Much has been made of bacteria that live in extreme conditions. We have mentioned the forms that live in the geyser pools at Yellowstone National Park. Those bacteria use a chemical source to allow them to exist in high-temperature environments. They, in turn, provide the basis for other forms of life that use the Sun as their energy source. The British Broadcasting Corporation has had numerous features in which they have reported on other animals that function in extreme environments. Some of the examples that the BBC cites are:
The sperm whale feeds 2000 meters down in the ocean where the pressure “is the equivalent of carrying ten jumbo jets on your back.” The whales deflate their lungs to do this and then spend up to an hour using chemically-stored oxygen to supply their muscles while they are down there.
Polar bears spend seven months without eating or drinking and then give birth in an area where the temperatures can hit -60 Celsius and the winds can reach 160 km/hr.
The bar-headed geese that fly over the Himalayas at 10,000 feet by concentrating oxygen with their special lung design.
DOES GOD EXIST? maintains a Facebook page with daily postings. We often get challenges and questions from atheists and skeptics or those who are seeking for answers. We want to share the following conversation from Facebook. The article we posted was about animals that are ruminants (cud chewers) The article ended like this:
DGE?- …This system of digestion allows animals who are grazers to survive in the hostile world of the wilderness. The balance in nature between predators and those animals that eat plant material is critical. If there are too many herbivores (plant eaters), they will eat all of the vegetation. If there are too many successful carnivores (meat eating predators), they can wipe out all of the plant eaters. The Master Designer has given us a balanced system with many features to allow animals and plants to avoid extinction. Cud chewing is one of those features. Ever since Adam and Eve, human actions have often thrown the system out of balance.
SEEKER- I would call that adaptation or evolution and the fact that you mention Adam and Eve says this was penned by someone who believes in creation. If Adam was the first man on Earth shortly after the creation by God, then where did the dinosaurs come from? Still not had a decent answer on that yet.
DGE?- Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” It does not say when the beginning was or how long God took to create the heavens and the Earth. The verse is undated and not timed. Then in verse 2, we are told that Earth was in place and it was formless and empty. Beginning in verse 3 we see a description of the stages of creation that God used to transform the formless and empty Earth into a planet that was full of life. Finally, on the last “day” of that creation, God brings human beings on the scene. The word translated “day” is the Hebrew “yom” which has four literal meanings in the Bible. It can mean a 24-hour day. It can mean the daylight portion of a 24-hour day. It can mean any portion of a 24-hour day. It can also mean an indefinite, but finite period of time. If you want to say that in Genesis chapter 1 it has to mean a 24-hour day, then you have a problem with dinosaurs and many other things. If you understand it as being an indefinite period of time, then any conflict between the Bible and science disappears. At DOES GOD EXIST? we believe that science and the Bible are friends, not enemies.
SEEKER- That still doesn’t answer the original question on dinosaurs. I have heard some say that the fossils we have were placed by “God” to test man’s faith, but I find this extremely hard to believe. Darwin is still winning. If there is an all-powerful God then why does he allow doubt? Why does he not simply show himself and remove all doubt? I guess a possibility is that if man was made in his image then like the man God too has died.
DGE?- When the Bible says that God made male and female in his image (Genesis 1:27) it doesn’t mean physical image. God is not physical. Jesus said, “God is spirit” (John 4:24). God is eternal and not subject to physical death. If the days of Genesis 1 are long but finite periods of time (as mentioned before), then dinosaurs would have been created on one of the earlier “days” before humans were created. (Probably day 5) Or perhaps dinosaurs roamed the Earth in that untimed period after God created the Earth in verse 1 and the time when it was empty and dark. Perhaps after a mass extinction. Many other creatures are not mentioned in the Genesis account–some extinct and some still in existence. The creatures mentioned are the ones familiar to humans. There was no Hebrew word for dinosaurs or other creatures that people did not know existed.
SEEKER- Definitely getting there now, but all based on “If.” Surely a day was twenty-four hours then as it is now and not millions of years. Also, it seems then that the Bible was written by man if the writer had no word for dinosaurs and never knew they existed. God surely would have had a name for them. I don’t understand if God does exist then why are we not born with this knowledge, why is it not a natural instinct like feeding from a mother’s breast at birth. Why would he want to give us doubt? Darwin still winning but I would so love God to win.
DGE?- There are other Bible passages where the Hebrew word “yom” translated “day” in Genesis 1 is used to mean an indefinite period of time longer than a day. (e.g. Hosea 6:2) If there were no word for the dinosaur in Hebrew and God made one up, how would anyone know what it meant? Hebrew is a language for human communication. If the people did not know what the word meant and had never seen a dinosaur, the word would be nonsense. We can know there is a God by the things he has made (Romans 1:20). I think we are born believing in God, and unbelief is learned. People in every primitive tribe in the history of the world have believed in “gods.” There is something deep in our soul that tells us there is something more—something beyond this life and higher than ourselves. It’s a vestige of an ancient memory of the Garden of Eden that we all long to find again.
SEEKER- Out of all conversations I have ever had on this subject I have to say you have been the one with answers that make any sort of sense. A vicar I once tried to discuss with simply said I must have faith and believe without doubting or questioning the Bible. My problem with that is the fact we mainly read from the King James version which I think Henry VIII doctored a bit. Darwin still holds a very strong argument though, and school did not help as one class was RE (Religious Education ) then the next class had a big poster of Darwin’s ape-to-man illustration. I so wish I could be an absolute believer without doubt as it really does give me one big headache. If there is a God, then can I be forgiven for having doubt or do those with doubt not enter into eternal life?
I have subscribed to National Geographic for well over 50 years. The magazine has evolved from a reporting magazine to a promoting magazine. What I mean is that in the 1950s and 60s the magazine reported on scientific discoveries and explanations of the science of the day. In recent years has adopted an agenda that does a great deal of speculative editorializing. Speculations concerning quantum mechanics and cosmology are presented in such a way that lay readers assume that they are scientific facts. This happens in a wide range of subject matter, including human evolution.
Sometimes the magazine is in an awkward position because of presenting speculations as facts. A few years ago, in their rush to push the idea that birds are actually dinosaurs, National Geographic ran a cover picture and article on a fossil find in China that seemed to prove that theory. Later it was discovered that the fossil they placed on the cover was a fake, constructed by a field worker and sold to make money.
In the April 2017, issue of the magazine there is an article titled “Beyond Human” and subtitled “Like any other species we are the product of millions of years of evolution. Now we’re taking the matter into our own hands.” The article by D. T. Maxis is well written and presents many facts about how humans can adapt to varied climatic conditions. People living at high elevations adapt in such a way that their hemoglobin binds larger amounts of oxygen.
The article also presents various ideas proposed by scientists to fit their particular model of human evolution. Some examples are bipedalism to speed up locomotion, making tools leading to bigger brains, reduced fur to keep cool and make finding parasites easier, blushing to signal remorse and elicit forgiveness, and tears to show vulnerability and get help. Those are interesting speculations, but tears also flush the cornea, have an antiseptic quality, and carry certain chemicals from the body. Most of the characteristics justified as evolutionary products have a purpose different from or in addition to what is suggested.
Magazines like National Geographic promote naturalism–the notion that everything can be explained by science and with natural causes. In this article, the use of art and symbols is viewed as an evolved characteristic for establishing civilizations. This ignores the fact that artwork has been found in the remains of the very earliest specimens of humans long before any civilization. Religion is presented as an evolved case of self-awareness leading to thoughts about a possible afterlife. How human evolution through natural selection would do such a thing is hard to visualize.
The article points out that humans now have the capacity to alter their genetic make-up and introduce new traits that will make us free of genetic diseases and give us improved physical characteristics. Naturalism cannot answer the moral and ethical questions of how we should use our ability to change the human genome.
God created us in His image–meaning that we have a soul, a spiritual aspect that is not a part of the physical body and is not in the genome. All humans have the same spiritual makeup, and thus all humans have equal value. We look different because the genome was designed to allow change and adaptation to the varied climates and conditions in which humans live. Genetic diseases result from a wide variety of things, and our pollution and misuse of the environment are major causes.
Imagine a creature that has no backbone, no ribs, in fact, no skeletal structure at all. It can weigh up to 200 pounds (90 kg), and its arms can be almost seven feet (2 m) long. It has three hearts, and the color of its blood is blue. Its limbs are covered with hundreds of tongues which have taste receptors, and its body is embedded with cells that sense light. Its eight arms are covered with suckers that can be moved independently and have tongues and taste receptors embedded in them. This “alien” creature is not as alien as you might think. It’s the octopus.
The octopus is the dominant member of a class of marine animals called cephalopods which number some 750 known living species. Octopuses have about 300 species, and they are far and away the most intelligent of the cephalopods. Trying to keep an octopus in an aquarium is almost impossible because they always find ways to escape. Since they have no skeletal structure, they can squeeze through the smallest crack. They can unscrew a jar lid, fit into a drain pipe, and camouflage their activity by releasing a cloud of ink. In an article on “Animal Intelligence” in the “News and Notes” section of our November/December 2016 printed publication, we told the story of “Inky” the octopus. Inky squeezed through a narrow gap at the top of his tank at the National Aquarium of New Zealand. After flopping to the floor, Inky scooted across the room to the opening of a drain pipe. He got into the pipe and dropped 164 feet (50 m) to where the pipe entered the sea, and there he escaped.
One of the most detailed discussions of living things is Karl von Frisch’s book Dance Language and Orientation of Bees. Von Frisch spent 40 years studying how bees communicate to other bees information about pollen sources. He referred to the honeycomb as a dance floor and described the bee making a “waggle dance” which gave other bees information where to find nectar. The bee dance indicates the direction to this food source and an alteration of the shape of the dance indicates the distance to the source. If the food source was close, the bee uses a round dance instead of the waggle dance. Von Frisch’s study catalogs what the bee does, but it doesn’t tell you how the bee does it.
Barbara Shipman is a mathematician with an interest in bees. There is a mathematical concept known as “manifolds.” Manifolds can have two dimensions, but they can have an infinite number of dimensions. One type of manifold called the “flag manifold” has six dimensions. As Shipman worked with flag manifolds, she saw patterns that were similar to the patterns of the waggle dance of the bees. Physicists use flag manifolds in dealing with subatomic particles called quarks which are the building blocks of protons and neutrons. Shipman believes that bees are sensitive to quarks and the sensitivity appears to be a reaction to a quantum field acting on the membranes of selected cells in the bees. It has been demonstrated that bees are sensitive to Earth’s magnetic field and the polarization of sunlight. Shipman is seeking to add the dimension of quantum fields to the bee’s repertoire of tools for location and communication.
Are you carrying around some vestigial conviction that God is good, or that Nature loves you? We guarantee that our newest nominee, the Guinea Worm, will fix that in one easy lesson. –From an atheist website.
Many atheist sites promoted the Guinea worm as the ultimate example of how one cannot believe in God because of terrible things that exist in the creation. It also shows how far atheists will go, and how much sarcasm and derision fills most atheist sites. A frequently quoted phrase is this one: “God’s plan [for the Guinea worm] is … carefully engineered pain machines, self-sustaining, spreading ever wider and deeper through the world … the worm is the very incarnation of god’s plan.”
A careful study of this situation is useful not only to answer the challenges of atheists but to better understand the design issue and how God functions in the world. The Guinea worm is a creature that is unquestionably a real horror story. This animal begins with Guinea worm larvae in ponds or rivers being eaten by small lobster-like water fleas. The embryos mature inside the water fleas. When humans drink the water, the water fleas with the larvae get into the human stomach where the fleas are digested, but the Guinea worm is not. They will find their way to the small intestine where they burrow through the wall and pass into the body cavity. During the next 10 to 14 months, the female worm will grow to as much as 31 inches (80 cm) long and as big around as cooked spaghetti. It will migrate to the lower limbs of the human. The worm will chew its way to the surface of the skin where it will emerge from a blister which causes a painful burning sensation. The only way to get relief is to put the foot or leg into water. When this is done, the female will release a milky white liquid with millions of larvae into the water contaminating the water supply. Once the worm emerges through the skin, you can pull it out, but you can only move it a few centimeters each day. If you pull too fast and break the worm, it will cause massive infection in the human body. It can take weeks to pull a worm from a person’s body. A person who has this parasite is likely to have many worms in his body and can be totally incapacitated and in severe pain. A person does not develop immunity and can be infected multiple times.
Our purpose is not to “gross you out” as my high school kids liked to say, but rather to look at the question of why such horrific creatures exist and how issues like this relate to the concept of a loving and compassionate God. Many other examples could be given from mosquitoes to the AIDS virus, and the points we want to make here apply to all of them.
It is important to understand that many things that exist in the world were not created by God, but they are a consequence of something else. As a simple example, God did not create war, but because God created humans with free will, there is war. Similar statements would apply to pornography, sexual abuse, and any number of other social issues. In the biological arena, there are many things that exist because good things have been mismanaged, misused, or are a product of a human-corrupted environment. Humans have many times caused nature to function in a way it was not designed to function. There are many examples of animal behavior that turn out to be aberrant, caused by the duress of captivity or other human activity and not by the normal function of the organism. In other cases, natural processes have caused changes with negative consequences. Seventy-five percent of all mosquitoes are pollinating insects that feed on nectar and plant juices and do not depend upon blood to survive. However, in many species, the mouthparts of the females have adapted to pierce the skin of humans or animals. Many virus mutations have caused changes in what was a positive organism and turned it into a negative one. Genetic studies of the Guinea worm have shown it is related to other worms which have positive roles in the environment. It appears that this terrible parasite is a mutant. Our point is that assuming that the Guinea worm is something God created to torture humans is an assumption that is due to the vested interests of those making the claim, not what the evidence shows.
Guinea worm infections are due to misuse of the environment. The worm is totally transmitted by humans drinking from contaminated water. Filtering water to remove the water fleas would stop the disease. Drinking from underground water sources would prevent it. The water sources given to the Israelites in the Old Testament would never have allowed the Guinea worm to exist. Not allowing humans to enter water supplies would stop the disease. For the most part, the disease has occurred where war has forced people to extreme situations and conditions.
God gave humans instructions on how to live. God told the first humans to have dominion over the Earth and all that is on it, and to “take care of the garden, to dress it and keep it.” Mismanagement of the natural world has caused massive hardship for humans, but to attribute this to a design or plan of God is to simply be dishonest. Christian organizations have led the battle against the Guinea worm. Atheist complaints against agents like the Guinea worm would be much more convincing if atheists were instrumental in helping to alleviate the suffering. The Carter Center founded by former President Jimmy Carter began attacking the problem in 1986 when there were almost a million cases. Since then the number of cases has decreased each year until there were only 25 in 2016. Many Christian organizations have worked to supply clean drinking water to people in impoverished and war-torn nations.
Many articles that we have posted on the “Does God Exist?” websites have revolved around definitions. Let us attempt to clarify some definitions.
EVOLUTION means different things to different people. Evolution essentially means change over time. We can see evidence of that in dogs and cattle and roses. Some would call those changes within plant and animal types as microevolution. There is also evolution of one type of animal into something completely different. That is sometimes called macroevolution, and it is something we don’t see. When someone says “you can’t believe in evolution and believe in God,” there will be different understandings of what that statement means. There are leading evolutionists like Dr. Francis Collins who are also prominent Christian leaders. Theistic evolution is evolution designed or guided by God. Naturalistic evolution is totally different.
NATURALISM asserts that natural laws are the only rules that govern the structure and behavior of the universe and that the universe at every stage of change is a product of those laws. Naturalism leaves out God and offers a purely materialistic cause and understanding of the universe.
MATERIALISM is the belief that physical “stuff” is the only thing that is real. Anything that is not physical in nature is deemed to be of no value in determining answers to the choices of life. Anything that cannot be measured or tested by science does not exist.
SCIENTISM is the belief that science is the only reliable source of truth. Years ago science was defined simply as knowledge. The modern definition of science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Scientism goes beyond science to make science a god.
DEISM is belief in the existence of a supreme being–a creator who started the universe but does not intervene or show any interest in it. The term is used chiefly of an intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries that accepted the existence of a creator on the basis of reason but rejected belief in a supernatural deity who interacts with humankind.
THEISM is belief in the existence of a deity or deities, but not necessarily the God of the Bible.
There is a great story circulating about a man named Jesse Newton who lives in Arkansas and has a dog. He also has a robotic floor-cleaner called a Roomba. The Roomba is a device you program to run while you are in bed, and it goes all around the rooms you designate sweeping up any dirt and debris on the floor. Last fall Mr. Newton had his robot programmed to clean his house starting at 1:30 AM.
The Roomba was doing fine until it hit a pile of dog poop that was picked up by the brushes and wheels of the device. The robot then spread the feces all through the house, on the carpets, the floors, the chair legs, the baseboards, and the kids’ toy box. Mr. Newton tells the whole hilarious story of how he discovered the mess at 3:00 AM and how he spent the next three hours trying to clean it up. He said the Roomba left the house “looking like a Jackson Pollock poop painting.” The story went viral on Facebook and was picked up by many news agencies, newspapers, and their websites, including USA Today and The Guardian. You can Google it to get the whole story.
That story reminded me of articles we have published in the past dealing with the process of cleaning up the waste that accumulates in nature. There are many living things that exist solely on the wastes of animals and plants. A classic example is the dung beetle, which cuts up chunks of “cow pies” or “elephant pies” into small balls and rolls them to their homes underground. Termites process dead trees into fine confetti which helps aerate the soil. Flies produce maggots which process large carrion in such a way that it is returned to the ecosystem in the form of chemicals. Certain kinds of fish clean up the bottom of rivers and lakes. While zebra mussels are a hazard to water-handling equipment, they filter and clean the water of their environment.
The universe is designed in such a way that things are constantly being recycled, cleaned, and worked back into the soil for future generations. This cleaning operation is highly complex and vital to all forms of life. It was not just a series of fortunate accidents that designed and maintains the system. By the way, iRobot, the company that manufactures the Roomba, says that this problem is not uncommon for people who have dogs or cats. Their engineers have been working on “poop detection technology,” but for now, they recommend not using the device when animals that might make a mess are present. We are glad that God figured out the process a long time ago.
