“A little science estranges men from God, but much science leads them back to Him.”
– Louis Pasteur or maybe Blaise Pascal or perhaps someone else altogether
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It’s unclear who exactly spouted this bit of wisdom above, but it is clear it isn’t always true. Well-studied evolutionists, like a Richard Dawkins, or like documentarian David Attenborough (the fellow narrating those amazing Planet Earth videos), have looked at God’s creation closely and remained evolutionists still. So, the principle doesn’t work always work.
But there’s still something to it. The deeper we dig into God’s creation, the more we find out how amazingly it’s all been crafted. And then it is by choice, and not evidence, that one remains blind to God’s artistry.
From the neck up
Consider just the human head. The human brain has more than 100 billion neurons, connected to maybe 1,000 other neurons (though some estimates up that by a factor of 10), for 100+ trillion electrical connections in all, making the human brain more complex than all the wiring done for all the houses in the world combined. All those interconnections then route into a very rigid, yet strangely flexible housing – your spinal column – that delivers messages to the rest of the body.
Staying with our head, if we were to compare the human eye to a camera it’s one with auto-focus, aperture control, and paired up to allow for depth perception. It has more than 100 million light-sensitive rods and cones that convert images into electrical impulses that our brain has the proper “program” to convert into images. There is said to be a blindspot where all the nerves bundle together in the back of the eye to head off to the brain and this is understood by critics to be evidence of the sort of bad design one might expect from accidental unguided evolution. But do you actually see any “blindspot” in your vision? No…because your brain, and the overlapping fields of vision from your two eyes, wonderfully compensate for it, such that it is only a theoretical and not actual blindspot. Astonishing!
Your ears also come in pairs, allowing us to hear directionally. They are precision instruments, able to differentiate between thousands of different sounds. Their inner workings also give us our sense of equilibrium – our sense of balance – without which we really couldn’t get around except on our hands and knees.
Still sticking with our head, the tongue houses 10,000 tastebuds, is deft enough to tie a cherry stem in a knot, and tough enough to guide our food towards the teeth where it can begin to be digested. Those teeth first show up in a set of 20 shallowly rooted models, sized just right to fit our infant mouth. As we get bigger, these baby buds get replaced with teeth that are bigger too, with more of them, coming in a set of 32 that fills out our adult jaw. What wonderful timing! Concealing those teeth are our lips, which have the ability to express our moods, produce music, and, with our best beloved, smush other lips in a very agreeable manner!
Let’s not forget the nose, with its extreme sensitivity, filtration ability, and self-clearing capability (i.e. sneezing).
Anyone not already amazed simply isn’t paying attention. And we haven’t even looked at the rest of our body, like how our heart pumps 1,500 to 2,000 gallons a day, for 75 years, and yet weighs a mere 12 ounces. We haven’t looked at the skin, just a 20th of an inch thick, yet our body’s biggest organ, self-repairing, infection sparing, touch sharing. And what of our bones, all 206 of them, flexible during birth when they need to be, then toughening up to function as the scaffolding for all our other parts, and also produce the white blood cells that help us fight infection.
Conclusion
Of course, if we were to venture south of the jawline to start exploring God’s engineering genius on display there too, this article might never end. So we’ll have to limit ourselves to just the neck and up, and that is more than enough to make our point.
Yes, educated men and women can deny God’s evident artistry, they can choose not to see it, but that’s only because it is possible for Man to suppress and deny the truth (Romans 1:18). But any with eyes to see – creatively and brilliantly crafted eyes! – the deeper we look, the more evident it becomes that from the top of our heads down, we are fearfully and wonderfully made (Ps. 139:14)!
