liThe Miracle of Planet Earth-3"
by Desmond Ford
The most amazing thing about the universe is that we can comprehend it-thanks to the marvel ofthe human mind. The same mind that learns from God's creatures also has a conscience.
'.'Conscience is a powerful evidence that God is just and immortality in Christ is real.
Mystery of MindThe mind, the marvel of the human mind! There's nocomputer like the human mind. There is no machine ofany kind like the human mind. We don't understand howit works.
No surgeon has ever opened up a cranium and said,"Eureka! I've found it. A thought!" No brain opened by asevere accident reveals consciousness.
How is it something that has no spatialquality (the mind) can result in some-thing with a spatial quality (the bodyor other objects) being moved? Ateenager in an automobile has athought. He or she moves her footand presses the accelerator.Thousands of pounds of Buick gohurtling along the road. Thatwhich has no geographical volumemakes that which has geographicalvolume move. No one knows how.No one knows why. Think of the mys-tery of the human mind.
The most interesting thing about our universe is that itis comprehensible.
Why should it be? Why should it be that something bal-anced here on my shoulders can make adequate sense out ofwhat is going on out there enough for me to live and func-tion?
How can we explain the relationship between this com-puter, the human brain, and out there? If thinking is onlyitching, it wouldn't make any sensible sense.
Odds Against Chance LifeFred Hoyle, the great astronomer, was an atheistbut he changed his mind. He and a Buddhist scien-tist studied the chances that life could come about bychance. They prepared the statistics and predicted theodds were 1 X 10287
, or one multiplied by ten to the power
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of 287. Now, thatruns into many,many trillions. (Alowly 1012 can get usinto the trillions.) Itwill keep you up allnight putting all thezeroes after the one.
Those are thechances of gettingone protein moleculeby chance. But ittakes 234 of those 1X 10287 molecules tomake the lowestform of life!
We are a miraclein and of ourselves.The liver has 500functions, a thou-sand enzymes. Thebody has a milliontypes of antibodies.
Mysteries of theNatural WorldThink of the natural world of which we are a part.
Think of migration. Often, when I walk with a friend ofmine on Sabbath afternoon, he talks about which birds areabout to move here or move there. The mystery of migra-tion.
Think of the salmon. You know the marvel of thesalmon. They come in from the ocean to spawn and returnupriver to where they were born. They struggle against tidesand currents, and against waterfalls. They stay only on acertain side of the river. They stay on that side where thetributary in which they were born will be found.
If you put the salmon in another tributary than the onewhere they were born, they fight against the current untilthey get back to the very place where they were born. Evenafter they've been a thousand miles out to sea. Who toldthem?
EelsWith eels, it's the opposite.
The salmon-the male salmon-digs a hole under waterin the tributary of the fresh water for spawning. But the eelsgo to the Sargasso Sea. From Europe, that's thousands ofmiles. From America, more like a thousand.
Yet you never find a European eel in American waters oran American eel in European waters. And because of thegreater distance from Europe, European eels are mature byan extra year so they'll be fit to travel that extra mileage.
The eels go to the Sargasso Sea and the female lays mil-lions of eggs. One female, millions of eggs. (Imagine if thehuman race were that fertile!) The male drops his spermover the top of them. When the eels are born, what do theydo? They go back to the coast from which their parentscame, European or American. Who told them?
AntsThink of the ants.
Ants are divided into different groups of functionality.There are hunters that go out from the nest, or hill, to scav-
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enge all dead ani-mal material, andbring it in. There arefarmers, or agricul-turists, among theants. They care forgreen growing thingsnear the nests.
Those that fasci-nate me the most arethe herders, or pas-toralists, who havetheir own herds andflocks. These antscare for aphids,those little insectsthat suck and suckon anything green.The herder antcomes to the littleaphid on the greenleaf, and it's suckingall the juice it canout of the leaf. Thisway it prepares hon-eydew.
The ant rubs the back of the aphid with its antennaeand the aphid releases a tiny globule of honeydew. If youand I scraped all day and night, the aphid wouldn't give usa thing. We would starve.
But the ant does it just the right way with its antennae,just the right way. When it has milked that aphid, it goes onto another one. It does more than that.
The ants have nurseries for the aphids. When the sea-sons pass, and baby aphids are born, the ants take themdown into the ant nest. They keep moving them so that theyare in the perfect humidity and temperature. Those ants aregreat nursemaids.
They also prepare cowsheds. When the aphids are suck-ing on the leaves, they are sometimes exposed and attackedby enemies. So the ants build cowsheds over the aphidcolonies out there on the vegetation and put guards at theentrance.
We all feel that we'd do better if we had a bigger brain.What if we had a brain the size of an ant's brain? How dothe ants do it?
God the TeacherNow, my friends, think of these things. Who taught thesalmon how to get home after having traveled thousands ofmiles at sea? Who taught the eel where in the world to go?Who taught the ants to be pastoralists, to have flocks andherds, cowsheds and nurseries? Who taught them?
God is exalted in his power,Who is a teacher like him? (Job 36:22)
Brain PoliceThe best thing about the brain I've not yet mentioned. Thebrain has a police officer.
In the United Kingdom the police use truncheons. InAmerica, the police use heavier weapons. We have a police-man in the brain, but it's not heavily armed like an army.It's called conscience.
The conscience cannot altogether be of our own contriv-
ing, because it doesn't go along with our wishes and desires.If we do·something that doesn't sing a sweet song, the con-science stabs us and says, "You shouldn't have done that."That's the police officer of conscience.
There's no dodging "ought." If you talk to atheists,they'll tell you, "Well, you oughtn't to talk about suchthings." You can't get out of "ought" that easily. Ought is inevery cell of our brain. And why is that good news? I'll tellyou. If we have a sense of right, it is because our Creator isaltogether right.
Conscience Says God Is JustThe conscience is therefore a clue to understanding the greatquestion that we all have: "Why is there so much injustice?"
Recently, I heard that a lifelong friend of mine just died.I knew her from childhood; she was my age. A beautiful,generous, kind, upright young lady. Yes, I still think of her asyoung, even though she was my age. Now she's gone. Why?
We all have this question. Why? Why mine? Why her?Why this one and not that one? Why?
Police-officer conscience assures us that our Creator, theprovidential Supervisor of the universe, is just. He is right-eous.
Guaranteed ImmortalityThat fact guarantees immortality-because belief in anotherlife is a corollary of the existence of God. Why was the uni-verse set going in the first place? Was it to develop character?But what is the good of developing character if after peoplehave fought their way through rivers of blood and jumpedthrough hoops of fire, God just blots them out?
Bruce Barton says:If you were God, would you form your children,
give them a conviction that right is right, that life is sig-nificant, tell them to live for the right even if it hurts allthe time-and then when they have done it, crushthem? Of course not.Immortality is a corollary to the existence of God. And
natural revelation tells us that.
Night and MorningThe Psalmist says:
Weeping may remain for a nightbut rejoicing comes in the morning. (Psalm 30:5)
Why? Because thewomb of morning is apromise of the resur-rection.
Things seemextremely bad atnighttime. We've alltossed and turned at night.Problems are so huge andinsurmountable at night. Whenthe morning comes, however, andthe sun rises and you begin to hearbirds chirp and you know it's breakfasttime, things appear quite different. Night is asymbol of death and morning a symbol of res-urrection.
Theme of Nature
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This is not an isolated fact in nature. Nature's full of thistheme. Every grain that dies in the soil tells us about deathand resurrection. Jesus said, "I tell you the truth, unless akernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains onlya single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds" (John12:24).
The cells of the body are constantly dying and beingrenewed. The moon fades away to nothing and suddenly isreborn.
Metamorphosis and ResurrectionIn Australia, we have a kind of cicada that stays under-ground for 17 years. One day you're walking through thebush and you hear a horrible clatter and racket! You knowthe cicadas have come up. This is the crop from those thatwent down 17 years ago. After 17 years they've come up tofill the bush with a cacophony of life and vitality. Afterbeing buried for 17 years!
Who doesn't know about the life of a caterpillar? At theprime of its life, it goes into its chrysalis tomb. A child stum-bling upon that wrapped, apparently lifeless form wouldsay, "That's the end of that."
But it's not the end. The time will unfailingly comewhen that chrysalis will open, and out of that tomb willcome something beautiful. And that butterfly will do some-thing it could never do before-fly!
Before it was earth-bound, as we are. One day we willtravel at the speed of thought. One day we will be metamor-phized and transformed, just as is the butterfly. 15~
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