Creation Devotional March 26 - Biology
Daily Devotional – March 26
Biology
Lest you think everything to be discovered has already been discovered, a recent examination of whales has revealed a previously unknown organ – completely different from any other structure found throughout the animal kingdom. Researchers studying blue whale carcasses in Iceland used MRI scans to identify this unique fluid-filled sac (the size of a small cushion) within their chins. This new organ helps the blue whale coordinate its mouth movements during lunge feeding.
Blue whales are the largest creatures on the earth and feed by lunging through the water. At just the right moment, they open their mouths so wide that they screech to a halt like a drag-racer deploying a parachute. Before they come to a stop, they gulp enormous amounts of water filled with krill (shrimp-like creatures). Whales swallow the equivalent of their enormous body mass (400,000 pounds) of water with each gulp. For many years, scientists have wondered how they coordinate their jaw movement in order to capture and filter the krill so efficiently.
The newly discovered organ within their mouths has provided the answer. This organ contains millions of microscopic, finger-like nerve structures and blood vessels that change shape as the jaw moves. This enables the mouth to open extra wide at just the right moment. But here is the most amazing example of modern man’s intellectual blindness. Because the nerves from this newly discovered organ go through the jaw cavity to the whale’s brain, these researchers attribute the existence of this organ to “a tooth socket earlier in whale evolution”! In other words, they would rather believe that a toothache turned into a complex organ (with absolutely no evidence to support such wild speculation) than to acknowledge that the existence of the blue whale, with all of its intricate design, involved a Creator.
We all need to stand back and marvel at God’s detailed handiwork. O Lord God, thou hast begun to shew thy servant thy greatness, and thy mighty hand: for what God is there in heaven or in earth, that can do according to thy works, and according to thy might?
~ Deuteronomy 3:24
Source: "Pearls in Paradise" by authors Bruce Malone and Jule Von Vett
References for this devotional.
Creation Devotional March 25 - Design
Daily Devotional – March 25
Design
Today, there is great concern over football players receiving concussions. Have you thought about the woodpecker banging its head against a tree trunk? Why doesn’t a woodpecker get a concussion or brain damage? On average, he bangs his head 12,000 times a day, each time reaching speeds of 13-15 mph. As he pecks, his beak stops abruptly when it hits the wood. The deceleration force has been measured to be 1,200 times the acceleration of gravity (1200 g). Decelerating one’s heads at just 300 g would leave a person with serious brain injury or a concussion. Through slow motion footage, x-ray images, tomography, and CT scans, scientists discovered four features that enable the woodpecker to sustain this type of head-banging existence:
- The beak is made of an elastic material.2. The woodpecker’s hyoid bone is different than a human’s. It loops around the entire skull, acting like a seat belt. In a human, this
- bone sits just above the “Adam’s apple”.
- The spongy bone behind the beak and at different places in the skull act as shock absorbers.
- A special skull bone contains spinal fluid.
Researchers emphatically claim that all four of these features have to be present at the same time in order for the woodpecker not to destroy his brain. Evolution says that these four features would have come about by accident and chance over millions of years. If this is true, would we have woodpeckers? All four special design features needed to be present from the beginning in order for the impact force to be spread throughout the skull.
One last amazing fact - every time the woodpecker hits a tree, his eyes close simultaneously – otherwise his eyeballs would pop out of his skull! Of course, learning to close his eyes simultaneously with hitting his head against the tree also needed to work the first time, or we would have lots of blind woodpeckers. God is an amazing designer of woodpeckers!
For thou art great, and doest wondrous things: thou art God alone.
~ Psalm 86:10
Source: "Pearls in Paradise" by authors Bruce Malone and Jule Von Vett
References for this devotional.
Creation Devotional March 24 - Geology
Daily Devotional – March 24
Geology
In a remote part of Utah lies Kodachrome Basin State Park. The National Geographic Society named this park because of its beauty. Some 60 towering stone spires jut up from the valley floor and are displayed against the backdrop of multi-colored sandstone layers. Evolutionists are at a loss to explain how these spires formed. When we put on our biblical glasses, we can view their formation from the Flood perspective.
During the Flood, many sedimentary layers were laid down. One of the layers would have been a squishy sand layer. Earthquakes could have caused this squishy sand mixture to be injected upward through the other sedimentary layers, like toothpaste being squished upward in its tube. This “plume” of sand then cemented together. At the end of the Flood, waters eroded the less cemented layers away, leaving the cemented plumes or sand pipes. Clusters of sand pipes can be found in other remote parts of the Colorado plateau. This same formation can be seen with mounds, like Ayers Rock in Australia. The sand plumes can be traced down to the source layer of sand. Secular geologists believe that the source bed was millions of years old prior to its injection. Would the source bed remain uncemented for millions of years? Hardly. These sedimentary sand pipes give evidence that there was little time between the layers being laid down, injected and eroded. The fact that sand pipes exist at all is evidence that little time passed from deposition to squeezing.
And spared not the old world, but saved Noah the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in the flood upon the world of the ungodly;
~ 2 Peter 2:5
Source: "Pearls in Paradise" by authors Bruce Malone and Jule Von Vett
References for this devotional.
Creation Devotional March 23 - Biology
Daily Devotional – March 23
Biology
Dolphins navigate and find their prey by using echolocation. A dolphin emits clicking calls and listens for their returning echoes. The greater time for the return of the echo, the further away an object. Echolocation is similar to sonar. So how is echolocation produced in a dolphin? The dolphin sends out ultrasonic clicks through its nasal canals. These vocalizations travel through a fatty protrusion on its forehead. This melon-like structure is actually a “sound-lens” designed to focus the sound waves into a beam that can be directed. This sound lens uses different fatty compounds to bend the ultrasonic sound waves in different ways. These specifically placed and designed fatty compounds have to be arranged in the right shape and sequence in order to focus the sound waves properly. These fatty compounds are different from normal blubber fats and are made by a complicated chemical process that requires a number of different enzymes.
Once the dolphin focuses and directs his ultrasound signal, the noise hits an object and bounces back to the dolphin. Sinuses filled with special oil located within the dolphin’s lower jaw receive the returning echo. The sonic information then passes to the inner ear which changes the sound waves to nerve impulses. These signals are then sent to the brain. This sonar system is so precise that it can detect a fish the size of a golf ball 230 feet away. The dolphin’s sonar system is the envy of the U.S. Navy. For such an organ to evolve by random mutations is hard to believe because it took years for inventors to develop the sonar used on ships. Consider just the sound-lens in the dolphin’s sonar system. It needed to have the right enzymes to make the right fatty compounds, and the lens had to be the right size and the right shape and be in the right location. A partially functioning system is no system at all. Ships and submarines have man-made sonar; dolphins have God-made sonar.
They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.
~ Psalm 107:23,24
Source: "Pearls in Paradise" by authors Bruce Malone and Jule Von Vett
References for this devotional.
Creation Devotional March 22 - Botany
Daily Devotional – March 22
Botany
Mangrove trees live alongside the ocean where their roots are flooded by salty ocean water. You would not expect ants, which build their home underground, to build nests in such a wet location. Believe it or not, some ants (Polyrhachis sokolova) thrive within Australia’s mangrove swamps. They build their cities deep into the mud some 18 inches below a mangrove tree. Twice a day, at high tide, their city is flooded!
The ants have designed their mound with two entrances that collapse at high tide - plugging the entrances and ensuring the safety of the ants inside. When seawater does leak into the underground tunnels, the ants scurry around moving their eggs and brood to different galleries. The bell-shaped galleries ensure that air is trapped, saving the ants from drowning. When the water recedes at low tide, the ants repair their city and others hunt small crustaceans on the mud flats. Two times a day…seven days a week…365 days a year, the ants repair their entrances and go hunting! Why would ants choose to live in such a way? It would be much easier to build their city in a place not covered with seawater twice a day. They did not choose it. God designed them to survive and thrive in this location.
Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.
~ Proverbs 6:6-8
Source: "Pearls in Paradise" by authors Bruce Malone and Jule Von Vett
References for this devotional.
Creation Devotional March 21 - History
Daily Devotional – March 21
History
Evolutionary ideas can actually kill people. In 1893, based on the belief in evolution, there were 83 human features considered to be useless leftovers from our ancestral past. One of these was the thymus gland. The thymus gland is located behind the breast bone in the upper chest. In babies and children, it is quite large and active, but this gland shrinks with age.
One of the functions of the thymus gland is to produce white blood cells called T lymphocytes, which attack foreign invaders such as bacteria and viruses. The white blood cells leave the thymus gland and settle in the spleen and lymph nodes where a new batch of white blood cells is produced. The thymus serves throughout life but is most active during childhood. Throughout the 1930’s, the thymus was considered a useless evolutionary leftover that was harmful to infants because of its large size. In misguided preventive measures, infants were exposed to x-rays in order to reduce the size of this “unnecessary evolutionary leftover” from the past. Follow-up studies found that infants who received the radiation treatment had abnormal growth and higher rates of infections that persisted longer than normal. In addition, the unintended consequence of the x-rays was cancer in the nearby thyroid gland - resulting in the death of many of these children from thyroid cancer some 10-15 years later. The misguided belief in microbe-to-man evolution is not only wrong, it is dangerous!
All of this unfathomable pain caused to these children and their parents could have been avoided if it had been acknowledged that we have a Creator who had a purpose in creating the various parts of our bodies. There are no junk leftover vestigial organs in our bodies; all parts have been created to serve a purpose. Your child’s ability to fight disease is in large part due to God’s creative design of the thymus gland.
There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.
~ Proverbs 14:12
Source: "Pearls in Paradise" by authors Bruce Malone and Jule Von Vett
References for this devotional.
Creation Devotional March 20 - History
Daily Devotional – March 20
History
Drawings or descriptions of two-headed dragons seem to strain credibility. But we have seen many examples of snakes and turtles with multiple heads. About 400 cases of two-headed snakes have been recorded in modern times. A two-headed reptile was even discovered fossilized in China. Perhaps two-headed reptiles gave rise to the idea of multi-headed dragons – like the Hydra that Hercules conquered.
The Bible even mentions a multi-headed dragon in Revelation 12:3. Having two heads is a detrimental developmental abnormality. The accident does not occur due to permanent mistakes in the DNA code (mutations) but in the process of forming the embryo. In this case, the embryo partially splits into two individuals, creating the two-headed reptile. If the embryo did split completely, it would result in identical twins. No new genetic information has been added to create a two-headed creature.
The two-headed creatures remind us that there are two ways of interpreting evidence - evolution or the Bible. Evolution believes that twoheadedness is a natural part of biological variation; evolution in action. The Bible on the other hand, teaches that suffering, sickness, death and two-headedness are a result of man’s rebellion in the Garden of Eden against their Creator.
For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.
~ Romans 8:22
Source: "Pearls in Paradise" by authors Bruce Malone and Jule Von Vett
References for this devotional.
Creation Devotional March 19 - Biology
Daily Devotional – March 19
Biology
Why are elephant’s tusks shrinking? African elephants and Asian elephants (living in India) have smaller tusks today than those measured in the 1850s; in fact, they average half the length. Ivory trade statistics and hunting records have revealed this fact. Why is this happening?
Hunters target elephants with large tusks and have been doing so for decades. This has culled out the elephants with large tusks, leaving only the elephants with smaller tusks or no tusks to propagate. Tuskless elephants are ignored by hunters and so survive to pass on their genes to the next generation. This is not evolution but selective pressure by hunters; you could say artificially-imposed selection. The consequences of trophy hunting are also impacting the antlers of moose and the wild bighorn sheep, as they are also experiencing smaller antler sizes. When trophy animals are culled out of the population, their genes are not passed down to future generations; there is a loss of information. Once the genes for larger size are lost, they are gone forever! New useful, functioning information is never added to the DNA. What nature reveals is a deterioration and reduction of information and features. The world is indeed in “bondage to decay” (Romans 8:21 NIV).
For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption….
~ Romans 8:20-21
Source: "Pearls in Paradise" by authors Bruce Malone and Jule Von Vett
References for this devotional.
Creation Devotional March 18 - History
Daily Devotional – March 18
History
Evolution always has been, and always will be, inherently racist. The foundational concept of evolution is that mankind evolved from some sort of ape-like creature, and since some groups of humans are still genetically more closely related to their ancestors than others, more evolved humans are superior and therefore of more value. Modern evolutionists like to downplay this inherent nature of their belief, but it was widely acknowledged early on. For instance, the full title of Darwin’s classic book is The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection—or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (emp. added). Imagine the response to any scientist today who wrote the following (excerpted from Darwin’s book):
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla (p. 521).” (Emphasis added)
Clearly, Darwin was convinced that the more “civilized races” (e.g., Caucasian) would one day exterminate the more savage races (e.g., African Negroes and Australian Aborigines), which he considered to be less evolved (and thus more ape-like) than Caucasians. The chief promoter of evolutionism in the 1800’s was Thomas Huxley who wrote:
“It may be quite true that some Negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average Negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favor, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites.” (Emphasis added)
The fact is that a historical understanding of evolution implies that some groups of humans are closer to our alleged ape-like ancestors in their mental faculties than others. Thus, some groups of humans supposedly are superior to others. The Bible teaches exactly the opposite. There are not different species or races of men; there is just one race, the human race. All people were created by God “in His image” from the very beginning of creation.
And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth…
~ Acts 17:26
Source: "Pearls in Paradise" by authors Bruce Malone and Jule Von Vett
References for this devotional.
Creation Devotional March 17 - Biology
Daily Devotional – March 17
Biology
You have probably have heard of the monarch butterfly migrating some 4,000 miles round trip, but have you heard of the painted lady butterfly migration? This butterfly migrates between Europe and Africa, flying an incredible 9,000 miles round trip. Why has this not been discovered until recently? People have not spotted these butterflies migrating because they fly at altitudes up to 3,000 feet and at speeds of 30 mph. Radar recently discovered millions of these butterflies migrating high up in the atmosphere. More than 60,000 sightings of painted lady butterflies have also been made as far north as the Arctic Circle.
The 9,000 mile migration takes six generations to complete. A butterfly might fly from Norway to Britain where it will breed and die, and then the next five generations will carry on the migration, breeding, flying, dying in an effort to fly all the way to Africa and returning to Norway. This is amazing! The tiny creature, weighing less than a gram, with a pin-sized head, having no opportunity to learn the migration route from older butterflies, undertakes and succeeds at this epic migration. How do they know where to go? Evolution says this all happened by chance. How could it? How would the painted lady evolve the ability to fly to a place it has never been before? God set this up from the beginning to show His great power. God has woven this information into the genetic code of each butterfly so that each generation “knows” what stage of the migration cycle the butterfly is in. This information is passed on to each generation. Such a delicate mechanism shouts intelligent design!
Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming...
~ Jeremiah 8:7
Source: "Pearls in Paradise" by authors Bruce Malone and Jule Von Vett
References for this devotional.
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