation is truly a wonder! |
| 10/1/2023 | Love is one of the necessities of life that is both physical and spiritual. While it doesn’t fit with a strictly materialistic view of life, love and touch, or lack of love and touch, can determine our health and sometimes even life and death.The claim that love and touch are necessary to life and health was considered so outrageous that it wasn’t until relatively recently that scientists began to test such claims. Researchers selected 40 hospitalized infants. These infants were not in intensive care, on oxygen, or intravenous feedings, but they were too tiny to leave the hospital. Researchers randomly selected half the group for attention. These infants were touched for three 15-minute periods a day. The first five minutes were spent stroking the infants’ bodies. The next five minutes were spend lightly moving the infants’ arms and legs. This was followed by five more minutes of stroking.Even though the infants often didn’t seem to notice the attention, it made a difference. After only 10 weekdays of this attention, the stroked infants had gained 47% more weight than the infants that were ignored. This is especially amazing considering the infants that gained less weight had been fed the same number of calories. The stroked infants were also more active, so they should have actually metabolized more of the calories and lost weight rather than increasing in weight.Can we literally live on love? Well, we do need food and other things, but we also need love—especially from our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 9/30/2023 | Language requires some very special designs that are rare in nature and found together only in humans. First, human language requires vocal cords, which none of the apes have. The only animals with vocal tracts are birds, but no one is suggesting that we evolved from birds.Language also seems to require an unusual structure to the brain. The frontal area of the left hemisphere of the brain is connected to an adjacent area of the cortex called the Wernicke area. These two areas are linked by a bundle of nerve fibers. The result is a distinct brain asymmetry that is unique to humans. Even the unborn human has this asymmetry that allows it to absorb language. Development in this area of the brain stops at puberty. That is why it becomes more difficult for adults to learn a new language. Language skills can be learned only by hearing language. So-called “feral” children, who have heard no language at all, cannot be taught language after puberty for the same reason.So where did Adam first hear language? Scripture tells us that it was the Creator God Himself who regularly spoke with Adam. This means that language is not a collection of meaningless sounds to which we have assigned meanings. The meanings and sounds have come from God, just as our unique design that makes language possible comes from God.Therefore, language is not only for worldly purposes. We have also been given language by our Magnificent Creator God to praise our God and Savior and to tell others who He is and what He has done!!! |
| 9/29/2023 | According to evolutionists, coral is one of the earlier creatures on the evolutionary time line. If evolutionary theory were fact, one would expect the corals to be very simple. One would also expect them to have changed a lot in over half a billion years of life.However, corals are not at all simple creatures. The stinger used by coral polyps to immobilize prey is very complex. It is produced by a highly specialized cell in the polyp itself. At one end of the stinging capsule is a poker, covered by a protective cap. At the other end of the capsule there is a hollow tube, coiled like a rope. The capsule itself is filled with a powerful poison.When the poker end of the capsule is touched, a number of complex things happen in a very short time. The cap springs open, the poker rips a hole in the victim and continues in, carrying with it the poison tube, which then pumps the poison into the victim. All of these amazing steps take place in less than five ten-thousandths of a second!Coral is “surprisingly” complex to be so near the bottom of the evolutionary ladder. In addition, the earliest corals in the fossil record – over half a billion years old by inflated evolutionary counting – are the same as those found today! So again, the scientific evidence fits well with the biblical story of creation by our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 9/28/2023 | Honeydew is one of the favorite foods of ants. There are a number of insects, including thorn bugs and aphids, who consume so much honeydew that they cannot digest it all. These insects are designed so that ants can milk them for the excess honeydew, just the way a farmer obtains milk from a cow.Many species of ants will milk the honeydew-collecting insect by stroking its abdomen with its antennae. The tree hopper actually slows its secretion of excess honeydew to the milking ant so that the ant may drink his honeydew “fresh from the cow”, so to speak.Some ants construct clay pens and shelters in which they enclose certain species of aphids, just as a farmer keeps his herd. Like the farmer, the ants move the aphids to better honeydew feeding sites when necessary. They also care for the aphid eggs during the winter.Herding ants are even better able to protect a young tree hopper than its parents. It is not unusual for a tree hopper parent to turn her young over to herding ants because they can do more for the young insect than she can.Such complex relationships between creatures point to a Magnificent Creator God who is both Creator and Teacher – even to insects! |
| 9/27/2023 | Which body structure is a powerful generator of emotions, gives you a sense of direction, and serves as a cannon all at the same time? It’s your nose, of course! It is common knowledge that without our noses the scent of a rose could not give us joy, nor would our food taste like very much. Less well known is the fact that our noses are directly hooked into the brain’s limbic system. Your limbic system plays a central role in generating and controlling emotions. This is why certain scents are able to raise strong emotional memories in us.The nose is also designed to filter out and catch particles that should not get into the lungs. When a particle is taken in through your nose, it is snagged by the tissue inside your nasal passages. Next, this highly special tissue decides the best method of getting rid of the foreign material. If a bacterium is identified, your nose begins to run, bathing the bacteria in powerful chemicals that dissolve most of them. If the particles are larger, like pollen, a sneeze is triggered that can eject particles at speeds of over 100 miles per hour!Perhaps the most remarkable ability associated with the nose is its ability to act as a compass. Human beings have a small amount of iron in the bony part of the nose between the eyes. Scientific experiments have shown that we have an ability, while not foolproof, that can sense direction that is influenced by magnetic fields!Our Magnificent Creator God made your multi-purpose nose not only to bring some pleasure to life but also to help protect your health. |
| 9/26/2023 | God made so many ants because ants are important housekeepers for the earth. Ants, not earthworms, turn most of the world’s soil, drain it and enrich it. Ants dispose of 90 percent of the corpses of small dead animals. As the world’s gardeners, ants spread and plant more seeds than any other creature.Like bees, ants have a sophisticated society, which includes workers, nurses, soldiers, hunters, farmers and even builders. Each of these different classes has specialized organs for their work. The soldier ants of one species are walking bombs. They are loaded with poison and literally explode when under attack, spraying poison on their enemies. Army ants in Central and South America march across the countryside in a line that can be nearly 50 feet long. The solid column sweeps along, flushing out even small animals, as it looks for food.The huge variety of living things around us represents more than simply variety. That variety carefully includes creatures to do every job that needs to be done to maintain life on Earth. This in itself is a witness to both the creativity and wisdom of our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 9/25/2023 | Not every spider can kill you if it bites you! But we never really warm up to the eight-legged monsters. It’s the sheer legginess of spiders that repels most of us. And jumping spiders are the worst.A recent science news article about a particular jumping spider called toxeus magna states that the mother spiders are actually good mothers and carefully look after their babies.This particular species was discovered in a park in Singapore. When scientist Zanqi Chen found the species, he found a female surrounded by babies. Yet, other jumping spiders are loners and sometimes even eat their young. This one was nursing them.Chen’s surprise deepened when he studied them in the lab. The mother spider was observed to be leaving droplets of white secretion around the nest, and the babies drank it up. Sometimes, babies clung to their mother and appeared to be suckling. Closer analysis showed that the baby spiders could not survive without this liquid, which, for a period, provided their only sustenance. Despite not being a mammal, these spiders appear to suckle their young on what is, for all intents and purposes, a liquid acting like milk.Our Magnificent Creator God has made some remarkable creatures and it never ceases to be amazing how many such marvels He has created. |
| 9/24/2023 | We have looked at many plants and animals that use different forms of camouflage to keep from being noticed. Some don’t wish to be noticed so that they can surprise their prey, while others don’t want to be noticed so they can avoid becoming prey. However, what happens when both predator and prey encounter each other in full camouflage?The predator in this drama, witnessed by a naturalist at the edge of a desert, is a yellow crab spider. The spider was waiting on a yellow flower that made him nearly invisible. The potential prey is an inchworm beneath the same flower. The inchworm was tearing off bits of the yellow flower petals and sticking them on its back.Properly camouflaged, the inchworm then worked his way toward the top of the flower where the spider waited. The spider felt the movement and ran around the edge to see whether lunch might be on the way. However, when the spider got around the edge of the flower, he saw nothing. He didn’t even notice the camouflaged inchworm on which he was standing! The spider then returned to the center of the flower, outsmarted by the inchworm who went on about his business.Our wisdom would have said that the inchworm should try to run when he noticed the spider. However, the wisdom given to him by our Magnificent Creator God allowed him to continue about his business on the flower. This offers us a good illustration of how following the Lord’s wisdom often requires us to reject our own. |
| 9/23/2023 | Our senses link us to the world around us and enable us to interact with the world. While most people believe that our sense of sight is the highest of the senses and the most marvelous in design, our sense of hearing is no less marvelous.When a sound strikes your ear, your eardrum vibrates with the sound waves, fast or slow, soft or hard. These variations in vibration provide us with important information about the nature of the sound we are hearing. Some sounds produce a vibration in the eardrum as small as a billionth of a centimeter – only one-tenth the diameter of a hydrogen atom! There are three tiny bones in the middle ear called the hammer, anvil and stirrup. They pick up the vibrations from the eardrum, amplify them and send them on to the cochlea. The cochlea is filled with about 25,000 tiny hair cells that finally turn the vibrations into electrical signals that are sent on to the brain.Our hearing is designed to be more sensitive to high-pitched sounds than to lower sounds. If we had just a little more sensitivity to lower-pitched sounds, we would continuously be distracted by the internal sounds of our body, including the blood rushing through our arteries. In fact, to help prevent this, there are no blood vessels at all in that part of the ear where vibrations are turned into electrical impulses. The body supports life in these tissues by constantly bathing them in dissolved nutrients.While we can hear many things, and decide not to hear other things, our Magnificent Creator God who so marvelously designed our ears invites us to hear His Word to us from the Bible! |
| 9/22/2023 | Some people have the green thumb in their family. Others may complain that they fail with plants because plants don’t tell them when they need care. Of course, most people can do well with family pets, who are enthusiastic about letting their needs be known.Now scientists have learned that plants do indeed cry out when they need attention. We just haven’t heard them because the sounds made by a thirsty plant are about five times higher-pitched than we can hear. But scientists with tiny specialized microphones have heard corn plants calling for water. During their study, researchers learned that plants make a great deal of noise. Corn leaves and stalks make noises as they slide against each other during growth. We have all heard the sound of plant leaves rattling in the wind. Corn stalks also make noise as they bend in the wind.However, another sound was heard when the corn didn’t have enough water. It was a high-pitched popping noise. Plants have water tubes in them that carry water and nutrients up from the roots to the leaves. Water flows up these tubes under tension. When there is not enough water, the tension becomes too great and the tubes fracture. The popping is the sound of those tubes fracturing. The result of fractured tubes is a wilted plant. When water is restored, the tubes refill, the popping noises stop, and the plant again looks healthy.The purpose of this research was to learn when to water crops and how much water they need. Now that we have learned how plants communicate, crops can tell farmers when to water!We can rely on our Magnificent Creator God to allow for every need whether animal, plant, or human. |
| 9/21/2023 | Most of us are familiar with the body’s response to foreign tissue. Transplant patients must be carefully matched and then patients still must be given powerful drugs to prevent destruction of the transplanted tissue. Our bodies’ immune system identifies tissue that’s not its own and then tries to destroy that tissue.As we have learned more about the immune system, doctors began asking themselves why a pregnant mother’s body doesn’t reject the foreign tissue of the baby growing inside her. The answer to this mystery is not fully understood, but research has suggested some answers.From conception, the unborn child is a genetically unique individual. Researchers think that the most important protection the unborn child has is the trophoblast. This tissue, known as the caul, seals the growing infant from its mother. However, the trophoblast itself develops from the same cells as the infant. So why doesn’t the mother’s immune system attack? It appears that under normal conditions the trophoblast is a special set of cells that the body cannot identify as foreign. In addition, the trophoblast makes cells that encourage the mother’s immune system to protect it. Scientists now believe that this amazing feature may actually be provided by the father’s genetic information.In effect, the baby, with the help of the father, immunizes the mother’s system so that it doesn’t reject the baby! So, even before birth, the mother nurtures and the father protects the child.Only our Magnificent Creator God could design such a process as childbirth. |
| 9/20/2023 | In a clever scheme of self-protection, the more poisonous the male rattlebox moth is, the more prized he is by the female rattlebox moth.In the caterpillar stage, the male moth favors the pods of certain legumes. These pods contain a powerful poison that seems to have no effect on the caterpillar. After the caterpillar has become a moth and it’s time for mating, the male releases a scent produced by the poison. Those who have more poison in their bodies release a stronger scent, while those with little poison release only a weak scent. Female rattlebox moths prefer males with a strong scent. During mating, the male coats the eggs with some of the poison, making them unpalatable to predators, like ladybugs, who might eat the eggs. So the more poison a male has, the better protected the female’s eggs will be. Studies have shown that female rattlebox moths will ignore males that have collected no poison.Likewise, the male of the queen butterfly species collects another plant poison in his system. This poison is produced by plants for protection against insects. The butterfly doesn’t attack the plant; rather, he drinks the poison from already injured plants. Here, too, the female queen butterfly favors those males with the most poison.It appears that human beings are not the only creatures who go to the drug store to get needed medicines. Our Magnificent Creator God has provided the animal world with their own drug store and the knowledge of how to use the chemicals He has provided. |
| 9/19/2023 | Fireflies may help light the way to new medical breakthroughs. The gentle glow of a firefly on a summer evening is produced by the chemical luciferase. The firefly has a gene with the code that makes this chemical. When that gene is added to the genetic information of other plants or animals, the cells begin to glow harmlessly. Researchers have been using the firefly gene to test their ability to add genetic information to a cell.When human heart arteries become clogged, a medicine called TPA is among the treatments doctors use. TPA is a natural clot-dissolving protein that helps prevent heart attacks. The problem is, without a continuous supply of TPA, the artery may reclog. It would help if the artery could make its own TPA 24 hours a day.Since TPA is a natural protein for which there is a genetic code, researchers wanted to know if genetic information could be added to artery cells. To find out, they injected dogs with the genetic code for luciferase. If genetic information could be added to the cells through this method, they would actually see the results in the glowing tissue. Tissue samples taken three days later did, in fact, have the distinctive glow of the firefly, proving that the method works. They warn that several years of research lie ahead before artery cells may be able to dissolve their own clots.Those glowing fireflies that delight children and adults show our Magnificent Creator God’s design in the creation in an unexpected way. The chemical that makes the glow is proving to be an important tool of medical science. |
| 9/18/2023 | The world is a frightening place without God. This fear can be seen today in fears that modern people often confuse with science.Several years ago, stories of gloom and doom about a greenhouse heating of the Earth were starting to fill the media. We at Creation Moments looked at the scientific basis for these claims. We wanted to know if the greenhouse warming of the Earth was a true threat or just another fear of a godless people. We then published the conclusion that the thin and conflicting evidence for greenhouse warming most likely came from the heat island effect of growing cities around some of the temperature-measuring sites.Knowing the elegance with which God designed everything in creation, creationists suspected that God probably designed the Earth with built-in thermostats that help keep it from warming up too much. When the Pacific Ocean warms more than normal, it sends increasing amounts of water vapor into the air. If heating continues, the water vapor will actually cause the heating to increase until vapor is forced higher into the atmosphere, creating icy cirrus clouds. These clouds reflect enough incoming sunlight to shut down the temperature increase and return things to normal.We are called to be good stewards of the Earth. We can be good stewards in joyful service, freed from the fears that afflict those who don’t know The Magnificent Creator God. |
| 9/17/2023 | Whalebone was used for all sorts of ornaments and structural purposes as a gently bendable, yet firm material. Today it has been replaced by plastics. But it wasn’t really bone. It came from the mouth of the whale. The structure is known today as baleen, and it is made of keratin, like your fingernails. The whale swallows huge quantities of water, then spits it out, sieving it through the baleen to catch the small krill organisms on which the baleen whale thrives.Evolutionists have to believe that this baleen evolved, as they believe that the ancestors of the whale had teeth – as do non-baleen whales today. A recent article on one popular-style science website stated that “rivaling the evolution of feathers in dinosaurs, one of the most extraordinary transformations in the history of life was the evolution of baleen.” The comparison is appropriate. We have remarked many times on the sheer impossibility of the evolution of feathers, and so it is with the evolution of baleen.The difficulty for evolutionists is working out a possible mechanism for the imaginary intermediate forms. Would the intermediate have had both teeth and baleen, or would there have had to be creatures with neither teeth nor baleen? If the latter, would those animals not have starved to death?As is usual, it makes more sense to suppose that our Magnificent Creator God designed baleen whales exactly as they needed to be so that they can live successfully in the oceans!!! |
| 9/16/2023 | Not only is the human brain the most complex structure in the universe, it is also one of the busiest. In fact, during intense concentration, your brain can burn as many calories as your muscles do during exercise! Intense thinking can literally be as exhausting as a physical workout! More than 100,000 chemical reactions go on in your brain every second.Among the brain’s many jobs is chemist. The brain produces more than 50 psychoactive drugs. Some of these are associated with memory, others with intelligence, still others are sedatives. Endorphin is the brain’s painkiller and it’s three times more potent than morphine. Serotonin is produced by the brain to help keep our moods under control. The brain also makes dopamine. Dopamine makes people more talkative and excitable. Another hormone regulates hunger.The brain is also a radio transmitter that sends out measurable electrical wave signals. In fact, the brain continues to send these signals for as long as 37 hours after death!Our tiny knowledge of the brain is enough to show us that this incredible organ is no accident. The brain is much more than a powerful testimony to our Magnificent Creator God. Its incredible powers convince us that there is much more to existence than this material life. However, we can learn only from the Word of God about eternal life through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ.Put your brain together with the Word of God today! |
| 9/15/2023 | Many textbooks tell young people today that birds are modified reptiles. Suppose, they say, that millions of years ago the scales on some reptiles began to fray along the edges. In time, they say, the frayed scales turned into feathers and birds were born.The elegance and beauty of the feather make this story hard to believe. Can sticking a feather on a lizard produce a peacock? The bird’s feather is only a small part of the complete flying system of the bird. Even with very careful planning and redesigning, a reptile doesn’t have what it takes.A bird needs massive breast muscles for flight. In some birds, 30 percent of the body weight of the bird is breast muscle. By comparison, in humans, breast muscles are only about 1 percent of body weight. A bird also needs an extremely high metabolism and blood pressure to deliver the energy those muscles need for flight. Birds have a higher metabolism than any other creature; they also have the necessary high blood pressure. Finally, as is well known, birds need light skeletons. The man-o’-war has a wingspan of seven feet. But its entire skeleton weighs only a few ounces – less than its feathers!Even the most clever rebuilding of a reptile cannot produce a bird. In fact, birds have very little in common with reptiles. The entire being of the bird, from body to brain, has been specially designed for flight by a Magnificent Creator God who clearly knows everything there is to know about flight. |
| 9/14/2023 | If, of all the millions of living things on Earth, a few creatures happened to look like something they are not and this helped protect them, we might put it down to chance. However, the creation is filled with too many creatures who practice look-alike deception to put it down to chance.Africa’s southern deserts have a plant called living stones. In a desert, any vegetation can be a welcome source of food or moisture. In this setting, a plant that doesn’t look like a plant has an advantage. And living stones look like nothing more than just another rock in the sand.Wasps can be some of the nastiest insects in nature. An insect in Costa Rica called the mantispid looks very much like the feared wasp, even up close. Then again, the hover fly looks like a wasp and sounds like a wasp because the frequency of its wing beats is almost identical to a wasp.Treehoppers have a very odd body shape that comes to a point on top. Not only do they look like thorns, but they usually stay on bushes that have thorns, orienting their bodies on the branches just like true thorns. This effectively hides them from hungry birds. Larval plant hoppers use a different form of deception. They attach themselves in groups on branches, orienting their frilly and feathery bodies together so they look like a flower!The clever forethought and planning involved in nature’s deceptions rule out any thought that these creatures designed themselves but were indeed a work of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 9/13/2023 | Spider silk begins as a liquid protein made by silk glands on the spider’s abdomen. Spiders make many kinds of silk for different uses. As the liquid silk is forced through the spider’s spinnerets, it begins to dry. The spinnerets pull and stretch the silk, creating just the right kind of silk for the spider’s use. Though the result seems thin and weak to us, ounce for ounce, spider silk is stronger than steel.Web-building spiders make two types of silk for their traps. The basic structure of the web is made of strong, non-sticky silk. Then the spider adds a sticky, elastic silk to trap its prey. Some webs are irregular, others are flat and sheet-like, while still others are shaped like funnels. All of us have admired the beautiful orb web.However, spiders also have many other ways in which they use their silk. The ogre-faced spider makes a net that it throws around its intended victim. The European water spider builds its web underwater. It stores its air supply in the web. The lasso spider twirls a single strand of silk over its head. A tiny drop of sticky silk at the end of the lasso captures its prey when the lasso is thrown. Probably the most creative use of silk is by the young of some species. When they hatch, they produce long loops of silk that catch the wind and send them floating off to new places.The spider’s skill in producing and using silk had to come from Someone wiser and more clever than the spider. Clearly, the spider has been well-equipped and instructed by its Magnificent Creator God. |
| 9/12/2023 | The founders of modern science, on the whole, believed in the Creator. The methods they developed were based upon the truth that the creation is voluntary. This means that God was not confined to what we have later defined as “scientific laws.” God could make anything He wanted in any way He wanted. Science cannot be done from the philosopher’s easy chair. Scientists must go out into the field and study how nature works. When science follows this path, it is open to astonishing discoveries.One relatively recent unexpected discovery was the hot water vents deep below the ocean’s surface. Where the earth’s crust has split apart, hot water gushes out. This water reaches temperatures hot enough to, say, cause a piece of paper to burst into flame. Only the tremendous pressure more than a mile below the waves keeps the water in liquid form.It was in this environment that scientists made an even more amazing discovery. They found bacteria that could live in the almost 700-degree water. These amazing creatures find the normal sea-level boiling point of water to be so cold, they can barely survive. Scientists are still trying to learn how these creatures live at temperatures that would destroy the normal biochemistry of life.Each new discovery tells us a little more about the work of our wonderful Magnificent Creator God. That’s what science was originally intended to do. Keep that in mind when you hear someone say that belief in the Creator makes doing science impossible. |
| 9/11/2023 | It’s a challenge, even for the Christian, to get along with lazy, selfish people. This is because they also tend to be quarrelsome, especially when their desires are not met. Now scientists have discovered that the phrase “industrious as an ant” does not apply to all ants. They report that they have found an entire ant society that is lazy, selfish and quarrelsome.Sometimes a society is pleasant to live in and sometimes it’s not. Not all ant societies are harmonious examples of cooperation. One ant society, popularly called the slave-makers, must be a miserable place to live. Slave-making ants make their living by plundering the nests of other species and making slaves of their captives. Slave ants are forced to feed, house and even defend their masters.This leaves the slave-making ants with a great deal of idle time. Most of that idle time is spent in endless squabbles with each other over social status. The higher a slave-maker’s status, the more service from a slave she receives. It would seem that just as idle human hands can lead to strife between people, idle ants tend to fight with each other too.This universal linking of selfishness, laziness and fighting tells us that there are indeed universal moral truths. It shows us that those who say there is no absolute morality are wrong. Perhaps our Magnificent Creator God has allowed this ant society to corrupt itself so we could have a scientific basis to reject today’s moral relativism. |
| 9/10/2023 | Sometimes a headline screams to be noticed even before we have read the article concerned. One such headline declared: “Prehistoric cave art suggests ancient use of complex astronomy.” There are so many presuppositions in that headline. The first is the use of the word prehistoric. The word historic refers to the timescale of human beings, so prehistoric implies something from before there were human beings on the Earth. However, the Bible does not allow for any prehistory – well, except perhaps 5 days. What the headline is getting at is that the art it is about to describe was supposedly done by creatures that were not fully evolved into human beings. Secondly, the headline refers to “complex astronomy”. The astronomy concerned should have been too complex for these primitive cave men.Researchers from the University of Edinburgh, examining yet again the cave drawings at Lascaux, France, determined that these early people understood the precession of the Earth’s orbit, and an ancient comet strike.We have discussed before that the reason these people were living in caves is not because they were primitive, but because they had only just arrived at the area, having migrated after the Tower of Babel incident. The drawings show how highly civilized they were, and their knowledge of complex astronomy confirms this. These astounding examples of cave art and science are fully understandable within a biblical worldview, whereas those using an evolutionary worldview are constantly taken by surprise.We must constantly remind ourselves that it was by the hand of our Magnificent Creator God that all things came to be!!! |
| 9/9/2023 | The red panda has to be one of the world’s most attractive animals, with a cute white face and a ginger red body. As its name suggests, it was once thought to be closely related to the giant panda, with whom it shares a number of traits, including a diet of bamboo. However, the giant panda has been placed in the same family as bears, while the red panda was thought to have been part of raccoon family. Even evolutionists now think the relationship between giant pandas and red pandas is remote, and the red panda has now been placed in a family all of its own, with no other extant species – called ailuridae. Creationists treat ailuridae as a baramin, and it causes us no problem to accept that this baramin is a single stick in the creationist orchard of life – a baramin containing only one species.Red pandas are supposed to be a good proof of evolution. Evolutionists like to class them as meat eaters because of their teeth and claws. However, their diet consists almost entirely of bamboo. If this is supposed to be the result of the upward march of evolutionary natural selection, then it seems to be an unusual route. Their bodies cannot digest bamboo well, so they have to eat a great deal of it in order to get the nutrients that they need.The uniqueness of the red panda is, however, the sort of thing we would expect in a creation made by our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 9/8/2023 | “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” We’ve all heard this familiar saying. In the case of the sun’s fire, scientists expect to find not smoke but tiny particles called neutrinos. The problem is, most of those neutrinos are missing.It was once thought that the sun’s heat was produced as its powerful gravity caused it to collapse in on itself. But as the theory of evolution became popular, this theory fell out of favor. Those who promoted evolution knew that their theory was more believable if they said the sun was millions or billions of years old. However, if the sun’s heat came from gravity collapse, it could not possibly be that old.So when scientists learned about nuclear energy, they proposed the theory that the sun’s energy comes from nuclear forces. This would give them their billions of years. The problem is, the sun’s nuclear engine should be turning out a large number of neutrinos. Scientists find only about one-third to one-fourth of the neutrinos that should be there. This mystery is so troubling that scientists have changed their theories about how the sun produces its energy every year or two for over a quarter of a century! Some of them admit that they really don’t know how the sun produces its energy.The sun is a vital blessing to us. And here we see another blessing, for the sun also keeps us humble. Our Magnificent Creator God has so wonderfully created the sun that even our best scientific minds can’t figure out how it works! |
| 9/7/2023 | Scientists have, for the first time, successfully communicated with honeybees in their own language! Scientists have for some time known how to interpret many of the elements of the bees’ so-called “waggle dance.” This dance is used by scouts to communicate the location of food sources to the food gatherers in the hive.A couple decades ago, researchers decided to see if they could confirm their understanding of bee communication. But how do you talk to a bee and get confirmation that she understood what you said? Scientists decided that the only way to do this was to build a robot bee through which they could communicate. The first attempts at building a robot bee acceptable to real bees did not work well. Early models were viciously attacked.Scientists finally perfected a computer-controlled robot bee that real honeybees accepted. These scientists describe honeybee language as elegant and precise. Yet they found they had learned enough bee language to communicate successfully a food source and its location to real bees. They also discovered that they have much more to learn about bee language. As a result, it may someday be possible for farmers to direct bees to crops that need pollination.Just as bees can best understand other bees, we humans can best understand other humans. That explains why, when our Magnificent Creator God wished to communicate with us, He became a human being. That human, Jesus Christ, taught us about God; and He also made peace with God for us, making possible the forgiveness of our sins. |
| 9/6/2023 | We have long known that the community within a honeybee hive divides the labor among specialized workers. There are scouts who search for food. Nurses tend the young. Some bees specialized in cleaning. There are even undertaker bees who remove and dispose of dead members of the hive.Scientists have now discovered that honeybee colonies also have brigades of specialized “soldiers.” These bees often seem to be sitting around, not doing much. In fact, they have only one duty – attack large intruders. It appears that these bees are fed and cared for by the hive members while they wait for the alarm. Should a raccoon, bear or human threaten the hive, thousands of soldier bees swarm around the enemy and sting.Soldiers have been well-known members of ant and termite colonies. However, up to now, they have never been confirmed in honeybee hives. The universal need for soldiers for protection among social insects reminds us that some things are universal in this world. These soldiers are not responsible for a bear’s attack on the hive. Nor are human soldiers who follow just war principles responsible for human war.Humanity’s greed and lack of love for others cannot be abolished by getting rid of armies. Rather, greed, theft and the need for protection remind us that we are not what God intended us to be. The solution lies not in denying reality, but in returning to our Magnificent Creator God through the forgiveness of our sins as made possible by Jesus Christ. |
| 9/5/2023 | How many different scents do you think your nose is able to smell? The answer is about 10,000. How does your nose tell the difference between a rose and a skunk? Until only recently, scientists really weren’t sure.Now we know that humans and mammals detect smells by using at least 1,000 different genes. These genes are located in every cell in your body, but they are active only in your nose. This discovery, say scientists, gives them their first insight into how smell works. Before this, said one scientist, “We had almost no knowledge of the olfactory system and this really opens up the molecular study of smell in a very fascinating way.”They say that each of the different genes seems designed to respond to a small group of odors. As each group of genes does its part, the entire system is able to recognize everything we can smell. These genes pass signals from the nerve cells in the nose to a small region of the brain called the olfactory bulb. Now that smell genes are identified, researchers say they can begin to understand how odors are detected and how the brain interprets those signals.Our sense of smell relies on a very elegant and sophisticated system. Imagine, 1,000 genes lie at the heart of that system. Each one of those genes is information – a programmed code that is designed to make sense of what we smell. Information, programming and decoding are all terms that assume that we have a highly intelligent Magnificent Creator God who designed our sense of smell! |
| 9/4/2023 | For centuries, Asian cooks have wrapped meat, sushi and candy in bamboo bark. Though the reason for this practice seems to have been forgotten, humans evidently once knew what modern science is rediscovering about bamboo.Chemists have succeeded in extracting the natural chemicals in bamboo bark. What they found was not one or two but four natural chemicals in the bark that inhibit bacteria, especially staph germs. These natural antibacterial agents are now under study for possible use as natural food and cosmetic preservatives. If these natural chemicals can be shown to kill bacteria and yet be harmless to people, the door will be open for an entirely new class of natural food preservatives.The question naturally arises about how Asians originally came to use bamboo in the kitchen. Is it possible that thousands of years ago, when ancestors of today’s Asians headed east from the Tower of Babel, humans knew that bamboo would help keep their food from spoiling?Much of what we are learning today was already known to a humanity that was only a few generations removed from our first and once-perfect parents.Remember that the perfection with which humanity was created by our Magnificent Creator God was more than moral perfection.Because Adam and Eve had a perfect knowledge of God, they also had a perfect understanding of all that He had made. While we cannot be perfect except through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ, it is also true that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom. |
| 9/3/2023 | Some of the most fascinating discoveries in recent years have to do with our growing knowledge of plant communication. New research continues to reveal even more amazing facts about the exquisite intricacy of God’s marvelous work.Naturalists have long noted that plants often choose to grow at precise spacing from each other and plants of other species. Scientists at the University of California at Santa Barbara theorized that this precision might be a result of communication between the roots of these plants. So they devised an experiment to find out. They designed a network of interlocking, partially transparent growth boxes. These boxes allowed them to watch how root growth took place in single plants, two plants of the same species, and plants of different species.They discovered that when burro weed roots neared the roots of the creosote bush, the roots of the creosote bush slowed the growth of the nearing roots. They also discovered that burro weed roots will stop growing when they encounter other burro weed roots. This allows the plants to send their roots out where they will not compete with their own kind. Most astonishing is the discovery that burro weed roots continue to grow if they encounter other roots from their own plant. The amazed scientists noted that this means that even plants may have a sense of self.When the Bible tells us that the whole creation praises its Creator, it certainly suggests that at least every living thing has a sense of itself as well as its Magnificent Creator God. |
| 9/2/2023 | As far as we know, the blue whale is the largest animal that has ever existed. Every statistic that we find about these giants is overwhelming.A blue whale’s tongue is larger than an elephant. Its flipper can be about six feet long – as long as a man is tall. A baby blue whale is the size of two minivans. Their mouths could hold 400 people. Yet the creatures they eat – krill – are only about half an inch long. They swallow vast amounts of water, then filter it back through their baleen – the strange keratin filter-like structure that they have in their mouths.They eat four tons of krill a day. That is 4 million of the tiny creatures. Babies consume 50 to 100 gallons of milk per day. The blue whale’s tail is as wide as a soccer net. One of these whales can dive to nearly 1,000 feet, and they can stay there for 30 minutes, without needing a breath. The water that they blow through their blowhole can jet up to 30 feet high.In short, these are magnificent animals, clearly illustrating the greatness and the beauty of God’s creation. We read in Genesis 1:21 that God made them on the fifth day of creation: “And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly.” The word translated as whales could also refer to other large sea creatures, but it certainly includes these beautiful, amazing giants of the ocean.The blue whale is but one tiny detail our Magnificent Creator God saw fit to be in His Master Design! |
| 9/1/2023 | Could the giant flying fox be a primate? In the 18th century, scientists weren’t quite sure what to do with bats. Some wanted to classify them as primates, while others thought they should have their own category. Since 1780, all 950 known species of bats have been classified in their own category. The bat order is divided into microbats and megabats. Microbats have an average wingspan of less than a foot. Megabats are larger. The giant flying fox has a wingspan of six feet!The evolutionary link between microbats and megabats is dissolving as scientists learn more about them. Although megabats and microbats are very clearly bats, they are constructed in importantly different ways. Microbats rely mainly on echo-location to navigate. Megabats have very large eyes, enabling them to see like owls in low light. The nerves that connect the eyes of microbats to the brain cross. As a result, the image from the right eye goes to the left brain, and the left eye feeds its image to the right brain. However, megabats are wired with both eyes feeding into both sides of the brain. This arrangement is otherwise unique to primates!If bats evolved, these new findings mean that bats must have evolved at least twice! It also means that some bats evolved from monkey-like creatures!It makes far more sense to admire our Magnificent Creator God’s unlimited creativity. We can logically reason that God gave His larger bats eyesight like that of a monkey because their needs are similar.Creation Moments |
| 8/31/2023 | Jesus talked about “the sign of Jonah” when He was being asked about signs. He said it was the only sign that would be given to that generation. He then proceeded to tell them what the sign meant. It refers to the fact that Jonah was inside the big fish for three days and three nights. Jesus related this to Himself by stating that, in the same way, the Son of Man (that is, Jesus) would be in the ground for three days and three nights and then would rise again.By referring this matter to Himself, Jesus was also validating the truthfulness of the account of Jonah and the big fish in Jonah chapter 1. Yet many people prefer to think of the account of Jonah and the big fish as a fairy tale.The Bible has many other examples of God using animals to do His will on different occasions. For example, He made Balaam’s donkey speak in order to get Balaam’s attention and to tell him exactly what he was to say. And He used various animal examples to Job in order to explain how Job had not grasped the purpose of God’s creation.Jonah was taken by the creature to Ninevah – a gentile town, which repented for that time. It is fitting that Jonah was used as a type of the death and resurrection of Christ because it is by Christ’s death and resurrection that all peoples of the world are able to be reconciled to our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 8/30/2023 | A family of fish that live in the depths of the sea actually go fishing – pole, dangling bait and all. This is only natural, since they, like people who go fishing, like to eat fish.This group of fish is collectively called the angler fish. The front dorsal spine in the female angler is located on her head. It is much longer than any of the other dorsal fins and has a fleshy bait on the end. When hungry, she sits very still and dangles the bait in front of her mouth. It doesn’t take long before something swims up to investigate this bait as its possible lunch. But before it can think about taking a sample, the angler has turned the tables and eaten her own lunch.Of course, this system wouldn’t work very well in the pitch darkness one mile below the surface of the ocean without one other special provision. Like many other fish at such depths, the angler is able to generate her own light. In her case, only the bait lights up, so she stays invisible to her victims. The chemical method she uses to create the light is nearly 100% efficient!In His imaginative creativity, God was pleased to place creatures a mile below the surface of the sea. Yet in His mercy He has provided them with everything they need to make their living there. Likewise, you may not know why our Magnificent Creator God has placed you into a particular situation right now. If He so cares for the creatures a mile below the waves, how much more does He care for You. And He has even included a light for you in His Son, Jesus Christ! |
| 8/29/2023 | A revolutionary design in metal-cutting blades is changing the metal-working industry. These blades don’t cut like a knife. Instead, the blade is fixed in one position while the metal to be shaped spins on a lathe. This new-style blade stays sharp six times longer than the old blade design. And where titanium used to make the old-style cutting blades dull almost the second they were used, the new blades last up to 30 minutes.This wonderful new blade was developed by two engineers who got the original idea from a rat. You see, rats’ teeth always have a sharp edge. Engineers learned that this is because their teeth are hard on one side and soft on the other. So as they wear, they always keep a sharp edge. Using this principle for metal-cutting has lowered costs and increased productivity, since the blades don’t have to be changed as often.Beginning in Job 39, God humbles Job with several chapters of questions about the wise designs found in the animal kingdom. God’s message is, “Job, if you think you’re so smart, who created all of this with such wisdom?”Even rats’ teeth are created with such wisdom that, once we learned the principle, our technology was greatly improved. In view of this, it doesn’t seem at all scientific to say that there is no Magnificent Creator God! |
| 8/28/2023 | Evolutionary naturalism paints the picture of life as if it were a haphazard series of accidents that just barely resulted in a range of living things that just manage to survive. This fanciful picture destroys our sense of wonder over the sophisticated engineering designs in nature.Consider the mystery of flight, for example. Some evolutionists suggest that perhaps birds are descended from lizards that fell out of trees a lot. Other evolutionists say that birds came from lizards who grew wings, not for flight but to chase down and catch insects. Yet, they have little to say about the fact that we humans have come by most of our sophisticated knowledge about flight from studying the birds.Then there is the problem, for the evolutionist, of how flight accidentally evolved so many times for so many creatures. Scientists studying the dragonfly are learning even more secrets of flight. Our best high-performance aircraft can barely lift themselves off the ground. However, the dragonfly can lift 15 times his own weight into the air. Scientists have learned that this is because the dragonfly’s wings are designed to create little whirlwinds over their top surfaces. These whirlwinds are the secret to creating incredible lifting power. Ways are now being planned to apply this secret to new aircraft designs.The engineering excellence found in nature and from which we have learned so much even in this day of interplanetary probes is not witness to a mindless process of evolution, but to a wise and mindful Magnificent Creator God. |
| 8/27/2023 | Most people are familiar with the story of Jonah and the whale. However, by calling it a story, some people want to cast doubt upon the key event of the account. Jonah, having run away and boarded a ship bound for Tarshish – probably the same as modern Spain – eventually ends up in the sea, and God sends a whale to swallow him and take him to Ninevah.People throw up all kinds of problems here. How could a large sea creature have swallowed Jonah? Would it not have chewed him first? Would there have been enough room in the creature’s stomach? How did Jonah escape being eaten away by the animal’s digestive juices? And surely there aren’t any large whales of suitable size to be found in the Mediterranean Sea!But I have to throw one big problem back at the naysayers. In Matthew 12:40, Jesus confirms that Jonah was indeed inside the whale for three days and three nights, and then Jesus uses the event to apply to His own death and resurrection to come.The Hebrew word tannin can be translated as large sea creature, as can the Greek word ketos in the Septuagint and New Testament. Therefore, it could apply to a whale, shark or any other large sea creature.The type of creature is not as important as accepting that this event is accurate history because it is in the Bible and its authenticity is underlined by our Magnificent Creator God Himself, Jesus Christ! |
| 8/26/2023 | The strange partnership between the snapping shrimp and the goby is absolutely necessary if both creatures are to survive. The nearly blind shrimp relies on the goby, a small fish, in the same way a blind person relies on his Seeing Eye dog. The goby relies on the safety of the complex tunnel system the shrimp digs.The shrimp is well designed for digging. Once a tunnel is started, the shrimp can dig a burrow large enough for both itself and the goby within a few hours. Each of its five pairs of legs is specialized. The first pair of claws is designed for carrying sediment out of the burrow. The second pair of legs is designed to probe for and clean objects as well as scratching sediment from walls. Pairs three, four and five are walking legs that also work well for scratching material from tunnel walls. On its abdomen, the shrimp has several appendages that allow it to move rapidly to protection. Other appendages can create water currents that shift sand back from the digging site.The snapping shrimp, which is less than two inches long, can dig a system of tunnels covering several square feet within a few days. The burrow will have several entrances, as much as four feet apart. All lead to a chamber at the deepest point of the system.Our Magnificent Creator God has given both the goby and the shrimp different gifts that they both need to live. If they did not share their gifts with each other, neither could survive. |
| 8/25/2023 | The conventional understanding has always been that North America was populated by people who crossed from Asia to Alaska via the Bering Strait and then migrated down the West Coast. Eventually, some of them crossed as far as the eastern coasts of North and South America. Known as the Clovis culture, their descendants produced all the North and South American Indian tribes and nations. The Clovis sites that have been excavated so far have produced distinctive spear points that have become known as Clovis points.That understanding has now been challenged by finds in Virginia. Signs of human habitation have been found at Cactus Hill, which is 45 miles south of Richmond. Researchers have dated the site to be fifty percent older than any known Clovis excavation. Stone points and blades have been found at Cactus Hill which show wear marks typical of hide scraping and butchering. The points and blades are unlike any known Clovis points. However, they do resemble western European blades and points from the same period. These facts have led some researchers to conclude that the site is evidence that ancient Europeans crossed the Atlantic Ocean to begin a settlement in North America. This was long, long before the time of the Vikings or Columbus.When God made Adam and Eve, and again, after the Genesis Flood, God commanded human beings to “fill the earth.” More and more we find evidences that early man obeyed this commandment from our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 8/24/2023 | Late at night, in hundreds of thousands of homes around the country, people are watching a bewildering array of monster movies. In these films, shadowy and not-so-shadowy monsters attack, possess or inhabit their victims. These stories are make-believe. However, in our real world, there is a fungus that does all these things.These fungi grow in and on the bodies of insects. They begin their work when a single fungus spore lands on the body of an insect. The spore germinates by growing thread-like filaments through a weak spot or some other entry point in the insect’s outer shell. Once inside the insect, these thread-like filaments grow into the insect’s nervous system. Scientists have been amazed by the apparent fact that the fungus then seems to take over the insect, actually controlling its movements. It seems that the fungus directs its victim to climb a convenient plant to a height that will make the next generation of spores likely to land on another unsuspecting insect. It is there that the insect dies and the fungus produces its spores.To the evolutionist, the ability of such a so-called “low” form of life to possess and control a more evolved form of life is totally without explanation. To those of us who believe in creation, intelligence is not a matter of evolution. Intelligence is the gift of a Magnificent Creator God. Only He has all intelligence and wisdom. There are no limits to His creativity as He provides His creatures with ways to proclaim Himself as their Creator. |
| 8/23/2023 | Roman Vishniac is a renowned photographer of microscopic scenes. One of his favorite subjects is one of the so-called simplest forms of life. This “simple” life, the protozoan, is supposedly the ancestor of all living things. However, Vishniac has noted that the protozoan is neither simple nor archaic in character. This creature carries out all the functions of life that we require millions of cells to sustain – all within a single cell.There is a parallel in technology. The first adding machines were large and heavy contraptions. As these mechanical adding machines became smaller, they had to be more cleverly designed because they were smaller. The first electronic calculators were even smaller and lighter than their mechanical brothers. But they were still much larger and simpler than calculators today. As calculators have decreased in size, they have had to be more cleverly designed because they are smaller.Vishniac has learned that the so-called “simple” one-celled creatures are not simple at all. This is because they must carry out the business of life within the limits of their small size. This has not swayed him from evolution. However, this fact has convinced him that current theories are wrong. You see, evolution is in trouble if there are no “simple” forms of life. We believe that this clear evidence that there are no simple forms of life – evidence powerful enough to sway the experts – supports the Bible’s claim that all forms of life were created in finished form by a wise Magnificent Creator God! |
| 8/22/2023 | Have you ever wondered why it is that ducks can spend all day in near-freezing water, and it doesn’t seem to bother them? For that matter, birds never seem to be bothered about cold feet. If we ran around in the ice and snow with bare feet, it wouldn’t be very long before we had a good case of frostbite. So why don’t birds need socks?Birds have a network of arteries that take the blood down to their feet. These arteries are interwoven with the veins that return the blood from the feet. This network of arteries and veins is called a “wonder net.” The blood going down the arteries is hot at 106 degrees, but the temperature of the blood returning in the veins may be as cool as 37 degrees as it leaves the foot. The warm blood reheats the cold blood coming from the foot before it enters the body. The result is that the bird loses very little body heat, and the blood going into the foot never becomes dangerously cold in normal winter weather.The wisdom of this design is obvious. Could birds have survived having their feet frozen off before they learned to evolve this special arrangement? Hardly! The most reasonable conclusion is that there is a Magnificent Creator God Who cares for all His creation, including you and me! |
| 8/21/2023 | The exotic Venus flytrap is an insect-catching plant and a wonder of God’s engineering. For example, these meat-eating plants usually live in mineral-poor soils, but by catching their own lunch, they actually provide their own fertilizer.Up until now, scientists have not fully understood what causes the trap of the flytrap to close so rapidly on its victim. They knew that when an insect trips the little trigger hairs inside the trap, those hairs send an electric impulse to the cells on the outside of the trap.Now it has been learned that this impulse almost instantly causes the outer cells of the trap to secrete acid. The acid breaks down the cell walls and they expand at high speed, causing the trap to close. The more the insect fights the trap, the more tightly it closes. Six to twelve hours later, after lunch is digested, the trap receives chemical signals from inside – the carnivorous plant’s version of a burp – and opens to await the next meal.The Venus flytrap is a glowing example of what Scripture is talking about when it says that the works of the Lord are manifold – that He has made so much variety and so many ways of providing for living things. Truly, our Magnificent Creator God’s imagination and creativity are a wonder to behold! |
| 8/20/2023 | There’s an old saying that people seldom remember how rapidly the job was done, but they do appreciate good workmanship. However, the staggering variety and number of things created by God did not limit the elegance of His fine workmanship.The relationship between the snapping shrimp and a fish called the goby is a good example of the Creator’s attention to the finest detail. The snapping shrimp has very poor eyesight, while the goby has excellent eyesight. Both share the same burrow, which is dug by the shrimp and guarded by the goby.The shrimp uses the goby as a blind person uses a Seeing Eye dog. Whenever the shrimp is outside its burrow, it always keeps one antenna on the goby. The shrimp stays hidden inside the burrow if the goby should temporarily swim away. When danger approaches, the goby signals and disappears inside the burrow. The shrimp is right behind him.Neither the goby nor the shrimp can survive without each other, so pairs are established for life when both goby and shrimp are very young. In order for this system to work, both goby and shrimp reproductive systems, which differ greatly, are synchronized so that shrimp and goby youngsters are ready to pair at the same time.This astonishing relationship shows us how our Magnificent Creator God’s standards of excellence bring His love to every corner of the creation. |
| 8/19/2023 | Roman Vishniac is a renowned photographer of microscopic scenes. One of his favorite subjects is one of the so-called simplest forms of life. This “simple” life, the protozoan, is supposedly the ancestor of all living things.However, Vishniac has noted that the protozoan is neither simple nor archaic in character. This creature carries out all the functions of life that we require millions of cells to sustain—all within a single cell.There is a parallel in technology. The first adding machines were large and heavy contraptions. As these mechanical adding machines became smaller, they had to be more cleverly designed because they were smaller. The first electronic calculators were even smaller and lighter than their mechanical brothers. But they were still much larger and simpler than calculators today. As calculators have decreased in size, they have had to be more cleverly designed because they are smaller.Vishniac has learned that the so-called “simple” one-celled creatures are not simple at all. This is because they must carry out the business of life within the limits of their small size. This has not swayed him from evolution. However, this fact has convinced him that current theories are wrong. You see, evolution is in trouble if there are no “simple” forms of life.We believe that this clear evidence that there are no simple forms of life—evidence powerful enough to sway the experts—supports the Bible’s claim that all forms of life were created in finished form by a wise Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 8/18/2023 | The bombardier beetle has a powerful and complex system for protecting himself from enemies. Glands within the beetle produce a mixture of two hydroquinone compounds and hydrogen peroxide. These chemicals must be held in separate chambers because when they come into contact with each other, they react. When the beetle is threatened, the chemicals are mixed in a third chamber, where a third chemical is added and an explosive reaction takes place. This reaction forces the caustic solution out through a special “nozzle.” The beetle is skilled in aiming this nozzle at its enemy.If this system is missing any of its parts, it is more than worthless to the beetle; the chemicals alone are very dangerous. So this sophisticated defense system could not have evolved in stages. Imagine the poor beetle who evolved the ability to produce the chemicals but hadn’t yet evolved the right chambers to mix them without blowing itself up. The first time he became alarmed – poof! – no more beetle at all!The bombardier beetle is such a problem for evolutionists that many of them have challenged claims that an explosion takes place. The fact is, the beetle can give you a nasty burn. Even the popular magazine Science Digest explained the bombardier beetle’s defense with the words “explosive reaction.”Clearly, the bombardier beetle is excellent evidence that creatures were originally created in finished form by a wise Magnificent Creator God, without the need for stages of improvement. |
| 8/17/2023 | Perhaps to get evolutionists to rethink their beliefs, the Creator has provided many inventive and unique structures. There are so many of these that even the longest evolutionary timescale could not account for their evolution.Let’s focus on a few examples among frogs for a moment. Frogs need to keep their eggs moist. Water must be available for their tadpoles. Frogs have many different ways of doing this.The Venezuelan marsupial frog has a skin pouch, just like a kangaroo, except hers is on her back. The female marsupial frog stores her eggs in the pouch. There is plenty of moisture and protection in her pouch for the young frogs. When they are mature, the skin pouch sort of unzips, and out come up to 20 young frogs!The Brazilian tree frog uses a completely different approach. This frog actually builds a pool of mud, near a pond, in which it lays its eggs. This pool is usually built so that by the time the eggs have developed into strong tadpoles, the regular tropical rains wash the pool, along with the swimming tadpoles, into the pond!In Job 38:36, the Lord asks Job, “Who has put wisdom in the mind?” It is obvious to us that only the Lord, the Magnificent Creator God of heaven and earth, could have given frogs these abilities and this knowledge. And it is just as clear that it is nonsense to say that chance and time made these frogs and their abilities. |
| 8/16/2023 | Beavers are widely known for their huge constructions. However, beavers build more than just dams.The beaver is quite an engineer. When building a dam, a beaver first rams poles into the bed of his waterway. The poles are placed on an angle to increase holding power and are then rammed into the waterway bed, thick end first. This basic skeleton is then reinforced with twigs, leaves, mud and stone. It’s not unusual for the beaver to use forked branches to further anchor his construction to trees and boulders.One beaver dam was over 1,800 feet long, 9 feet high and 18 feet wide. It was strong enough for a horse and rider to use as a natural bridge.Large trees brought down for use in construction are not dragged by the beavers to their project. Instead, beavers dig overland channels and float the trees to the main body of water where they are working. These channels can be 1,000 feet long.Our wise Magnificent Creator God gave so much intelligence and wisdom to the animal kingdom that often we can learn some things from the animals. Rather than supporting the idea of evolution, with its claim that there is progressively greater intelligence in higher creatures, the beaver supports the idea that the Creator is the source of all intelligence. |
| 8/15/2023 | Imagine a beetle that can move across the surface of water without any body movement. Some creatures have been given such ability and skill that it should be clear to even the most skeptical person that their Maker and Teacher is greater than any human being.One such creature is the large-eyed rove beetle. Like many other insects, this beetle can walk on water. The surface tension of the water is enough to support the beetle on top of the water, given the special structure of his legs and feet. Should you see the large-eyed rove beetle, you will notice that he moves across the water, stops, turns, and starts up again without moving any part of his body. How does this work?The large-eyed rove beetle has special glands that produce a chemical – something like detergent – that changes the surface tension of the water. When the surface tension of the water near his back feet is different from the surface tension of the water near his front feet, the beetle is pulled forward.Such a unique method of movement requires sophisticated knowledge of both hydrodynamics and chemistry. Since the beetle is obviously not that smart, it is no wonder that evolutionists often speak of evolution as though it were intelligent and able to create such wonders. However, it makes a lot more sense to talk about a wise, personal Magnificent Creator God than it does to speak of the wisdom of a mindless force like evolution. |
| 8/14/2023 | Intelligence – as much as is needed and no more – is generously found throughout the creation. So we cannot say that intelligence alone makes humans special.Consider the weaverbird. The weaverbird nest consists of woven strips of fiber and grass. Using beak and feet, the male weaverbird uses both loops and knots to weave his hanging nest. Then the nest must be inspected by a prospective mate. If she doesn’t like the nest’s construction, she will turn down the hopeful mate. The male must then tear down his work and start over. Some males have been observed constructing and tearing down their nests two dozen times before finding a prospective mate who is satisfied with his work. Some weaverbirds actually build huge cities of nests protected by a woven roof. One roof over a weaverbird city was 15 feet across!Human intelligence spans much more than animal intelligence. However, what sets us apart from animals is the fact that our Magnificent Creator God made us to have a special relationship with Him. And even when Adam and Eve placed their will above God’s Word, He still loved us enough to pay the highest price to restore us to Himself. Jesus Christ lived in perfect obedience to God for us and then suffered the penalty of our disobedience against God. In His resurrection from the dead, all those who embrace Christ in faith receive the promise of being made new creations again – beginning right here in this life! That’s the wide gulf between humans and animals! |
| 8/13/2023 | The Aye-Aye is one of the strangest little monkeys on earth. Its peculiar features bear witness that it was specially designed and created to fill a unique niche in nature, not a chance development of evolution.The Aye-Aye lives in Madagascar. This small creature has huge ears and an extra long middle finger. It crawls on trees, tapping on them to find grubs. The Aye-Aye’s ears are so sensitive that it can tell if there is a grub hole hidden beneath the surface of the wood. Not only can the Aye-Aye sense a grub hole an inch within the wood, it can even tell if there is a grub in the hole. When the Aye-Aye senses a grub, it chews into the wood with forward curving, incisor teeth. However, the Aye-Aye doesn’t have to worry about wearing its teeth down chewing on the tough wood. Its special incisor teeth are unique among primates. They continue to grow throughout the Aye-Aye’s life, just like a rodent’s teeth. Once down to the grub, it uses its elongated middle finger to fish the grub out for lunch. Researchers have noted that the Aye-Aye fills the same niche as the woodpecker in an environment where there are no woodpeckers.The Aye-Aye has clearly been specially designed with unique features so that it can make its living in a niche that is unfilled in its own environment. Our Magnificent Creator God not only made the earth to be inhabited, He designed His creatures to make a living within it!!! |
| 8/12/2023 | Dinosaur fossil hunters and paleontologists have long debated whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or cold-blooded. With reptile characteristics, it was expected that dinosaurs would be cold-blooded. Yet, some evidence indicated that they must have been warm-blooded. The problem is that their soft organs are almost never fossilized.The words “almost never” are important. A dinosaur liver and diaphragm – the soft parts – were recently found fossilized. Fossilization of soft organs is a testimony to the rapidity with which the dinosaurs were encased in the mud that later hardened to rock. Now a fossilized dinosaur heart has been discovered in South Dakota within the chest cavity of a fossilized Thescelosaurus. Once researchers recognized that the stone within the chest cavity might be a heart, they x-rayed it. X-rays revealed a four-chambered heart with one aorta. Reptiles have two aortas. In other words, Thescelosaurus had a heart constructed like the hearts of warm-blooded animals. This kind of heart is more efficient in delivering oxygen to the body. This in turn supports a more active lifestyle and higher metabolic rates. Based on the structure of Thescelosaurus’s heart, many scientists have concluded that it was indeed warm-blooded.The same Magnificent Creator God who made the dinosaur’s heart is able to heal our hearts when they are broken by sorrow. It is He Who heals our broken hearts through the forgiveness of sins that is found in Jesus Christ. |
| 8/11/2023 | “Survival of the fittest” is an essential principle of evolution. This principle has not only been applied to animals, but also to human beings, as a social theory.Scientists, however, are learning that cooperation among animals is more often the rule. Researchers studied seven pairs of unrelated capuchin monkeys in the lab to see if they would cooperate. The monkey pairs were then placed in an enclosure, one on each side of a mesh screen. Two clear bowls of apple slices were placed on trays designed to be accessible to the monkeys when they pulled on a bar.However, the acquired food would be given only to one of the monkeys. When the bar was set so that both monkeys had to pull on it to get the food, the monkey that received the food shared with his helper. When the bar was set so that one monkey could access the apple slices, he generally didn’t share. Clearly, the monkey who came into control of the food with help, felt that it was his duty to reward his helper. Instead of talking about “survival of the fittest,” one researcher spoke about the “deep evolutionary roots of cooperation.” Unfortunately for evolutionary scientists, real science very often gives good evidence that contradicts the theory of evolution, but we seldom hear of this.Our Magnificent Creator God has designed the creation so that we sometimes need help, or have the opportunity to help others. He did this to remind us that He is our ultimate Helper!!! |
| 8/10/2023 | Bees depend on a good memory of their surroundings to make the thousands of trips necessary to keep their hive in operation. Each day a single bee must make trips to hundreds of flowers, some as far as a mile from the hive. Scientists have long wondered how the tiny bee can remember what may be dozens of square miles of territory.When a bee finds a good source of nectar, she returns to the hive and does a dance for the other bees. This dance tells them where a new find is located. Researchers have studied this in detail and can now interpret these dances.Researchers from Princeton University tricked a bee into dancing out a location that turned out to be in the middle of a nearby lake. After receiving the message, the other members of the hive simply ignored their fellow worker. She kept dancing, but no one would believe her. Only later, when the dance clearly said that the flowers were on the opposite side of the lake, did the other bees pay attention and check out the flowers.Researchers are now wondering whether bees keep a mental map of their surroundings. How else could they tell when someone gives them a false location? Evolutionary researchers are trying to figure out how such an “evolutionarily simple” creature as the bee could be so intelligent. However, the Bible makes clear that intelligence is not related to evolution. It is the gift of an all-wise and Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 8/9/2023 | When we compare ourselves with many of the other living things on this Earth, our abilities are not very impressive.A camel can carry 1,000 pounds 30 miles through the desert every day. As a human being, I become tired even thinking about walking 30 miles with empty pockets. The ostrich can run at 30 miles per hour, faster than my car might go during rush hour. The Indian swift can fly at more than 100 miles per hour. The elephant’s trunk has 40,000 muscles. This is 70 times the number of muscles in your entire body. Yet, his trunk can bulldoze a tree or pick up a pin. Many of us can’t do either one on the first try.The flea can jump 350 times its own length, a total of 13 inches. This is equivalent to our jumping 2,000 feet into the air. Most of us can’t jump more than two feet off the ground. As it works out, 13 inches is just about right if you are looking for a nice warm dog on which to raise a family. A tiny insect called the midge beats its wings an amazing 133,000 times per minute. That’s a hundred times faster than you can blink your eye.Humans can use their superior intellect to build the machines they need. With those machines, they can outdo any one of these creatures. But God simply made a gift to the animals of the specialized abilities they needed. God expects us to follow His example and design and build what we need. If we look carefully, we will see that our Magnificent Creator God has given us all the materials and all the ideas we need within the creation. No one can say that He does not care what we do with our lives on Earth. |
| 8/8/2023 | Most mammals in Australia are marsupials. That is one of the things that makes Australia so special to those of us elsewhere in the world who may never have been there. Think of Australia, and most of us think of kangaroos, koalas, and wombats. Placentals, like rats and rabbits, are normally pests, introduced in colonial times.Yet, there is one placental mammal that is associated with Australia, as a typical wild animal. That is the wild dog known as the dingo. Dingoes are widespread across the continent. There are not many competitors to the dingo, as carnivores. Dingoes can, therefore, be a problem for livestock but are also considered useful in their depredation on rabbits.It appears genetically that dingoes contain the mDNA haplotype A29. MDNA refers to mitochondrial DNA, always inherited from the mother, while a haplotype indicates a group of genes inherited from a single parent. Therefore, it can be assumed that all dingoes are descended from a single female. Of course, we know that, biblically, this will apply to all kinds of animals, but in the case of dingoes, this would appear to be a good deal more recent, generationally, than the animals which emerged from the Ark. This first dingo probably came from SE Asia, and was likely brought to Australia with human migration because the same haplotype is found in 70% of domestic dogs.This makes dingoes a case study in miniature of how populations of animals could quickly migrate and establish their place in eco-systems after the Flood and we owe all wonders of creation to our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 8/7/2023 | The human body, according to medical science, contains 37 trillion cells that reproduce themselves every seven years. Each one of the 37 trillion cells performs 10,000 different chemical functions, according to the late Dr. Ralph Byron of the City of Hope Cancer Clinic, yet all of them just work together to produce a healthy body.When you get tired, you cannot say, “All right, cell number 843,291, get to work. You are not pulling your share of the load.” All of these cells are linked together by nerve cells tied into a brain containing 100 billion cells (give or take a few). I hesitate to say that these 100 billion nerve cells are tied into a computer‑like device called the human brain since the human brain is far superior to any computer ever created. The eminent neuroscientist Moshe Abeles of Bar-Ilan University in Israel says, “Our ability to understand all the details of even one brain is practically zero.”Only our Magnificent Creator God in all of His brilliance and magnificence could have thought up such a complex piece of creation!!! |
| 8/6/2023 | Modern researchers are learning that bacteria are not a simple form of life. Rather, a bacterium is a tremendously complex creature that thinks. Scientists have discovered that bacteria actually have molecule-sized sensors. Some of these sensors act as eyes, while others act as ears. A dozen other proteins have been discovered that receive the information gathered by the bacteria’s “eyes” and “ears.” The collected information is then processed the same way your brain gathers and makes sense of information.Bacteria have specialized senses and a brain. In fact, bacteria are better at sensing some things than you and I are. A bacterium can, for example, sense the difference between two parts and one part in 10,000. This is the same as if you could tell the difference between one jar with 9,999 pennies and another jar with 10,000 pennies!The idea that bacteria are just “simple” forms of life comes from evolution. Growing research is showing that even one-celled creatures are not simple at all. Think of it. Every single-celled bacterium must accomplish, within that one cell, all the tasks we accomplish using the trillions of cells in our bodies. Eating, digestion, metabolism, waste removal, reproduction – and even thinking – all take place within a single cell! There is no such thing as a simple form of life.Science certainly argues against the idea that life began by accident. What science is learning urges us to think about the wise and thoughtful Magnificent Creator God Who made us!!! |
| 8/5/2023 | Previously we discussed the fact that the famous scientist and mathematician Isaac Newton believed Genesis to be a true book. We would probably not want to follow Newton’s theological beliefs, given that they were Arian in nature, but it is not often realized that Newton wrote extensively on the subject of history. His views on history were broadly the same as those of Archbishop James Ussher, whose calculations Newton endorsed.The significance of Newton’s historical writings is that he compared biblical timescales to those of other nations and peoples. He started with an important presupposition – that the biblical timescale is correct. He then proceeded into a great deal of detail about historical chronologies, showing that the comparison with a biblical timescale makes sense and works. Newton went to a great deal of effort to describe his calculations for four key dates: the birth of Lycurgus (708 BC), the return of Heraclides (825 BC), the Fall of Troy (904 BC), and the Argonaut (933 BC). He tied in these dates with biblical dates, relating them, for example, to the death of King Solomon in 975 BC.It is notable that Newton’s chronologies do not agree with many of the modern chronologies which are used to undermine faith in the Bible. For example, it is often said that the dating of the Egyptian Pharaohs cannot be reconciled with a biblical timescale. Newton was, however, familiar with these non-biblical timescales and argues strongly and convincingly for the biblical approach.Newton’s writings are not Gospel. But when such a noted figure of genius produces calculations which are consistent with the Bible’s presentation of the works of our Magnificent Creator God, it is time that people took notice. |
| 8/4/2023 | Scientists are learning that even the lowly bacteria have mind and memory. New research is showing that mind, memory, brain, and personality did not evolve. These can be found in the lowliest of creatures, including the bacteria.Another sign of intelligence in a life form is the ability to learn. Using attracting and repelling substances, scientists have found that bacteria can learn about their surroundings and draw conclusions. Follow-up tests showed that they later remember what they learned. Scientists have even found that younger bacteria learn better than older ones. If some things are not learned when young, they never can be learned! It seems that it’s hard to teach an old bacterium new tricks!The biggest surprise of all came when scientists discovered that bacteria have what the researchers called individual personality. They are mystified about how bacteria, each with the same genetic structure and from the same environment, can develop unique quirks in behavior. Because we find individual personality even in the lowly bacteria, we know that did not evolve.That God would give even a bacterium the gift of personality shows us something about His mind toward us. Nothing is so small or unimportant that it escapes His attention. Since He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to rescue us from the decay that is in the world because of sin, there is no force too great for Him to overcome. Surely He is a Magnificent Creator God of details as well as a God of love, Who is concerned about every individual among us. |
| 8/3/2023 | Many plants reproduce simply by cloning. The most obvious example of cloning that comes to mind is the dandelion. Unless you get all of the main dandelion root out of the ground, each piece of the root can sprout another dandelion, identical to the parent.The walking fern reproduces by cloning too. It moves across the countryside, albeit slowly, by producing new plants. A new plant is generated wherever the tips of its leaves touch the ground. Each new plant is identical to the parent.The bamboo reproduces through underground stems. The different species of bamboo live anywhere from 20 to 120 years. During their life spans, they produce only by cloning. Then they flower – once. When it’s time for a particular species to flower, every member of that species, no matter where in the world it grows, flowers gloriously. Each flower can have as many as 100 pollen-producing stamens. Once the seeds are ripe and scattered, every member of that species in the world dies. At this point, the entire species exists only in the scattered seeds.This is brilliant testimony to a recent creation of all bamboos at the same time. If evolution produced them and the forces of change worked on them for millions of years, one would think that all members of the same species would no longer be in perfect synchronization. Bamboo makes a strong testimony for the recent creation reported in Genesis by our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 8/2/2023 | Many plants, especially orchids, offer different ploys to fool insects into pollinating them. Each of these ploys shows planning, design and the ability to create the design that will work. That there are so many examples makes it impossible for any rational person to believe that mindless, impersonal forces could have made these plants.Four different groups of orchids produce flowers that look so much like the female of the insect that pollinates them that pollinators will try to mate with them. The Brassia orchid found in southern Florida produces a flower that mimics the prey of its pollinator, the spider wasp. The flower is so designed that as the wasp stings its supposed prey – really the flower – pollen is deposited on his head. The pollen is then carried to a nearby female flower and deposited in just the right place during another attack.Another orchid imitates an aggressive swarm of bees as it blows in the wind. The strongly territorial bees that live in the area swarm and attack the flowers. In the process, they transfer the pollen from male to female flowers. The female flowers of at least 50 species of Mexican orchids offer fake pollen to lure pollen-eating insects that have been feeding on male flowers. Many of these insect-orchid relationships are so tightly interlocked that neither could survive without the other.This speaks of a planned creation by our Magnificent Creator God. It also bears witness that all forms of life came into being in a relatively short time, not over millions of years as evolutionists would have it. |
| 8/1/2023 | The largest known beetle in the world is the aptly named goliath beetle. This African beetle can become almost as large as a mouse. Dinosaurs were not the largest animals ever to live. The great blue whale holds that honor. The smallest mammal in the world is smaller than many insects. A newly discovered species of bat in Thailand weighs only six one-hundredths of an ounce.Such extremes might lead some to wonder whether those giant insects we see in the movies would ever develop. Could a spider grow to be as large as a house?You will be happy to know that no spider or any other insect could grow as large as a house. We can be sure of this because of the way insects breathe. Insects breathe through small tubes along their bodies. These tubes provide oxygen directly to their internal tissues. If an insect were to grow too large, these tubes could not get enough oxygen to the tissues. This is because the larger the creature, the more internal living tissue that requires oxygen. You and I have lungs that provide a network of surfaces equal to the size of a tennis court. An insect our size would need a body that has the surface area of a tennis court, too, which is an impossibility.Even though different creatures have different organs to supply their needs, each creature has just the right organs for its needs. This is a sign of our Magnificent Creator God’s wisdom. This fact also tells us that living things are not related to each other by evolution. |
| 7/31/2023 | Researchers are learning that bacteria have senses similar to our hearing and sight. Bacteria even have a brain that receives information from their senses. They can make decisions. However, all of this is not enough to explain how bacteria can make the decision to swim toward food.When you want a candy bar, you know where to find one, even if you must go to the nearest store. You might also hope that your dentist doesn’t see you buying candy. All of this involves memory, which has long been considered a basic part of the mind.Researchers, using various solutions of substances that attract or repel bacteria, have now learned that bacteria do indeed have both long-term and short-term memories. They remember where goodies are to be found. Once a bacterium develops a strategy for dealing with the unknown, it will remember what to do next time.This finding shocked researchers. They know that when you or I decide to retreat or advance, at least hundreds and probably thousands of brain cells are involved. The one-celled bacteria can make the same decision based on past memories. Are there really “simple” forms of life that serve as the living traces of evolutionary development? Scientists haven’t found any yet. According to the Bible’s account of creation by our Magnificent Creator God, we don’t expect them to find any simple forms of life from which we can be traced. |
| 7/30/2023 | How does your nose work? Medical researchers admit that they don’t know. Your nose performs an extremely unlikely job. It senses invisible molecules in the air and turns each molecule into a unique sensation that is sent to the brain. If the fact that molecules floating in the air could be detected was a modern discovery, it would be hailed as the scientific discovery of the century!Medical researchers do know that the roof of your nose cavity contains about 10 million cells that are wired directly into the brain. The nervous system that connects your olfactory cells to your brain is so large and complex that its surface area is several times greater than the surface area of your body. Researchers also know that your sense of smell is important to your sense of taste. For example, that’s why – when you have a head cold – chocolate tastes like a flavorless waxy paste. In this case, what you taste in your mouth has more to do with what is happening in your nose than on your tongue.Many creatures, including birds, can sense odors. Farmers who had difficulty with birds eating as much as 20 percent of the food set out in feed lots discovered that birds hate the smell of grapes. When they laced the feed with grape scent, the birds left it alone, but the cattle didn’t seem to mind.Every detail in the creation of everything that has ever existed was planned and created by our Magnificent Creator God who knew that no detail was too small!!! |
| 7/29/2023 | What keeps the big-bodied bumblebee with those little, stubby wings in the air? Scientists are still trying to learn the secret of bumblebee flight. And while they are learning some astonishing things about the bumblebee, they still don’t know how he does it.Scientists have been testing bumblebees by monitoring their energy use, placing them in wind tunnels, and measuring their oxygen use. No, they haven’t been able to make little oxygen masks for the bees – bumblebees have 24 breathing holes.Scientists have learned that a flying bumblebee flaps its wings 160 times per second and consumes the equivalent of 180 candy bars per hour! A flying bee uses the same amount of oxygen for its body weight as a flying bird or a bat. However, unlike birds, the bumblebee uses no more oxygen when hovering than when flying. This is only one of the discoveries that contradict scientists’ theories. In fact, the director of the latest studies on bumblebee flight admits that they still have no idea how the bumblebee stays in the air. He warns other scientists to stop using the current theories on the subject because they are far too simple.Of course, our Magnificent Creator God knows how to make a bumblebee fly, even if the best of modern science can’t figure it out. This should help us to see that when scientists tell us they have figured out how everything could have been made without a Creator, they don’t know what they’re talking about.In His great magnificence God did it and that’s all there is to it!!! |
| 7/28/2023 | There are at least four known types of orchids that effectively pretend to be female insects. They are so good at this ruse that they attract the attentions of male pollinators. That there are four different varieties that do this makes it clear that this trickery isn’t due to chance. The Creator does not want us to make the mistake of thinking that He doesn’t exist.The Ophrys group of orchids are found around the Mediterranean. Ophrys orchids produce flowers that look and smell so much like the insect that pollinates it, the male insect will mate with the flower. In the process, he picks up the pollen. The pollen is then carried to another flower, thus ensuring the next generation. The flowers even mimic the sheen of the female’s wings, the furry fringe on her abdomen, and her antennae.The Cryptostylus orchid, found in New Guinea and Australia, mimics the female of the wasp that pollinates it. The Cryptostylus does this so perfectly that it even moves as a mating female. The same is true of an orchid found in the Andes that is pollinated by a particular species of fly through the same ruse.Our Magnificent Creator God has much more in mind than just letting us know that He is. He wants us to see that He is intimately involved with His creatures. Through the perfect life of Jesus Christ, and His suffering, death and resurrection, He has removed the final barriers between us and Himself. With the barrier of sin removed by forgiveness, He may be even more intimately involved with each of us on a personal basis. |
| 7/27/2023 | Two groups of tropical vines rely for reproduction on the world’s only known species of pollen-eating butterfly. Neither vine has very showy flowers, nor do their flowers have any scent. However, they don’t need to attract pollinators because the Heliconius butterfly depends on the pollen produced by the vines for its food. So the butterflies don’t go far from their food source.Since the butterfly depends on the pollen, the vines produce many more male flowers than female. This keeps its army of pollinators well fed. Being messy eaters, the butterflies end up with pollen all over them.But what would attract the butterfly to the female flower, which can be up to 20 feet away? Two tricks are used. First, a female flower usually grows close to where a male flower has just withered. Second, the female flower, while producing no pollen, looks just like the male flower to invite the butterfly’s attention.Did you see the intelligence in this arrangement? If only chance were involved, why would the only known species of pollen-eating butterfly be found with the only known vines that rely on their services? This is a very big planet! If there is no design in this arrangement, why should these vines offer female flowers that look like the males so that they will be pollinated? It is so clear that these butterflies were custom-made for these vines, and the vines were made for the butterflies. This is a witness to a personal Magnificent Creator God Who is personally involved in life on Earth! |
| 7/26/2023 | When lost in the forest with no clues to where to go, humans tend to go in circles. And we have brains. Amoebas, which don’t have brains, somehow manage not to end up going in circles when they have no clues where to go.Normally, amoebas look for food by picking up its scent. When amoebas detect something good to eat, they move in its direction by extending parts of its body called pseudopods. However, when there are no scents to follow, many single-celled creatures tend to wander aimlessly. This turns out to be a very inefficient strategy for finding food. That’s because, just like humans, they end up wandering in circles. But after careful study, researchers from Princeton University have concluded that amoebas somehow manage to avoid this problem. Somehow, though they have no brain, they appear to remember where they have been. They suggest that forming pseudopods causes a type of temporary scarring on its cell wall which serves as a type of memory.While amoebas are just looking for food, we ultimately seek an eternity with our Creator. Many people do not know of, or do not believe our Magnificent Creator God’s Word and end up with lives that wander in spiritual circles. But God’s Word brings heaven’s light into our lives which lights the way to heaven through our Lord Jesus Christ. |
| 7/25/2023 | Bees depend on a good memory of their surroundings to make the thousands of trips necessary to keep their hive in operation. Each day a single bee must make trips to hundreds of flowers, some as far as a mile from the hive. Scientists have long wondered how the tiny bee can remember what may be dozens of square miles of territory.When a bee finds a good source of nectar, she returns to the hive and does a dance for the other bees. This dance tells them where a new find is located. Researchers have studied this in detail and can now interpret these dances.Researchers from Princeton University tricked a bee into dancing out a location that turned out to be in the middle of a nearby lake. After receiving the message, the other members of the hive simply ignored their fellow worker. She kept dancing, but no one would believe her. Only later, when the dance clearly said that the flowers were on the opposite side of the lake, did the other bees pay attention and check out the flowers.Researchers are now wondering whether bees keep a mental map of their surroundings. How else could they tell when someone gives them a false location? Evolutionary researchers are trying to figure out how such an “evolutionarily simple” creature as the bee could be so intelligent. However, the Bible makes clear that intelligence is not related to evolution. It is the gift of an all-wise Magnificent Creator God. |
| 7/24/2023 | Perhaps no type of animal has been used more in biological research than the fruit fly. Certain biological processes such as reproduction or genetic replication are similar in most eukaryote organisms, so observing these in fruit flies might, unlikely as it may seem, have implications for how the processes work in humans. The great volume of academic research which uses the fruit fly as the subject can be seen by the fact that, to date, eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded to work involving drosophila.There are several reasons why fruit flies make useful research subjects. From the moment a fruit fly egg has been laid to the moment the adult dies is, on average, about 50 days. The adult flies can mate and lay eggs after just 10 days. This means that three generations can have been studied in a month. A year would yield 36 generations. The effects of inherited genetic problems or defects can, therefore, be analyzed within months, as can the probabilities of genetic problems being inherited by future generations.God has surely designed all that there is for our benefit to help us study and improve our lives in this world. God expects us to use His blessings to help ourselves and to not expect Him to do everything for us. We may need a hole in the ground but our Magnificent Creator God might bless us with a shovel and wisdom to know how to dig!!! |
| 7/23/2023 | Even though many frogs live much of their lives out of the water, they need water to reproduce. This can be a problem since some frogs live in trees and some even live in the desert!For a tree frog, the trip from the treetops to a nearby pool is a long and dangerous journey. However, the Creator cares about all of His creatures. The leaves of the bromeliad that grows in the branches of many trees in the tropical forest form a private pool far above the ground. As a result, mama frog can raise her young without ever leaving the treetops!The desert would seem to offer an even greater challenge for a frog. However, since it pleased the Creator to place frogs in the desert – maybe to challenge the evolutionists – He has also provided for their needs. It may rain only once every two years in the deserts of central Australia. When it does rain, the water-holding frogs emerge from their underground hideaways to lay their eggs in the puddles. Before the puddles disappear, not only do the eggs hatch, but the young grow and develop into frogs that are able to store water until the next rain. As the desert again takes over, the frogs dig themselves back into the ground and go into suspended animation until the next rains come. A year or two later, the new generation will emerge after the next rain to raise their young.Neither chance nor the smartest frog in the world could design or create these abilities. Only a wise Creator could. And if the Creator has provided this much care for frogs, just think of how much more He cares about you and me in our everyday lives! What a Magnificent Creator God He is!!! |
| 7/22/2023 | “And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” Genesis 2:19It surely wasn’t possible, we are often told, for Adam to have given names to all the millions of species of animals that exist on earth in the space of one day. Obviously, they tell us, this means that the Bible is wrong.In fact, the activity was nowhere near as arduous as this accusation suggests. The number of animals would be far less than the estimated 2 million species.Adam did not have to go looking for these animals. God brought them to him. God brought three classes of animals to Adam – livestock, birds of the heavens, and beasts of the field. All of these are vertebrates, whereas 98% of all species are invertebrates. Of the remaining 2% – or 40,000 species – many have developed from others (note: developed, not evolved) by the process of speciation. It is likely that the creatures were all descended from just a couple of thousand baramins, or created kinds.It would not be that difficult for Adam to assign a name to each of the animals that paraded before him, especially as he was created perfect, and unlikely to get tired. Suppose he took five seconds to name an animal. He could have named 2,000 animals in 2¾ hours. You might think such a task would be boring, but it was not onerous and would easily fit with all the other activities occurring on that sixth day of our Magnificent Creator God’s creation, including God making the land animals and making Eve from Adam. |
| 7/21/2023 | Modern researchers are learning that bacteria are not a simple form of life. Rather, a bacterium is a tremendously complex creature that thinks. Scientists have discovered that bacteria actually have molecule-sized sensors. Some of these sensors act as eyes, while others act as ears. A dozen other proteins have been discovered that receive the information gathered by the bacteria’s “eyes” and “ears.” The collected information is then processed the same way your brain gathers and makes sense of information.Bacteria have specialized senses and a brain. In fact, bacteria are better at sensing some things than you and I are. A bacterium can, for example, sense the difference between two parts and one part in 10,000. This is the same as if you could tell the difference between one jar with 9,999 pennies and another jar with 10,000 pennies!The idea that bacteria are just “simple” forms of life comes from evolution. Growing research is showing that even one-celled creatures are not simple at all. Think of it. Every single-celled bacterium must accomplish, within that one cell, all the tasks we accomplish using the trillions of cells in our bodies. Eating, digestion, metabolism, waste removal, reproduction – and even thinking – all take place within a single cell! There is no such thing as a simple form of life.Science certainly argues against the idea that life began by accident. What science is learning urges us to think about the wise and thoughtful Magnificent Creator God Who made us! |
| 7/20/2023 | It has long been assumed that the Siberian woolly rhinoceros died out because of hunting by people. Evolutionists have, in the past, assumed that the extinction of the woolly rhino coincided with the migration of humans to Siberia. Now a new theory has emerged, which was headlined on the Science Daily website as “Ancient genomes suggest woolly rhinos went extinct due to climate change”. Analyses of the genetic make-up of woolly rhinos have been compared with alleged evolutionary dates. As creationists, we do not accept such dates because the Bible makes it clear that the world was created about 6,000 years ago, while the Flood occurred about 4,400 years ago.However, we do agree with the article that woolly rhinos had a common ancestor with the extant five species of rhinoceros. This is not evolution; as we have frequently explained, God made animals according to their kind [baramin] so that, after the Flood, they could cope with changing environmental conditions, adapting by a process called speciation.Scientists now suggest that the end of the Ice Age could have created conditions with which the highly cold-adapted woolly rhino would not have been able to cope. The world would have gone through the Ice Age in the centuries immediately following the Flood as water vapor from warm oceans condensed in a cold atmosphere.As is always the case, good modern scientific research on issues, like the extinction of the woolly rhino, is consistent with the biblical account of the world from our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 7/19/2023 | There are five known groups of orchids that throw their pollen. These flowers are designed with mechanical flower structures that work as triggers. Some types use a bee’s back to trigger the pollen discharge. Another uses, yes, the bee’s knees.The Catasetum orchid produces a few male flowers that have a strong scent that attracts a male bee. When the bee lands and trips the pollen trigger, it is showered with that flower’s entire hope for the next generation. Then the flower stops producing any scent and begins to wither and die. Now it’s up to the bee to find a female flower for the pollen.It’s not easy for the bee to find a female flower because the Catasetum orchid produces even fewer females than males. But the female flower has an even stronger scent than the male, and it lives longer. If the bee finds a female flower, the future of this orchid is bright because the fruit that results produces three million seeds! That’s as if nearly half the population of New York City had the same mother and father!Because the designs of the Creator are carried out amid such beauty and with such careful planning, evolutionists often talk about evolution as if it were a living being. However, the truth is clear. Our Magnificent Creator God is not merely a distant God up in His heaven. Think of it for a moment. If He is so concerned about such detail even among plants and insects, how much more concerned is He about the details of our lives! |
| 7/18/2023 | Even though many frogs live much of their lives out of the water, they need water to reproduce. This can be a problem since some frogs live in trees and some even live in the desert!For a tree frog, the trip from the treetops to a nearby pool is a long and dangerous journey. However, the Creator cares about all of His creatures. The leaves of the bromeliad that grows in the branches of many trees in the tropical forest form a private pool far above the ground. As a result, mama frog can raise her young without ever leaving the treetops!The desert would seem to offer an even greater challenge for a frog. However, since it pleased the Creator to place frogs in the desert – maybe to challenge the evolutionists – He has also provided for their needs. It may rain only once every two years in the deserts of central Australia. When it does rain, the water-holding frogs emerge from their underground hideaways to lay their eggs in the puddles. Before the puddles disappear, not only do the eggs hatch, but the young grow and develop into frogs that are able to store water until the next rain. As the desert again takes over, the frogs dig themselves back into the ground and go into suspended animation until the next rains come. A year or two later, the new generation will emerge after the next rain to raise their young.Neither chance nor the smartest frog in the world could design or create these abilities. Only a wise Magnificent Creator God could. And if the Creator has provided this much care for frogs, just think of how much more He cares about you and me in our everyday lives! |
| 7/17/2023 | Hydraulic machines are part of our everyday lives. When you step on the brakes in your car, brake fluid, which cannot be compressed, is forced from a cylinder into the braking mechanism attached to your wheels. Hydraulic mechanisms work because fluid cannot expand, but it will easily flow to areas where there is less pressure.However, humans were not the first to invent uses for this principle. The spider uses it all the time. The spider has his skeleton on the outside of his body and his muscles inside his skeleton. Since our muscles are outside our skeleton, we can use muscles both to bend our legs and stretch them out. However, the spider’s arrangement allows his muscles only to bend his leg. When he wants to straighten out his leg to take another spidery step, he pumps fluid into his leg, and the leg joint hinges open.The North American dwarf mistletoe builds up hydraulic pressure equal to that found in a truck tire. It uses that stored pressure to catapult its seeds up to 50 feet at a speed close to 60 miles per hour. The squirting cucumber, found in the Mediterranean area, uses the same principle to propel its seeds up to 40 feet.Who would believe that the brake system in an automobile came together by chance and natural forces? Neither does it make sense to believe that spiders, other animals and plants came about without a Designer and Magnificent Creator God. |
| 7/16/2023 | A study by the University of Lincoln in England suggested that “global sea level rise of at least 10 centimetres by the end of the 21st century if global warming trends continue”. Their conclusions, they report, are based on 30 years of scientific data in Greenland, looking at the melting of the glaciers on that large ice-covered island. The Greenland ice sheet, say the researchers, could potentially raise the entire world’s sea level by seven meters (about 23 feet). One is reminded of a recent documentary by a well-known politician turned environmental campaigner, which started with film of rapidly running water plunging through holes in the ice of Greenland’s glaciers. The unspoken implication was that this was caused by global warming.In fact, there has been no global warming trend over the last 30 years.Global temperatures rose rapidly in the ‘90s, followed by cooling from 2000 to 2009, with temperatures only picking up again in the last few years. So the idea that the next 80 years of the 21st century will see steady temperature increases is not based on evidence.As is so often the case, we need to recall that God has promised there will be no catastrophic climate change again until the end of the world.Our Magnificent Creator God has plans for every need we will ever have!!! |
| 7/15/2023 | The old joke goes: “What’s gray and has a trunk? A mouse on vacation.” Of course, we know that this is really the description of the world’s favorite animal, the elephant.In another posting, we described Rudyard Kipling’s Just So story about the Elephant Child. But the evolutionary account of how the elephant got its trunk is not really more rational. A look at articles on Wikipedia about the evolution of the elephant reveals that they do not want to discuss the evolutionary appearance of the trunk. But the BBC was not so reticent. On their science pages, they maintain that the evolution of the trunk was essential so that the elephant could get enough food into its mouth to maintain its large size. One biological “law” suggests that the mouth and skull volumes alone are not as large as would be expected on the basis of how much elephants eat. Therefore, the trunk is necessary to get the food into the mouth faster.There are significant problems with simple evolutionary explanations like this. Does the elephant have a trunk because of its large size? In which case, why did the large trunkless elephant not die out? Or did it develop a trunk first, which caused subsequent generations to grow larger? If so, what was the supposed evolutionary advantage of that first trunk if the animal was not large? As we frequently observe, evolution is supposed to proceed one step at a time, not two!We would observe that these features of an elephant are exactly what we would expect since they are designed by our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 7/14/2023 | There are between 10,000 and 15,000 species of orchids. While you surely are not familiar with all of them, it sounds strange to talk about orchid behavior. This huge variety of orchids offers a multitude of different flower shapes, colors and sizes. Each unique shape, color and size is perfectly suited to the bees, butterflies, bats, moths, flies and birds that are involved in that orchid’s pollination.Those orchids that use birds as pollinators have no scent. Instead, they offer the brightest of colors, appealing to the birds’ strongest sense. Evolutionists call this “co-evolution.” However, giving it a name doesn’t explain it. How did these orchids know that the bird’s strongest sense is sight? And how were these orchids able to perform genetic recombination on themselves so that they could develop their bright colors? No, giving something a scientific-sounding name doesn’t make naturalistic claims any more scientific.Or consider the bee orchid. It offers a flower that looks like a female bee. The purpose here is to attract male bees to a position that will load them with pollen. How can it be scientific to suggest that a plant purposely restructured itself to fool bees into pollinating it?Our Magnificent Creator God has purposely made it impossible to explain the creation without Him. He did this not simply so that we would see that He is real. His purpose is much greater. God seeks a personal relationship with you and has made that possible through the saving work of His Son, Jesus Christ, for us. It is to Christ that He would ultimately draw our attention. |
| 7/13/2023 | It sounds silly to ask whether bacteria can think. However, science has known for more than 100 years that the little guys can indeed think. Experiments in 1883 conducted by Wilhelm Pfeffer showed that bacteria will swim toward good food like chicken soup and away from poisons such as mop disinfectant.Pfeffer also learned that bacteria can make decisions. He made sure that his bacteria knew the location of chicken soup. Then he separated them from it with a mild mixture of disinfectant. He found that the little fellows would swim as fast as they could through the disinfectant to get to the soup.This is the same type of decision-making process you and I go through every day. We often tolerate the unpleasant to arrive at the pleasant. As a result of this research, scientists today talk about bacteria actually making decisions.These conclusions amaze most people. That’s because we have been trained to think of intelligence in an evolutionary context. The “higher” or more evolved a creature is, the smarter we expect it to be. However, if we recognize, as the Bible says, that all life is the product of an intelligent Creator, we should not be surprised to find that intelligence has nothing to do with evolution. Every creature has been given as much intelligence as it needs by our Magnificent Creator God Who truly cares for every living creature – even bacteria! |
| 7/12/2023 | While the Bible teaches us that sex is a wonderful gift of God, evolutionists believe that sexual reproduction should not have evolved. According to evolutionists, if sexual reproduction were to develop, evolution is supposed to get rid of it.To make matters worse, immobile plants use sexual reproduction. This creates a problem in transferring the male genes to the female for fertilization. Just to confound things even more, God uses insects and even mammals to transfer the pollen. Since evolutionists believe that plants were around for many millions of years before animals, evolutionists have yet another problem.The European family of the Arum lilies attracts beetles and flies. When one of the insects lands on a flower, he finds a slick, oil-coated surface and ends up sliding down into a chamber filled with small hairs. Imprisoned, he finds a sweet sap that makes good eating. While he is gorging himself on the sap and getting sticky in the process, the male part of the flower showers him with pollen. The next day, the sticky, pollen-coated insect finds that the doors to his prison are open. So he flies off to another flower to unwittingly deliver his load of pollen!It sounds like science fiction to say that a flower figured out how to do this. And it certainly doesn’t sound very scientific to say that nobody designed and made this complex arrangement. As we learn more about these arrangements in nature, it becomes even more clear that an all-wise Magnificent Creator God designed these beautiful, symbiotic relationships between different members of the living kingdom. |
| 7/11/2023 | The Willow Warbler is a fascinating little bird. It weighs less than half an ounce and measures about four inches from its beak to the tip of its tail. It likes open woodland with small trees and is particularly happy in areas managed by humans, such as coppices and young plantations. An attractive little bird, it is greenish-brown from above, with a yellowish underside. Willow Warblers are part of the Leaf Warbler, or Phylloscopus baramin (or created kind). There are 77 species in this baramin, but we are interested here in the species Phylloscopus trochilu, especially the subspecies Phylloscopus trochilus yakutensi. This remarkable little bird has the most incredible migratory behavior, traveling about 7,500 miles.Between April and August, the birds live and breed in eastern Siberia. But as the breeding season ends, the birds begin their long, exhausting flight to sub Saharan Africa, where they will spend the winter, from October through March. Then they begin the 7,500-mile journey back to Siberia. That’s 15,000 miles per year!The reason why these warblers migrate seems clear. They do not like the extremes of temperatures in either of their homes. But a more interesting question is: How do they know where to migrate?Scientists have speculated that migratory birds are able to sense the Earth’s magnetic field. But those scientists who believe in evolution have to explain how the birds used trial and error to find their routes. A more logical explanation is that our Magnificent Creator God designed them to achieve this remarkable feat!!! |
| 7/10/2023 | There are between 10,000 and 15,000 species of orchids. While you surely are not familiar with all of them, it sounds strange to talk about orchid behavior. This huge variety of orchids offers a multitude of different flower shapes, colors and sizes. Each unique shape, color and size is perfectly suited to the bees, butterflies, bats, moths, flies and birds that are involved in that orchid’s pollination.Those orchids that use birds as pollinators have no scent. Instead, they offer the brightest of colors, appealing to the birds’ strongest sense. Evolutionists call this “co-evolution.” However, giving it a name doesn’t explain it. How did these orchids know that the bird’s strongest sense is sight? And how were these orchids able to perform genetic recombination on themselves so that they could develop their bright colors? No, giving something a scientific-sounding name doesn’t make naturalistic claims any more scientific.Or consider the bee orchid. It offers a flower that looks like a female bee. The purpose here is to attract male bees to a position that will load them with pollen. How can it be scientific to suggest that a plant purposely restructured itself to fool bees into pollinating it?God has purposely made it impossible to explain the creation without Him. He did this not simply so that we would see that He is real. His purpose is much greater. Our Magnificent Creator God seeks a personal relationship with you and has made that possible through the saving work of His Son, Jesus Christ, for us. It is to Christ that He would ultimately draw our attention!!! |
| 7/9/2023 | When you look through the Bible, there is one interesting land animal type which is missing. There is nothing to say that a pair of them got on the Ark, but we have to assume that they did so that they survived until after the Flood. Today, we just think of them strutting around the world, vicious killers, waiting for the opportunity to spring on their next prey. I am, of course, referring to that well-known animal kind – the cat. Yes, that’s right. The word “cat” is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. Yet we know they exist, and, as land animals, they must have been created on Day Six.The Bible, however does mention two members of the cat kind – lions and leopards. But these animals can hybridize and are therefore part of the same kind. Therefore, the Ark would not have had a pair of lions and a pair of leopards – just a pair of cats.What sort of cats would have been on the Ark? They would not have been tiny domestic cats which have insufficient genetic material to be responsible for all of today’s cat species. It is more likely that the cats on the Ark were similar to the famous Saber-toothed cats found in the fossil record. Recent scientific studies on a semi-fossilized saber-toothed cat bone found in the North Sea shows that it shared a common ancestor with all other cat species. This DNA research is compelling.Descent and variation happen within a kind, but not from creatures of other kinds – exactly what we expect when we assume the Bible, inspired by our Magnificent Creator God, to be true!!! |
| 7/8/2023 | Honeydew is one of the favorite foods of ants. There are a number of insects, including thorn bugs and aphids, who consume so much honeydew that they cannot digest it all. These insects are designed so that ants can milk them for the excess honeydew, just the way a farmer obtains milk from a cow.Many species of ants will milk the honeydew-collecting insect by stroking its abdomen with its antennae. The tree hopper actually slows its secretion of excess honeydew to the milking ant so that the ant may drink his honeydew “fresh from the cow” so to speak.Some ants construct clay pens and shelters in which they enclose certain species of aphids, just as a farmer keeps his herd. Like the farmer, the ants move the aphids to better honeydew feeding sites when necessary. They also care for the aphid eggs during the winter.Herding ants are even better able to protect a young tree hopper than its parents. It is not unusual for a tree hopper parent to turn her young over to herding ants because they can do more for the young insect than she can.Such complex relationships between creatures points to a God who is both a Magnificent Creator God and Teacher—even to insects!!! |
| 7/7/2023 | Some creatures are so bizarre that they suggest a lesson to us. Yet even in their strangeness we see that they have been perfectly provided for by their Creator.One such example is the three-toed sloth. It rarely moves, spending about 18 hours a day sleeping upside down in a tree. When it does bother to move, it is in ultra-slow motion. It is not unusual for the three-toed sloth to take 30 seconds to shift one leg a few inches.The three-toed sloth doesn’t do well on the ground because he can’t walk or even crawl. If a sloth is placed on the ground it v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y pulls itself along on its belly to a tree. However, sloths hang effortlessly in the trees even when asleep. Their grasp of the tree is so solid that they continue to hang in the trees even after they have died.Even though sloths are hunted for food by the South American Indians, the three-toed sloth is the most abundant tree-dwelling mammal in South America’s forests. Despite the seeming helplessness of the three-toed sloth, it is doing well because it has been perfectly designed for its life. Because its life doesn’t seem to amount to much, it was named after one of the so-called seven deadly sins. This creature, that has a face only a mother could love, presents an image with which neither child nor adult would want to be associated. Yet the sloth still has God’s care. The nearly helpless condition of the sloth reminds us that we are completely helpless when it comes to our relationship with our Magnificent Creator God. Only because of the efforts of our Savior, Jesus Christ, do we have peace with God. Let’s not be slothful about telling others of the forgiveness of sins! |
| 7/6/2023 | Bees depend on a good memory of their surroundings to make the thousands of trips necessary to keep their hive in operation. Each day a single bee must make trips to hundreds of flowers, some as far as a mile from the hive. Scientists have long wondered how the tiny bee can remember what may be dozens of square miles of territory.When a bee finds a good source of nectar, she returns to the hive and does a dance for the other bees. This dance tells them where a new find is located. Researchers have studied this in detail and can now interpret these dances.Researchers from Princeton University tricked a bee into dancing out a location that turned out to be in the middle of a nearby lake. After receiving the message, the other members of the hive simply ignored their fellow worker. She kept dancing, but no one would believe her. Only later, when the dance clearly said that the flowers were on the opposite side of the lake, did the other bees pay attention and check out the flowers.Researchers are now wondering whether bees keep a mental map of their surroundings. How else could they tell when someone gives them a false location? Evolutionary researchers are trying to figure out how such an “evolutionarily simple” creature as the bee could be so intelligent. However, the Bible makes clear that intelligence is not related to evolution. It is the gift of an all-wise and Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 7/5/2023 | You might not think of the crocodile as a particularly loving creature. In reality, the crocodile is among the most gentle and loving of parents. Mama crocodile lays between 40 and 80 eggs in a large nest. For the 90 days they take to hatch, she will keep close watch over them, even foregoing food so as not to leave the nest unattended. Even the father stays close to guard the eggs that are a delicacy to many animals.At the end of this three-month watch the babies begin to chirp from within their eggs. Before long there may be dozens of babies chirping from the nest of buried eggs. This brings the mother who carefully uncovers the eggs, one by one.The young are only nine inches long and weigh just four ounces. Yet the gentle and loving mother picks up each one and with a flip of her head places them in a special pouch in her mouth.When some of the young have trouble breaking out of their shell, mama picks up the eggs and delicately works the eggs inside her mouth with her tongue, freeing the imprisoned baby. Once collected, all the young are taken to a special protected nursery where they will be just as carefully tended for months. Most amazing is that, should the mother not be present to tend to the hatchling chores, the father offers the hatchlings the very same help and care!Our Magnificent Creator God loves even the crocodile! And his acceptance of you and me, because of what Jesus Christ has done for us, is an even greater wonder than the loving crocodile! |
| 7/4/2023 | Imagine a huge living creature covering about one square mile and made up of almost a third of a billion cells. Imagine each of those living cells being able to move about independently of the others.No, it’s not the plot of a new science fiction movie. Some scientists have suggested that ant colonies may be thought of as one large living organism. They suggest this because of the way individual members within ant colonies behave. Ant colonies have many kinds of members, each with its own specific task. The soldier ants in a colony have extra large heads and heavy-duty jaws for fighting. Other ants are concerned only about finding and returning food. Still other workers do nothing but process and store food.Within the colony another caste of ants does nothing but tend the eggs. Others prepare the food for the larvae and deliver it to other specialized ants who do nothing but feed the next generation.If this sounds complex, imagine the largest known ant colony. This Japanese ant colony has an estimated 306 million worker ants, and more than a million queens. The colony occupies 45,000 interconnected underground nests that range over about a square mile!There is obviously intelligent design and control behind ant society—intelligence not found in ants or in nature itself. This intelligence comes from outside nature. Here is yet another witness that no concern of any living thing is too small for our Magnificent Creator God’s complete attention! |
| 7/3/2023 | How would you like to be a dental hygienist for a crocodile? That’s how the crocodile bird makes his living.Of course you do need to know that the crocodile bird doesn’t show up to do his work with any drills or needles. He and the crocodile are on good terms with each other. After eating, the crocodile climbs the river bank and relaxes with his mouth open. The little crocodile bird enter the crocodile’s mouth to clean up the scraps that are left. While the crocodile bird makes most of his living as sort of a crocodile dental hygienist, he also helps keep the crocodile free of pesky insects that lodge in his skin.The crocodile also receives one other service from the crocodile bird. Whenever the bird senses approaching danger, he gives his sharp warning call and flies off. The crocodile, now warned, can quickly roll over into the water where virtually no animal can get the best of him.This is but one of many unlikely cooperative arrangements that we find in the plant and animal kingdoms. Every one of these relationships speaks for a Magnificent Creator God and against the idea that either these creatures, or their cooperation, evolved naturally. Evolutionists have written whole books on the subject. Yet they don’t seem satisfied that they have explained how these relationships could develop through evolution. We agree that they have no explanation. Nor are they likely to find one as long as they deny a Creator who cares for His creation. |
| 7/2/2023 | The human body, according to medical science, contains 37 trillion cells that reproduce themselves every seven years. Each one of the 37 trillion cells performs 10,000 different chemical functions, according to the late Dr. Ralph Byron of the City of Hope Cancer Clinic, yet all of them just work together to produce a healthy body.When you get tired, you cannot say, “All right, cell number 843,291, get to work. You are not pulling your share of the load.” All of these cells are linked together by nerve cells tied into a brain containing 100 billion cells (give or take a few). I hesitate to say that these 100 billion nerve cells are tied into a computer‑like device called the human brain since the human brain is far superior to any computer ever created. The eminent neuroscientist Moshe Abeles of Bar-Ilan University in Israel says, “Our ability to understand all the details of even one brain is practically zero.”Only our Magnificent Creator God in all of His brilliance and magnificence could have thought up such a complex piece of creation!!! |
| 7/1/2023 | Modern researchers are learning that bacteria are not a simple form of life. Rather, a bacterium is a tremendously complex creature that thinks. Scientists have discovered that bacteria actually have molecule-sized sensors. Some of these sensors act as eyes, while others act as ears. A dozen other proteins have been discovered that receive the information gathered by the bacteria’s “eyes” and “ears.” The collected information is then processed the same way your brain gathers and makes sense of information.Bacteria have specialized senses and a brain. In fact, bacteria are better at sensing some things than you and I are. A bacterium can, for example, sense the difference between two parts and one part in 10,000. This is the same as if you could tell the difference between one jar with 9,999 pennies and another jar with 10,000 pennies!The idea that bacteria are just “simple” forms of life comes from evolution. Growing research is showing that even one-celled creatures are not simple at all. Think of it. Every single-celled bacterium must accomplish, within that one cell, all the tasks we accomplish using the trillions of cells in our bodies. Eating, digestion, metabolism, waste removal, reproduction – and even thinking – all take place within a single cell! There is no such thing as a simple form of life.Science certainly argues against the idea that life began by accident. What science is learning urges us to think about the wise and thoughtful Magnificent Creator God Who made us!!! |
| 6/30/2023 | The yellow-and-black striped archer fish shops among the insects that land on branches overhanging his pond in the peaceful waters of the East Indies. Sometimes he will wait under a branch until something that would make a good lunch lands on it.When the archer fish finds a tasty-looking insect, he shoots an accurately aimed stream of water at his prey, knocking the insect into the water. Before the insect has a chance to recover, the archer fish has eaten him and is looking for dessert.The archer fish has a deep groove in his mouth. When he places his tongue against this groove, he ends up with a blow tube that is about 1/16-inch in diameter. Compressing his gills forces pressurized water through the blow pipe. The rounded tip of the archer fish’s tongue acts as a valve so the fish can shoot a few small bursts or one long stream of water at his prey. The archer fish seldom misses if his prey is within four feet.This simple but elegant arrangement is testimony to a wise and skillful Creator. Neither mindless chance evolution nor any fish could be smart enough to design this system. Nor could any fish redesign his normal mouth tissues into this unique tool. Here we see that our Magnificent Creator God even cares about providing the needs of a fish. We know that He cares even more about our lives! In fact, He has said so! |
| 6/29/2023 | Our Creator’s work reflects some of His incredible inventive creativity. In Matthew 6:30 Jesus reminds us how God provides for all the needs of all His creatures. Each creature is perfectly suited for its life, even if that requires special creativity from God.Many of the creatures that live in the deepest and darkest parts of the sea are equipped with lights. One has a very bright headlamp to light its way. Others have lights on their tails, jaws or sides. The light they produce, as the light produced by the firefly, is a cold light. The light is generated when chemicals manufactured by the creatures are mixed together.Or consider the small bird that has an “engine” powerful enough to allow it to fly for 10,000 or more miles. The construction of the bird’s heart differs from yours and mine in important ways. However, we couldn’t get by with the bird’s heart just as it couldn’t get by with ours.While it seems strange to think of the penguin as a bird that flies under water, that’s exactly what it does. The penguin can reach speeds of 30 miles per hour underwater, as fast as the fastest marine mammal, the dolphin.All of us would benefit from looking at the creatures around us a little more closely. If we do, we will learn a little more about our Magnificent Creator God. As we learn about their lives and how they are provided for, we will, as one early scientist put it, learn to think God’s thoughts about the natural world after Him! |
| 6/28/2023 | How does your nose work? Medical researchers admit that they don’t know. Your nose performs an extremely unlikely job. It senses invisible molecules in the air and turns each molecule into a unique sensation that is sent to the brain. If the fact that molecules floating in the air could be detected was a modern discovery, it would be hailed as the scientific discovery of the century!Medical researchers do know that the roof of your nose cavity contains about 10 million cells that are wired directly into the brain. The nervous system that connects your olfactory cells to your brain is so large and complex that its surface area is several times greater than the surface area of your body. Researchers also know that your sense of smell is important to your sense of taste. For example, that’s why – when you have a head cold – chocolate tastes like a flavorless waxy paste. In this case, what you taste in your mouth has more to do with what is happening in your nose than on your tongue.Many creatures, including birds, can sense odors. Farmers who had difficulty with birds eating as much as 20 percent of the food set out in feed lots discovered that birds hate the smell of grapes. When they laced the feed with grape scent, the birds left it alone, but the cattle didn’t seem to mind.Every detail in the creation of everything that has ever existed was planned and created by our Magnificent Creator God who knew that no detail was too small!!! |
| 6/27/2023 | What keeps the big-bodied bumblebee with those little, stubby wings in the air? Scientists are still trying to learn the secret of bumblebee flight. And while they are learning some astonishing things about the bumblebee, they still don’t know how he does it.Scientists have been testing bumblebees by monitoring their energy use, placing them in wind tunnels, and measuring their oxygen use. No, they haven’t been able to make little oxygen masks for the bees – bumblebees have 24 breathing holes.Scientists have learned that a flying bumblebee flaps its wings 160 times per second and consumes the equivalent of 180 candy bars per hour! A flying bee uses the same amount of oxygen for its body weight as a flying bird or a bat. However, unlike birds, the bumblebee uses no more oxygen when hovering than when flying. This is only one of the discoveries that contradict scientists’ theories. In fact, the director of the latest studies on bumblebee flight admits that they still have no idea how the bumblebee stays in the air. He warns other scientists to stop using the current theories on the subject because they are far too simple.Of course, our Magnificent Creator God knows how to make a bumblebee fly, even if the best of modern science can’t figure it out. This should help us to see that when scientists tell us they have figured out how everything could have been made without a Creator, they don’t know what they’re talking about.In His great magnificence God did it and that’s all there is to it!!! |
| 6/26/2023 | Many Christians are willing to accept what Genesis has to say about creation with one exception. They don’t want to accept the six days as literal, natural, approximately 24-hour days. Did you know that there are other important portions of Scripture that depend on those six days being literal and normal days?In Exodus 20:11 the Lord is giving the Ten Commandments to Moses. The Lord is explaining the principle of the Sabbath in this verse. God’s explanation says that man shall work six days and rest on the seventh because God Himself made the heavens and the earth in six days and rested on the seventh. Therefore He blessed the seventh day. This truth is repeated in Deuteronomy 5:13.Surely no Christian would argue that the Ten Commandments are poetry to be taken figuratively. The Lord is confirming here that His work of creation really occupied six normal days and that He rested on the seventh normal day. If these days were actually long ages, then we should work for six long ages before we take some rest. We can be sure that this is not what the Lord has in mind.If the Ten Commandments should not be interpreted literally because of this connection with creation, where does that leave us? Surely the creation days, by our Magnificent Creator God’s own confirmation and commandment to us, are literal, natural, approximately 24-hour days! |
| 6/25/2023 | Perhaps no type of animal has been used more in biological research than the fruit fly. Certain biological processes such as reproduction or genetic replication are similar in most eukaryote organisms, so observing these in fruit flies might, unlikely as it may seem, have implications for how the processes work in humans. The great volume of academic research which uses the fruit fly as the subject can be seen by the fact that, to date, eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded to work involving drosophila.There are several reasons why fruit flies make useful research subjects. From the moment a fruit fly egg has been laid to the moment the adult dies is, on average, about 50 days. The adult flies can mate and lay eggs after just 10 days. This means that three generations can have been studied in a month. A year would yield 36 generations. The effects of inherited genetic problems or defects can, therefore, be analyzed within months, as can the probabilities of genetic problems being inherited by future generations.Our Magnificent Creator God has surely designed all that there is for our benefit to help us study and improve our lives in this world. God expects us to use His blessings to help ourselves and to not expect Him to do everything for us. We may need a hole in the ground but God might bless us with a shovel and wisdom to know how to dig!!! |
| 6/24/2023 | Even though many frogs live much of their lives out of the water, they need water to reproduce. This can be a problem since some frogs live in trees and some even live in the desert!For a tree frog, the trip from the treetops to a nearby pool is a long and dangerous journey. However, the Creator cares about all of His creatures. The leaves of the bromeliad that grows in the branches of many trees in the tropical forest form a private pool far above the ground. As a result, mama frog can raise her young without ever leaving the treetops!The desert would seem to offer an even greater challenge for a frog. However, since it pleased the Creator to place frogs in the desert – maybe to challenge the evolutionists – He has also provided for their needs. It may rain only once every two years in the deserts of central Australia. When it does rain, the water-holding frogs emerge from their underground hideaways to lay their eggs in the puddles. Before the puddles disappear, not only do the eggs hatch, but the young grow and develop into frogs that are able to store water until the next rain. As the desert again takes over, the frogs dig themselves back into the ground and go into suspended animation until the next rains come. A year or two later, the new generation will emerge after the next rain to raise their young.Neither chance nor the smartest frog in the world could design or create these abilities. Only a wise Creator could. And if the Creator has provided this much care for frogs, just think of how much more He cares about you and me in our everyday lives! What a Magnificent Creator God He is!!! |
| 6/23/2023 | “And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” Genesis 2:19It surely wasn’t possible, we are often told, for Adam to have given names to all the millions of species of animals that exist on earth in the space of one day. Obviously, they tell us, this means that the Bible is wrong.In fact, the activity was nowhere near as arduous as this accusation suggests. The number of animals would be far less than the estimated 2 million species.Adam did not have to go looking for these animals. God brought them to him. God brought three classes of animals to Adam – livestock, birds of the heavens, and beasts of the field. All of these are vertebrates, whereas 98% of all species are invertebrates. Of the remaining 2% – or 40,000 species – many have developed from others (note: developed, not evolved) by the process of speciation. It is likely that the creatures were all descended from just a couple of thousand baramins, or created kinds.It would not be that difficult for Adam to assign a name to each of the animals that paraded before him, especially as he was created perfect, and unlikely to get tired. Suppose he took five seconds to name an animal. He could have named 2,000 animals in 2¾ hours. You might think such a task would be boring, but it was not onerous and would easily fit with all the other activities occurring on that sixth day of God’s creation, including Our Magnificent Creator God making the land animals and making Eve from Adam. |
| 6/22/2023 | It has long been assumed that the Siberian woolly rhinoceros died out because of hunting by people. Evolutionists have, in the past, assumed that the extinction of the woolly rhino coincided with the migration of humans to Siberia. Now a new theory has emerged, which was headlined on the Science Daily website as “Ancient genomes suggest woolly rhinos went extinct due to climate change”. Analyses of the genetic make-up of woolly rhinos have been compared with alleged evolutionary dates. As creationists, we do not accept such dates because the Bible makes it clear that the world was created about 6,000 years ago, while the Flood occurred about 4,400 years ago.However, we do agree with the article that woolly rhinos had a common ancestor with the extant five species of rhinoceros. This is not evolution; as we have frequently explained, God made animals according to their kind [baramin] so that, after the Flood, they could cope with changing environmental conditions, adapting by a process called speciation.Scientists now suggest that the end of the Ice Age could have created conditions with which the highly cold-adapted woolly rhino would not have been able to cope. The world would have gone through the Ice Age in the centuries immediately following the Flood as water vapor from warm oceans condensed in a cold atmosphere.As is always the case, good modern scientific research on issues, like the extinction of the woolly rhino, is consistent with the biblical account of the world from our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 6/21/2023 | Nearly 50% of the people in the United States, including many Christians, believe that God did indeed create all things. Unfortunately, they believe He used evolution as His instrument of creation.Christians often adopt this idea because they are unaware that there are thousands of scientists who believe God created the entire universe supernaturally in six days. Many are unaware that good scientific reasons exist to accept God’s work of creating just as it is described in the Bible. While it doesn’t get much media attention, the work being done by these creation scientists is challenging evolutionism. The work of creationists has appeared in scientific journals. Scientists who believe the truth of the Bible’s account of creation are involved in the professional scientific dialogue that continually goes on among science professionals.At seminars conducted by these scientists, I have heard smiling, joyful people telling everyone they saw, “I didn’t know that the Bible offered an intelligent alternative to evolution. I didn’t know there were so many well-educated scientists who were creationists! What I have heard today shows me that I can be a more faithful follower of my Lord Jesus Christ and give up belief in evolution!”There are no ‘facts” that demand that an educated person accept evolution as fact. The testimony of thousands of believing scientists confirms this. The instrument of our Magnificent Creator God’s creation was not natural law, but His Son, who took our form upon Himself in the Person of Jesus Christ for our salvation! |
| 6/20/2023 | A study by the University of Lincoln in England suggested that “global sea level rise of at least 10 centimetres by the end of the 21st century if global warming trends continue”. Their conclusions, they report, are based on 30 years of scientific data in Greenland, looking at the melting of the glaciers on that large ice-covered island. The Greenland ice sheet, say the researchers, could potentially raise the entire world’s sea level by seven meters (about 23 feet). One is reminded of a recent documentary by a well-known politician turned environmental campaigner, which started with film of rapidly running water plunging through holes in the ice of Greenland’s glaciers. The unspoken implication was that this was caused by global warming.In fact, there has been no global warming trend over the last 30 years.Global temperatures rose rapidly in the ‘90s, followed by cooling from 2000 to 2009, with temperatures only picking up again in the last few years. So the idea that the next 80 years of the 21st century will see steady temperature increases is not based on evidence.As is so often the case, we need to recall that God has promised there will be no catastrophic climate change again until the end of the world.Our Magnificent Creator God has plans for every need we will ever have!!! |
| 6/19/2023 | The Willow Warbler is a fascinating little bird. It weighs less than half an ounce and measures about four inches from its beak to the tip of its tail. It likes open woodland with small trees and is particularly happy in areas managed by humans, such as coppices and young plantations. An attractive little bird, it is greenish-brown from above, with a yellowish underside. Willow Warblers are part of the Leaf Warbler, or Phylloscopus baramin (or created kind). There are 77 species in this baramin, but we are interested here in the species Phylloscopus trochilu, especially the subspecies Phylloscopus trochilus yakutensi. This remarkable little bird has the most incredible migratory behavior, traveling about 7,500 miles.Between April and August, the birds live and breed in eastern Siberia. But as the breeding season ends, the birds begin their long, exhausting flight to sub Saharan Africa, where they will spend the winter, from October through March. Then they begin the 7,500-mile journey back to Siberia. That’s 15,000 miles per year!The reason why these warblers migrate seems clear. They do not like the extremes of temperatures in either of their homes. But a more interesting question is: How do they know where to migrate?Scientists have speculated that migratory birds are able to sense the Earth’s magnetic field. But those scientists who believe in evolution have to explain how the birds used trial and error to find their routes. A more logical explanation is that our Magnificent Creator God designed them to achieve this remarkable feat!!! |
| 6/18/2023 | There are between 10,000 and 15,000 species of orchids. While you surely are not familiar with all of them, it sounds strange to talk about orchid behavior. This huge variety of orchids offers a multitude of different flower shapes, colors and sizes. Each unique shape, color and size is perfectly suited to the bees, butterflies, bats, moths, flies and birds that are involved in that orchid’s pollination.Those orchids that use birds as pollinators have no scent. Instead, they offer the brightest of colors, appealing to the birds’ strongest sense. Evolutionists call this “co-evolution.” However, giving it a name doesn’t explain it. How did these orchids know that the bird’s strongest sense is sight? And how were these orchids able to perform genetic recombination on themselves so that they could develop their bright colors? No, giving something a scientific-sounding name doesn’t make naturalistic claims any more scientific.Or consider the bee orchid. It offers a flower that looks like a female bee. The purpose here is to attract male bees to a position that will load them with pollen. How can it be scientific to suggest that a plant purposely restructured itself to fool bees into pollinating it?Our Magnificent Creator God has purposely made it impossible to explain the creation without Him. He did this not simply so that we would see that He is real. His purpose is much greater. God seeks a personal relationship with you and has made that possible through the saving work of His Son, Jesus Christ, for us. It is to Christ that He would ultimately draw our attention. |
| 6/17/2023 | Honeydew is one of the favorite foods of ants. There are a number of insects, including thorn bugs and aphids, who consume so much honeydew that they cannot digest it all. These insects are designed so that ants can milk them for the excess honeydew, just the way a farmer obtains milk from a cow.Many species of ants will milk the honeydew-collecting insect by stroking its abdomen with its antennae. The tree hopper actually slows its secretion of excess honeydew to the milking ant so that the ant may drink his honeydew “fresh from the cow” so to speak.Some ants construct clay pens and shelters in which they enclose certain species of aphids, just as a farmer keeps his herd. Like the farmer, the ants move the aphids to better honeydew feeding sites when necessary. They also care for the aphid eggs during the winter.Herding ants are even better able to protect a young tree hopper than its parents. It is not unusual for a tree hopper parent to turn her young over to herding ants because they can do more for the young insect than she can.Such complex relationships between creatures points to a God who is both a Magnificent Creator God and Teacher—even to insects!!! |
| 6/16/2023 | You might not think of the crocodile as a particularly loving creature. In reality, the crocodile is among the most gentle and loving of parents.Mama crocodile lays between 40 and 80 eggs in a large nest. For the 90 days they take to hatch, she will keep close watch over them, even foregoing food so as not to leave the nest unattended. Even the father stays close to guard the eggs that are a delicacy to many animals.At the end of this three-month watch the babies begin to chirp from within their eggs. Before long there may be dozens of babies chirping from the nest of buried eggs. This brings the mother who carefully uncovers the eggs, one by one.The young are only nine inches long and weigh just four ounces. Yet the gentle and loving mother picks up each one and with a flip of her head places them in a special pouch in her mouth.When some of the young have trouble breaking out of their shell, mama picks up the eggs and delicately works the eggs inside her mouth with her tongue, freeing the imprisoned baby. Once collected, all the young are taken to a special protected nursery where they will be just as carefully tended for months. Most amazing is that, should the mother not be present to tend to the hatchling chores, the father offers the hatchlings the very same help and care!Our Magnificent Creator God loves even the crocodile! And his acceptance of you and me, because of what Jesus Christ has done for us, is an even greater wonder than the loving crocodile! |
| 6/15/2023 | How many ants are there in the world? No one has actually counted them all or asked them to fill out little ant census forms. However, scientists have estimated that there are about 10 million billion ants in the world, waiting for you to have a picnic. That’s more ants than there are mammals, reptiles, birds, and amphibians combined.God made so many ants because ants are important housekeepers for the earth. Ants, not earthworms, turn most of the world’s soil, drain it, and enrich it. Ants dispose of 90% of the corpses of small dead animals. As the world’s gardeners, ants spread and plant more seeds than any other creature.Like bees, ants have a sophisticated society, which includes workers, nurses, soldiers, hunters, farmers, and even builders. Each of these different classes have specialized organs for their work. The soldier ants of one species are walking bombs. They are loaded with poison and literally explode when under attack, spraying poison on their enemies. Army ants in Central and South America march across the countryside in a line that can be nearly 50 feet long. The solid column sweeps along, flushing out even small animals, as it looks for food.The huge variety of living things around us represents more than simply variety. That variety carefully includes creatures to do every job that needs to be done to maintain life on earth. This, in itself, is a witness to both the creativity and wisdom of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 6/14/2023 | If your measuring stick is inaccurate, you could end up with too much wallpaper or too little. If your map tells you that your destination is 200 miles away when it’s really only 50 miles away, you might drive right past it. If your map of the universe is inaccurate and stars are a lot closer than you expect, you will arrive at the wrong age for the universe.Most science textbooks solemnly teach that the universe is 10 to 20 billion years old. A distant galaxy in the Virgo cluster is one of the primary measuring sticks used by astronomers to figure out the distance of other objects in space. Ultimately these distances are used to compute the age of the universe. Recently, though, astronomers were finally able to see individual stars in this distant cluster.Using a new, high-resolution camera, astronomers saw stars that are very much like stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. Since they know how bright these stars are, they were able to check their computations on how far away the measuring-stick galaxy is. Instead of the expected 100 million light-years, their new figures told them that the galaxy was only 50 million light-years away. This means that the universe might only be half as old as they thought.The lesson for us in this is that the millions and billions of years many scientists talk about are mere speculation. Many measuring sticks for the age of the universe are available, and many of them support an age in the biblical range of only thousands of years.The only source for the age of this universe is our Magnificent Creator God himself!!! |
| 6/13/2023 | Scientists and manufacturers are studying a new technique that could lead to more durable fibers. This technique manufactures liquid crystals to produce stronger, longer-lasting fibers. The process uses sulfuric acid, temperatures well above the boiling point of water and a high-pressure atmosphere.Meanwhile, another team of researchers finally discovered how orb weaving spiders and silkworms manufacture their silk. Scientists had theorized that silk from spiders and silkworms was stronger by weight than steel because proteins in the silk cross-linked with each other. But after watching silk production and drying in careful lighting under magnification, astonished scientists actually saw what happens.Silk is produced in the silk gland as a thin, watery liquid. Once the protein-rich liquid is released from the gland, the liquid begins to concentrate because of evaporation. As the liquid concentrates, it changes into a liquid crystal state. Scientists have been trying to create fibers in the lab from liquid crystals. They would love to know how the spider does it, using only water at normal temperatures and pressures.This is another example of how God has already solved an engineering problem that we were trying to solve. It is especially interesting that He allowed scientists to discover His solution at the same time that others were trying to solve the problem. This allows us to reemphasize that our world is the work of a Magnificent Creator God and not mindless, natural accidents. |
| 6/12/2023 | Why did the Creator bring together so many precise specifications and high intelligence in the honeybee? To glorify Himself and because bees are crucial to the reproductive cycles of so many plants as well as the food chain.The amazing structure of the honeycomb has amazed scientists for thousands of years. As early as the third century AD, the astronomer Pappus of Alexandria offered an explanation for the six-sided or hexagonal shape of the honeycomb. He pointed out that while the triangle, square and hexagon could all be candidates for the shape of the comb, one of these shapes holds more than the others. The most efficient shape for storing the most honey while wasting the least space is the hexagon.There are many variations of the hexagon that are available to the bee. However, the honeybee is always very precise in constructing honeycomb hexagons, with an obtuse angle of 109 degrees 23 minutes and an acute angle of 70 degrees 23 minutes. These angles produce the most usable space for the least amount of building material. Humans are unable to use such precision in their designs without sophisticated equipment.Each honeybee is a tiny but powerful computer that could only have been designed and built by an intelligent Magnificent Creator God. Bees and what they do are of central importance to much of the rest of creation. No wonder God has given them so much: the complex structure of their society, their intelligence and industriousness! |
| 6/11/2023 | Picture yourself sitting in a friend’s living room. Can you picture in your mind where the door is located? Scientists call this a thought map. Thought maps are mental pictures of the arrangement of objects relative to one another.Thought maps help us remember where to find a water glass, the gas or brake pedal, and home. Thought maps require intelligence. They help make possible additional intelligent activity, such as finding our way around and conducting an intelligent search. This is why scientists have been surprised to find that many creatures, not just humans, use thought maps.One experimenter carried a chimpanzee on his back while he hid 18 pieces of food in a field. Then the chimp and five others were released in the field to find the food. The chimp who had seen the hiding places found most of the food, following a very different route than that originally taken by the researcher. Bees, likewise, use mental maps. Even if a bee is forced to detour on its way back to the hive, it always reports the food source as though it had used a direct route. Bees are also able to find a food source that has been moved after its discovery. Ants have also been shown to use mental maps.Mental maps help humans and animals think deductively about changes in the environment. Mental mapping ability could not have evolved because even the lowliest creature requires this ability to survive. This ability must have been given to them in the first place by our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 6/10/2023 | The jellyfish almost seems like a creature from a bad science fiction movie. Around 500 species of jellyfish, ranging in size from small marbles to several feet across, inhabit the world’s oceans. Jellyfish have several mouths and will try to eat anything, including each other. Thankfully, the stings of most jellyfish have no effect on human beings.The jellyfish lives two very different lives, each with different lifestyles and methods of reproduction. The familiar jellyfish form is a swimming lifestyle in which the creatures reproduce sexually. However, in another phase of their life, they are called polyps. In the polyp stage, they look like small anemones, cling to rocks and reproduce by cloning.Jellyfish cannot move fast enough to chase prey. However, careful study of jellyfish swimming patterns shows that jellyfish don’t swim at random. The pattern in which they swim produces the greatest mathematical likelihood of encountering prey. Biologically jellyfish have only two internal organs: a stomach and sex organs. Although evolutionists tell us jellyfish were among the earliest creatures, some of them have sophisticated brain functions that – outside of jellyfish – are found only in mammals and human beings!The jellyfish is a tribute to God’s creativity and imagination. Even though the jellyfish appears to be one of the simplest forms of life on Earth, it is also a mathematically precise hunter. Even this living bag of lukewarm Jell-O praises our Magnificent Creator God through its existence. |
| 6/9/2023 | Some people have the green thumb in their family. Others may complain that they fail with plants because plants don’t tell them when they need care. Of course, most people can do well with family pets, who are enthusiastic about letting their needs be known.Now scientists have learned that plants do indeed cry out when they need attention. We just haven’t heard them because the sounds made by a thirsty plant are about five times higher-pitched than we can hear. But scientists with tiny, specialized microphones have heard corn plants calling for water. During their study, researchers learned that plants make a great deal of noise. Corn leaves and stalks make noises as they slide against each other during growth. We have all heard the sound of plant leaves rattling in the wind. Corn stalks also make noise as they bend in the wind.However, another sound was heard when the corn didn’t have enough water. It was a high-pitched popping noise. Plants have water tubes in them that carry water and nutrients up from the roots to the leaves. Water flows up these tubes under tension. When there is not enough water, the tension becomes too great and the tubes fracture. The popping is the sound of those tubes fracturing. The result of fractured tubes is a wilted plant. When water is restored, the tubes refill, the popping noises stop, and the plant again looks healthy.The purpose of this research was to learn when to water crops and how much water they need. Now that we have learned how plants communicate, crops can tell farmers when to water!Aren’t we blessed to have a Magnificent Creator God that took care of so much minute detail!!! |
| 6/8/2023 | Imagine a huge living creature covering about one square mile and made up of almost a third of a billion cells. Imagine each of those living cells being able to move about independently of the others.No, it’s not the plot of a new science fiction movie. Some scientists have suggested that ant colonies may be thought of as one large living organism. They suggest this because of the way individual members within ant colonies behave. Ant colonies have many kinds of members, each with its own specific task. The soldier ants in a colony have extra large heads and heavy-duty jaws for fighting. Other ants are concerned only about finding and returning food. Still other workers do nothing but process and store food.Within the colony another caste of ants does nothing but tend the eggs. Others prepare the food for the larvae and deliver it to other specialized ants who do nothing but feed the next generation.If this sounds complex, imagine the largest known ant colony. This Japanese ant colony has an estimated 306 million worker ants, and more than a million queens. The colony occupies 45,000 interconnected underground nests that range over about a square mile!There is obviously intelligent design and control behind ant society—intelligence not found in ants or in nature itself. This intelligence comes from outside nature. Here is yet another witness that no concern of any living thing is too small for our Magnificent Creator God’s complete attention!!! |
| 6/7/2023 | How would you like to be a dental hygienist for a crocodile? That’s how the crocodile bird makes his living.Of course you do need to know that the crocodile bird doesn’t show up to do his work with any drills or needles. He and the crocodile are on good terms with each other. After eating, the crocodile climbs the river bank and relaxes with his mouth open. The little crocodile bird enters the crocodile’s mouth to clean up the scraps that are left. While the crocodile bird makes most of his living as sort of a crocodile dental hygienist, he also helps keep the crocodile free of pesky insects that lodge in his skin.The crocodile also receives one other service from the crocodile bird. Whenever the bird senses approaching danger, he gives his sharp warning call and flies off. The crocodile, now warned, can quickly roll over into the water where virtually no animal can get the best of him.This is but one of many unlikely cooperative arrangements that we find in the plant and animal kingdoms that our Magnificent Creator God has designed!!! |
| 6/6/2023 | If, as we are continually told, evolution is a fact, why is it that human technology improves when we copy designs found in nature? If nature is really a giant trial-and-error experiment, we should not only find evidence of less-sophisticated designs in the distant past, but humans today should be able to improve on designs found in nature.Science has long known that an object moving through water or air moves with the least resistance when the ratio of its length to diameter is four to one. This ratio is found in the fastest swimmers in the sea – like the tuna, dolphin and swordfish. A Boeing 707, with a ratio of nine to one, experiences much more resistance than the larger, fatter 747, which has a ratio of six to one – much closer to the tuna and the dolphin.Studies of the vision of the horseshoe crab, supposedly one of the earlier forms of life, have taught engineers how to produce a clearer, sharper television picture. The United States Air Force copied a speed-sensing system from beetles to improve the ground speed indicators of their jets. The optics of a frog’s eye showed them how to improve their radar. The fly’s multifaceted eye taught engineers how to design a lighting system that generates more light with less energy.Humans are learning from and copying design solutions worked out by our Magnificent Creator God. The brilliant designs in our world are not the result of trial and error. This reality makes the claim that evolution is a fact of science sound empty! |
| 6/5/2023 | Most of us are familiar with the body’s response to foreign tissue. Transplant patients must be carefully matched and then patients still must be given powerful drugs to prevent destruction of the transplanted tissue. Our bodies’ immune system identifies tissue that’s not its own and then tries to destroy that tissue.As we have learned more about the immune system, doctors began asking themselves why a pregnant mother’s body doesn’t reject the foreign tissue of the baby growing inside her. The answer to this mystery is not fully understood, but research has suggested some answers.From conception the unborn child is a genetically unique individual. Researchers think that the most important protection the unborn child has is the trophoblast. This tissue, known as the caul, seals the growing infant from its mother. However, the trophoblast itself develops from the same cells as the infant. So why doesn’t the mother’s immune system attack? It appears that under normal conditions the trophoblast is a special set of cells that the body cannot identify as foreign. In addition, the trophoblast makes cells that encourage the mother’s immune system to protect it. Scientists now believe that this amazing feature may actually be provided by the father’s genetic information.In effect, the baby, with the help of the father, immunizes the mother’s system so that it doesn’t reject the baby! So, even before birth, the mother nurtures and the father protects the child.What a Magnificent Creator God we have!!! |
| 6/4/2023 | They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. While that is often true, they also say that it takes a highly evolved brain to picture objects and remember them. Science is learning that this bit of evolutionary myth is indeed fiction.As far as the honeybee is concerned, not all flowers are created equal. Some flowers are a good source of nectar while others are a waste of time. Alfalfa flowers can kill a honeybee because they are designed for pollination by larger insects. When an insect lands, a central petal in the flower releases the stamen and sweeps pollen upward to aid pollination. Honeybees can be tossed off the flower or trapped inside by this action.Scientists always thought that honeybees solved the problem of finding safe and productive flowers by remembering a list of characteristics. They believed the honeybee was evolutionarily too simple to remember mental pictures of favored flowers. However, recent experiments have convinced scientists that bees actually store a mental picture of productive flowers. In these experiments, bees were rewarded with sugar water for visiting some patterns and not others. Their reactions showed that they remember images, not simply patterns.What’s more, the experiments showed that bees are quite intelligent and good learners. One scientist noted that these experiments showed that evolution’s assumptions about so-called higher and lower creatures are false. Those who believe in evolution are having to rethink their view of the world. Meanwhile, we can give thanks to our Magnificent Creator God for so generously giving the gift of intelligence to so many of His creatures. |
| 6/3/2023 | In a clever scheme of self-protection, the more poisonous the male rattlebox moth is, the more prized he is by the female rattlebox moth.In the caterpillar stage the male moth favors the pods of certain legumes. These pods contain a powerful poison that seems to have no effect on the caterpillar. After the caterpillar has become a moth and it’s time for mating, the male releases a scent produced by the poison. Those who have more poison in their bodies release a stronger scent, while those with little poison release only a weak scent. Female rattlebox moths prefer males with a strong scent. During mating the male coats the eggs with some of the poison, making them unpalatable to predators, like ladybugs, who might eat the eggs. So the more poison a male has, the better protected the female’s eggs will be. Studies have shown that female rattlebox moths will ignore males that have collected no poison.Likewise, the male of the queen butterfly species collects another plant poison in his system. This poison is produced by plants for protection against insects. The butterfly doesn’t attack the plant; rather he drinks the poison from already injured plants. Here, too, the female queen butterfly favors those males with the most poison.It appears that human beings are not the only creatures who go to the drug store to get needed medicines. Our Magnificent Creator God has provided the animal world with their own drug store and the knowledge of how to use the chemicals He has provided!!! |
| 6/2/2023 | Fireflies may help light the way to new medical breakthroughs. The gentle glow of a firefly on a summer evening is produced by the chemical luciferase. The firefly has a gene with the code that makes this chemical.When that gene is added to the genetic information of other plants or animals, the cells begin to glow harmlessly. Researchers have been using the firefly gene to test their ability to add genetic information to a cell.When human heart arteries become clogged, a medicine called TPA is among the treatments doctors use. TPA is a natural clot-dissolving protein that helps prevent heart attacks. The problem is, without a continuous supply of TPA, the artery may reclog. It would help if the artery could make its own TPA 24 hours a day.Since TPA is a natural protein for which there is a genetic code, researchers wanted to know if genetic information could be added to artery cells. To find out, they injected dogs with the genetic code for luciferase. If genetic information could be added to the cells through this method, they would actually see the results in the glowing tissue. Tissue samples taken three days later did, in fact, have the distinctive glow of the firefly proving that the method works. They warn that several years of research lie ahead before artery cells may be able to dissolve their own clots.Those glowing fireflies that delight children and adults show God’s design in the creation in an unexpected way. The chemical that makes the glow is proving to be an important tool of medical science.What a Magnificent Creator God we have to preplan our needs!!! |
| 6/1/2023 | At first glance, jellyfish may not look like much of a creation. Many are quite beautiful. However, most jellyfish simply look like blobs of jelly, so fragile that what might be a minor blow to one of us could prove fatal to them.There are around 500 species of jellyfish. They live everywhere in the oceans – from the surface down to great depths. Some are as small as a BB. The largest jellyfish is the lion’s mane, which can grow to seven feet in diameter and have tentacles 200 feet long.Despite their apparent simplicity, these insubstantial creatures make their living by capturing and eating fish and crustaceans that could easily tear them apart. To accomplish this seemingly impossible task, the jellyfish trails out its long thread-like tentacles. Each tentacle can have millions of capsules loaded with tiny harpoons. Once touched, the tentacles fire, injecting several deadly toxins. If enough toxin is injected, the victim’s heart stops. If not enough of this poison is injected, another toxin finds its way to the brain where it stops respiration. Yet another toxin bursts red blood cells, disrupting the circulatory system. Thankfully, only a few dozen of the hundreds of species of jellyfish can hurt human beings.Imagine trying to design a creature that is not much more than a bag of Jell-O that can capture and subdue much larger and more powerful creatures. The jellyfish may look simple. However, its specialized design for a seemingly impossible task makes it an elegant witness to our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 5/31/2023 | Some creatures simply try to look uninteresting to hungry predators. Others take their role-playing so seriously that they actually fulfill some of the same roles as their models.Loopers, or inchworms, move along the ground, twigs or branches with the characteristic opening and closing of an upside-down letter U. These creatures are not true worms. Rather, they are caterpillars. As caterpillars, they often look very much like the twigs or branches on which they move. However, their odd form of movement can give them away.Here’s an experiment you can try. If you ever notice a looper on a branch, simply give the branch a gentle tap. Chances are, the looper will suddenly freeze into the same shape as a nearby twig. If you were to carefully touch the looper, you would find that it had become as stiff as a twig. A botanist reports that while studying one looper moving along a branch, an ant happened along. Ants, of course, will eat loopers. The looper froze in a horizontal position between branches. The ant walked across the looper, never noticing that its walkway was actually a potential meal.Many scientists suggest that the looper “just happens” to be the same color as the branches on which it crawls. We ask, does it also accidentally know how to act like a twig to fool predators? The almighty hand of our Magnificent Creator God is evident even in the inchworm! |
| 5/30/2023 | Many people have been taught that evolution is science and creation is religion. However, the origins debate is really a debate between two religions. According to the evolutionist’s own rules of science, evolution is not good science. Consider the claims of evolution in view of what science knows today.Life has never been seen to develop from nonliving materials. Yet, evolutionists say it did. Mutations, said by evolutionists to have created all the kinds of living things, have never been seen to produce one creature that was more complex or better able to survive. The moon has moonquakes, a magnetic field and internal heat. These are all indications that it is far younger than evolutionists care to believe. Geological strata were at one time sediments in water – floodwaters. Evolutionists believe that the multiple layers of sedimentary rock were laid down one after another by local floods with millions of years between each flood. If that is true, how is it that these strata are often found showing the lower strata blending into the strata above it?If language evolved, why are the most ancient languages the most complex? If religions evolved, why do the most ancient forms of religion worship one God – a Magnificent Creator God – while later forms of the same religions have many gods – gods who are much more like human beings?Many more examples show that only the Bible’s account of history makes sense in view of what we know. |
| 5/29/2023 | The world is a frightening place without God. This fear can be seen today in fears that modern people often confuse with science.Several years ago stories of gloom and doom about a greenhouse heating of the earth were starting to fill the media. The people at Creation Moments looked at the scientific basis for these claims. They wanted to know if the greenhouse warming of the earth was a true threat or just another fear of a godless people. They then published the conclusion that the thin and conflicting evidence for greenhouse warming most likely came from the heat island effect of growing cities around some of the temperature measuring sites.Knowing the elegance with which God designed everything in creation, creationists suspected that God probably designed the earth with built-in thermostats that help keep it from warming up too much. When the Pacific Ocean warms more than normal, it sends increasing amounts of water vapor into the air. If heating continues, the water vapor will actually cause the heating to increase until vapor is forced higher into the atmosphere, creating icy cirrus clouds. These clouds reflect enough incoming sunlight to shut down the temperature increase and return things to normal.We are called to be good stewards of the earth. We can be good stewards in joyful service, freed from the fears that afflict those who don’t know God.What a Magnificent Creator we have in our God!! |
| 5/28/2023 | Do you know how to handle a sailboat? If you had to sail to a destination that was not exactly downwind, would you be able to do it?Unlike most jellyfish, velella does not merely drift with the wind. Velella has a triangular sail. However, unlike some jellyfish with sails, velella‘s sail doesn’t simply catch the wind and move velella along with it. Velella‘s triangular sail has an S-shaped base so that it can stand up to winds from any direction. The sail is set on top of velella‘s body at an angle to its length. This makes velella a biological oddity – because its body is not symmetrical.This asymmetry is not without purpose. The unusual body design of this jellyfish allows it to sail as much as 60° off the direction of the wind. This is what sailors call a broad reach. Some velellas have their sails tilted to the right, allowing them to sail up to 60° to the right of downwind. Others have their sails tilted to the left, allowing them to sail up to 60° left of downwind. What’s more, velellas can change their angle of sailing by extending or retracting their tentacles in the water.When scientists noticed that velella‘s body was asymmetrical, they immediately looked for a purpose behind the design. Even though many scientists will not recognize our Magnificent Creator God, they understand enough to realize that nothing in the creation is without purpose or design. So while many deny the Creator, they still recognize the pattern of His handiwork! |
| 5/27/2023 | Many textbooks tell young people today that birds are modified reptiles. Suppose, they say, that millions of years ago the scales on some reptiles began to fray along the edges. In time, they say, the frayed scales turned into feathers and birds were born.The elegance and beauty of the feather make this story hard to believe. Can sticking a feather on a lizard produce a peacock? The bird’s feather is only a small part of the complete flying system of the bird. Even with very careful planning and redesigning, a reptile doesn’t have what it takes.A bird needs massive breast muscles for flight. In some birds, 30% of the body weight of the bird is breast muscle. By comparison, in humans breast muscles are only about 1% of body weight. A bird also needs an extremely high metabolism and blood pressure to deliver the energy those muscles need for flight. Birds have a higher metabolism than any other creature; they also have the necessary high blood pressure. Finally, as is well known, birds need light skeletons. The man-o’-war has a wingspan of seven feet. But its entire skeleton weighs only a few ounces—less than its feathers!Even the most clever rebuilding of a reptile cannot produce a bird. In fact, birds have very little in common with reptiles.The entire being of the bird, from body to brain, has been specially designed for flight by a Creator who clearly knows everything there is to know about flight!!! |
| 5/26/2023 | While the Bible teaches us that sex is a wonderful gift of God, evolutionists believe that sexual reproduction should not have evolved. According to evolutionists, if sexual reproduction were to develop, evolution is supposed to get rid of it.To make matters worse, immobile plants use sexual reproduction. This creates a problem in transferring the male genes to the female for fertilization. Just to confound things even more, God uses insects and even mammals to transfer the pollen. Since evolutionists believe that plants were around for many millions of years before animals, evolutionists have yet another problem.The European family of the Arum lilies attracts beetles and flies. When one of the insects lands on a flower, he finds a slick, oil-coated surface and ends up sliding down into a chamber filled with small hairs. Imprisoned, he finds a sweet sap that makes good eating. While he is gorging himself on the sap and getting sticky in the process, the male part of the flower showers him with pollen. The next day, the sticky, pollen-coated insect finds that the doors to his prison are open. So he flies off to another flower to unwittingly deliver his load of pollen!It sounds like science fiction to say that a flower figured out how to do this. And it certainly doesn’t sound very scientific to say that nobody designed and made this complex arrangement.As we learn more about these arrangements in nature, it becomes even more clear that an all-wise Magnificent Creator God designed these beautiful, symbiotic relationships between different members of the living kingdom!!! |
| 5/25/2023 | One would never expect to find any insect sharing living arrangements with a spider. That’s why scientists were amazed to find a tiny fly in the rain forests of Central America who shares both room and board with a spider!The fly spends most of his time on the back of the golden web spider, who does not seem to object. This spider does not deal with its victims in the same way most spiders do. When a large insect gets caught in the tough web of the spider, the golden web spider injects the victim with digestive juices to prepare it for eating. The fly keeps track of meal preparations from the spider’s back. Just before the meal is liquefied to the spider’s satisfaction, the fly buzzes over and drinks its fill in a few seconds. By the time the spider approaches lunch, the fly is back napping on the spider.Both the spider and the fly are designed with special features to make this most unlikely arrangement work. If the golden web spider’s eating habits were like most spiders’, there would be no liquefied meal for the fly. The fly itself has a mouth that is specially designed to allow it to drink a full meal in seconds. This helps keep him out of the spider’s way.How can a spider and a fly live together? God can design a solution to any problem. Why design an arrangement between a spider and a fly anyway? So that we would know there is a Magnificent Creator God and that He can meet any challenge! There is nothing you cannot take to Him in the name of His Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. |
| 5/24/2023 | Respect for the name Thomas Jefferson reaches far beyond the United States and far beyond the English language.By the time Jefferson was 14, he could read four languages. He later learned three more. Jefferson’s legacy goes far beyond his accomplishments in law and government. He also made his mark in the fields of mathematics, architecture, medicine, agriculture, literature, education, music and science. He earned three doctorates. And he served as president of the American Philosophical Society, America’s leading scientific organization of the time, for nearly 20 years.One might think that Jefferson would have accepted the evolutionary ideas that were being circulated then by such people as Charles Darwin’s grandfather. However, while Jefferson was a deist rather than a Christian, he spoke and wrote against evolutionary ideas and in favor of a Creator. He based his argument that belief in a Creator is more scientific than evolution on the precise and interrelated design that is visible everywhere in the creation. We thank our Magnificent Creator God that His handiwork is so clear in the creation that one does not even have to be a Christian to know that He is The Creator. God’s most earnest desire for all is that seeing this much, we might be drawn to His forgiveness in Jesus Christ. |
| 5/23/2023 | The yellow-and-black striped archer fish shops among the insects that land on branches overhanging his pond in the peaceful waters of the East Indies. Sometimes he will wait under a branch until something that would make a good lunch lands on it.When the archer fish finds a tasty-looking insect, he shoots an accurately aimed stream of water at his prey, knocking the insect into the water. Before the insect has a chance to recover, the archer fish has eaten him and is looking for dessert.The archer fish has a deep groove in his mouth. When he places his tongue against this groove, he ends up with a blow tube that is about 1/16-inch in diameter. Compressing his gills forces pressurized water through the blow pipe. The rounded tip of the archer fish’s tongue acts as a valve so the fish can shoot a few small bursts or one long stream of water at his prey. The archer fish seldom misses if his prey is within four feet.This simple but elegant arrangement is testimony to a wise and skillful Creator. Neither mindless chance evolution nor any fish could be smart enough to design this system. Nor could any fish redesign his normal mouth tissues into this unique tool.Here we see that our Magnificent Creator God even cares about providing the needs of a fish. We know that He cares even more about our lives! In fact, He has said so! |
| 5/22/2023 | Language requires some very special designs that are rare in nature and found together only in humans. First, human language requires vocal cords, which none of the apes have. The only animals with vocal tracts are birds, but no one is suggesting that we evolved from birds.Language also seems to require an unusual structure to the brain. The frontal area of the left hemisphere of the brain is connected to an adjacent area of the cortex called the Wernicke area. These two areas are linked by a bundle of nerve fibers. The result is a distinct brain asymmetry that is unique to humans. Even the unborn human has this asymmetry that allows it to absorb language. Development in this area of the brain stops at puberty. That is why it becomes more difficult for adults to learn a new language. Language skills can be learned only by hearing language. So-called “feral” children, who have heard no language at all, cannot be taught language after puberty for the same reason.So where did Adam first hear language? Scripture tells us that it was our Magnificent Creator God Himself who regularly spoke with Adam. This means that language is not a collection of meaningless sounds to which we have assigned meanings. The meanings and sounds have come from God, just as our unique design that makes language possible comes from God.Therefore, language is not only for worldly purposes. We have also been given language to praise our God and Savior and to tell others who He is and what He has done! |
| 5/21/2023 | Which body structure is a powerful generator of emotions, gives you a sense of direction, and serves as a cannon all at the same time? It’s your nose, of course! It is common knowledge that without our noses the scent of a rose could not give us joy, nor would our food taste like very much.Less well known is the fact that our noses are directly hooked into the brain’s limbic system. Your limbic system plays a central role in generating and controlling emotions. This is why certain scents are able to raise strong emotional memories in us.The nose is also designed to filter out and catch particles that should not get into the lungs. When a particle is taken in through your nose, it is snagged by the tissue inside your nasal passages. Next, this highly special tissue decides the best method of getting rid of the foreign material. If a bacterium is identified, your nose begins to run, bathing the bacteria in powerful chemicals that dissolve most of them. If the particles are larger, like pollen, a sneeze is triggered that can eject particles at speeds of over 100 miles per hour!Perhaps the most remarkable ability associated with the nose is its ability to act as a compass. Human beings have a small amount of iron in the bony part of the nose between the eyes. Scientific experiments have shown that we have an ability, while not foolproof, that can sense direction that is influenced by magnetic fields!Our Magnificent Creator God made your multi-purpose nose not only to bring some pleasure to life but also to help protect your health. |
| 5/20/2023 | “And the LORD God formed man out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”It’s behind your refrigerator and under your bed. It’s part of the air you breathe. While dust is common, it’s not commonplace at all.Much of the dust in our everyday lives is nothing more than tiny particles of skin, clothing, carpeting – just pieces of everyday life floating in the air. Studies of dust particles reveal that most dust is soil.However, a second common dust – even a thousand miles from the sea – is salt, driven into the wind by the waves. This salt helps form the clouds that bring us rain.The next most common forms of natural dust are volcanic eruptions and forest fires. Transatlantic winds pick up the dust of the Sahara and sweep it across the ocean where enough of it lands in Miami to sometimes give the rain a light pink color.Not only does your home have dust from all over the world, there’s probably also some from outer space. Ten thousand tons of disintegrating meteorites and comets rain down on the Earth every year. You can even identify some of this dust by running a magnet through the dust in a rain gutter. Most of the magnetic particles that stick to the magnet are probably from space. In addition, some dust is alive, made up of pollen, fungus spores and even dormant bacteria, hoping to land on a good place to grow.Dust reminds us that the world is smaller than we think and that it won’t last forever. Are you ready for the next world? All your preparations have been made by Jesus Christ. Find out in the Bible what our Magnificent Creator God has done for you today. |
| 5/19/2023 | Spider silk begins as a liquid protein made by silk glands on the spider’s abdomen. Spiders make many kinds of silk for different uses. As the liquid silk is forced through the spider’s spinnerets, it begins to dry. The spinnerets pull and stretch the silk, creating just the right kind of silk for the spider’s use. Though the result seems thin and weak to us, ounce for ounce, spider silk is stronger than steel.Web-building spiders make two types of silk for their traps. The basic structure of the web is made of strong, nonsticky silk. Then the spider adds a sticky, elastic silk to trap its prey. Some webs are irregular, others are flat and sheet-like, while still others are shaped like funnels. All of us have admired the beautiful orb web.However, spiders also have many other ways in which they use their silk. The ogre-faced spider makes a net that it throws around its intended victim. The European water spider builds its web underwater. It stores its air supply in the web. The lasso spider twirls a single strand of silk over its head. A tiny drop of sticky silk at the end of the lasso captures its prey when the lasso is thrown. Probably the most creative use of silk is by the young of some species. When they hatch, they produce long loops of silk that catch the wind and send them floating off to new places.The spider’s skill in producing and using silk had to come from Someone wiser and more clever than the spider. Clearly the spider has been well-equipped and instructed by our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 5/18/2023 | We have looked at many plants and animals that use different forms of camouflage to keep from being noticed. Some don’t wish to be noticed so that they can surprise their prey, while others don’t want to be noticed so they can avoid becoming prey. However, what happens when both predator and prey encounter each other in full camouflage?The predator in this drama, witnessed by a naturalist at the edge of a desert, is a yellow crab spider. The spider was waiting on a yellow flower that made him nearly invisible. The potential prey is an inchworm beneath the same flower. The inchworm was tearing off bits of the yellow flower petals and sticking them on its back.Properly camouflaged, the inchworm then worked his way toward the top of the flower where the spider waited. The spider felt the movement and ran around the edge to see whether lunch might be on the way. However, when the spider got around the edge of the flower, he saw nothing. He didn’t even notice the camouflaged inchworm on which he was standing! The spider then returned to the center of the flower, outsmarted by the inchworm who went on about his business.Our wisdom would have said that the inchworm should try to run when he noticed the spider. However, the wisdom given to him by our Magnificent Creator God allowed him to continue about his business on the flower. This offers us a good illustration of how following the Lord’s wisdom often requires us to reject our own. |
| 5/17/2023 | Squirrels often seem to run about without any purpose. However, a naturalist in the State of Maine recently discovered that the squirrel’s activities are well planned and efficient.It was a cold January day when the naturalist was watching a red squirrel who seemed to be nibbling on a sugar maple. Then the squirrel would run to a tree where some of the sap had leaked out and lap at it with his tongue. The naturalist knew that conventional wisdom said it was too early to tap trees for sugar. He also knew that the sap from the trees is 98 percent water and could not provide enough energy to keep the squirrel going in cold weather. Becoming more curious, he decided to study the squirrels’ activity in detail.He discovered that the red squirrels were systematically tapping the sugar maples with a peculiar bite into the tree. Each bite went through the outer and inner bark and into the xylem where the sap runs. The squirrels were then allowing the running sap to dry until the sugar content was more than 55 percent. Not only were squirrels tapping just the maples, they only tapped them when the weather was right for the sap to run. The mad running up and down the trees actually followed a careful daily schedule of tree visitations that could include over 70 trees!Could it be that humans learned from squirrels to tap sugar maples? Whatever the answer to that question, we know that it was our Magnificent Creator God Himself Who taught the squirrel the processing and use of this sugary winter treat! |
| 5/16/2023 | The founders of modern science, on the whole, believed in the Creator. The methods they developed were based upon the truth that the creation is voluntary. This means that God was not confined to what we have later defined as “scientific laws.” God could make anything He wanted in any way He wanted. Science cannot be done from the philosopher’s easy chair. Scientists must go out into the field and study how nature works. When science follows this path, it is open to astonishing discoveries.One recent unexpected discovery was the hot water vents deep below the ocean’s surface. Where the earth’s crust has split apart, hot water gushes out. This water reaches temperatures hot enough to, say, cause a piece of paper to burst into flame. Only the tremendous pressure more than a mile below the waves keeps the water in liquid form.It was in this environment that scientists made an even more amazing discovery. They found bacteria that could live in the almost 700 degree water. These amazing creatures find the normal, sea level boiling point of water to be so cold they can barely survive. Scientists are still trying to learn how these creatures live at temperatures that would destroy the normal biochemistry of life.Each new discovery tells us a little more about the work of our wonderful Magnificent Creator God. That’s what science was originally intended to do. Keep that in mind when you hear someone say that belief in the Magnificent Creator makes doing science impossible!!! |
| 5/15/2023 | Our senses link us to the world around us and enable us to interact with the world. While most people believe that our sense of sight is the highest of the senses and the most marvelous in design, our sense of hearing is no less marvelous.When a sound strikes your ear, your eardrum vibrates with the sound waves, fast or slow, soft or hard. These variations in vibration provide us with important information about the nature of the sound we are hearing. Some sounds produce a vibration in the eardrum as small as a billionth of a centimeter – only one-tenth the diameter of a hydrogen atom! There are three tiny bones in the middle ear called the hammer, anvil and stirrup. They pick up the vibrations from the eardrum, amplify them and send them on to the cochlea. The cochlea is filled with about 25,000 tiny hair cells that finally turn the vibrations into electrical signals that are sent on to the brain.Our hearing is designed to be more sensitive to high-pitched sounds than to lower sounds. If we had just a little more sensitivity to lower-pitched sounds, we would continuously be distracted by the internal sounds of our body, including the blood rushing through our arteries. In fact, to help prevent this, there are no blood vessels at all in that part of the ear where vibrations are turned into electrical impulses. The body supports life in these tissues by constantly bathing them in dissolved nutrients.While we can hear many things, and decide not to hear other things, our Magnificent Creator God who so marvelously designed our ears invites us to hear His Word to us from the Bible. |
| 5/14/2023 | Many plants and animals disguise themselves as something they are not in the hope of protecting themselves. However, a true master of disguise must have many disguises. The tiger swallowtail offers no less than three disguises as it grows through its various stages toward adulthood.The newly hatched larva looks for all the world like a bird dropping. This appearance makes the larva of no interest to birds that might otherwise eat it. Three molts later the caterpillar has turned green to match the leaves on which it feeds. In case he is spotted by some birds looking for a nice fat caterpillar for lunch, the caterpillar also has two large spots on its head that look like the eyes of a snake. Birds who are interested in caterpillars usually try to stay as far from snakes as possible. Finally, in the pupal stage, the tiger swallowtail has again radically altered its appearance. The pupa now looks like nothing more than just another broken twig on a tree trunk.The immature tiger swallowtail’s bag of disguises reflects a great deal of knowledge about the behavior of those creatures that threaten it. Each of its three disguises uses a different method to fool those birds that would be interested in the larva. Each disguise has the same specific goal. This master of disguise is no accident of biology.Our Magnificent Creator God’s purpose in making Himself evident in the creation is ultimately aimed at bringing each of us into a relationship with Himself. That relationship is based on the forgiveness of our sin through His Son, Jesus Christ. |
| 5/13/2023 | It was first discovered in 1855, but many scientists debated its existence for another 50 years. Once its existence was finally proven to everyone’s satisfaction, it was another 50 years before science had any tools to begin studying it. Finally, in the late 1980s, scientists began to learn a little about the secrets of one of the tiniest, yet most amazing structures in the body.At the back of the eye, between the deepest layer of the retina and the cells beneath it, lies a tiny moat made up of about 10 drops of a mysterious fluid. The entire moat is thinner than a sheet of cellophane.It seems that the clear fluid in the moat serves the surrounding light-sensing tissues of the eye in place of blood, bringing in nutrients and carrying away waste. It also transports light-sensitive chemicals needed by the light-detecting cells in the eye. In addition, it seems to glue the retina in place. More than that, the moat is rich in a growth factor. This fact makes scientists believe that the gel may also be important to repairing injuries to the retina, keeping the cells of the retina young and active, as well as helping in the growth of new cells. As one researcher said, the more they study this tiny structure, the more unexpected abilities they find – something like a bottomless suitcase.Charles Darwin, who didn’t even know about the moat, was right when he said that it was impossible to believe that natural selection could have produced the eye. As Christians we believe that only Our Magnificent Creator God could have produced the eye!!! |
| 5/12/2023 | “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” We’ve all heard this familiar saying. In the case of the sun’s fire, scientists expect to find not smoke but tiny particles called neutrinos. The problem is, most of those neutrinos are missing.It was once thought that the sun’s heat was produced as it’s powerful gravity caused it to collapse in on itself. But as the theory of evolution became popular, this theory fell out of favor. Those who promoted evolution knew that their theory was more believable if they said the sun was millions or billions of years old. However, if the sun’s heat came from gravity collapse, it could not possibly be that old.So when scientists learned about nuclear energy, they proposed the theory that the sun’s energy comes from nuclear forces. This would give them their billions of years. The problem is, the sun’s nuclear engine should be turning out a large number of neutrinos. Scientists find only about one-third to one-fourth of the neutrinos that should be there. This mystery is so troubling that scientists have changed their theories about how the sun produces its energy every year or two over the last 25 years! Some of them admit that they really don’t know how the sun produces its energy.The sun is a vital blessing to us. And here we see another blessing, for the sun also keeps us humble. Our Magnificent Creator God has so wonderfully created the sun that even our best scientific minds can’t figure out how it works!!! |
| 5/11/2023 | The strange and nasty plant called witchweed is found mainly in Africa and Asia, but some has been reported in North America as well. This parasitic plant can prevent crop plants from producing yields and is said to be responsible for intensifying the results of famine in Ethiopia.Not long after germination, witchweed sends an enzyme “feeler” through the soil around it to find nearby roots. If the enzyme finds a root system, it will digest a few of the cells on the root surface. The damaged roots actually help the witchweed by sending out a chemical response that confirms their presence to the witchweed. The witchweed then grows an attachment organ to penetrate the neighbor’s root system. However, witchweed cannot penetrate many root systems. If attachment is not made within four days, the witchweed grows aimlessly and dies in less than a week.If the witchweed successfully attaches to a neighbor’s root system, witchweed can enjoy a long and full life, being fed by its neighbor’s roots. In fact, witchweed changes the hormones produced by its neighbor so that the neighbor’s root system grows ever larger at the expense of the stem growth of the victim. While the victim may live its normal span, it will not be allowed enough strength to reproduce.Witchweed is no simple plant. We learn from the witchweed that our Magnificent Creator God’s unlimited imagination not only created some very strange living things, but also created some unique solutions to providing a means of living for them. |
| 5/10/2023 | Not only is the human brain the most complex structure in the universe, it is also one of the busiest. In fact, during intense concentration, your brain can burn as many calories as your muscles do during exercise! Intense thinking can literally be as exhausting as a physical workout! More than 100,000 chemical reactions go on in your brain every second.Among the brain’s many jobs is chemist. The brain produces more than 50 psychoactive drugs. Some of these are associated with memory, others with intelligence, still others are sedatives. Endorphin is the brain’s painkiller and it’s three times more potent than morphine. Serotonin is produced by the brain to help keep our moods under control. The brain also makes dopamine. Dopamine makes people more talkative and excitable. Another hormone regulates hunger.The brain is also a radio transmitter that sends out measurable electrical wave signals. In fact, the brain continues to send these signals for as long as 37 hours after death!Our tiny knowledge of the brain is enough to show us that this incredible organ is no accident. The brain is much more than a powerful testimony to our Magnificent Creator God. Its incredible powers convince us that there is much more to existence than this material life. However, we can learn only from the Word of God about eternal life through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. |
| 5/9/2023 | If, of all the millions of living things on Earth, a few creatures happened to look like something they are not and this helped protect them, we might put it down to chance. However, the creation is filled with too many creatures who practice look-alike deception to put it down to chance.Africa’s southern deserts have a plant called living stones. In a desert, any vegetation can be a welcome source of food or moisture. In this setting, a plant that doesn’t look like a plant has an advantage. And living stones look like nothing more than just another rock in the sand.Wasps can be some of the nastiest insects in nature. An insect in Costa Rica called the mantispid looks very much like the feared wasp, even up close. Then again, the hover fly looks like a wasp and sounds like a wasp because the frequency of its wing beats is almost identical to a wasp.Treehoppers have a very odd body shape that comes to a point on top. Not only do they look like thorns, but they usually stay on bushes that have thorns, orienting their bodies on the branches just like true thorns. This effectively hides them from hungry birds. Larval plant hoppers use a different form of deception. They attach themselves in groups on branches, orienting their frilly and feathery bodies together so they look like a flower!The clever forethought and planning involved in nature’s deceptions rule out any thought that these creatures were not designed by our Magnificent Creator God Himself! |
| 5/8/2023 | One of the spider’s virtues is that it loves to eat flies. However, not all spiders catch flies in their webs.The jumping spider stalks its prey until, like a tiny tiger, it is close enough to pounce. Rather than defining its territory with a web, the jumping spider takes its territory with it in a manner of speaking. Wherever the jumping spider is becomes its territory, When one jumping spider encounters another, they wave their legs at each other, warning each other to back off.Herein lies the tale of how one species of fruit fly is able to outsmart the spider. Unlike most fruit flies, this particular species has stripes on its wings. When it waves its wings over its head, it looks something like a jumping spider declaring its territory. When stalked by a jumping spider, the fly is able to convince the spider that it’s another jumping spider protecting its territory.Researchers have discovered why this trick works even though the fly doesn’t look much like a spider. The spider’s response to the pattern is pre-wired into its brain and is triggered by certain cells in its eyes. These cells are only activated by a display of the pattern. The spider automatically reacts to the pattern. All the fly has to do is fake the pattern and it’s safe!The fruit fly’s strategy requires a sophisticated knowledge of the jumping spider’s nervous system as well as its behavior. It’s safe to say that no fruit fly was able to create this strategy. It could have been authored only by the Magnificent Creator God who created them both. |
| 5/7/2023 | Over the last couple of centuries many Bible scholars have developed a skeptical approach to the Bible. Their treatment of the Bible as nothing more than a human document stems from their belief in evolution. According to them, Christianity has evolved from earlier religions just as humans evolved.As a result, critics reject the idea that the Bible is God’s inerrant, inspired, trustworthy Word. Because they hold this low view of the Bible, they believe that they have found many errors in the Bible over the years. At one time they said that the Hittites mentioned in the Old Testament never existed. They said that ancient biblical writers invented these people so that Israel could make up pretend victories over them. Eventually the Hittites were discovered, one of the first evidences being hard-to-ignore six-foot-tall jars! Over the years these critics have been consistently proven wrong by new discoveries.Likewise, critics have said that the Israelites could not have entered Canaan when the Old Testament says they did. They reason that because the Old Testament mentions the Ammonites, which critics said didn’t live in Canaan until later, the Bible’s dating is in error. However, in the summer of 1989, biblical archaeologists proved that the Ammonites were in Canaan well before the Bible’s date for the exodus. Again Bible critics have been proven wrong.As one biblical archaeologist wrote, “As usual the absence of evidence is not necessarily the evidence of absence.” When the Bible says something is true, there is no question of its truth.The Bible truly is the inerrant, inspired, trustworthy Word of our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 5/6/2023 | Scientists and manufacturers are studying a new technique that could lead to more durable fibers. This technique manufactures liquid crystals to produce stronger, longer-lasting fibers. The process uses sulfuric acid, temperatures well above the boiling point of water and a high-pressure atmosphere.Meanwhile, another team of researchers finally discovered how orb weaving spiders and silkworms manufacture their silk. Scientists had theorized that silk from spiders and silkworms was stronger by weight than steel because proteins in the silk cross-linked with each other. But after watching silk production and drying in careful lighting under magnification, astonished scientists actually saw what happens.Silk is produced in the silk gland as a thin, watery liquid. Once the protein-rich liquid is released from the gland, the liquid begins to concentrate because of evaporation. As the liquid concentrates, it changes into a liquid crystal state. Scientists have been trying to create fibers in the lab from liquid crystals. They would love to know how the spider does it, using only water at normal temperatures and pressures.This is another example of how our Magnificent Creator God has already solved an engineering problem that we were trying to solve. It is especially interesting that He allowed scientists to discover His solution at the same time that others were trying to solve the problem. This allows us to reemphasize that our world is the work of a Creator and not mindless, natural accidents!!! |
| 5/5/2023 | For many, the existence of so much ice on Antarctica is a grave cause for concern, as they have been told that climate change will cause a lot of this ice to melt and cause the sea level to rise. The worry is that many of the world’s great cities, and many small island nations, could disappear as the Antarctic melts. So why did God make such a troublesome continent which could precipitate the end of the world?Remember that the topography of the world is not the way it was originally created. We have explained previously that there was likely just one main pre-Flood continent, which we call Rodinia. This continent split up during the Flood. The massive deposits of fossil fuels known to exist on the southernmost continent are evidence of pre-Flood forests, probably populated with animals.Every time ice breaks off from an Antarctic glacier, the media worry about flooding – yet God has promised not to flood the world again, nor to bring seasons to an end. Despite seeming to be a homogeneous repository for the 70% of the Earth’s fresh water, locked in as ice, there are considerable variations in climate between different parts of the continent. For every place where ice is melting and breaking up, there are parts where the ice cap gets thicker. Our Magnificent Creator God has all this in balance for His own purposes, and we can be sure He will keep all His promises!!! |
| 5/4/2023 | Humpbacks are among the largest whales in the world. A typical humpback weighs about 40 tons and begins its breach deep down in the ocean.Imagine the acceleration required to get this enormous animal out of the water and into the air. The whale leaves the water at an angle of 30° and a speed of 18 mph. Clearly, this monster uses a lot of energy in breaching, yet it is not unknown for the whale to repeat the exercise – the observed record being 130 leaps in 90 minutes!Why does it go to all this trouble? No one really knows. As with all such obscure phenomena, there are those who suggest that the whales are trying to “attract the girls”! Others suggest that the big splash achieved on re-entry rips some of the barnacles off the whale’s surface. There may be truth in either of these suggestions. But Wilson says that he cannot overlook the probability that the whale breaches simply because it gives God pleasure! He is a Magnificent Creator God, and the world He made is not for utility only, but also for beauty!!! |
| 5/3/2023 | In 1981 it was only a theory—one that seemed to go against all logic. The theory said that if you have a signal, say a sound that was too weak to be heard, adding a little noise would make it easier to hear. If you added too much noise, you would drown out the weak signal. Add too little noise and it wouldn’t help at all. But add just the right amount of noise and a sound signal too weak to be heard could be heard.The theory was shown to be a scientific fact in 1983. This illogical effect was given the name “stochastic resonance.” Since the 1980s, scientists have discovered numerous examples of stochastic resonance and have researched various uses for it. Radio static makes it hard to listen to a station, especially if the signal is weak. However, researchers are building unique radios that add just the right amount of static to make impossible-to-receive stations understandable.Now for the surprise! Did you ever wonder how you are able to select a single voice in a noisy, crowded room and hear what it was saying? Scientists now believe that our brains have built-in stochastic resonance processors much more sophisticated than the units they hope to build someday. As one scientist said, “Nature may have understood stochastic resonance long before we did.”What seems illogical—to add noise to a sound to make it clear—is actually an astonishing piece of wisdom. The wisdom in the way this advanced technical knowledge is used is yet one more witness, not to impersonal “nature,” but to our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 5/2/2023 | Many people know that, despite its appearance, coral is actually a tiny animal. Even a small coral growth may be made up of billions of tiny animals, each living inside its limestone skeleton.What many people don’t know is that coral cannot live without the help of algae—a plant. Thousands of one-celled algae live in the tiny stomach of each coral polyp. The polyp requires the waste products of the algae to complete its nutrition requirements and to get the calcium with which it builds reefs. In return, the polyp’s stomach provides an ideal protected living place for the algae. Incidentally, the wonderful colors in living coral come from the algae in each polyp’s stomach.Evolutionists have said that it must take millions of years for the tiny polyps to build large coral reefs, like the 2,000-kilometer-long Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The Great Barrier Reef, incidentally, is considered the largest structure ever built by living organisms. However, it has now been shown that coral polyps can double their own weight in just over 10 days! As a result, the claim of millions of years for the age of the Great Barrier Reef has been reduced by a factor of 40!Many of the long age figures claimed by evolutionists have had to be drastically revised downward as we have learned more about the work of our Magnificent Creator God. The resulting figures fit the Bible’s account of history much more closely. |
| 5/1/2023 | One unusual argument that the universe is the work of the Creator rather than aimless chance goes like this: only with the highest quality research and work, often over many years, can humans begin to approach the excellence of things in nature.One would think, for example, that it would be a simple job for modern science to create a fireproof fabric better than anything found in nature. After all, no living things in nature— besides humans—crash and burn. However, 80% of those who die in airplane crash fires are killed by the blinding, poisonous smoke, much of which comes from their seat cushions. The foam in the cushion begins to produce toxic smoke when the treated upholstery fabric gives out at 1,300° and allows the flames through.It took two years of work before an upholstery manufacturer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, came up with something better. The new fabric, which has since been used on some airline seats, has stood up to a 5,000° blowtorch flame for several minutes without catching fire! Amazingly, the fabric itself is a very dense weave of wool backed with flame resistant yarns. Its inventor says “It’s one of God’s ideas…There are things about wool that are beyond what man can do.”Sheep have no need to produce wool with properties that could help protect them in a place crash—as would have to be the case if evolution were correct. However, since sheep are part of a larger design in our Magnificent Creator God’s provision for humans, He has given their wool qualities needed by humans as well as by sheep. |
| 4/30/2023 | Scientists have, for the first time, successfully communicated with honeybees in their own language! Scientists have for some time known how to interpret many of the elements of the bees’ so-called “waggle dance.” This dance is used by scouts to communicate the location of food sources to the food gatherers in the hive.A couple years ago researchers decided to see if they could confirm their understanding of bee communication. But how do you talk to a bee and get confirmation that she understood what you said? Scientists decided that the only way to do this was to build a robot bee through which they could communicate. The first attempts at building a robot bee acceptable to real bees did not work well. Early models were viciously attacked.Scientists finally perfected a computer-controlled robot bee that real honeybees accepted. These scientists describe honeybee language as elegant and precise. Yet they found they had learned enough bee language to communicate successfully a food source and its location to real bees. They also discovered that they have much more to learn about bee language. As a result, it may someday be possible for farmers to direct bees to crops that need pollination.Just as bees can best understand other bees, we humans can best understand other humans. That explains why, when our Magnificent Creator God wished to communicate with us, He became a human being. That human, Jesus Christ, taught us about God; and He also made peace with God for us, making possible the forgiveness of our sins!!! |
| 4/29/2023 | There are a number of blurry, indistinct, cloudy-looking objects in the night sky which are not pinpoints of light as the stars are. One hundred ten of these are the so-called Messier objects, which were cataloged by one Charles Messier – a French astronomer who lived from 1730 through 1817. These are a mixture of objects. Some of them we would now call nebulae – quite literally, nebulous clouds of interstellar dust and gas. Examples of these are M8 – the Lagoon Nebula in the constellation of Sagittarius, and M42 – the famous Orion Nebula. Others are star clusters, such as The Pleiades, in Taurus – an object mentioned in the Bible, which is cataloged as M45. Still others are actually other galaxies, such as M104, the Sombrero Galaxy, or M31 – the Andromeda Galaxy.Why did Messier catalog such a wide variety of different objects without commenting on their differentiation? The answer is that he wasn’t actually interested in those objects. He cataloged them, rather, as a police officer catalogs data from a possible suspect in order to eliminate them from the inquiry. Messier was interested in comets – which also, from a distance, look like blurry objects. The difference is that comets, being Solar System objects, move from night to night, whereas his cataloged objects appear fixed relative to the stars.The Hebrew word for star includes what we call stars today and other objects, such as Messier’s objects. All were made by our Magnificent Creator God and declare His glory. All of God’s creation is magnificent in every way!!! |
| 4/28/2023 | What did God have in mind when He created the human male? The world around us offers many images of what it means to be a “real man.” The world offers us the breadwinner, the tough-guy and the workaholic’s unending push for success. Also, it’s becoming increasingly universal that it is the woman who holds the family together. We can be sure that none of these images capture what God had in mind.If we want to learn some practical lessons about what God intended a man to be, we need to begin with God’s original creation of the first man. The first job given to Adam, the first man, was an intellectual task – identifying and naming the animals.Jesus Christ taught us to call God “our Father.” However, we shouldn’t make the mistake of comparing Him to our imperfect human fathers. Human fathers need to learn from God. What kind of father is He? He’s tough. However, toughness does not mean hurling thunderbolts. True toughness is best shown when love persists despite rejection and disobedience. God never tired of patiently seeking Saul of Tarsus, His sworn enemy.However, while He is loving, God is not a wimp. He has established absolutes that we can depend on. He always keeps His Word. We can be thankful for that because when we look at ourselves we know that we have not been the men or women He intended us to be. His Word of grace in the forgiveness of sins through Jesus Christ assures all who cling to Christ that the perfect and almighty Magnificent Creator God is truly our Father!!! |
| 4/27/2023 | Infants will often look ever so serious as they babble away, as if they’re actually saying something of great importance. Most of us have assumed that they do this because they see others talking and they want to join in.The clue to the fact that there is more to speech than simple imitations came when scientists discovered that infants can babble without ever making a sound. Researchers studied five infants, two of whom were deaf and had deaf parents. In the deaf households, communication took place through American Sign Language.Scientists found that both hearing and deaf children babbled in the language used in their homes. Hearing infants produced sounds, then syllables, and eventually meaningful words. The deaf infants did the same with their hands. At first they would make the hand signs for basic letters and numbers, stringing them together without meaning. Just as the hearing infants were beginning to offer meaningful communication by their first birthday, the deaf infants’ signing had reached the same point by their first birthday.Researchers were shocked when they realized what this means. It means that the brain has some type of unified ability built into it for learning language. This conclusion goes against everything evolution says about who and what humans are. However, it fits perfectly with the Bible when it tells us that men and women were made for fellowship and communication with their Magnificent Creator God. |
| 4/26/2023 | For centuries Asian cooks have wrapped meat, sushi and candy in bamboo bark. Though the reason for this practice seems to have been forgotten, humans evidently once knew what modern science is rediscovering about bamboo.Chemists have succeeded in extracting the natural chemicals in bamboo bark. What they found was not one or two but four natural chemicals in the bark that inhibit bacteria, especially staph germs. These natural antibacterial agents are now under study for possible use as natural food and cosmetic preservatives. If these natural chemicals can be shown to kill bacteria and yet be harmless to people, the door will be open for an entirely new class of natural food preservatives.The question naturally arises about how Asians originally came to use bamboo in the kitchen. Is it possible that thousands of years ago, when ancestors of today’s Asians headed east from the Tower of Babel, humans knew that bamboo would help keep their food from spoiling?Much of what we are learning today was already known to a humanity that was only a few generations removed from our first and once-perfect parents. Remember that the perfection with which humanity was created was more than moral perfection. Because Adam and Eve had a perfect knowledge of God, they also had a perfect understanding of all that He had made. While we cannot be perfect except through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ, it is also true that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom.By the grace of our Magnificent Creator God we are still discovering the many wonders of this world that He spoke into existence in The Beginning. |
| 4/25/2023 | Medical researchers are learning that your thoughts can affect your health.The cells that make white blood cells can be directly controlled by the brain through nerves.Using the language of hormones the brain, as well as individual nerve cells, can direct the abilities of immune cells to kill invaders. Immune cells also communicate back to the brain using hormones. It has been shown that stress and highly emotional states can make this communication less efficient, hampering the immune system.Macrophages are large amoeba-like cells that rebuild injured tissue and devour bacteria, viruses and anything else that should not be in wounded tissue. These amazing little cells can even eat iron filings. But chemicals produced by the body during times of stress, for example during prolonged periods of feeling helpless, actually make macrophages very sluggish.A word of caution. While many New Agers have selectively used some of these findings to promote their pagan ideas about medicine and health, there is nothing mystical going on here. Not only does this link between our brain and our health once again glorify our Magnificent Creator God, it supports biblical truth. In Philippians 4:8 the Apostle Paul advises, “Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, what-ever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things.” Not only is this advice good for the soul, it is good for the body. |
| 4/24/2023 | Some of the most fascinating discoveries in recent years have to do with our growing knowledge of plant communication. New research continues to reveal even more amazing facts about the exquisite intricacy of God’s marvelous work.Naturalists have long noted that plants often choose to grow at precise spacing from each other and plants of other species. Scientists at the University of California at Santa Barbara theorized that this precision might be a result of communication between the roots of these plants. So they devised an experiment to find out. They designed a network of interlocking, partially transparent growth boxes. These boxes allowed them to watch how root growth took place in single plants, two plants of the same species, and plants of different species.They discovered that when burro weed roots neared the roots of the creosote bush, the roots of the creosote bush slowed the growth of the nearing roots. They also discovered that burro weed roots will stop growing when they encounter other burro weed roots. This allows the plants to send their roots out where they will not compete with their own kind. Most astonishing is the discovery that burro weed roots continue to grow if they encounter other roots from their own plant. The amazed scientists noted that this means that even plants may have a sense of self.When the Bible tells us that the whole creation praises its Creator, it certainly suggests that at least every living thing has a sense of itself as well as its Magnificent Creator God. |
| 4/23/2023 | The strange partnership between the snapping shrimp and the goby is absolutely necessary if both creatures are to survive. The nearly blind shrimp relies on the goby, a small fish, in the same way a blind person relies on his Seeing Eye dog. The goby relies on the safety of the complex tunnel system the shrimp digs.The shrimp is well designed for digging. Once a tunnel is started, the shrimp can dig a burrow large enough for both itself and the goby within a few hours. Each of its five pairs of legs is specialized. The first pair of claws is designed for carrying sediment out of the burrow. The second pair of legs is designed to probe for and clean objects as well as scratching sediment from walls. Pairs three, four and five are walking legs that also work well for scratching material from tunnel walls. On its abdomen the shrimp has several appendages that allow it to move rapidly to protection. Other appendages can create water currents that shift sand back from the digging site.The snapping shrimp, which is less than two inches long, can dig a system of tunnels covering several square feet within a few days. The burrow will have several entrances, as much as four feet apart. All lead to a chamber at the deepest point of the system.The Creator has given both the goby and the shrimp different gifts that they both need to live. If they did not share their gifts with each other, neither could survive. Our Magnificent Creator God has given us all special gifts to share! |
| 4/22/2023 | While staying with some family members in Kentucky, I was delighted one dark evening to see little flashes of light in the air, low over the garden lawn. Although I was too far away to see the insects concerned, these must have been fireflies.Fireflies are not actually flies – they are beetles. Their light-producing organs are in their abdomens. Most species use these bioluminescent displays for courtship.The bioluminescence is caused by a type of luciferin molecule, commonly called firefly luciferin. The name has nothing to do with evil! It comes from the Latin word for light. Firefly luciferin reacts with oxygen, and the reaction is catalyzed by an enzyme, luciferase, as well as the presence of magnesium ions and adenosine triphosphate – the energy-giving molecule ATP. Luciferin first forms another highly tensed molecule called a dioxetane, which releases CO2 to form a ketone. The ketone is in a highly excited electronic state, so it “relaxes” back to normal state by releasing energy. This energy is at exactly the right frequency to be in the visible light range. The fireflies in Kentucky emitted yellow light.If one were an evolutionist, one would have to wonder – what would have been the evolutionary advantage for the beetle to produce luciferase if there was no luciferin, or vice versa?We have a lot more work to do to investigate the chemistry of the process, but we still marvel at the wonder of our Magnificent Creator God’s design for these insects and all of the rest of His Creation!!! |
| 4/21/2023 | Why did the Creator bring together so many precise specifications and high intelligence in the honeybee? To glorify Himself and because bees are crucial to the reproductive cycles of so many plants as well as the food chain.The amazing structure of the honeycomb has amazed scientists for thousands of years. As early as the third century AD, the astronomer Pappus of Alexandria offered an explanation for the six-sided or hexagonal shape of the honeycomb. He pointed out that while the triangle, square and hexagon could all be candidates for the shape of the comb, one of these shapes holds more than the others. The most efficient shape for storing the most honey while wasting the least space is the hexagon.There are many variations of the hexagon that are available to the bee. However, the honeybee is always very precise in constructing honeycomb hexagons, with an obtuse angle of 109°23´ and an acute angle of 70°23´. These angles produce the most usable space for the least amount of building material. Humans are unable to use such precision in their designs without sophisticated equipment.Each honeybee is a tiny but powerful computer that could only have been designed and built by an intelligent Magnificent Creator God. Bees and what they do are of central importance to much of the rest of creation. No wonder God has given them so much: the complex structure of their society, their intelligence and industriousness! |
| 4/20/2023 | There’s an old saying that people seldom remember how rapidly the job was done, but they do appreciate good workmanship. However, the staggering variety and number of things created by God did not limit the elegance of His fine workman-ship.The relationship between the snapping shrimp and a fish called the goby is a good example of the Creator’s attention to the finest detail. The snapping shrimp has very poor eyesight, while the goby has excellent eyesight. Both share the same burrow, which is dug by the shrimp and guarded by the goby.The shrimp uses the goby as a blind person uses a Seeing Eye dog. Whenever the shrimp is outside its burrow, it always keeps one antenna on the goby. The shrimp stays hidden inside the burrow if the goby should temporarily swim away. When danger approaches, the goby signals and disappears inside the burrow. The shrimp is right behind him.Neither the goby nor the shrimp can survive without each other, so pairs are established for life when both goby and shrimp are very young. In order for this system to work, both goby and shrimp reproductive systems, which differ greatly, are synchronized so that shrimp and goby youngsters are ready to pair at the same time.This astonishing relationship shows us how our Magnificent Creator God’s standards of excellence bring His love to every corner of the creation. |
| 4/19/2023 | Which of your five senses is most important? Which sense could be lost with the least threat to your life?Most people consider their sense of sight the most important. While the loss of sight is a terrible tragedy, life can go on. Lose your sense of smell and food will be flavorless, but you can get by. Loss of hearing, too, is a great loss, but the loss can be adjusted to. And few people’s lives are threatened by the loss of the sense of taste. However, if you lose your sense of touch, you lose your sense of pain and therefore any warning that you might be injuring yourself. Unfortunately there are people who have no sense of touch. Sometimes they receive life-threatening injuries because they cannot feel pain.Science has shown that touching is necessary for life. Newborn animals that are licked by their mothers have a higher resistance to disease. They are also more likely to live to adulthood than newborns who are untouched by their mothers. Chihuahua pups have a notoriously high rate of death because their mothers are often unwilling to lick them. Lambs will die after birth if their mothers do not lick and nuzzle them. Even human infants who are not lovingly touched enough will suffer from depression, poor sleep, weight loss, poor immunity and, in extreme cases, even death.Our wise Magnificent Creator God has built into us the need for touch. Though we take it for granted, without touch, life would be impossible. |
| 4/18/2023 | If you had painful skin, one of the last things you would apply to it would be hot peppers. Not only do hot peppers burn the mouth, some can even blister the skin.Yet in South America ground hot peppers have been used for centuries to help relieve pain. Scientists have discovered the active ingredient in peppers that relieves skin pain. This sub-stance blocks the pain signals that come from the nerves just under the surface of the skin. The “hot pepper” sauce for skin not only causes no pain, it relieves pain that doesn’t respond to any other treatment. It’s available in creams and ointments that, tests show, relieve pain in two out of three people.Conventional wisdom says that medicines that are found in natural plants were discovered by accident. Someone might accidentally discover a relationship between a person’s having eaten a certain plant and then getting well. They would try the same plants on others with the same disease. If they found that there were more cures, the plant would be remembered as a folk medicine.The “hot pepper” pain reliever for skin tells us that there’s a problem with this theory. People who have a painful skin condition are not likely to apply a pepper sauce. Doing that would be expected to make their skin more painful and cause it to blister. However, it’s possible that our Magnificent Creator God originally gave humans some knowledge of the cures for our ills—cures that He wisely built into creation. |
| 4/17/2023 | Plants make cellulose. Cellulose is a type of natural plastic made of many sugar molecules linked together. Scientists have known for years how to use the natural plastic qualities of cellulose to make things like cellophane and rayon.Scientists have also known that animals generate a similar natural plastic called chitin. Like cellulose, chitin is a carbohydrate made of long chains of sugar molecules. Chitin is found in the shells of all insects and crustaceans, like crabs. Each year the crabmeat industry had thrown away thousands of tons of chitin because scientists couldn’t figure out how to extract chitin from the shells in a usable form.Finally in 1975 scientists discovered how to remove the chitin from shells and change its form so it could be made into whatever forms they needed. Suture thread made from chitin dissolves in the body. This means that stitches don’t have to be removed, and it can be more easily knotted than regular suture thread. Suture thread made from chitin also causes no allergic reaction and it seems to promote healing. It’s hard to believe that a crab shell, which is usually thrown away, could do so much! Food processing companies are even using a chemical made from chitin to recover protein from wastewater.Almost everything in the creation seems to have numerous uses for human needs. This is testimony that our Magnificent Creator God has made this universe for us and that He cares about our needs. In the Bible we learn that He has provided for our greatest need through His Son Jesus Christ. |
| 4/16/2023 | Many cultures around the world have legends about creation and a great Flood that have been handed down from generations in the distant past. Most of these creation and Flood stories sup-port the biblical story of creation and the Flood.The Wallam Olum is the story of creation and the history of the Delaware Indians. It predates the coming of white people or Christianity to North America. The Delaware creation legend reveals an all-powerful creator, who began by creating an earth without dry land, and the heavens including the sun, moon and stars. After dividing the waters from the land, he made all living things, including the first mother. This world was full of joy and had no sorrow until the snake brought wickedness. It concludes by saying that all this happened beyond the great ocean.The Delaware story of the Flood begins with the world filled with evil because of the activity of the evil snake. While the Delaware legend blames the Flood on the snake, a few were saved through the Flood at an island called “Nana,” a name very similar to Noah.While the Wallam Olum is not Genesis, the similarities with Genesis are too many and too exact to be accidental. Similar legends from all over the globe have the same or similar details that they, too, share with Genesis. This can only be explained by the fact that the Bible is accurate in describing how all cultures have shared this common history together.Regardless of what we call Him, it was our Magnificent Creator God to whom we owe it all. |
| 4/15/2023 | Deserts are inhospitable places with little rain—blazingly hot by day and chillingly cold by night. Few plants can survive, but the rock morning glory can. It has large underground tubers resembling sweet potatoes that store water whenever it rains. In times of drought, it’s sustained by the water stored in its twenty or so underground reserves.Jeremiah 17:8 says of those who put their confidence in God: “They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit”.Our Magnificent Creator God’s provisions are always sufficient! |
| 4/14/2023 | Solar Cycle 10 – a typical 11-year sunspot cycle, from late 1855 to 1867 – was one of the busiest ever observed for solar activity. British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington had noticed a great deal of activity on the surface of the Sun from August 28th, 1859. On the morning of Thursday, September 1st, he once again pointed his brass telescope at the Sun, and he hurriedly made dozens of rapid sketches of the projected images.Suddenly, he reported that he saw “two patches of intensely bright and white light”. He had just witnessed the largest ever recorded solar event – now named the Carrington Event.Within 18 hours, the Earth was experiencing massive Aurora displays – the northern lights seen at latitudes as far south as Cuba. More interesting was the effect on the telegraph systems. All around the world, telegraph systems failed, operators experienced shocks and telegraph papers caught fire.What would happen if a solar storm the size of the Carrington Event happened today? Earth is surrounded by communication satellites, and most countries of the world rely on computer networks and the Internet. All of these could be damaged or destroyed by another Carrington.The Carrington Event at least shows why our Magnificent Creator God created a magnetic field around the Earth. The Aurora displays at least showed that Earth has some protection against such an unusual event. And no event is truly random! |
| 4/13/2023 | For many people bats bring to mind words like “creepy,” “fangs,” “rabies,” and even “ugly.” However, over 450 years ago Martin Luther marveled at the delicate beauty of the bat. He pronounced the creature an excellent witness to the skill and wisdom of the Creator.God must also like bats. Almost one-fourth of all mammals He created are bats! The flying fox bat has a wingspan of nearly six feet. Bumblebee bats, native to Thailand, are the smallest mammals known, weighing less than a penny. There are brilliantly patterned tropical bats called butterfly bats. And hundreds of species of tropical plants depend on bats as pollinators.Popular legend considers bats a serious part of the rabies problem. The truth is that raccoons, skunks, foxes, and even dogs and cats are more likely to have rabies. In fact, one study shows that in Pennsylvania you are more likely to find a rabid cow than a rabid bat. In reality bats are delicate, helpful and intelligent creatures. A typical North American bat will eat about 600 mosquitoes an hour. Large colonies will consume between 250,000 and 500,000 pounds of insects per night! Bats can be trained, demonstrating their intelligence. And finally, an important warning. If you find sleeping bats, don’t disturb them. Even one such disturbance during sleep can be fatal, since stored nutrition may be consumed by the disturbance before the next feeding cycle.So next time you see a bat, don’t recoil in fear. Rather, say a prayer of thanksgiving to the Magnificent Creator God who made both of you. |
| 4/12/2023 | Some people talk to their plants. But what do you say to a bacterium? Evidently the soybean plant knows just what to say to make bacteria its close friend and helper.Symbiosis means a relationship between two different creatures in which they both help each other. Plants need nitrogen for healthy growth. However, while there is more than enough nitrogen in the air, plants normally can’t make use of that nitrogen. Legumes, like soybeans, link up with bacteria that are able to take nitrogen from the air and turn it into a form of nitrogen that plants, including the soybean, can use. In return, the plant creates a nice home for the bacteria in nodes in its roots and provides the bacteria with food.The bacteria need a great deal of oxygen and energy to fix nitrogen into the soil. The oxygen is supplied by heme. If that name reminds you of the hemoglobin that carries oxygen in blood, you’re on the right track. That’s why the heme in the nodules turns them reddish. Who makes the heme, the soybean or the bacteria? When alone, neither creature has any heme. Researchers have learned that the plant performs the first part of the chemistry needed to make heme and the bacterium finishes the job. The plant and the bacterium actually communicate chemically with each other so that production goes smoothly!Communication between such different creatures, allowing them to perform sophisticated chemistry to improve both of their lives, shows how inadequate evolution is to explain life. This arrangement surely glorifies our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 4/11/2023 | Previously we talked about the Perseverance Mars 2020 mission, which included a helicopter named Ingenuity.Another technology demonstration taken with Perseverance is an instrument for collecting oxygen. The atmosphere on Mars is very thin; its surface pressure is only 1% of Earth’s atmosphere. Of this tenuous Martian atmosphere, 95.3% is carbon dioxide, which is only a trace gas on Earth.There is 2.6% nitrogen and 1.9% argon, with trace amounts of water vapor, oxygen, carbon monoxide, hydrogen and noble gases. Despite the rarity of oxygen, NASA engineers believe that their equipment can extract oxygen in sufficient quantities to make human exploration of Mars possible.Which brings us to the subject of life. Previous missions – and indeed photographs – have provided evidence that there was once water on Mars.Even Perseverance’s landing site – the Jezero Crater – appears surrounded by dried water channels. But water and atmospheric carbon dioxide do not make life. Says one NASA scientist, “If we found a microbe that arose on the next planet over, if lightning struck twice in this one corner of the solar system, it would suggest that our whole universe could have life on lots and lots of planets and it’s not just us alone in the dark night.” But his “lightning” did not strike once. Chemicals in lifeforms are not produced by mixtures or even simple reactions. They contain codes and information which could only have been put there by the Magnificent Creator God of the Bible!!! |
| 4/10/2023 | Garlic. Even say the word and some people move away to give you some distance. Others gather around, because to them, garlic helps make the meal. Garlic has begun to attract the attention of medical researchers as well.At the Tagore Medical College in India, researcher Arun Bordia kept track of 432 heart attack survivors for three years. During that time half of the survivors drank the juice from six to ten cloves of fresh garlic each day while others took a garlic scented drink with no garlic in it. Over the three-year period the garlic group had 32% fewer heart attacks and 45% fewer deaths than the other group. Research in the United States with chickens, who metabolize cholesterol in much the same way as humans, suggests a reason for these results. Chickens that were fed aged garlic extract showed a 50% reduction in the kind of cholesterol that clogs arteries.Medical researchers are also looking at some interesting evidence that garlic may help prevent some forms of cancer, especially stomach cancer.When our Magnificent Creator God made the heavens and earth, He knew that humans would disobey Him, destroying the creation with sin. He also knew that in doing so we would bring disease and death into the world. We can thank Him that He stocked the earth with substances that could be used to treat some of the earthly effects of sin. However, we can thank Him even more joyfully that He provided the full cure for sin for each of us in the life, death and resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ! |
| 4/9/2023 | They are the only cells in the human body that repeatedly die and self-regenerate throughout life. And science considers them so interesting that several branches of science are studying them. I am talking about hair cells.As scientists are learning more about hair, they are coming to greater appreciation of, as one researcher put it, hair’s bewildering biology. A Harvard molecular biologist admitted that one of the reasons we know so little about hair is that scientists have avoided studying this complex structure.The average scalp has about 100,000 hairs growing at any one time. Each hair follicle produces hair for about two to five years, followed by a rest period of four to six months. A miniature assembly line of cells divides within the follicle, pushing older hair cells upward through the skin. Pigmentation is added as each new cell is produced. When the follicle is at rest, it shrivels and many of its cells die. However, seed cells, promising new life to the follicle, hide within it waiting for the signal to spring back to life. As humans grow older the resting time of the follicles increases and growing time decreases, especially in men. So if you find yourself balding, you’re not necessarily losing your hair. It’s just that your hair is spending more time resting than it used to.Our Magnificent Creator God tells us that He cares so much about each one of us that He even knows how many hairs we have on our head! |
| 4/8/2023 | David Bowie sang about the Spiders from Mars, but by the time you hear this Creation Moment, the sky above the Red Planet could be buzzing with helicopters; well, one helicopter at least. NASA’s Perseverance mission was launched successfully on July 30th, 2020 and was scheduled to land in the Jezero Crater on February 18th, 2021. We probably know much more about this landing site for a robotic spacecraft than we did about the Mare Tranquilitatis Apollo 11 landing site on the Moon in 1969. The surface of Mars has been extensively mapped by orbiting craft. Many landings have taken so-called rovers with them. Perseverance is another such rover and carries seven different sensing instruments. It will even collect a number of samples for returning to Earth, though the Perseverance mission itself will not return; NASA hopes that a mission in 2026 will be able to retrieve the samples.One very interesting extra feature of Perseverance is that it carries with it the very first aircraft to operate in another planet’s atmosphere. Ingenuity is a sort-of helicopter, or perhaps a drone, designed to be able to fly in the tenuous Martian atmosphere. Seven flights of this robotic drone will provide much new information.Unfortunately, the focus of the mission is, once again, the fruitless search for extraterrestrial life. But we will still follow the mission with interest because God made Mars, and what we find there will cause us to praise our Magnificent Creator God all the more! |
| 4/7/2023 | The headline “Scientist Sees Planets with Very Large Telescope” might not excite the imagination until you realize that the Very Large Telescope, or VLT, is actually a thing! It is a huge reflecting telescope, built by the European Southern Observatory in the desert in Chile. It is actually comprised of four telescopes, each of which has a primary hyperbolic mirror about 27 feet across. The result is that the instrument can “see” objects millions of times fainter than those detected by the human eye.Recently, the VLT was pointed at a star rejoicing in the name TYC 8998-760-1, about 300 light years away. It was already known, from calculations, that the star had two planets orbiting it. So the VLT was able to take a magnificent photograph of the stellar system, clearly showing these planets.Both planets are gas giants. The one closer to the star is 14 times more massive than Jupiter, while the other is six times bigger. The planets are 160 and 320 times further from their star than the Earth is from the Sun, compared with just five and ten times the Earth-Sun distance for Jupiter and Saturn.And all of this fits perfectly into the master plan of our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 4/6/2023 | We don’t often think about our sense of smell. While our noses are on the job all the time, we note an odor only when it is unusual. Most of the time the scents around us contribute, unnoticed, to our overall impression of our surroundings.It’s hard to remain tense at the beach. Simply the mention of the water and waves, the sand and sun, brings back the last trip to the beach and starts relaxing a person. However therapeutic these elements of the beach are, scientists have found that the one beach fixture that is probably most responsible for relaxing us is the smell.The smelly chemical that utility companies put in natural gas so that we can smell leaks is methyl mercaptan. This chemical is also produced by rotting meat. The human nose is extremely sensitive to this smell. We can detect as little as one 400-billionth of a gram of it in a quart of air.Doctors have long known that their noses are helpful in diagnosing disease. A person is brought into the emergency room in a coma. It’s very likely that the doctor will smell the patient’s breath as he tries to discover the problem. A sweet smell could indicate diabetes. The smell of ammonia could indicate a kidney malfunction. Arsenic poisoning smells like garlic. Diphtheria can be identified by a sickeningly sweet odor, and people with the plague smell like apples. A patient who smells like freshly baked bread may have typhoid.While we seldom think about our sense of smell, it’s a wonderful gift from our Magnificent Creator God for which we owe Him thanks. |
| 4/5/2023 | When you are ill, you need sleep. And when you are sick you are usually sleepy. Medical researchers are now learning that it’s not accidental that illness and sleepiness go together. In fact, the relationship is one of God’s ingenious designs.Early in this century scientists isolated what they called the S factor—the S being for sleep. Modern biochemists have identified the S factor as a biochemical that is released from the cell walls of bacteria when our bodies destroy them. This chemical finds its way to the brain where it induces sleep. It also stimulates the immune system. Normally the body breaks down some of the harmless bacteria that live in our digestive systems every day. By the end of the day enough sleep factor has collected in our blood to make bedtime welcome.However, when we are fighting a bacterial infection, our body is destroying many additional bacteria and releasing a lot more sleep factor. That sleep factor is also stimulating our immune system to higher levels of activity. Researchers recommend that we give in to our desire to sleep when we are ill. Our immune system and non-dreaming sleep are closely related. In other words, grandma was right when she told us that we would avoid getting sick if we got enough sleep.It’s no accident that bacterial infections trigger the body to react not only to rid itself of bacteria but also to strengthen itself for the fight. This ingenious design is yet another indication that our Magnificent Creator God does care about what happens to us. That love is why He sent His Son to win our salvation on the cross of Calvary. |
| 4/4/2023 | Picture yourself sitting in a friend’s living room. Can you picture in your mind where the door is located? Scientists call this a thought map. Thought maps are mental pictures of the arrangement of objects relative to one another.Thought maps help us remember where to find a water glass, the gas or brake pedal, and home. Thought maps require intelligence. They help make possible additional intelligent activity, such as finding our way around and conducting an intelligent search. This is why scientists have been surprised to find that many creatures, not just humans, use thought maps.One experimenter carried a chimpanzee on his back while he hid 18 pieces of food in a field. Then the chimp and five others were released in the field to find the food. The chimp who had seen the hiding places found most of the food, following a very different route than that originally taken by the researcher. Bees, likewise, use mental maps. Even if a bee is forced to detour on its way back to the hive, it always reports the food source as though it had used a direct route. Bees are also able to find a food source that has been moved after its discovery. Ants have also been shown to use mental maps.Mental maps help humans and animals think deductively about changes in the environment. Mental mapping ability could not have evolved because even the lowliest creature requires this ability to survive. This ability must have been given to them in the first place by their Magnificent Creator God! |
| 4/3/2023 | If, as we are continually told, evolution is a fact, why is it that human technology improves when we copy designs found in nature? If nature is really a giant trial-and-error experiment, we should not only find evidence of less-sophisticated designs in the distant past, but humans today should be able to improve on designs found in nature.Science has long known that an object moving through water or air moves with the least resistance when the ratio of its length to diameter is four to one. This ratio is found in the fastest swimmers in the sea – like the tuna, dolphin and swordfish. A Boeing 707, with a ratio of nine to one, experiences much more resistance than the larger, fatter 747, which has a ratio of six to one – much closer to the tuna and the dolphin.Studies of the vision of the horseshoe crab, supposedly one of the earlier forms of life, have taught engineers how to produce a clearer, sharper television picture. The United States Air Force copied a speed-sensing system from beetles to improve the ground speed indicators of their jets.The optics of a frog’s eye showed them how to improve their radar. The fly’s multifaceted eye taught engineers how to design a lighting system that generates more light with less energy.Humans are learning from and copying design solutions worked out by their Magnificent Creator God. The brilliant designs in our world are not the result of trial and error. This reality makes the claim that evolution is a fact of science sound empty! |
| 4/2/2023 | Though God created the entire living kingdom in only a few days, the variety and creativity of what He made seems nearly unlimited by our standards. One of the more unusual creatures He made was thought extinct until it was rediscovered in 1958.The kakapo parrot lives in New Zealand. The most unusual parrot on earth, it is one of only a few known parrots that prefers to sleep during the day and becomes active at night. Weighing in at five pounds, it is also the world’s heaviest parrot. It is, perhaps not surprisingly, the world’s only non-flying parrot.The Creator’s unusual expression of inventive creativity in designing the kakapo did not end here. The mating habits of the kakapo are especially peculiar for birds. In mating season the males gather in locations that are used year after year for mate selection. Female parrots come to these places to inspect the males to select a mate. However, in most un-bird-like fashion, the males provide absolutely no help building the nest or rearing the young.The kakapo is remarkable because of its many strange traits, most of which would make it least fit for survival. In other words, not only is it an unusual creature, but its more unusual characteristics seem to put it at a disadvantage as far as evolution is concerned. So while evolution would not have made the kakapo, our inventive Magnificent Creator God did, perhaps as a witness against evolution. |
| 4/1/2023 | We have all looked in wonder at the amazing transformation of a caterpillar into a moth. However, did you realize that a moth needs an entirely different kind of brain than a caterpillar? We can truly say that here we have an insect with two brains!In the caterpillar stage, the moth lumbers around in a body that is primarily designed for eating. Its brain must be able to command powerful jaws and a comparatively huge digestive system as well as the complexities of caterpillar locomotion. The world of the caterpillar is very different from the world of the moth.During metamorphosis the caterpillar completely dissolves and the moth is rebuilt from the liquid. The brain, for example, requires new nerve cells and new connections between brain cells, while some brain cells change function, migrate to new locations, or even die. The result is a brain that is 10 times the size of the caterpillar’s and ready to control flight. The moth’s primary purpose in life is to reproduce. So its new brain is able to generate the odors used by moths to identify and communicate with potential mates. It is also equipped to detect the scents of a potential mate.Only our almighty Magnificent Creator God could completely rebuild a caterpillar into a moth. Only He could rebuild and increase its brain ten-fold in only a week or two. Even more amazing is how He remakes people. Through the forgiveness of sins, Jesus Christ turns us from people who wish to escape Him to new creatures who love Him and find joy in Him. |
| 3/31/2023 | They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. While that is often true, they also say that it takes a highly evolved brain to picture objects and remember them. Science is learning that this bit of evolutionary myth is indeed fiction.As far as the honeybee is concerned, not all flowers are created equal. Some flowers are a good source of nectar while others are a waste of time. Alfalfa flowers can kill a honeybee because they are designed for pollination by larger insects. When an insect lands, a central petal in the flower releases the stamen and sweeps pollen upward to aid pollination. Honeybees can be tossed off the flower or trapped inside by this action.Scientists always thought that honeybees solved the problem of finding safe and productive flowers by remembering a list of characteristics. They believed the honeybee was evolutionarily too simple to remember mental pictures of favored flowers. However, recent experiments have convinced scientists that bees actually store a mental picture of productive flowers. In these experiments, bees were rewarded with sugar water for visiting some patterns and not others. Their reactions showed that they remember images, not simply patterns.What’s more, the experiments showed that bees are quite intelligent and good learners. One scientist noted that these experiments showed that evolution’s assumptions about so-called higher and lower creatures are false. Those who believe in evolution are having to rethink their view of the world. Meanwhile, we can give thanks to our Magnificent Creator God for so generously giving the gift of intelligence to so many of His creatures. |
| 3/30/2023 | Some creatures simply try to look uninteresting to hungry predators. Others take their role-playing so seriously that they actually fulfill some of the same roles as their models.Loopers, or inchworms, move along the ground, twigs or branches with the characteristic opening and closing of an upside-down letter U. These creatures are not true worms. Rather, they are caterpillars. As caterpillars, they often look very much like the twigs or branches on which they move. However, their odd form of movement can give them away.Here’s an experiment you can try. If you ever notice a looper on a branch, simply give the branch a gentle tap. Chances are, the looper will suddenly freeze into the same shape as a nearby twig. If you were to carefully touch the looper, you would find that it had become as stiff as a twig. A botanist reports that while studying one looper moving along a branch, an ant happened along. Ants, of course, will eat loopers. The looper froze in a horizontal position between branches. The ant walked across the looper, never noticing that its walkway was actually a potential meal.Many scientists suggest that the looper “just happens” to be the same color as the branches on which it crawls. We ask, does it also accidentally know how to act like a twig to fool predators? The almighty hand of our Magnificent Creator God is evident even in the inchworm! |
| 3/29/2023 | It is unfortunate that we so often have the sense that nothing technologically important has happened in human history until modern times. This helps maintain the illusion that humans are indeed progressing and evolving upward.Differential gears, allowing a machine to perform two functions simultaneously, were not used in modern times until 1575. However, a model planetarium using differential gears was found in a ship that sank off Greece in 78 BC. While Ben Franklin is given credit for discovering electricity, electric batteries dating from 100 BC have been found in Iraq.The Gate of the Sun is a ten-ton intricately carved stone gate in Bolivia, 13,000 feet above sea level. In Mexico there are boulders with faces carved on them. They were erected between 1250 and 400 BC, carved out of boulders weighing up to 24 tons that were quarried 45 miles away from their present location. How were these giants moved and erected? Joseph Davidovits, a scientist at the Geopolymer Institute in France, believes he may know. He suggests that the builders chemically broke down the stone with acid. Then they carried the liquid stone to the present sites and poured the liquid into molds. In support of his theory, Davidovits points out that some Indians still use this method now, while traces of the acid can still be found in some ancient stone structures.Despite all of our modern gadgets, there is no evidence that humans are any more clever today than they were on the first day they walked the earth when they were placed there by our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 3/28/2023 | All insects that hear, except one, have two ears. Some insects have ears on their legs, thorax, or abdomen. However, they all follow the same principle. Their ears are separated so that they can locate the source of the sound – except in one insect.Scientists always thought the preying mantis was deaf. The 1,700 species of mantises have no structure that looks like an ear. Only after a long process of detailed study and testing did scientists finally discover that the mantis can hear. Further investigation finally led to the discovery of one of the most bizarre methods of hearing anywhere in the animal kingdom.The mantis’s hearing organ is difficult to call an ear. Unlike any other insect, the mantis has only one hearing organ, located in a groove underneath its thorax. The teardrop‑shaped groove has a thinner cuticle than other parts of the body. Beneath the cuticle there is a relatively large air sac on each side of the groove. These sacs are connected to the insect’s respiratory system. Near the top of the sac are the nerves that carry the sensation of sound to the nervous system. Scientists say that this hearing organ senses ultrasonic frequencies. When researchers played a bat‑like sound to a mantis in flight, it immediately took an evasive flight path to escape the bat it thought it heard.There is no limit to our Magnificent Creator God’s creativity and His ability to make whatever He can imagine. |
| 3/27/2023 | We want to avoid getting bacteria in our food, don’t we? Bacteria cause illness. Bacteria are bad.Yet, some of the world’s healthiest foods contain deliberately introduced bacteria. One such strain of bacteria is the Lactic Acid Bacterium (LAB). This is used in foods such as kimchi or sauerkraut. Brassicas, such as cabbage, often have low quantities of this bacterium. When sealed in a suitable fermentation jar with salt, the LAB can thrive. LAB is able to withstand high acidity and salinity, so it grows, even in a salty environment. One of the products of LAB’s metabolism is lactic acid. Most other bacteria cannot survive in either acid or salt, so the LAB begins to dominate, while the vast majority of other bacteria die. LAB itself is not harmful to humans, so, paradoxically, the good bacteria have effectively killed off all the bad bacteria, providing a healthy, long-lasting food.When God finished making the world at the end of day six of creation, He looked at all that He had made and declared it to be very good. This must have included bacteria. Since Adam’s sin, many bacteria have mutated (though not evolved, as they have not gained new genetic information) into harmful organisms. Perhaps originally, all bacteria were created to be as useful as LAB in that original perfect world that our Magnificent Creator God gave us and that we so sinfully polluted. |
| 3/26/2023 | It’s commonly known that many animals are able to detect extraordinarily weak odors. The real mystery is how they can smell scents that are 1,000 times too weak to produce the chemical reactions necessary to make a scent signal.From the chemist’s point of view, our sense of smell shouldn’t work as well as it does. When you smelled that wonderful dinner a few days ago, a marvel of chemical reactions was taking place in your nose. Scientists still aren’t sure how we sense such a wide range of smells. It was while investigating this question that scientists may have stumbled across the answer to another question.The receptors in our noses have to detect a certain number of scent molecules before they can trigger the chemical response that makes the signal that tells us we have smelled something. When air is drawn into your nose, an organ called Steno’s duct sprays a fine mist. Scientists always thought this mist simply humidified the incoming air. Now they’ve discovered that the duct also makes proteins that grab onto odor molecules. Sprayed into the incoming air, the proteins collect odor molecules. Then, with their load of odor molecules, they settle onto receptors that trigger your sense of smell. As a result, even scents that are too weak to smell are concentrated by this ingenious system so that we can sense them.Our sense of smell helps protect us, gives our food flavor, and adds richness to the experience of living. It’s truly a marvel of our Magnificent Creator God’s design. |
| 3/25/2023 | “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.”One of the most common arguments against a literal six-day creation is that the structure of the days is a literary device, called the Framework Hypothesis. The hypothesis suggests an almost poetic pattern to the days, which they claim demonstrates that the days are not meant to be taken literally. On day one, God made the universe. On day two, He made the seas and atmosphere, and on day three He made the land, with its plants. Then on day four, He filled the universe, day five filled the sea and atmosphere, and day six filled the land. So there are three days of creating ex nihilo and three days of filling those creations. Again, the advocates of this hypothesis maintain that this pattern shows that Genesis 1 is allegorical literature, proclaiming the truth of God as Creator, but does not give a historical account.A quick answer to this point is that if there is a real pattern of two sets of three days, this does not prove that the days are not literal. God is a God of order. However, their neat pattern breaks down. Day one is not actually the parallel to day four – day two is. How so? On day two, God created the firmament, and the firmament refers not merely to the atmosphere but the entirety of space.A better suggestion is to take our Magnificent Creator God at His word, that He created everything exactly how He said He did!!! |
| 3/24/2023 | Language requires some very special designs that are rare in nature and found together only in humans. First, human language requires vocal cords, which none of the apes have. The only animals with vocal tracts are birds, but no one is suggesting that we evolved from birds.Language also seems to require an unusual structure to the brain. The frontal area of the left hemisphere of the brain is connected to an adjacent area of the cortex called the Wernicke area. These two areas are linked by a bundle of nerve fibers. The result is a distinct brain asymmetry that is unique to humans. Even the unborn human has this asymmetry that allows it to absorb language. Development in this area of the brain stops at puberty. That is why it becomes more difficult for adults to learn a new language. Language skills can be learned only by hearing language. So-called “feral” children, who have heard no language at all, cannot be taught language after puberty for the same reason.So where did Adam first hear language? Scripture tells us that it was the Creator God Himself who regularly spoke with Adam. This means that language is not a collection of meaningless sounds to which we have assigned meanings. The meanings and sounds have come from God, just as our unique design that makes language possible comes from God.Therefore, language is not only for worldly purposes. We have also been given language to praise our Magnificent Creator God and Savior and to tell others who He is and what He has done! |
| 3/23/2023 | Tropical beauty has inspired many Hawaiian love songs. However, none is more unusual than the love song of Hawaiian fruit flies.There are more than 100 species of Hawaiian Drosophila, or fruit fly. Just like everything else in that tropical paradise, these fruit flies are not the drab creatures known in mainland biology labs. Hawaiian fruit flies are larger and more brightly colored. And while mainland fruit flies do sing, Hawaiian fruit flies offer more variety in their songs and in the way they make the sounds. One of their unique songs is called the click song. Its high‑pitched clicks sound something like a fingernail being dragged across a comb. Another song is made up of a complex pattern that includes pulses and trills. A third song pattern is a steady purr. A fourth pattern is made up of a low hum. Scientists describe the singing patterns as elaborate for a fly.Scientists suspect that the fruit flies use singing as part of their mating ritual. In one encounter, a male stood behind a female with his head under her wing. He then hummed until she either accepted his advance or flew off. It may be, scientists speculate, that the female feels the male’s song rather than hears it. Songs and rituals seem to vary between the species.Scripture tells us that everything in the creation sings praise to our Magnificent Creator God. Often that truth is taken as figurative. However, as we learn more about His creatures, we see that the complexity of music is a gift that has been given to many things in the creation. |
| 3/22/2023 | Which body structure is a powerful generator of emotions, gives you a sense of direction, and serves as a cannon all at the same time? It’s your nose, of course! It is common knowledge that without our noses the scent of a rose could not give us joy, nor would our food taste like very much. Less well known is the fact that our noses are directly hooked into the brain’s limbic system. Your limbic system plays a central role in generating and controlling emotions. This is why certain scents are able to raise strong emotional memories in us.The nose is also designed to filter out and catch particles that should not get into the lungs. When a particle is taken in through your nose, it is snagged by the tissue inside your nasal passages. Next, this highly special tissue decides the best method of getting rid of the foreign material. If a bacterium is identified, your nose begins to run, bathing the bacteria in powerful chemicals that dissolve most of them. If the particles are larger, like pollen, a sneeze is triggered that can eject particles at speeds of over 100 miles per hour!Perhaps the most remarkable ability associated with the nose is its ability to act as a compass. Human beings have a small amount of iron in the bony part of the nose between the eyes. Scientific experiments have shown that we have an ability, while not foolproof, that can sense direction that is influenced by magnetic fields!Our Magnificent Creator God made your multi-purpose nose not only to bring some pleasure to life but also to help protect your health. |
| 3/21/2023 | Normally they bother no one. The creatures, called protozoan ciliates, quietly go about their business in water‑filled tree holes, eating other microorganisms. The protozoans themselves are an important food for mosquito larvae.However, as mosquito wigglers begin to populate the water, the protozoans turn into deadly monsters. Secretions from the mosquito larvae alert the protozoans to the presence of the larvae. They begin rapidly growing cells and their appearance changes. The result is a completely different creature that is well‑designed to infect mosquito larvae and kill them. In other words, for self‑protection, the prey becomes parasite, making the would‑be predator its prey. Scientists are seeking better understanding of this in the hope of developing better natural mosquito controls.Scientists have known for some time that some microorganisms respond to predators. The most common protective response is to grow spines or some other projection. This makes the prey difficult to eat. But the strategy used by the protozoan ciliates is the most extreme self‑protective response known.There is no creature in God’s creation that is so unimportant that God has failed to give it ways to make its living. Many creatures have been given what seem to be very uncreative ways to live. However, the fact that even these seemingly unimportant creatures have special gifts from our Magnificent Creator God gives witness to His care for everything He has made. |
| 3/20/2023 | We have looked at many plants and animals that use different forms of camouflage to keep from being noticed. Some don’t wish to be noticed so that they can surprise their prey, while others don’t want to be noticed so they can avoid becoming prey. However, what happens when both predator and prey encounter each other in full camouflage?The predator in this drama, witnessed by a naturalist at the edge of a desert, is a yellow crab spider. The spider was waiting on a yellow flower that made him nearly invisible. The potential prey is an inchworm beneath the same flower. The inchworm was tearing off bits of the yellow flower petals and sticking them on its back.Properly camouflaged, the inchworm then worked his way toward the top of the flower where the spider waited. The spider felt the movement and ran around the edge to see whether lunch might be on the way. However, when the spider got around the edge of the flower, he saw nothing. He didn’t even notice the camouflaged inchworm on which he was standing! The spider then returned to the center of the flower, outsmarted by the inchworm who went on about his business.Our wisdom would have said that the inchworm should try to run when he noticed the spider. However, the wisdom given to him by our Magnificent Creator God allowed him to continue about his business on the flower. This offers us a good illustration of how following the Lord’s wisdom often requires us to reject our own. |
| 3/19/2023 | We have long known that the community within a honeybee hive divides the labor among specialized workers. There are scouts who search for food. Nurses tend the young. Some bees specialized in cleaning. There are even undertaker bees who remove and dispose of dead members of the hive.Scientists have now discovered that honeybee colonies also have brigades of specialized “soldiers.” These bees often seem to be sitting around, not doing much. In fact, they have only one duty—attack large intruders. It appears that these bees are fed and cared for by the hive members while they wait for the alarm. Should a raccoon, bear or human threaten the hive, thousands of soldier bees swarm around the enemy and sting.Soldiers have been well-known members of ant and termite colonies. However, up to now, they have never been confirmed in honeybee hives.The universal need for soldiers for protection among social insects reminds us that some things are universal in this world. These soldiers are not responsible for a bear’s attack on the hive. Nor are human soldiers who follow just war principles responsible for human war.Humanity’s greed and lack of love for others cannot be abolished by getting rid of armies. Rather, greed, theft and the need for protection remind us that we are not what God intended us to be. The solution lies not in denying reality, but in returning to our Magnificent Creator God through the forgiveness of our sins as made possible by Jesus Christ. |
| 3/18/2023 | How many different scents do you think your nose is able to smell? The answer is about 10,000. How does your nose tell the difference between a rose and a skunk? Until only recently, scientists really weren’t sure.Now we know that humans and mammals detect smells by using at least 1,000 different genes. These genes are located in every cell in your body, but they are active only in your nose. This discovery, say scientists, gives them their first insight into how smell works. Before this, said one scientist, “We had almost no knowledge of the olfactory system and this really opens up the molecular study of smell in a very fascinating way.”They say that each of the different genes seems designed to respond to a small group of odors. As each group of genes does its part, the entire system is able to recognize everything we can smell. These genes pass signals from the nerve cells in the nose to a small region of the brain called the olfactory bulb. Now that smell genes are identified, researchers say they can begin to understand how odors are detected and how the brain interprets those signals.Our sense of smell relies on a very elegant and sophisticated system. Imagine, 1,000 genes lie at the heart of that system. Each one of those genes is information—a programmed code that is designed to make sense of what we smell. Information, programming and decoding are all terms that assume that we have a highly intelligent Magnificent Creator God who designed our sense of smell!!! |
| 3/17/2023 | Our senses link us to the world around us and enable us to interact with the world. While most people believe that our sense of sight is the highest of the senses and the most marvelous in design, our sense of hearing is no less marvelous.When a sound strikes your ear, your eardrum vibrates with the sound waves, fast or slow, soft or hard. These variations in vibration provide us with important information about the nature of the sound we are hearing. Some sounds produce a vibration in the eardrum as small as a billionth of a centimeter – only one-tenth the diameter of a hydrogen atom! There are three tiny bones in the middle ear called the hammer, anvil and stirrup. They pick up the vibrations from the eardrum, amplify them and send them on to the cochlea. The cochlea is filled with about 25,000 tiny hair cells that finally turn the vibrations into electrical signals that are sent on to the brain.Our hearing is designed to be more sensitive to high-pitched sounds than to lower sounds. If we had just a little more sensitivity to lower-pitched sounds, we would continuously be distracted by the internal sounds of our body, including the blood rushing through our arteries. In fact, to help prevent this, there are no blood vessels at all in that part of the ear where vibrations are turned into electrical impulses. The body supports life in these tissues by constantly bathing them in dissolved nutrients.While we can hear many things, and decide not to hear other things, the Magnificent Creator God who so marvelously designed our ears invites us to hear His Word to us from the Bible. |
| 3/16/2023 | Not only is the human brain the most complex structure in the universe, it is also one of the busiest. In fact, during intense concentration, your brain can burn as many calories as your muscles do during exercise! Intense thinking can literally be as exhausting as a physical workout! More than 100,000 chemical reactions go on in your brain every second.Among the brain’s many jobs is chemist. The brain produces more than 50 psychoactive drugs. Some of these are associated with memory, others with intelligence, still others are sedatives. Endorphin is the brain’s painkiller and it’s three times more potent than morphine. Serotonin is produced by the brain to help keep our moods under control. The brain also makes dopamine. Dopamine makes people more talkative and excitable. Another hormone regulates hunger.The brain is also a radio transmitter that sends out measurable electrical wave signals. In fact, the brain continues to send these signals for as long as 37 hours after death!Our tiny knowledge of the brain is enough to show us that this incredible organ is no accident. The brain is much more than a powerful testimony to our Creator. Its incredible powers convince us that there is much more to existence than this material life. However, we can learn only from the Word of God about eternal life through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ.Put your brain together with the Word of our Magnificent Creator God today! |
| 3/15/2023 | If, of all the millions of living things on Earth, a few creatures happened to look like something they are not and this helped protect them, we might put it down to chance. However, the creation is filled with too many creatures who practice look-alike deception to put it down to chance.Africa’s southern deserts have a plant called living stones. In a desert, any vegetation can be a welcome source of food or moisture. In this setting, a plant that doesn’t look like a plant has an advantage. And living stones look like nothing more than just another rock in the sand.Wasps can be some of the nastiest insects in nature. An insect in Costa Rica called the mantispid looks very much like the feared wasp, even up close. Then again, the hover fly looks like a wasp and sounds like a wasp because the frequency of its wing beats is almost identical to a wasp.Treehoppers have a very odd body shape that comes to a point on top. Not only do they look like thorns, but they usually stay on bushes that have thorns, orienting their bodies on the branches just like true thorns. This effectively hides them from hungry birds. Larval plant hoppers use a different form of deception. They attach themselves in groups on branches, orienting their frilly and feathery bodies together so they look like a flower!The clever forethought and planning involved in nature’s deceptions rule out any thought that these creatures designed themselves. Only our Magnificent Creator God could have created such a Master Plan for His Master Creation! |
| 3/14/2023 | New research shows that, when attacked, many plants make chemicals that will give munching insects a bad case of indigestion. They also seem to warn their neighbors about the attack so that they, too, start up their defenses. Some plants even call in air defenses.Some plants, when attacked by caterpillars, release a scent that scientists simply describe as “green leaf odors.” These odors attract certain female wasps, who home in on the plant. The wasp will sting the caterpillar, leaving him paralyzed. She then lays her eggs in the pest, who remains paralyzed until the hatching young wasps consume it. That “green leaf odor” is a plant’s way of calling in air defenses. It is communication between plant and insect!Only our Magnificent Creator God can design a plan so complete that every minute piece of His creation is provided for. |
| 3/13/2023 | The study of plants’ abilities to protect themselves from insect attackers is a fairly new and rapidly growing area of research. It seems that new and even more amazing discoveries are appearing every month.Let’s imagine that you are a nice little beetle looking for a tasty tomato plant. Soon after spotting a juicy looking tomato, you are happily munching away. However, before you can finish your meal you are in trouble. Every leaf on the tomato has started turning out chemicals that will, at the least, give you serious indigestion and possibly kill you. At the same time, the plant has warned its neighbors of your presence, and the other tomatoes, too, are turning out the same nasty chemicals. Your very act of eating has made it impossible to get a decent meal in this garden!The latest research suggests that the tomato under attack communicates with its neighbors by releasing a chemical called methyl jasmonate. (This chemical is commonly found in perfumes.) Methyl Jasmonate warns neighboring plants that hungry insects are in the neighborhood. On receiving the news, they begin producing the two chemicals that prevented you from digesting the protein in your lunch. This reaction has been seen among a number of plants, including cotton plants and various trees.Who would ever have imagined that plants warn each other about attack?Who would have guessed that they know enough chemistry and insect biochemistry to mount such a clever defense?While even we who believe in creation are amazed, we know that our Magnificent Creator God can and did equip plants with these abilities. |
| 3/12/2023 | For centuries, Asian cooks have wrapped meat, sushi and candy in bamboo bark. Though the reason for this practice seems to have been forgotten, humans evidently once knew what modern science is rediscovering about bamboo.Chemists have succeeded in extracting the natural chemicals in bamboo bark. What they found was not one or two but four natural chemicals in the bark that inhibit bacteria, especially staph germs. These natural antibacterial agents are now under study for possible use as natural food and cosmetic preservatives. If these natural chemicals can be shown to kill bacteria and yet be harmless to people, the door will be open for an entirely new class of natural food preservatives.The question naturally arises about how Asians originally came to use bamboo in the kitchen. Is it possible that thousands of years ago, when ancestors of today’s Asians headed east from the Tower of Babel, humans knew that bamboo would help keep their food from spoiling?Much of what we are learning today was already known to a humanity that was only a few generations removed from our first and once-perfect parents.Remember that the perfection with which humanity was created was more than moral perfection. Because Adam and Eve had a perfect knowledge of God, they also had a perfect understanding of all that our Magnificent Creator God had made. While we cannot be perfect except through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ, it is also true that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom. |
| 3/11/2023 | Some of the most fascinating discoveries in recent years have to do with our growing knowledge of plant communication. New research continues to reveal even more amazing facts about the exquisite intricacy of God’s marvelous work.Naturalists have long noted that plants often choose to grow at precise spacing from each other and plants of other species. Scientists at the University of California at Santa Barbara theorized that this precision might be a result of communication between the roots of these plants. So they devised an experiment to find out. They designed a network of interlocking, partially transparent growth boxes. These boxes allowed them to watch how root growth took place in single plants, two plants of the same species, and plants of different species.They discovered that when burro weed roots neared the roots of the creosote bush, the roots of the creosote bush slowed the growth of the nearing roots. They also discovered that burro weed roots will stop growing when they encounter other burro weed roots. This allows the plants to send their roots out where they will not compete with their own kind. Most astonishing is the discovery that burro weed roots continue to grow if they encounter other roots from their own plant. The amazed scientists noted that this means that even plants may have a sense of self.When the Bible tells us that the whole creation praises its Creator, it certainly suggests that at least every living thing has a sense of itself as well as its Magnificent Creator God! |
| 3/10/2023 | A family of fish that live in the depths of the sea actually go fishing—pole, dangling bait, and all. This is only natural, since they, like people who go fishing, like to eat fish.This group of fish is collectively called the angler fish. The front dorsal spine in the female angler is located on her head. It is much longer than any of the other dorsal fins and has a fleshy bait on the end. When hungry, she sits very still and dangles the bait in front of her mouth. It doesn’t take long before something swims up to investigate this bait as its possible lunch. But before it can think about taking a sample, the angler has turned the tables and eaten her own lunch.Of course this system wouldn’t work very well in the pitch darkness one mile below the surface of the ocean without one other special provision. Like many other fish at such depths, the angler is able to generate her own light. In her case, only the bait lights up, so she stays invisible to her victims. The chemical method she uses to create the light is nearly 100% efficient!In His imaginative creativity, God was pleased to place creatures a mile below the surface of the sea. Yet in His mercy He has provided them with everything they need to make their living there. Likewise, you may not know why God has placed you into a particular situation right now. If He so cares for the creatures a mile below the waves, how much more does He care for You. And He has even included a light for you in His Son Jesus Christ! How wonderful is our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 3/9/2023 | A revolutionary design in metal-cutting blades is changing the metal-working industry. These blades don’t cut like a knife. Instead, the blade is fixed in one position while the metal to be shaped spins on a lathe. This new-style blade stays sharp six times longer than the old blade design.And where titanium used to make the old-style cutting blades dull almost the second they were used, the new blades last up to 30 minutes. This wonderful new blade was developed by two engineers who got the original idea from a rat. You see, rats’ teeth always have a sharp edge.Engineers learned that this is because their teeth are hard on one side and soft on the other. So as they wear, they always keep a sharp edge. Using this principle for metal-cutting has lowered costs and increased productivity, since the blades don’t have to be changed as often.Beginning in Job 39 God humbles Job with several chapters of questions about the wise designs found in the animal kingdom. God’s message is, “Job, if you think you’re so smart, who created all of this with such wisdom?”Even rats’ teeth are created with such wisdom that, once we learned the principle, our technology was greatly improved.Our Magnificent Creator God left nothing out of His creation that would help us live and learn in this magnificent world He made just for us!!! |
| 3/8/2023 | After suffering a stroke, a man in Baltimore suddenly began speaking with a Scandinavian accent. Though he had no experience with languages other than English, he suddenly sounded Nordic and appeared unfamiliar with English! In the weeks after the stroke his speech gradually returned to normal. After three and one-half months, he again spoke with no trace of accent.This affliction is real. It’s called “foreign-accent syndrome.” It’s a rare condition in which a brain malfunction causes speech to sound as if the speaker has a foreign accent. Americans have also reportedly developed apparent German, Welsh, Scottish, Irish and Italian accents.Scientists say the fact that speech follows certain patterns in this way suggests something about the way the human brain is wired. A growing number of studies and experiences—such as “foreign-accent syndrome”—suggest that humans have been programmed with much more than just language ability. Some of the unique features of specific languages may actually be programmed into our brains.The Bible tells us that everyone on earth spoke the same language until God confused the languages of rebellious people at Babel. “Foreign-accent syndrome” suggests that many of the detailed characteristics of language may have been originally wired into the brain. It also helps us see that language is more that just noises to which we have given meaning. Language is our Magnificent Creator God’s gift. |
| 3/7/2023 | It’s not very pretty, nor is it graceful, but Colombia’s rock-climbing catfish has a unique ability among fish. Perhaps there are days when a salmon, trying to make it up a waterfall, wishes that it could simply climb the rocks.The rock-climbing catfish’s climbing equipment begins with a powerful sucker mouth. Once it attaches itself to a rock, it can stay stuck despite any torrent. The rock-climbing catfish also has a bony plate on its belly that helps it hold its place while it repositions its sucker a little further up the rocks. The plate has fins with tiny, backward-pointing teeth. These teeth dig into the rock and prevent slipping. The catfish’s third special feature is a set of powerful muscles to control the plate.Once the rock-climbing catfish has attached its sucker to the rock, it pulls up its stomach plate and anchors it. With its body anchored, it moves its sucker up the face of the rock and repeats the process. Following this method, the rock-climbing catfish can walk its way up a 20-foot rock wall against the torrent of a waterfall in about 30 minutes!Who gave the rock-climbing catfish that powerful sucker mouth? Who gave it such a clever bony stomach plate and the powerful muscles to control it? And who taught it to climb rocks? It was the work of our Magnificent Creator God of worlds and stars and you and me! |
| 3/6/2023 | How smart is the smartest tree you ever met? Does it sound silly to speak of trees as being smart? Botanists are learning that some trees have elaborate defenses against insect pests.Studies have shown that a cottonwood tree sets up an elaborate zone defense when attacked by aphids. Some branches will manufacture poisons to resist the aphids while others use a different strategy. Branches that offer the aphids poisons can be dozens of times more resistant to aphids than neighboring branches. Should an aphid land on a leaf that is not manufacturing poisons, that leaf is very likely to be shed by the tree. This squeeze play by the tree keeps both strategies viable in resisting aphids.However, sometimes insects are almost as clever as trees. The eastern tent caterpillar eats a fatal dose of cyanide with each mouthful of cherry tree leaves without harm. The poison is combined with two sugar molecules in the leaves. Normally an insect’s digestive system would separate those sugars, releasing the cyanide. However, the tent caterpillar’s digestive system releases only one sugar, leaving the cyanide bound and harmless.On the other hand the pink sawfly larva concentrates and stores the toxic oils of the eucalyptus leaves it eats. When threatened, the worm-like larva rears up and spits droplets of the poisonous oils at its attackers.There is no level at which the creation fails to show forth intelligence and planning. Every level of creation glorifies our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 3/5/2023 | One good method of avoiding attack in nature is to pretend that you are somebody who should not be attacked. In the insect world one of the most feared creatures is the ant. Not only are ants ferocious, they also taste bad.As a result, many insects mimic ants to avoid predators. One of the most interesting groups of ant mimics is spiders. Of course, even insects can count, so they know that ants have six legs while spiders have eight. To solve this problem, some ant-mimicking spiders wave their front two legs over their heads so they look like antenna. The ants don’t seem to be fooled, however. Nevertheless, they will allow the spiders to hang around so long as they stay out of trouble.Some red ants have red spiders who mimic them and black ants have some black spiders who mimic them. This suggests that many insects can see color. Wasps that prey on one African red spider are no match for the vicious red ant the spider sometimes mimics. The African red ant can easily kill the wasp. This wasp also preys on a black spider. So the black spiders are often found among black ants that are almost as dangerous as the African red ants.Some modern scientists tell us that this appearance of intelligence in insect behavior is nothing more than appearance. However, we should not be as easily fooled as these wasps are by the spiders. There are millions of similar evidences of intelligence in the creation, and they can’t all be deceptive appearance!Only our Magnificent Creator God could have created such intelligence to allow even the smallest of the creatures on this planet to exist together and survive. |
| 3/4/2023 | Evolutionary naturalism paints the picture of life as if it were a haphazard series of accidents that just barely resulted in a range of living things that just manage to survive. This fanciful picture destroys our sense of wonder over the sophisticated engineering designs in nature.Consider the mystery of flight, for example. Some evolutionists suggest that perhaps birds are descended from lizards that fell out of trees a lot. Other evolutionists say that birds came from lizards who grew wings—not for flight, but to chase down and catch insects. Yet, they have little to say about the fact that we humans have come by most of our sophisticated knowledge about flight from studying the birds.Then there is the problem, for the evolutionist, of how flight accidentally evolved so many times for so many creatures. Scientists studying the dragonfly are learning even more secrets of flight. Our best high-performance aircraft can barely lift themselves off the ground. However, the dragonfly can lift 15 times his own weight into the air. Scientists have learned that this is because the dragonfly’s wings are designed to create little whirlwinds over their top surfaces. These whirlwinds are the secret to creating incredible lifting power. Ways are now being planned to apply this secret to new aircraft designs.The engineering excellence found in nature and from which we have learned so much even in this day of interplanetary probes, is not witness to a mindless process of evolution, but to a wise and mindful and Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 3/3/2023 | It seems like science fiction to suggest that if someone typed your name into a computer, misspelling your name, the computer would find it and correct it.Yet the genetic code within each of your cells is an even more sophisticated information storage and transmission system. Not only does your genetic code store far more information in a microscopic space than our largest computers can, it has a built-in error correction system.Scientists have found a number of key enzymes in the cell that have just one job—find and correct errors in the genetic code. Those errors can creep in because of radiation, chemicals, or other reasons. These enzymes faithfully correct any errors, preventing mutations.But these are the very ones scientists thought could cause evolution—before they discovered this process. One scientist who studied these enzymes said science has no explanation for how this process could have evolved naturally. Scientists also say they don’t know how life could have continued without this genetic proofreading and correction.Only our Magnificent Creator God could have been wise enough to design an information system that can correct errors within itself. Even we human beings have not figured out how to do this with our simplest computers.Asking us to believe that blind chance and natural law could have done it certainly strains the credibility of science!!! |
| 3/2/2023 | Genesis uses only a few words and simple language to describe the creation of trees. That hardly seems fair, considering the importance, variety and complexity of the largest and longest-living things on earth.The largest Sequoias in northern California weigh more than six blue whales. The tallest Australian eucalyptus trees and redwoods tower as high as a 30-story building. Some of the Bristlecone pines in the American west are 4,000 years old.Trees do more than provide us with building materials, food and medicine. Like other green plants, trees take the waste carbon dioxide produced by animals and humans and turn it into oxygen. As a bonus, trees produce sugar. The cellulose fiber we call wood is actually only thousands of sugar molecules linked into long chains. In recent years scientists have also learned that trees communicate with each other. They cool the air and pump enough moisture into the air to transform a dry desert-like climate. If it were not for the mycorrhiza fungi, trees would battle through their roots for control of moisture and soil resources. However, when this fungus is present in the root systems, trees will link roots with each other and share water and nutrients.Scripture’s simple statement that God created trees expands into volumes of information as we learn more about them. This is how science done in faith—that is, as our search for knowledge about what God has made—serves to glorify our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 3/1/2023 | It’s a warm day on the Amazon River. A small fish swims near the surface looking among the natural floating river debris for some food. As he looks among the occasional leaf or twig in the water he sees no danger. At the same time, one of the floating “leaves” is waiting for the little fish to move just a bit closer. Then, without warning, the floating “leaf” comes to life, grabs the fish and eats it!What the little fish thought was simply another floating leaf was actually another fish. The Amazonian leaf fish is carefully designed not only to look like a leaf, but to act like one as well. It has a flat body, very much like a leaf. A black line runs the length of its body, giving the appearance of the midrib of a leaf. A fleshy growth in its lower jaw looks like a leaf stem.Beyond looking like a leaf, the leaf fish also acts like a leaf. It lies still in the water, drifting with the current. To hide its identity further, it draws its fins close to its body, removing any last hint that it is indeed a hungry fish looking for lunch.The leaf fish combines deceptive coloring, appearance and behavior into one design so that it, too, can make its living. In this the leaf fish shows that the Creator makes nothing without also designing a special purpose for that creature. According to the Bible, the same can be said even more emphatically for each human being He has made. Our Magnificent Creator God has a special purpose for us, too, and it begins with His plan of salvation for us through His Son Jesus Christ. |
| 2/28/2023 | Are you a musician? From the standpoint of evolution, human musical ability serves no purpose. Assuming that the laws of nature could even invent musical ability, they would have no reason to do so. However, from the standpoint of creation, music serves to praise our Creator.Unfortunately, some of us who enjoy music cannot carry a tune, while other people can play or sing a piece without even looking at any music after hearing it once. The scientific study of musical ability has become an important area of study as a result of some recent discoveries. Researchers have discovered that it’s true that some people have natural musical ability and some don’t. They have found that some people have perfect pitch, even if they have no musical training, while those who are tone-deaf remain tone-deaf despite musical training. Studies show that only about one person in 2,000 has perfect pitch.Researchers were shocked to find solid evidence that musical ability is genetically inherited. Studying musical ability in both musically trained and untrained families, they found that musical ability follows a dominant inheritance pattern. Sons or daughters have a 50% chance of inheriting the gene from a parent who carries it.How could mindless evolution develop a gene that codes for musical ability? Even evolutionists appear to be puzzled by this. But those of us who believe in the Magnificent Creator God praise Him whether we have musical ability or not! |
| 2/27/2023 | Late at night, in hundreds of thousands of homes around the country, people are watching a bewildering array of monster movies. In these films, shadowy and not-so-shadowy monsters attack, possess or inhabit their victims. These stories are make-believe. However, in our real world, there is a fungus that does all these things.These fungi grow in and on the bodies of insects. They begin their work when a single fungus spore lands on the body of an insect. The spore germinates by growing thread-like filaments through a weak spot or some other entry point in the insect’s outer shell. Once inside the insect, these thread-like filaments grow into the insect’s nervous system. Scientists have been amazed by the apparent fact that the fungus then seems to take over the insect, actually controlling its movements. It seems that the fungus directs its victim to climb a convenient plant to a height that will make the next generation of spores likely to land on another unsuspecting insect. It is there that the insect dies and the fungus produces its spores.To the evolutionist, the ability of such a so-called “low” form of life to possess and control a more evolved form of life is totally without explanation. To those of us who believe in creation, intelligence is not a matter of evolution. Intelligence is the gift of our Magnificent Creator God. Only He has all intelligence and wisdom. There are no limits to His creativity as He provides His creatures with ways to proclaim Himself as their Creator!!! |
| 2/26/2023 | The strange partnership between the snapping shrimp and the goby is absolutely necessary if both creatures are to survive. The nearly blind shrimp relies on the goby, a small fish, in the same way a blind person relies on his Seeing Eye dog. The goby relies on the safety of the complex tunnel system the shrimp digs.The shrimp is well designed for digging. Once a tunnel is started, the shrimp can dig a burrow large enough for both itself and the goby within a few hours. Each of its five pairs of legs is specialized. The first pair of claws is designed for carrying sediment out of the burrow. The second pair of legs is designed to probe for and clean objects as well as scratching sediment from walls. Pairs three, four and five are walking legs that also work well for scratching material from tunnel walls. On its abdomen, the shrimp has several appendages that allow it to move rapidly to protection. Other appendages can create water currents that shift sand back from the digging site.The snapping shrimp, which is less than two inches long, can dig a system of tunnels covering several square feet within a few days. The burrow will have several entrances, as much as four feet apart. All lead to a chamber at the deepest point of the system.The Creator has given both the goby and the shrimp different gifts that they both need to live. If they did not share their gifts with each other, neither could survive. |
| 2/25/2023 | There’s an old saying that people seldom remember how rapidly the job was done, but they do appreciate good workmanship. However, the staggering variety and number of things created by God did not limit the elegance of His fine workmanship.The relationship between the snapping shrimp and a fish called the goby is a good example of the Creator’s attention to the finest detail. The snapping shrimp has very poor eyesight, while the goby has excellent eyesight. Both share the same burrow, which is dug by the shrimp and guarded by the goby.The shrimp uses the goby as a blind person uses a Seeing Eye dog. Whenever the shrimp is outside its burrow, it always keeps one antenna on the goby. The shrimp stays hidden inside the burrow if the goby should temporarily swim away. When danger approaches, the goby signals and disappears inside the burrow. The shrimp is right behind him.Neither the goby nor the shrimp can survive without each other, so pairs are established for life when both goby and shrimp are very young. In order for this system to work, both goby and shrimp reproductive systems, which differ greatly, are synchronized so that shrimp and goby youngsters are ready to pair at the same time.This astonishing relationship shows us how our Magnificent Creator God’s standards of excellence bring His love to every corner of the creation. |
| 2/24/2023 | Roman Vishniac is a renowned photographer of microscopic scenes. One of his favorite subjects is one of the so-called simplest forms of life. This “simple” life, the protozoan, is supposedly the ancestor of all living things.However, Vishniac has noted that the protozoan is neither simple nor archaic in character. This creature carries out all the functions of life that we require millions of cells to sustain—all within a single cell.There is a parallel in technology. The first adding machines were large and heavy contraptions. As these mechanical adding machines became smaller, they had to be more cleverly designed because they were smaller. The first electronic calculators were even smaller and lighter than their mechanical brothers. But they were still much larger and simpler than calculators today. As calculators have decreased in size, they have had to be more cleverly designed because they are smaller.Vishniac has learned that the so-called “simple” one-celled creatures are not simple at all. This is because they must carry out the business of life within the limits of their small size. This has not swayed him from evolution. However, this fact has convinced him that current theories are wrong. You see, evolution is in trouble if there are no “simple” forms of life. We believe that this clear evidence that there are no simple forms of life—evidence powerful enough to sway the experts—supports the Bible’s claim that all forms of life were created in finished form by a wise Magnificent Creator God. |
| 2/23/2023 | You’re not feeling well and you have a fever. Is your increased body temperature good for you or should you try to lower it?Medical researchers are learning what happens in the body when we develop a fever. They say that the body’s fever response is usually a very important part of our body’s defense against disease. Normally the body’s temperature varies through the day. If the body’s temperature drops below 80° or climbs higher than 108° for a prolonged period, death usually results. Your body has a thermostat, called the hypothalamus, to keep its temperature within that range.When disease germs are detected in your bloodstream, your white blood cells release a chemical called EP. EP quickly makes its way to the hypothalamus, where it raises the setting of your thermostat. This increase in temperature can make your body increase its production of T cells by 20 times or more to fight bacterial infection. It also increases the production of blood chemicals that fight viruses. EP also blocks bacteria’s ability to make use of the free iron in your blood at just the time bacteria are most in need of that iron. Even iguanas and fish are known to raise their body temperature when ill by moving into warmer environments.Does the fever response just accidentally happen to help fight infection, or was it designed to work the way it does?Clearly we must thank our Magnificent Creator God for this cleverly designed defense against disease! |
| 2/22/2023 | We live in a world—indeed a universe—that is in continual change. Things have been designed that way for a very important reason. Unfortunately, some people choose to define evolution as simply change. However, that’s not the kind of continuous change that surrounds us.The change we see around us serves to keep things the same. Biologists call this stasis. That might sound contradictory, but think about it for a moment. A baby is born—that’s change. The baby grows into a child and then a young adult. That’s more change. In the end, though, a new generation is born to replace the last generation, and things are as they were. It’s the cycle of life, common to all living things.What’s more, the interrelated life cycles of all living things complement each other. Plants use sunlight and carbon dioxide to make oxygen and food, which are needed by the animal kingdom and human beings. Each generation of living things reproduces after its own kind, helping to keep this balance in tune.The change we see all around us was designed by our Magnificent Creator God to renew the creation so that it might remain stable—the same. We can truly say that the more things change, the more they stay the same. However, this state of affairs will not go on forever. One day—and perhaps soon—the world will end. The Son of God who was the instrument of our creation and the instrument of our salvation will return. Are you ready to meet Him? |
| 2/21/2023 | Is it possible that your pharmacist could be a chimpanzee? That’s not such a silly question. Naturalists are discovering that many animals use a variety of plants and other items to treat their illnesses. Animals often know about the medicinal properties of plants when modern medicine has yet to learn about them.Recently naturalists noticed that one of the monkeys in the African preserve under their care had become lethargic, lost her appetite, and obviously had a severe gastric upset. A few hours after she became sick, she started munching on a native shrub that is not a normal part of the monkey’s diet. She chewed the plant, swallowed the bitter juice and spit out the pulp. By the next afternoon her symptoms were gone and she was feeling better. After a little research, scientists discovered that local tribes use juices from the same plant to treat intestinal upset and loss of appetite.Studies of the juices of a root that bears rub into their coats show that the bears are using an effective insecticide. Scientists have observed elephants, monkeys, birds and bears eating a variety of things that were not a normal part of their diet only to discover that the things being eaten had medicinal properties. Most amazing is that the animals know how best to take their medicine. If a leaf is best swallowed whole to kill intestinal parasites, it will be swallowed unchewed!Who other than our Magnificent Creator God and Great Physician Himself could have taught the animals this medicine? |
| 2/20/2023 | Have you ever watched ducks out on an icy lake paddling around in the near-freezing water. They will spend much of the day in that one spot with the temperature well below freezing, and yet the cold doesn’t seem to bother them. Perhaps on shore there are some sparrows hopping around in the snow. One wonders: why don’t birds need shoes and socks?If you or I ran around with bare feet and legs when the temperature was below freezing, it would not be very long before we had a good case of frostbite. We could even lose so much body heat that our very lives would be threatened.Birds have a network of arteries that all blood going into their legs must enter. These arteries are interwoven with the veins returning from the foot. When the blood going to the foot enters this structure, called a “wonder net,” its temperature is 106° F. The blood returning from the foot at the same time is only 37°F. The warm blood passing through the net reheats the cold blood coming from the foot before it enters the body. The result is that the bird loses very little body heat. So the blood going into the foot never becomes dangerously cold in normal winter weather.The wisdom of this design is obvious. Could birds have survived having their feet frozen off before they learned to evolve this special arrangement? Our only conclusion can be that there is a Magnificent Creator God who cares for all of His creation, including you and me!!! |
| 2/19/2023 | We are beginning to discover more about how Neanderthal people were not primitive subhuman cavemen, as popular-style evolutionary documentaries show. Instead, they were actually fully human – and the evidence for this is so conclusive that even serious evolutionists accept the fact today.It appears that Neanderthals cooked. They didn’t just eat raw or burnt meat. It appears that food remains were seasoned with herbs. They also used nuts and legumes, among other plant-based edibles. Perhaps they were familiar with the Keto Diet!Those interested in natural remedies often recommend using certain tree barks as an infusion or just chewed, as a painkiller. This is because such barks – I use willow bark – are a source of salicylic acid, which is closely related to aspirin. It has even been found that Neanderthals consumed the mold penicillium, which we now know produces the well-known antibiotic penicillin.Their clothing included furs, required to combat European conditions during the post-Flood Ice Age. But they also seemed to wear pendants and other jewelry.An excellent, recent article in Creation magazine by Robert Carter and Lita Cosner, gives links to scientific papers on these and other civilizing traits attributed to Neanderthals. Though the authors are not Bible-believing Christians, their article reminds us that Neanderthals, being human, were descended from Adam through Noah, just as we are.All things were made by our Magnificent Creator God for a specific reason and for a specific purpose. |
| 2/18/2023 | When we compare ourselves with many of the other living things on this Earth, our abilities are not very impressive.A camel can carry 1,000 pounds 30 miles through the desert every day. As a human being, I become tired even thinking about walking 30 miles with empty pockets.The ostrich can run at 30 miles per hour, faster than my car might go during rush hour.The Indian swift can fly at more than 100 miles per hour.The elephant’s trunk has 40,000 muscles. This is 70 times the number of muscles in your entire body. Yet, his trunk can bulldoze a tree or pick up a pin. Many of us can’t do either one on the first try.The flea can jump 350 times its own length, a total of 13 inches. This is equivalent to our jumping 2,000 feet into the air. Most of us can’t jump more than two feet off the ground. As it works out, 13 inches is just about right if you are looking for a nice warm dog on which to raise a family.A tiny insect called the midge beats its wings an amazing 133,000 times per minute. That’s a hundred times faster than you can blink your eye.Humans can use their superior intellect to build the machines they need. With those machines, they can outdo any one of these creatures. But God simply made a gift to the animals of the specialized abilities they needed. God expects us to follow His example and design and build what we need.If we look carefully, we will see that our Magnificent Creator God has given us all the materials and all the ideas we need within the creation. No one can say that He does not care what we do with our lives on Earth!!! |
| 2/17/2023 | Have you ever thought what a strange material water actually is? A water molecule comprises of three atoms – two hydrogens and one oxygen.Oxygen is an element in Group VI of the Periodic Table; Group VI also contains the elements sulfur, selenium, and tellurium, in increasing order of size (oxygen is the smallest. Hydrogen can also form compounds with these elements: H2S, H2Se, H2Te. These have the boiling points -60.7, -41.5, and -2.2deg Celcius.Therefore, all these compounds are gases at room temperature. If we were following the size of the Group VI atom only, then water should have a boiling point considerably lower than that of H2S. But it doesn’t. In fact, the boiling point of water is higher than all those other compounds, at 100 deg C (or 212 deg F).This, of course, is not the only anomalous property of water. The solid form of water – ice – floats on liquid water. So what, you might say. Well, the solid form of every other liquid there is always sinks in its liquid. If you have ever allowed molten candle wax to cool down, for example, you will notice it freezes from the bottom up. Nearly all liquids behave that way – except water! In short, the most common liquid in the world – the one that we require most for life – behaves like no other liquid. It is almost as if it were specially designed!It was our Magnificent Creator God who designed the Earth – including water – for us to inhabit. |
| 2/16/2023 | The relatively rare bucket orchid, Coryanthes, behaves almost like an animal at pollination time. This remarkable ability is essential to its survival.Coryanthes has a steep-sided flower. Two glands extend over the center of the “bucket” and secrete a clear fluid into the flower after it opens. Just above the pool of fluid inside the bucket, a tunnel opens to the outside of the bucket. At the end of the tunnel are the flower’s pollen and stigma.When it opens, the flower sends out a strong sweet odor that can attract male bees from over five miles away. The male bees collect a waxy material on the flower’s surface that they later use in mating rituals. As the number of bees collecting this substance off the flower’s surface increases, so does the likelihood that in the excitement one of them will fall into the pool below. When this happens, the sticky fluid makes it impossible for the bee to make it out of the “top” of the bucket-shaped flower. However, the tunnel provides an easy exit. But as the bee nears the tunnel’s end, the flower drops down a projection from the tunnel’s ceiling, holding the bee for about ten minutes before freeing him. While the bee is held, the flower glues two packets of pollen to the bee. If it should happen that the bee already has pollen packets, this activity delivers the pollen to the stigma, and pollination is complete.The Coryanthes orchid not only shows us the Magnificent Creator God, but it shows us how unlimited His creativity and imagination are. |
| 2/15/2023 | How does your nose work? Medical researchers admit that they don’t know. Your nose performs an extremely unlikely job. It senses invisible molecules in the air and turns each molecule into a unique sensation that is sent to the brain. If the fact that molecules floating in the air could be detected was a modern discovery, it would be hailed as the scientific discovery of the century!Medical researchers do know that the roof of your nose cavity contains about 10 million cells that are wired directly into the brain. The nervous system that connects your olfactory cells to your brain is so large and complex that its surface area is several times greater than the surface area of your body. Researchers also know that your sense of smell is important to your sense of taste. For example, that’s why, when you have a head cold, chocolate tastes like a flavorless waxy paste. In this case what you taste in your mouth has more to do with what is happening in your nose than on your tongue.Many creatures, including birds, can sense odors. Farmers who had difficulty with birds eating as much as 20% of the food set out in feed lots discovered that birds hate the smell of grapes. When they laced the feed with grape scent, the birds left it alone, but the cattle didn’t seem to mind.Researchers have also learned that each of us has a unique “odor print.” This reminds us that each of us is a unique being, made by our Magnificent Creator God because He wanted to have a relationship with us. |
| 2/14/2023 | You have 30,000,000,000,000 individual cells in your body. That’s thirty trillion, and you have about two hundred different types of cells, including red blood cells, skin cells, nerve cells (neurons), and fat cells. Each type of cell performs a vital role in keeping your body healthy. As amazing as it seems, the average human body makes between two and three million new red blood cells every second.Oh, how we want each of our thirty trillion cells to be devoted to Jesus. We’re to love the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. As amazing as our incredibly-designed bodies are, we also have minds, personalities, and spirits. And we have gifts, talents, abilities, and strengths.The Lord gave you the wonderful workmanship of YOU so you could serve Him. Today, present your body to Him as a living sacrifice and let your life be transformed by the renewing of your mind, which happens as you meditate on His Word. Let Him be Lord of all there is of you.We are more than the chemicals that form our body. We are a special creation of God. Man is our Magnificent Creator God’s masterpiece—His workmanship, the crown of creation. |
| 2/13/2023 | Blessings can become curses. For example, a painkiller may be used to cover up an injury that needs immediate treatment. Pain is unpleasant. However, when pain tells us to move our hand from the hot stovetop, it helps us prevent worse injury.When God created the universe and placed humans on this earth, there was no disease, no pain, and no death. The Bible tells us that God also knew that our freedom to withdraw our love from Him would also result in the consequences of withdrawing that love—that is, disease, pain and death. In His wisdom, God filled the creation with chemical factories that could provide temporary help for pain and disease.Foxglove, or digitalis, offers a treatment for heart failure. Quinine, from a South American tree, is used to treat malaria. Steroids come from a Mexican yam. A treatment for gout is made from the autumn crocus. A fungus that grows on the rye plant and caffeine from coffee beans are used to treat migraine headaches. White willow bark, which contains a form of aspirin, has been used for thousands of years as a natural treatment for pain and fever.Pain, disease and death call our attention to our much more serious spiritual condition. If we did not have to face death in this life, we would be condemned to spend eternity in an imperfect world. We can thank our Magnificent Creator God that He has provided the remedy for our sin in the forgiveness of sins through His Son, Jesus Christ. |
| 2/12/2023 | We all have a number of clocks within us that help keep life constant in changing surroundings. The pineal gland is one clock that helps us adjust to our surroundings like the changing lengths of daylight through the year.Earlier in this century many scientists, having no understanding of the pineal, decided that it had no purpose and was left over as a vestige from our evolution. Creationists knew it must have a purpose because they knew we have not evolved.If you are one of those people who typically feel a bit more lethargic or even depressed during the darkest months of winter, you might be able to blame your pineal, which is located near the center of your brain. How can a gland deep in the center of the brain know how long the days are? Light causes our bodies to make certain chemicals. When days are short, those chemicals are scarce, so the pineal cannot make from these chemicals the hormones that encourage the alertness we feel in the spring and summer. In addition, your pineal has a private nerve hookup to your eyes, so it can literally see for itself how much light is available! Scientists have found that adding artificial light during winter can sometimes help the winter blues.Our bodies are a network of complex control systems and chemical factories—a complex union of systems that go beyond the abilities of the best human designers, but which testify to the wisdom of our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 2/11/2023 | In the tiny museum of Isma’ilya, northeast of Cairo, is an artifact that corroborates the Biblical Exodus.. It’s known as the “El Arish Stone”. It is a piece of black granite weighing two tons, measuring 4 feet in length, and 2.5 feet in width. It was found in 1887 on a farm at El Arish, lying on its side. At the time, it was being used as a water trough for cattle. When archaeologist Frances Llewellyn Griffith found the slab of granite, his clue to its value was the hieroglyphics. By the writing, he dated the object to the Ptolemaic period, specifically the 30th Dynasty (380-360 BC), when it was probably used as a shrine. The inscriptions seem to refer to events some 1200 years earlier (c. 1500 BC) and appear to tell the story of the Exodus, but with a twist: this story is told from Pharaoh’s point of view.The black granite inscription corroborates the story of the parting of the sea, as told in Exodus 14. There is a unique hieroglyph on it: three waves and two knives.Egyptologist James Hoffmeier has suggested that we look at the hieroglyphic literally. Seen in this way, the obvious translation is the “parting of the sea” or the “parted sea”.Because the El Arish stone was being used for water for cattle, some of the inscriptions have been eroded, leaving the ones on the right and back sides of the monument mostly intact. In all, 74 lines are still legible. One line seems to be referencing Moses: he is referred to as the “Prince of the Desert” and his Israelite followers are called the “evil ones” or “evil-doers”. The Egyptian text also tells about how Pharaoh chased the Queen Mother, Tefnut, presumably the royal princess that once raised Moses, as she was leaving with the departing Israelites. This corroborates the Talmud (Sotah 12a) which states that the princess left on the Exodus, marrying the Israelite leader, Caleb son of Yefuneh.The stone also seems to be reporting some of the Biblical plagues, including prolonged darkness and a terrible tempest. Furthermore, it mentions a specific location next to where the sea parted. The place is called “Pekharti”. Remarkably, this exact place is mentioned in Exodus 14:2,9 as the location where the Israelites camped just prior to the parting of the sea. In the Book of Exodus, it is called “Pi-hahiroth”.If all this is not enough the Torah states that, as he was dying, the Biblical patriarch Jacob/Israel blessed his son Joseph wishing for Joseph’s children to “fishify” i.e., that they ”increase in the land like fish”. For this blessing, he made up a new word; “fishify”, “Idgu” in Hebrew (Genesis 48:16). Later, when the Israelites are leaving on the Exodus they take the bones of Joseph with them to the Promised Land (Exodus 13:19). Shockingly, the El Arish stone says that when the “evildoers” left Egypt, they took “Dagai” with them. The exact nickname given by the Torah to Joseph!Isn’t is curious how academics can ignore inconvenient archaeology that proves the Bible as inspired by our Magnificent Creator God! |
| 2/10/2023 | Both archaeology and the Bible suggest that the world was once quite different from the world we know today. Each agrees that the earth’s climate was once much more uniform than it is today.At one time the tropics may have extended into what are today polar regions. However, the Bible and evolutionary geology don’t agree on how long ago that was. Bible-believing geologists, on the other hand, are reporting evidence to support the Bible’s story of history.In the last few years scientists have been surprised to discover dinosaur fossils in Alaska. Dinosaurs need warm temperatures—warmer than Alaska was thought to have been. In 1986, on Canada’s Axel Heiberg Island, only 600 miles from the North Pole, scientists found a huge, dense forest. Some of the trees were well over 125 feet tall. They have been snapped off at the stump and are neither fossilized nor petrified, but remain as fresh wood. Even some of the leaves are still intact. The area was filled with spruce, hickory, dawn redwood and cypress trees and was evidently a swamp, since tropical turtle and alligator remains have also been found. Tree rings show that the area was warmer in the recent past, while the size of the rings tell us that there were short, hot summers during which rapid growth occurred, followed by long, dark winters as there are today.The most interesting conclusion reached by the scientific team is that the entire region must have been subjected to a huge flood! This discovery tells us that all of geology must be restructured to present a history that agrees with the Bible’s story of the earth’s past as told by our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 2/9/2023 | The swiftly moving bat cuts almost invisibly through the darkness, silent to all but those who can hear its ultrasonic radar. What chance does a poor night-flying cricket—prized as a tasty bat snack—have?Let’s treat this problem as if you were the Creator, faced with the problem of giving your night-flying cricket a chance against its predator. Of course, you could design the cricket so that it would stay in its hiding place at night, but then you wouldn’t have a night-flying cricket. You could give the cricket the ability to hear the bat’s radar, but that alone won’t help the cricket if he can’t get to safety.The solution our true Creator has invented to help the cricket preserve its life is another example of His engineering excellence. He has built the cricket with a single-celled bat detector that is wired into the cricket’s nervous system. The detector is triggered by the frequency that bats use for navigation. When triggered, the cell fires off up to 500 impulses per second. These impulses automatically cause the cricket to steer away from the source of the ultrasound. The most impressive engineering fact about this bat detector is that it only works if the cricket is in flight and therefore vulnerable to bats. When crickets are safe from bats—resting, hiding, eating or preening—the bat detector cell doesn’t fire any warning at all!The precise elegance that our Magnificent Creator God has designed into the cricket for its protection is a witness to His wisdom in caring for all He that has created. |
| 2/8/2023 | God determined the exact number of stars that He spoke into existence. He identified each star with a name (Psalm 147:4), an intimate act that demonstrates His attention to the smallest details. His strength—insight, discernment, and knowledge—have “no limit” in the past, present, or future (v. 5).God hears each desperate cry and sees each silent tear as clearly as He notices each sigh of contentment and belly laugh. He sees when we’re stumbling and when we’re standing in triumph. He understands our deepest fears, our innermost thoughts, and our wildest dreams. He knows where we’ve been and where we’re going.As our Magnificent Creator God helps us see, hear, and love our neighbors, we can trust Him to see, understand, and care for us. |
| 2/7/2023 | What keeps the big-bodied bumblebee with those little stubby wings in the air? Scientists are still trying to learn the secret of bumblebee flight. And while they are learning some astonishing things about the bumblebee, they still don’t know how he does it.Scientists have been testing bumblebees by monitoring their energy use, placing them in wind tunnels, and measuring their oxygen use. No, they haven’t been able to make little oxygen masks for the bees—bumblebees have 24 breathing holes.Scientists have learned that a flying bumblebee flaps its wings 160 times per second and consumes the equivalent of 180 candy bars per hour! A flying bee uses the same amount of oxygen for its body weight as a flying bird or a bat. However, unlike birds, the bumblebee uses no more oxygen when hovering than when flying. This is only one of the discoveries that contradict scientists’ theories. In fact, the director of the latest studies on bumblebee flight admits that they still have no idea how the bumblebee stays in the air. He warns other scientists to stop using the current theories on the subject because they are far too simple.Of course, our Magnificent Creator God knows how to make a bumblebee fly, even if the best of modern science can’t figure it out.This should help us to see that when scientists tell us they have figured out how everything could have been made without a Creator, they don’t know what they’re talking about. |
| 2/6/2023 | The silk produced by spiders is very different from the silk produced by silkworms in some very important ways. While silkworm silk is strong yet not prone to stretching, spiders make silk that is both strong and stretchy. They also make several different kinds of silk, each with its own purpose.In fact, spider silk is stronger than an equal amount of steel and yet it stretches. Spider silk is made of nothing more than proteins. However, scientists are finding it extremely difficult to study the chemical structure of spider silk because it resists most of their efforts to break it down into its chemical parts. Scientists have finally resorted to hot, concentrated acids to break down the silk. They are learning that one type of spider silk is made up of lengths of very stiff amino acids, separated by segments of amino acids that form a springy helix. Together they contribute to the strength and stretchiness of spider silk.Scientists are exploring how spider silk is made, because this wonderful material promises new methods for creating stronger and lighter materials for human use. One possible use would be making cloth that is both comfortable and bulletproof.Our Magnificent Creator God has done all things well. The fact that we can learn to design better things by learning how He designed things is a witness for His wisdom as well as a witness against claims that the creation designed itself by trial and error. However, there is much more to God’s plans for us, as you can learn from the Bible. |
| 2/5/2023 | It comes as quite a surprise to discover that the word locust does not actually indicate any separate species. Locusts are really just grasshoppers, but the term refers to their well-known swarming behavior. Under normal conditions, locusts are solitary insects. In normal times, they cause little or no problem to agriculture. But sometimes, conditions are not normal.After times of drought, the locusts seem to produce far more nymphs than would be normal. These then begin to swarm as the insects suddenly become gregarious. These swarms of locusts cause terrible problems for agriculture. In swarming conditions, the insects turn to eating crops and can devastate whole fields in short order. The transformation seems to be caused by increased body concentrations of serotonin, and this, in turn, is produced when there are multiple touches of the hind legs by other locusts, caused by overcrowding. Towards the end of 2019 and into 2020, large swarms of locusts affected parts of Africa and Asia, and these were so large that they brought to mind the plague of locusts in Egypt, mentioned in Exodus.For these reasons, locusts were, in the Bible, a symbol of destruction. In Joel 2:25, we read: “I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent among you” (Joel 2:25). The destruction caused is to be reversed by the blessing and favor of our Magnificent Creator God. |
| 2/4/2023 | If you had painful skin, one of the last things you would apply to it would be hot peppers. Not only do hot peppers burn the mouth, some can even blister the skin.Yet in South America, ground hot peppers have been used for centuries to help relieve pain. Scientists have discovered the active ingredient in peppers that relieves skin pain. This substance blocks the pain signals that come from the nerves just under the surface of the skin. The “hot pepper” sauce for skin not only causes no pain, it relieves pain that doesn’t respond to any other treatment. It’s available in creams and ointments that, tests show, relieve pain in two out of three people.Conventional wisdom says that medicines that are found in natural plants were discovered by accident. Someone might accidentally discover a relationship between a person’s having eaten a certain plant and then getting well. They would try the same plants on others with the same disease. If they found that there were more cures, the plant would be remembered as a folk medicine.The “hot pepper” pain reliever for skin tells us that there’s a problem with this theory. People who have a painful skin condition are not likely to apply a pepper sauce. Doing that would be expected to make their skin more painful and cause it to blister. However, it’s possible that our Magnificent Creator God originally gave humans some knowledge of the cures for our ills – cures that He wisely built into creation. |
| 2/3/2023 | Scientists are learning that even the lowly bacteria have mind and memory. New research is showing that mind, memory, brain, and personality did not evolve. These can be found in the lowliest of creatures, including the bacteria.Another sign of intelligence in a life form is the ability to learn. Using attracting and repelling substances, scientists have found that bacteria can learn about their surroundings and draw conclusions. Follow-up tests showed that they later remember what they learned. Scientists have even found that younger bacteria learn better than older ones. If some things are not learned when young, they never can be learned! It seems that it’s hard to teach an old bacterium new tricks!The biggest surprise of all came when scientists discovered that bacteria have what the researchers called individual personality. They are mystified about how bacteria, each with the same genetic structure and from the same environment, can develop unique quirks in behavior. Because we find individual personality even in the lowly bacteria, we know that did not evolve.That God would give even a bacterium the gift of personality shows us something about His mind toward us. Nothing is so small or unimportant that it escapes His attention. Since He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to rescue us from the decay that is in the world because of sin, there is no force too great for Him to overcome. Surely He is a Magnificent Creator God of details as well as a God of love, Who is concerned about every individual among us!!! |
| 2/2/2023 | Most of us were amazed when we first learned that physicians in ancient Egypt did brain surgery. Even more amazing is that the skulls of their patients showed healing: they accomplished such complicated surgery without killing their patients. That physicians had the knowledge to do such delicate operations thousands of years ago challenges the modern, evolutionary view that humans began as primitives.Where did such knowledge come from? How did man learn that relieving fluid pressure on an injured brain prevented further damage and promoted healing? Obviously, according to the modern view, the first would‑be physician to try brain surgery had no idea what he was doing. However, history paints a very different picture. Recently, archaeologists in west central China discovered a skull of someone who had brain surgery over 4,000 years ago. A large hole in the center of a series of cracks had been made by scraping through the bone. The skull shows that healing took place after the surgery, indicating some degree of success. Even older examples of successful brain surgery have also been found in eastern Europe. Creationist dating would place these examples to within several centuries after the Flood.That the knowledge and skill to do successful brain surgery was so widespread so long ago suggests that man had such knowledge and skill even before the Flood. Noah may even have passed on knowledge that had been passed down to him from Adam himself!Our Magnificent Creator God is not called The Great Physician without merit!!! |
| 2/1/2023 | “For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof.” Psalm 50:10-12“If God exists, why is there so much suffering in the world?” Many of us are used to such accusations from atheists, but, unfortunately, many Christians do not know how to answer the point.Christians would be right to point to Genesis 3 and show that evil came into the world by disobedience – the disobedience of Adam – which polluted the entire world.However, there are some who object to this presentation of the Eden account on the grounds that, if God is a God of love and righteousness, how could He allow evil to happen in this way? This question leads some, incorrectly, to assume that God cannot know for sure what is going to happen in the future.The problem, if such it is, is better resolved by reasoning in biblical categories. Thinking in categories appears to be a lost art. Our error is in judging God by human standards even though God rebukes us, in Psalm 50, declaring: “You thought that I was just like you.”God is not like us, even though we are made in His image. We understand events through the passage of time, but God is transcendent over time.Therefore, to us it appears that God, in His Sovereignty, wills two different things; He permits evil but is not responsible for it – we are. If we do not fully understand this, we remind ourselves that His thoughts are so much higher than ours.The wonders of our Magnificent Creator God exceeds anything we can comprehend with our human minds which is why we have faith in an omniscient and omnipotent Father!!! |
| 1/31/2023 | According to the Bible, Noah’s Ark was 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high. It was built of a type of wood called “gopher wood.” This may have been laminated wood, but it was wood. However, skeptics claim that even today wooden boats cannot be made that large simply because wood is not strong enough to endure the huge stresses generated by such a large structure; they say only iron can endure these stresses.That is, of course, not true. Ancient writers tell us of a sea battle in 280 B.C. in which the Leontifera participated. They describe the Leontifera in some detail. They tell us that she carried 1,600 rowers and 1,200 additional fighting men. From these and other details, the Leontifera has been estimated to have been between 400 and 500 feet long. Plutarch tells us of another ship built around 294 B.C. that had twice as many banks of oars as the Leontifera. In the late third century B.C., Ptolemy Philopator built a ship that took 400 sailors to run, in addition to 4,000 rowers. With additional soldiers on board, the ship carried 7,250 men. This battleship was 420 feet long, wider than Noah’s Ark and about the same height.Again, recorded history proves that The Bible is trustworthy in all that it teaches, even when it talks about historical fact or the natural world that science studies. The world and all that it contains were created by our Magnificent Creator God and the facts cannot be denied. |
| 1/30/2023 | We do not want dandelions in our gardens. They are classed as weeds, and they have a tendency to take over large areas, especially in flower beds and also among the grass in a lawn. But when we come across them in the countryside, they are much more welcome. Pretty much every part of a dandelion plant can be put to some useful purpose.Dandelion leaves can be eaten as part of a salad. They have a mild, peppery taste. Many collect them together to make a woodland salad, with finely chopped dandelion leaves, wild garlic, and blanched nettle leaves.An infusion of the flowers in olive oil makes a fine remedy for aching muscles. A jar can be filled with flower heads, lightly pressed down, then filled with oil, sealed, and left for two to four weeks. Alternatively, the flowers can be treated with gently melted coconut oil, then solidified to make semi-solid balm.The roots can be cleaned and used in one of two ways. They can be finely sliced and sautéed as a vegetable. Or you can roast them on a very low heat. The dried roots are then put into a coffee grinder and powdered. The resultant powder is brewed like coffee, and tastes similar.It is very evident that our Magnificent Creator God has made a lot of very useful plants for us, like the dandelion. It makes little sense to suppose that so many uses could all have evolved. This is an example of God’s Master Plan for how we use the wonders of His creative power. |
| 1/29/2023 | When Isaac Asimov wrote his famous robot stories, we all thought we knew what robots looked like. They looked like us. Indeed, many of Asimov’s robots began to look indistinguishable from human beings, such as the iconic R Daneel Olivaw, who partnered with detective Elijah Baley in the sci-fi crime novel The Caves of Steel.As real-life robots began to appear in industry, making cars and operating other machinery, they did not look quite so anthropomorphic. Now in the 21st century, self-mobile robots are not necessarily built to walk like people. For example, we have already seen tiny flying robots about the size and shape of a cockroach – and liable to be just as beloved!A more recent robotic development has seen soft robots built to imitate jellyfish. Two layers of elastic polymer are joined – one stressed and one unstressed. Between the layers, air can be pumped, reversing the stressing and enabling the robot to swim through water. A third stress-free layer provides direction, and the whole machine is able to lift and carry fairly large cargos.The video accompanying the research shows strips of this robotic material being used out of water as a prehensile grip that would have sensitivity approaching that of human hands.As with all new technologies, it is to be hoped that good uses are found for it. God has given us dominion over this world, and technological developments, such as the soft robot, are methods by which humans can operate under this divine mandate.What a Magnificent Creator God we serve using the vast array of inventions He has taught us to make! |
| 1/28/2023 | In the early 1960s, some unusually blue star-like objects were observed in the universe, giving out radio frequencies along with visible light. There were a number of them. Through telescopes, they appeared to have fuzzy boundaries. They were given the name Quasi-Stellar Radio Sources – and this was quickly abbreviated to quasars.Another odd feature of these objects was the existence, in their spectra, of emission lines, similar to those of stars, but at the “wrong” frequencies. The emission lines in normal stars were known to be due to hydrogen, but the lines in the quasar’s spectrum had a wavelength about 15% longer than that of hydrogen in other stars, or in the laboratory. It was eventually realized that this effect must be due to red shift – but a red shift bigger than anything that had previously been seen. An application of Hubble’s Law – which shows that the red shift is proportional to the object’s distance – showed that the quasar 3C 273 was over 2 billion light years away and was therefore over 100 times more luminous than typical stars within the same cluster.The existence of such amazing objects once again underlines for us how true it is that the heavens declare the glory of our Magnificent Creator God.So many objects have now been discovered that astronomers give them numbers like 3C 273. How interesting it is, then, that the Bible tells us that our Magnificent Creator God knows the actual name of every single astronomical object!!! |
| 1/27/2023 | Plants make cellulose. Cellulose is a type of natural plastic made of many sugar molecules linked together. Scientists have known for years how to use the natural plastic qualities of cellulose to make things like cellophane and rayon.Scientists have also known that animals generate a similar natural plastic called chitin. Like cellulose, chitin is a carbohydrate made of long chains of sugar molecules. Chitin is found in the shells of all insects and crustaceans, like crabs. Each year the crabmeat industry had thrown away thousands of tons of chitin because scientists couldn’t figure out how to extract chitin from the shells in a usable form.Finally in 1975 scientists discovered how to remove the chitin from shells and change its form so it could be made into whatever forms they needed.Suture thread made from chitin dissolves in the body. This means that stitches don’t have to be removed, and it can be more easily knotted than regular suture thread. Suture thread made from chitin also causes no allergic reaction, and it seems to promote healing. It’s hard to believe that a crab shell, which is usually thrown away, could do so much! Food processing companies are even using a chemical made from chitin to recover protein from wastewater.Almost everything in the creation seems to have numerous uses for human needs. This is testimony that our Magnificent Creator God has made this universe for us and that He cares about our needs. In the Bible we learn that He has provided for our greatest need through His Son, Jesus Christ. |
| 1/26/2023 | For many people, bats bring to mind words like “creepy,” “fangs,” “rabies,” and even “ugly.” However, over 450 years ago, Martin Luther marveled at the delicate beauty of the bat. He pronounced the creature an excellent witness to the skill and wisdom of the Creator.God must also like bats. Almost one-fourth of all mammals He created are bats! The flying fox bat has a wingspan of nearly six feet. Bumblebee bats, native to Thailand, are the smallest mammals known, weighing less than a penny. There are brilliantly patterned tropical bats called butterfly bats.And hundreds of species of tropical plants depend on bats as pollinators.Popular legend considers bats a serious part of the rabies problem. The truth is that raccoons, skunks, foxes, and even dogs and cats are more likely to have rabies. In fact, one study shows that in Pennsylvania you are more likely to find a rabid cow than a rabid bat. In reality, bats are delicate, helpful and intelligent creatures. A typical North American bat will eat about 600 mosquitoes an hour. Large colonies will consume between 250,000 and 500,000 pounds of insects per night! Bats can be trained, demonstrating their intelligence. And finally, an important warning. If you find sleeping bats, don’t disturb them. Even one such disturbance during sleep can be fatal since stored nutrition may be consumed by the disturbance before the next feeding cycle.So next time you see a bat, don’t recoil in fear. Rather, say a prayer of thanksgiving to the Magnificent Creator God who made both of you. |
| 1/25/2023 | One of the criticisms of solar power is that it is so variable. Clearly, a solar plant is going to produce no energy at night and an inadequate supply when the sky is cloudy. On the other hand, a suitable size plant could over-produce when sunlight is intense.Plants have a similar problem. The rapidly changing incidence of sunlight on their leaves could, conceivably, cause problems within the plant. However, researchers have discovered that plants have mechanisms to cope with these variations, and one such mechanism could answer the old question: “Why are plants green?”Plants produce high energy carbohydrate molecules from water vapor and carbon dioxide by the well-known process of photosynthesis. This endothermic reaction requires the input of energy in the form of light, and the reaction is catalyzed by the green dye chlorophyll. What many of us have not considered is why chlorophyll is green.White light is a mixture of all three primary colors – red, green and blue – which have increasing frequency and, hence, increasing energy, in that order. The remarkable thing about plants, therefore, is that they are absorbing light energy only at either end of the visible spectrum while rejecting – and reflecting – the middle of the spectrum, which is green.Researchers have shown that this selective absorption of certain frequencies minimizes “noise” and, therefore, enables the plant to cope with rapidly changing conditions of sunshine.Our Magnificent Creator God, in His Creation, has literally thought of everything. No wonder He said “and it was good”! |
| 1/24/2023 | As creationists, we spend a lot of time working on our models about how we think the Flood could have happened, developing new models. The old vapor canopy model has long since been superseded by more biblical and more scientific models, such as Catastrophic Plate Tectonics or the newer Vertical Impact Tectonics.What we should not lose sight of is the reason why God sent the Flood. The reason for the coming of the Flood is given in Genesis 6:5. “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” If God had chosen to destroy everyone and everything, He would have been just to do so. But God also had a plan of salvation, which we read about in Genesis 6:8, which, in my opinion, is the most beautiful verse of the early chapters of Genesis.Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.Hebrews 11 tells us: “By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household. By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.” It follows, then, that Noah was saved by grace through faith. And in Ephesians 2:8 reminds Christians: “By grace you have been saved through faith”. There has only ever been one method of salvation – by grace, through faith. We just have that little bit more knowledge than Noah, so that we know Who bought that salvation, and how.We owe thanks to our Magnificent Creator God for this world and all that is in it and for the everlasting life we have because of Him. |
| 1/23/2023 | Garlic. Even say the word and some people move away to give you some distance. Others gather around because, to them, garlic helps make the meal. Garlic has begun to attract the attention of medical researchers as well.At the Tagore Medical College in India, researcher Arun Bordia kept track of 432 heart attack survivors for three years. During that time, half of the survivors drank the juice from six to ten cloves of fresh garlic each day, while others took a garlic-scented drink with no garlic in it. Over the three-year period, the garlic group had 32% fewer heart attacks and 45% fewer deaths than the other group. Research in the United States with chickens, who metabolize cholesterol in much the same way as humans, suggests a reason for these results. Chickens that were fed aged garlic extract showed a 50% reduction in the kind of cholesterol that clogs arteries.Medical researchers are also looking at some interesting evidence that garlic may help prevent some forms of cancer, especially stomach cancer.When the Creator made the heavens and Earth, He knew that humans would disobey Him, destroying the creation with sin. He also knew that in doing so we would bring disease and death into the world. We can thank our Magnificent Creator God that He stocked the Earth with substances that could be used to treat some of the earthly effects of sin. However, we can thank Him even more joyfully that He provided the full cure for sin for each of us in the life, death and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ! |
| 1/22/2023 | Our eyes do more work and tell more about us than many people realize. These amazing organs are so closely tied into the brain that they have been referred to as part of the brain.Your eyes were among your first organs to form. Within four weeks of fertilization, an unborn infant’s eyes begin to form. Interestingly enough, many newborns can move their eyes independently of each other, which can be a shock to unsuspecting parents. Usually the eyes are working together within a few months. However, those eye muscles will get more of a workout during our lifetimes than any other voluntary muscle. During any 24-hour period, our eyes will move about 100,000 times. That’s equivalent to walking 50 miles every day!Studies have shown that people with dark eyes generally have faster reaction times than people with light-colored eyes. Brown-eyed people generally are better at tennis while blue-eyed people generally do better at golf. Our eyes secrete different kinds of tears. Normal tears contain bacteria-fighting chemicals produced by cells in the lining of the eyelid. Emotional tears contain hormones released by the body in response to stress, including a natural painkiller. One more eye fact: The vitamin A in carrots is necessary for the proper working of the rods in your eye. The rods themselves are responsible for night vision. On a clear, dark night a healthy eye can see the light from a single candle 25 miles away!Only our Magnificent Creator God could have designed and made such a unique organ as the human eye!!! |
| 1/21/2023 | “Dog bites man” is not an unusual headline. However, “Man bites dog” would usually get people’s attention. If that’s true, the headline “Leeches teach physicians” should capture everyone’s attention.Physicians used leeches in bloodletting treatments well into the 19th century. They were used to treat everything from headaches to heart disease. As the 20th century matured, the medical use of leeches became not only a memory but a symbol of how backward medicine used to be. Now, as the 21st century is underway, leeches are again a part of modern medicine.To obtain their food, leeches inject a powerful blood thinner called hirudin. This hirudin is what interests modern medical researchers in leeches.Doctors have for many years been using a blood thinner called heparin to dissolve blood clots, such as those associated with heart attacks. But researchers are finding that hirudin is ten times as effective as heparin in dissolving clots, and in addition it works directly to prevent clotting. The studies continue. However, medical researchers are convinced that the blood thinner which leeches taught them how to make offers a powerful medicine. Should the possibilities presented by this modern medicine be realized, many lives that are now lost due to blood clotting may soon be routinely saved.Our Magnificent Creator God of the heavens and Earth is so wise and generous that He can teach even modern science some new things through a seemingly simple creature like the leech. |
| 1/20/2023 | They are the only cells in the human body that repeatedly die and self-regenerate throughout life. They are probably the only cells in the body that inspired a Broadway play named after them. And science considers them so interesting that several branches of science are studying them. I am talking about hair cells.As scientists are learning more about hair, they are coming to greater appreciation of, as one researcher put it, hair’s bewildering biology. A Harvard molecular biologist admitted that one of the reasons we know so little about hair is that scientists have avoided studying this complex structure.The average scalp has about 100,000 hairs growing at any one time. Each hair follicle produces hair for about two to five years, followed by a rest period of four to six months. A miniature assembly line of cells divides within the follicle, pushing older hair cells upward through the skin. Pigmentation is added as each new cell is produced. When the follicle is at rest, it shrivels and many of its cells die. However, seed cells, promising new life to the follicle, hide within it waiting for the signal to spring back to life. As humans grow older, the resting time of the follicles increases and growing time decreases, especially in men. So if you find yourself balding, you’re not necessarily losing your hair. It’s just that your hair is spending more time resting than it used to.Our Magnificent Creator God tells us that He cares so much about each one of us that He even knows how many hairs we have on our head! |
| 1/19/2023 | We don’t often think about our sense of smell. While our noses are on the job all the time, we note an odor only when it is unusual. Most of the time, the scents around us contribute, unnoticed, to our overall impression of our surroundings.It’s hard to remain tense at the beach. Simply the mention of the water and waves, the sand and sun brings back to memory the last trip to the beach and starts relaxing a person. However therapeutic these elements of the beach are, scientists have found that the one beach fixture that is probably most responsible for relaxing us is the smell.The smelly chemical that utility companies put in natural gas so that we can smell leaks is methyl mercaptan. This chemical is also produced by rotting meat. The human nose is extremely sensitive to this smell. We can detect as little as one 400-billionth of a gram of it in a quart of air.Doctors have long known that their noses are helpful in diagnosing disease. A person is brought into the emergency room in a coma. It’s very likely that the doctor will smell the patient’s breath as he tries to discover the problem. A sweet smell could indicate diabetes. The smell of ammonia could indicate a kidney malfunction. Arsenic poisoning smells like garlic. Diphtheria can be identified by a sickeningly sweet odor, and people with the plague smell like apples. A patient who smells like freshly baked bread may have typhoid.While we seldom think about our sense of smell, it’s a wonderful gift from our Magnificent Creator God for which we owe Him thanks. |
| 1/18/2023 | Do your eyes ever play tricks on you? Our eyes regularly play tricks on us with the help of our brains.Repeated research has shown that the images we see are not exactly what our eyes see. Our eyes and brains work together to construct the images we call sight. It’s not that our eyes are out to hoodwink us. Most of the time our eyes are working to help us. Working together, our brain and eyes add logical details to the images we see. Each of us has a blind spot in our vision because there are no vision cells where the optic nerve is. Instead of showing us a spot of nothing at the blind point in our field of vision, our brain invents an image from surrounding details. Your brain pulls the same trick on you when you proofread your completed manuscript. While others can still find typos, you may not.Your brain knows what you are saying and so it automatically shows you a repaired version, making many of your typing errors invisible.Your pupils can reveal your thoughts. Studies show that when seeing unpleasant scenes the pupils retract. Pleasant or interesting scenes cause the pupils to open wider.Charles Darwin wrote, “To suppose that the eye, with all of its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.” We don’t often agree with Charles Darwin, but this time we do!Our Magnificent Creator God once more demonstrates that His Wisdom is above all wisdom!!! |
| 1/17/2023 | In recent years, our knowledge about Pluto has multiplied over and over again. Despite its status being downgraded to that of a mere Dwarf Planet rather than a planet proper, NASA determined to send out a space probe called New Horizons in January 2006. New Horizons finally reached Pluto in January 2015 and sent back invaluable data for about 18 months, with the result that we now probably know more about the surface of Pluto than that of parts of Earth’s ocean floor.Some surface evidence has caused scientists to think that maybe Pluto was a hot body when it came into existence. This heat could still be there, prompting speculation that there could be a liquid ocean beneath the icy frozen surface.Whenever water is discovered in the Solar System, thoughts turn to the possibility of life having evolved – especially as Pluto’s surface shows evidence of the existence of methane and ammonia molecules, which scientists always think could provide a synthetic route to organic compounds.Such interpretations ignore the fact that Earth was created separately from, and three days before, the creation of the other stars and planets.God in His wisdom chose the Earth to be the sole focus of life. |
| 1/16/2023 | In the past we have discussed individual studies that link good health to religious commitment. It’s always easy to find individual studies to prove almost any point. So researchers did a statistical analysis of 42 different studies made since 1977.The 42 studies that were examined involved over 125,000 people, mostly Christian and Jewish. The analysis, conducted by the National Institute for Healthcare Research, distinguished between public and private religious activity. Public religious activity included attending worship services and volunteering time for church activities. Private religious activity included praying alone and “internal spiritual feelings.” While there are some who question these studies, they have consistently shown that religiously involved people live longer, healthier lives. However, the researchers who analyzed these studies arrived at a new conclusion as they analyzed the differences between public and private religious activity. They concluded that public religious involvement, as opposed to private or no involvement, showed a statistically important relationship to higher health and survival rates.Two thousand years ago, the writer of the book of Hebrews encouraged believers not to neglect assembling themselves together for worship on a regular basis. Like burning embers removed from the fire, when believers fail to be a regular part of their faith community, believers’ faith, too, cools to the temperature around it.Our Magnificent Creator God created everyone for a purpose and part of that purpose is to “assemble ourselves together” as He said, that we might love Him and each other and grow spiritually as a body of believers. |
| 1/15/2023 | The closest star to Earth is Alpha Centauri 26 trillion miles away. That is 26 with 12 zeros after it. 26,000,000,000,000. When our Magnificent Creator God in His awesome power creates something, distance is of no concern. |
| 1/14/2023 | Many people know that, despite its appearance, coral is actually a tiny animal. Even a small coral growth may be made up of billions of tiny animals, each living inside its limestone skeleton.What many people don’t know is that coral cannot live without the help of algae – a plant. Thousands of one-celled algae live in the tiny stomach of each coral polyp. The polyp requires the waste products of the algae to complete its nutrition requirements and to get the calcium with which it builds reefs. In return, the polyp’s stomach provides an ideal protected living place for the algae. Incidentally, the wonderful colors in living coral come from the algae in each polyp’s stomach.Evolutionists have said that it must take millions of years for the tiny polyps to build large coral reefs – like the 2,000-kilometer-long Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The Great Barrier Reef, incidentally, is considered the largest structure ever built by living organisms. However, it has now been shown that coral polyps can double their own weight in just over 10 days! As a result, the claim of millions of years for the age of the Great Barrier Reef has been reduced by a factor of 40!Many of the long-age figures claimed by evolutionists have had to be drastically revised downward as we have learned more about our Magnificent Creator God’s creation. The resulting figures fit the Bible’s account of history much more closely. |
| 1/13/2023 | It’s not very pretty, nor is it graceful, but Colombia’s rock-climbing catfish has a unique ability among fish. Perhaps there are days when a salmon, trying to make it up a waterfall, wishes that it could simply climb the rocks.The rock-climbing catfish’s climbing equipment begins with a powerful sucker mouth. Once it attaches itself to a rock, it can stay stuck despite any torrent. The rock-climbing catfish also has a bony plate on its belly that helps it hold its place while it repositions its sucker a little further up the rocks. The plate has fins with tiny, backward-pointing teeth. These teeth dig into the rock and prevent slipping. The catfish’s third special feature is a set of powerful muscles to control the plate.Once the rock-climbing catfish has attached its sucker to the rock, it pulls up its stomach plate and anchors it. With its body anchored, it moves its sucker up the face of the rock and repeats the process. Following this method, the rock-climbing catfish can walk its way up a 20-foot rock wall against the torrent of a waterfall in about 30 minutes! Our Magnificent Creator God thought of everything in His Master Design for every creature! |
| 1/12/2023 | By the time she had returned from her adventures in Oz, Dorothy had learned that “There’s no place like home.” As we discover more planets outside the solar system, we are learning that there’s no place like Earth or even the solar system. While we usually think of planets orbiting a star, astronomers are now finding planets that simply float through space without a home star.Of the 15 known homeless planets, 13 of them were recently found in the Orion Nebula. These most recent discoveries were made using a specialized camera that examines the heavens for infrared and near infrared light. Scientists speculate that the planets might have escaped from orbit around some star. Others speculate that the planets are failed brown dwarf stars. To become a brown dwarf, a body has to be at least as big as 13 Jupiters. The smallest of these planets is as big as 8 Jupiters, making its gravity far too strong for any life that we know about. To make matters worse, temperatures on these planets would not support life, either. Analysis of the light coming from these planets reveals that their surface temperatures are nearly 5000° F.These homeless planets are part of God’s illustration to us of how He specially designed our solar system and Earth just for us.The Bible tells us that the Word made flesh, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ Who gave His life for us, was also the Instrument our Magnificent Creator God used to create the entire universe. |
| 1/11/2023 | A hummingbird heart weighs a fraction of an ounce and beats eight hundred times a minute; a blue whale’s heart weighs half a ton, beats only ten times per minute, and can be heard two miles away. In contrast to either, the human heart seems dully functional, yet it does its job, beating 100,000 times a day [65–70 times a minute] with no time off for rest, to get most of us through seventy years or more. Our Magnificent Creator God’s master design for His master creation is infinite in detail and function. |
| 1/10/2023 | We take the sky for granted. It is just there. Yet, whether it is covered with cloud, or clear, we do not consider the fact that, during the daytime, all of the sky is somewhat light. In particular, on a clear day, the sky appears blue. The blueness itself is remarkable, given that the sun is yellow, but why is the sky any color at all?Having seen photographs from the Moon, taken by the Apollo Astronauts, we know that even when the sun is out, the rest of the sky is black. Sunlight comes from the Sun, so the blueness of the sky on Earth must be because of light coming from elsewhere.Of course, all the light is from the Sun originally. But that light has been scattered. So there is scattered light coming at us from many different directions when we look at the sky. The reason for this scattering of light is a phenomenon known as Raleigh scattering – named for British physicist Lord Raleigh.Sunlight is scattered by molecules and particles in the atmosphere. It turns out that the mix of molecules and particles that we have in Earth’s atmosphere scatters light more strongly at shorter wavelengths than at longer wavelengths. Of the colors of visible light, blue has a shorter wavelength than red. So it appears to us that blue light is coming to us from all directions of the sky because that light has been scattered.When we learn the mechanism for something, it should not spoil our wonder at it but should cause us all the more to praise our Magnificent Creator God for His attention to detail! |
| 1/9/2023 | A gypsy moth caterpillar infestation can strip the leaves from large numbers of trees, threatening the trees’ lives. Since they don’t have a means of escape, it doesn’t seem as if the poor trees have much of a chance.But botanists were tipped off to the possibility that trees may not be all that defenseless when they began to investigate why only a few trees were badly damaged by insects in an infected grove while most stood unharmed. They discovered that when facing a threat like gypsy moth caterpillars, trees begin to defend themselves by sounding the alarm. A large variety of trees – including beeches, poplars, sugar maples and red oaks – communicate with each other. Scientists believe the trees communicate by releasing chemicals called pheromones into the air. What they now know is that before insects attacking one tree can get to the tree next door, the second tree has already begun defending itself.How do they defend themselves? When under attack or notified by other trees of attack, most trees begin to manufacture an array of poisons. Some of the poisons make leaves impossible to digest, while others kill the insects outright. Some make as many as eight poisons at once, and many can change the poisons that are made from year to year.Our Magnificent Creator God’s concern for living things extends even to plants. If He sees to this detailed level of care for trees, can there be anything in our lives that is too small for His loving concern? |
| 1/8/2023 | During World War II, Hitler and his Nazi Army killed one third of all of the then living Jews, six million of them. God’s magnificent plan of salvation is so perfect it would even have allowed Hitler to go to heaven if he had accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior. When our Magnificent Creator God said that all who call on the name of The Lord would be saved He meant ALL! |
| 1/7/2023 | Many plants reproduce simply by cloning. The most obvious example of cloning that comes to mind is the dandelion. Unless you get all of the main dandelion root out of the ground, each piece of the root can sprout another dandelion, identical to the parent.The walking fern reproduces by cloning too. It moves across the countryside, albeit slowly, by producing new plants. A new plant is generated wherever the tips of its leaves touch the ground. Each new plant is identical to the parent.The bamboo reproduces through underground stems. The different species of bamboo live anywhere from 20 to 120 years. During their life spans, they produce only by cloning. Then they flower – once. When it’s time for a particular species to flower, every member of that species, no matter where in the world it grows, flowers gloriously. Each flower can have as many as 100 pollen-producing stamens. Once the seeds are ripe and scattered, every member of that species in the world dies. At this point, the entire species exists only in the scattered seeds.This is brilliant testimony to a recent creation of all bamboos at the same time. If evolution produced them and the forces of change worked on them for millions of years, one would think that all members of the same species would no longer be in perfect synchronization. Bamboo makes a strong testimony for the recent creation by our Magnificent Creator God reported in Genesis! |
| 1/6/2023 | Many plants, especially orchids, offer different ploys to fool insects into pollinating them. Each of these ploys shows planning, design and the ability to create the design that will work. That there are so many examples makes it impossible for any rational person to believe that mindless, impersonal forces could have made these plants.Four different groups of orchids produce flowers that look so much like the female of the insect that pollinates them that pollinators will try to mate with them. The Brassia orchid found in southern Florida produces a flower that mimics the prey of its pollinator, the spider wasp. The flower is so designed that as the wasp stings its supposed prey – really the flower – pollen is deposited on his head. The pollen is then carried to a nearby female flower and deposited in just the right place during another attack.Another orchid imitates an aggressive swarm of bees as it blows in the wind. The strongly territorial bees that live in the area swarm and attack the flowers. In the process, they transfer the pollen from male to female flowers. The female flowers of at least 50 species of Mexican orchids offer fake pollen to lure pollen-eating insects that have been feeding on male flowers. Many of these insect-orchid relationships are so tightly interlocked that neither could survive without the other.This speaks of a planned creation. It also bears witness that all forms of life came into being in a relatively short time, not over millions of years as evolutionists would have it.Our Magnificent Creator God had all of this planned before the beginning of time – before the world existed! |
| 1/5/2023 | There has been a considerable amount of interest over exoplanets recently. This is due, in large part, to information gleaned from the Kepler spacecraft, which was launched in 2009. Data started being made available from the spacecraft in 2014. There is too much data to be studied quickly by NASA or anyone else, so the data has been made freely available, and anyone with the expertise to analyze the data can do so. This has led to the discovery of a lot of new exoplanets. My friend and fellow creation speaker, Dr. Jason Lisle, discovered a planet using this data and made that discovery known in May 2017.What is an exoplanet? An exoplanet is a planet orbiting a star other than our own sun. You might suppose that they were discovered by peering through a telescope in the same way that planets like Uranus and Neptune and the dwarf planet Pluto were discovered. However, this is not the case. The data released by Kepler, orbiting beyond the haze of the atmosphere, comprises of readings of brightness from many stars. If a planet orbits across the surface of that star, then the brightness of the star will be imperceptibly, but measurably, diminished. If observed dips in the stellar brightness are observed regularly, then it can be assumed that this regularity is due to the regularity of an orbiting planet.In considering these discoveries, one is impressed by the beauty and majesty of God’s creation. One is also impressed by the talents that He has given to those who analyze such data for these discoveries.The key word herein is “Discovery”. We are always amazed at what our Magnificent Creator God has created – but that’s just what we know about today – there is no way to imagine just what remains for us to discover – we may never know in this life just what is really “out there”. |
| 1/4/2023 | The largest known beetle in the world is the aptly named goliath beetle. This African beetle can become almost as large as a mouse. Dinosaurs were not the largest animals ever to live. The great blue whale holds that honor. The smallest mammal in the world is smaller than many insects. A newly discovered species of bat in Thailand weighs only six one-hundredths of an ounce.Such extremes might lead some to wonder whether those giant insects we see in the movies would ever develop. Could a spider grow to be as large as a house?You will be happy to know that no spider or any other insect could grow as large as a house. We can be sure of this because of the way insects breathe. Insects breathe through small tubes along their bodies. These tubes provide oxygen directly to their internal tissues. If an insect were to grow too large, these tubes could not get enough oxygen to the tissues. This is because the larger the creature, the more internal living tissue that requires oxygen. You and I have lungs that provide a network of surfaces equal to the size of a tennis court. An insect our size would need a body that has the surface area of a tennis court, too, which is an impossibility.Even though different creatures have different organs to supply their needs, each creature has just the right organs for its needs. This is just another sign of our Magnificent Creator God’s wisdom. |
| 1/3/2023 | Researchers in the 1950s and ’60s established that the octopus is quite intelligent and can learn different visual patterns. Octopi have very large brains with large areas reserved for storing information. New research has shown that they are even more intelligent than earlier studies revealed. These findings run counter to evolutionary theory, which says that intelligence evolves in social species to help them deal with social relationships. The octopus is not a social animal and operates alone.Unlike other animals, octopi use a variety of strategies to solve the same problem. They can use their eight powerful arms to open clams, or they can drill through the shell and inject a fast-acting poison. In the laboratory, octopi kept in isolation were given a floating plastic bottle. The bored octopuses quickly devised a variety of games to play with the bottle – a sure sign of intelligence.The Creator gave the octopus the ability to learn a lot so it could cope with its unusual way of life. Octopi begin life as tiny plankton that drift with the ocean currents. When they finally settle to the bottom, they may find themselves in any of the many habitats provided by the ocean and face any variety of predators and food sources. Thus, our Magnificent Creator God designed them with the ability to learn how to adapt to a large variety of habitats and situations. Just like He designed us… |
| 1/2/2023 | New research is revealing the health benefits of eating nuts. While eating peanuts has been shown to reduce heart disease risks by lowering triglycerides, tree nuts offer many more benefits.People often worry about the fat in nuts. However, most of that fat is the good kind that protects hearts, while at the same time satisfying the body’s need for fat. The result is that nut eaters can lose weight and keep it off. In one Canadian study, those trying to lose weight while satisfying their fat needs with nuts lost an average of nine pounds over 18 months. Over the same trial period, those trying to lose weight with a low-fat diet actually gained an average of six pounds. Another study showed that people who ate two ounces of nuts four or five times a week lowered their risk of heart attack by 50 percent. Yet another study showed that women who ate only five ounces of nuts per week were one-third less likely to have a heart attack than those who ate nuts infrequently. Several studies have shown that almonds, macadamia nuts, or walnuts lowered high cholesterol by ten percent. Other studies have shown that nut eating can lower the risk of prostate cancer by 30 percent and may lower the risk of colon and stomach cancers.Nuts are a great gift from God and truly are among the best fruits of the land. Chance would not have evolved all these health benefits in a food clearly designed for us to eat. A loving Magnificent Creator God made them for our good!!! |
| 1/1/2023 | The Bible tells us that a young shepherd named David killed the giant Philistine, Goliath, with a very accurately sling stone (1 Samuel 17:40, 49).The Bible states that the Israelites used slings as weapons of war (2 Kings 3:25). Sling stones from Khirbet el-Maqatir (West Bank, Israel) are not naturally rounded. They all have evidence of being shaped by man. Archaeologists are finding evidence that confirms these Biblical stories. Sling stones were important weapons in an ancient army’s arsenal.At one excavation site in Israel, 10 miles north of Jerusalem, sling stones have been found in almost every area of the dig. Interestingly, the site is located in the territory given to the tribe of Benjamin. This tribe was known for an elite corps of slingers (Judges 20:15-16; 1 Chronicles 12:2), many of whom were left-handed slingers. 700 of them could each “sling a stone at a hair and not miss.The best method of releasing a stone from a sling is by an underhand motion.It is unclear when men first started slinging stones instead of throwing them. Yet, once known, it did not take long to learn that stones could be slung faster, farther, and more accurately, than they could be thrown. Early slingers also found smoother, rounded, stones were far more effective than any other shape.Ancient hand slings generally consisted of a single long strip of leather or woven wool, with a central “pocket” for the stone. The longer the sling, the greater its range. Long-range slings were about 3 feet long (0.9 meters).Slingers are often visualized as releasing overhead, yet the best way to utilize a sling is by an underhand motion, like a softball pitcher. Elaborate wind-ups were wasted motion. One windup, like a good softball pitcher, was sufficient. Before development of the modern compound bow, ancient slingers were as effective as archers and served as an important part of any military force.Surprisingly, a good slinger hurled a stone as far and accurately as a good archer. Roman military texts recommended archery target practice at about 200 yards (183 meters). Slingers are known to hurl their projectiles even farther, as much as 440 yards (402 meters) (a quarter of a mile / 0.40 km). As for accuracy, one ancient writer noted that the best slingers “would wound not merely the heads of their enemies, but any part of the face at which they might have aimed.”Experiments demonstrate that missiles leave a sling in excess of 60 miles per hour (97 km/h).One Roman writer noted that opponents in leather armor were in far greater danger from sling missiles than arrows. Even if the stone did not penetrate the armor, it was capable of inflicting a fatal internal injury.Unarmored bodies were easily penetrated by sling stones. An ancient medical book included instructions for removing lead and stone sling missiles from the bodies of wounded soldiers.While typical sling stones used by the Greek and Roman armies were the size of golf balls, different cultures liked different sizes.This is just another piece of our Magnificent Creator God’s design before anything existed!!! |
| 12/31/2022 | You might not think of the crocodile as a particularly loving creature. In reality, the crocodile is among the most gentle and loving of parents. Mama crocodile lays between 40 and 80 eggs in a large nest. For the 90 days they take to hatch, she will keep close watch over them, even foregoing food so as not to leave the nest unattended. Even the father stays close to guard the eggs that are a delicacy to many animals. At the end of this three-month watch the babies begin to chirp from within their eggs. Before long there may be dozens of babies chirping from the nest of buried eggs. This brings the mother who carefully uncovers the eggs, one by one. The young are only nine inches long and weigh just four ounces. Yet the gentle and loving mother picks up each one and with a flip of her head places them in a special pouch in her mouth. When some of the young have trouble breaking out of their shell, mama picks up the eggs and delicately works the eggs inside her mouth with her tongue, freeing the imprisoned baby. Once collected, all the young are taken to a special protected nursery where they will be just as carefully tended for months. Most amazing is that, should the mother not be present to tend to the hatchling chores, the father offers the hatchlings the very same help and care! Our Magnificent Creator God loves even the crocodile! And his acceptance of you and me, because of what Jesus Christ has done for us, is an even greater wonder than the loving crocodile! |
| 12/30/2022 | How many ants are there in the world? No one has actually counted them all or asked them to fill out little ant census forms. However, scientists have estimated that there are about 10 million billion ants in the world, waiting for you to have a picnic. That’s more ants than there are mammals, reptiles, birds, and amphibians combined. God made so many ants because ants are important housekeepers for the earth. Ants, not earthworms, turn most of the world’s soil, drain it, and enrich it. Ants dispose of 90% of the corpses of small dead animals. As the world’s gardeners, ants spread and plant more seeds than any other creature. Like bees, ants have a sophisticated society, which includes workers, nurses, soldiers, hunters, farmers, and even builders. Each of these different classes have specialized organs for their work. The soldier ants of one species are walking bombs. They are loaded with poison and literally explode when under attack, spraying poison on their enemies. Army ants in Central and South America march across the countryside in a line that can be nearly 50 feet long. The solid column sweeps along, flushing out even small animals, as it looks for food. The huge variety of living things around us represents more than simply variety. That variety carefully includes creatures to do every job that needs to be done to maintain life on earth. This, in itself, is a witness to both the creativity and wisdom of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 12/29/2022 | Presumably, before the fall into sin, we didn’t have any bad cholesterol, or at least it didn’t do any damage in our bloodstream. The so-called “bad cholesterol” is low-density-lipoprotein. It’s called bad because it tends to cause our arteries to clog unless countered by the so-called “good cholesterol” or high-density-lipoprotein. Based on earlier research, scientists wanted to test the idea that substances in orange juice could improve levels of good cholesterol. Volunteers had their cholesterol levels checked on a regular basis during the test period. After six weeks of a low cholesterol diet, they were to drink one glass of orange juice every day for four weeks. The result was a 5 percent increase in the good cholesterol. Then they drank two glasses of orange juice per day for four weeks. The result was another 7 percent increase in good cholesterol. Then they were directed to drink three glasses per day. The result was a 27 percent overall improvement. Surprisingly, researchers found that five weeks after they stopped the three glasses-a-day portion of the experiment, their good cholesterol remained high. We can be thankful that, in His perfect foreknowledge, our Magnificent Creator God created some foods that counter the effects of sin on us!!! We can be even more thankful that His plan to save us from our sins was in place even before there was sin!!! |
| 12/28/2022 | If you live in a temperate climate, you have probably heard your home pop and crack on cold days. Those sounds are caused by the different materials that make up your house contracting at different rates as the temperature falls. At some point, the growing tensions are released, and you hear the result. If you live in a warm climate that is subject to hurricanes, you know that a building is likely to fail at the point where different parts of the house, like the roof and wall, meet together. Buildings are made up of a large number of things, each of which acts differently under the same conditions. That makes for weak points in any structure. British architects have looked at the structure of living things to find an answer to this problem. They noted that skeletons can work well under conditions that would cause many other building materials to fail. One researcher noted that a skeleton is more efficient than any man-made structure. One architect’s suggestion was to build structures like walls and bridges out of artificial bone that is formed to the needs of the structure. We should not be surprised that, once again, man is looking to the living world for solutions to his problems. The living world, like everything else, was designed by our all-wise Magnificent Creator God Who does all things well!!! |
| 12/27/2022 | Evolutionists often claim that language and music evolved independently of each other. However, new research along several lines is showing that there is a close connection between music and language. Researchers have been studying the effect of music on verbal comprehension. Electrical activity within the brain was tracked, using electrodes attached to the scalps of volunteers. They found that those volunteers who had just heard the trilling of flutes, for example, identified the word “bird” a split second faster than those who had not heard the music. This effect is called priming. When volunteers heard a church anthem, they more quickly identified the word “devotion” than those who did not. The study showed that these effects were consistent, whether the words had concrete meanings, were cultural references, or were abstract concepts. Other research has shown that when a region of the brain called Broca’s area is damaged, both recognition of harmonic chords as well as language are impaired, also suggesting a connection between language and music. Both music and language are gifts of God. As the Psalmist noted, the songs he sang were placed into his mouth by God. Genesis tells us that Adam and Eve could talk the day they were created. While music isn’t mentioned, we see that within a couple of generations, they were making musical instruments and must therefore have played music. Isn’t it apparent that the hand of our Magnificent Creator God gave us music and voice with which we should praise Him!!! |
| 12/26/2022 | According to the theory of evolution, all life is related. There is claimed to be a hierarchy of rising complexity from the earliest simple organisms to man. The earliest organisms are said to include corals, sea anemones and jellyfish that thrived 500 million years ago. These early creatures eventually led to the first creatures to move onto land, and worms were among them. Based on this supposed evolutionary history, one would expect the DNA of humans to be closer to worms than to coral. However, recent mapping of the DNA of these creatures has produced some surprises. While corals have the simplest nervous system of any animal, their genetic sequences are similar to those in human nervous systems. Even more strange is that worms, which are supposed to stand between us and the corals, lack these sequences. These sequences are called ESTs. Researchers have found that, in general, coral ESTs tended to be closer to human ESTs than to worm ESTs. Baffled by this and still convinced that evolution is true, the scientists simply assumed that worms must have lost these DNA sequences. However, they stressed that more creatures need to be studied. Would it not be simpler to conclude that corals, worms, people and everything else were made by the same Magnificent Creator God Who created specific DNA coding for each creature without concern for evolutionary history? |
| 12/25/2022 | Before time began, God had in His mind’s eye a masterpiece—a beautiful picture of grace that His beloved Son, the second person of the Trinity, would illustrate with His life. Even before the breathtaking splendor of creation, God sketched out His plan for His perfect fellowship with humanity. But not long after He had splashed color on the landscape, the deep, dark shadows of man’s rebellious choice to live independently of His grace obscured the beauty of God’s work. Coal black, pitch darkness enveloped the scene, and all creation hung in suspense of what God would do. How could God redeem His masterpiece? What could rescue us, the pitiful portraits in whom breathed God’s breath? Then, with a heart weeping for His people, God dipped His brush in Calvary’s scarlet ink, wrote His message on a rough wooden banner, and pinned it against an empty sky for all the world to read. Bold, crimson words: “I love you.” This is the message of Christmas: Because He loves us, our Magnificent Creator God has come to redeem us—to bring life and color back to our lives, to expel the darkness of our hearts and from our world!!! |
| 12/24/2022 | The Clark’s Nutcracker is an amazing bird. Every year it prepares for winter by hiding tiny caches of four or five whitebark pine seeds, as many as five hundred seeds per hour. Then, months later, it returns to uncover the seeds, even under heavy snow. A Clark’s Nutcracker may remember as many as ten thousand locations where it has hidden seeds—an astounding feat (especially when you consider the difficulty we humans can have remembering the location of our car keys or glasses). But even this incredible act of memory pales in comparison with God’s ability to remember our prayers. He’s able to keep track of every sincere prayer and remember and respond to them even years later. In the book of Revelation, the apostle John describes “four living creatures” and “twenty-four elders” worshiping the Lord in heaven. Each one was “holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of God’s people” (5:8). Just as incense was precious in the ancient world, our prayers are so precious to our Magnificent Creator God that He keeps them before Him continually, treasured in golden bowls! Our prayers matter to God because we matter to Him, and through His undeserved kindness to us in Jesus He offers us uninhibited access (Hebrews 4:14–16). So we can pray boldly! And know that not a word will be forgotten or misplaced because of the amazing love of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 12/23/2022 | About 300 years after the Genesis Flood, when all people spoke the same language, they decided to work together to build a great city. Working together for a common goal is called “social intelligence.” Do animals practice social intelligence? Of course, there are the bees, the ants and the beavers, but even bacteria – among the lowliest of all creatures can also show social intelligence! Several types of common bacteria have shown evidence of social intelligence. Contrary to expectation, sometimes this cooperation takes place between unrelated types at the expense of genetically related individuals. Bacterial colonies where cooperation is taking place always attract freeloaders. Such colonies often find ways to discourage or even kill the freeloaders. One such cooperative community is a common soil bacterium. When they locate prey, they swim over the prey like a pack of wolves. Many species of bacteria remain relatively singular until they sense that they have enough to form a community. Then, they communicate to each other by releasing certain molecules which the others sense, and they form slime mold colonies, or biofilm. Cooperation and a result of social intelligence can be used to do good or evil. But it doesn’t matter where they are on the imagined evolutionary tree. Our Magnificent Creator God has given social abilities to many of His creatures as a means of helping their kind to survive!!! |
| 12/22/2022 | We are surrounded by sounds, some of which can be louder than an airliner taking off. Yet, we never hear these sounds. It’s called infrasound. It’s real sound that can be recorded if you have the right equipment. Infrasound waves are below 20 hertz, the lowest frequency that we can hear. Because the sound waves are long, they can travel hundreds or even thousands of miles. Volcanic eruptions regularly generate infrasound and so does the wind. But, perhaps most interestingly, these beautiful Northern Lights that often color the night sky also generate infrasound. The sound is produced when the incoming solar particles push the air forward. While we are not able to hear infrasound, it does influence us. Researchers in England placed an infrasound generator in a concert hall, and during the performance, infrasound was added at selected points. After the concert, the audience was asked about their emotions during certain passages of music, or if they had had experienced any strange feelings during the concert. Researchers concluded that infrasound intensified whatever emotional state the music had produced in people. So, if you have ever watched the Northern Lights and thought you were almost hearing something, it was likely the infrasound you were sensing. The more we learn about the creation our Magnificent Creator God has given us, the more we find to marvel at how excellent in His workmanship!!! |
| 12/21/2022 | God created animals to reproduce according to their kind. As the Hebrew word for created is bārā, and that for kind is min, creation biologists use the term baramin to describe the entire created kind that God made on days five and six. God made the first animals in each baramin with the genetic ability to adapt, so that over the millennia, these have changed into multiple species, especially after the Flood. Creation biologists suggest that the baramin is usually equivalent to the evolutionary taxonomic level known as the family. There are, however, some exceptions to this rule. In the Americas, there is a family of animals known as peccaries. These look very similar to Old World pigs. The confusion is exacerbated by pigs having been imported to the Americas by European settlers, and then having become feral. Evolutionists emphasize that peccaries and pigs are two different families, although they think they must have had a common ancestor within the suborder known as suina. It is true that there are some morphological differences between the two families, and no hybrids have so far been discovered between pigs and peccaries. Yet, peccaries look unmistakably like pigs. Both have a two-chambered stomach – though this is more complex in peccaries. Also, both families have a duplicated gene which is not found in any other mammals. For these reasons and more, creation biologists are surely correct in considering the whole suborder to be one baramin, created by our Magnificent Creator God on Day Six. |
| 12/20/2022 | If your measuring stick is inaccurate, you could end up with too much wallpaper or too little. If your map tells you that your destination is 200 miles away when it’s really only 50 miles away, you might drive right past it. If your map of the universe is inaccurate and stars are a lot closer than you expect, you will arrive at the wrong age for the universe. Most science textbooks solemnly teach that the universe is 10 to 20 billion years old. A distant galaxy in the Virgo cluster is one of the primary measuring sticks used by astronomers to figure out the distance of other objects in space. Ultimately these distances are used to compute the age of the universe. Recently, though, astronomers were finally able to see individual stars in this distant cluster. Using a new, high-resolution camera, astronomers saw stars that are very much like stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. Since they know how bright these stars are, they were able to check their computations on how far away the measuring-stick galaxy is. Instead of the expected 100 million light-years, their new figures told them that the galaxy was only 50 million light-years away. This means that the universe might only be half as old as they thought. The lesson for us in this is that the millions and billions of years many scientists talk about are mere speculation. Many measuring sticks for the age of the universe are available, and many of them support an age in the biblical range of only thousands of years. The only source for the age of this universe is the one who created it – our Magnificent Creator God himself!!! |
| 12/19/2022 | In previous postings, we discussed how a discovery of some teeth and some ankle bones, or tarsals, at Dormaal in Belgium, has led to evolutionary scientists believing they have found a missing link between dogs, cats and bears. They picture a little two-pound creature, scurrying through the branches of trees; yet, not a single complete or even nearly complete skeleton has been found. Creationist researcher Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell has explained the evolutionary thinking process involved. Evolutionary researchers made a number of assumptions which simply do not add up. First, evolutionists assume that the fact that there is a wide variety of animal species on the planet, that this is actually proof that they have a common ancestor. Common ancestry is, therefore, assumed and is a basic, unshakeable belief without any real proof whatsoever. Second, they assume that comparing the features of various fossils can enable them to line them up in an evolutionary history. This is despite the fact that there has never been an observation of one kind of animal evolving into another. Third, millions of years have to be assumed in order to give time for the alleged evolution, which has never been actually observed to take place. Dr. Mitchell says, “There is no biological evidence for the divergence of canines, cats, and bears from a common carnivorous ancestor… There is no scientific justification for insisting that in the unobservable past they evolved into more complex and divergent kinds of animals from a common ancestor.” Only our Magnificent Creator God can understand the how and why behind every creature that has ever roamed this incredible planet we call home!!! |
| 12/18/2022 | Some people have the green thumb in their family. Others may complain that they fail with plants because plants don’t tell them when they need care. Of course, most people can do well with family pets, who are enthusiastic about letting their needs be known. Now scientists have learned that plants do indeed cry out when they need attention. We just haven’t heard them because the sounds made by a thirsty plant are about five times higher-pitched than we can hear. But scientists with tiny, specialized microphones have heard corn plants calling for water. During their study, researchers learned that plants make a great deal of noise. Corn leaves and stalks make noises as they slide against each other during growth. We have all heard the sound of plant leaves rattling in the wind. Corn stalks also make noise as they bend in the wind. However, another sound was heard when the corn didn’t have enough water. It was a high-pitched popping noise. Plants have water tubes in them that carry water and nutrients up from the roots to the leaves. Water flows up these tubes under tension. When there is not enough water, the tension becomes too great and the tubes fracture. The popping is the sound of those tubes fracturing. The result of fractured tubes is a wilted plant. When water is restored, the tubes refill, the popping noises stop, and the plant again looks healthy. The purpose of this research was to learn when to water crops and how much water they need. Now that we have learned how plants communicate, crops can tell farmers when to water! Aren’t we blessed to have a Magnificent Creator God that took care of so much minute detail!!! |
| 12/17/2022 | Imagine a huge living creature covering about one square mile and made up of almost a third of a billion cells. Imagine each of those living cells being able to move about independently of the others. No, it’s not the plot of a new science fiction movie. Some scientists have suggested that ant colonies may be thought of as one large living organism. They suggest this because of the way individual members within ant colonies behave. Ant colonies have many kinds of members, each with its own specific task. The soldier ants in a colony have extra large heads and heavy-duty jaws for fighting. Other ants are concerned only about finding and returning food. Still other workers do nothing but process and store food. Within the colony another caste of ants does nothing but tend the eggs. Others prepare the food for the larvae and deliver it to other specialized ants who do nothing but feed the next generation. If this sounds complex, imagine the largest known ant colony. This Japanese ant colony has an estimated 306 million worker ants, and more than a million queens. The colony occupies 45,000 interconnected underground nests that range over about a square mile! There is obviously intelligent design and control behind ant society—intelligence not found in ants or in nature itself. This intelligence comes from outside nature. Here is yet another witness that no concern of any living thing is too small for our Magnificent Creator God’s complete attention!!! |
| 12/16/2022 | Con men develop elaborate schemes to cheat people out of their money or other possessions. Successful cons are cleverly and intelligently directed toward the con man’s goal. We would not expect such intelligently directed, albeit sinful, behavior in animals, except that the Bible tells us that deceit is the way of the world since sin has entered the creation. To their surprise, two groups of researchers have discovered a number of animals that try to con their own kind. One group of researchers spent two years standing in ponds, getting to know green frogs. They discovered that when an intruding frog enters a frog community, even the younger males attempt to intimidate him by croaking at a much lower pitch than normal. This makes even the young frog sound like the bigger members of the community, bluffing the intruder. Another team studied Afro-Asian fiddler crabs. When one of the male crabs loses its claw, it will grow back only slowly. So the crab quickly grows a fake claw until the new one grows in. The fake claw is useless for fighting, but works well in aggressive claw waving at other males. It can also be used in the claw waving that is part of the crabs’ mating ritual. Females prefer the fastest waving claws, so the lighter fake claws, which wave faster, are a real advantage. Only our Magnificent Creator God could have planned a universe so complete that even the smallest details were included!!! |
| 12/15/2022 | Many people today tend to dismiss the early chapters of Genesis as legend rather than history. However, if the Bible’s story of the Flood and the Tower of Babel are not history there are some established historical facts that have no explanation. According to the Bible, after the great Flood, people multiplied but failed to scatter over the face of the earth as commanded by God. Having one language, most of the people stayed in one location and built a great city. It was not until God confused their language that they scattered across the earth. If these events did not take place, how do we explain the fact that a 6th century B.C. Chinese writer describes the ultimate God Who created all things in much the same way as an ancient Egyptian writer? And why would these descriptions match 8th century B.C. Greek writings? While it is true that each of these cultures had their unique gods, their ancient writings about the Creator use special language. Lao-tzu was an 8th century B.C. writer who described the ultimate God as eternal and self-existing. Likewise, an ancient Egyptian writer described the ultimate God as the source of everything in the heavens and on earth as well as all life. If man was not once of one culture and language, how did all these ancient writers each get the same story to tell? The similarities between these descriptions and those of other cultures bear witness to the historicity of even the earliest parts of Genesis – all performed by our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 12/14/2022 | If you want to learn a new subject, find a master at the subject and copy them. If you want to lose weight, find someone who has already lost weight. If you want to program video games, find the ace games programmer and become her apprentice. And if you want to design ingenious and innovative new materials, go to the master designer Himself – God. Unfortunately, many engineers who might benefit from imitating God’s material designs do not give Him the glory, maintaining instead that they are imitating nature. One example of material design, following what is seen of God’s design in nature, is that of fish scales. Scientists at Montreal’s McGill University experimented on fish scales by puncturing them and examining the results under microscopes. If you have work gloves, you will know that you need them to be both flexible and strong. They should be strong enough to resist puncture, yet flexible enough to allow comfortable working. McGill University’s François Barthelat realized that fish scales had the properties required. The fish’s skin is indeed flexible, but it was discovered that individual scales are very tough and are actually well resistant to puncture and damage. Barthelat’s team discovered how fish scales fractured, deformed and interacted in order to develop new materials based on the properties that they discovered. Their resulting artificial scales had to be made in a manner akin to overlapping tiles, so that large surfaces could be covered. The whole process relies on the research into materials, which could only have been designed by our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 12/13/2022 | The writer of the book of Ecclesiastes, reminds us to “Remember your Creator”. Why do we need to remember Him? It is because everything that we value has come from Him. If we do not reference everything to God, then it is all meaningless, just like trying to grab hold of the air. Most of us have times when we do not know where to turn. We spend so long wondering who can help us through our difficult times, when the answer is within us. It perhaps sounds trite to some to say that God is always with us and that He will listen to our needs. It might sound trite – but it’s true. “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble”, says the Psalmist. “Therefore, we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling. (Psalms 46:1-3) It is often the very work of God in creation that brings us back to hopefulness. If God could fling the stars into space, if God can move the mountains and control the waves, then He can deal with my little problem. We are told “Remember your Creator… before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened, and the clouds return after the rain.” (Ecclesiastes 12:1-2) Our problems are of more concern to Our Magnificent Creator God than the light of the stars. We can turn to Him – “for your Father knows what you need before you ask him”. |
| 12/12/2022 | The leviathan of Job 41 appears to be a ferocious creature. It cannot be caught with any sort of hook. It cannot be captured by harpoon, either through its jaw or its nose. The description given in Job 41 is that of an enormous sea monster with great strength, defensive armor, and able to breathe fire. This last attribute has led many to suggest that the creature is not real but only mythical. After all, the passage makes leviathan sound like a fire-breathing dragon, and there is no such thing, is there? It is certainly very difficult to ascertain what leviathan could have been. However, a biblical presupposition will tell us that, whatever our confusion, the animal must have been real and must have possessed all the attributes ascribed to it. Several candidates have been suggested in the past. Perhaps, for example, it could have been some sort of plesiosaur. It is interesting that many versions of the Bible footnote the creature and suggest that it was a crocodile. However, the same versions tend to refer to behemoth as a hippopotamus, when it seems clear to me that behemoth was a sauropod. One interesting, suggested candidate is a huge extinct creature called sarcosuchus. This animal looked a bit like, and could have been related to, modern crocodiles. However, it was 36 feet long, and its weight is estimated at 8 tons. It also had a large cavity inside its bulbous snout. Could this have been an organ to produce heat? Sarcosuchus may or may not have been leviathan. But leviathan certainly existed, and its description in Job 41 is clear. Is there any doubt that if our Magnificent Creator God could create the whole world and everything in it, a fire-breathing dragon would be nothing but a brief thought and it would have come into existence!!! |
| 12/11/2022 | How would you like to be a dental hygienist for a crocodile? That’s how the crocodile bird makes his living. Of course you do need to know that the crocodile bird doesn’t show up to do his work with any drills or needles. He and the crocodile are on good terms with each other. After eating, the crocodile climbs the river bank and relaxes with his mouth open. The little crocodile bird enters the crocodile’s mouth to clean up the scraps that are left. While the crocodile bird makes most of his living as sort of a crocodile dental hygienist, he also helps keep the crocodile free of pesky insects that lodge in his skin. The crocodile also receives one other service from the crocodile bird. Whenever the bird senses approaching danger, he gives his sharp warning call and flies off. The crocodile, now warned, can quickly roll over into the water where virtually no animal can get the best of him. This is but one of many unlikely cooperative arrangements that we find in the plant and animal kingdoms that our Magnificent Creator God has designed!!! |
| 12/10/2022 | Most of us are familiar with the body’s response to foreign tissue. Transplant patients must be carefully matched and then patients still must be given powerful drugs to prevent destruction of the transplanted tissue. Our bodies’ immune system identifies tissue that’s not its own and then tries to destroy that tissue. As we have learned more about the immune system, doctors began asking themselves why a pregnant mother’s body doesn’t reject the foreign tissue of the baby growing inside her. The answer to this mystery is not fully understood, but research has suggested some answers. From conception the unborn child is a genetically unique individual. Researchers think that the most important protection the unborn child has is the trophoblast. This tissue, known as the caul, seals the growing infant from its mother. However, the trophoblast itself develops from the same cells as the infant. So why doesn’t the mother’s immune system attack? It appears that under normal conditions the trophoblast is a special set of cells that the body cannot identify as foreign. In addition, the trophoblast makes cells that encourage the mother’s immune system to protect it. Scientists now believe that this amazing feature may actually be provided by the father’s genetic information. In effect, the baby, with the help of the father, immunizes the mother’s system so that it doesn’t reject the baby! So, even before birth, the mother nurtures and the father protects the child. What a Magnificent Creator God we have!!! |
| 12/9/2022 | In a clever scheme of self-protection, the more poisonous the male rattlebox moth is, the more prized he is by the female rattlebox moth. In the caterpillar stage the male moth favors the pods of certain legumes. These pods contain a powerful poison that seems to have no effect on the caterpillar. After the caterpillar has become a moth and it’s time for mating, the male releases a scent produced by the poison. Those who have more poison in their bodies release a stronger scent, while those with little poison release only a weak scent. Female rattlebox moths prefer males with a strong scent. During mating the male coats the eggs with some of the poison, making them unpalatable to predators, like ladybugs, who might eat the eggs. So the more poison a male has, the better protected the female’s eggs will be. Studies have shown that female rattlebox moths will ignore males that have collected no poison. Likewise, the male of the queen butterfly species collects another plant poison in his system. This poison is produced by plants for protection against insects. The butterfly doesn’t attack the plant; rather he drinks the poison from already injured plants. Here, too, the female queen butterfly favors those males with the most poison. It appears that human beings are not the only creatures who go to the drug store to get needed medicines. Our Magnificent Creator God has provided the animal world with their own drug store and the knowledge of how to use the chemicals He has provided!!! |
| 12/8/2022 | We are all familiar with the concept of the Ice Age – probably due to the eponymous cartoon feature film series. Evolutionists believe that this event took place about 2.6 million years ago. There is considerable evidence around the world of valleys carved by glaciation, and glacial moraines – deposits of rocky debris left at the end of glaciers. In a biblical framework, it is relatively easy to explain how the Ice Age could have happened. Instead of beginning 2.6 million years ago, we think that the Ice Age began in the immediate post-Flood period as oceans warmer than today evaporated into an atmosphere cooler than today. However, evolutionary geologists do not believe in just one Ice Age. They believe that the Earth has been through a cyclical path of continual ice ages and times of more temperate climate. Their evidence for this is found in rocks which bear scratch marks similar to those damaged during the known Ice Age. Indeed, evolutionists suppose that some of these earlier ice ages could have had ice sheets covering nearly the whole Earth. Such a scenario causes a problem. It can be seen that this sort of ice age would perhaps have caused a snowball effect. That is to say that most of the Earth could be covered by a white ice covering which would reflect most of the Sun’s heat away. In that case, it is difficult to see how the ice could ever have melted to return Earth to temperate conditions. Creationist researchers have shown that the effects interpreted as early ice ages could more easily be explained as being caused by landslides and other geological movements created by our Magnificent Creator God during the Flood!!! |
| 12/7/2022 | The word prehistoric refers to a period of time before there were people on the Earth. Evolutionists assume that to have been for millions of years, so their accounts of the majority of fossils would refer to them as prehistoric. As Bible believers, we know that God made everything in the Creation Week, so there was no prehistoric time. So the recent discovery of a baby ichthyosaurus in Britain would be described as prehistoric by evolutionists, but not by us. This baby ichthyosaurus was found associated with fossilized hooks, which would appear to be from the tentacles of a squid. Therefore, this ichthyosaurus’s last meal was calamari! It is not unusual to find fossils in situ with the remains of their last meal. However, this would seem to be a problem for evolutionists. They are usually obliged to think that a fossil has formed quite slowly. Time is involved, as the body of the creature gets covered by sediment. Yet, a creature fossilized with its food is likely to have been fossilized very fast, so that the food did not get the chance to rot away before the fossil was formed. This is true of this baby ichthyosaurus. It is also true of the famous fossil in London’s Natural History Museum showing one ichthyosaurus giving birth to another. The most likely explanation for the formation of these fossils is the sudden and catastrophic burial of these creatures by mud and silt in the early stages of the worldwide Flood. Even though the debate by evolutionists and creationists will probably continue to the end of time, there is more and more evidence every day that our Magnificent Creator God created everything that ever was and ever will be in one magnificent week as He displayed His awesome power!!! |
| 12/6/2022 | Many people are aware that evolutionary astrophysicists believe that the Earth came into existence about 4.5 billion years ago. The formation of this planet-size lump of rock allegedly happened by gravitational accretion from the dust that had previously swirled around the Sun. One grain of dust would attract another. Gradually, one lump would attract another. This would keep repeating until a planet-sized object appeared. There are two main problems with this scenario, apart from the fact that it is not described that way in the Bible. First, why would particles of dust or small stones stick together by gravity? If this were a normal thing to happen, then why has it not subsequently happened in the asteroid belt? The second problem is that even if such accretion were possible, it would only produce a planet-sized lump of amorphous rock. But the Earth has structure, with a solid crust, semi-molten mantle, and molten inner and outer core. So evolutionary astrophysicists suppose that about 3.9 billion years ago, another planet, about the size of Mars, crashed into the Earth, and vaporized. This caused the Earth to melt so that it could reset in the “correct” order. Although this model is a lot more sophisticated than this simplified version, it still seems to be something of a fiddle-factor – an invented story to attempt to explain the inexplicable. In contrast, the Bible tells us that the Earth was a direct creation by God and that the rest of the Solar System – and, indeed, the rest of the universe – was formed three days later, again as a direct creative act of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 12/5/2022 | Fireflies may help light the way to new medical breakthroughs. The gentle glow of a firefly on a summer evening is produced by the chemical luciferase. The firefly has a gene with the code that makes this chemical. When that gene is added to the genetic information of other plants or animals, the cells begin to glow harmlessly. Researchers have been using the firefly gene to test their ability to add genetic information to a cell. When human heart arteries become clogged, a medicine called TPA is among the treatments doctors use. TPA is a natural clot-dissolving protein that helps prevent heart attacks. The problem is, without a continuous supply of TPA, the artery may reclog. It would help if the artery could make its own TPA 24 hours a day. Since TPA is a natural protein for which there is a genetic code, researchers wanted to know if genetic information could be added to artery cells. To find out, they injected dogs with the genetic code for luciferase. If genetic information could be added to the cells through this method, they would actually see the results in the glowing tissue. Tissue samples taken three days later did, in fact, have the distinctive glow of the firefly proving that the method works. They warn that several years of research lie ahead before artery cells may be able to dissolve their own clots. Those glowing fireflies that delight children and adults show God’s design in the creation in an unexpected way. The chemical that makes the glow is proving to be an important tool of medical science. What a Magnificent Creator God we have to preplan our needs!!! |
| 12/4/2022 | The world is a frightening place without God. This fear can be seen today in fears that modern people often confuse with science. Several years ago stories of gloom and doom about a greenhouse heating of the earth were starting to fill the media. The people at Creation Moments looked at the scientific basis for these claims. They wanted to know if the greenhouse warming of the earth was a true threat or just another fear of a godless people. They then published the conclusion that the thin and conflicting evidence for greenhouse warming most likely came from the heat island effect of growing cities around some of the temperature measuring sites. Knowing the elegance with which God designed everything in creation, creationists suspected that God probably designed the earth with built-in thermostats that help keep it from warming up too much. When the Pacific Ocean warms more than normal, it sends increasing amounts of water vapor into the air. If heating continues, the water vapor will actually cause the heating to increase until vapor is forced higher into the atmosphere, creating icy cirrus clouds. These clouds reflect enough incoming sunlight to shut down the temperature increase and return things to normal. We are called to be good stewards of the earth. We can be good stewards in joyful service, freed from the fears that afflict those who don’t know God. What a Magnificent Creator God we have!!! |
| 12/3/2022 | Many textbooks tell young people today that birds are modified reptiles. Suppose, they say, that millions of years ago the scales on some reptiles began to fray along the edges. In time, they say, the frayed scales turned into feathers and birds were born. The elegance and beauty of the feather make this story hard to believe. Can sticking a feather on a lizard produce a peacock? The bird’s feather is only a small part of the complete flying system of the bird. Even with very careful planning and redesigning, a reptile doesn’t have what it takes. A bird needs massive breast muscles for flight. In some birds, 30% of the body weight of the bird is breast muscle. By comparison, in humans breast muscles are only about 1% of body weight. A bird also needs an extremely high metabolism and blood pressure to deliver the energy those muscles need for flight. Birds have a higher metabolism than any other creature; they also have the necessary high blood pressure. Finally, as is well known, birds need light skeletons. The man-o’-war has a wingspan of seven feet. But its entire skeleton weighs only a few ounces—less than its feathers! Even the most clever rebuilding of a reptile cannot produce a bird. In fact, birds have very little in common with reptiles. The entire being of the bird, from body to brain, has been specially designed for flight by our Magnificent Creator God who clearly knows everything there is to know about flight!!! |
| 12/2/2022 | Life on Earth began somewhere between 3.7 and 4.5 billion years ago, after meteorites splashed down and leached essential elements into warm little ponds, say scientists. These scientists, from McMaster University, have run probability calculations and reckon that Earth life could have begun as ponds on Earth took in long-chain compounds from meteorites to form a sort of broth from which life could emerge. This is really a new twist on the panspermia model. Panspermia is the idea that life on Earth was seeded from space, and the idea of molecules on meteorites has been a popular supposition for some time. In the current model, these scientists are not suggesting that the meteorites housed living cells, but rather that they added the right ingredient mix to the primordial soup of ancient Earth. This research acknowledges that “DNA is too complex to have been the first aspect of life to emerge. It had to start with something else, and that is RNA.” Many scientists have begun to acknowledge the impossibility of evolution on Earth. But imagining that there was some sort of seeding from space, however vague, merely pushes the problem to another realm. How would the proposed long-chain molecules have developed on these meteorites? Or did the meteorites come from another source, such as Mars? As is so often the case, research papers like these simply point out the fact that evolution has no answer to the problem of where life came from. In contrast, the Bible has a very clear answer. Genesis 1:1 – The very first verse in the very first book of the Bible – clearly reveals that in the beginning our Magnificent Creator God created the heavens and the earth!!! |
| 12/1/2022 | While the Bible teaches us that sex is a wonderful gift of God, evolutionists believe that sexual reproduction should not have evolved. According to evolutionists, if sexual reproduction were to develop, evolution is supposed to get rid of it. To make matters worse, immobile plants use sexual reproduction. This creates a problem in transferring the male genes to the female for fertilization. Just to confound things even more, God uses insects and even mammals to transfer the pollen. Since evolutionists believe that plants were around for many millions of years before animals, evolutionists have yet another problem. The European family of the Arum lilies attracts beetles and flies. When one of the insects lands on a flower, he finds a slick, oil-coated surface and ends up sliding down into a chamber filled with small hairs. Imprisoned, he finds a sweet sap that makes good eating. While he is gorging himself on the sap and getting sticky in the process, the male part of the flower showers him with pollen. The next day, the sticky, pollen-coated insect finds that the doors to his prison are open. So he flies off to another flower to unwittingly deliver his load of pollen! It sounds like science fiction to say that a flower figured out how to do this. And it certainly doesn’t sound very scientific to say that nobody designed and made this complex arrangement. As we learn more about these arrangements in nature, it becomes even more clear that our all-wise Magnificent Creator God designed these beautiful, symbiotic relationships between different members of the living kingdom!!! |
| 11/30/2022 | The yellow-and-black striped archer fish shops among the insects that land on branches overhanging his pond in the peaceful waters of the East Indies. Sometimes he will wait under a branch until something that would make a good lunch lands on it. When the archer fish finds a tasty-looking insect, he shoots an accurately aimed stream of water at his prey, knocking the insect into the water. Before the insect has a chance to recover, the archer fish has eaten him and is looking for dessert. The archer fish has a deep groove in his mouth. When he places his tongue against this groove, he ends up with a blow tube that is about 1/16-inch in diameter. Compressing his gills forces pressurized water through the blow pipe. The rounded tip of the archer fish’s tongue acts as a valve so the fish can shoot a few small bursts or one long stream of water at his prey. The archer fish seldom misses if his prey is within four feet. This simple but elegant arrangement is testimony to a wise and skillful Creator. Neither mindless chance evolution nor any fish could be smart enough to design this system. Nor could any fish redesign his normal mouth tissues into this unique tool. Here we see that our Magnificent Creator God even cares about providing the needs of a fish. We know that He cares even more about our lives! In fact, He has said so! |
| 11/29/2022 | Genesis 1:1 is pretty cool. It tells us that God made the world, the universe, and everything from nothing. It is a verse that gives the lie to all the great philosophies of the modern age. Yet, if I had to choose what I thought was the most beautiful verse in Genesis, that first verse would be close, but not the one. Genesis 2:24 talks about the importance of marriage – that a man leaves his father and mother and holds fast to his wife. It reminds us that marriage is to be between one man and one woman and should last for life. It is beautiful – but, to me, not the most beautiful. Genesis 9:13 is pretty special, where God sets His bow in the clouds as a sign to remind us that He will never again flood the Earth in a worldwide deluge. He has no obligation to limit Himself by covenant, yet He does so out of love for us, and He keeps those covenants out of love. Yet even this special verse is not the most beautiful. In my opinion, the most beautiful verse in Genesis is in chapter 6, and verse 8. “But Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD.” (Genesis 6:8) The verse begins with a “but” because we have just learned how evil men’s hearts are. Nevertheless, Noah was to be saved because of God’s favor; in other words, by grace. It is only by grace that we are saved – and that grace was extended to Noah as it is to all who repent and trust in Jesus. The most magnificent thing our Magnificent Creator God ever made was not a material thing but a spiritual thing – it was His Grace – and He made enough of it for all of His human creation!!! |
| 11/28/2022 | Imagine that the tide went out much farther than it had ever done before. Imagine that you lived in a world full of evil, but this day it seemed like something big was about to happen. One man and his family had been building an enormous vessel while warning people of the coming judgment of God. You had joined in the laughter with everyone else. But now, there was a rumbling like thunder, the sky had strangely darkened, and water was falling like it had never fallen before. The largest tsunami the world has ever seen was heading your way. Fanciful fiction? The Bible tells us that it is a real event from the history of the world. In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights. (Genesis 7:11-12) The detail of the timescale suggests a real event. The waters rose while rain continued for 40 days. The rain stopped, but the waters continued to rise due to geological upheaval for a further 50 days. Then the waters prevailed: for a further 60 days, making a total of 150 days. Gradually, the waters abated for 110 days and then receded from the land for 110 days. These are real events, and the Apostle Peter reminds us that it is the scoffers who remain deliberately ignorant of the facts that our Magnificent Creator God made, and later flooded, this world. What He gives He can take away. What He makes He can destroy. |
| 11/27/2022 | “And the LORD God formed man out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” It’s behind your refrigerator and under your bed. It’s part of the air you breathe. While dust is common, it’s not commonplace at all. Much of the dust in our everyday lives is nothing more than tiny particles of skin, clothing, carpeting – just pieces of everyday life floating in the air. Studies of dust particles reveal that most dust is soil. However, a second common dust – even a thousand miles from the sea – is salt, driven into the wind by the waves. This salt helps form the clouds that bring us rain. The next most common forms of natural dust are volcanic eruptions and forest fires. Transatlantic winds pick up the dust of the Sahara and sweep it across the ocean where enough of it lands in Miami to sometimes give the rain a light pink color. Not only does your home have dust from all over the world, there’s probably also some from outer space. Ten thousand tons of disintegrating meteorites and comets rain down on the Earth every year. You can even identify some of this dust by running a magnet through the dust in a rain gutter. Most of the magnetic particles that stick to the magnet are probably from space. In addition, some dust is alive, made up of pollen, fungus spores and even dormant bacteria, hoping to land on a good place to grow. Dust reminds us that the world is smaller than we think and that it won’t last forever. Are you ready for the next world? All your preparations have been made by Jesus Christ our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 11/26/2022 | Revelation 21:15-17 says “The angel who talked to me held in his hand a gold measuring stick to measure the city, its gates, and its wall. When he measured it, he found it was a square, as wide as it was long. In fact, its length and width and height were each 1400 miles”. 1,400 is the cubic mileage of God’s eternal capital city in length, breadth, and height. Just in area coverage, it’s larger than India. But a city rising 1,400 miles into the sky? That calls for a huge planet—a supersized new earth, which our Magnificent Creator God can easily create!!! |
| 11/25/2022 | One of the fundamental lessons we learn from Scripture is that there is only one God. There are, however, a lot of false gods. In biblical times, these would often have been idols of wood, stone, or metal. But there are idols all around us today which demand our worship. These could be anything that people have put in the place of God. Some modern idols would, however, be recognizable to people of biblical times. These might be such objects as charms, horoscopes, or crystals. Sometimes, like the Children of Israel, Christians can be tempted by such idols. In Jeremiah 10, we read: Thus shall you say to them: “The gods who did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens.” It is he who made the earth by his power, who established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding stretched out the heavens. (Jeremiah 10:11-12) Our attitude to such idols needs to be to remind ourselves that these idols did not make the universe. Only God has the power to create, and the Bible reminds us that He created the whole universe in just six days about 6,000 years ago. Compared to God, the false gods and idols look so worthless. What is the test of whether or not they are true or false? The test is whether they created the heavens and the earth. Our Magnificent Creator God is the only true God, the God who really did make the heavens and the earth!!! |
| 11/24/2022 | The Ark was made of wood, so it had to be waterproofed. The most suitable type of waterproofing would be a hydrophobic substance, such as oil or grease. So, it was coated inside and out with pitch. But what actually is pitch? In modern parlance, this refers to an oil fraction. But here some people raise a problem. If pitch is an oil fraction, then do we not assume that oil was produced during the Flood? If that is so, then it could not have been around before the Flood. This objection actually misses the point. The Hebrew word translated as pitch in Genesis 6:14 is khafar. The only other places where the word pitch is used to describe a bituminous substance would be Exodus 2:3 and Isaiah 34:9, but in these latter two cases, a different Hebrew word (zepheth) is used. Khafar is only used to mean pitch in Genesis 6:14, but khafar appears in another 101 places in the Old Testament. In all those other places, it is translated with words such as appease, reconcile, or atonement. The word is used in the Pentateuch for the coverings of blood, which foreshadow the blood of our Savior. The altar was covered by a sin offering of blood. Noah and his family were waterproofed against the watery judgment of God, and we, who belong to Christ, are fireproofed against the judgment to come by the atoning blood of Jesus Christ, which not only covers, but washes away all our sin. The Word of our Magnificent Creator God has meaning that we must study carefully so as to not miss the wonder of His works!!! |
| 11/23/2022 | The Flood began with two geophysical events – the bursting forth of Fountains of the Great Deep and the opening of the Windows of Heaven. But what could these events have actually looked like? Starting with the Fountains of the Great Deep, this would appear to be a reference to volcanic activity. We can envisage cracks opening up in deep points of the pre-Flood ocean. Possibly magma came through these rocks, but also, we expect that a lot of super-heated water would emerge, thrown at supersonic speed high into the atmosphere. In other words, these fountains would have been similar to the ocean floor springs that exist today, but on a larger and more violent scale. This would have been the main source of the overwhelming majority of the floodwaters which covered the Earth. And after the water had been thrown high into the atmosphere, it would have returned to the Earth as torrential rain, so this is probably what is meant by the Windows of Heaven – more correctly, the Floodgates of Heaven. There would not have been enough moisture in the pre-Flood atmosphere to produce the amount of floodwater required, whereas the mechanism suggested, called Catastrophic Plate Tectonics, flows from Scripture, and seems to fit scientific observations. We are humbled when we think of the amazing power of our Magnificent Creator God and of His creation and the truth of His word that He did everything exactly in the way that He said He would!!! |
| 11/22/2022 | Spider silk begins as a liquid protein made by silk glands on the spider’s abdomen. Spiders make many kinds of silk for different uses. As the liquid silk is forced through the spider’s spinnerets, it begins to dry. The spinnerets pull and stretch the silk, creating just the right kind of silk for the spider’s use. Though the result seems thin and weak to us, ounce for ounce, spider silk is stronger than steel. Web-building spiders make two types of silk for their traps. The basic structure of the web is made of strong, nonsticky silk. Then the spider adds a sticky, elastic silk to trap its prey. Some webs are irregular, others are flat and sheet-like, while still others are shaped like funnels. All of us have admired the beautiful orb web. However, spiders also have many other ways in which they use their silk. The ogre-faced spider makes a net that it throws around its intended victim. The European water spider builds its web underwater. It stores its air supply in the web. The lasso spider twirls a single strand of silk over its head. A tiny drop of sticky silk at the end of the lasso captures its prey when the lasso is thrown. Probably the most creative use of silk is by the young of some species. When they hatch, they produce long loops of silk that catch the wind and send them floating off to new places. The spider’s skill in producing and using silk had to come from Someone wiser and more clever than the spider. Clearly the spider has been well-equipped and instructed by its Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 11/21/2022 | The Cassini-Huygens Mission, which ended in 2017, was, by any stretch of the imagination, a remarkable human achievement. Launched on October 15, 1997, the craft was active for nearly 20 years before its final descent into the oblivion of Saturn’s gravity on September 15, 2017. Cassini-Huygens took seven years to reach Saturn. In order to save fuel, an extremely complicated orbit was calculated to use planetary gravitational fields to accelerate the craft enough for its long journey to Saturn. This involved two close approaches to Venus, one to the Earth, and another to Jupiter, which finally whipped the craft off in the right direction for the rendezvous with the ringed planet and its moons. The complexity of the calculations required to power the craft to Saturn relied on the predictability and measurability of gravitational forces elsewhere in the Solar System. Such confidence in calculations was only possible because these universal constants display the wisdom of God. NASA’s brilliant scientists did not assume that their work would be hindered by random evolutionary chance in the way that all these planets behaved. Yet, part of their mission was the vain search for the evolution of life on one of Saturn’s moons. Evolution-minded scientists often cannot see the irony or the inconsistency of such an approach – a reliance on divine design in an attempt to prove such design does not exist! Once again our Magnificent Creator God has blessed many people with intelligence and skill to navigate the vast universe He so carefully planned and built!!! |
| 11/20/2022 | The founders of modern science, on the whole, believed in the Creator. The methods they developed were based upon the truth that the creation is voluntary. This means that God was not confined to what we have later defined as “scientific laws.” God could make anything He wanted in any way He wanted. Science cannot be done from the philosopher’s easy chair. Scientists must go out into the field and study how nature works. When science follows this path, it is open to astonishing discoveries. One recent unexpected discovery was the hot water vents deep below the ocean’s surface. Where the earth’s crust has split apart, hot water gushes out. This water reaches temperatures hot enough to, say, cause a piece of paper to burst into flame. Only the tremendous pressure more than a mile below the waves keeps the water in liquid form. It was in this environment that scientists made an even more amazing discovery. They found bacteria that could live in the almost 700 degree water. These amazing creatures find the normal, sea level boiling point of water to be so cold they can barely survive. Scientists are still trying to learn how these creatures live at temperatures that would destroy the normal biochemistry of life. Each new discovery tells us a little more about the work of our wonderful Creator. That’s what science was originally intended to do. Keep that in mind when you hear someone say that belief in our Magnificent Creator God makes doing science impossible!!! |
| 11/19/2022 | It was first discovered in 1855, but many scientists debated its existence for another 50 years. Once its existence was finally proven to everyone’s satisfaction, it was another 50 years before science had any tools to begin studying it. Finally, in the late 1980s, scientists began to learn a little about the secrets of one of the tiniest, yet most amazing structures in the body. At the back of the eye, between the deepest layer of the retina and the cells beneath it, lies a tiny moat made up of about 10 drops of a mysterious fluid. The entire moat is thinner than a sheet of cellophane. It seems that the clear fluid in the moat serves the surrounding light-sensing tissues of the eye in place of blood, bringing in nutrients and carrying away waste. It also transports light-sensitive chemicals needed by the light-detecting cells in the eye. In addition, it seems to glue the retina in place. More than that, the moat is rich in a growth factor. This fact makes scientists believe that the gel may also be important to repairing injuries to the retina, keeping the cells of the retina young and active, as well as helping in the growth of new cells. As one researcher said, the more they study this tiny structure, the more unexpected abilities they find – something like a bottomless suitcase. Charles Darwin, who didn’t even know about the moat, was right when he said that it was impossible to believe that natural selection could have produced the eye. As Christians we believe that only our Magnificent Creator God could have produced the eye!!! |
| 11/18/2022 | “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” We’ve all heard this familiar saying. In the case of the sun’s fire, scientists expect to find not smoke but tiny particles called neutrinos. The problem is, most of those neutrinos are missing. It was once thought that the sun’s heat was produced as it’s powerful gravity caused it to collapse in on itself. But as the theory of evolution became popular, this theory fell out of favor. Those who promoted evolution knew that their theory was more believable if they said the sun was millions or billions of years old. However, if the sun’s heat came from gravity collapse, it could not possibly be that old. So when scientists learned about nuclear energy, they proposed the theory that the sun’s energy comes from nuclear forces. This would give them their billions of years. The problem is, the sun’s nuclear engine should be turning out a large number of neutrinos. Scientists find only about one-third to one-fourth of the neutrinos that should be there. This mystery is so troubling that scientists have changed their theories about how the sun produces its energy every year or two over the last 25 years! Some of them admit that they really don’t know how the sun produces its energy. The sun is a vital blessing to us. And here we see another blessing, for the sun also keeps us humble. Our Magnificent Creator God has so wonderfully created the sun that even our best scientific minds can’t figure out how it works!!! |
| 11/17/2022 | You may not think of plants as being super intelligent on any level since it appears that they just sort of sit in the soil and grow. However, there are many instances of plants that try to poison or repel a predator. Now we will see that the lima bean employs an even more sophisticated defense strategy that not only warns surrounding lima beans of the attack, but also calls in defenders. Anyone who has ever worked with plants is familiar with spider mites. There are many varieties, but one of the most dangerous to the lima bean is the two‑spotted spider mite. These mites inject their saliva into a plant’s tissues, dissolving them. One of the mites’ biggest enemies is a carnivorous mite that feeds on these two‑spotted mites. These carnivorous mites are small and travel wherever the winds carry them. When two‑spotted mites attack a lima bean, the plant sends out a special chemical signal. When this distress signal reaches surrounding lima beans, they, too, begin to send the signal even though they are not under attack. The signal carries several messages to different species. Spider mites not on the plant being attacked are repelled from the area. On the other hand, any carnivorous mites that drift into the area will stay to feed on the two-spotted spider mites. As a result, the lima bean defends itself by sending specific messages to three different species! The lima bean’s intelligent defense strategy is difficult for evolutionists to explain but it is easily accounted for by our Magnificent Creator God who cares about all His creatures!!! |
| 11/16/2022 | Scientists have long wondered how deep‑diving creatures such as the whale and the dolphin can dive so deeply on one breath. It takes a great deal of energy for a seal, for example, to dive 1,200 feet deep and then return to the surface. Scientists computed that one breath should not be able to provide enough oxygen to burn the muscular fuel necessary for such dives. In one attempt to learn how deep‑diving sea creatures do what seems to be impossible, researchers even built a robotic fish. Their studies of how the fish swam indicated that gliding would not conserve a deep‑diving creature’s energy. However, scientists have finally been able to attach video cameras to deep divers and have discovered their secrets. The cameras were designed to show scientists exactly how the animals moved. They found that these animals actually do save energy for their return to the surface by gliding into the depths. To their surprise, researchers saw that as the animals descend water pressure squeezes their bodies into a smaller volume, making them more dense. The pressure also flattens air sacs in their lungs, further helping the animal to descend. These effects help save oxygen reserves for hunting and the return to the surface. Scientists marveled at how clever the animals are. No one has even seen cleverness result from the chance forces that supposedly drive evolution. Intelligent design comes from an intelligent Designer, our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 11/15/2022 | The Bible speaks of bird calls as songs, as most of us do. However, evolutionary theory has led some scientists to say that we are merely assigning human meanings to the calls of birds. They say that the bird calls have nothing to do with real music. Ornithologists have known for some time that bird songs use the same musical scales as our music. Decades ago, it was noted that some of Beethoven’s work could be heard from the European blackbird. The music was the same as the opening rondo of Beethoven’s “Violin Concert in D, Opus 61.” Since these birds pass their songs from generation to generation, Beethoven could have gotten the lilting music from the forefathers of today’s European blackbird! The songs of some species, like the song sparrow, follow the form of a sonata, beginning with a strong theme, then the theme is musically played with, and for a finish, the original theme is then repeated. Mozart had a starling as a pet. Once, having heard Mozart play his “Piano Concerto in C Major,” the starling not only imitated it, but changed the sharps to flats! Mozart exclaimed, “That was beautiful!” When the starling died, Mozart held an elaborate funeral for it. Eight days later he wrote “A Musical Joke,” which contains the same elaborate structure found in starling song. Do birds make true music, as the Bible says? Contrary to what some evolutionists say, Beethoven and Mozart certainly thought they did. Our Magnificent Creator God had a specific reason for every piece of His creation – even the art of playing the spoons on The Grand Old Opry!!! |
| 11/14/2022 | The chempedak tree is found in Malaysia. It is closely related to jackfruits in the mulberry family. The chempedak tree that offers edible fruits that are about a foot long. Researchers studying the chempedak were surprised to discover that they bloom irregularly. One tree was watched by researchers for five years before it bloomed! While the flowers smell like watermelon, they offer no nectar to entice pollinating insects. Moreover, the insects that do pollinate the chempedak tree do not eat any of the pollen. What, then, attracts the two species of gall midges that pollinate the flowers? The answer: a fungus that attacks only the male flowers of the tree. The midges like to eat the fungus, so they crawl on the male flowers as they eat the fungus, picking up pollen. Then they go to the clumps of female flowers looking for more fungus, inadvertently pollinating them. This arrangement in which the tree depends entirely on a fungus to attract pollinators is unknown in any other species. This raises the question of how such an arrangement could have evolved. Without both the midges and the fungus, the first chempedak tree would have been the last. All three elements in this interrelated system had to have come into being at the same time. The chempedak tree bears witness to a rapid creation of the interdependent plant and insect world where living things had to wait, at most, mere days for the other creatures it depends on to come into existence, just as Genesis reports. Our Magnificent Creator God developed His Master Plan before He did anything else and it provided not only for the creation of everything but its survival as well!!! |
| 11/13/2022 | Scientists and manufacturers are studying a new technique that could lead to more durable fibers. This technique manufactures liquid crystals to produce stronger, longer-lasting fibers. The process uses sulfuric acid, temperatures well above the boiling point of water and a high-pressure atmosphere. Meanwhile, another team of researchers finally discovered how orb weaving spiders and silkworms manufacture their silk. Scientists had theorized that silk from spiders and silkworms was stronger by weight than steel because proteins in the silk cross-linked with each other. But after watching silk production and drying in careful lighting under magnification, astonished scientists actually saw what happens. Silk is produced in the silk gland as a thin, watery liquid. Once the protein-rich liquid is released from the gland, the liquid begins to concentrate because of evaporation. As the liquid concentrates, it changes into a liquid crystal state. Scientists have been trying to create fibers in the lab from liquid crystals. They would love to know how the spider does it, using only water at normal temperatures and pressures. This is another example of how God has already solved an engineering problem that we were trying to solve. It is especially interesting that He allowed scientists to discover His solution at the same time that others were trying to solve the problem. This allows us to reemphasize that our world is the work of our Magnificent Creator God and not mindless, natural accidents!!! |
| 11/12/2022 | For many, the existence of so much ice on Antarctica is a grave cause for concern, as they have been told that climate change will cause a lot of this ice to melt and cause the sea level to rise. The worry is that many of the world’s great cities, and many small island nations, could disappear as the Antarctic melts. So why did God make such a troublesome continent which could precipitate the end of the world? Remember that the topography of the world is not the way it was originally created. We have explained previously that there was likely just one main pre-Flood continent, which we call Rodinia. This continent split up during the Flood. The massive deposits of fossil fuels known to exist on the southernmost continent are evidence of pre-Flood forests, probably populated with animals. Every time ice breaks off from an Antarctic glacier, the media worry about flooding – yet God has promised not to flood the world again, nor to bring seasons to an end. Despite seeming to be a homogeneous repository for the 70% of the Earth’s fresh water, locked in as ice, there are considerable variations in climate between different parts of the continent. For every place where ice is melting and breaking up, there are parts where the ice cap gets thicker. Our Magnificent Creator God has all this in balance for His own purposes, and we can be sure He will keep all His promises!!! |
| 11/11/2022 | Humpbacks are among the largest whales in the world. A typical humpback weighs about 40 tons and begins its breach deep down in the ocean. Imagine the acceleration required to get this enormous animal out of the water and into the air. The whale leaves the water at an angle of 30° and a speed of 18 mph. Clearly, this monster uses a lot of energy in breaching, yet it is not unknown for the whale to repeat the exercise – the observed record being 130 leaps in 90 minutes! Why does it go to all this trouble? No one really knows. As with all such obscure phenomena, there are those who suggest that the whales are trying to “attract the girls”! Others suggest that the big splash achieved on re-entry rips some of the barnacles off the whale’s surface. There may be truth in either of these suggestions. But Wilson says that he cannot overlook the probability that the whale breaches simply because it gives God pleasure! Our Magnificent Creator God is a creative God, and the world He made is not for utility only, but also for beauty!!! |
| 11/10/2022 | Scientists have, for the first time, successfully communicated with honeybees in their own language! Scientists have for some time known how to interpret many of the elements of the bees’ so-called “waggle dance.” This dance is used by scouts to communicate the location of food sources to the food gatherers in the hive. A couple years ago researchers decided to see if they could confirm their understanding of bee communication. But how do you talk to a bee and get confirmation that she understood what you said? Scientists decided that the only way to do this was to build a robot bee through which they could communicate. The first attempts at building a robot bee acceptable to real bees did not work well. Early models were viciously attacked. Scientists finally perfected a computer-controlled robot bee that real honeybees accepted. These scientists describe honeybee language as elegant and precise. Yet they found they had learned enough bee language to communicate successfully a food source and its location to real bees. They also discovered that they have much more to learn about bee language. As a result, it may someday be possible for farmers to direct bees to crops that need pollination. Just as bees can best understand other bees, we humans can best understand other humans. That explains why, when our Magnificent Creator God wished to communicate with us, He became a human being. That human, Jesus Christ, taught us about God; and He also made peace with God for us, making possible the forgiveness of our sins!!! |
| 11/9/2022 | We have now gotten used to the idea that there are dinosaur fossils containing soft tissue. Our familiarity with such finds has begun to dull the edge of the surprising import of such finds. Whichever way you spin this, the presence of soft tissue is not consistent with evolutionary ages for the dinosaurs. Perhaps this sense of surprise, for the evolutionist, will be rekindled by the discovery of dinosaurs complete with skin, scales and pigments. One such dinosaur find is that of Borealopelta markmitchelli. This amazing specimen caused one expert to remark that it “might have been walking around a couple of weeks ago”. When the protein molecules of such organisms break down, they form secondary proteins called kerogens. These molecules have been found in this dinosaur. Although the exact lifespan of such molecules has not been fully researched, it is clear that they cannot last anywhere near as long as the required 112 million years – the date assigned to this dinosaur. Similarly, pigments like melanin have been found in the scales of the dinosaur. Experiments have suggested that the lifespan of melanin is only thousands of years. Yet, this dinosaur is not the only discovery in which such melanin has been found, even though there is no scientific mechanism by which such pigments could last the millions of years required. These dinosaur finds are troubling to evolutionists. But they are fully consistent with a biblical worldview, confirming as they do the Bible’s timescale for our Magnificent Creator God’s Creation and the Flood. |
| 11/8/2022 | There are a number of blurry, indistinct, cloudy-looking objects in the night sky which are not pinpoints of light as the stars are. One hundred ten of these are the so-called Messier objects, which were cataloged by one Charles Messier – a French astronomer who lived from 1730 through 1817. These are a mixture of objects. Some of them we would now call nebulae – quite literally, nebulous clouds of interstellar dust and gas. Examples of these are M8 – the Lagoon Nebula in the constellation of Sagittarius, and M42 – the famous Orion Nebula. Others are star clusters, such as The Pleiades, in Taurus – an object mentioned in the Bible, which is cataloged as M45. Still others are actually other galaxies, such as M104, the Sombrero Galaxy, or M31 – the Andromeda Galaxy. Why did Messier catalog such a wide variety of different objects without commenting on their differentiation? The answer is that he wasn’t actually interested in those objects. He cataloged them, rather, as a police officer catalogs data from a possible suspect in order to eliminate them from the inquiry. Messier was interested in comets – which also, from a distance, look like blurry objects. The difference is that comets, being Solar System objects, move from night to night, whereas his cataloged objects appear fixed relative to the stars. The Hebrew word for star includes what we call stars today and other objects, such as Messier’s objects. All were made by our Magnificent Creator God and declare His glory. All of God’s creation is magnificent in every way!!! |
| 11/7/2022 | What did God have in mind when He created the human male? The world around us offers many images of what it means to be a “real man.” The world offers us the breadwinner, the tough-guy and the workaholic’s unending push for success. Also, it’s becoming increasingly universal that it is the woman who holds the family together. We can be sure that none of these images capture what God had in mind. If we want to learn some practical lessons about what God intended a man to be, we need to begin with God’s original creation of the first man. The first job given to Adam, the first man, was an intellectual task – identifying and naming the animals. Jesus Christ taught us to call God “our Father.” However, we shouldn’t make the mistake of comparing Him to our imperfect human fathers. Human fathers need to learn from God. What kind of father is He? He’s tough. However, toughness does not mean hurling thunderbolts. True toughness is best shown when love persists despite rejection and disobedience. God never tired of patiently seeking Saul of Tarsus, His sworn enemy. However, while He is loving, God is not a wimp. He has established absolutes that we can depend on. He always keeps His Word. We can be thankful for that because when we look at ourselves we know that we have not been the men or women He intended us to be. His Word of grace in the forgiveness of sins through Jesus Christ assures all who cling to Christ that our perfect and almighty Magnificent Creator God is truly our Father!!! |
| 11/6/2022 | While staying with some family members in Kentucky, I was delighted one dark evening to see little flashes of light in the air, low over the garden lawn. Although I was too far away to see the insects concerned, these must have been fireflies. Fireflies are not actually flies – they are beetles. Their light-producing organs are in their abdomens. Most species use these bioluminescent displays for courtship. The bioluminescence is caused by a type of luciferin molecule, commonly called firefly luciferin. The name has nothing to do with evil! It comes from the Latin word for light. Firefly luciferin reacts with oxygen, and the reaction is catalyzed by an enzyme, luciferase, as well as the presence of magnesium ions and adenosine triphosphate – the energy-giving molecule ATP. Luciferin first forms another highly tensed molecule called a dioxetane, which releases CO2 to form a ketone. The ketone is in a highly excited electronic state, so it “relaxes” back to normal state by releasing energy. This energy is at exactly the right frequency to be in the visible light range. The fireflies in Kentucky emitted yellow light. If one were an evolutionist, one would have to wonder – what would have been the evolutionary advantage for the beetle to produce luciferase if there was no luciferin, or vice versa? We have a lot more work to do to investigate the chemistry of the process, but we still marvel at the wonder of our Magnificent Creator God’s design for these insects and all of the rest of His Creation!!! |
| 11/5/2022 | The writer of Proverbs 30 was counting his blessings while pondering God’s diverse creation. Four little creatures brought awe to his heart as he considered their skill. First, he was amazed at the tiny ants, which hurry around in organized lines setting aside their food for winter. Second, rock badgers, who know how to craft homes in the mountain crags. Third, locusts, which appear at once to be organized and disorganized as they sweep through the sky. Fourth, spiders, whose ability to spin webs makes them among the world’s greatest engineers (verses 24-28). Perhaps you’re not very thankful for ants or spiders, but take a moment to watch them and ponder how such tiny creatures know how to do their daily work. Then turn your focus to aspects of God’s creation that bring you more delight. As you go about your day, take time to notice the flowers, fields, grass, clouds, birds, puppies, and sunsets and remember that it was our Magnificent Creator God who created this world of wonder, surrounded by galaxies of glory!!! |
| 11/4/2022 | The purpose of an advertising billboard would be to grab the attention of the passerby. One way of attracting the attention of prospective customers might be to use bright colors. Suppose that the more brightly colored paint was more expensive. The increased business would be mitigated against by a greater cost involved in getting the necessary paint or ink. This is the sort of situation faced by a flowering plant. The flowers are the organs of the plant used for reproduction. The plant needs some sort of mediator to transfer male pollen cells from one flower to the stamen of another. The mediator is a pollinator and would typically be an insect or occasionally a mammal or a bird. The flower has to attract the pollinator, who does not visit the plant out of the goodness of his heart. Therefore, the petals of the flower become advertising billboards. Different shades and brightness of hue will attract different insects. However, what is not often considered is the amount of energy expended by the plant to produce such a colorful display. Consider that, in the early supposed evolution of a flowering plant, the plant would have had to use up a lot of energy to attract a pollinator. What if it hadn’t worked? The weakened plant would have wasted energy without any reproductive advantage. That clearly would not have occurred. In fact, from whatever angle you examine this, there is no evolutionary mechanism for the brightness of flowers. Instead, this is a clear design feature, illustrating the greatness of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 11/3/2022 | Why did the Creator bring together so many precise specifications and high intelligence in the honeybee? To glorify Himself and because bees are crucial to the reproductive cycles of so many plants as well as the food chain. The amazing structure of the honeycomb has amazed scientists for thousands of years. As early as the third century AD, the astronomer Pappus of Alexandria offered an explanation for the six-sided or hexagonal shape of the honeycomb. He pointed out that while the triangle, square and hexagon could all be candidates for the shape of the comb, one of these shapes holds more than the others. The most efficient shape for storing the most honey while wasting the least space is the hexagon. There are many variations of the hexagon that are available to the bee. However, the honeybee is always very precise in constructing honeycomb hexagons, with an obtuse angle of 109°23´ and an acute angle of 70°23´. These angles produce the most usable space for the least amount of building material. Humans are unable to use such precision in their designs without sophisticated equipment. Each honeybee is a tiny but powerful computer that could only have been designed and built by an intelligent Creator. Bees and what they do are of central importance to much of the rest of creation. No wonder our Magnificent Creator God has given His creation so much: the complex structure of their society, their intelligence and industriousness!!! |
| 11/2/2022 | Deserts are inhospitable places with little rain—blazingly hot by day and chillingly cold by night. Few plants can survive, but the rock morning glory can. It has large underground tubers resembling sweet potatoes that store water whenever it rains. In times of drought, it’s sustained by the water stored in its twenty or so underground reserves. Jeremiah 17:8 says of those who put their confidence in God: “They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit”. Our Magnificent Creator God’s Master Plan provides for the sustenance of His every creation!! |
| 11/1/2022 | A recent science article in the UK’s Telegraph newspaper suggested that grizzly bears may have dropped their carnivorous ways in favor of a life of eating berries. Apparently, the streams and rivers on Alaska’s Kodiak Island are replete with salmon. Normally, 75% of these salmon are killed by grizzlies, but in recent years, the salmon have remained untouched, while bears stay in the hills eating elderberries. This change in behavior, which is billed as a form of evolution, is said to have occurred because elderberries are said to be ripening earlier every year. The normal diet of the grizzly bear would involve eating salmon at the end of summer and early fall, followed by gorging on the high-energy berries in order to fatten up for the winter hibernation. But the berries are ripening early, so the bears are missing out on the salmon in order to consume high energy berries. The Telegraph’s article thinks that it knows the culprit for this situation, which it sees as problematic. Early berry ripening has been caused by our old friend climate change. Apparently, this will affect the ecosystems of the rivers. Bears do not consume the whole salmon. The discarded carcasses rot and enrich the soil in the riparian region. Worried scientists suggest that bears will have completely given up on salmon by 2070. There has, of course, been frequent warming and cooling of environments before. More to the point, the Bible reminds us that “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” (Genesis 8:22). We owe all of what we have – whether weather, plant, or animal, to our Magnificent Creator God’s Master Plan that He perfected before time began!!! |
| 10/31/2022 | A new attempt is being made to undermine people’s trust in God’s word. Interest has recently been shown in a 100-page document in Latin, written by the fourth-century Italian bishop Fortunatianus of Aquileia. Dr. Hugh Houghton of the University of Bormingham has translated the work and reports that it provides an allegorical interpretation of the Gospels. Houghton says, “There’s been an assumption that [the Bible is] a literal record of truth… But for people teaching the Bible in the fourth century, it’s not the literal meaning which is important, it’s how it’s read allegorically.” Houghton’s claim is that, because the document dates back to the fourth century, it should carry more weight about methods of interpreting the Bible than, for example, the works of Augustine. But is the antiquity of the document any evidence for its authority? The answer to that question must be a resounding “No”. It should be a surprise to nobody that there were people in the post-apostolic church who were already casting doubt on the authenticity of New Testament books. After all, the first record we have of someone casting doubt on the authority of God’s word is recorded in the Bible itself, when the serpent, in Genesis 3, does exactly that. There are many scholars who have shown that many post-apostolic writers accepted the authority of the entire Bible, and the New Testament documents themselves are self-authenticating – such as Peter’s acknowledgment of the Scriptural authority of Paul’s letters in 2 Peter 3:16. Our Magnificent Creator God gave us His Word to be a lamp to our feet and a light to our path that we would always to be guided by His Holy Word!!! |
| 10/30/2022 | Solar Cycle 10 – a typical 11-year sunspot cycle, from late 1855 to 1867 – was one of the busiest ever observed for solar activity. British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington had noticed a great deal of activity on the surface of the Sun from August 28th, 1859. On the morning of Thursday, September 1st, he once again pointed his brass telescope at the Sun, and he hurriedly made dozens of rapid sketches of the projected images. Suddenly, he reported that he saw “two patches of intensely bright and white light”. He had just witnessed the largest ever recorded solar event – now named the Carrington Event. Within 18 hours, the Earth was experiencing massive Aurora displays – the northern lights seen at latitudes as far south as Cuba. More interesting was the effect on the telegraph systems. All around the world, telegraph systems failed, operators experienced shocks and telegraph papers caught fire. What would happen if a solar storm the size of the Carrington Event happened today? Earth is surrounded by communication satellites, and most countries of the world rely on computer networks and the Internet. All of these could be damaged or destroyed by another Carrington. The Carrington Event at least shows why God created a magnetic field around the Earth. The Aurora displays at least showed that Earth has some protection against such an unusual event. And no event is truly random! Nothing ever created by our Magnificent Creator God is by accident or chance!!! |
| 10/29/2022 | Previously we talked about the Perseverance Mars 2020 mission, which included a helicopter named Ingenuity. Another technology demonstration taken with Perseverance is an instrument for collecting oxygen. The atmosphere on Mars is very thin; its surface pressure is only 1% of Earth’s atmosphere. Of this tenuous Martian atmosphere, 95.3% is carbon dioxide, which is only a trace gas on Earth. There is 2.6% nitrogen and 1.9% argon, with trace amounts of water vapor, oxygen, carbon monoxide, hydrogen and noble gases. Despite the rarity of oxygen, NASA engineers believe that their equipment can extract oxygen in sufficient quantities to make human exploration of Mars possible. Which brings us to the subject of life. Previous missions – and indeed photographs – have provided evidence that there was once water on Mars. Even Perseverance’s landing site – the Jezero Crater – appears surrounded by dried water channels. But water and atmospheric carbon dioxide do not make life. Says one NASA scientist, “If we found a microbe that arose on the next planet over, if lightning struck twice in this one corner of the solar system, it would suggest that our whole universe could have life on lots and lots of planets and it’s not just us alone in the dark night.” But his “lightning” did not strike once. Chemicals in lifeforms are not produced by mixtures or even simple reactions. They contain codes and information which could only have been put there by our Magnificent Creator God of the Bible!!! |
| 10/28/2022 | Everybody loves pandas, don’t they? We must love them because we are trying to save them from extinction, with some success; pandas have been downgraded from endangered to vulnerable. Apparently, their habitat in China is expanding, so that the likelihood of those adorable black-and-white icons of world wildlife may not disappear after all. However, you might recall one British comedian poking ironic fun at the mission to save the pandas by saying that we could do without them. After all, he opined, they seem determined to commit species suicide, so why not just let them go where the dinosaurs and mammoths went? A Christian position is more logical – less sentimental, but more compassionate. If pandas had already gone extinct, then we could clearly live without them. However, given that humanity has a mandate from Genesis 1 of stewardship of the Earth and its resources, it is certainly admirable to attempt to preserve what we have in the way of panda populations. The concept of panda extinction is inconsistent for evolutionists. A hard-line evolutionist should want them to die out because, in the survival of the fittest stakes, pandas have proved themselves less fit. Yet most people, while holding evolutionary philosophy, would rather try to take steps to preserve the cuddly looking giants. It is only those of us taking a biblical worldview who can view the subject with any degree of rationality. Animals are only animals. When they die, their souls return to the ground. Yet, the survival of pandas has only occurred because of massive human effort – effort that is not wrong and can indeed be justified from Scripture. It was a mandate from our Magnificent Creator God that we should always tend the earth and all that He created for it!!! |
| 10/27/2022 | David Bowie sang about the Spiders from Mars, but by the time you read this, the sky above the Red Planet could be buzzing with helicopters; well, one helicopter at least. NASA’s Perseverance mission was launched successfully on July 30th, 2020 and was scheduled to land in the Jezero Crater on February 18th, 2021. We probably know much more about this landing site for a robotic spacecraft than we did about the Mare Tranquilitatis Apollo 11 landing site on the Moon in 1969. The surface of Mars has been extensively mapped by orbiting craft. Many landings have taken so-called rovers with them. Perseverance is another such rover and carries seven different sensing instruments. It will even collect a number of samples for returning to Earth, though the Perseverance mission itself will not return; NASA hopes that a mission in 2026 will be able to retrieve the samples. One very interesting extra feature of Perseverance is that it carries with it the very first aircraft to operate in another planet’s atmosphere. Ingenuity is a sort-of helicopter, or perhaps a drone, designed to be able to fly in the tenuous Martian atmosphere. Seven flights of this robotic drone will provide much new information. Unfortunately, the focus of the mission is, once again, the fruitless search for extraterrestrial life. But we will still follow the mission with interest because God made Mars, and what we find there will cause us to praise our Magnificent Creator God all the more!!! |
| 10/26/2022 | James says that “every good and perfect gift is from above…” Perhaps this is twisting Scripture a little by including coffee in this category. We have to confess – we love coffee. So we should be delighted to read on the Science Daily website that the intake of coffee could contribute to longer life! If that is so, can we be looking forward to living as long as Methuselah? It isn’t the purpose of this discussion to extol the virtues or otherwise of this honey-colored liquid. Just simply note that a recent study has linked drinking four cups of coffee a day with a long and healthy life. 337 participants were studied over a ten-year period and were found to have a 64% lower risk of all-cause mortality than those who never or almost never consumed coffee. All participants lived in Spain or other Mediterranean areas. The researchers noted that previous studies on coffee consumption had not been carried out around the Mediterranean. The study also notes that previous studies had sometimes shown that there was a deleterious effect to the over-consumption of coffee or other caffeinated drinks. There are, after all, many people who suggest that drinking coffee could be bad for one’s health. The fact that another study is now suggesting an opposite conclusion simply underlines how volatile the professional opinion of scientists can be. The idea of scientific consensus turns out to be a myth and not an argument of authority. Our only absolute authority is what our Magnificent Creator God says in His word!!! |
| 10/25/2022 | In 1 Kings 7:23, there is an unusual account of how Solomon had the sea of bronze made. We read that is was “ten cubits from brim to brim, and five cubits high, and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference”. Many atheists and skeptics have used this verse to criticize the Bible. They suggest that the inaccuracy suggested by the dimensions given is inconsistent with a Book claiming to be without error. They suggest that a diameter of 10 cubits and circumference of 30 cubits is impossible, as the relationship between these two values is governed by a value called pi (π). Now, pi, the famous mathematical constant, is found by dividing the circumference of a circle by its diameter. So, if Solomon had made the sea ten cubits across, then surely the circumference would have to be about 31½ cubits. What the skeptics fail to notice is that verse 26 informs us that there was a rim, with a width of a handsbreadth. A cubit is about 18 inches, while a handsbreadth is 4 inches. So the circumference is 540 inches. The rim-to-rim distance is 180 inches, but we need to subtract two handsbreadths to find the diameter of the vessel, which will be 172 inches. 540 divided by 172 is 3.1395, which is extremely close to the recognized value of 3.1416, giving a tiny experimental error of just 0.07% – well within the accuracy of any measuring device used at the time. This little math lesson is, as expected, consistent with our presupposition of the Bible’s trustworthiness. Once again The Holy Inspired Word of our Magnificent Creator God proves to be true in even the tiniest, least significant details!!! |
| 10/24/2022 | You might have liked math when you were in high school. But one aspect of math was tedious. This was when special numbers had to be looked up in boring books called log tables. These books contained not only logarithms but also the trigonometric functions – sines, cosines and tangents. Today’s students simply press a button on their scientific calculators, but we had to look with painstaking concentration through page after page of figures until we had worked out the value required. A clay tablet, called Plimpton 322, was discovered in the early 1900s in the area where Babylon must have been. This mysterious tablet, with four columns and 15 rows of numbers, has remained an enigma until recently. Researchers at the University of New South Wales have discovered that the numbers are in base 60 rather than the base 10 that we use. In addition, they are trigonometric tables like those sine, cosine and tangent tables that we remember from our youth. It has been known for a very long time that the Babylonians used base 60. In fact this is the source of our idea that an hour contains 60 minutes, and a minute 60 seconds. Ancient civilizations were far from primitive. It is likely that the earliest post-Flood civilizations, such as Babylon, retained some of the pre-Flood knowledge passed down through the generations. No wonder their inhabitants wanted to keep central control of such knowledge, before God scattered the people across the face of the Earth. We should give thanks to our Magnificent Creator God for being in control of all the sciences – even mathematics – and for the wonder of creation that we see through historic math documents such as Plimpton 322!!! |
| 10/23/2022 | The headline “Scientist Sees Planets with Very Large Telescope” might not excite the imagination until you realize that the Very Large Telescope, or VLT, is actually a thing! It is a huge reflecting telescope, built by the European Southern Observatory in the desert in Chile. It is actually comprised of four telescopes, each of which has a primary hyperbolic mirror about 27 feet across. The result is that the instrument can “see” objects millions of times fainter than those detected by the human eye. Recently, the VLT was pointed at a star rejoicing in the name TYC 8998-760-1, about 300 light years away. It was already known, from calculations, that the star had two planets orbiting it. So the VLT was able to take a magnificent photograph of the stellar system, clearly showing these planets. Both planets are gas giants. The one closer to the star is 14 times more massive than Jupiter, while the other is six times bigger. The planets are 160 and 320 times further from their star than the Earth is from the Sun, compared with just five and ten times the Earth-Sun distance for Jupiter and Saturn. Even though we may not understand why our Magnificent Creator God made all of these stars and planets a part of His Master Plan, we will someday in glory!!! |
| 10/22/2022 | Picture yourself sitting in a friend’s living room. Can you picture in your mind where the door is located? Scientists call this a thought map. Thought maps are mental pictures of the arrangement of objects relative to one another. Thought maps help us remember where to find a water glass, the gas or brake pedal, and home. Thought maps require intelligence. They help make possible additional intelligent activity, such as finding our way around and conducting an intelligent search. This is why scientists have been surprised to find that many creatures, not just humans, use thought maps. One experimenter carried a chimpanzee on his back while he hid 18 pieces of food in a field. Then the chimp and five others were released in the field to find the food. The chimp who had seen the hiding places found most of the food, following a very different route than that originally taken by the researcher. Bees, likewise, use mental maps. Even if a bee is forced to detour on its way back to the hive, it always reports the food source as though it had used a direct route. Bees are also able to find a food source that has been moved after its discovery. Ants have also been shown to use mental maps. Mental maps help humans and animals think deductively about changes in the environment. Mental mapping ability could not have evolved because even the lowliest creature requires this ability to survive. This ability must have been given to them in the first place by their Magnificent Creator God! |
| 10/21/2022 | You must have heard the evolutionary idea that dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid hitting the Earth about 66 million years ago – probably on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Recently, this idea has come under criticism from evolutionists as well as from creationists. Other models for the extinction of the dinosaurs have been explored. Recently, researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) have been revisiting the idea of the asteroid strike and have suggested that dust and soot, flying into the air after the impact, would have caused about two years of darkness over the entire world. The researchers suggest that this would have shut down all the photosynthesis across the world, resulting in mass extinctions and reducing the global temperature. This darkness, therefore, would have caused the demise of the dinosaurs. The word “dinosaur” was originally coined to give a label to types of animals which do not really have much in common, other than the fact that they are extinct. It seems odd to spend so much time wondering how a class of animals became extinct, whose very nomenclature was only created to state that they were indeed extinct. Many animals have become extinct. In a biblical worldview, we can see that some animals, following the Flood, might have had difficulty adapting to new climatic conditions. In any case, it seems more logical to attribute the death of dinosaurs to climatic conditions following a known worldwide catastrophe (the Flood) rather than a similar change caused by the speculation about an unknown worldwide catastrophe – the years of Darkness. Put your faith into The Word of God and know that our Magnificent Creator God is the source of all that is and all that ever was!! |
| 10/20/2022 | From an early age, Charles Darwin’s mother, Sukey, took him to church. That is why so many people assume that Darwin’s background was Christian. But the church to which Sukey Darwin took her children was not just any church. It was a Unitarian Church. And the influence of this church, and its pastor, Rev. William Case, was not just for Sundays. Case operated a small grammar school in the manse, and Sukey sent the young Charles there. Unitarianism takes a strong doctrinal position on not taking doctrinal positions. Its name suggests not only a belief in the singularity of God, but an opposition to the biblical Trinitarian position. Unitarians deny that Jesus is God, even though the Bible says He is. Consequently, they also deny the authority and inspiration of Scripture, except in the vague sense of being “inspired” by any “uplifting” literature. Case’s influence on Darwin’s later life is undeniable. For example, Case’s nature trips to the local quarry instilled a lifelong love of natural history in the boy. It surely must also be that Darwin had no foundation of trusting God’s word from these early experiences – God’s word that reveals to us His triune character and the deity of Christ. Though we do not derive the doctrine of the Trinity from Genesis 1, we can see the doctrine clearly reflected in the Creation by our Magnificent Creator God, by the Word of God and by the Spirit of God!!! |
| 10/19/2022 | Three people went out to dig for rock. The rocks in their claim were rich in minerals, such as malachite – the principle ore of copper. Historically, copper has been used as an alloy, being mixed with tin to form bronze. Today, copper is used in the printed circuits of computers, cell phones and other electronic devices. Copper is relatively easy to extract from its ore, requiring not too much heating of the ore, with a reducing agent such as carbon. One morning, the three miners drove to their claim, as normal. They parked their car and walked a mile or so to their claim in order to dig for ore. Their mine was in the heart of the Cascade Range in the state of Washington, close to the volcano known as Mount St Helens. Donald and Natalie Parker, and their nephew Richard signed waivers at the edge of the “blue zone” in order to gain permission to the area, access to which was being restricted because of the possibility of an eruption. The next morning, Sunday May 18, 1980, the mountain blew and the Parkers’ cabin was destroyed by the blast. All three miners died of asphyxiation. Their car was thrown 60 feet and landed where it remains to this day as a macabre tourist sight. We do not know what tomorrow may bring. This is why the Bible reminds us that today is the day of salvation. It is important to get right with our Magnificent Creator God today. He has not only made the physical wonders of our world but the spiritual wonders as well such as His Master Plan Of Salvation!!! |
| 10/18/2022 | If, as we are continually told, evolution is a fact, why is it that human technology improves when we copy designs found in nature? If nature is really a giant trial-and-error experiment, we should not only find evidence of less-sophisticated designs in the distant past, but humans today should be able to improve on designs found in nature. Science has long known that an object moving through water or air moves with the least resistance when the ratio of its length to diameter is four to one. This ratio is found in the fastest swimmers in the sea – like the tuna, dolphin and swordfish. A Boeing 707, with a ratio of nine to one, experiences much more resistance than the larger, fatter 747, which has a ratio of six to one – much closer to the tuna and the dolphin. Studies of the vision of the horseshoe crab, supposedly one of the earlier forms of life, have taught engineers how to produce a clearer, sharper television picture. The United States Air Force copied a speed-sensing system from beetles to improve the ground speed indicators of their jets. The optics of a frog’s eye showed them how to improve their radar. The fly’s multifaceted eye taught engineers how to design a lighting system that generates more light with less energy. Humans are learning from and copying design solutions worked out by our Magnificent Creator God. The brilliant designs in our world are not the result of trial and error. This reality makes the claim that evolution is a fact of science sound empty!!! |
| 10/17/2022 | Many of us in the United States recently watched the total eclipse of the Sun in 2017. I was at my place of work in the state of Washington, where the eclipse was 98%. An eclipse happens when the Sun, Moon and Earth are perfectly lined up, with the Moon casting a shadow on to the Earth. You might think that such an arrangement would happen every month, but it does not because the Moon’s orbit is at an angle to the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Nevertheless, total eclipses are not that rare and there is likely to be one somewhere in the world every couple of years. We are so used to seeing the Sun and the Moon that we forget some important but simple concepts. First, we forget that these objects are entirely different. The Sun produces its own light by nuclear fusion, but the Moon – a solid lump of rock – simply reflects sunlight. Also, we forget that the apparent size of these objects in the sky is the same. The Sun is many times bigger than the Moon but is also a lot farther away. The coincidence of their relative sizes means that the Moon can exactly fit over the Sun, enabling us to see phenomena such as the Sun’s promontories, looking like large flames. As Christians, we believe that this “coincidence” is actually a design feature. Eclipses in history can accurately be dated, enabling us to calculate the dates of many historical events. This is one of the reasons that our Magnificent Creator God has designed this spectacular phenomenon!!! |
| 10/16/2022 | We have all looked in wonder at the amazing transformation of a caterpillar into a moth. However, did you realize that a moth needs an entirely different kind of brain than a caterpillar? We can truly say that here we have an insect with two brains! In the caterpillar stage, the moth lumbers around in a body that is primarily designed for eating. Its brain must be able to command powerful jaws and a comparatively huge digestive system as well as the complexities of caterpillar locomotion. The world of the caterpillar is very different from the world of the moth. During metamorphosis the caterpillar completely dissolves and the moth is rebuilt from the liquid. The brain, for example, requires new nerve cells and new connections between brain cells, while some brain cells change function, migrate to new locations, or even die. The result is a brain that is 10 times the size of the caterpillar’s and ready to control flight. The moth’s primary purpose in life is to reproduce. So its new brain is able to generate the odors used by moths to identify and communicate with potential mates. It is also equipped to detect the scents of a potential mate. Only our almighty Magnificent Creator God could completely rebuild a caterpillar into a moth. Only He could rebuild and increase its brain ten-fold in only a week or two. Even more amazing is how He remakes people. Through the forgiveness of sins, Jesus Christ turns us from people who wish to escape Him to new creatures who love Him and find joy in Him!!! |
| 10/15/2022 | They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. While that is often true, they also say that it takes a highly evolved brain to picture objects and remember them. Science is learning that this bit of evolutionary myth is indeed fiction. As far as the honeybee is concerned, not all flowers are created equal. Some flowers are a good source of nectar while others are a waste of time. Alfalfa flowers can kill a honeybee because they are designed for pollination by larger insects. When an insect lands, a central petal in the flower releases the stamen and sweeps pollen upward to aid pollination. Honeybees can be tossed off the flower or trapped inside by this action. Scientists always thought that honeybees solved the problem of finding safe and productive flowers by remembering a list of characteristics. They believed the honeybee was evolutionarily too simple to remember mental pictures of favored flowers. However, recent experiments have convinced scientists that bees actually store a mental picture of productive flowers. In these experiments, bees were rewarded with sugar water for visiting some patterns and not others. Their reactions showed that they remember images, not simply patterns. What’s more, the experiments showed that bees are quite intelligent and good learners. One scientist noted that these experiments showed that evolution’s assumptions about so-called higher and lower creatures are false. Those who believe in evolution are having to rethink their view of the world. Meanwhile, we can give thanks to our Magnificent Creator God for so generously giving the gift of intelligence to so many of His creatures!!! |
| 10/14/2022 | Some creatures simply try to look uninteresting to hungry predators. Others take their role-playing so seriously that they actually fulfill some of the same roles as their models. Loopers, or inchworms, move along the ground, twigs or branches with the characteristic opening and closing of an upside-down letter U. These creatures are not true worms. Rather, they are caterpillars. As caterpillars, they often look very much like the twigs or branches on which they move. However, their odd form of movement can give them away. Here’s an experiment you can try. If you ever notice a looper on a branch, simply give the branch a gentle tap. Chances are, the looper will suddenly freeze into the same shape as a nearby twig. If you were to carefully touch the looper, you would find that it had become as stiff as a twig. A botanist reports that while studying one looper moving along a branch, an ant happened along. Ants, of course, will eat loopers. The looper froze in a horizontal position between branches. The ant walked across the looper, never noticing that its walkway was actually a potential meal. Many scientists suggest that the looper “just happens” to be the same color as the branches on which it crawls. We ask, does it also accidentally know how to act like a twig to fool predators? The almighty hand of our Magnificent Creator God is evident even in the inchworm! |
| 10/13/2022 | We want to avoid getting bacteria in our food, don’t we? Bacteria cause illness. Bacteria are bad. Yet, some of the world’s healthiest foods contain deliberately introduced bacteria. One such strain of bacteria is the Lactic Acid Bacterium (LAB). This is used in foods such as kimchi or sauerkraut. Brassicas, such as cabbage, often have low quantities of this bacterium. When sealed in a suitable fermentation jar with salt, the LAB can thrive. LAB is able to withstand high acidity and salinity, so it grows, even in a salty environment. One of the products of LAB’s metabolism is lactic acid. Most other bacteria cannot survive in either acid or salt, so the LAB begins to dominate, while the vast majority of other bacteria die. LAB itself is not harmful to humans, so, paradoxically, the good bacteria have effectively killed off all the bad bacteria, providing a healthy, long-lasting food. When God finished making the world at the end of day six of creation, He looked at all that He had made and declared it to be very good. This must have included bacteria. Since Adam’s sin, many bacteria have mutated (though not evolved, as they have not gained new genetic information) into harmful organisms. Perhaps originally, all bacteria were created to be as useful as LAB in that original perfect world that our Magnificent Creator God gave us and that we so sinfully polluted. |
| 10/12/2022 | “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.” One of the most common arguments against a literal six-day creation is that the structure of the days is a literary device, called the Framework Hypothesis. The hypothesis suggests an almost poetic pattern to the days, which they claim demonstrates that the days are not meant to be taken literally. On day one, God made the universe. On day two, He made the seas and atmosphere, and on day three He made the land, with its plants. Then on day four, He filled the universe, day five filled the sea and atmosphere, and day six filled the land. So there are three days of creating ex nihilo and three days of filling those creations. Again, the advocates of this hypothesis maintain that this pattern shows that Genesis 1 is allegorical literature, proclaiming the truth of God as Creator, but does not give a historical account. A quick answer to this point is that if there is a real pattern of two sets of three days, this does not prove that the days are not literal. God is a God of order. However, their neat pattern breaks down. Day one is not actually the parallel to day four – day two is. How so? On day two, God created the firmament, and the firmament refers not merely to the atmosphere but the entirety of space. A better suggestion is to take our Magnificent Creator God at His word, that He created everything exactly how He said He did!!! |
| 10/11/2022 | It must have been a very exciting meeting of the Geological Society of London in December 1912. Charles Dawson was presenting a paper concerning a skull that he said had been found at a gravel pit in Sussex, England. The skull appeared to be half human half ape. The prevailing opinion of the time, as it is today, was that apes and humans had a common ancestor from which they had all evolved. Dawson’s colleague, Arthur Smith Woodward, claimed at the same meeting that the find was that of the fabled missing link between apes and humans. Thus began the legend of Piltdown Man. The gravel pits at Piltdown, Sussex, yielded a number of finds along with the skull. These finds in total were sufficient to convince the scientific establishment of the truth of the find. But in 1953, an extensive investigation of the skull indicated that the cranium was that of a human who had died about 600 years ago while the jaw was that of an orangutan. Tests revealed that these fragments had been artificially aged with various chemicals. Today, Piltdown Man is the textbook example of a scientific fraud. However, we should remember that the skull was considered to be genuine for over 40 years. How many of today’s evolutionary “proofs” will turn out not to be what they appear? Throughout all this, our Magnificent Creator God’s word remains the same, and remains true!!! |
| 10/10/2022 | Language requires some very special designs that are rare in nature and found together only in humans. First, human language requires vocal cords, which none of the apes have. The only animals with vocal tracts are birds, but no one is suggesting that we evolved from birds. Language also seems to require an unusual structure to the brain. The frontal area of the left hemisphere of the brain is connected to an adjacent area of the cortex called the Wernicke area. These two areas are linked by a bundle of nerve fibers. The result is a distinct brain asymmetry that is unique to humans. Even the unborn human has this asymmetry that allows it to absorb language. Development in this area of the brain stops at puberty. That is why it becomes more difficult for adults to learn a new language. Language skills can be learned only by hearing language. So-called “feral” children, who have heard no language at all, cannot be taught language after puberty for the same reason. So where did Adam first hear language? Scripture tells us that it was the Creator God Himself who regularly spoke with Adam. This means that language is not a collection of meaningless sounds to which we have assigned meanings. The meanings and sounds have come from God, just as our unique design that makes language possible comes from God. Therefore, language is not only for worldly purposes. We have also been given language to praise our Magnificent Creator God and Savior and to tell others who He is and what He has done! |
| 10/9/2022 | Which body structure is a powerful generator of emotions, gives you a sense of direction, and serves as a cannon all at the same time? It’s your nose, of course! It is common knowledge that without our noses the scent of a rose could not give us joy, nor would our food taste like very much. Less well known is the fact that our noses are directly hooked into the brain’s limbic system. Your limbic system plays a central role in generating and controlling emotions. This is why certain scents are able to raise strong emotional memories in us. The nose is also designed to filter out and catch particles that should not get into the lungs. When a particle is taken in through your nose, it is snagged by the tissue inside your nasal passages. Next, this highly special tissue decides the best method of getting rid of the foreign material. If a bacterium is identified, your nose begins to run, bathing the bacteria in powerful chemicals that dissolve most of them. If the particles are larger, like pollen, a sneeze is triggered that can eject particles at speeds of over 100 miles per hour! Perhaps the most remarkable ability associated with the nose is its ability to act as a compass. Human beings have a small amount of iron in the bony part of the nose between the eyes. Scientific experiments have shown that we have an ability, while not foolproof, that can sense direction that is influenced by magnetic fields! The Magnificent Creator God made your multi-purpose nose not only to bring some pleasure to life but also to help protect your health! |
| 10/8/2022 | We have looked at many plants and animals that use different forms of camouflage to keep from being noticed. Some don’t wish to be noticed so that they can surprise their prey, while others don’t want to be noticed so they can avoid becoming prey. However, what happens when both predator and prey encounter each other in full camouflage? The predator in this drama, witnessed by a naturalist at the edge of a desert, is a yellow crab spider. The spider was waiting on a yellow flower that made him nearly invisible. The potential prey is an inchworm beneath the same flower. The inchworm was tearing off bits of the yellow flower petals and sticking them on its back. Properly camouflaged, the inchworm then worked his way toward the top of the flower where the spider waited. The spider felt the movement and ran around the edge to see whether lunch might be on the way. However, when the spider got around the edge of the flower, he saw nothing. He didn’t even notice the camouflaged inchworm on which he was standing! The spider then returned to the center of the flower, outsmarted by the inchworm who went on about his business. Our wisdom would have said that the inchworm should try to run when he noticed the spider. However, the wisdom given to him by the Creator allowed him to continue about his business on the flower. This offers us a good illustration of how following Our Magnificent Creator God’s wisdom often requires us to reject our own! |
| 10/7/2022 | We know that Noah did not have to fit two of every species of animal on the Ark. The Ark sheltered two of every kind of land and flying vertebrate, not two of every species. For example, modern species like lions and tigers would have developed from the pair from the cat family that were on the Ark. Over time, different species of cats have developed from this pair. It is easy to see how this happened. Environmental conditions favor certain genes over others, so that these features are selected in the offspring. A simplistic example is that creatures with longer hair or fur have developed in colder areas of the world. This has involved no new genetic information; there has simply been selection from existing genetic information. But why did God make this speciation possible? Our Magnificent Creator God knew the different conditions that would arise in different parts of the world!!! Because Scripture shows us that Our Magnificent Creator God actively sustains life, it is possible that He included this ability to diversify in creatures in order to help their offspring to survive in radically different conditions – especially the vastly changed conditions in the aftermath of the Flood. |
| 10/6/2022 | We have long known that the community within a honeybee hive divides the labor among specialized workers. There are scouts who search for food. Nurses tend the young. Some bees specialized in cleaning. There are even undertaker bees who remove and dispose of dead members of the hive. Scientists have now discovered that honeybee colonies also have brigades of specialized “soldiers.” These bees often seem to be sitting around, not doing much. In fact, they have only one duty—attack large intruders. It appears that these bees are fed and cared for by the hive members while they wait for the alarm. Should a raccoon, bear or human threaten the hive, thousands of soldier bees swarm around the enemy and sting. Soldiers have been well-known members of ant and termite colonies. However, up to now, they have never been confirmed in honeybee hives. The universal need for soldiers for protection among social insects reminds us that some things are universal in this world. These soldiers are not responsible for a bear’s attack on the hive. Nor are human soldiers who follow just war principles responsible for human war. Humanity’s greed and lack of love for others cannot be abolished by getting rid of armies. Rather, greed, theft and the need for protection remind us that we are not what God intended us to be. The solution lies not in denying reality, but in returning to our Magnificent Creator God through the forgiveness of our sins as made possible by Jesus Christ!!! |
| 10/5/2022 | How many different scents do you think your nose is able to smell? The answer is about 10,000. How does your nose tell the difference between a rose and a skunk? Until only recently, scientists really weren’t sure. Now we know that humans and mammals detect smells by using at least 1,000 different genes. These genes are located in every cell in your body, but they are active only in your nose. This discovery, say scientists, gives them their first insight into how smell works. Before this, said one scientist, “We had almost no knowledge of the olfactory system and this really opens up the molecular study of smell in a very fascinating way.” They say that each of the different genes seems designed to respond to a small group of odors. As each group of genes does its part, the entire system is able to recognize everything we can smell. These genes pass signals from the nerve cells in the nose to a small region of the brain called the olfactory bulb. Now that smell genes are identified, researchers say they can begin to understand how odors are detected and how the brain interprets those signals. Our sense of smell relies on a very elegant and sophisticated system. Imagine, 1,000 genes lie at the heart of that system. Each one of those genes is information—a programmed code that is designed to make sense of what we smell. Information, programming and decoding are all terms that assume that we have a highly intelligent Magnificent Creator God who designed our sense of smell!!! |
| 10/4/2022 | Our senses link us to the world around us and enable us to interact with the world. While most people believe that our sense of sight is the highest of the senses and the most marvelous in design, our sense of hearing is no less marvelous. When a sound strikes your ear, your eardrum vibrates with the sound waves, fast or slow, soft or hard. These variations in vibration provide us with important information about the nature of the sound we are hearing. Some sounds produce a vibration in the eardrum as small as a billionth of a centimeter – only one-tenth the diameter of a hydrogen atom! There are three tiny bones in the middle ear called the hammer, anvil and stirrup. They pick up the vibrations from the eardrum, amplify them and send them on to the cochlea. The cochlea is filled with about 25,000 tiny hair cells that finally turn the vibrations into electrical signals that are sent on to the brain. Our hearing is designed to be more sensitive to high-pitched sounds than to lower sounds. If we had just a little more sensitivity to lower-pitched sounds, we would continuously be distracted by the internal sounds of our body, including the blood rushing through our arteries. In fact, to help prevent this, there are no blood vessels at all in that part of the ear where vibrations are turned into electrical impulses. The body supports life in these tissues by constantly bathing them in dissolved nutrients. While we can hear many things, and decide not to hear other things, the Magnificent Creator God who so marvelously designed our ears invites us to hear His Word to us from the Bible. |
| 10/3/2022 | Carbon dioxide is a wonderful gas. It occurs in the atmosphere at an average concentration of 404 parts per million by volume (ppm). Plants need carbon dioxide to grow. This is the principle source from which plants derive the carbon compounds that they require. Green plants use chlorophyll to catalyze a reaction between carbon dioxide and water vapor that produces sugars and also some free oxygen. Greater concentrations of carbon dioxide will cause faster growth in plants. For example, large greenhouses in Britain used to pump in extra carbon dioxide to help tomato plants grow. The optimum concentration of carbon dioxide for plant growth is 2,000 ppm – 5 times greater than normal concentrations. Yet, climate change advocates claim that even the 400 ppm that we have is too high. So the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has declared that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. The IPCC has determined that human-generated carbon dioxide – generated by industrial processes – is causing the Earth to get warmer. That there is a continuous increase in global temperature is by no means certain. Nevertheless, 20th century data does indeed suggest a correlation between carbon dioxide concentration and average global temperature. Could this be a case of cause and effect? Increase in concentration of carbon dioxide actually follows temperature rises rather than the reverse. If there is any cause and effect, it would appear that it is the temperature rises which causes the increase in carbon dioxide – possibly by warmer oceans dissolving less CO2. Perhaps it is time to celebrate rather than denigrate this strange and wonderful gas that our Magnificent Creator God designed for our benefit!!! |
| 10/2/2022 | Not only is the human brain the most complex structure in the universe, it is also one of the busiest. In fact, during intense concentration, your brain can burn as many calories as your muscles do during exercise! Intense thinking can literally be as exhausting as a physical workout! More than 100,000 chemical reactions go on in your brain every second. Among the brain’s many jobs is chemist. The brain produces more than 50 psychoactive drugs. Some of these are associated with memory, others with intelligence, still others are sedatives. Endorphin is the brain’s painkiller and it’s three times more potent than morphine. Serotonin is produced by the brain to help keep our moods under control. The brain also makes dopamine. Dopamine makes people more talkative and excitable. Another hormone regulates hunger. The brain is also a radio transmitter that sends out measurable electrical wave signals. In fact, the brain continues to send these signals for as long as 37 hours after death! Our tiny knowledge of the brain is enough to show us that this incredible organ is no accident. The brain is much more than a powerful testimony to our Magnificent Creator God. Its incredible powers convince us that there is much more to existence than this material life. However, we can learn only from the Word of God about eternal life through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. Put your brain together with the Word of God today! |
| 10/1/2022 | If, of all the millions of living things on Earth, a few creatures happened to look like something they are not and this helped protect them, we might put it down to chance. However, the creation is filled with too many creatures who practice look-alike deception to put it down to chance. Africa’s southern deserts have a plant called living stones. In a desert, any vegetation can be a welcome source of food or moisture. In this setting, a plant that doesn’t look like a plant has an advantage. And living stones look like nothing more than just another rock in the sand. Wasps can be some of the nastiest insects in nature. An insect in Costa Rica called the mantispid looks very much like the feared wasp, even up close. Then again, the hover fly looks like a wasp and sounds like a wasp because the frequency of its wing beats is almost identical to a wasp. Treehoppers have a very odd body shape that comes to a point on top. Not only do they look like thorns, but they usually stay on bushes that have thorns, orienting their bodies on the branches just like true thorns. This effectively hides them from hungry birds. Larval plant hoppers use a different form of deception. They attach themselves in groups on branches, orienting their frilly and feathery bodies together so they look like a flower! The clever forethought and planning involved in nature’s deceptions rule out any thought that these creatures designed themselves but that it was our Magnificent Creator God Himself!!! |
| 9/30/2022 | Gold must be one of the most remarkable elements in the Periodic Table. Its chemical symbol is Au, its atomic number is 79, and its atomic mass is 196.967. It is a lustrous, yellow-colored metal, and is almost chemically inert. It is this lack of chemistry, coupled with its rarity, that gives it its value. Gold is almost completely unreactive to the sort of agents that normally corrode metals, such as water or acids. It will, however, react with aqua regia – a blend of nitric and hydrochloric acids. Because of this unreactivity, gold is found as a native metal, not as a compound or ore. Most gold that is mined is stored as bullion, but its attractiveness and monetary value make it useful in jewelry. Because gold has such a large atom, it has a great many electron orbitals. The outer orbitals are very large for atoms, so an electron in the 5d orbital can reach speeds approaching the speed of light. The transition of an electron from the 5d to 6s orbital requires a photon of energy. However, by analogy with the transition from 4d to 5s in silver, this ought not to alter the basic silver color of the metal. But the speed of the 5d orbital is such that there is a relativistic effect, causing this transition to absorb a photon in the blue range of the visible spectrum. With blue light thus absorbed, gold appears, well, gold-colored! I find it fascinating that, when looking at my gold wedding ring, I am seeing Einstein’s theory of relativity in action. Gold is a metal fit for a king. That is why the Wise Men brought some to the child Jesus. If this description of the intricate makeup of gold is confusing and hard to understand just remember that gold is only one tiny element of this universe that our Magnificent Creator God has made!!! |
| 9/29/2022 | Coldwater Lake in Washington State looks so pretty, nestled between the mountains. This scene of tranquility is very popular among the fishing community. A better view of Coldwater Lake can be had by climbing the steep trail up to Coldwater Ridge. As you reach the top, you look back at the magnificent views of the Mount St Helens with its gaping crater, forever marred by having lost such a large portion of itself in the violent eruption of May 1980. In the other direction, you see the lake, which did not even exist before the eruption. The devastation caused by the volcano blocked Coldwater Creek so that the valley filled with water. So you keep walking along the ridge, and you espy a different sort of devastation. Huge pieces of rusting machinery can be seen. This machinery was there to aid with logging processes because this ridge used to be covered with forest before the eruption. The blast from the volcano had a speed of up to 350 mph as it hit the ridge, knocking down the trees and sending the logging machinery into a spin so that it landed in its current position. If the eruption had occurred on the Monday or the Saturday, one can imagine that this machinery would have been operated by many loggers, causing far more deaths than actually occurred on that Sunday morning. Out of that violence has come the tranquility of the lake scenery, just as out of the violence of the worldwide Flood, God brought a message of hope and mercy to a world reborn. We thank our Magnificent Creator God for the beauty of His creation and the way He can bring beauty out of brokenness!!! |
| 9/28/2022 | Some of the most fascinating discoveries in recent years have to do with our growing knowledge of plant communication. New research continues to reveal even more amazing facts about the exquisite intricacy of God’s marvelous work. Naturalists have long noted that plants often choose to grow at precise spacing from each other and plants of other species. Scientists at the University of California at Santa Barbara theorized that this precision might be a result of communication between the roots of these plants. So they devised an experiment to find out. They designed a network of interlocking, partially transparent growth boxes. These boxes allowed them to watch how root growth took place in single plants, two plants of the same species, and plants of different species. They discovered that when burro weed roots neared the roots of the creosote bush, the roots of the creosote bush slowed the growth of the nearing roots. They also discovered that burro weed roots will stop growing when they encounter other burro weed roots. This allows the plants to send their roots out where they will not compete with their own kind. Most astonishing is the discovery that burro weed roots continue to grow if they encounter other roots from their own plant. The amazed scientists noted that this means that even plants may have a sense of self. When the Bible tells us that the whole creation praises its Creator, it certainly suggests that at least every living thing has a sense of itself as well as its Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 9/27/2022 | For centuries, Asian cooks have wrapped meat, sushi and candy in bamboo bark. Though the reason for this practice seems to have been forgotten, humans evidently once knew what modern science is rediscovering about bamboo. Chemists have succeeded in extracting the natural chemicals in bamboo bark. What they found was not one or two but four natural chemicals in the bark that inhibit bacteria, especially staph germs. These natural antibacterial agents are now under study for possible use as natural food and cosmetic preservatives. If these natural chemicals can be shown to kill bacteria and yet be harmless to people, the door will be open for an entirely new class of natural food preservatives. The question naturally arises about how Asians originally came to use bamboo in the kitchen. Is it possible that thousands of years ago, when ancestors of today’s Asians headed east from the Tower of Babel, humans knew that bamboo would help keep their food from spoiling? Much of what we are learning today was already known to a humanity that was only a few generations removed from our first and once-perfect parents. Remember that the perfection with which humanity was created was more than moral perfection. Because Adam and Eve had a perfect knowledge of God, they also had a perfect understanding of all that He had made. While we cannot be perfect except through the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ, it is also true that the fear of the Lord – our Magnificent Creator God – is the beginning of all wisdom!!! |
| 9/26/2022 | A family of fish that live in the depths of the sea actually go fishing—pole, dangling bait, and all. This is only natural, since they, like people who go fishing, like to eat fish. This group of fish is collectively called the angler fish. The front dorsal spine in the female angler is located on her head. It is much longer than any of the other dorsal fins and has a fleshy bait on the end. When hungry, she sits very still and dangles the bait in front of her mouth. It doesn’t take long before something swims up to investigate this bait as its possible lunch. But before it can think about taking a sample, the angler has turned the tables and eaten her own lunch. Of course this system wouldn’t work very well in the pitch darkness one mile below the surface of the ocean without one other special provision. Like many other fish at such depths, the angler is able to generate her own light. In her case, only the bait lights up, so she stays invisible to her victims. The chemical method she uses to create the light is nearly 100% efficient! In His imaginative creativity, God was pleased to place creatures a mile below the surface of the sea. Yet in His mercy He has provided them with everything they need to make their living there. Likewise, you may not know why God has placed you into a particular situation right now. If He so cares for the creatures a mile below the waves, how much more does He care for You. And He has even included a light for you in His Son Jesus Christ! How wonderful is our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 9/25/2022 | A revolutionary design in metal-cutting blades is changing the metal-working industry. These blades don’t cut like a knife. Instead, the blade is fixed in one position while the metal to be shaped spins on a lathe. This new-style blade stays sharp six times longer than the old blade design. And where titanium used to make the old-style cutting blades dull almost the second they were used, the new blades last up to 30 minutes. This wonderful new blade was developed by two engineers who got the original idea from a rat. You see, rats’ teeth always have a sharp edge. Engineers learned that this is because their teeth are hard on one side and soft on the other. So as they wear, they always keep a sharp edge. Using this principle for metal-cutting has lowered costs and increased productivity, since the blades don’t have to be changed as often. Beginning in Job 39 God humbles Job with several chapters of questions about the wise designs found in the animal kingdom. God’s message is, “Job, if you think you’re so smart, who created all of this with such wisdom?” Even rats’ teeth are created with such wisdom that, once we learned the principle, our technology was greatly improved. Our Magnificent Creator God left nothing out of His creation that would help us live and learn in this magnificent world He made just for us!!! |
| 9/24/2022 | Evolutionary naturalism paints the picture of life as if it were a haphazard series of accidents that just barely resulted in a range of living things that just manage to survive. This fanciful picture destroys our sense of wonder over the sophisticated engineering designs in nature. Consider the mystery of flight, for example. Some evolutionists suggest that perhaps birds are descended from lizards that fell out of trees a lot. Other evolutionists say that birds came from lizards who grew wings—not for flight, but to chase down and catch insects. Yet, they have little to say about the fact that we humans have come by most of our sophisticated knowledge about flight from studying the birds. Then there is the problem, for the evolutionist, of how flight accidentally evolved so many times for so many creatures. Scientists studying the dragonfly are learning even more secrets of flight. Our best high-performance aircraft can barely lift themselves off the ground. However, the dragonfly can lift 15 times his own weight into the air. Scientists have learned that this is because the dragonfly’s wings are designed to create little whirlwinds over their top surfaces. These whirlwinds are the secret to creating incredible lifting power. Ways are now being planned to apply this secret to new aircraft designs. The engineering excellence found in nature and from which we have learned so much even in this day of interplanetary probes, is not witness to a mindless process of evolution, but to a wise and mindful and Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 9/23/2022 | It seems like science fiction to suggest that if someone typed your name into a computer, misspelling your name, the computer would find it and correct it. Yet the genetic code within each of your cells is an even more sophisticated information storage and transmission system. Not only does your genetic code store far more information in a microscopic space than our largest computers can, it has a built-in error correction system. Scientists have found a number of key enzymes in the cell that have just one job—find and correct errors in the genetic code. Those errors can creep in because of radiation, chemicals, or other reasons. These enzymes faithfully correct any errors, preventing mutations. But these are the very ones scientists thought could cause evolution—before they discovered this process. One scientist who studied these enzymes said science has no explanation for how this process could have evolved naturally. Scientists also say they don’t know how life could have continued without this genetic proofreading and correction. Only our Magnificent Creator God could have been wise enough to design an information system that can correct errors within itself. Even we human beings have not figured out how to do this with our simplest computers. Asking us to believe that blind chance and natural law could have done it certainly strains the credibility of science!!! |
| 9/22/2022 | Why did the Wise Men bring myrrh as a gift for Jesus, along with their gifts of frankincense and gold? This is an interesting question, and many people have pondered the meanings of all the gifts given to Jesus, but I think it is unlikely that we can give a definitive answer. Myrrh is a resin from the bark of certain varieties of the commiphora tree. When the bark splits (or is deliberately tapped), a fluid is exuded. This hardens in the air into lumps, called tears. The solid tears are reddish or golden brown in color. They are sweet-smelling but bitter to the taste. When consumed, myrrh has a stimulant effect. It is also clear from the Old Testament that myrrh had value. When Joseph was sold to the Ishmaelites by his brothers, that group of travelers was on their way to Egypt “with their camels bearing gum, balm, and myrrh” (Genesis 37:25). Later, when Jacob was sending his sons to Egypt for food (where they would unknowingly meet Joseph again), he urged them to take a number of items of value, including myrrh. In John 19:39, Nicodemus brought myrrh and aloes with him to Jesus’ grave. Its aromatic properties presumably would make it ideal as an embalming material. Therefore, it could be said that myrrh speaks of death. Perhaps the Wise Men were being prophetic, when they brought Jesus gold, for His kingship, frankincense to represent prayers, because Jesus was and is God, and myrrh to represent the fact that He was to die to cleanse repentant sinners of their sins. We praise You, Magnificent Creator God, because You left nothing to chance. You gave us Your Son, Jesus, to be the propitiation for our sins!!! |
| 9/21/2022 | Late at night, in hundreds of thousands of homes around the country, people are watching a bewildering array of monster movies. In these films, shadowy and not-so-shadowy monsters attack, possess or inhabit their victims. These stories are make-believe. However, in our real world, there is a fungus that does all these things. These fungi grow in and on the bodies of insects. They begin their work when a single fungus spore lands on the body of an insect. The spore germinates by growing thread-like filaments through a weak spot or some other entry point in the insect’s outer shell. Once inside the insect, these thread-like filaments grow into the insect’s nervous system. Scientists have been amazed by the apparent fact that the fungus then seems to take over the insect, actually controlling its movements. It seems that the fungus directs its victim to climb a convenient plant to a height that will make the next generation of spores likely to land on another unsuspecting insect. It is there that the insect dies and the fungus produces its spores. To the evolutionist, the ability of such a so-called “low” form of life to possess and control a more evolved form of life is totally without explanation. To those of us who believe in creation, intelligence is not a matter of evolution. Intelligence is the gift of a Creator. Only He has all intelligence and wisdom. There are no limits to His creativity as He provides His creatures with ways to proclaim Himself as their Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 9/20/2022 | The strange partnership between the snapping shrimp and the goby is absolutely necessary if both creatures are to survive. The nearly blind shrimp relies on the goby, a small fish, in the same way a blind person relies on his Seeing Eye dog. The goby relies on the safety of the complex tunnel system the shrimp digs. The shrimp is well designed for digging. Once a tunnel is started, the shrimp can dig a burrow large enough for both itself and the goby within a few hours. Each of its five pairs of legs is specialized. The first pair of claws is designed for carrying sediment out of the burrow. The second pair of legs is designed to probe for and clean objects as well as scratching sediment from walls. Pairs three, four and five are walking legs that also work well for scratching material from tunnel walls. On its abdomen, the shrimp has several appendages that allow it to move rapidly to protection. Other appendages can create water currents that shift sand back from the digging site. The snapping shrimp, which is less than two inches long, can dig a system of tunnels covering several square feet within a few days. The burrow will have several entrances, as much as four feet apart. All lead to a chamber at the deepest point of the system. Our Magnificent Creator God has given both the goby and the shrimp different gifts that they both need to live. If they did not share their gifts with each other, neither could survive. |
| 9/19/2022 | There’s an old saying that people seldom remember how rapidly the job was done, but they do appreciate good workmanship. However, the staggering variety and number of things created by God did not limit the elegance of His fine workmanship. The relationship between the snapping shrimp and a fish called the goby is a good example of the Creator’s attention to the finest detail. The snapping shrimp has very poor eyesight, while the goby has excellent eyesight. Both share the same burrow, which is dug by the shrimp and guarded by the goby. The shrimp uses the goby as a blind person uses a Seeing Eye dog. Whenever the shrimp is outside its burrow, it always keeps one antenna on the goby. The shrimp stays hidden inside the burrow if the goby should temporarily swim away. When danger approaches, the goby signals and disappears inside the burrow. The shrimp is right behind him. Neither the goby nor the shrimp can survive without each other, so pairs are established for life when both goby and shrimp are very young. In order for this system to work, both goby and shrimp reproductive systems, which differ greatly, are synchronized so that shrimp and goby youngsters are ready to pair at the same time. This astonishing relationship shows us how our Magnificent Creator God’s standards of excellence bring His love to every corner of the creation!!! |
| 9/18/2022 | Roman Vishniac is a renowned photographer of microscopic scenes. One of his favorite subjects is one of the so-called simplest forms of life. This “simple” life, the protozoan, is supposedly the ancestor of all living things. However, Vishniac has noted that the protozoan is neither simple nor archaic in character. This creature carries out all the functions of life that we require millions of cells to sustain—all within a single cell. There is a parallel in technology. The first adding machines were large and heavy contraptions. As these mechanical adding machines became smaller, they had to be more cleverly designed because they were smaller. The first electronic calculators were even smaller and lighter than their mechanical brothers. But they were still much larger and simpler than calculators today. As calculators have decreased in size, they have had to be more cleverly designed because they are smaller. Vishniac has learned that the so-called “simple” one-celled creatures are not simple at all. This is because they must carry out the business of life within the limits of their small size. This has not swayed him from evolution. However, this fact has convinced him that current theories are wrong. You see, evolution is in trouble if there are no “simple” forms of life. We believe that this clear evidence that there are no simple forms of life—evidence powerful enough to sway the experts—supports the Bible’s claim that all forms of life were created in finished form by a wise and Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 9/17/2022 | Have you ever watched ducks out on an icy lake paddling around in the near-freezing water. They will spend much of the day in that one spot with the temperature well below freezing, and yet the cold doesn’t seem to bother them. Perhaps on shore there are some sparrows hopping around in the snow. One wonders: why don’t birds need shoes and socks? If you or I ran around with bare feet and legs when the temperature was below freezing, it would not be very long before we had a good case of frostbite. We could even lose so much body heat that our very lives would be threatened. Birds have a network of arteries that all blood going into their legs must enter. These arteries are interwoven with the veins returning from the foot. When the blood going to the foot enters this structure, called a “wonder net,” its temperature is 106° F. The blood returning from the foot at the same time is only 37°F. The warm blood passing through the net reheats the cold blood coming from the foot before it enters the body. The result is that the bird loses very little body heat. So the blood going into the foot never becomes dangerously cold in normal winter weather. The wisdom of this design is obvious. Could birds have survived having their feet frozen off before they learned to evolve this special arrangement? Our only conclusion can be that there is a Magnificent Creator God who cares for all of His creation, including you and me!!! |
| 9/16/2022 | We are beginning to discover more about how Neanderthal people were not primitive subhuman cavemen, as popular-style evolutionary documentaries show. Instead, they were actually fully human – and the evidence for this is so conclusive that even serious evolutionists accept the fact today. It appears that Neanderthals cooked. They didn’t just eat raw or burnt meat. It appears that food remains were seasoned with herbs. They also used nuts and legumes, among other plant-based edibles. Perhaps they were familiar with the Keto Diet! Those interested in natural remedies often recommend using certain tree barks as an infusion or just chewed, as a painkiller. This is because such barks – I use willow bark – are a source of salicylic acid, which is closely related to aspirin. It has even been found that Neanderthals consumed the mold penicillium, which we now know produces the well-known antibiotic penicillin. Their clothing included furs, required to combat European conditions during the post-Flood Ice Age. But they also seemed to wear pendants and other jewelry. An excellent, recent article in Creation magazine by Robert Carter and Lita Cosner, gives links to scientific papers on these and other civilizing traits attributed to Neanderthals. Though the authors are not Bible-believing Christians, their article reminds us that Neanderthals, being human, were descended from Adam through Noah, and made by our Magnificent Creator God just as we are! |
| 9/15/2022 | Think of the Arctic and you probably think about polar bears. Those magnificent, big, white carnivores are probably pictured in your mind standing on snow and ice, where they can be difficult to see. The Arctic is the realm of the bear, and this is reflected in its name. The word “Arctic” is derived from the Greek word arktos, meaning bear. There are layers of meaning here. Certainly, the Arctic is home to the polar bear, but also the constellation Ursa Minor, the Little Bear, contains the star Polaris, which is the Pole Star, being directly above the North Pole, so if you were traveling “towards the Bear”, or Bearwards, you would be traveling North. Perhaps the most iconic pictures of polar bears published have been those showing one or two bears clinging precariously to tiny icebergs barely able to support them. The implication of such images is that the habitat of the bears is disappearing. What would be the culprit that is melting the ice? Presumably, it would be our old friend Climate Change. So what would a bear do if the ice under its feet melted away? I guess it would have to swim! Fortunately, polar bears are strong swimmers. Some bears have been tracked swimming up to ten days. Contrary to popular opinion, recent research has shown that many polar bear populations increased during times of receding ice. In the last couple of years, ice sheets have expanded again. Climate Change Alarmists notwithstanding, conditions continue to underline that “while the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” Our Magnificent Creator God’s perfect Master Plan covers all events having to do with changes in nature and how all humans and animals will be able to cope!!! |
| 9/14/2022 | When we compare ourselves with many of the other living things on this Earth, our abilities are not very impressive. A camel can carry 1,000 pounds 30 miles through the desert every day. As a human being, I become tired even thinking about walking 30 miles with empty pockets. The ostrich can run at 30 miles per hour, faster than my car might go during rush hour. The Indian swift can fly at more than 100 miles per hour. The elephant’s trunk has 40,000 muscles. This is 70 times the number of muscles in your entire body. Yet, his trunk can bulldoze a tree or pick up a pin. Many of us can’t do either one on the first try. The flea can jump 350 times its own length, a total of 13 inches. This is equivalent to our jumping 2,000 feet into the air. Most of us can’t jump more than two feet off the ground. As it works out, 13 inches is just about right if you are looking for a nice warm dog on which to raise a family. A tiny insect called the midge beats its wings an amazing 133,000 times per minute. That’s a hundred times faster than you can blink your eye. Humans can use their superior intellect to build the machines they need. With those machines, they can outdo any one of these creatures. But God simply made a gift to the animals of the specialized abilities they needed. God expects us to follow His example and design and build what we need. If we look carefully, we will see that our Magnificent Creator God has given us all the materials and all the ideas we need within the creation. No one can say that He does not care what we do with our lives on Earth!!! |
| 9/13/2022 | Have you ever thought what a strange material water actually is? A water molecule comprises of three atoms – two hydrogens and one oxygen. Oxygen is an element in Group VI of the Periodic Table; Group VI also contains the elements sulfur, selenium, and tellurium, in increasing order of size (oxygen is the smallest. Hydrogen can also form compounds with these elements: H2S, H2Se, H2Te. These have the boiling points -60.7, -41.5, and -2.2deg Celcius. Therefore, all these compounds are gases at room temperature. If we were following the size of the Group VI atom only, then water should have a boiling point considerably lower than that of H2S. But it doesn’t. In fact, the boiling point of water is higher than all those other compounds, at 100 deg C (or 212 deg F). This, of course, is not the only anomalous property of water. The solid form of water – ice – floats on liquid water. So what, you might say. Well, the solid form of every other liquid there is always sinks in its liquid. If you have ever allowed molten candle wax to cool down, for example, you will notice it freezes from the bottom up. Nearly all liquids behave that way – except water! In short, the most common liquid in the world – the one that we require most for life – behaves like no other liquid. It is almost as if it were specially designed! Our Magnificent Creator God designed the Earth – including water – for us to inhabit!!! |
| 9/12/2022 | You have 30,000,000,000,000 individual cells in your body. That’s thirty trillion, and you have about two hundred different types of cells, including red blood cells, skin cells, nerve cells (neurons), and fat cells. Each type of cell performs a vital role in keeping your body healthy. As amazing as it seems, the average human body makes between two and three million new red blood cells every second. Oh, how we want each of our thirty trillion cells to be devoted to Jesus. We’re to love the Lord with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. As amazing as our incredibly-designed bodies are, we also have minds, personalities, and spirits. And we have gifts, talents, abilities, and strengths. The Lord gave you the wonderful workmanship of YOU so you could serve Him. Today, present your body to Him as a living sacrifice and let your life be transformed by the renewing of your mind, which happens as you meditate on His Word. Let Him be Lord of all there is of you. We are more than the chemicals that form our body. We are a special creation of God. Man is our Magnificent Creator God’s masterpiece—His workmanship, the crown of creation! |
| 9/11/2022 | It comes as quite a surprise to discover that the word locust does not actually indicate any separate species. Locusts are really just grasshoppers, but the term refers to their well-known swarming behavior. Under normal conditions, locusts are solitary insects. In normal times, they cause little or no problem to agriculture. But sometimes, conditions are not normal. After times of drought, the locusts seem to produce far more nymphs than would be normal. These then begin to swarm as the insects suddenly become gregarious. These swarms of locusts cause terrible problems for agriculture. In swarming conditions, the insects turn to eating crops and can devastate whole fields in short order. The transformation seems to be caused by increased body concentrations of serotonin, and this, in turn, is produced when there are multiple touches of the hind legs by other locusts, caused by overcrowding. Towards the end of 2019 and into 2020, large swarms of locusts affected parts of Africa and Asia, and these were so large that they brought to mind the plague of locusts in Egypt, mentioned in Exodus. For these reasons, locusts were, in the Bible, a symbol of destruction. In Joel 2:25, we read: “I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent among you” (Joel 2:25). The destruction caused is to be reversed by the blessing and favor of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 9/10/2022 | If you had painful skin, one of the last things you would apply to it would be hot peppers. Not only do hot peppers burn the mouth, some can even blister the skin. Yet in South America, ground hot peppers have been used for centuries to help relieve pain. Scientists have discovered the active ingredient in peppers that relieves skin pain. This substance blocks the pain signals that come from the nerves just under the surface of the skin. The “hot pepper” sauce for skin not only causes no pain, it relieves pain that doesn’t respond to any other treatment. It’s available in creams and ointments that, tests show, relieve pain in two out of three people. Conventional wisdom says that medicines that are found in natural plants were discovered by accident. Someone might accidentally discover a relationship between a person’s having eaten a certain plant and then getting well. They would try the same plants on others with the same disease. If they found that there were more cures, the plant would be remembered as a folk medicine. The “hot pepper” pain reliever for skin tells us that there’s a problem with this theory. People who have a painful skin condition are not likely to apply a pepper sauce. Doing that would be expected to make their skin more painful and cause it to blister. However, it’s possible that our Magnificent Creator God originally gave humans some knowledge of the cures for our ills – cures that He wisely built into creation! |
| 9/9/2022 | Luke 11:49-51 “Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send them prophets and apostles, and some of them they shall slay and persecute: that the blood of all the prophets, which was shed from the foundation of the world, may be required of this generation; from the blood of Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, which perished between the altar and the temple: verily I say unto you, It shall be required of this generation.” Jesus described Abel as a prophet. He referred to all the prophets who had been killed, “from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah” (Luke 11:51). Prophecy refers to that forth telling, which comes from the Holy Spirit. The words of the prophet are the words of God. Prophecy can sometimes, though not always, be predictive. However, although Cain had a few things to say in conversation with God, there is no recording of any words of Abel at all, let alone any words of prophecy. So what was the prophecy of Abel? Abel was the world’s first murder victim. If you accept the early chapters of Genesis to be historically true – which you should – then there had been no previous human death. If evolution were true, then there would have been previous deaths, so Abel’s death was nothing significant. In a word, the death of Abel is only significant if it really was the very first human death. God said to Cain, “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” The prophecy of Abel was his shed blood. His blood poured out onto the ground points to the much more important blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ to be poured out on the ground for our sins. In Hebrews 12:24, we read, “You have come… to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.” Our Magnificent Creator God not only made everything perfect He gave the most perfect thing He owned – His life – for every one of us on the cross of Calvary!!! |
| 9/8/2022 | “There can’t possibly have been a worldwide Flood. Where would all the water have gone after the Flood?” This is a common objection to belief in the biblical account of the Flood of Noah’s time. Did the water drain away, or evaporate? This misconception is because our society is very Western-centered. As a child, growing up in Britain, all pictures of the Earth would have London at their center. This is, after all, where the 0º longitude line is! In America, most similar images would show the United States at the center. But what if we center our image on the Pacific Ocean? Then we will see a hemisphere almost entirely made up of ocean. This reminds us that nearly three quarters of the Earth’s surface is water. What if all the existing water on the Earth could be spread out? French diver and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau used to say: Were the crust of earth to be leveled – with great mountain ranges like the Himalayas and ocean abysses like the Mariana Trench evened out – no land at all would show above the surface of the sea. Earth would be covered by a uniform sheet of water – more than 10,000 feet deep! This agrees with what the Bible says in Psalm 104:8: The mountains rose, the valleys [or deeps] sank down to the place that you appointed for them. The rising of the mountains and the lowering of the ocean deeps at the end of the Flood easily explains where all the floodwater went. It didn’t go anywhere. It is all still on planet Earth. Our Magnificent Creator God’s Master Plan provides for every situation we have ever encountered or ever will! |
| 9/7/2022 | It is notable that the first giving of the Gospel was spoken to Satan, but in the hearing of Adam and Eve. It is also notable that the first Gospel was given immediately after the first sin. God, in His mercy, did not leave mankind for a moment without a means of salvation. The Lord God said to the serpent… I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. (Genesis 3:15) The word translated “offspring” is zera and elsewhere always refers to the offspring of the father. So, who could be the offspring of the woman? The strong implication is that this will be a man who does not have an earthly father, but does have an earthly mother. We therefore assume that this is a prophecy of the coming Messiah, Jesus. Also in the Old Testament, whenever there is a direct appearance of God, we assume that this is a pre-incarnate appearance of the Second Person of the Trinity. Therefore, this announcement of the Gospel in Genesis 3:15 is possibly the Son of God prophesying His own coming as a man, stating that He will bruise or crush the head of the serpent. Did Adam and Eve believe this Gospel? I think it is possible that they did. But whether or not Adam and Eve believed, the fact remains that our Magnificent Creator God provided the way of salvation right from the beginning, as soon as sin had entered the world!!! |
| 9/6/2022 | Rest well last night? Keep both your eyes closed? Settle down into rhythmic breathing? What if you had to keep one eye open all night and make a conscious decision every time you needed to breathe? That’s how dolphins sleep. Their breathing is not automatic; they must decide when to take their next breath. God designed them that way, but He also gave them some pretty amazing abilities. Dolphins allow only half of their brain to sleep at a time, and they close only one eye at a time. When the left eye is closed, the right half of the brain sleeps. When the right eye is closed, the left side of the brain gets some… well, shut-eye. They alternate from one side of the brain to the other, getting the rest they need yet never fully losing consciousness. The fish of the sea can speak to us of God’s glory. His natural world is full of curious wonders, and the genius of creation moves us to worship. Today look for an animal—any animal, from the kitten in your kitchen to the sparrow outside your window—and take a moment to praise our Magnificent Creator God for His inventive genius! |
| 9/5/2022 | Popular science information websites sometimes reveal fascinating facts. The Science Daily website recently published an article suggesting that water is not one, but two liquids. One would have thought that we knew everything that there was to know about water. It covers 70 percent of the Earth’s surface. Up to 60 percent of the human body is made up of water. It is essential for life, and we are familiar with it in our everyday life, in ponds, streams, rivers, lakes, and so many different bodies of water worldwide. However, we are also familiar with the fact that water has many anomalous properties which set it apart from other liquids. A team of researchers at Sweden’s Stockholm University have discovered, using X-ray analysis, that there are two different arrangements for water molecules in liquid water, especially at low temperatures, just above the melting point of ice. We know that if water had a melting point consistent with the small size of its molecule alone, its melting point would be very low. However, water molecules associate together in different formations because of the so-called hydrogen-bonding between molecules. Apparently, at low temperatures, this can cause such a high association between molecules that the liquid, or at least portions of it, can become a thick, viscous liquid just as it freezes into ice. At once simple and highly complex, molecular and inter-molecular arrangements in water cause this common, yet mysterious liquid, to do so many things for us that we tend to take for granted. That such a seemingly simple material can still have properties for us to research shows something of the creativity of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 9/4/2022 | Scientists are learning that even the lowly bacteria have mind and memory. New research is showing that mind, memory, brain, and personality did not evolve. These can be found in the lowliest of creatures, including the bacteria. Another sign of intelligence in a life form is the ability to learn. Using attracting and repelling substances, scientists have found that bacteria can learn about their surroundings and draw conclusions. Follow-up tests showed that they later remember what they learned. Scientists have even found that younger bacteria learn better than older ones. If some things are not learned when young, they never can be learned! It seems that it’s hard to teach an old bacterium new tricks! The biggest surprise of all came when scientists discovered that bacteria have what the researchers called individual personality. They are mystified about how bacteria, each with the same genetic structure and from the same environment, can develop unique quirks in behavior. Because we find individual personality even in the lowly bacteria, we know that did not evolve. That God would give even a bacterium the gift of personality shows us something about His mind toward us. Nothing is so small or unimportant that it escapes His attention. Since He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to rescue us from the decay that is in the world because of sin, there is no force too great for Him to overcome. Surely He is a Magnificent Creator God of details as well as a God of love, Who is concerned about every individual among us!!! |
| 9/3/2022 | “For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof.” Psalm 50:10-12 “If God exists, why is there so much suffering in the world?” Many of us are used to such accusations from atheists, but, unfortunately, many Christians do not know how to answer the point. Christians would be right to point to Genesis 3 and show that evil came into the world by disobedience – the disobedience of Adam – which polluted the entire world. However, there are some who object to this presentation of the Eden account on the grounds that, if God is a God of love and righteousness, how could He allow evil to happen in this way? This question leads some, incorrectly, to assume that God cannot know for sure what is going to happen in the future. The problem, if such it is, is better resolved by reasoning in biblical categories. Thinking in categories appears to be a lost art. Our error is in judging God by human standards even though God rebukes us, in Psalm 50, declaring: “You thought that I was just like you.” God is not like us, even though we are made in His image. We understand events through the passage of time, but God is transcendent over time. Therefore, to us it appears that God, in His Sovereignty, wills two different things; He permits evil but is not responsible for it – we are. If we do not fully understand this, we remind ourselves that His thoughts are so much higher than ours. Our magnificent Creator God exceeds anything we can comprehend with our human minds which is why we have faith in an omniscient and omnipotent Father!!! |
| 9/2/2022 | When Isaac Asimov wrote his famous robot stories, we all thought we knew what robots looked like. They looked like us. Indeed, many of Asimov’s robots began to look indistinguishable from human beings, such as the iconic R Daneel Olivaw, who partnered with detective Elijah Baley in the sci-fi crime novel The Caves of Steel. As real-life robots began to appear in industry, making cars and operating other machinery, they did not look quite so anthropomorphic. Now in the 21st century, self-mobile robots are not necessarily built to walk like people. For example, we have already seen tiny flying robots about the size and shape of a cockroach – and liable to be just as beloved! A more recent robotic development has seen soft robots built to imitate jellyfish. Two layers of elastic polymer are joined – one stressed and one unstressed. Between the layers, air can be pumped, reversing the stressing and enabling the robot to swim through water. A third stress-free layer provides direction, and the whole machine is able to lift and carry fairly large cargos. The video accompanying the research shows strips of this robotic material being used out of water as a prehensile grip that would have sensitivity approaching that of human hands. As with all new technologies, it is to be hoped that good uses are found for it. God has given us dominion over this world, and technological developments, such as the soft robot, are methods by which humans can operate under this divine mandate. What a Magnificent Creator God we serve using the vast array of inventions He has taught us to make!!! |
| 9/1/2022 | In the early 1960s, some unusually blue star-like objects were observed in the universe, giving out radio frequencies along with visible light. There were a number of them. Through telescopes, they appeared to have fuzzy boundaries. They were given the name Quasi-Stellar Radio Sources – and this was quickly abbreviated to quasars. Another odd feature of these objects was the existence, in their spectra, of emission lines, similar to those of stars, but at the “wrong” frequencies. The emission lines in normal stars were known to be due to hydrogen, but the lines in the quasar’s spectrum had a wavelength about 15% longer than that of hydrogen in other stars, or in the laboratory. It was eventually realized that this effect must be due to red shift – but a red shift bigger than anything that had previously been seen. An application of Hubble’s Law – which shows that the red shift is proportional to the object’s distance – showed that the quasar 3C 273 was over 2 billion light years away and was therefore over 100 times more luminous than typical stars within the same cluster. The existence of such amazing objects once again underlines for us how true it is that the heavens declare the glory of God. So many objects have now been discovered that astronomers give them numbers like 3C 273. How interesting it is, then, that the Bible tells us that our Magnificent Creator God knows the actual name of every single astronomical object!!! |
| 8/31/2022 | It was, they say, the “Great Dying” – supposedly 250 million years ago. 57% of all land-dwelling vertebrates became extinct. Yet, amidst the death and destruction of this event, a new group of animals arose. We call them the dinosaurs. One interesting evolutionary study suggests that this so-called Permian-Triassic Extinction was initially triggered by large-scale volcanic activity. An article on the ScienceDaily website explains it thus: Following the discovery of volcanic rocks of the same age as the extinction, volcanic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions had previously been suggested as an important contributor to this extinction event. How could they possibly know that these rocks are the same age? Volcanic rocks would be dated by radiometric methods; fossil-bearing rocks, by comparison with nearby other rocks, and estimating the ages by examining the fossils contained within. The article is also implying a massive climate change caused by volcanic CO2 emissions. In short, there is little or no evidence for the climate change, the CO2 emissions, or any correlation between the two. The Bible gives a very much shorter timescale than millions of years – a timescale of only just over 6,000 years. Also giving the lie to the evolutionary myth is the fact that death could not have occurred before Adam sinned. Instead, dinosaurs were magnificent land animals created by our Magnificent Creator God on Day Six of creation. |
| 8/30/2022 | Plants make cellulose. Cellulose is a type of natural plastic made of many sugar molecules linked together. Scientists have known for years how to use the natural plastic qualities of cellulose to make things like cellophane and rayon. Scientists have also known that animals generate a similar natural plastic called chitin. Like cellulose, chitin is a carbohydrate made of long chains of sugar molecules. Chitin is found in the shells of all insects and crustaceans, like crabs. Each year the crabmeat industry had thrown away thousands of tons of chitin because scientists couldn’t figure out how to extract chitin from the shells in a usable form. Finally in 1975 scientists discovered how to remove the chitin from shells and change its form so it could be made into whatever forms they needed. Suture thread made from chitin dissolves in the body. This means that stitches don’t have to be removed, and it can be more easily knotted than regular suture thread. Suture thread made from chitin also causes no allergic reaction, and it seems to promote healing. It’s hard to believe that a crab shell, which is usually thrown away, could do so much! Food processing companies are even using a chemical made from chitin to recover protein from wastewater. Almost everything in the creation seems to have numerous uses for human needs. This is testimony that our Magnificent Creator God has made this universe for us and that He cares about our needs. In the Bible we learn that He has provided for our greatest need through His Son, Jesus Christ. |
| 8/29/2022 | For many people, bats bring to mind words like “creepy,” “fangs,” “rabies,” and even “ugly.” However, over 450 years ago, Martin Luther marveled at the delicate beauty of the bat. He pronounced the creature an excellent witness to the skill and wisdom of the Creator. God must also like bats. Almost one-fourth of all mammals He created are bats! The flying fox bat has a wingspan of nearly six feet. Bumblebee bats, native to Thailand, are the smallest mammals known, weighing less than a penny. There are brilliantly patterned tropical bats called butterfly bats. And hundreds of species of tropical plants depend on bats as pollinators. Popular legend considers bats a serious part of the rabies problem. The truth is that raccoons, skunks, foxes, and even dogs and cats are more likely to have rabies. In fact, one study shows that in Pennsylvania you are more likely to find a rabid cow than a rabid bat. In reality, bats are delicate, helpful and intelligent creatures. A typical North American bat will eat about 600 mosquitoes an hour. Large colonies will consume between 250,000 and 500,000 pounds of insects per night! Bats can be trained, demonstrating their intelligence. And finally, an important warning. If you find sleeping bats, don’t disturb them. Even one such disturbance during sleep can be fatal since stored nutrition may be consumed by the disturbance before the next feeding cycle. So next time you see a bat, don’t recoil in fear. Rather, say a prayer of thanksgiving to the Magnificent Creator God who made both of you! |
| 8/28/2022 | One of the criticisms of solar power is that it is so variable. Clearly, a solar plant is going to produce no energy at night and an inadequate supply when the sky is cloudy. On the other hand, a suitable size plant could over-produce when sunlight is intense. Plants have a similar problem. The rapidly changing incidence of sunlight on their leaves could, conceivably, cause problems within the plant. However, researchers have discovered that plants have mechanisms to cope with these variations, and one such mechanism could answer the old question: “Why are plants green?” Plants produce high energy carbohydrate molecules from water vapor and carbon dioxide by the well-known process of photosynthesis. This endothermic reaction requires the input of energy in the form of light, and the reaction is catalyzed by the green dye chlorophyll. What many of us have not considered is why chlorophyll is green. White light is a mixture of all three primary colors – red, green and blue – which have increasing frequency and, hence, increasing energy, in that order. The remarkable thing about plants, therefore, is that they are absorbing light energy only at either end of the visible spectrum while rejecting – and reflecting – the middle of the spectrum, which is green. Researchers have shown that this selective absorption of certain frequencies minimizes “noise” and, therefore, enables the plant to cope with rapidly changing conditions of sunshine. Our Magnificent Creator God, in His Creation, has literally thought of everything. No wonder He said “and it was good”! |
| 8/27/2022 | Garlic. Even say the word and some people move away to give you some distance. Others gather around because, to them, garlic helps make the meal. Garlic has begun to attract the attention of medical researchers as well. At the Tagore Medical College in India, researcher Arun Bordia kept track of 432 heart attack survivors for three years. During that time, half of the survivors drank the juice from six to ten cloves of fresh garlic each day, while others took a garlic-scented drink with no garlic in it. Over the three-year period, the garlic group had 32% fewer heart attacks and 45% fewer deaths than the other group. Research in the United States with chickens, who metabolize cholesterol in much the same way as humans, suggests a reason for these results. Chickens that were fed aged garlic extract showed a 50% reduction in the kind of cholesterol that clogs arteries. Medical researchers are also looking at some interesting evidence that garlic may help prevent some forms of cancer, especially stomach cancer. When the Creator made the heavens and Earth, He knew that humans would disobey Him, destroying the creation with sin. He also knew that in doing so we would bring disease and death into the world. We can thank Him that He stocked the Earth with substances that could be used to treat some of the earthly effects of sin. However, we can thank our Magnificent Creator God even more joyfully that He provided the full cure for sin for each of us in the life, death and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ! |
| 8/26/2022 | Our eyes do more work and tell more about us than many people realize. These amazing organs are so closely tied into the brain that they have been referred to as part of the brain. Your eyes were among your first organs to form. Within four weeks of fertilization, an unborn infant’s eyes begin to form. Interestingly enough, many newborns can move their eyes independently of each other, which can be a shock to unsuspecting parents. Usually the eyes are working together within a few months. However, those eye muscles will get more of a workout during our lifetimes than any other voluntary muscle. During any 24-hour period, our eyes will move about 100,000 times. That’s equivalent to walking 50 miles every day! Studies have shown that people with dark eyes generally have faster reaction times than people with light-colored eyes. Brown-eyed people generally are better at tennis while blue-eyed people generally do better at golf. Our eyes secrete different kinds of tears. Normal tears contain bacteria-fighting chemicals produced by cells in the lining of the eyelid. Emotional tears contain hormones released by the body in response to stress, including a natural painkiller. One more eye fact: The vitamin A in carrots is necessary for the proper working of the rods in your eye. The rods themselves are responsible for night vision. On a clear, dark night a healthy eye can see the light from a single candle 25 miles away! Our Magnificent Creator God spoke His Master Plan into existence, including the features of sight, with no effort at all!!! |
| 8/25/2022 | “Dog bites man” is not an unusual headline. However, “Man bites dog” would usually get people’s attention. If that’s true, the headline “Leeches teach physicians” should capture everyone’s attention. Physicians used leeches in bloodletting treatments well into the 19th century. They were used to treat everything from headaches to heart disease. As the 20th century matured, the medical use of leeches became not only a memory but a symbol of how backward medicine used to be. Now, as the 21st century is underway, leeches are again a part of modern medicine. To obtain their food, leeches inject a powerful blood thinner called hirudin. This hirudin is what interests modern medical researchers in leeches. Doctors have for many years been using a blood thinner called heparin to dissolve blood clots, such as those associated with heart attacks. But researchers are finding that hirudin is ten times as effective as heparin in dissolving clots, and in addition it works directly to prevent clotting. The studies continue. However, medical researchers are convinced that the blood thinner which leeches taught them how to make offers a powerful medicine. Should the possibilities presented by this modern medicine be realized, many lives that are now lost due to blood clotting may soon be routinely saved. Our Magnificent Creator God of the heavens and Earth is so wise and generous that He can teach even modern science some new things through a seemingly simple creature like the leech! |
| 8/24/2022 | They are the only cells in the human body that repeatedly die and self-regenerate throughout life. They are probably the only cells in the body that inspired a Broadway play named after them. And science considers them so interesting that several branches of science are studying them. I am talking about hair cells. As scientists are learning more about hair, they are coming to greater appreciation of, as one researcher put it, hair’s bewildering biology. A Harvard molecular biologist admitted that one of the reasons we know so little about hair is that scientists have avoided studying this complex structure. The average scalp has about 100,000 hairs growing at any one time. Each hair follicle produces hair for about two to five years, followed by a rest period of four to six months. A miniature assembly line of cells divides within the follicle, pushing older hair cells upward through the skin. Pigmentation is added as each new cell is produced. When the follicle is at rest, it shrivels and many of its cells die. However, seed cells, promising new life to the follicle, hide within it waiting for the signal to spring back to life. As humans grow older, the resting time of the follicles increases and growing time decreases, especially in men. So if you find yourself balding, you’re not necessarily losing your hair. It’s just that your hair is spending more time resting than it used to. God tells us that He cares so much about each one of us that He even knows how many hairs we have on our head – as well He should – our Magnificent Creator God designed and created every one of them!!! |
| 8/23/2022 | We don’t often think about our sense of smell. While our noses are on the job all the time, we note an odor only when it is unusual. Most of the time, the scents around us contribute, unnoticed, to our overall impression of our surroundings. It’s hard to remain tense at the beach. Simply the mention of the water and waves, the sand and sun brings back to memory the last trip to the beach and starts relaxing a person. However therapeutic these elements of the beach are, scientists have found that the one beach fixture that is probably most responsible for relaxing us is the smell. The smelly chemical that utility companies put in natural gas so that we can smell leaks is methyl mercaptan. This chemical is also produced by rotting meat. The human nose is extremely sensitive to this smell. We can detect as little as one 400-billionth of a gram of it in a quart of air. Doctors have long known that their noses are helpful in diagnosing disease. A person is brought into the emergency room in a coma. It’s very likely that the doctor will smell the patient’s breath as he tries to discover the problem. A sweet smell could indicate diabetes. The smell of ammonia could indicate a kidney malfunction. Arsenic poisoning smells like garlic. Diphtheria can be identified by a sickeningly sweet odor, and people with the plague smell like apples. A patient who smells like freshly baked bread may have typhoid. While we seldom think about our sense of smell, it’s a wonderful gift from our Magnificent Creator God for which we owe Him thanks!!! |
| 8/22/2022 | Do your eyes ever play tricks on you? Our eyes regularly play tricks on us with the help of our brains. Repeated research has shown that the images we see are not exactly what our eyes see. Our eyes and brains work together to construct the images we call sight. It’s not that our eyes are out to hoodwink us. Most of the time our eyes are working to help us. Working together, our brain and eyes add logical details to the images we see. Each of us has a blind spot in our vision because there are no vision cells where the optic nerve is. Instead of showing us a spot of nothing at the blind point in our field of vision, our brain invents an image from surrounding details. Your brain pulls the same trick on you when you proofread your completed manuscript. While others can still find typos, you may not. Your brain knows what you are saying and so it automatically shows you a repaired version, making many of your typing errors invisible. Your pupils can reveal your thoughts. Studies show that when seeing unpleasant scenes the pupils retract. Pleasant or interesting scenes cause the pupils to open wider. Charles Darwin wrote, “To suppose that the eye, with all of its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.” We don’t often agree with Charles Darwin, but this time we do! Our Magnificent Creator God has once more demonstrated that all things come as a result of His Master Plan! |
| 8/21/2022 | In recent years, our knowledge about Pluto has multiplied over and over again. Despite its status being downgraded to that of a mere Dwarf Planet rather than a planet proper, NASA determined to send out a space probe called New Horizons in January 2006. New Horizons finally reached Pluto in January 2015 and sent back invaluable data for about 18 months, with the result that we now probably know more about the surface of Pluto than that of parts of Earth’s ocean floor. Some surface evidence has caused scientists to think that maybe Pluto was a hot body when it came into existence. This heat could still be there, prompting speculation that there could be a liquid ocean beneath the icy frozen surface. Whenever water is discovered in the Solar System, thoughts turn to the possibility of life having evolved – especially as Pluto’s surface shows evidence of the existence of methane and ammonia molecules, which scientists always think could provide a synthetic route to organic compounds. Such interpretations ignore the fact that Earth was created separately from, and three days before, the creation of the other stars and planets. Our Magnificent Creator God in His wisdom chose the Earth to be the sole focus of life! |
| 8/20/2022 | The closest star to Earth is Alpha Centauri 26 trillion miles away. That is 26 with 12 zeros after it. 26,000,000,000,000. When our Magnificent Creator God creates something, distance is of no concern!!! |
| 8/19/2022 | Many people know that, despite its appearance, coral is actually a tiny animal. Even a small coral growth may be made up of billions of tiny animals, each living inside its limestone skeleton. What many people don’t know is that coral cannot live without the help of algae – a plant. Thousands of one-celled algae live in the tiny stomach of each coral polyp. The polyp requires the waste products of the algae to complete its nutrition requirements and to get the calcium with which it builds reefs. In return, the polyp’s stomach provides an ideal protected living place for the algae. Incidentally, the wonderful colors in living coral come from the algae in each polyp’s stomach. Evolutionists have said that it must take millions of years for the tiny polyps to build large coral reefs – like the 2,000-kilometer-long Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The Great Barrier Reef, incidentally, is considered the largest structure ever built by living organisms. However, it has now been shown that coral polyps can double their own weight in just over 10 days! As a result, the claim of millions of years for the age of the Great Barrier Reef has been reduced by a factor of 40! Many of the long-age figures claimed by evolutionists have had to be drastically revised downward as we have learned more about the creation. The resulting figures fit the Bible’s account of history much more closely. Our Magnificent Creator God developed His Master Plan – a perfect plan – before anything else and we shall live with it throughout eternity!!! |
| 8/18/2022 | It’s not very pretty, nor is it graceful, but Colombia’s rock-climbing catfish has a unique ability among fish. Perhaps there are days when a salmon, trying to make it up a waterfall, wishes that it could simply climb the rocks. The rock-climbing catfish’s climbing equipment begins with a powerful sucker mouth. Once it attaches itself to a rock, it can stay stuck despite any torrent. The rock-climbing catfish also has a bony plate on its belly that helps it hold its place while it repositions its sucker a little further up the rocks. The plate has fins with tiny, backward-pointing teeth. These teeth dig into the rock and prevent slipping. The catfish’s third special feature is a set of powerful muscles to control the plate. Once the rock-climbing catfish has attached its sucker to the rock, it pulls up its stomach plate and anchors it. With its body anchored, it moves its sucker up the face of the rock and repeats the process. Following this method, the rock-climbing catfish can walk its way up a 20-foot rock wall against the torrent of a waterfall in about 30 minutes! Our Magnificent Creator God thought of everything in His master design for every creature!!! |
| 8/17/2022 | “You can’t possibly believe that there was a worldwide Flood. If the Ark was floating above Mount Everest, the air would be so thin that they would not be able to breathe.” This objection to the Flood is a very common one that I hear frequently. It is also one that is most easily disproved. In fact, I am always very surprised that so many people think this must be a valid argument. The statement contains two incorrect presuppositions. Let’s deal with the easiest false presupposition first. This is the idea that an Ark floating above Mount Everest would suffer from thin air. But if the Earth’s oceans were all combined and at that height, they would have displaced the atmosphere. Therefore, the surface of the Flood would be the new sea level and the air would not be thin; the surface would be the new sea level, and the air would be as dense as at the coast. The second incorrect presupposition is that Mount Everest existed before the Flood. Psalm 104 shows us that the mountains were raised and the valleys, or rather ocean deeps, were lowered at the end of the Flood. Therefore, pre-Flood mountains would have been quite a lot lower than post-Flood mountains. It is always interesting to notice that questions designed to ridicule our belief in the literal truth of Genesis are often based on faulty presuppositions. It is not a surprise to us that genuine science is consistent with our Magnificent Creator God’s word! |
| 8/16/2022 | A hummingbird heart weighs a fraction of an ounce and beats eight hundred times a minute; a blue whale’s heart weighs half a ton, beats only ten times per minute, and can be heard two miles away. In contrast to either, the human heart seems dully functional, yet it does its job, beating 100,000 times a day [65–70 times a minute] with no time off for rest, to get most of us through seventy years or more. Our Magnificent Creator God’s master design for His master creation is infinite in detail and function!!! |
| 8/15/2022 | A gypsy moth caterpillar infestation can strip the leaves from large numbers of trees, threatening the trees’ lives. Since they don’t have a means of escape, it doesn’t seem as if the poor trees have much of a chance. But botanists were tipped off to the possibility that trees may not be all that defenseless when they began to investigate why only a few trees were badly damaged by insects in an infected grove while most stood unharmed. They discovered that when facing a threat like gypsy moth caterpillars, trees begin to defend themselves by sounding the alarm. A large variety of trees – including beeches, poplars, sugar maples and red oaks – communicate with each other. Scientists believe the trees communicate by releasing chemicals called pheromones into the air. What they now know is that before insects attacking one tree can get to the tree next door, the second tree has already begun defending itself. How do they defend themselves? When under attack or notified by other trees of attack, most trees begin to manufacture an array of poisons. Some of the poisons make leaves impossible to digest, while others kill the insects outright. Some make as many as eight poisons at once, and many can change the poisons that are made from year to year. Our our Magnificent Creator God’s concern for living things extends even to plants! If He sees to this detailed level of care for trees, can there be anything in our lives that is too small for His loving concern? |
| 8/14/2022 | During World War II Hitler and his Nazi Army killed one third of all of the then living Jews, six million of them. Our Magnificent Creator God’s plan of salvation is so perfect it would even have allowed Hitler to go to heaven if he had accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior!!! |
| 8/13/2022 | Many plants reproduce simply by cloning. The most obvious example of cloning that comes to mind is the dandelion. Unless you get all of the main dandelion root out of the ground, each piece of the root can sprout another dandelion, identical to the parent. The walking fern reproduces by cloning too. It moves across the countryside, albeit slowly, by producing new plants. A new plant is generated wherever the tips of its leaves touch the ground. Each new plant is identical to the parent. The bamboo reproduces through underground stems. The different species of bamboo live anywhere from 20 to 120 years. During their life spans, they produce only by cloning. Then they flower – once. When it’s time for a particular species to flower, every member of that species, no matter where in the world it grows, flowers gloriously. Each flower can have as many as 100 pollen-producing stamens. Once the seeds are ripe and scattered, every member of that species in the world dies. At this point, the entire species exists only in the scattered seeds. This is brilliant testimony to a recent creation of all bamboos at the same time. If evolution produced them and the forces of change worked on them for millions of years, one would think that all members of the same species would no longer be in perfect synchronization. Bamboo makes a strong testimony for the recent creation reported in Genesis and performed by our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 8/12/2022 | Have angels always existed from eternity? The Bible says “No”. Only God, the One God in Three Persons, has existed for all eternity. So the angels and any other spirit beings that there might be must have been created by God. If the angels were created, then when were they created? Were they, perhaps, created before the creation week? Perhaps God made them a long time before He made the world. Again, the Bible is very clear that this is not the case. We read in Exodus 20:11 that everything was made in the six days of the Creation Week. So, we can definitely say that the Bible teaches that angels were created by God, they have not existed for all eternity, and that they must have been made during the creation week. However, we cannot be anywhere near as dogmatic about what day of the creation week God created them. If we look in the book of Job, we read this: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth… when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” It seems likely that these words refer to angels. If they were singing for joy at the foundation of the Earth, then they possibly saw most of creation happen. It is also my opinion that angels were created early on Day One of the Creation Week. At the end of the Creation Week, everything was “very good”. So all the angels were still good at the end of that week. No angel had yet fallen, though that would happen soon, before the events of Genesis 3. Our Magnificent Creator God did nothing by happenstance. His master plan was in effect during creation week and it’s still in effect now!!! |
| 8/11/2022 | Many plants, especially orchids, offer different ploys to fool insects into pollinating them. Each of these ploys shows planning, design and the ability to create the design that will work. That there are so many examples makes it impossible for any rational person to believe that mindless, impersonal forces could have made these plants. Four different groups of orchids produce flowers that look so much like the female of the insect that pollinates them that pollinators will try to mate with them. The Brassia orchid found in southern Florida produces a flower that mimics the prey of its pollinator, the spider wasp. The flower is so designed that as the wasp stings its supposed prey – really the flower – pollen is deposited on his head. The pollen is then carried to a nearby female flower and deposited in just the right place during another attack. Another orchid imitates an aggressive swarm of bees as it blows in the wind. The strongly territorial bees that live in the area swarm and attack the flowers. In the process, they transfer the pollen from male to female flowers. The female flowers of at least 50 species of Mexican orchids offer fake pollen to lure pollen-eating insects that have been feeding on male flowers. Many of these insect-orchid relationships are so tightly interlocked that neither could survive without the other. This speaks of a planned creation by our Magnificent Creator God! It also bears witness that all forms of life came into being in a relatively short time, not over millions of years as evolutionists would have it. |
| 8/10/2022 | Many people know about the devastating and explosive eruption of Mount St Helens in 1980. Not so many people know that the volcano has erupted since then, but in less spectacular fashion. Throughout the late 1980s and into the 1990s, lava continued to appear in the crater, with a dome of lava growing in the middle of the crater. On October 11th 2004, magma once again erupted from the volcano, causing a new lava dome to grow rapidly south of the existing dome. Many unusual but temporary shapes were formed, such as a large lava formation called the “whaleback”. On July 2nd 2005, the pressure of the magma resulted in an eruption, which broke the whaleback, and sent ash into the air, visible from Seattle. A number of other eruptions occurred during the period from 2004 through 2008. On July 10th 2008, there had been no activity for six months, so the US Geological Survey officially concluded that this eruptive period was over. There has been no significant eruptive activity since then. The lava dome is now quite big. The summit of the lava dome is currently about 7,500 feet above sea level, so it is still below the 8,300 foot high crater walls. However, if the dome grows any larger, it could grow above the crater rim. Basically, the lava dome is a new volcano growing inside the ruins of the old one. It already takes up 6% of the space lost by the big 1980 eruption. One thing is clear. Once again, even in less spectacular fashion, our Magnificent Creator God has used Mount St Helens to prove that the surface of the Earth can change rapidly at times, and that changes do not require millions of years. |
| 8/9/2022 | Forestry organizations have a major problem with beetles. The Mountain Pine beetle infests many coniferous trees in the Western United States. Apparently 40 million acres of forest have been damaged by these critters. A fungus can get into the tree with the beetle, and this fungus prevents transportation of water and nutrients. The beetle lays its eggs in the bark, and beetle larvae can also cause the tree to die. If this were not bad enough, forestry companies then have the difficulty of disposing of these trees, before they cause further damage from fire. The timber from the trees, however, is likely to be cracked and damaged, and is often stained by the presence of the beetles and fungus. University of Washington scientists have come up with an ingenious solution. The damaged timber can still be used as a fuel. So the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences have come up with a way of heating this wood, and other organic materials, at very high temperatures, in the absence of oxygen. This treatment creates a type of fuel oil, which is a dark brown liquid. This fuel has been used in some countries for heating buildings, such as hospitals. Different kinds of oil will have different compositions. While there is not necessarily a close similarity between this wood oil, and petroleum oil, the process at least demonstrates that fuel oils do not take millions of years to form. Similarly, petroleum oils need not have taken millions of years, but could have formed in conditions at the time of the Flood. Only our Magnificent Creator God could have so carefully planned every detail needed for our survival on this earth!!! |
| 8/8/2022 | The largest known beetle in the world is the aptly named goliath beetle. This African beetle can become almost as large as a mouse. Dinosaurs were not the largest animals ever to live. The great blue whale holds that honor. The smallest mammal in the world is smaller than many insects. A newly discovered species of bat in Thailand weighs only six one-hundredths of an ounce. Such extremes might lead some to wonder whether those giant insects we see in the movies would ever develop. Could a spider grow to be as large as a house? You will be happy to know that no spider or any other insect could grow as large as a house. We can be sure of this because of the way insects breathe. Insects breathe through small tubes along their bodies. These tubes provide oxygen directly to their internal tissues. If an insect were to grow too large, these tubes could not get enough oxygen to the tissues. This is because the larger the creature, the more internal living tissue that requires oxygen. You and I have lungs that provide a network of surfaces equal to the size of a tennis court. An insect our size would need a body that has the surface area of a tennis court, too, which is an impossibility. Even though different creatures have different organs to supply their needs, each creature has just the right organs for its needs. This is a sign of our Magnificent Creator God’s wisdom. |
| 8/7/2022 | For a moment think of the uniqueness of the human body. You, friend, are not a blob of protoplasm but a living organism of some 50 trillion cells. Your brain weighs about a kilo—roughly 2 ½ to 3 pounds. It consists of two hemispheres of gray matter connected by an interface called a corpus collosum. Daily, 10,000 thoughts flit in and out of your brain. A hundred billion neurons process information. Its complexity is something that we are just beginning to understand. Your heart pumps 18,000 gallons of blood daily through 75,000 miles of vessels and arteries. Try building something like that. Then there is the iris of your eye that automatically opens and closes depending on the intensity of light and lubricates itself with fluid called tears. Your hand, though, is perhaps the most amazing part of your body. Dr. Paul Brand, the great hand surgeon of the past century, believed it proved your uniqueness as a human being as does nothing else. Our Magnificent Creator God simply spoke this magnificent creation into existence! |
| 8/6/2022 | There are at least four known types of orchids that effectively pretend to be female insects. They are so good at this ruse that they attract the attentions of male pollinators. That there are four different varieties that do this makes it clear that this trickery isn’t due to chance. The Creator does not want us to make the mistake of thinking that He doesn’t exist. The Ophrys group of orchids are found around the Mediterranean. Ophrys orchids produce flowers that look and smell so much like the insect that pollinates it, the male insect will mate with the flower. In the process, he picks up the pollen. The pollen is then carried to another flower, thus ensuring the next generation. The flowers even mimic the sheen of the female’s wings, the furry fringe on her abdomen, and her antennae. The Cryptostylus orchid, found in New Guinea and Australia, mimics the female of the wasp that pollinates it. The Cryptostylus does this so perfectly that it even moves as a mating female. The same is true of an orchid found in the Andes that is pollinated by a particular species of fly through the same ruse. God has much more in mind than just letting us know that He is. He wants us to see that He is intimately involved with His creatures. Through the perfect life of Jesus Christ, and His suffering, death and resurrection, He has removed the final barriers between us and Himself. With the barrier of sin removed by forgiveness, our Magnificent Creator God may be even more intimately involved with each of us on a personal basis! |
| 8/5/2022 | The cockeyed squid lives in the ocean’s “twilight zone” where sunlight barely filters through the deep waters. The squid’s nickname is a reference to its two extremely different eyes: the left eye develops over time to become considerably larger than the right—almost twice as big. Scientists studying the mollusk have deduced that the squid uses its right eye, the smaller one, to look down into the darker depths. The larger, left eye, gazes upward, toward the sunlight. Our Magnificent Creator God thought of every need for every creature He ever made!!! |
| 8/4/2022 | The Andean condor is the world’s largest soaring bird. With a wingspan of more than ten feet, condors can soar for up to five hours, covering one hundred miles, without flapping their wings once! In one study, a group of condors spent just one percent of their time aloft flapping their wings. Our Magnificent Creator God saw to every need of every creature He ever made!!! |
| 8/3/2022 | The half-life is a value which gives an indication of the rate of decay of radioactive isotopes. Radioactive decay occurs in an exponential, rather than linear way. Suppose an isotope, which we will call X, has a half-life of 1 year. If we have 32lb of X today, then in a year, we will have just 16lb – half of 32. In another year, however, we will lose only 8lb more—half of 16. The year after that, there will be 4lb left, and so on. The term half-life is misleading. Half-life is a notional number, showing how long it would take for half a given radioactive material to decay. When we say that uranium-238 has a half-life of 4,500 million years, this figure is not a problem for creationists. We simply mean that uranium is decaying at a rate, whereby half of it would not decay until 1,500 million years had passed. Uranium-238 decays into stable lead-206 by a 14 step process. Eight of these steps involves the release of an alpha particle, which is the nucleus of a helium atom. So, every atom of uranium that turns into lead will also yield 8 atoms of helium. An igneous rock should, therefore, contain 8 helium atoms for every one lead atom. Of course, it doesn’t. Helium can escape into the atmosphere. But this means that we can calculate the speed at which helium can leave radioactive rocks. Measuring this speed reveals that uranium must actually have decayed very much faster in the past than it does today. Aren’t you glad it wasn’t left up to you to develop this world and the laws of physics under which it behaves? Be thankful we have a mighty Magnificent Creator God who knew just what He was doing!!! |
| 8/2/2022 | Two groups of tropical vines rely for reproduction on the world’s only known species of pollen-eating butterfly. Neither vine has very showy flowers, nor do their flowers have any scent. However, they don’t need to attract pollinators because the Heliconius butterfly depends on the pollen produced by the vines for its food. So the butterflies don’t go far from their food source. Since the butterfly depends on the pollen, the vines produce many more male flowers than female. This keeps its army of pollinators well fed. Being messy eaters, the butterflies end up with pollen all over them. But what would attract the butterfly to the female flower, which can be up to 20 feet away? Two tricks are used. First, a female flower usually grows close to where a male flower has just withered. Second, the female flower, while producing no pollen, looks just like the male flower to invite the butterfly’s attention. Did you see the intelligence in this arrangement? If only chance were involved, why would the only known species of pollen-eating butterfly be found with the only known vines that rely on their services? This is a very big planet! If there is no design in this arrangement, why should these vines offer female flowers that look like the males so that they will be pollinated? It is so clear that these butterflies were custom-made for these vines, and the vines were made for the butterflies. This is a witness to a personal Magnificent Creator God who is personally involved in life on Earth!!! |
| 8/1/2022 | The priests who served at the Temple began their “priesthood” at the age of thirty, having studied for twenty-eight years the priestly duties and responsibilities. The number of Levites serving the Temple in one capacity or another was 38,000, and of these, 24,000 of them were to carry out the work of the house of the Lord. It’s interesting to note that 4,000 of the 38,000 were “to praise the Lord” with instruments which King David had made to be used for “praising the Lord”. It was the “harp” that King David had made and used to “praise the Lord”. He also wrote many of the Psalms by using his harp. No detail was too small or too big for our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 7/31/2022 | Bees depend on a good memory of their surroundings to make the thousands of trips necessary to keep their hive in operation. Each day a single bee must make trips to hundreds of flowers, some as far as a mile from the hive. Scientists have long wondered how the tiny bee can remember what may be dozens of square miles of territory. When a bee finds a good source of nectar, she returns to the hive and does a dance for the other bees. This dance tells them where a new find is located. Researchers have studied this in detail and can now interpret these dances. Researchers from Princeton University tricked a bee into dancing out a location that turned out to be in the middle of a nearby lake. After receiving the message, the other members of the hive simply ignored their fellow worker. She kept dancing, but no one would believe her. Only later, when the dance clearly said that the flowers were on the opposite side of the lake, did the other bees pay attention and check out the flowers. Researchers are now wondering whether bees keep a mental map of their surroundings. How else could they tell when someone gives them a false location? Evolutionary researchers are trying to figure out how such an “evolutionarily simple” creature as the bee could be so intelligent. However, the Bible makes clear that intelligence is not related to evolution. It is the gift of an all-wise Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 7/30/2022 | The human body, according to medical science, contains 37 trillion cells that reproduce themselves every seven years. Each one of the 37 trillion cells performs 10,000 different chemical functions, according to the late Dr. Ralph Byron of the City of Hope Cancer Clinic, yet all of them just work together to produce a healthy body. When you get tired, you cannot say, “All right, cell number 843,291, get to work. You are not pulling your share of the load.” All of these cells are linked together by nerve cells tied into a brain containing 100 billion cells (give or take a few). I hesitate to say that these 100 billion nerve cells are tied into a computer‑like device called the human brain since the human brain is far superior to any computer ever created. The eminent neuroscientist Moshe Abeles of Bar-Ilan University in Israel says, “Our ability to understand all the details of even one brain is practically zero.” Only our Magnificent Creator God in all of His brilliance and magnificence could have thought up such a complex piece of creation!!! |
| 7/29/2022 | The Solar System has seen many impacts. On so many bodies of the Solar System, these impacts have produced craters. It is well known that the surface of the Moon contains many craters, which are thought to have been formed when a meteorite hit the Lunar surface. However, the Moon is not alone. I have often shown my audiences a photograph of the surface of Mercury, and asked them what it is, because I know that most people will think it is the Moon, because of its cratered surface. In recent years, exploratory, unmanned missions to bodies in the further reaches of the Solar System have revealed surfaces pockmarked with craters. We cannot give a definitive answer for how or when the craters were formed. Some creationists believe that this cratering was actually a part of God’s creative process, so that the cratering took place within the Creation Week. Others believe that the cratering was part of the process that initiated the Flood. One creation researcher has suggested that a massive Flood-time bombardment of other planets and moons would also have led to massive impacts on the Earth. Some of these impacts would have been of sufficient energy to cause large vertical faulting, and to help split the Earth’s crust into the Tectonic Plates we see today. Whatever cratering mechanism turns out to be the best one, we can be sure that these impacts were not random accidents, not merely freaks of nature. They had a purpose in our Magnificent Creator God’s plan, whether they were at the formation of the Solar System, or at the initiation of the Flood!!! |
| 7/28/2022 | Richard Dawkins believes he has found an organ system, which is badly designed, and so proves that no god could have designed it. He has popularized this accusation so widely that atheistic websites and forums simply quote the example, as if it were proven. He refers to the color receptors on the retina of the vertebrate eye. These are the wrong way round, he says, with the receptor pointing towards the retina, instead of out to the lens. He says: “Any engineer would naturally assume that the photocells would point towards the light, with their wires leading backwards towards the brain. He would laugh at any suggestion that the photocells might point away, from the light, with their wires departing on the side nearest the light.” The wiring, to which he refers, is that of the nerves. He supposes that the nerves should be behind the retina, so that the receptors point outwards. However, the nerves cannot be behind the eye, as this is the space required for the cooling blood system. If this cooling system were not there, then the receptors would overheat. The receptors could also locally overheat, if they were pointed outward, and so could detect light directly. It would appear that it is better, safer, and more efficient for the receptors to receive light indirectly. Moreover, the nervous system is actually transparent, so light can get through the system just lensward of the receptors. Far from being bad design, the structure of the vertebrate eye is an example of masterful design. That, of course, is what we expect from the creativity of the Magnificent Creator God of the Bible!!! |
| 7/27/2022 | If we were to think about it, all Christians should be interested in astronomy. That does not mean that we should be experts in how stars work, or how light travels. But the Psalmist says that “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork”. So it is good to look upwards at night, and notice what God has made out there in the heavens and because of this to stop and consider what God has done. We are charged in Scripture never to worship anything in the heavens, because these are things that God has created, but it is right and proper to consider stars, planets, galaxies and so on, and to stand in awe at all that our Magnificent Creator God has made!!! In Genesis 1:14, God tells us that one of the purposes of the night sky is to mark signs and seasons for us. When night falls, it will be different stars that appear on the horizon at different times of year, because of the position of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun, so we keep track of the seasons. But also, by measuring the angles of certain stars above the horizon, and above the equator, we can work out what latitude we are at. Coupled with the longitude, calculated using accurate time, we can pinpoint our position on the Earth. With our modern technology of smartphones and satellites, we take such matters for granted today. But our Magnificent Creator God provided us with time-keeping and positioning software in the sky, right from the beginning of creation. That is certainly a cause to praise His Name!!! |
| 7/26/2022 | Modern researchers are learning that bacteria are not a simple form of life. Rather, a bacterium is a tremendously complex creature that thinks. Scientists have discovered that bacteria actually have molecule-sized sensors. Some of these sensors act as eyes, while others act as ears. A dozen other proteins have been discovered that receive the information gathered by the bacteria’s “eyes” and “ears.” The collected information is then processed the same way your brain gathers and makes sense of information. Bacteria have specialized senses and a brain. In fact, bacteria are better at sensing some things than you and I are. A bacterium can, for example, sense the difference between two parts and one part in 10,000. This is the same as if you could tell the difference between one jar with 9,999 pennies and another jar with 10,000 pennies! The idea that bacteria are just “simple” forms of life comes from evolution. Growing research is showing that even one-celled creatures are not simple at all. Think of it. Every single-celled bacterium must accomplish, within that one cell, all the tasks we accomplish using the trillions of cells in our bodies. Eating, digestion, metabolism, waste removal, reproduction – and even thinking – all take place within a single cell! There is no such thing as a simple form of life. Science certainly argues against the idea that life began by accident. What science is learning urges us to think about the wise and thoughtful Magnificent Creator God who made us!!! |
| 7/25/2022 | How does your nose work? Medical researchers admit that they don’t know. Your nose performs an extremely unlikely job. It senses invisible molecules in the air and turns each molecule into a unique sensation that is sent to the brain. If the fact that molecules floating in the air could be detected was a modern discovery, it would be hailed as the scientific discovery of the century! Medical researchers do know that the roof of your nose cavity contains about 10 million cells that are wired directly into the brain. The nervous system that connects your olfactory cells to your brain is so large and complex that its surface area is several times greater than the surface area of your body. Researchers also know that your sense of smell is important to your sense of taste. For example, that’s why – when you have a head cold – chocolate tastes like a flavorless waxy paste. In this case, what you taste in your mouth has more to do with what is happening in your nose than on your tongue. Many creatures, including birds, can sense odors. Farmers who had difficulty with birds eating as much as 20 percent of the food set out in feed lots discovered that birds hate the smell of grapes. When they laced the feed with grape scent, the birds left it alone, but the cattle didn’t seem to mind. Every detail in the creation of everything that has ever existed was planned and created by our Magnificent Creator God. No detail was too small!!! |
| 7/24/2022 | What keeps the big-bodied bumblebee with those little, stubby wings in the air? Scientists are still trying to learn the secret of bumblebee flight. And while they are learning some astonishing things about the bumblebee, they still don’t know how he does it. Scientists have been testing bumblebees by monitoring their energy use, placing them in wind tunnels, and measuring their oxygen use. No, they haven’t been able to make little oxygen masks for the bees – bumblebees have 24 breathing holes. Scientists have learned that a flying bumblebee flaps its wings 160 times per second and consumes the equivalent of 180 candy bars per hour! A flying bee uses the same amount of oxygen for its body weight as a flying bird or a bat. However, unlike birds, the bumblebee uses no more oxygen when hovering than when flying. This is only one of the discoveries that contradict scientists’ theories. In fact, the director of the latest studies on bumblebee flight admits that they still have no idea how the bumblebee stays in the air. He warns other scientists to stop using the current theories on the subject because they are far too simple. Of course, our Magnificent Creator God knows how to make a bumblebee fly, even if the best of modern science can’t figure it out. This should help us to see that when scientists tell us they have figured out how everything could have been made without a Magnificent Creator God, they don’t know what they’re talking about. In His great magnificence God did it and that’s all there is to it!!! |
| 7/23/2022 | Perhaps no type of animal has been used more in biological research than the fruit fly. Certain biological processes such as reproduction or genetic replication are similar in most eukaryote organisms, so observing these in fruit flies might, unlikely as it may seem, have implications for how the processes work in humans. The great volume of academic research which uses the fruit fly as the subject can be seen by the fact that, to date, eight Nobel Prizes have been awarded to work involving drosophila. There are several reasons why fruit flies make useful research subjects. From the moment a fruit fly egg has been laid to the moment the adult dies is, on average, about 50 days. The adult flies can mate and lay eggs after just 10 days. This means that three generations can have been studied in a month. A year would yield 36 generations. The effects of inherited genetic problems or defects can, therefore, be analyzed within months, as can the probabilities of genetic problems being inherited by future generations. God has surely designed all that there is for our benefit to help us study and improve our lives in this world. God expects us to use His blessings to help ourselves and to not expect Him to do everything for us. We may need a hole in the ground but our Magnificent Creator God might bless us with a shovel and wisdom to know how to dig. |
| 7/22/2022 | Even though many frogs live much of their lives out of the water, they need water to reproduce. This can be a problem since some frogs live in trees and some even live in the desert! For a tree frog, the trip from the treetops to a nearby pool is a long and dangerous journey. However, the Creator cares about all of His creatures. The leaves of the bromeliad that grows in the branches of many trees in the tropical forest form a private pool far above the ground. As a result, mama frog can raise her young without ever leaving the treetops! The desert would seem to offer an even greater challenge for a frog. However, since it pleased the Creator to place frogs in the desert – maybe to challenge the evolutionists – He has also provided for their needs. It may rain only once every two years in the deserts of central Australia. When it does rain, the water-holding frogs emerge from their underground hideaways to lay their eggs in the puddles. Before the puddles disappear, not only do the eggs hatch, but the young grow and develop into frogs that are able to store water until the next rain. As the desert again takes over, the frogs dig themselves back into the ground and go into suspended animation until the next rains come. A year or two later, the new generation will emerge after the next rain to raise their young. Neither chance nor the smartest frog in the world could design or create these abilities. Only a wise Magnificent Creator God could. And if the Creator has provided this much care for frogs, just think of how much more He cares about you and me in our everyday lives! |
| 7/21/2022 | “And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” Genesis 2:19 It surely wasn’t possible, we are often told, for Adam to have given names to all the millions of species of animals that exist on earth in the space of one day. Obviously, they tell us, this means that the Bible is wrong. In fact, the activity was nowhere near as arduous as this accusation suggests. The number of animals would be far less than the estimated 2 million species. Adam did not have to go looking for these animals. God brought them to him. God brought three classes of animals to Adam – livestock, birds of the heavens, and beasts of the field. All of these are vertebrates, whereas 98% of all species are invertebrates. Of the remaining 2% – or 40,000 species – many have developed from others (note: developed, not evolved) by the process of speciation. It is likely that the creatures were all descended from just a couple of thousand baramins, or created kinds. It would not be that difficult for Adam to assign a name to each of the animals that paraded before him, especially as he was created perfect, and unlikely to get tired. Suppose he took five seconds to name an animal. He could have named 2,000 animals in 2¾ hours. You might think such a task would be boring, but it was not onerous and would easily fit with all the other activities occurring on that sixth day of God’s creation, including our Magnificent Creator God making the land animals and making Eve from Adam! |
| 7/20/2022 | There are several unusual plants that have strange reproductive methods. The most unusual of all is the bucket orchid. This orchid grows in Central and South America. The flower forms a bucket, which fills with a sticky secretion from the plant. The flower then has to sit and wait for a bee. But it is not just any bee that can pollinate this plant. It has to be the special, beautiful, green orchid bee. The bee is attracted by the sweet liquid, but slips and falls into it. The exhausted bee eventually climbs out, through a passage way of Goldilocks proportions—not too big, not too small, just right. As the bee tries to escape through this passage, the flower holds it tight, and glues two pollen sacks on its back. After holding the bee long enough for the glue to dry, the flower releases the bee. If a bee arrives at the orchid, with pollen sacks already on its back, the flower lets it quickly through the system, and takes away the pollen sacks, before the bee can finally escape. Evolutionists maintain that this is an example of co-evolution—two organisms evolving so that they cannot do without each other. Which evolved first? It is difficult to see how one could have evolved before the other. It is far more sensible to take the biblical presupposition, that both were the work of our Magnificent Creator God!!! |
| 7/19/2022 | The Willow Warbler is a fascinating little bird. It weighs less than half an ounce and measures about four inches from its beak to the tip of its tail. It likes open woodland with small trees and is particularly happy in areas managed by humans, such as coppices and young plantations. An attractive little bird, it is greenish-brown from above, with a yellowish underside. Willow Warblers are part of the Leaf Warbler, or Phylloscopus baramin (or created kind). There are 77 species in this baramin, but we are interested here in the species Phylloscopus trochilu, especially the subspecies Phylloscopus trochilus yakutensi. This remarkable little bird has the most incredible migratory behavior, traveling about 7,500 miles. Between April and August, the birds live and breed in eastern Siberia. But as the breeding season ends, the birds begin their long, exhausting flight to sub Saharan Africa, where they will spend the winter, from October through March. Then they begin the 7,500-mile journey back to Siberia. That’s 15,000 miles per year! The reason why these warblers migrate seems clear. They do not like the extremes of temperatures in either of their homes. But a more interesting question is: How do they know where to migrate? Scientists have speculated that migratory birds are able to sense the Earth’s magnetic field. But those scientists who believe in evolution have to explain how the birds used trial and error to find their routes. A more logical explanation is that our Magnificent Creator God designed them to achieve this remarkable feat! |
| 7/18/2022 | There are between 10,000 and 15,000 species of orchids. While you surely are not familiar with all of them, it sounds strange to talk about orchid behavior. This huge variety of orchids offers a multitude of different flower shapes, colors and sizes. Each unique shape, color and size is perfectly suited to the bees, butterflies, bats, moths, flies and birds that are involved in that orchid’s pollination. Those orchids that use birds as pollinators have no scent. Instead, they offer the brightest of colors, appealing to the birds’ strongest sense. Evolutionists call this “co-evolution.” However, giving it a name doesn’t explain it. How did these orchids know that the bird’s strongest sense is sight? And how were these orchids able to perform genetic recombination on themselves so that they could develop their bright colors? No, giving something a scientific-sounding name doesn’t make naturalistic claims any more scientific. Or consider the bee orchid. It offers a flower that looks like a female bee. The purpose here is to attract male bees to a position that will load them with pollen. How can it be scientific to suggest that a plant purposely restructured itself to fool bees into pollinating it? Our Magnificent Creator God has purposely made it impossible to explain the creation without Him. He did this not simply so that we would see that He is real. His purpose is much greater. God seeks a personal relationship with you and has made that possible through the saving work of His Son, Jesus Christ, for us. It is to Christ that He would ultimately draw our attention. |
| 7/17/2022 | You might not think of the crocodile as a particularly loving creature. In reality, the crocodile is among the most gentle and loving of parents. Mama crocodile lays between 40 and 80 eggs in a large nest. For the 90 days they take to hatch, she will keep close watch over them, even foregoing food so as not to leave the nest unattended. Even the father stays close to guard the eggs that are a delicacy to many animals. At the end of this three-month watch the babies begin to chirp from within their eggs. Before long there may be dozens of babies chirping from the nest of buried eggs. This brings the mother who carefully uncovers the eggs, one by one. The young are only nine inches long and weigh just four ounces. Yet the gentle and loving mother picks up each one and with a flip of her head places them in a special pouch in her mouth. When some of the young have trouble breaking out of their shell, mama picks up the eggs and delicately works the eggs inside her mouth with her tongue, freeing the imprisoned baby. Once collected, all the young are taken to a special protected nursery where they will be just as carefully tended for months. Most amazing is that, should the mother not be present to tend to the hatchling chores, the father offers the hatchlings the very same help and care! Our Magnificent Creator God loves even the crocodile! And his acceptance of you and me, because of what Jesus Christ has done for us, is an even greater wonder than the loving crocodile! |
| 7/16/2022 | Imagine a huge living creature covering about one square mile and made up of almost a third of a billion cells. Imagine each of those living cells being able to move about independently of the others. No, it’s not the plot of a new science fiction movie. Some scientists have suggested that ant colonies may be thought of as one large living organism. They suggest this because of the way individual members within ant colonies behave. Ant colonies have many kinds of members, each with its own specific task. The soldier ants in a colony have extra large heads and heavy-duty jaws for fighting. Other ants are concerned only about finding and returning food. Still other workers do nothing but process and store food. Within the colony another caste of ants does nothing but tend the eggs. Others prepare the food for the larvae and deliver it to other specialized ants who do nothing but feed the next generation. If this sounds complex, imagine the largest known ant colony. This Japanese ant colony has an estimated 306 million worker ants, and more than a million queens. The colony occupies 45,000 interconnected underground nests that range over about a square mile! There is obviously intelligent design and control behind ant society—intelligence not found in ants or in nature itself. This intelligence comes from outside nature. Here is yet another witness that no concern of any living thing is too small for Our Magnificent Creator God’s complete attention! |
| 7/15/2022 | How would you like to be a dental hygienist for a crocodile? That’s how the crocodile bird makes his living. Of course you do need to know that the crocodile bird doesn’t show up to do his work with any drills or needles. He and the crocodile are on good terms with each other. After eating, the crocodile climbs the river bank and relaxes with his mouth open. The little crocodile bird enters the crocodile’s mouth to clean up the scraps that are left. While the crocodile bird makes most of his living as sort of a crocodile dental hygienist, he also helps keep the crocodile free of pesky insects that lodge in his skin. The crocodile also receives one other service from the crocodile bird. Whenever the bird senses approaching danger, he gives his sharp warning call and flies off. The crocodile, now warned, can quickly roll over into the water where virtually no animal can get the best of him. This is but one of many unlikely cooperative arrangements that we find that our Magnificent Creator God has provided for in the plant and animal kingdoms. |
| 7/14/2022 | There are those that claim that Evolution is a scientific theory. Scientific theories can be subject to the scientific method. If the same test or experiment is carried out under the same conditions, on different days or locations, the results should still be the same. The existence of scientific methodology suggests that ideas, referred to as science, actually divide under two headings. The first of these would be the testable, repeatable scientific ideas, which refer to situations here and now. These can be referred to as Observable or Operational Science. This is, in fact, the real science. Not only is there nothing unbiblical about Operational Science, we can insist that such science would not be possible without a rational, biblical worldview. The other scientific heading would be Historical Science. This is the type of science that refers to one-time, single events that allegedly happened in the past. Because these events are one-time events, they are not repeatable, nor are they falsifiable, because we do not have a time machine to go back and test things. Evolution must fall into this second category. Therefore, the alleged event, when non-living molecules got together to form a living cell, cannot be repeated. Evolution is not testable, and is therefore not Operational Science. Some might point out that biblical creation is similarly untestable, and must be Historical Science. Although this is true, it merely serves to remind us that science is not the ultimate test of truth. The revelation of our Magnificent Creator God’s word in the Bible is that ultimate truth!!! |
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