DOES GOD EXIST? TODAY - Page 7 of 258 - Evidence for God In the Things He Has Made

August 29, 2024August 27, 2024

Trees Are Affected by Smoke

Smoke from wildfires has been a fact of life for virtually everyone. Even here in Michigan, we have seen smoke from the fires on the West Coast. At times, it has been dense enough that some folks with respiratory illnesses have had to stay inside and use air purifiers to breathe. Researchers at Colorado State University have found that even trees are affected by smoke, but they have a system designed into them to avoid damage that smoke can cause.

Plants have pores called stomata on their leaves, which do the opposite of our lungs by taking in carbon dioxide and expelling oxygen. However, taking in smoke could interfere with this process. The researchers found that when smoke wafted across ponderosa pines, the trees responded by closing their stomata, essentially holding their breath.

Smoke in the air is not a new feature in the natural world. Fires are expected whenever there are forests and dry weather, even without human carelessness. Since trees are affected by smoke, they have a designed response to what might damage their ability to take in carbon dioxide. This is just one more example of the incredible thought and planning that went into the creation.

Genesis 1:11-12 tells us that God created the fruit tree, but as we look deeper into the makeup of trees, we see the handiwork of God displayed in this remarkable design. Research is ongoing to see if this is true of all plants, including those we depend on for food. This question becomes very important with the increase in wildfires in the past two years.

— John N. Clayton © 2024
Reference: The Week for August 30, 2024, page 21.

August 28, 2024August 27, 2024

New Data on Neanderthals

In 1864, a research paper was distributed in the scientific community announcing the discovery of a form of ancient humans called Homo neanderthalensis. The artistic reconstructions showed ape-like humans, and evolutionists called it a missing link proving human evolution from apes. The artistic reconstructions were inaccurate. More advanced scientific tools have given us new data on Neanderthals, providing a better picture of what they were like.

Past research has not shown that Neanderthals lived together in communities. However, Neanderthal DNA in Siberia indicates a possible community, and some 600 footprints recently found near Normandy, France, indicate a group of adults with children and teenagers. The new data on Neanderthals gives evidence that they formed tight-knit communities. Another interesting discovery is that the communities cared for individuals with deformities or severe injuries for many years. Neanderthal burials indicate that they showed special care to children.

We can learn many lessons from recent studies that provide new data on Neanderthals. One thing we learned is to avoid jumping to conclusions too quickly. One of my favorite lines I heard during my graduate work was, “Always be sure your data conforms to your conclusions.” The point was and is that people take what they already believe and then work to find ways to support that belief. The media jumped on early finds of Neanderthals, and their depictions gave an unclear picture of what they were like.

For people who have religious convictions about the history of humans, the same problem exists. The fact that Neanderthals clearly lived more than 6,000 years ago flies in the face of some denominational teachings. The point is that the Bible is silent on how long ago Adam lived. There is also a tendency to make Adam in our physical image when the Bible says Adam was created in God’s spiritual image. Biblical literature may show Adam with light skin and blue eyes, but that is almost certainly not what Adam looked like.

You and I are created in God’s image. That means we all have equal value and demonstrate spiritual characteristics and talents. These include creative ability in art and music, the capacity to worship, empathy and sympathy, and guilt, which have nothing to do with our physical or racial makeup. New data on Neanderthals shows that they demonstrated some of those characteristics, and we have some Neanderthal markers in our DNA.

— John N. Clayton © 2024
Reference: “Family Ties” in Discover magazine, July/August 2024, pages 24-28.

August 27, 2024August 26, 2024

Medical Aid in Dying and Hospice Care

One of the many issues involved in the advancement of modern medicine is what to do when a person is slowly dying and has no quality of life. Should a lethal injection be given to end their struggle? “Medical aid in dying,” or MAiD, has been accepted in Europe, Canada, and other places. As expected, there have been abuses, and for that reason, the European Court of Human Rights recently ruled that access to assisted suicide is not a human right.

Contrastingly, the Human Population Group has promoted assisted suicide and has had success in getting various American states to accept it. Now, the Hospice and Palliative Nurses Association (HPNA) has announced a policy change that allows hospice nurses to participate in assisted suicide under the MAiD euphemism. The statement reads: “Nursing care for patients considering MAiD and their families is crucial to ensure that patients and families are not overtly or inadvertently disenfranchised or stigmatized as they proceed with MAiD and that they experience a safe and comfortable death, free from complications.”

This is a highly complex issue. Keeping someone alive when there is no hope of survival and no quality of life can be very expensive. Do you wipe out your loved one’s financial resources by continuing life in these situations? When a person has Alzheimer’s and doesn’t know anyone but is otherwise healthy, do you administer assisted suicide if they had requested it when they were rational? These issues touch many of us and will increase as our population ages.

Proponents of medical aid in dying argue that since we euthanize animals when they are suffering, we should extend that same option to humans. One prominent supporter of medically assisted suicide is Peter Singer, who is the DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Singer would not only support medical aid in dying but would require the euthanization of prisoners who have life sentences and mentally ill patients who are beyond help.

For Christians, there are grave concerns with medically assisted suicide. In 1 Corinthians 3:16-17, we read, “Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God has His home in you? If any man ruins the temple of God, God shall ruin him, for the temple of God is sacred, and that is what you are.” When hospice nurses are allowed to administer “medical aid in dying,” how long will it be before they are required to do so regardless of their religious and ethical objections?

There are no easy answers for any of us in this issue, but it seems that with modern medicine and technology, there should be an option other than giving a human a lethal injection to end their lives.

— John N. Clayton © 2024
Reference: The Life Legal Defense Foundation publication Lifeline for Summer 2024, pages 6-7.

August 26, 2024August 25, 2024

“Plant Neuroscientists” and Plant Consciousness

“Plant Neuroscientists” Claim Plant Consciousness

Several “plant neuroscientists” have written papers claiming that plants have intelligence and cognition and experience pain and other feelings. This is not the work of crackpots but of reputable scientists writing in professional journals.

It started in 2006 with an article in the scientific journal Trends in Plant Science by E.D. Brenner titled “Plant Neurobiology: An Integrated View of Plant Signaling.” In 2009, Frantisek Baluska claimed that root tips were “a brain-like command center.” In 2016, Monica Gagliano claimed to have demonstrated Pavlov-type classical conditioning in pea plants. The following year, she wrote that plants have an “internal value system” and use “feelings” to “motivate their choices.”

Plant neuroscientists accuse scientists who reject their claims of being “animal chauvinists.” The reality is that if you reject eating plants because they have feelings and experience pain, you will also have to reject eating insects or animals of any kind, such as fish, birds, or even farm animals. That leaves you with nothing to eat.

Genesis 1:29 finds God telling Adam and Eve, “I have given you every herb bearing seed … and every tree in which there is fruit for food.” In Genesis 9:3, God told Noah, “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you even as the green plant I have given you.” God gave humans the capacity to have adequate food and challenged us to manage His environment with intelligence and respect.

Scientific evidence shows that what plant neuroscientists interpret as consciousness is a misunderstanding of the design God built into plants. It is well known that sunflower blooms will turn to follow the Sun from sunrise to sunset. Are the sunflowers thinking and acting on their thoughts? Of course not! This function is programmed into the plants to give them maximum sunlight exposure.

We have all seen plants wilt when they are too dry or hot. Is this the result of feeling pain or thinking out the need to reduce leaf area? An intelligent Creator hard-wired these responses into their DNA. Animals have consciousness because of a complex nervous system and a brain system that oversees the neural pathways. Conscious responses to pain help animals and humans survive.

I have known people who talk to their plants and claim that it makes the plants grow better. I must admit that I have talked to my car when it wasn’t working. Whether plants or cars, our conversations are really for our own benefit, not the thing we are taking to. We tend to anthropomorphize plants and cars, giving them human attributes. God has designed plants to feed us, shade us, and show us beauty, but they are not created like us and are not to be worshipped.

— John N. Clayton © 2024
Reference: Skeptical Inquirer for September/October 2024, pages 21-23.

August 23, 2024August 20, 2024

Change the Way You Think

A primary biblical teaching that many people find repulsive is that Jesus Christ brought change to all who would listen to and follow Him. In the “Sermon on the Mount” (Matthew 5-7), Jesus compared what people had said about lust and hatred to a new standard. The message of “repentance” seen throughout the teachings of Christ and His followers was a call to change the way you think, and that threatens many people.

Moses changed from an Egyptian prince to a leader of Israel. Jonah changed from a man trying to run away from God to a preacher to the city of Nineveh. Peter changed from a denier of any association with Christ to the main speaker on the day of Pentecost. Paul changed from a persecutor of Christianity to one of Christianity’s great leaders.

All humans tend to resist change. Political parties and many voters rely on the status quo despite a huge need for change. The call of Christianity for America to change its stance on moral issues is a massive source of conflict. Terrorist groups, from the Ku Klux Klan to Muslim extremists, resist change. The biblical call of Galatians 3:28 is a threat to many people. It says that for Christians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female for we are all one..” That contrasts with the great prejudice and violence against the Christian community.

Repentance is not merely confessing to faults or to a mistake. Repentance is changing the way you think. In Acts 2:38, when Peter said, “repent and be baptized,” he was challenging his listeners to change the way they think and then wash away their sins in baptism. If you don’t change the way you think, then baptism is just getting wet.

Christian teaching seeks to transform our world from one marred by war, hatred, racism, abuse, violence, and prejudice to a world of love, caring, compassion, empathy, and peace. This is a call to change the way you think. That is a change the world desperately needs, perhaps more at this time than ever before in history.

August 22, 2024August 20, 2024

The Giant Sequoia Design

The design that God has built into every ecosystem continues to radiate the truth of the biblical statement that we can know there is a God through the things He has made (Romans 1:20). As science discovers design in the creation, the truth of that biblical statement becomes obvious. We often see design in very small things such as bacteria, viruses, and algae, but on the other end of the scale, we find very large objects such as the giant sequoia.

Imagine a plant that can be uninjured by fire but needs fire to reproduce. In our day of forest mismanagement resulting in massive fires, this feature becomes important. In the past, smaller fires wiped out ordinary trees like oaks or maples. The super-large trees were unaffected by the fires and used them as part of their reproductive design. One of the most notable examples is the giant sequoia found in California.

The giant sequoia is so tall and large that fire does not affect it. The tree stands more than 370 feet tall. (A football field is 300 feet long.) Giant sequoias weigh 640 tons, as much as 107 elephants. They can be up to 29 feet wide and are not affected by the blights that affect ash, elm, oak, or maple trees. In California, the redwoods cover 1.6 million acres, and the giant sequoias another 48,000 acres. These trees, which do not depend on groundwater and a root system, get their moisture from snow, rain, and fog.

These giant trees occupy a unique ecological niche among Earth’s staggering diversity of plant and animal life. They show God’s design and planning, making our planet extraordinary.

Reference: SaveTheRedwoods.org

August 21, 2024August 20, 2024

Bats Are Unique in Several Ways

Bats are among the most amazing creatures. The August 2024 issue of National Geographic was devoted to exploring research into all that bats can do and how they do it. Bats are unique in several ways.

There are over 1400 species of bats, ranging in size from the bumblebee bat, which weighs less than an ounce, to the flying fox, a fruit bat with a wingspan of nearly six feet and weighing up to three pounds. One-fifth of all mammal species on Earth are bats, and bats do many things that benefit humans. They consume mosquitoes and agricultural pests and are primary pollinators for bananas, mangoes, avocados, and durians (an important Asian fruit).

Bat wings are made of skin stretched on light bones with many joints, with muscles embedded in the skin. By comparison, bird wings have three joints. Bat wings have vast numbers of tiny hairs that sense airflow. Attempting to develop a drone in such a small space has turned out to be incredibly difficult. The quadcopter drones in widespread use can’t rival the flight of a bat in dark places.

Bats are unique in their long life expectancy and disease resistance. They can live for decades and rarely get cancers. They carry several viruses but are not affected by them. Some researchers suggested that COVID-19 jumped from bats to humans. Research shows that as bats age, their DNA is repaired, and scientists are studying this repair and immune activity.

It is interesting that the Bible doesn’t say much about bats. In Leviticus and Deuteronomy, bats are among the flying creatures God told the Israelites not to eat, a point that has interesting connections to viruses they can carry. Bats are unique and a critical part of the ecosystem that God designed. The more we understand about them, the more we see the hand of God in their creation. These small creatures are essential to God’s ecosystem and to us.

Reference: National Geographic for August 2024, pages 16-49

August 20, 2024August 19, 2024

The Design of Sperm

One of the great mysteries that still confounds scientists is how a human sperm cell finds the egg it fertilizes. Experiments have shown that the design of sperm has several features that allow fertilization to occur. Understanding this is important because the real answer to the abortion question is not what to do once a human embryo is developing but how to prevent fertilization.

Researchers at the Weizmann Institute in Israel found that the sperm cell uses temperature to find the egg. The region around the egg is four degrees Fahrenheit warmer than surrounding parts of the fallopian tubes. The sperm cell can detect a temperature rise of one degree, causing it to swim toward the warmer area. Researchers at the Hanns Hatt of Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, have shown that human sperm cells can smell chemicals surrounding an egg using olfactory receptors similar to those found in the human nose.

Research shows that the design of sperm cells includes the ability to detect heat and respond to chemical signals from the egg. We see indications that the sperm cell’s design is beyond any chance proposal. Ancient people thought the baby was complete in the human sperm and the woman was essentially just a glorified incubator. Genesis 3:15 refutes that idea when God says to the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her Seed.” It took humans a long time to understand that the seed was in the woman.

We frequently refer to human birth as a miracle. From the very start, as the sperm comes into contact with the egg, we see that every human being is a miracle of God and deserves to be loved and cared for. Atheism teaches that humans are just animals with no intrinsic or unique value. As Christians, we value human life regardless of ethnic, racial, or religious background. Perhaps the rejection of the Bible and persecution of Christians is rooted in a poor understanding of God’s design of human reproduction.

Reference: Discover magazine, July 2003, page 18.

August 19, 2024August 18, 2024

Medication Abortion In Reality

Medication abortion is a two-drug cocktail that ends the life of the developing child during the first trimester of pregnancy. It is essential for women considering medication abortion to know what it does and its side effects.

The first pill is mifepristone/RU-486, which prevents the pre-born baby from receiving hormonal support (progesterone) essential for the baby to develop. The second pill (misoprostol) causes the uterus to contract and expel the baby. The process is painful for the woman.

The Mayo Clinic says the side effects include vomiting, fever, nausea, chills, diarrhea, and headache. Women may need painkillers to manage pain after a medication abortion. The Mayo Clinic also says that a woman undergoing a pill-induced medication abortion needs access to emergency services. Complications include hemorrhaging and infection. A 17-year study showed that of 423,000 abortions, there were 121,283 confirmed emergency room visits within 30 days.

When humans interfere with God’s design, there are always problems, and the miracle of conception and birth is a design that works. Medication abortions are a disaster in too many cases to be a reasonable alternative. The writer of Psalms 139:13-14 said it well: “For you, God, possessed my inmost being, you covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise you, God, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are your works..”

Note: The 2024 Democratic National Convention is this week in Chicago, and one of the features being offered is free chemical abortions from a mobile clinic operated by Planned Parenthood.

August 16, 2024August 14, 2024

Inconsistency of Well-Educated Skeptics

It has become fashionable in the media to bash the Bible, but the inconsistency of well-educated skeptics who denigrate the Bible as a fictitious writing does not stand up. This essay is not about bashing skeptics but about encouraging them to reconsider their views on the credibility of the Bible.

Most skeptics do not question the credibility of Plato’s writings, but how many ancient copies do we have of Plato’s work? The answer is seven. No educated scholar would question the works of Pliny even though, once again, only seven copies exist. Herodotus and Suetonius are required reading in most universities, but we have only eight manuscripts for each. Even Socrates and Aristotle exist in less than 50 ancient copies. It is easy to understand why this is the case because these manuscripts were hand-written and produced hundreds of years after the author lived. We agree that these copies are valid and that their message is clear.

In comparison, roughly 5600 early New Testament copies and fragments are in museums worldwide. Well-known ancient scholars also quoted from the New Testament. Justin Martyr quotes 268 times from the gospels and 43 times from the letters of Paul. Origen quotes 9231 times from the gospels, 349 times from Acts, and over 8,000 times from the letters. If you add up all the Bible quotes known to scholars, there are 19,369 quotes from the gospels, 1,352 from the book of Acts, 14,905 from the letters, and 664 from the book of Revelation. This adds up to 36,289 quotes by ancient writers.

We see the amazing inconsistency of well-educated skeptics accepting writings with only seven or eight ancient copies while rejecting biblical manuscripts of similar ages with over 35,000 quotes. Because of the huge number of manuscripts and quotes available, we can check on the integrity of biblic a l translations. Attempting to justify rejecting Christ because you don’t want to live as He says is one thing, but being dishonest and inconsistent with evidence is something else.

We warmly invite you to take our free correspondence course “Beyond Reasonable Doubt.” Simply send us your USPS address, and we will send you lesson # 1. This is an opportunity for you to delve deeper into the evidence supporting the Bible’s credibility and reconsider any doubts you may have. – John N. Clayton
jncdge@aol.com
Does God Exist?
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