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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Little-known Miracles of God's Creation

Matthew Priebe

Little-known Miracles of God’s Creation, Part 1

Little-known Miracles of God’s Creation, Part 2

Red in Tooth and Claw. Who Created the Predators?

Q & A Session

This is not normal for me, so bear with me as I get used to this.

Well, it's been a long time since I was here.

It has been 3 years since I last was speaking at Advent Hope.

And of course, at that point, you weren't even in this building.

So I've never actually set foot in this building in my life.

So this is actually quite interesting to see the new facilities and all that sort of thing.

How many were here for my last presentation 3 years ago?

It was a presentation that dealt with creation and evolution And the ways that the animal world reveals to us information that we never probably thought we could get from that source.

Normally when we talk about creation and evolution, we look at it from fossil records or from various different scientific studies of sedimentation rate and various different very specialized sciences like that.

But with the animals, sometimes we tend to ignore that because what can the animals tell us about the natural world and the way that creation and evolution works.

And so that's what we talked about last time.

And we looked at the animal world to find ways that they were specialized, complicated, very intricate, and the ways that those things reveal a very intelligent designer, the intelligent designer of the Bible, God who created all life on Earth in the beginning.

And how it doesn't support the ideas of evolution.

Evolution has a lot of ideas and theories that the animal world in and of itself does not in any way support when you look at the ways these animals are put together.

So that's what we talked about last time and we're going to be continuing on with that today, the sequel to that in a way, because we're going to be looking at more animals and more ways that animals are put together both physically and mentally to see how they are a living testimony of God's wonder and design.

And so what we're going to do is we're going to look at individual species and groups of animals to see what we can learn.

And we're going to be doing this all day because we're going to be having meetings in the afternoon, and we'll talk about that a little bit later.

So what I'm going to do to start out is I'm going to read from the verse in Scripture that I finished last presentation with.

This is what was the theme of last time's presentation.

It was kind of the summation of what we were talking about and it is the theme of today's as well, so that's where we're going to start.

But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee, And the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee, Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee, And the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee, who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this, in whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind." In child guidance, we have the passage from Ellen White next to the Bible, Nature is to be our great lesson book.

You already got started with nature this morning.

We're going to continue that right now, because it's all about nature today.

So what I'm going to do now, first of all, is how many here are familiar with the term intelligent design?

That's a very important topic that everybody needs to know because it is very important in our society today, in our scientific circles.

Intelligent design is the ideas by scientists that nature is too well designed to be anything but intelligently designed.

It cannot be the result of chaos and chance and random selection.

Massive works have been done in this area that you're probably familiar with.

This has become a public school issue, intelligent design, in various places where intelligent design has been tried to be instituted.

And so intelligent design is a very important familiar concept that we as Adventists can use because the scientists doing these studies are basically giving us information that we can use to promote creationism.

It's very important to us to be able to have this information available.

But there is 1 area of intelligent design that comes up short.

When you talk to someone who supports the ideas of intelligent design and you ask that person, who is the intelligent designer?

What is the force that is responsible for this creation?

And at that point, the system tends to break down.

At that point, you'd have a blank look on the face because they do not want to answer that question.

Most intelligent design scientists will say, that's not my field, I don't have any idea, that's not something I can study, therefore I'm not going to speak to that.

And so it kind of leaves a question mark at the end of their sentences because they have no really strong answer to that that they're willing to share.

Whether they hold something privately or not, I have no idea, but publicly they will not share any answer to that question.

And so that's a missing link in their presentation, to borrow a phrase, because when we think about it, we need to be promoting who the intelligent designer is, not just the fact that it's intelligently designed.

We need to be able to say that yes, God made everything that we see around us.

God made it special and here is the evidence for that and here in the scripture in Genesis we have a record of how he did it.

And to leave that part out is only to give half the message.

We need to give the whole message in order to be able to really do our job as admonished witnesses of creation.

We can't just say it's intelligently designed.

So what I'm doing today is a little bit different than last time because last time when I talked about the animals, I was specifically using illustrations from the animal world that refute the ideas of evolution, that make evolution look pretty silly in many ways.

But today, we're not going to do that, because I feel that sometimes we get a little bit too negative.

We get a little bit too anti-evolution, because it's always easy to poke holes in evolution.

But a lot of time, we tend to miss the point where we need to be promoting God and promoting creation.

And so today's meeting is going to be showing ways that animals are well-designed in order to show God's power and God's creation and the way he makes animals very special.

So what we're going to do now is we're going to get into the main presentation, get off this slide show, and we will get into the main section of what we're doing.

Also going to get it onto a different setting so we can watch the videos.

So we're going to start out with a bird that you may never have seen if you haven't been to the East Coast, because the only places this bird lives in America is in the southeastern part of the United States.

And it is a water bird and it's very common along the Florida swamps and everglades and whatnot.

And it has a very distinctive lifestyle that you may not be familiar with because there's no other bird quite like it in North America.

This 1 right here is called an African darter.

It's called darter in most every other place in the world, but in America we call them anhingas.

Here's 1 who has built a very bulky stick nest in the Everglades of Florida.

And so now these birds live near water always, because that's where they get their food.

They will dive underwater and swim around and catch their fish underneath the water's surface, and that's how they find their food for living.

But something very strange about this bird.

When you think of a water bird who gets into the water, it immediately will sit there on the water's surface floating away because they're very buoyant.

But as you will see with this bird, that's not what happens.

They get under the water and they immediately sink underneath the water's surface and they are not floating on the surface at all and usually only their head and neck will be protruding above the water's surface.

And so this is a very unusual lifestyle for a water bird that we look at and go, that's a very strange looking system.

And in fact, when they get into the water, you will see that they immediately sink beneath the water's surface.

He sees a fish down under the water's surface there.

And immediately, he is underneath the water's surface without any buoyancy whatsoever.

This allows him to very easily move amongst the rocks and underwater vegetation without having to constantly fight and kick like a duck would to get underneath the water's surface where he can see his food.

And so he's very well built and very well designed to be able to swim underneath the water surface in this way.

Now, the problem with this is, the reason for this is because their feathers do not have the same water coating protection that other ducks and water birds have.

Because they do not have the same oils that they coat their feathers with that would then waterproof their feathers.

Normally a bird, when it waterproofs its feathers, makes them very water resistant, so water rolls off a duck's back.

But these birds do not have those water-resistant oils.

And so they do not have the ability to water coat their feathers.

Series

Little-known Miracles of God's Creation

Little-known Miracles of God’s Creation, Part 1

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

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