God Did It First

HUMANS ARE COPYCATS

THEY GIVE NO CREDIT TO GOD FOR HIS INVENTIONS, BUT THEY TAKE OUT PATENTS FOR THEIRS

THERMOMETERS

Man has made very sensitive thermometers and other heat gauges, but they are crude compared to the built-in abilities certain snakes have exercised for thousands of years. A rattlesnake, for example, can detect a heat change of one-thousandth of one degree Celsius. A boa constrictor responds to a heat change in 35 milliseconds, whereas a sensitive man-made instrument takes a minute to make the same measurement. Such snakes use this heat-sensing ability to search out and capture warm-bodied prey in the dark. The heat sensors also indicate the direction of the heat source.

HYPOTHERMIA

Surgeons now lower body temperature and slow heartbeat and breathing for certain operations, but long before this, animal hibernators practiced hypothermia. The tiny thirteen-lined ground squirrel, for example, during summer activity has a heartbeat and breathing rate of a few hundred times a minute. During winter sleep, however, its heart slows to one or two beats a minute and it takes a slow breath every five minutes. Body temperature drops to within a few degrees of the winter cold outside. Yet through it all the blood circulates, pressure remains normal, oxygen is supplied, and muscle tone is maintained.

ELECTRICITY

Prompted by Luigi Galvani’s treatise on animal electricity, the Italian physicist-chemist Volta made the first artificial constant-current electric battery. Millenniums before, however, some 500 varieties of electric fish had batteries. The African catfish can produce 350 volts, the giant electric ray of the North Atlantic puts out 50-ampere pulses of 60 volts, and the South American electric eel’s shocks have been measured as high as 886 volts. The currents are produced by banks of electroplaques​—in effect, voltaic cells. Each electroplaque is an individual electrochemical cell producing only a small fraction of a volt. But when thousands and sometimes millions of them are connected variously in series and in parallel in God’s creations, a natural electric battery is the result.

CHEMICAL WARFARE

Nerve-gas shells have two canisters of relatively nontoxic chemicals, but when the shell is fired the chemicals mix and upon explosion the deadly nerve gas is released. Long before this, and strictly for defensive purposes, the bombardier beetle had used chemical repellants. Glands produce two different chemicals, stored in separate chambers closed off by muscular valves. When it is attacked, the valves open and the two chemicals flow into a third heavily walled chamber. There an enzyme causes an explosive reaction, with an audible pop, and a noxious mist shoots out of a turret that the beetle can aim in any direction. The bombardier beetle can fire repeatedly, dozens of times in minutes, and ants, spiders, praying mantises, birds or snakes retreat gasping.

COMPUTERS

Computers do fantastic things, but they do not compare with human brains. The human brain​—three pounds of mystery, 2 percent of the body weight, uses 20 percent of the blood and 25 percent of the oxygen supply. Estimates of the number of its neurons range from 10 billion to 100 billion, and from 100 trillion to 500 trillion neuronal connections (synapses). A hundred million bits of information pour in every second, and the brain scans itself every one tenth of a second, operating on 20 watts of power. It receives, processes and evaluates information, makes decisions, sets goals, initiates actions, creates music and art. Only in the human brain are there systems programmed for speech. And only in the human brain is there an innate need to believe and to worship a higher power.

As one scientist said: “Anyone who speaks of a computer as an ‘electronic brain’ has never seen a brain.” Little wonder that Dr. Richard Restak says that the human brain is “immeasurably more complicated than anything else in the known universe.” And anthropologist Henry Fairfield Osborn once declared: “To my mind, the human brain is the most marvelous and mysterious object in the whole universe.”

GOD’S FIRSTS ARE ENDLESS

Bats and dolphins use sonar; octopuses use jet propulsion; mosquitoes use hypodermic needles; wasps make paper; beavers build dams; ants make bridges; bees and termites use air conditioning; fish, worms and insects make cold light; birds weave, tie knots, construct incubators, do masonry, build apartment houses, desalinate seawater, have compasses and internal clocks, and navigate; beetles use aqualungs; spiders use diving bells, make doors, are balloonists; some fish and beetles have bifocals; snapping turtles and water scorpions use snorkels; animal eyes, like man’s solar cells, turn light into electricity; ants do gardening and tend livestock; a beetle prunes trees​—on and on could go the listing of creation’s mechanisms that human inventors copy. Men’s works are said to be due to their genius; God’s are dismissed as blind chance​—at least, by the evolutionist. Incredible!

Design Requires A Designer

“YES,” AND “NO,” SAY EVOLUTIONISTS

“EVERY HOUSE IS CONSTRUCTED BY SOMEONE, BUT HE THAT CONSTRUCTED ALL THINGS IS GOD.”​—HEBREWS 3:4

NO EVOLUTIONIST would contend that an inanimate house could build itself. But he is dogmatic that an inanimate universe did​—a universe with unknown millions of galaxies, each galaxy with unknown millions of stars, and all moving in awesome grandeur with split-second timing.

And much more than that. On earth, say the evolutionists, all the myriads of living organisms constructed themselves out of their ancestors, this continuing all the way back to an original first parent of everything, which spontaneously constructed itself out of nonliving chemicals. Neither is the evolutionist deterred from this course by the appalling complexity and the intricate and purposeful design found in all these living things.

We marvel at the ingenious inventions of human designers, but the greatest of their works is insignificant in comparison with the simplest living organism. With all their 20th-century scientific technology, they cannot even begin to construct a little single-celled amoeba. Yet they have no difficulty in assigning to blind chance​—random mutations with questionable help from natural selection—​the power to construct all life on the earth.

In this there is a glaring inconsistency. Evolutionists can blithely assign to chance the power to design all complex living creatures, and at the same time insist that extremely simple objects require the existence of an intelligent designer.

For example, a scientist digs in some ancient rubble, finds an oblong stone that has a groove circling its middle and confidently announces that it was bound to a stick and used as a hammer or weapon by primitive man. It was designed for a purpose by an intelligent creature. Not so, however, the feather of a bird. A flight feather may have thousands of barbs growing out of the shaft, hundreds of thousands of barbules out of the barbs, and millions of barbicels, or hooklets, to hold all these parts together for flying. If barbs get separated, they can be zipped together again by the bird’s beak. Zippers​—long before man “invented” them!

The product of an intelligent designer? Not to the evolutionist, who says: “How did this structural marvel evolve? It takes no great stretch of imagination to envisage a feather as a modified scale, basically like that of a reptile​—a longish scale loosely attached, whose outer edges frayed and spread out until it evolved into the highly complex structure that it is today.”​—Life Nature Library, The Birds, p. 34.

Another example of the evolutionist’s arbitrariness: The evolutionist finds a flat stone with a sharp edge, and he is sure this was designed by an intelligent Stone Age man as a knife or scraper. However, no designer is needed, the evolutionist tells us, for the little beetle called “mimosa girdler.” The female climbs up the mimosa tree, crawls out to the end of a limb, cuts a slit in the bark and lays her eggs there. Then she crawls back to the middle of the limb, gnaws a circle around the branch deep enough to cut through the cambium layer, and the end of the branch dies and falls off. The beetle’s eggs scatter and hatch, and the cycle begins again. The mimosa tree, in turn, benefits. It is pruned, and because of this lives twice as long​—40 or 50 years—​as it would otherwise. In fact, the mimosa tree puts out a scent to attract the mimosa girdler, and this little beetle can reproduce in no other tree. The flat, sharp stone required a designer; the mimosa girdler just happened. Or so we are told.

Another comparison: A small piece of sharp flint shaped like an arrowhead convinces the evolutionist that it was designed by man to use on the tip of an arrow or a spear. Such purposeful, designed things, he concludes, cannot happen by chance. But spiders are another matter, he says. Consider the spider Aranea. It has six teats, each having some 100 taps, each tap connected by an individual tube to a separate gland inside the spider. It can make separate threads or join them to produce a broad band of silk. Spiders manufacture seven kinds of silk. No species makes all seven, all have at least three, and Aranea makes five. Its 600 pipes do not all make silk; some extrude glue to make some of the web sticky. Aranea, however, oils her feet and never gets stuck. The source of these spinnerets? Legs became spinnerets, evolutionists say.

Reflect: The spider has the chemical lab to make the silk, the physical mechanisms to spin it, and the instinctive know-how to make the web. Any one of these is useless without the other two. They must all evolve by chance, at the same time, in the same spider. Evolutionists believe they did. Do you? Which could more easily just happen​—the sharp bit of flint, or the spider?

Let’s enter the space age to listen to Dr. Carl Sagan of Cornell University. “It is easy to create an interstellar radio message,” he says, “which can be recognized as emanating unambiguously from intelligent beings.” He believes that “by far the most promising method is to send pictures.” One suggested picture to send would show a man, woman, child, the solar system and several atoms​—all accomplished by sending a series of dots and dashes, each one called a “bit” of information, and requiring 1,271 bits in all.

Please reason on this. If 1,271 bits of information in a certain sequence suggested order and design and “unambiguously” proved it was “from intelligent beings,” what about the some 10 thousand million bits of information encoded in the chromosomes of every living cell? Evolutionists say the 1,271 bits of information ‘unambiguously prove an intelligent designer,’ but dismiss 10 thousand million bits of information as needing no designer, as just happening.

Do you not find such reasoning illogical, arbitrary, even prejudiced? If simple designs require a designer, would not extremely complex ones make a far stronger demand for an even greater designer? British theorist Edward Milne, when considering the origin of the universe, wisely concluded: “Our picture is incomplete without Him.”

[Picture on page 15]

THE ARROWHEAD REQUIRES A DESIGNER, BUT DNA DOESN’T?

Instinct​—Wisdom Programmed Before Birth

TINY BRAINS, COLOSSAL FEATS

“THEY ARE INSTINCTIVELY WISE.”​—PROVERBS 30:24

THE UNBELIEVABLE JOURNEY

The little blackpoll warbler is an unlikely candidate to ‘take on’ the evolutionary establishment​—but it does. This North American songbird weighs only 20 grams, less than three fourths of an ounce, and is but five inches (13 cm) long. Nevertheless, its migratory feats are colossal.

When fall approaches, it leaves its summer home in Alaska and flies southeast across the North American continent to the Atlantic coast, eating voraciously along the way, because the warbler’s journey has just begun.

Along the coast of New England, the blackpoll warbler waits and watches the weather. It somehow knows exactly what weather it wants​—a strong cold front that will pass southeast over the coast and out into the Atlantic.

When the cold front arrives, the little warbler sets off, helped by the favorable winds as it flies southeast​—out to sea. The cold front also means that there will probably not be any tropical storms to contend with en route​—a wise choice of weather!

Flying southeast puts the tiny bird on course for Africa, hopelessly distant and not its destination. But the blackpoll warbler doesn’t change direction. It flies nonstop past Bermuda, climbing to altitudes of 21,000 feet as it nears Antigua. It is cold and the oxygen is scarce at that altitude. Why is the little warbler up there? Because there it finds the prevailing winds that blow it west to its real destination, South America. After a nonstop flight of over 2,400 miles in more than three days and nights the warbler arrives on another continent, right on target!

Scientists marvel at the feat performed every year by this little bird. How does it know exactly what weather conditions to look for? How does it know just when to change altitude to find the winds that will take it to South America? How does it know to select exactly the proper navigational heading that will allow it to intersect with those winds at the right spot over the ocean? Scientists cannot explain it. Certainly the theory of evolution cannot.

There is, however, a good reason for the blackpoll’s unusual route. Its sea route to South America is much shorter than an “island hopping” trip would be, and there are few predators to worry about. The blackpoll warbler can make the nonstop flight, equivalent to a race horse running consecutive two-minute miles for 80 hours, because of its specially designed metabolism. “If a blackpoll warbler were burning gasoline instead of its reserves of body fat,” notes one scientist, “it could boast of getting 720,000 miles to the gallon!”

TERMITES​—AIR-CONDITIONING ENGINEERS

If you have termites, likely you have little sympathy for their physical weaknesses. They tend to be soft and weak, needing carefully controlled temperature and moisture. It would seem that such insects could never survive in the harsh climate of the tropics. Yet they thrive there. How?

The answer is termite architecture and engineering skills. Tropical termite nests are mounds of hardened mud that will make sparks fly from a hatchet. Some Australian termites build a long, narrow, wedge-shaped mound that always points north-south, apparently giving protection against the hot midday sun. Other species build mounds that look like human huts from a distance.

While the outside of a termite mound might be too hot to touch, inside it is a comfortable 85 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius). How is the temperature controlled? Thick walls help, but more is involved. Some termites dig tunnels 130 feet (40 m) into the ground below the nest to obtain water, which they use both to cool the nest by evaporation and to maintain proper humidity, even in the dry, hot desert air! Others build nests with a “cellar” and an “attic.” For air exchange, the outside of the mound contains hollow channels that regulate the temperature and make sure there is plenty of fresh air inside the nest. The termites are observed to be constantly at work on these channels, and by opening and closing them the air conditioning can be adjusted to perfection.

Who taught the termites their skills in architecture and engineering? Blind evolution? Or a discerning Master Designer?

THE DANCING BEES THAT VOTE

Perhaps you have heard of the instinctive feats of honeybees. These small creatures often have many jobs during their short lives, beginning as nurses to the queen and larvae, then graduating to become honeycomb builders, hive guards and janitors. But it is the older bees that have the risky assignment of foraging for nectar and other needed substances, and whose instinctive powers excite the most admiration.

When a foraging bee finds a new source of nectar it returns to the hive to share the good news. This is done by means of a dance. The speed of the dance and its pattern (whether a circle or a figure eight), as well as the amount of abdomen wagging done by the dancing bee, informs other bees of the distance to the nectar source. The direction to the nectar relative to the sun is indicated by the dance as well. “The language of bees seems unbelievable,” admits the book “The Insects,” “yet it has been confirmed by countless experiments.”

When the hive is overcrowded some of the bees follow the old queen to a new home. How do they know where to go? Scouts from the new swarm fly out in all directions. Now, however, they are not looking for flowers. They are looking for hollows in trees, cracks in walls​—sites for a new home. Upon return, the scouts dance to indicate the location of these new sites, much as they would dance to indicate the location of a flower. Scouts that have found good sites dance very enthusiastically, sometimes keeping at it for hours, while many other bees are stimulated by the energetic dance to have a look. Scouts that have found less desirable sites don’t dance as long or as enthusiastically, and fewer bees are stimulated to check them out.

Gradually the bees narrow down their choices to a few locations, and finally, to just one, as enthusiastic dances by follow-up scouts attract more and more support for the best site. In effect, the swarm is looking at several prospective sites and voting on the one they like best. The whole process may take five days, after which, with unanimous agreement, the swarm flies off to its new home!

Could accidental mutations and random events produce such marvelous communicative feats and social harmony? Do accidents and chaos produce harmony in any other society?

[Picture on page 16]

THE BLACKPOLL WARBLER​—GIFTED OCEAN MIGRANT

[Pictures on page 17]

A TERMITE HOME WITH AIR-CONDITIONED COMFORT

BEES GO TO THE POLLS