God’s Very Good Design in Animals

Matthew 13:3-8 says:

A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.

That Scripture describes my life. I heard the gospel numerous times when I was a kid and made no real commitment—something seemed to “eat it up” like the birds before I digested it. And then I joined the church, was baptized, and started reading the Bible now and then around age eleven. There was some kind of decision to become a Christian, but it was very shallow and “withered” when things heated up as my faith was tested. I rededicated my life during various revival meetings at church, but they did not last very long either because I kept allowing sports, work, girls, etc. to choke my spiritual life. But the seed finally fell on “good soil” when I was a freshman at North Carolina State University, and I made a true commitment to follow Jesus. This time was different. I began sharing my faith, memorizing Scripture, and really studying the Bible instead of just reading it, etc.

But something was still missing. I had a lot of respect for God’s Word, but often wondered how science and the Bible could both be true when they are so often heading in very different directions. How could a person ever live to be 900 years old? How could evolution and Genesis 1 both be true? The Bible says life was perfect when it was created and is now going downhill, whereas evolution claims that life is becoming better and better as natural selection occurs.

Fortunately God used the Triangle Association for the Science of Creation (https://www.tasc-creationscience.org), Ken Ham, and many others to show me how the Bible has always been—and will always be—true, just like it is written without having to jump through lots of hoops to make everything fit together.

In this article we’re going to increase our faith in God’s Word by taking a closer look at God’s very good design in animals.

God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. Genesis 1:25

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. Romans 1:20

God created all the animals, and we can certainly see his fingerprints on each and every one of them. My wife and I use Character Sketches by Bill Gothard to share how well designed all of the animals are when we spend time with our grandkids. If you’ve never heard of Bill Gothard, he comes from very good “stock.”

The Gideons International asked Bill Gothard’s dad to serve as executive director soon after he left the business world and retained this position there for more than five years. In later years, he served as executive director of the Chicago Christian Businessmen’s Connection, director of Chicago Child Evangelism Fellowship, and chairman of the board of the Pacific Garden Mission. While with the Pacific Garden Mission, he helped to launch the widely heard radio program, “Unshackled.”

Are you ready to check out God’s design now? Please try to guess which animal is described below. The correct answers are provided at the end of this article.

  1. This first animal we’ll look at often travels in large circles and runs across thin ice to get dogs off his trail and sometimes he’ll go through a cow pasture so the dogs smell the cows instead of him. He has also been known to run down a creek and then jump high up onto a bank to get rid of the dogs. God gave him ears that can hear whispers that are half a football field away from him. He is very committed to his mate and they will take turns being chased so that one of them does not become completely exhausted.
  2. This little animal is always hungry and does not hesitate to eat friends and relatives. When a man set up a trap to catch one of them, he did not get a whole animal until the fourth try because the guy would eat part of the animal caught in the trap before it was emptied. He is as violent as a lion, so it is a very good thing that he is only three inches long. He looks for food for three hours and then rests for three hours, even at night, because he eats twice his weight in food every day. He’ll starve if he eats no food for seven hours because his heart beats 1200 times per minute and requires a lot of fuel. The good news is that he eats lots of dead things and there are no teeth, no bones, and no hair left when he is finished.
  3. This bird has three eyelids to keep the eyes moist when it hunts at night, and one ear is slightly higher than the other ear to help it better determine where a sound came from in the dark. God gave it wings that make very little noise so that it has a built-in stealth mode to help it sneak up on its food.
  4. This next animal can squeeze through a hole the size of a golf ball and is one of the most vicious animals on this planet. It bites the neck of its attacker and never releases it. It is fast enough to kill a hawk.
  5. This bird eats some feathers to protect its stomach from the bones that are in the fish it eats. Hunters call this bird the “water witch” because it disappears right after they spot it. It does this by swimming under water for a while so that it’s more difficult to find its nest.
  6. This next guy swims as far as twenty-five miles in one day and has a nose that works so well that it can detect the addition of one tablespoon of salt in a swimming pool.
  7. These birds can digest fish hooks and drink salt water, and he drops crabs while he is way up in the air to crack their shells. They once saved a country (Scotland) by eating all of the caterpillars that were destroying the plants.
  8. This animal has built-in nose plugs and can stay underwater for up to seventeen minutes. The Lord has also blessed him with “goggles” and flaps to keep his teeth warm and a brain that keeps him on course when the river current would be a real challenge for us.
  9. Which insect was once so valuable to the Chinese that they imposed the death penalty on anyone that tried to take the bug’s eggs or worms out of their country in order to maintain their monopoly on the product that the Chinese were making?
  10. Which insect pollinates more plants than all the other insects? Hint: This bug can survive under water for days and be completely frozen and still live.

    Question: How did these plants survive for millions of years without any bugs around to pollinate them?

  11. Which bird has a bone that protrudes from each wing to help it defeat predators? This bird sometimes flies so high that we cannot see it from the ground, and it gets new feathers once a year, every year, and the parents have the baby birds as soon as the last snow melts so that the kids have a fighting chance to grow up enough to survive the next winter.
  12. This next bird stays on the move and travels up to 150 miles per day, every day, and flies enough miles to circle the entire planet in about 20 weeks while moving to areas where food is easier to find. Fishermen love this bird because it dives down to eat the minnows that larger fish are chasing, which helps the fishermen know where to fish next.
  13. Earthworms often come out of the ground when it rains so that they will not drown, so this bird beats its wings on the ground to make it sound like it is raining, and the bird’s feet are so sensitive that it can detect when a worm is right below it.
  14. This next bird uses as many as fifty different noises to signal the other birds in the group. They keep the roads clean for us and they are very smart. One of them is always on guard duty and cries out whenever danger is near. Some of them have been smart enough to distinguish between when the farmer has a stick with him on his tractor or a gun with him on the tractor.
  15. Which animal has eyes that reflect light that help it see at night? This animal has been known to figure out how to work door knobs, undo latches, and are such great swimmers that they can drown a dog when it tries to catch them.
  16. Dogs and cats almost always allow this animal to eat their food because they are afraid of it and the animal sometimes walks as far as five miles per night while searching for food. Farmers like it because it eats mice and bugs, but most of the rest of us don’t like it. The animal stomps its feet and growls when we get near it to keep us from getting harmed by it—praise the Lord for this feature!
  17. This animal mimics a rattlesnake to scare us away, and if that does not work, it turns himself upside down to make it look like he is dead. He mainly eats frogs and has back teeth that remove the air from the
  18. One of these next animals was caught inside of a vending machine at a rest stop when we were watching the Funniest Home Video show one night. He was smart enough to go in through the door where we pull the food out, grab something, and then exit with the food in his mouth.

    The following items came from Battle for the Beginning by John MacArthur.
     

  19. Which animal bites the sand to catch a flounder that is motionless? And how does he know the flounder is there? The answer is neither sound nor vibration nor odor. Instead, the animal possesses a fantastically sophisticated three-dimensional electric field detector that senses the muscle and body potentials of the flounder. The high sensitivity of this system can be compared to our knowing the precise whereabouts of a single flashlight battery located about two thousand miles away.
  20. Which animal can digest sticks and live almost anywhere humans can live, all the way from Canada to Florida? They are easy to breed and relatively inexpensive to feed and maintain, so most of them provide food for about sixty people each year. Some people use the animal’s manure for fuel and some even worship it.
  21. Another animal that God created especially for humans provides clothing that helps us retain our body heat even when it is wet, and this material is also fire resistant.
  22. One of God’s creatures can survive for 2.5 weeks in a hot desert because he can easily consume thirty gallons of water in ten minutes when three gallons in ten minutes would kill most every other animal. His body is so efficient that the manure can be used for fuel as soon as it hits the ground.
  23. One animal has a special gift that the doctors would love to have available for us when our digestive system might be out of commission for a month. What is this gift?
  24. There’s one animal that partners with a sea creature called an “anemone,” and these anemones have special cells that sting predators, so one animal serves another animal, and thus he is allowed to share the living quarters and the food scraps from whatever the next meal is. When the first animal outgrows one shell, he and the smaller guy, find a new larger home.

    The following information came from Creation Magazine:
     

  25. This last animal can move as much dirt as six men with shovels.

Where did all of these neat animals above come from? How are they able to perform such marvelous tasks? Are they not gifts from God? Where would we be today without the beef, chicken, pork, and fish we enjoy, plus all the fun we have watching animals and spending time with our pets? Did random chance produce all of the above? If random chance alone created all we see, then it is smarter than today’s engineers because they continue to try to copy what they see in nature and come up short.

If evolution is true, what did a porcupine evolve from? And where did the duckbill platypus come from? No other animal is similar to either one of these. Please note that these animals never appear on a pro-evolution book cover! Evolutionists always show the animals that are similar instead of the ones that are very different.

What did an electric eel evolve from? And how can he generate 600 volts without electrocuting himself or his mate?

The following material came from Dr. Jobe Martin’s videos Incredible Creatures That Defy Evolution:

Dr. Jobe Martin is a graduate of Bucknell University and the University of Pittsburgh Dental School. He served on the faculty of Baylor College of Dentistry and has also served as a dentist on Air Force One. He once taught that the theory of evolution is the best possible explanation for man’s existence, but now he teaches that creation is much more believable. What changed his thinking? Did he become a Christian?

Dr. Martin did become a Christian, but he held onto his view on evolution for about five years after this decision. He reversed his view on evolution as he discovered more and more animals that do not seem to evolve from any other animals. Here are a couple of things you’ll here Martin say if you watch the videos:

One of the theories of evolution states that nothing evolves until it is needed. You will see that this is not really true as you consider the animals featured in his videos.

Scientists once thought that giraffes resulted from animals that ate leaves off of a tree in order to survive. Their necks stretched longer and longer over millions of years so they could reach more food. This made perfect sense until you consider all of the other systems that needed to evolve to support this long neck because some giraffes are over eighteen feet tall. It takes a much larger pump than other animals have to raise blood to a place that is almost twice as high as a basketball goal. The giraffe’s heart is about two and a half feet long. Several other systems had to evolve at exactly the right time, or the animal would not live.

Job 12:7–10 (NIV) says:

But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.

The creation worldview glorifies God We were created to glorify God. He’s the only one that deserves the credit for all we see all around us.

Answers: 1. fox; 2. shrew; 3. owl; 4. weasel; 5. grebe; 6. salmon; 7. sea gull; 8. beaver; 9. cecropia moth; 10. ants; 11. whistling swan; 12. arctic tern; 13. wood cock; 14. crow; 15. raccoon; 16. skunk; 17. hog-nosed snake; 18. squirrel; 19. shark; 20. cow; 21. sheep; 22. camel; 23. bear (hibernation); 24. hermit crab; 25. aardvark