Most sea birds stay ashore when they sense a storm is approaching. Frigate birds ascend to very high altitudes to avoid the strong winds of hurricanes. Albatrosses find calm in the eye of a hurricane. But not all birds see hurricanes as threats. For Desertas petrels, flying into hurricanes is a feast.
These small, agile seabirds with long, slender wings dive straight into the spinning air bands, reaching areas 124 miles (200 km) from the hurricane’s eye. In one study, a Desertas petrel was seen flying into winds over 60 mph and ocean waves taller than 26 feet. As a hurricane moves, these birds travel with it. Researchers have tracked Desertas petrels flying from Africa to the New England coast, over 7,000 miles.
This unusual behavior creates a feast for the Desertas petrels, key predators in the ocean. Hurricanes stir up life forms from depths as great as 3,280 feet. They also bring zooplankton and larger swimming prey up from the deep, allowing the Desertas petrels to feed and help maintain balance among different ocean life forms.
It’s easy for humans to misunderstand the careful design of ocean food chains. Without balance, a species could become overly numerous, consume all available food, and face extinction. Desertas petrels help maintain the balance of squid, octopus, cuttlefish, hatchetfish, and lanternfish. Francesco Ventura, a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, has studied these birds in detail and has shown how they not only survive hurricanes but thrive in them.
We can learn many lessons from studying God’s creatures. We see how crucial it is for humans to care for ocean life without disrupting the balance, which ultimately affects our own food supply. Understanding how all life forms survive provides powerful evidence of God’s wisdom and design of our planet. We are not here by chance.
We usually think of dinosaurs as reptiles that lived in tropical jungles, and were part of the ecosystem that produced fossil fuels like coal and peat. We even see articles about places like the Galápagos Islands referring to iguanas, lizards, and other reptiles, such as the Komodo dragon, as modern-day dinosaurs. The truth is that dinosaurs were unlike any modern creatures on Earth today, and there were Alaskan dinosaurs.
Alaska magazine reported on extensive fossil evidence of the northernmost dinosaurs that ever lived. During the time these dinosaurs existed, Alaska did not have a tropical climate, because many of the fossils were found in permafrost. The first fossil fragments of Alaskan dinosaurs were discovered in 1994 in the Talkeetna Mountains. In the Colville River watershed, researchers found fossils of a tyrannosaur called Nanuqsaurus, meaning “polar bear lizard.” In 2016, a hadrosaur fossil was announced, and in 2020, a velociraptor was displayed for the public. In 2021, Dr. Patrick Druckenmiller, the only vertebrate paleontologist in Alaska, published a paper in the journal Current Biology describing a dinosaur nest containing eggs with embryonic dinosaurs. Along with dinosaur fossils, large numbers of bird fossils and an early salmon ancestor have been found.
Discoveries of Alaskan dinosaurs reveal that they were adapted to thrive in a wide range of environments where modern animals, including humans, could not survive. Jurassic Park movies do not give a complete picture of the dinosaur world. God prepared the Earth for humans with purpose, intelligence, and design. Our planet was created with life in all environments, providing everything humans would need to survive, while also allowing humans to find and even synthesize these resources.
The discovery of dinosaurs, especially Alaskan dinosaurs, suggests that the human race is not a chance accident. The Creator had us in mind. God prepared Earth for human habitation so that we could fulfill His purpose. We were created for a purpose, and our world shows that we can know there is a God “through the things He has made” (Romans 1:20).
Joshua chapter 10 records an incident in which the Sun stood still to provide light for “about a full day” so that Joshua could lead the Israelites to defeat the Amorites in battle. I don’t pretend to know the details of how that happened, but I have heard a suggestion that God provided a miraculous way to reflect the Sun’s light into the Valley of Aijalon until the victory was complete. From the perspective of someone in that location, it would appear that the Sun stood still. Now, a California-based company called Reflect Orbital wants to do something like that with a constellation of solar reflectors in space.
Reflect Orbital hopes to launch a 60-by-60-foot (18-by-18-meter) mirror into orbit in April of 2026 to test the idea. If the plan succeeds, they want to place 4,000 solar reflectors in space to orbit in a sun-synchronous orbit between the poles. They would follow the boundary between day and night, providing reflected light to areas in the twilight zone. Reflect Orbital says it could enable solar power generation during peak morning and evening hours, improve crop growth, allow people to work into the night, and provide emergency lighting for disaster zones. Reflect Orbital has applied to the FCC for a license, claiming they have the funding and have already received 250,000 requests for service.
Astronomers and those interested in wildlife are very concerned. For example, Robert Massey, Deputy Director of the Royal Astronomical Society in the UK, said, “The central goal of this project is to light up the sky and extend daylight, and obviously, from an astronomical perspective, that’s pretty catastrophic.” With 4,000 solar reflectors in space, each reflection could cover a 5-kilometer area where some agency has requested and paid for service. However, atmospheric scattering would reach an undefined surrounding area. For up to 100 kilometers, the mirrors would appear like very bright stars.
Light pollution is already a problem, increasing by 10 percent per year since the introduction of LED lights, causing fewer stars to be visible in the night sky. Light pollution is also linked to the decline of beneficial insect populations, as well as increased sleep disorders and depression in humans. In addition to affecting astronomical observations, the solar reflectors in space could disrupt migratory birds that depend on the stars for guidance.
Instead of dreaming about what humans can do, maybe we should carefully consider what we should or should not do. Anyone who has experienced the night sky in one of the rare dark sky areas remaining can appreciate the words of the psalmist David: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, or the son of man that you care for him? (Psalms 8:3,4 ESV)
Ten species of hammer orchids (genus Drakaea) are found only in Western Australia, and each is pollinated by a specific wasp species in the Thynnid family. Each orchid has a fake model of the pollinating wasp carefully placed to attract the real wasps. It sounds like a clever practical joke, but the hammer orchid has a “dummy” labellum on a stem attached to a hinge that only bends toward the orchid’s flower.
Of course, the dummy on the stem resembles a female thynnid wasp in size, shape, and color. At the right time for fertilization, the hammer orchid releases a pheromone that mimics the female wasp’s scent. Thynnid wasps are unusual because the female is flightless and waits on a stem or grass blade for a male wasp to carry her away to a food source for mating. When a male thynnid wasp falls for the trick and tries to carry away the dummy, a hinge throws him backward into the orchid, dusting him with pollen.
The humiliated male wasp then leaves and might be fooled by another hammer orchid, where he deposits the pollen he collected from the first flower. The male wasp might repeat this process several times (assuming he’s a slow learner), which is the only way the orchid gets pollinated. If the trick didn’t work, the hammer orchid would become extinct.
Consider all the things that must go right for this trick to succeed:
1. The orchid must produce a labellum that resembles the female wasp in size, color, and shape.
2. The male wasp must be programmed to grab a flightless female and carry her away as part of the mating ritual.
3. The orchid must produce the right complex chemical pheromone to mimic the female wasp at just the right time to attract the male.
4. The hinge must move in the right direction and not be too weak or too stiff.
5. The stem from the hinge to the dummy wasp must be exactly the right length to coat the male wasp with pollen.
6. The male wasp must not be clever enough to learn from his mistakes.
Could the unique design of the hammer orchid have happened by chance, or is design a better explanation? Could it also be that the Designer has a sense of humor?
What is “precisely nothing?” Theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss used that phrase in the preface of his 2012 New York Times best-selling book titled A Universe from Nothing. Krass at that time was a professor at Arizona State University and head of the Origins Project there. He later lost that position due to “moral failure,” and is now an anti-theist blogger. An anti-theist is more than an atheist. He does not believe in God, but also actively opposes faith in a creator. Like other anti-theists, he believes that faith in God is not just wrong, but destructive to society.
On what did Krauss base his statement that there was “remarkable new support for the idea that our universe arose from precisely nothing?” Krauss suggests that quantum gravity fluctuations could allow for “the creation, albeit perhaps momentarily, of space itself where none existed before.” Furthermore, “small-density fluctuations in empty space due to the rules of quantum mechanics will later be responsible for all the structures we observe in the universe today. So we, and everything we see, result out of quantum fluctuations in what is essentially nothingness…” He further writes that the universe arose through “a process whereby the energy of empty space (nothing) gets converted into the energy of something.”
Is what Krauss calls “precisely nothing” actually nothing? You may have the same feeling that I have that someone is trying to fool you into believing nonsense. When he writes that “getting something from nothing is not a problem,” I have trouble believing him. Perhaps I am simple-minded, but I prefer a simple explanation of why there is something instead of nothing. It’s explained in a video called a “Proof of God in 3 Minutes.” I encourage you to watch it by clicking HERE.
Our Beyond Reasonable Doubt video series faces a challenge: it can’t keep up with new archaeological findings. The fall issue of Biblical Archaeology Review announced two new archaeological discoveries supporting the Bible.
The Jordan Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities reported an inscription carved into a desert rock face in southern Jordan. The inscription features two cartouches, which are Egyptian hieroglyphic oval shapes containing the names of royalty. In this case, they display the name of Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses III, who reigned from 1186 to 1155 BCE. One column shows his birth name, while the other shows his throne name and title. Other cartouches of Ramesses III have been found in the Sinai, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, indicating the Egyptian-Arabian trade route. This is the first one discovered in Jordan.
The second find is a report from Matthew D.C. Larsen about discovering what is called the Boudrouml prison in Corinth. The existence of the Boudrouml prison has been known since the early 20th century, when Herbert F. deCou first excavated it. However, newly found inscriptions carved into the pavement by prisoners offer insights into life in Roman prisons. The spelling and grammar errors in the inscriptions reveal the prisoners’ lack of formal education. These messages also show boredom, rage, and personal devotion. One inscription reads, “Lord, do not show mercy on the one who threw us in here.” The evidence of Roman prison life aligns with what the Bible describes regarding Peter and Paul’s imprisonment.
As archaeologists continue their excavations and new technologies analyze the findings, they find more archaeological discoveries supporting the Bible. Those who try to cast doubt on the biblical record will find themselves at odds with the evidence.
A fascinating question that marine scientists have explored is fish communication. Finding a mate, locating food sources, and defending territory are challenges all animals face. Terrestrial animals solve this problem by pushing air through their lungs, with different land animals having various designs to do this. Birds and lions produce sounds for communication differently, but both systems involve air in some form. So, the question is, how do fish communicate?
Researchers from Cornell University placed equipment in the ocean off Hawaii and Curacao to study this question and found that each fish species has its own method for communicating with others. Triggerfish slap their pectoral fins on specialized scales. Glasseye snappers rattle their swim bladders. Blackbar soldierfish use sonic muscles to vibrate their ribs. Aaron Rice, who was the project manager for Cornell, states that the “sounds lack the elegance of birdsong, but they are significantly more diverse.”
The more scientists learn about life on our planet, the more varieties of specialized designs they observe everywhere on Earth. Explaining the origin of things like fish communication as a chance occurrence in the distant past pushes credibility too far. Seeing these as outcomes of design is an example of intelligent purpose, allowing a vast diversity of life forms to exist.
Beginning in 1987, a new glass and metal structure began to rise in the desert near Oracle, Arizona. In 1991, it opened as the world’s largest closed ecological system. It was called “Biosphere 2” because planet Earth is “Biosphere 1.” The idea behind the project was to test whether a closed system could support human life on another planet. This marked the start of a two-year mission in which eight people were isolated inside this artificial biosphere to simulate life on a space colony.
The experiment in Biosphere 2 ran from 1991 to 1993 with only limited success. It was attempted again for six months in 1994. Both attempts encountered technical issues and the strain of human group dynamics. Additionally, during the second try, the company managing the experiment was dissolved, leaving the project in limbo. Initially, Columbia University took control of the facility and used it for scientific research until 2003. When it seemed Biosphere 2 might be demolished for urban development, the University of Arizona (UA) took over in 2007 and gained full ownership in 2011.
Today, about 100,000 tourists visit Biosphere 2 each year while UA continues to conduct experiments there. One of the experimental areas is the Landscape Evolution Observatory (LEO). It consists of three artificial landscapes, each measuring 30 by 11 meters with a 4-meter depth of crushed basalt rock from a volcanic crater in northern Arizona. The scientists aim to observe how these landscapes change “from purely mineral and abiotic substrate to living, breathing landscapes that will ultimately support microbial and vascular plant communities” (UA’s words).
I wonder how the researchers could be sure that the one million pounds of basalt from a volcanic crater could be “abiotic,” meaning free of any life forms. However, if microbes or seeds are present, I believe the landscapes will “evolve.” The key is that for any life to develop, it must already be there. Evolution is change over time, but the development of life requires initial life to exist.
The UA scientists explain that the evolution of cyanobacteria—the first microscopic organisms to use photosynthesis—pumped oxygen into the atmosphere, facilitating the development of aerobic life. This paved the way for multicellular life, an ozone layer to shield life from harmful ultraviolet radiation, and weathering to break down rocks into soil.
Considering the history of Biosphere 2, I doubt it will be around—or that the scientists will be—long enough to observe significant evolution. It takes time for rocks to break down into soil. They describe the “process of primary succession,” where simple microbes expand into organisms of increasing “complexity and biodiversity.” The researchers state that photosynthesizing cyanobacteria will capture nitrogen from the air, preparing the way for mosses to grow. The next step involves “colonization by larger plants with roots,” and the primary succession continues.
Long before Biosphere 2, Genesis 1:11-12 details the process of primary succession: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass” (Hebrew deshe, meaning tender grass such as lichen or algae), “the herb yielding seed” (Hebrew eseb, meaning naked seed or gymnosperm), “and the tree yielding fruit” (Hebrew ets, meaning tree, wood, or timber). The process of primary succession then continues. (For more on this, see John N. Clayton’s booklet “God’s Revelation in His Rocks and His Word.”)
As the UA scientists describe in their explanation of LEO, “The Earth system consisting of air, water, soil, plants, and microbes is a complex, interacting system.” And so it is, as God revealed to Moses thousands of years ago. Complex, interacting systems require an intelligent Designer.
In many regions, apple snails are considered an invasive species and pest. However, scientists are studying one freshwater species, the golden apple snail (Pomacea canaliculata), for its unique ability to regenerate a lost eye. Researchers hope to learn from the eyes of golden apple snails something that could have potential applications in preserving human vision.
Apple snails have eyes that resemble cameras, similar to human eyes. A golden apple snail’s eye can heal itself if damaged. If the eye is completely removed, a new eye will grow back in less than a month. Of course, human eyes cannot do that. Researchers studying the eyes of golden apple snails hope to find new ways to treat human eye injuries or diseases like macular degeneration.
By using the gene editing toolCRISPR/Cas9 to disable certain genes, scientists are searching for the genes responsible for the snail’s remarkable eye recovery. Disabling the snails’ PAX6 gene prevented them from developing eyes. That same gene is crucial for human eyes. Due to the similarity, further research may lead to new breakthroughs in treating eye diseases.
Humans cannot regrow damaged parts of the eye, and doctors have yet to perform an eye transplant that communicates with the brain. God has given humans curiosity and intelligence to explore life’s mysteries. In the eyes of golden apple snails, He has provided us with a model to study and potentially learn how to restore lost or damaged vision.
Biogenesis is the process of reproduction—life giving birth to new life through natural means. Abiogenesis is the origin of life from non-living matter, the concept that life originated from non-life. It’s an undisputed fact that life began to exist. Equally undeniable is the fact that the universe also began to exist. Therefore, we are presented with two scientifically accepted facts: 1-The non-living matter in the universe came into existence. 2-Life began to exist. Explaining the existence of life remains a challenge that science has yet to overcome.
Since we know the universe had a beginning, life on Earth cannot be explained simply by claiming it was seeded by aliens from another galaxy (panspermia). Their galaxy would have had a beginning too, so how did their life originate? The theory of panspermia merely pushes the question farther back.
The idea that non-living elements spontaneously combined into organic molecules, which then organized into living cells by random chance, is hard to believe and even harder to prove. Many brilliant minds have tried to explain life in this way. Evolution does not account for the origin of life; it only attempts to explain the development and diversity of life that already existed.
It is not a “god-of-the-gaps” argument when we suggest that the best explanation for abiogenesis is that an Intelligence acted upon non-living matter, imparting information (DNA) and organization beyond human understanding. This Intelligence would have to exist outside of the time dimension we live in—without beginning or end and without physical limitations—to explain the existence of life and the creation of time, space, matter, and energy. Such an intelligent Being could also take the form of a man to enter time and space and restore lost creatures to Himself. That is clearly what the Bible describes. (See John 1:1-17.)
