The Creator Revealed

Design In Ecology

Three Angels Broadcasting Network

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Series Code: TCR

Program Code: TCR180005A


00:31 Welcome to The Creator Revealed.
00:35 I'm Tim Standish, I'm a scientist.
00:38 And being a scientist,
00:39 I was taught not to believe in the Creator,
00:44 but when we look at the creation,
00:48 we not only come to the conclusion
00:50 that there is a Creator behind it all,
00:54 but it tells us the most fascinating things
00:57 about His nature, His personality, if you will.
01:02 Absolutely.
01:03 You know, that's what Paul wrote to the Romans
01:05 that in Romans 1:20,
01:07 he says,
01:09 "That God's invisible attributes
01:11 are seen in the things that He made."
01:15 And we're so glad you're joining us today.
01:17 This is already becoming a very popular program.
01:21 In our first segment,
01:22 you're going to get just a little bit of science.
01:25 And in the second segment,
01:26 we'll be giving you a practical application.
01:29 And I'm just very thrilled.
01:31 What are we talking about?
01:33 We're talking about relationships,
01:34 relationships between organisms and their environment,
01:40 and relationships between one kind of organism
01:44 and another kind of organism.
01:45 All right.
01:46 I'm ready to learn.
01:48 All right.
01:50 I love this topic
01:52 because it tells us
01:57 so many beautiful things
01:59 about not only ourselves but also God who created us.
02:05 This photograph,
02:07 I took one day on the campus of Loma Linda University.
02:12 These poppies are such beautiful flowers,
02:15 and it's fascinating
02:17 to watch the bees buzzing around them.
02:20 The thing that struck me, when I was looking at these,
02:25 was these two organisms are working together.
02:31 They are not in some kind of struggle to the death
02:34 with one another.
02:36 Right.
02:37 Everything is cooperative there.
02:42 Yeah.
02:43 And it got me thinking about what the...
02:47 Not only cooperative but dependent really.
02:49 Interdependent, they are interdependent.
02:51 Yes, the bee gets obviously sugar,
02:54 ultimately, from the flower.
02:57 And the flower is pollinated by the bees.
03:01 So there's a nice trade off here,
03:03 both of them are benefiting in a beautiful way.
03:07 So as a biologist, I, you know, started thinking about things
03:12 because one of the things
03:14 that I was taught over the course of my education
03:18 was that a central principle of life is competition,
03:24 competition not cooperation.
03:27 So organisms
03:28 that are in this kind of struggle to the death...
03:31 A survival of the fittest.
03:32 That's right, the survival of the fittest.
03:35 But in reality, I started to think about...
03:38 In reality, could life even exist
03:43 if that was really the principle?
03:46 When we look at living things, we see cooperation,
03:49 interdependence all over the place.
03:54 When it comes to bees,
03:57 let's say,
04:02 how do you get a bee? Where does a bee come from?
04:05 How does a bee exist?
04:08 There's a relationship between bees
04:10 and their environment obviously.
04:12 Without air, the bee wouldn't be able to fly.
04:15 Without atoms to be made out of,
04:17 the bee couldn't exist.
04:20 Really, in my thinking, it sort of walked me
04:23 all the way back to the universe.
04:26 Without a universe, the bee couldn't exist.
04:31 But the universe has to be a just right universe.
04:34 There are all kinds of factors
04:38 that have to be just precisely right
04:41 if you want to get a bee, or a puppy,
04:43 or a human or a puppy for that matter.
04:46 You mean, just to sustain life,
04:48 when you're talking about all these factors,
04:50 to sustain life, we've got Mars that they're saying,
04:53 you know, perhaps they're learning a little more,
04:56 but we are a planet on which everything
05:00 comes together perfectly to sustain life.
05:02 Oh, yes.
05:03 This planet is a very, very special planet,
05:06 that's becoming quite obvious from the study of these planets
05:11 that they're finding out there in space.
05:13 Ours is special, it's a very special planet,
05:16 there's no doubt about that.
05:17 But I'm going bigger than the planet.
05:18 Okay. I'm going the whole universe.
05:21 The whole universe operates by laws.
05:24 And we're not going to talk about all of them, don't panic.
05:27 But let's talk about one of them, gravity,
05:29 because gravity is something that we all understand.
05:32 It turns out that gravity is just right
05:37 so that our sun can exist.
05:39 Our sun is actually a great big hydrogen bulb
05:43 up in the sky.
05:45 It's made out of primarily hydrogen,
05:47 and gravity pulls that hydrogen together
05:51 so that in the center of the sun,
05:53 the pressure is so high
05:56 that the hydrogens are fusing together,
05:59 and when they do that,
06:00 they release enormous amounts of energy.
06:03 And that's what's going on up there.
06:07 It's just right.
06:09 If gravity was a bit stronger,
06:12 you would think, "Well, that might be good,
06:14 because we could somehow rather have a hotter sun
06:18 or something, it'd be more nuclear fusion going on there."
06:21 But the problem is that if we sped up that fusion,
06:26 so much energy would be coming off the sun...
06:29 We'll burn up. That we would burn up.
06:32 Not only that, the orbit of the earth would change,
06:36 the earth would have to be adjusted
06:38 in many, many different ways.
06:40 But there probably isn't a way of adjusting things
06:43 so that life could possibly exist.
06:45 If it was strong, the earth would be orbiting closer,
06:47 we'd actually have to rearrange things
06:48 and put the earth a long way away.
06:50 But it's not just the amount of radiation light coming off.
06:55 It's also the kind of light.
06:59 There are certain kinds of light like X-rays.
07:01 We don't see it,
07:03 but we know that those can do a lot of damage to us.
07:06 So that would be a problem as well.
07:08 Getting everything to work with stronger gravity
07:10 might well be and probably is impossible
07:13 for life to exist.
07:15 So what would happen
07:16 if we made it a little bit weaker?
07:18 What if we made it
07:22 so that the fusion is not going on
07:26 so rapidly inside the sun?
07:28 Well, then the sun would be too cold,
07:30 and we wouldn't have enough light energy hitting the earth,
07:33 the earth would freeze.
07:35 Ice Age. Yeah.
07:37 We'd be in a permanent Ice Age.
07:39 And again, the bee couldn't exist,
07:41 and neither could the flower, neither could the human being,
07:43 neither could the elephant,
07:45 no life could exist if gravity wasn't just right.
07:48 That's amazing.
07:50 So bear in mind, yeah,
07:51 it takes a universe to make a bee.
07:55 This is just one of many things
07:58 that need to be just exactly right.
08:00 So that's a relationship thing.
08:03 For the relationship to exist between life
08:06 and the rest of the physical universe,
08:09 things have to be just right.
08:11 We've got to get them exactly perfect.
08:14 Now, let's get back to this business
08:16 of how organisms relate to one another.
08:20 Charles Darwin wrote about that,
08:22 and here is what he thought.
08:23 This is in the Origin of Species,
08:26 his most famous book, he wrote,
08:28 "It is the most closely allied forms,
08:31 varieties of the same species and species of the same genus
08:36 or related genera,
08:37 which, from having nearly the same structure,
08:40 constitution and habits,
08:41 generally come into the severest competition
08:45 with each other.
08:47 Consequently, each new variety or species,
08:50 during the progress of its formation,
08:52 will generally press hardest on its nearest kindred
08:56 and tend to exterminate them."
09:02 That's a solemn thought, isn't it?
09:03 You can see, by the way.
09:05 You can see why it is that
09:06 people regularly take this kind of thinking,
09:09 and Charles Darwin
09:11 also spells it out quite clearly
09:13 and apply it to human beings
09:15 and say, "Well, there are other human beings
09:16 who need to be exterminated,
09:19 because we're in competition with them."
09:21 And that's not a hypothetical situation,
09:25 that is something that has been acted on
09:28 over the course of history.
09:31 But think about it.
09:32 The most closely related are the ones
09:35 that are in the severest competition
09:36 according to this way of thinking.
09:38 There is no competition...
09:40 Sorry, no cooperation.
09:43 That's a coincidental thing that, you know, whatever,
09:48 but the rule is competition, the rule is struggle,
09:52 the rule is survival of the fittest
09:55 in that particular way of thinking.
09:56 And you can see that in some ways
09:58 like in a lion and a pride
10:01 where the dominant male will kill his cubs
10:06 or something like this.
10:08 So there's sometimes that if you look at that
10:11 in that isolated incident, that may be true,
10:14 but not overall.
10:16 Well, here's the interesting thing
10:17 about something like that.
10:19 Don't you viscerally respond to a situation like that?
10:23 Oh, yes. Absolutely.
10:24 Isn't it awful?
10:26 Isn't a terrible thing?
10:27 Haven't we all seen nature programs
10:31 where lions are not just killing each other,
10:33 they're killing all these other gazelles.
10:35 And the gazelles are beautiful creatures.
10:37 Why it that we know
10:40 that there is something wrong about that?
10:44 The secret is actually...
10:46 It's not a secret, it's stated quite plainly in the Bible.
10:50 We know that that is wrong.
10:52 We know that's wrong, because that wasn't God's plan.
10:54 Yes.
10:56 God did not create lions
10:58 to tear gazelles to pieces and eat them.
11:02 This is the fall, this is the result of sin.
11:06 And the good news is, in the new earth,
11:09 the lion and the gazelle will lie down together.
11:11 Exactly.
11:13 So let's look
11:14 at another example of cooperation
11:17 that's evident there in nature.
11:19 Of fungi,
11:21 we usually don't think of fungus as doing anything
11:24 other than breaking down dead stuff.
11:27 But in fact,
11:28 they play a very important role in nature.
11:31 They also taste good if you eat mushrooms.
11:34 But when you see a mushroom,
11:36 what you're seeing is really the tip of the iceberg.
11:39 So let's go way back
11:40 to the very beginning with mushrooms.
11:43 And we need to start looking at the tips of roots.
11:47 These could be tree roots or any other plant root.
11:51 What you commonly find there, way out of the root tips,
11:55 is that there are things called mycorrhiza
12:01 that are growing into the root tips.
12:04 Those are fungi.
12:07 When you look at a mushroom, that's the tip of the iceberg.
12:12 The rest of the organism is this hair-like structure
12:19 that's growing down there in the soil
12:21 into the roots of plants.
12:24 And people thought, "Oh, those must be parasites
12:29 stealing stuff from these poor plants."
12:31 In fact, the opposite is true.
12:33 When we start looking at
12:37 what the plant gets from these fungi,
12:41 it's quite amazing.
12:43 First of all, they get water,
12:44 and obviously water is very important for plants.
12:47 It increases the size of their root system,
12:50 the surface area,
12:52 so they can absorb water, pass it on to the plant.
12:54 In addition to that,
12:56 the fungi help to absorb minerals
12:59 that the plants need to grow,
13:01 and they give protection to the plant.
13:04 They stop other things
13:05 that might come in and want to eat the plant or.
13:09 And finally, and this is one of the most amazing things,
13:12 they actually have a communication system
13:16 that they use from one plant to another
13:18 through these mycorrhiza.
13:20 I see fungus all the time at the root
13:23 or at the base of our oak trees.
13:25 Didn't realize they were doing the tree some good.
13:28 Quite possibly they are.
13:29 It depends, obviously, if the tree is dying,
13:32 the fungi will help to break it down
13:34 and recycle it.
13:36 But when everything's alive and thriving, it's great.
13:40 So what does the fungus get?
13:41 It gets sugar from the plant
13:44 and that's mostly it.
13:47 But they are interdependent somewhat.
13:49 So they are interdependent.
13:50 This is an exchange that they're making.
13:54 This brings to mind this text in Proverbs.
13:58 "There are three things that are too amazing for me,
14:02 four that I do not understand.
14:03 The way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on a rock,
14:07 the way of a ship on the high seas,
14:09 and the way of a man with a young woman."
14:12 So all relationships.
14:13 All relationships, the bird and the air,
14:17 the man and the woman, cooperating, working together.
14:23 So what does this ultimately tell us
14:24 about the Creator?
14:26 The Creator loves these beautiful relationships,
14:30 relationships between bees and flowers,
14:33 those sorts of things.
14:34 He gets joy
14:35 from these cooperative relationships
14:39 that we see in ecology,
14:40 and His desire for cooperation with humans
14:44 and the rest of creation is evident
14:47 in the interdependence we see among all things,
14:51 the living part of the universe
14:54 and the inanimate universe.
14:58 So ultimately, the created things
15:01 reveal the Creator's desire for harmonious relationships.
15:05 And that is exactly what we want to talk about
15:09 in the second segment.
15:11 So we ask you to stay tuned with us.
15:13 We'll be back in 60 seconds.


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Revised 2019-03-14