One of the most studied fish in the ocean is a three-inch long shore fish called the frillfin goby (Bathygobius soporator). This little fish has even gotten attention from the New York Times which ran an article about studies by Dr. Jonathan Balcombe on this fish and how it survives (May 15, 2016).
This fish lives in the intertidal zones in the Atlantic Ocean. When the tide goes out, the fish lives in small tidal pools which are isolated and free of the large predatory fish which pose a threat when the tide is in. The problem is that these small pools can be hunting grounds for shorebirds and crabs so sometimes the fish needs to change pools. The goby does this by jumping out of its pool and landing in a nearby pool that offers better protection. The obvious problem with making this jump is knowing where the next pool is to land in it and not on bare rock. In 1971 a study was done at the American Museum of Natural History to see how the frillfin goby learns where to jump and how far to jump to land in the pool. Their conclusion was that the goby swims over the area at high tide and makes a mental map of the topography of the sea-floor. It can use this mental map 40 days later to escape from a predator. Essentially they have a mental GPS that allows them to make what would otherwise be a very dangerous escape.
The DOES GOD EXIST? ministry tries very hard to focus on evidence, and not scientific or biblical speculation. In 1 Timothy 6:20 Paul tells Christians to “avoid profane and vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so called…” The Greek word used here for “falsely” is pseudonumos which has a close connection to the modern phrase “pseudo-science”. So much of what dominates the headlines of the media today is not science at all, but wild speculation much of which is not testable or falsifiable. There is no way to test most of these proposals, and so they fall outside the realm of science. String theory, brane theory, multiverses, parallel universes, and even some versions of quantum mechanics fall into this category. These areas of study rely on equations and interpretations of those equations. In string theory, for example, there are 10 to the 500th power different equations to choose from, and no one can maintain that one equation has been observed to work.
This same problem occurs when one looks at the fossil record and what we can observe from the fossils or from the remains of human drawings and accounts. There is no valid evidence that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, but some apologists continue to crank out claims that eyewitnesses of the dinosaurs exist. Andrew Snelling who works with Ken Ham in his amusement parks in Kentucky claims that Norwegian and Chinese writers provide eye-witnesses of dinosaurs and humans living together. To do that he makes references to Chinese scrolls showing dragons pulling the chariots of emperors, and a Norwegian fictional story called Beowulf in which a king slays a dragon.
The recent election is unpopular with lots of people for many different reasons. Atheists are unhappy because the percentage of elected officials who call themselves “Christian” is the highest it has been in many years. All but three members of the Senate call themselves “Christian” when asked their religious faith, and the same percentage applies to the House of Representatives. Atheists in their blogs are not very excited about that.
When prisons release the faith preferences of inmates, “Christian” dominates prisoner choices. In most prisons, over 90% of the prisoners say they are Christians. The number of atheists is in the single digits. Atheists like to brag about that, but there is a simple explanation of why prisons have so many “Christians” and so few “atheists.” First of all, in most prisons, the information cards the inmates fill out do not have “atheist” as a choice. They are forced to check a Christian denomination, Buddhist, Hindu or Muslim. The more important point is that prisoners are anxious to please the warden or powers that can facilitate their release, so they will check whatever they think will get them out sooner.
That is the title of an article in the January 2017 issue of Scientific American (pages 11-12) by Kate Wong. The article deals with the discovery that wild capuchin monkeys in Brazil’s Serra da Capivara National Park have been observed banging rocks together to break them and thus isolating conchoidal fractured chips and flakes which could then be used as cutting tools. When researchers study the flakes and chips, they find that they look very much like the flakes and chips found in caves and shelters where early humans are thought to have lived. However, part of the reason that humans were assumed to have been in those locations was the finding of tools similar to the capuchin monkey flakes.
There are some interesting points connected with all of this. One obvious point is that you cannot define what is human and what is not human by whether they fashioned tools or not, and that has been a method used by scientists studying this question. We have known that some birds and chimps use objects found in the wild to secure food. Chimps use sticks to get ants by pushing the sticks into an ant hill and eating the ants that cling to the sticks. Birds have been observed dropping objects on eggs to crack them open to eat the contents. Making a tool is another issue, but once again this does not seem to be a good indicator of whether or not a specimen was human.
Since 1972 the Does God Exist? Ministry has had a journal that contained articles showing the compatibility of science and faith, examples of design, book reviews, and a discussion of current events that affect faith in God and the Bible as God’s Word. The journal started as a ditto mailed to 30 or so interested people and gradually evolved to a 32-page four-color periodical mailed to over 10,000 people in print as well as in an audio format to the visually impaired. By the end of 2016, it was obvious that we had to make a change in the periodical. One problem was that news was coming so rapidly that the time between what happened and when we could discuss it was in months. The second problem involved cost factors in both printing and in mailing the periodical.
