Creation theology explores God's role as the sovereign Creator who established the universe and its natural laws. It emphasizes the order and intentionality behind creation, highlighting that both physical and spiritual realms operate under God's impartial governance (Genesis 1:1, Colossians 1:16). Illustrations often draw on natural phenomena to reveal divine wisdom and authority.
The atom's complexity and permanence testify to God's sustaining power and design.
Not only “day unto day, uttereth speech,” but, according to science, there are innumerable voices in the world that also speak of God. A writer finds such in the atom of matter:
How then came they to be what they are? These “myriad types of the same letter”; these unhewn blocks from an unknown quarry; more indestructible than adamant; the substratum of all the phenomena of the universe; and yet, amid the wreck of all things else, this infinitude of discrete atoms alone is found incapable of change or of decay. Who preserves to them their absolute identity, notwithstanding their infinite variety? Who endowed them with their inalienable properties? Who imprest upon them the ineffaceable characters which they are found to bear? At what mint were they struck, on what anvil were they forged, in what loom were they woven, so as to possess, as Huxley declares, “all the characteristics of manufactured articles”?
Birds preserve the earth by controlling insect populations, showing God's providential care.
See DARKNESS, INFLUENCE OF.
BIRDS, VALUE OF
The bird is not only our brother--he is far more. He is our benefactor, our preserver, for the simple reason that he alone is able to hold in check the most powerful race on earth--the insects. It is well known to scientific men that the insect tribes, unchecked, would control the earth. Innumerable, multiplying with a rapidity that defies figures and even comprehension, devouring everything that has, or has had, life, from the vegetable to the man, and living but to eat, these myriads would soon, if left to themselves, reduce our planet to a barren wilderness, uninhabitable by man or beast.--OLIVE THORNE MILLER, “The Bird Our Brother.”
A child equates human builders with God, misunderstanding divine creation.
Seeing a group of workmen, a child said:
“Mama, are these gods?”
“Gods? Why?”
“Because they make houses and churches, same as God makes moons and people and ickle dogs.”
God’s intricate design in nature reveals His wisdom and power.
The tufts of feathers which distinguish the short-eared and long-eared owls, and are developed still more imposingly in the great eagle owl of northern Europe, are, of course, no more ears than they are horns; but the true ears of the owls are most remarkable organs. The facial disk of feathers, which gives them their most characteristic appearance, serves as a kind of sounding-board or ear-trumpet to concentrate the slightest sounds and transmit them to the orifice of the true ear, which is concealed in the small feathers behind the eye. Even in the barn-owl, which possesses the least complicated arrangement of this kind, the orifice of the ear is covered by a remarkable flap of skin; while in the other species there are striking differences in the size and shape of this orifice and its covering flap on the two sides of the head. The exact way in which owls utilize this elaborately specialized apparatus has still to be discovered; but it is a natural inference that two ears of widely different structure must give the owls which possess them a power of localizing sound which is of the greatest use to them when hunting small creatures in the dark. It is, therefore, all the more surprizing that the barn-owl’s ears have not this difference of structure, altho the power of instantly locating the rustle of the running mouse must be almost indispensable. For catching small birds, which are the especial prey of the wood-owl, keenness of sight rather than of hearing must be necessary, since they are chiefly caught when at roost; and the large nocturnal eye is developed in most of the owls almost as remarkably as the ear. In the short-eared owl, which is a day-flying species, the eye is correspondingly reduced. It has also a far less conspicuous facial disk; and this might also seem to be naturally explained as a result of its diurnal habits, with the consequent reduction of the need for acute hearing, if it were not for the marked difference in the structure of its two ears, which is even greater than in the case of the wood-owl. In the study of such complex problems, we are soon forced to realize how inadequate is even the most helpful and fascinating of single clues. The equilibrium of nature is no simple thing, like the balance of a pair of scales; it more resembles the complicated equipoise of an aeroplane among air-currents playing in three dimensions.--London _Times_.
Orbits illustrate how gravitational forces balance without direct collision, showing divine order.
All orbits, including the orbits of comets, are the result of compromises in gravities. Now you have got to get over the idea that because one body attracts another strongly it is likely to draw it smack into it. It doesn’t. I made an apparatus in my laboratory the other day to show my students about that.
I fixt up a little gun capable of shooting a steel ball quite a distance up an inclined plate of glass. The ball shot upward and then rolled directly back into the muzzle of the gun time after time. That was to show what a comet would do if just merely shot out into space to be uninfluenced by any other heavenly bodies after it got a start.
Then I put a powerful electric magnet under the plate of glass, quite a little distance away from the track of my steel ball. This time when it was shot upward instead of keeping on its straight path or swerving directly into the magnet, as some of my students expected it to do, it shot on past, curving its course toward the magnet, and then finally it swung around the magnet in very much the way the comet is swinging around the sun. On its return course it swung off in a new direction altogether. My students were quite delighted with the oval course taken by the steel ball. It was just such a course as they had seen mapped out for Halley’s visitor.--H. JACOBY, New York _Times_.
Heavenly bodies visibly declare God's purpose and sustaining power.
Not a planet that wheels its circle around its controlling flame, not a sun that pours its blaze upon the black ether, not one of all the constellated chandeliers that burn in the dome of heaven, not a firmament that spots the robe of space with a fringe of light, but is a visible statement of a conception, wish, or purpose in the mind of God, from which it was born, and to which alone it owes its continuance and form.
— THOMAS STARR KING
Evolutionary hopes for monkeys becoming men illustrate flawed thinking about origins.
Is the chimpanzee the coming man? The thought of Superintendent Conklin, of the Central Park Museum at New York, had a cast of that hue. He was deeply interested in the possibilities of the development of intelligence and culture in the chimpanzee race, and doubtless his dreams went far beyond the daring of his spoken hope. “Mr. Crowley,” a somewhat noted and remarkably intelligent specimen of this exalted race of monkeys, long adorned the museum, and at the time a helpmeet for him was imported. Dr. Conklin believed that their offspring would inherit their sagacity, and with two or three generations of careful training the least he expected was “a chimpanzee accustomed to wearing clothes, able to stand erect, capable of being taught the meaning of simple commands, and docile enough to obey them.” In the fifth or sixth generation, the doctor thought he should have chimpanzees able to perform to a limited extent the duties of servants. Following out the idea, the doctor predicted a gradual improvement in their features and eventually a possibility that they might grasp the meaning of words and phrases. This is surely a very practical experiment in Darwinian evolution, and tho it may seem funny, it is by no means ridiculous. If horses and dogs may be trained and taught, why not monkeys? And how much more useful would an intelligent trained monkey be by reason of his capacity to grasp and handle things? The story came a few years ago from South America that chimpanzees are already employed there in picking cotton in place of the emancipated slaves.--Springfield _Union_.
The life force within an oak tree sustains and defines its existence.
Look at a full-sized oak, the rooted Leviathan of the fields. Judging by your senses and by the scales, you would say that the substance of the noble tree was its bulk of bark and bough and branch and leaves and sap, the cords of woody and moist matter that compose it and make it heavy. But really its substance is that which makes it an oak, that which weaves its bark and glues it to the stem, and wraps its rings of fresh wood around the trunk every year, and pushes out its boughs and clothes its twigs with digestive leaves and sucks up nutriment from the soil continually, and makes the roots clench the ground with their fibrous fingers as a purchase against the storm wind, and at last holds aloft its tons of matter against the constant tug and wrath of gravitation, and swings its Briarean arms in triumph over the globe and in defiance of the gale. Were it not for this energetic essence that crouches in the acorn and stretches its limbs every year, there would be no oak; the matter that clothes it would enjoy its stupid slumber; and when the forest monarch stands up in his sinewy lordliest pride, let the pervading life-power, and its vassal forces that weigh nothing at all, be annihilated, and the whole structure would wither in a second to inorganic dust. So every gigantic fact in nature is the index and vesture of a gigantic force.
— THOMAS STARR KING
All creation testifies to God’s power and wisdom, revealing His nature clearly.
The mosses on the rock, as well as the trees that bend stately above them, the birds that fly and sing in heaven, as well as the clouds that gather and dissolve there, the mimosa that closes its sensitive petals if a footfall approaches, and the stars that reign silent on empyreal thrones--each must in turn give witness to the Most High; till the frame of creation shall be all eclaircised, not so much a pillar engraven around with the trophies of omnipotence, as a solid but transparent sphere of crystal, lighted from within by the calm thought of God! (Text.)
— RICHARD S. STORRS
The fleeting life of insects shows God's wisdom and glory in creating happiness as a good.
Entomologists tell us that millions of insects, generations whose numbers must be counted by myriads, are born and die within the compass of one summer’s day. Perfected with the morning, they flutter through their sunny life; and the evening, when it turns its shadow upon the earth, becomes to their animated and tuneful being a universal grave. It is impossible to understand for what end this is done, unless we accept the happiness which these share, as a good in itself; a good so great, in the judgment of the Creator, and of those who look with Him on the creation, as to justify the expenditure of such wisdom and force on their delicate, harmonious, but ephemeral structure; and to make this structure illustrative of His glory.
— RICHARD S. STORRS
Nature's creatures seek the unseen air, illustrating God's invisible presence everywhere.
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The immanence of God is illustrated in these lines from an unidentified source:
“Oh, where is the sea?” the fishes cried,
As they swam the crystal clearness through.
“We’ve heard from of old of the ocean’s tide,
And we long to look on the waters blue.
The wise ones speak of an infinite sea,
Oh, who can tell us if such there be?”
The lark flew up in the morning bright,
And sung and balanced on sunny wings;
And this was its song: “I see the light,
I look on a world of beautiful things;
But flying and singing everywhere,
In vain I have searched to find the air.”
Life remains true to its kind, showing God's design in distinct, unchanging individuality.
Change is stamped upon life, but according to science, the opposite also is true. Life, in its minutest subdivisions, is true to itself. It knows no variation nor shadow of turning. Dr. Stirling remarks concerning protoplasm:
Here are several thousand pieces of protoplasm; analysis can detect no difference in them. They are to us, let us say, as they are to Mr. Huxley, identical in power, in form, and in substance; and yet on all these several thousand little bits of apparently indistinguishable matter an element of difference so pervading and so persistent has been imprest, that of them all, not one is interchangeable with another! Each seed feeds its own kind. The protoplasm of the gnat will no more grow into the fly than it will grow into an elephant. Protoplasm is protoplasm; yes, but man’s protoplasm is man’s protoplasm, and the mushroom’s the mushroom’s.
Animal instincts adapt to emergencies, showing God’s providential care in nature.
In guarding against evils should we not be as fertile in expedients to adapt our defense to the kind of weapons we possess as some cattle are:
The plainsmen on Western cattle-ranches have called attention to an illustration of the adaptability of animal instinct to emergencies.
The cattle of former days were of the long-horned kind. When the herd was threatened with an attack by wolves, the calves were placed in the middle of the bunch and the older animals formed themselves into a solid phalanx about them, all facing outward.
The cattle of to-day are largely hornless. If, as occasionally happens still, the herd is attacked by wolves, the calves are guarded as before, but the herd faces in instead of out. Their hoofs, not their horns, are now their weapons.
Natural laws reflect the inherent qualities of matter, not arbitrary rules imposed externally.
The laws of matter are simply the mode in which matter in virtue of its constitution acts. Oxygen unites chemically with hydrogen, in certain proportions, under certain conditions, simply because of the qualities or attributes wherewith these two gases are invested. It is not the law which determines the combination, but the qualities which determine the law. These elements act as they act, simply because they are what they are.
Human nature inevitably manifests itself like creation reveals God's nature.
Just as creation is the revelation of God--His avowal, as a poet has said--so in the same way the external life of man, when it follows its normal development, is the translation, in signs and symbols, of what he bears at the bottom of his being. It would be easier to keep the sap from mounting, the flowers from opening, the leaves from tearing apart their coverings, than human nature from manifesting itself. It is this need that gives man his distinction as a social and communicative being.--Charles Wagner, “The Gospel of Life.”
Scientific estimates of Niagara Falls' erosion suggest man's age on earth is about 7,900 years.
Some scientists reason that the Falls of Niagara must have been formed soon after the Glacial Epoch, and the time occupied in wearing the rock back to the present position therefore furnishes a basis for calculating the age of man on the earth, as he must have begun his career since that epoch:
In an address in Washington before the United States Geological Survey, Professor Gilbert gave the following interesting information regarding the recession of the ground under Niagara Falls: The estimate is that for the past forty-four years the falls have receded at the rate of twenty-four feet in a year. The Horseshoe Falls are at the head of the gorge and the American Falls at the eastern side, but the time was when both were together, before the little point called Goat Island was reached. The recession is more rapid at the center than on the sides. As the crest of the Horseshoe Falls retreats the water tends to concentrate there, and the time will probably come when the sides of the present falls will have become dry shores. The gorge is known to be 35,500 feet long. A calculation has shown that, on this basis, the falls began to wear away the rock of the escarpment near Lewiston about 7,900 years ago.--_Public Opinion._
Man transforms nature into culture, art, and civilization, showing his unique greatness.
The world is one thing to a bird, or a fish, but quite another thing to Cuvier or Agassiz. Then man entered the scene. Stretching out his hand he waved a wonder-working wand. He touched the wood, and it became a wagon; he touched the ore and it became an engine; he touched the boughs and they became the reeds of an organ; he touched the wild animal, and it became a burden-bearer for his weary feet; while his intellect turned the stone into geology, and the stars into astronomy, and the fields into husbandry, and his duties into ethics. When the flint and steel meet, something beyond either appears--a tongue of flame. And when man and nature met, something new emerged--art, industry, ethics, cities and civilization. There is nothing great in nature but man. Take man out of this wondrous city with its cathedrals, galleries, and homes, and Broadway would become a streak of iron-rust. The earth wears man upon her bosom as the circling ring wears a sparkling gem. The bog puts forth a white lily; genius is a flower rooted in earth, but borrowing its bloom and beauty from heaven.
— N. D. HILLIS
Fish demonstrate short-term memory and learning from experience in their feeding behavior.
Experiments recently made at Tortugas show that fishes have the faculty of remembering for at least twenty-four hours.
The fish studied at Tortugas are gray perch, whose favorite food is the little silver sardine. The experimenters painted some of the silver sardines light red; then they offered them to the gray perch mixed with the unpainted sardines. The perch snatched the silver sardines and ate them, then very deliberately and cautiously they nibbled at the painted sardines. Finding that the fish were the same whether red or silver, they devoured the red fish.
Having given proof of their intelligence, they were permitted to rest twenty-four hours. The experimenters offered them silver sardines, sardines painted red, and sardines painted blue. The perch quickly devoured the silver fish, then, without an instant’s hesitation, they devoured the red fish. Finally, gliding cautiously up to the blue fish, they took a bite and darted away. As the taste was favorable they returned to the blue fish, nibbled again, and devoured them.
The experimenters then tied sea-thistles to the blue sardines. The perch nibbled, then, disagreeably surprized, darted away. For twenty-four hours not a fish approached the painted blue fishes. They remembered the sea-thistles. But their memory is short; the day following again they snatched the blue fish.--_Harper’s Weekly._
Animals develop fear and prudence through experience, showing mental growth for survival.
C. C. Abbot writes in the New York _Sun_:
Beasts and birds long ago became afraid of man, and afraid of him in a way wholly different from their fear of other forms of animal life. This demonstrates that they recognize a difference, as when I can not approach a snipe that will permit a cow almost to tread upon it. Fear being the sum of disastrous experiences, the birds that soonest learned the lesson of prudence left the most descendants. The fearless ones paid the price of their foolhardiness and died out. Such conditions did not call for anatomical changes, but mental ones, and this increased mentality that led to the preservation of the species is so near the border line of what Goldwin Smith calls self-improvement that it can be looked upon only as its forerunner, as birds and all beasts foreran the man who was to prove their arch enemy.
The illustration explains how place names often derive from historical or natural features.
N
NAMES
Many of the names we bear, as well as names of many of the places we know and frequent, are derived from something done or some particular thing connected with the place. For example, there is a town about thirty-five miles from Paris by the name of Fontainebleu. It is said that when this town was originally founded, near the tenth century, that there was a beautiful fountain there, and from this it took the name of Fontainebleu, contracted from Fontaine Belle Eau (Fountain of beautiful water).
Spider silk uniquely aids astronomy by its fineness and durability under extreme conditions.
The cultivation of certain species of spiders solely for the fine threads which they weave has an important bearing upon the work of the astronomer.
No substitute for the spider’s thread has yet been found for bisecting the screw of the micrometer used for determining the positions and motions of the stars; not only because of the remarkable fineness of the threads, but because of their durable qualities.
The threads of certain spiders raised for astronomical purposes withstand changes in temperature, so that often in measuring sunspots they are uninjured when the heat is so great that the lenses of the micrometer eye-pieces are cracked. These spider lines are only one-fifth to one-seventh of a thousandth of an inch in diameter, compared with which the threads of the silk-worm are large and clumsy.--_Harper’s Weekly._
Nature relentlessly reclaims human-made land when vigilance is relaxed.
Winthrop Packard, in “Wild Pastures,” describes the way in which nature’s wild growths obliterate the marks of human labor:
Let but vigilance relax for a year, a spring month even, and bramble and bayberry, sweet-fern and wild-rose, daring scouts that they are, will have a foothold that they will yield only with death. Close upon these will follow the birches, the light infantry which rushes to the advance line as soon as the scouts have found the foothold. These entrench and hold the field desperately until pine and hickory, maple and oak, sturdy men of the main line of battle, arrive, and almost before you know it the farm is reclaimed. The wilderness has regained its lost ground, and the cosmos of the wild has wiped out that curious chaos which we call civilization.
Nature ingeniously creates protective and useful materials like pottery, cloth, glass, and rope.
Excellent natural pottery is manufactured by nature in the case of a certain cactus. Woodpeckers are apt to excavate nests in the trunk and branches, and, in order that it may protect itself against these incursions, the plant exudes a sticky juice, which hardens, forming a woody lining to the hole made by the birds. Eventually the cactus dies and withers away, but the wooden bowl remains.
As a weaver, nature is an exceedingly neat worker. Certain tree-barks and leaves furnish excellent cloth, such as, for instance, the famous tapa cloth used in the South Sea islands.
Nature is also a glass-maker. By discharging lightning into beds of quartz sand she forms exquisite little pipes of glass.
Nature does a bit in the rope-making line, too. These products of her handicraft may be seen in the shape of various tropical vines and creepers; and her skill as a lace-maker may be seen in the case of the lace-tree of the West Indies.--_Harper’s Weekly._
Fish change color in sleep to protect themselves from predators through camouflage.
Fish are, we are told, very light sleepers, and frequently assume singular positions; but the most remarkable fact concerning them is the change of color many of them undergo while asleep.
Usually their spots and stripes become darker and more distinct when they fall asleep. Occasionally the pattern of their coloration is entirely changed. The ordinary porgy, for instance, presents in the daytime beautiful iridescent hues playing over its silvery sides, but at night, on falling asleep, it takes on a dull bronze tint, and six conspicuous black bands make their appearance on its sides. If it is suddenly awakened by the turning up of lights in the aquarium it immediately resumes the silvery color that it shows by daylight. These changes have been ascribed to the principle of “protective coloration,” and it has been pointed out that the appearance of black bands and the deepening of the spots serve to conceal the fish from their enemies when lying amid eel-grass and seaweeds.--_Harper’s Weekly._
Nature restores life to devastated land through gradual plant succession after disaster.
A unique opportunity to study Nature’s processes in restoring the vegetation of a land swept clean by a great disaster was afforded after the eruption of a volcano on the little island of Krakatoa in 1883. All living organisms were destroyed. In 1886 a number of plants had already established themselves on the devastated island, those in the interior being remarkably different from those on the coast, ferns especially preponderating. In 1897 further progress had been made, and in 1906 the forest trees had advanced so far as to make it evident that within a short time the island will again be densely forested. It is believed that the first plants to establish themselves on the blasted soil--such as ferns, algae, mosses, compositæ, and grasses--were borne thither by the winds, and that ocean currents were probably agents in the importation of seeds and fruit.--San Francisco _Bulletin_.
Oak-galls form as trees protect and nourish insect larvae living inside them.
The oak-galls are formed only where a gall-insect has pricked a live leaf or stem or twig with her sharp, sting-like little egg-layer, and has left an egg in the plant tissue. Nor does the gall begin to form even yet. It begins only after the young gall-insect is hatched from the egg, or at least begins to develop inside the egg. Then the gall grows rapidly. The tree sends an extra supply of sap to this spot, and the plant-cells multiply, and the house begins to form around the little white grub. Now this house or gall not only encloses and protects the insect, but it provides it with food in the form of plant-sap and a special mass or layer of soft, nutritious plant-tissue lying right around the grub. So the gall-insect not only lives in the house, but eats it!--VERNON L. KELLOGG, “Insect Stories.”
Different human races have distinct physical traits, such as jaw and teeth structure.
All the white race have teeth vertical, the jaw short; and the manner in which the teeth fit one upon the other is perpendicularly, so that when we close the mouth we bring the lower teeth against the upper teeth in such a juxtaposition that the two sets stand vertical, one above the other. The races of men which have that kind of dentition are called orthognate; that is, straight-jawed races; while there are other races--and, among others, all the inhabitants of the South Sea Islands and all the inhabitants of Africa south of the Atlas--that have their front teeth inclined, so that the upper teeth and the lower teeth, when brought against one another, form an angle and the mouth is more prominent; these men are called prognate. And that difference is a constant one. All the races of men with prognate jaws have also thicker and more prominent lips. They have also flat noses, which I have already described, with broad partitions between the nostrils, and the nostrils opening sideways.
— Prof. LOUIS AGASSIZ
The dew symbolizes nature's tears over the broken unity of earth and sky.
The South Sea islanders have a singular tradition to account for the existence of the dew. The legend relates that in the beginning the earth touched the sky, that being the golden age when all was beautiful and glad; then some dreadful tragedy occurred, the primal unity was broken up, the earth and the sky were torn asunder as we see them now, and the dew-drops of the morning are the tears that nature sheds over the sad divorce. (Text.)
Nature's small details reveal God's consistent design and providence over time.
It is by carefully noting small and apparently insignificant things and facts that men of science are enabled to reach some of their most surprizing and interesting conclusions. In many places the surface of rocks, which millions of years ago must have formed sandy or muddy sea beaches, is found to be pitted with the impressions of rain-drops. In England it has been noticed that in many cases the eastern sides of these depressions are the more deeply pitted, indicating that the rain-drops which formed them were driven before a west wind. From this the conclusion is drawn that in the remote epoch when the pits were formed the majority of the storms in England came from the west, just as they do to-day.--_Harper’s Weekly._
The human voice reveals God’s design and latent spiritual capacities in man.
The author of the “Descent of Man” thinks even the human voice is prophetic of the ascent of man. Speaking of the “wonderful power, range, flexibility, and sweetness of the musical sounds producible by the human larynx,” he says:
The habits of savages give no indication of how this faculty could have been developed. The singing of savages is a more or less monotonous howling, and the females seldom sing at all. It seems as if the organ had been prepared in anticipation of the future progress of man, since it contains latent capacities which are useless to him in his earlier condition.
