Inspired Evidence
By
I‘ve been reading Inspired Evidence by Julie Von Vett and Bruce Malone for quite a while now, and it is awesome because it provides a new page of inspired evidence for a Biblical worldview every single day for all 365 of them. These authors actually made Romans 1:20 come alive for me:
For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse. (KJV)
The items below are just a few of the truly great things that I learned on various days throughout the year of my study of this book. I could have written a whole page on most of these items but I’m trying to leave out a lot of the information that you already know. So some of the highlights will be only a sentence or two long.
Planet Earth is located in the “Goldilocks” area, where it is not too hot or too cold, yet the moon heats up to 253°F and cools down to –384°F. We have an atmosphere that acts as insulation and the moon does not have this feature.
Plants need photosynthesis to survive, and this is a seventy-step process that none of our scientists have figured out how to duplicate. So how did plants survive before all seventy steps evolved over millions of years?
Man is not a more-evolved animal. We long to know why, are creative, have a sense of humor, write, speak, recognize beauty, study medicine, draw conclusions, and worship our Creator.
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Man was created in the very image of God and has always been highly intelligent. In fact, a mechanical computer with seventy-two gears in it was built around 65 BC, and batteries and electroplating were built in 250 BC. We’ve never really been as dumb as the cave men that we often see on TV.
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Were the first humans very primitive? Not really. Sacsayhuaman, an ancient city built by the Incas near Cuzco, Peru has one huge stone in it that weighs forty million pounds and is larger than a five-story building and is part of a wall where the stones are so tight that a piece of paper cannot be inserted between them plus the stones are irregular shapes. How did they move them and make them fit? In Genesis 4:21–22 man was already working with bronze and iron!
God created some termites with the ability to build a structure that has lots of vents that can be opened and closed to maintain a constant temperature of 87±1°F even when the temperature outside of it goes down to 35°F or up to 104°F. This concept has now been copied in an eighteen-story tall building in Zimbabwe to reduce the need for air conditioning.
Fossilized dinosaur skin impressions, footprints, bones, eggs, and even poop have been found around the globe as though some rapid burial event happened about the same time that Noah’s flood occurred in the Bible. (Note: The coal we use almost every day also needed a huge burial event to form it.)
Evolution says life became more complex with time, but we see the opposite occurring in real life. Mutations have a negative rather than a positive effect on the individual 99.9% of the time. Information is almost always lost, not gained, when mutations occur. Our genes are going downhill, not uphill.
Almost everything that we study appears to be designed instead of just a product of random chance. Our sweat feeds the type of bacteria that kills the bad bacteria on our skin. In addition, sweat cools us, and skin usually heals itself.
The information that we have discovered in DNA cannot be explained by any natural process. Less than one gram of DNA can store as much data as one trillion CDs.
Our kidneys keep our blood from becoming too thick or too thin plus keep us from having too much or not enough salt in our blood. They also help bone marrow make red blood cells and are more efficient than a dialysis machine that is a hundred times larger than they are.
We learned how to make much better chain saws by studying one beetle that God made. Our first motorized saws had teeth that were pointed like those on a hand saw. Joseph Buford Cox watched a timber beetle larva easily cut through wood and copied the c-shaped mandibles to his chain saw chain which made a world of difference.
Humans have deeper throats, over one hundred muscles to control our vocal cords, and a language center in the brain that apes do not have. We are very different from them.
Our sun has the right mass, the right light, the right composition, the right distance, and is located in the right place for living things to survive. However, we would be receiving way too much radiation when there are solar flares without earth’s magnetic field that directs the radiation to the poles. And this radiation would eventually strip away our atmosphere without this magnetic field. So why do we continue to think that all the above happened by random chance?
Both a human male and a human female had to evolve at the same time and be in the same general location to make babies if evolution formed everything we see. Just look at all the physical, emotional, biological, physiological, and chemical differences between males and females. This is no small feat for evolution, but a very tiny feat for a Creator that can speak things into being.
From 1800 until 1960 the Bible was the foundation of all reality here in the US, and we won more Noble Prizes than any other nation on the planet! In 1961/1962 prayer and the Bible were removed from public schools here in the US, and everything (including winning Nobel prizes) has gone downhill since then.
Michael Faraday is second only to Isaac Newton as the greatest physicist to ever walk the earth. He invented lots of things which are great for us, but not as great as his devotion to the Lord. Over three thousand meticulously written notations appear in his Bible. And Isaac Newton served the Lord too.
Earth could have very easily been either too hot or too cold. If it had been a lot colder, we would have no vegetables to eat. If there had been less gravity, the wind could easily blow us off the ground. If there had been more gravity, ammonia and methane would remain too close to the ground. And if the earth’s rotation were faster, hurricanes would be much worse. If the rotation of the earth were slower, nights would be much colder and days much hotter.
A postage stamp-size piece of skin contains three million cells, one yard of blood vessels, four yards of nerves, one hundred sweat glands, fifteen oil glands, and twenty-five nerve endings. The average human body contains potassium, iron, sulfur, calcium, magnesium, and phosphorous. We are fearfully and wonderfully made as stated in the Bible.
What caused the ice age? This is exactly what we would expect to see after the world-wide flood in the Bible. Is there any other explanation that makes more sense than this one?
Why do we have so many different languages? The tower of Babel explains how this could have easily happened. If we all evolved from one mutation and the tower of Babel event never occurred, it seems like we would all be speaking the same language.
Our blood gets oxygen when it travels through our lungs; but if our lungs start working before we are born, we’ll drown in our mom’s womb. So, God designed a bypass system where our blood gets oxygen from the mother’s blood by diffusion into placental capillaries and is mostly shunted away from our not-fully-developed lungs. Our first cry inflates our lungs and closes the bypass system so that the placental blood is diverted to our inflated lungs where we start getting oxygen without our mom’s help.
There can be no survival of the fittest without arrival of the fittest. So far no one has been able to explain where the fittest came from. Mutations are not making us better humans.
God used forty people that were very different from each other to write the Bible. Some were kings and some were shepherds. Some lived in cities while other lived in the desert. They lived on three different continents and wrote in three different languages during war, prosperity, and times of great need, and they wrote on controversial topics, yet there is harmony and continuity from Genesis to Revelation.
Jupiter has three hundred times the mass of Earth, and its gravity acts like a giant vacuum cleaner as it travels through space. The other planets do some of the same type of thing. Their gravity pulls debris towards them so that it never reaches planet Earth.
People predicted an ice age in the 1970s, and in the 1980s they said we would starve due to overpopulation. In the 1990s they said we would run out of energy. In the 2000s they said we would see a big increase in global warming until they discovered that we are actually experiencing global cooling, and then they changed it to climate change. Man’s predictions are often wrong.
In 1893 there were eighty-three human features that were considered to be leftovers from evolution, but now we know that all eighty-three have legitimate, useful functions!
Some argue that poor design and/or bad things show that there is no god. Please note that Genesis 3 says sin wrecked the creation. God allowed this to happen to show us how sin wrecks everything and how much we need Jesus to rescue us from our sin.
Most of us think we’re awesome if we ever complete a twenty-six-mile marathon. God gave all birds special lungs that allow a hummingbird to fly non-stop for six hundred miles when it crosses the Gulf of Mexico on the way to South America for the winter months. A tracking device has been attached to a bar-tailed godwit bird, and it traveled 7100 miles non-stop in just over eight days!
Almost everything that we’ve found that humans have made such as pottery, plows, the wheel, and written language is less than ten thousand years old, so why do we keep hearing that the first humans appeared way before ten thousand years ago?
Scientists agree that James Clerk Maxwell’s greatest contribution to science was his 913-page treatise on the mathematical unification of electricity with magnetism. It provided a foundation for television, computers, space travel, and modern electronics. He also made major contributions to the fields of statistics, astronomy, gas theory, thermodynamics, and color theory that helped us produce the first color photograph. Maxwell had Psalm 111:2 posted over the door to his lab at Cambridge University:
The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein. (KJV)
And Maxwell soundly rejected Charles Darwin’s theory when it was published.
Did you know that our eyes are cleansed by a type of antibacterial soap every day? God created tears that are over 90% water plus an enzyme that destroys bacteria to help keep them infection-free.
Camels can allow their body temperature to rise as high as 106°F so that it does not feel so hot and can reduce it at night when it is cold outside. And they can drink twentysix gallons of water in ten minutes!
In 1953 Stanley Miller tried to duplicate what might have created life on our planet. He put all the right chemicals in a sealed apparatus and added something to simulate lightning to try to make amino acids, which are the building blocks for proteins. His experiment failed. Amino acids disperse in water and are easily contaminated, so they will never form proteins in natural conditions. So, he actually proved how very difficult it is to create life, which is the opposite of what he was trying to do.
God is mentioned thirty-two times in Genesis chapter 1; and if we add the use of the personal pronoun, He is mentioned forty-three times, so Satan will always attack what it plainly says! Why? Because if he can convince us that it means something other than what it actually says, he has won the battle for our souls. When we question this part of the Bible, we question a lot of the rest of it too, and this causes lots of people to walk away from the Lord and never return.
There are at least twenty factors that make our planet optimized for habitability and the probability of all these factors being present at the same time is about one in 1015.
There are only two main choices in life. We live for ourselves, our desires, our comfort, and our own good works, which ends with us being separated from God forever and ever; or we live for Him, which ends with us spending time with Him forever and ever.
Colossians 1:16 says:
For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. (NIV)
Colossians 1:21 says:
Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. (NIV)
Paul was right on target when he said, “Once you were alienated from God…” because I attended church a thousand times without ever knowing the real Jesus! My Jesus was just a figment of my imagination where I could do whatever I want whenever I want and still go to heaven. I never listened to Christian radio, never read my Bible, and only prayed when I was at the end of my rope. I was basically my own god.
When I finally asked Jesus to rescue me, he came into my life and gave me a new heart and a new mind that wanted to please Him (instead of me) and now my life is truly worth living! Praise God!
Before the event above happened, I never realized how much better life could be. Are you currently content with how well things are going in your life? If not, can you please ask someone to help you discover our Designer’s great plan for our lives? Please note that the world, the devil, and my own flesh kept me away from the real Jesus and a life full of hope for almost twenty years and these same three will try to keep you, too, away from Him as long as possible.
Please fill in the blank: “The only thing stopping me from giving my life to Jesus is _________.”
Will you please ask someone to help you with this “sticking point” today? If you have no one around to help you answer your questions, please send an email to melblinson [at] gmail.com and I’ll try to help. d