Note: A DVD of this material may be ordered from the presenter’s website: www.ask-the-animals.com/new/?q=node/8.

Note: A DVD of this material may be ordered from the presenter’s website: <a href="http://www.ask-the-animals.com/new/?q=node/8">www.ask-the-animals.com/new/?q=node/8</a>.

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Matthew Priebe

Can The Blind Watchmaker Account For This? Part 1

I'm going to go ahead and get these started here.

And so these pictures go by fairly rapidly, so once they're gone, you're not going to see them again.

They won't be needed for this presentation.

So if it's dark, you'll be able to see this better.

Now, I know many of you and even more of you know me from my various trips through this area and in company of my dad as he holds meetings here and whatnot, But this is the first opportunity I've ever had to speak at Advent Hope, and so I'm very glad to have this chance to do so.

For those who don't know me, which are a lot of you, I will give a little bit of background as to where I come from and what my specialty is.

The last 20 years I have been traveling around the United States and Canada exploring the natural world in whatever habitat I happen to be at the time.

My father is a speaker that travels from church to church and allows him to get to every state in the country.

And I have had the opportunity to help out with his ministry and help him in his endeavors, and in the same time have the advantage of traveling throughout the country, seeing virtually every type of habitat you can possibly imagine.

And in this process, I have made the study of animals and the animal behavior not my specialty.

It has become my passion to explore the various habitats that I happen to be in and find the animals that don't like to be found and in that way Find out what God has to teach us in this regard in the animal world Now in this process, I've discovered a lot of interesting things But the 2 that I want to share with you this morning are animal diversity and animal complexity Now first off there is the in incredible diversity of animal life on this planet.

No matter where you look, you're going to find something different that you haven't seen before.

There is every type of locomotion, there's every type of behavior, there's every type of way of surviving in this very different and varied habitats we have around the world.

In this incredible diversity, the more we study, the more diverse we find it to be.

There are millions and billions of species on this planet, and all of them more interesting than the last in many cases.

Second thing that I've been able to discover is the incredible complexity of animal life.

When we study animal life, and scientists are doing this on a constant basis around the world with creatures beyond your wildest dreams, we find everything to be more complex than we ever dreamed possible.

There is no limit to the complexity of the life that we study.

When we study the animals, we find them to be far, far more complex than we ever, ever had any idea.

But now, every PBS program, every National Park Service ranger talk has used the idea of animal complexity and animal diversity to promote the theories of evolution.

Now, As we go through history, we find a very interesting sequence has developed.

When Darwin sailed the Beagle and used island adaptation of animal life as the keystone of his ideas, creationists became on the defensive in this area and have been ever since.

Early church fathers stated wrongly that every animal species was created exactly as we see it today, and evolutionists were easily able to disprove this claim and make creationists very defensive.

Now, I refuse to surrender that ground to evolutionists since I know it so well myself.

Now others have shown in detail how the evolutionists' view of the fossil record is wrong, how sedimentation and erosion testifies to a worldwide flood, how astronomy cannot work on evolutionary models, How deeply flawed dating methods are continually used to lie to the public how paleontology has foisted repeated hoaxes as evidence for evolution I will not be exploring any of those topics since others have done it so well But I have been impressed that not nearly enough attention has been paid to the living souls all around us to testify of a master designer.

Now in the last 150 years, this is the sequence that has happened.

A creationist, 150 years ago, put forth the idea that if we came across a pocket watch lying upon a beach, if we found a working pocket watch, we would automatically assume that someone had built that watch, that someone had designed it, that someone had put it together.

We would not assume that it happened by random chance that there was a working pocket watch lying on the ground.

And so the argument went that a living creature, a living being, an animal, a plant, was far more complex than any mechanical construct of man and therefore had to be designed as well.

It could not happen by the processes of random chance.

Now, this was a very powerful argument that evolutionists had no good answer for.

Then in the 1980s, a book came out called The Blind Watchmaker.

This book stated that given enough time, given enough raw materials, that it was not only possible but inevitable that evolution would produce life in all its infinite complexity, that it would be able to create not only a working pocket watch but far more complex living creatures.

Is this a reasonable answer to this question?

Is this the solution that evolutionists would like it to be?

I decided that I needed to challenge this idea of the blind watchmaker and show the fallacy of what this really stands upon.

Now, in this presentation, I will be showing various examples from the animal world of the amazing variety and adaptation of life.

I am solely focusing on animal life, but just as much could be done from the plant world.

Now as I list various species, keep asking yourself the following question.

Are the physical structures of these animals a likely product of chance or design?

Now, second question, are the mental specializations displayed by these animals a likely product of chance or design?

There are only 2 choices, lucky chance or master design.

You must decide for yourself which you feel is the most appropriate.

This is the rock formation in southern England that we call Stonehenge.

Now when we look at Stonehenge, do we say, what an amazing display of random forces resulting in this rock arrangement?

Do we say instead, what an amazing display of architectural ingenuity by whoever built it?

When we come across a rubble pile, do we say, look at all the effort somebody went to piling all those rocks like that.

When we look at a stained glass window, do we say, it sure is lucky that the glass accidentally formed into that beautiful pattern so that we can enjoy it.

When we look at a pane of broken glass, do we say that must have taken a huge amount of effort and work to create that pattern in the glass?

Now both of these substances are the same, glass.

Both of the previous substances are the same, rock.

But don't we know instinctively, based on our innate knowledge and experience, which of these is due to accident and which of these is due to design?

If we can use common sense and experience to identify whether or not an inanimate object is due to chance or design, then why can't we use that same common sense and experience to determine whether or not a living creature is due to the results of design or accident.

We start with 1 of the more common groups of birds in the world.

These are found virtually everywhere you want to go in any tropical or temperate part of the world on every continent except for Antarctica.

These birds are found no matter where you live, you will have some form of woodpecker near where you are.

Now, woodpeckers all share the same basic structure and the same basic adaptations in which they are able to function.

Now to start with, they all have a very stiff tail that allows them to brace themselves upon a tree trunk so that they're able to get into the exact position in which they are able to be upright so they can pound on the wood with their head.

Secondly, they have very special feet up here.

Instead of having, like most birds, 3 toes pointing forward and 1 toe pointing backward, they have in fact 2 toes pointing forward and 2 toes pointing backward.

This allows them to get a very strong grip on the wood without slipping because they're going up and down and around and needing to hold on very tightly.

And this allows them to get a very good grip as they're moving about.

Now woodpeckers are built to pound their head against a tree trunk.

They not only do it once, they do it many, many times, hundreds of times per day.

They are throwing their head forward at 25 miles an hour with each hit.

Now, if we threw our heads forward against a solid object at 25 miles an hour, we would not be doing this for very long.

It would not be a very successful endeavor.

But these guys do it hundreds of times a day with no ill effects.

Well, first off, they have a very strong skull, a very hard, reinforced skull, a very strong neck compared to most birds.

This allows them to withstand the force of the impact as they're hammering away, so they don't get skull fractures, they don't have any kind of injuries, that sort of thing.

They also have a cushion around their brain that allows them to act like a shock absorber, so that it actually protects their brain from being shaken out of its senses.

They also, the brain is different from most other birds in that it's above the level of the bill so that it actually is out of the way of most of the impact of its hammering, and therefore avoids any of the damage that would occur if it was on the same level as the bill.

So all these things are built into it so that it can able to pound its head without any damage.

Now they are pounding their head for a simple reason.

They got to get the food inside the tree trunk.

They have to get the insect grubs that are inside the wood.

And so now once they've drilled a hole, they still have to extract the insect grub from the from the hole.

And to do this, they have an extremely specialized tongue.

Their tongue is covered with a very gluey saliva that allows them to stick to whatever they touch inside the hole, pull out their tongue, whatever is touching the tongue is pulled out, and that way they're able to hook on to whatever they got.

They're also, their tongue has very spiky hairs that allow them to yank onto anything it grabs and yank it back into its mouth very easily.

And so this allows them to get the food they need.

Now, their most specialized aspect of their tongue, however, is the fact that it is 4 times the length of their bill.

Now, where are we going to put a tongue that is 4 times the length of a bird's bill?

If we had a tongue like that, we wouldn't be able to do anything else but stick it in our mouth and not be able to talk or anything.

We wouldn't be able to function very well.

So a woodpecker has a special, unique adaptation that is completely different from any other family of birds in the world.

There is a point at the back of its throat where the tongue would normally attach in a regular bird, and instead it goes into a tube inside a woodpecker's mouth.

This tube allows the tongue to slide backwards and the tube goes up the back of the head, between the brain and the skull, over the top of the brain, down forward, and ends up in the nostril, like this.

This allows him to store his tongue and allows him to hang on to whatever he needs to grab onto, and then when he's done with his tongue, it's able to slide back into the slot.

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Can The Blind Watchmaker Account For This? Part 1

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