073: Dan Robinson - Stand Still and Consider the Wondrous Works of God

Automatically transcribed. Accuracy is good but not perfect, and words are sometimes wrong. Trust the audio over the text.

1. 0:13

   Welcome to the good Christian talks podcast. I’m Levi. And I’m Chris. Thank you so much for joining us this week. On this podcast, we select one taco week to help each one of us. Get the Bible in our daily news feed. We post at the start of each week for you to listen. With a short intro beforehand to kind of set the stage for the talk, you’re about to hear.

2. 0:33

   And now let’s hear more about this week’s talk. For this week, we’re listening to a talk that was given at the watch on Lake. Bible school just last year by our brother Dan Robinson. This was an evening program that he gave and the topic of his class is stand still and consider the wondrous works of God.

3. 0:57

   And what brother Dan is taking a look at in this class is the proof in the world around us that there is a Creator. This is a topic that I feel many people may have heard similar classes to talking about how the complexities in the world. I’ll just prove to be more evidence of the fact that there is a intelligent designer behind some of the things that we see in the world around us rather than things that just randomly happened to come together. I really enjoyed the way brother Dan took a look at this. So one of the examples that he uses and in the class, he makes references to videos and some slides that he’s put up on the screen.

4. 1:33

   And in the beginning, you kind of feel like you’re starting to lose something but he ends up. Describing what you’re seeing on the screen fairly well, I thought I was able to follow the class really well without being able to see See, the content that he was putting up when he gave this evening program at the Bible school. But what was unique about?

5. 1:49

   This one is he goes to one of the examples that is often used in, in kind of conversation of the. I being an example of how complex the human eye is and what made it unique in this case, his brother Dan is an optometrist by trade. He is an eye doctor. So he spent a lot of time looking at different eyes from different animals. And how how much variety there was in the different eyes and then spend some time looking at the human eye. But then what I thought was unique in the way that brother Dan approach.

6. 2:19

   This is typically, you hear a class and they talk about, you know, the is so complex, it’s amazing. Like, there’s no other way that it could have been created and then the conversation just stops and that’s sort of like this is the proof and stops and then you’ll see different things from people in the scientific community and people who don’t believe the same things that we do will then break down.

7. 2:40

   The eye and say, you know why, it’s not a good example and brother, Dan touches on those arguments and then turns around and breaks those arguments down to make further arguments to support the idea that the, I actually is a really good example of God’s creation. And the wonder that is into it, which I found really interesting because I had heard people, use the eyes, an example, and go into some detail on the complexities of the eye, but never go into kind of the counter argument as to why the eye isn’t a good example of Of a divinely inspired creation and then broke that argument down and again, reinforce that argument.

8. 3:16

   So I just found it to be a really more in-depth. Look at the argument that sometimes people use, when they look at the creation around us to use it as an example to prove that God exists and that the creation we see around us is proof of his his power in the world around us.

9. 3:32

   So I really enjoyed this class. It was a fun one to just kind of dive into I’m a little bit of science nerd. So it was fun to listen to brother Dan, and because it is his His trade in his career, he was able to add a lot more depth than I feel a lot of other classes on a similar topic were.

10. 3:45

    So it was a great one to listen to this one came in as a suggestion that somebody had sent in that was at the Washington Bible school, and really enjoyed it and sent it our way. I’m glad they did. It was a great one to listen to. If you have any other suggestions or recommendations, even just speakers that you would like to hear more of feel free to send it in.

11. 4:03

    We’ve got some really encouraging feedback recently in the last couple weeks and months from people who are finding certain classes or topics. It’s or speakers to be really encouraging for them and we love hearing about that. We’re glad that it’s something that is uplifting to everybody. I know myself and Levi, we’ve both been enjoying being able to listen to all of these classes and dig into them.

12. 4:22

    It’s been um, look up Lifting for us and we hope it’s been just as uplifting to you with that. We’re going to turn it over to our brother Dan Robinson for his evening program class stand still and consider the wondrous works of God. I love this verse and when you think about it there’s an awful lot to this verse every phrase.

13. 4:40

    Is important. I wanted to put, you know, capitals or highlights or make the text, a little bigger for the important words. And as you can see, I’ve I’ve almost highlighted everything in the verse because it’s all important. And in case, you’re not sure from the title, our class this evening is really to strengthen our conviction that God is the creator of the universe in which we live. The world is increasingly, pushing God to the side out of their minds.

14. 5:06

    They teach Evolution as a fact. It’s an Aligning some underlying assumption in almost every scientific article that’s written about biology. And our class might be a little scientific. I don’t think it’ll be too challenging. We’re just going to look at how complex the world we live in is and I think it’s rather ironic that at a time when there’s an explosion of knowledge where we have the technology to see the vastness of the universe, and look down in minut detail at the complexity of every creature.

15. 5:39

    And we’ve Things are thousands of times more complex than we ever thought. Man is quick to leave God out of the equation. So, where does this first come from? It comes from the lips of a like you in the Book of Job and you might be hesitant to take some verses out of Joe. But there’s there’s nothing untrue about this statement that the job makes if you’d like just turn in your Bible to job, 37, I’ll put it on the screen.

16. 6:06

    In case you find it difficult to look it up. But but, This is pretty important. Just read for you job, 37. I’ve left some of it off the screen and so I’ll have to turn it up here. It says hearken unto this so job stands still and consider the wondrous works of God Dost. Thou know, when God disposed them and cause the light of his Cloud to shine, Dost, thou know the balancing of the clouds. The wondrous works of him which is perfect in knowledge. And so we know Ally whose approach, he’s, he’s trying to get job to admit that he doesn’t understand all the ways of God and hear his topic is something quite simple. It’s it’s the weather and he says to job. Can you explain the, the clouds in the sky and the lightning and the rain?

17. 6:59

    The NIV says, do you know how God lays his command upon them and Club causes the lightning of his Cloud to shine? And I think that’s a pretty valid question to anyone even to scientists today. We more we learn the more we realize we don’t understand how these things happen, but you see what’s repeated in these two verses again?

18. 7:20

    And again, it’s the wondrous works of God Wonders that are are perfect in knowledge and there’s so many wonders of creation isn’t, isn’t there? The wonders of everyday life? Roman says, there’s so many wonders in the world about us. That man is without excuse that everyone should believe in God. By just looking at the things that have been created and those wondrous works. I looked it up to see what it meant in. Almost every translation has the same thing, but strong stiction, areas a little bit helpful.

19. 7:51

    It tells us sort of the the color of the language. It means to be to be separate. The works of God are different than the works of anyone else. There they’re distinguished. You can tell that their gods and not man’s They’re great. They’re difficult. They’re wonderful. So the idea of things that no other person could accomplish and presumably this is the argument of a like you job.

20. 8:18

    Watch what you’re saying. There’s proof all around you. That God is all-knowing and he knows what’s what he’s doing and who are we to question him? That same word in Hebrew Paula is in Psalm 139 which we did for our reading, just turn over to Psalm 139. This is a rule really, really interesting section of scripture.

21. 8:49

    When you look at the, the Hebrew words, it says, in verse 13, thou Hast possessed, my reins thou has covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise thee for, I am fearfully and wonderfully made marvelous. That’s that word about wondrous marvelous are thy works. And that my soul knoweth right, well my substance was not hid from thee when I was made in secret and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. And so Typically, the psalmist is talking about the creation of a child in the womb, you know, how can anyone understand that? It’s so marvelous.

22. 9:22

    It’s it’s beyond understanding how a single cell becomes, you know, a baby, that’s born, nine months later everyone that’s the psalmist says should understand this and and you’ve got to love the beauty of the Hebrew language in verse 13, where it says covered me in Rotherham that says Thou did. We’ve me together in the womb the ESV said you knitted me together in my mother’s womb and that’s applicable to all children. But particularly applicable to Christ who is the subject. And then in verse 15, the word curiously wrought, his to embroider and so you can just picture the fine. Embroidery, that’s done.

23. 10:04

    That becomes who we are when we’re born. Some of actually suggested that this language sounds a bit like the twisting together of two fibers of DNA. And if you read the section very closely, it sounds like all the instructions of how a person is made are written in in the twisting together of the DNA strands.

24. 10:23

    But that’s an uncertain, of course. But the point is, is that when we look at things that are around us, especially the creation, we see the power of God and what Liu is Owing job is to stand still, that was our excitation last night, wasn’t it? We move so quickly. We often don’t take a moment just to meditate upon the things that God has done.

25. 10:50

    And we’re going to do that tonight. We’re going to look at some of God’s creation, just sit back for an hour. Look at the complexity of what God has made and Marvel at at his power and we want to consider and again, we’ll just look at that word there. Consider means to Take some time to mentally, think about to meditate upon, to attend, to discern to look well, to to perceive. That’s how its translated elsewhere. And I was, I was planning on showing you a lot of things that God created, but I kind of got stuck on what I think is the most incredible thing that God has made, and you’re probably able to guess what that might be. It would be your eye. that is an extreme close-up of a part of the eye called, the iris And I chose this picture because there was a moment in my life where I did exactly what a like you advise job to do.

26. 11:49

    I’m in my first year of optometry school and we’re in a lab on. The second floor with other students and we have these microscopes, where you can look at the eye and it was the very first time. I got to look at an eye living. I up close with a microscope and this is what I use every day to look at people’s eyes and I’ve never looked It anything like this.

27. 12:10

    So close that was living because I looked in microscopes and you could see things that, you know, we’re dead. But when you look at the eye under the microscope, there’s all these these Hills and Valleys and folds, it’s all different colors. You know, you think of your I being one color but there’s all different shades of color who is in 3D. It’s intricate that black hole in the middle. That you see that’s like in a camera. Has a lens behind it that you can’t see in the picture. But the best part was that, while I was looking at it, everything is moving.

28. 12:47

    You know, when you move the light to the pupil the pupil get smaller, and then when you move it away, it gets larger. So not are you looking at only looking at a picture like this, but it’s moving. It’s really hard to describe what it looked like, but it made me stop. And I thought, I think I’m the only person probably in this room that’s thinking that this was created by God.

29. 13:07

    And everyone else thought that this just kind of kind of happened. What occurred to me is actually this part of the eye is a muscle. We learned that in class, but there’s actually two muscles in this part of the eye, the iris. There’s a circular muscle here that when it contracts makes the pupil smaller and then there’s all these muscles that run laterally and when they contract that makes the pupil bigger. So, this happens all day long as you’re looking at things that people gets bigger and smaller to All the amount of light that comes into your eye, it actually responds to your emotion. It responds to how close an object is response to those little sticky drops.

30. 13:47

    We put in your eyes when you go for an eye exam and make you blurry. And I just wanted to recreate for you. That moment, I had 20 years ago and I’ve built it up pretty big. I don’t know that it’ll work, but this is a video if it works here of the eye up close.

31. 14:07

    Moving. Hopefully, that doesn’t gross anyone out. Come on, you have two of them and they’re doing this all day long. Can’t it can’t be that at that. But you know it’s the pupil getting bigger and smaller. That’s the muscles working in is you know the people get smaller that Iris tissue thins out and is it gets bigger? It gets thicker.

32. 14:28

    I’m going to turn that off. Just in case it is gross and you are The blank that you were looking at. That happens in a tenth of a second and on average, we blink about ten times a minute, except when you’re staring at your device’s. When you only do it about five times a minute and your eyes dry out and that color of the eye depends on a whole bunch of genes.

33. 14:51

    Most most children of European descent are born with light colored eyes, almost blue. And by six months, three to six months, the darker pigment forms. If it’s going to And you usually know the eye color of a child and there’s up to 15 different genes. That decide that so no matter what color eyes, your parents have, you can have children with different color eyes.

34. 15:12

    There is, I’m looking at this, under the microscope and I’m thinking, none of my classmates believe that this intricate structure is made by God. Well, there’s a lot to the I and I think you need a quick Anatomy lesson. Here took me a long time to find a picture that had that few labels on it because I didn’t want to.

35. 15:32

    To overwhelm you. But you’ve got the front of the eye, where you’d stick a contact on your eye called the cornea. You’ve got a whole called the pupil, this is great for five, right? The lens. And then at the back of the eye called the retina, which is like the film of your camera and then there’s a nerve that goes out the back and we’re going to talk about some of these tonight.

36. 15:55

    So if you’re thinking like a camera, you’ve got the pupil, which is the aperture, you’ve got the cornea and lens, which is focusing. Camera. The retinas like the digital sensor and the nerve is like, the USB cable that goes to your computer and your brain is like Photoshop, okay? So that’s, that’s really what’s happening with this here and just give you some interesting facts about the eye. This is a photograph of the retina. That’s like the sensor of your camera. Film for those of you that are older, the filament the back and every eye has about 7 million cones which allow you to see in the day there’s three different types of them that allow you to see in color.

37. 16:40

    So if you only have two types of cones, you’re not going to see colors the same way as everyone else and you’ll be somewhat colorblind. There’s got to be some mails here, that are colour-blind because one in twelve males has some color vision deficiency. That’s why we have trouble with, you know, clothes and stuff like that.

38. 17:01

    But less than 1 in 200, women have color deficiencies and it’s all to do with genetics. And then you’ve got 120 million rods which allow you to see at night and pick up motion, okay? And some of the processing of what you see. Actually happens in this tissue, the nerves actually connect before they go to the brain and then that yellow circle there that is 1.2 million nerve fibers going out the back of your eye, connecting your eye, to the brain.

39. 17:31

    And Jeb because the nerve goes out in that yellow circle. You have what’s called a blind spot. Okay, there’s no rods or cones in that optic nerve. So if you were to close one eye and hold something in a certain spot about here, it would sort of disappear. It’s hard to do because your brain actually fills in most of the detail. Most of your vision is in that little dark circle there in the middle, that’s your best Vision.

40. 17:58

    That’s where, when you’re looking at something, the light focuses on the back of the eye and it’s called the macula you’ve heard of macular degeneration. Perhaps some of the older members, we know people in our family with that disease and in that area for every square millimeter, there’s 140,000 cones little cells that detect light and You’ve got a retina display in that same area you’ve got 139 pixels. So your eye is 140,000 cones and your retinal display has 139 pixels.

41. 18:34

    Not really retina, is it? Yeah, but it’s what they call it and the rods that you see at night, or actually focused about 15 degrees off to the side. So, if you were looking at a star at night, and look right at it might kind of disappear, but if you look off to the side about 15 degrees, you’ll see it much better because that’s where your, your nighttime vision.

42. 18:51

    Ian is focused, you’ve got muscles that control your eye, you got the ones you think about, right? Left up down and a couple that turn the eye in different direction, they help, give us a view of the world. That’s that’s better than 180 degrees that we think about And they’re quite interesting. Have you ever watched someone that’s really quite poor at doing home movies and everything’s moving all the time and you sort of start feeling nauseous, you ever thought why your vision isn’t like that.

43. 19:20

    When you’re running down the road and everything stays in the right spot? Well, it’s your eyes are hooked up to sensors in your ears that send how you’re moving and adjust for eye movements to compensate that in real time. No, that’s way better than any camcorder heads and, and your eye does this automatically You and these muscles never get tired. They’re not like muscles where you’re running. And you know by the end of the day you don’t want to move your eyes anymore.

44. 19:48

    The other interesting thing is that remember that small area with lots of cones in it called the macula. Well, that’s our best Vision. But we actually see the whole world because our eyes constantly are moving, and the Brain puts all the pictures together and gives us this this full view. That’s why when you take a picture and you show it to someone else, it doesn’t Quite capture. Like if you’ve been to the Grand Canyon, you can’t quite capture the Grand Canyon on film, or in a picture as it is in real life because their eyes just do a much better job at taking in the whole picture.

45. 20:21

    So those are just some of the things that make me Marvel at at the creation of God, there was there was a wise man named Solomon, who said the hearing year and the seeing I the Lord hath made both of them. So when so when we look at Some beautiful lake or a mighty tree or we look at the intricacy of a bird in Flight, you know, we can Marvel at God’s creation but we should also Marvel that he’s given us.

46. 20:47

    The eyesight the complexity of our eye, in order to be able to see it, but God gives us site for another reason. In Psalm 90 for it says he that planted the ear, shall he not here and he that formed the I shall he not see? I think there’s a bit of a warning there for us, isn’t there reminding us that if if we have this ability to see things, surely God can see and it would be absurd to say that God is blind. But there’s people that do and perhaps those people are us. If we do things thinking that God isn’t watching us, and we might say that by our actions, he were to look at the context of this verse.

47. 21:30

    You’ll see that it’s the wicked, that would say that the Lord shall not. See but there are some people that actually say this literally, and we’ll talk about that in a moment. It also says, in Psalm 90 4 verse 8, that people who say that are brutish and strong says, that means that their senseless, they don’t have their senses and their thinking that God doesn’t see.

48. 21:55

    So there’s some pretty Spirit, good spiritual lessons that we can look at. You could do a good class on on whether our spiritual vision is is 20/20. Like, we like to have Well, our last verse 4 for this evening is from First Kings chapter 4 and we think about the wisdom of Solomon, we think of his Proverbs, we think of how important the fear of the Lord is.

49. 22:20

    But it appears that God also gave Solomon a little bit of understanding about biology. He spoke of trees and the cedar tree spoke of hyssop, he spoke of beasts and fowls and of creeping things in a fish’s. And when he looked at all these things, he would have been impressed. With the creative power of God. And I think, we’ll how much more impressed. Should we be that we can, you know, put pictures of this up on the screen.

50. 22:45

    We can look at the eye in great detail, with with huge magnification and we should be impressed with his Limitless power, and the observations that we are going to make this evening. I just don’t think fit in with the concept of evolution. You know, there’s so many different eyes in nature. How did they evolve so many times? How is it that each eye is perfectly suited to its environment?

51. 23:11

    And how did things that are? So complex appear without a Creator? And there’s actually a lot of scientists that are ready to admit. That Evolution does not provide the answers. So, I’m going to share with you some of the eyes in nature. So that is a box jellyfish and it’s called a box jellyfish, because it’s shaped like a box and most of them are venomous.

52. 23:41

    They live, of course, in our oceans and these jellyfish are carnivores. They actually hunt little fish. They can move up to four miles an hour and I’m like other jellyfish, which only have simple eyes. These jellyfish have eyes with a cornea. And lens and the retina and it has 24 eyes actually in groups of six. So there’s four dark spots that you can see there. And in each of those dark spots, there’s six eyes and four of them are really simple, they just detect light and two of them are complex.

53. 24:19

    And have this structure, like, our eyes, have one looks up in one looks down, and it allows it to distinguish between light and dark. It helps, it have directional. Oh swimming. It helps it hunt. Its prey. That’s kind of interesting.

54. 24:37

    That’s a fruit fly. Okay they’re like two or three millimeters in size and those red circles on the side of it are the eyes of the fruit fly and it’s very different than our eyes. They’re called compound eye. So instead of being one eye, that fruit fly each of its size has 100. No sorry, a thousand different.

55. 25:00

    Sections that are just all individualize and even though they only live about 40 days, they’re very complicated. The vision of the fruit fly. Here’s an electron microscope picture of some of the sections of the eye of the fruit fly. So there’s thousands of these elements that actually focus light and you know what it’s better than our I in many ways because it can see almost 360 degrees.

56. 25:26

    It has a much better field of view. It’s way better at motion detection. As you know, when you try to swat a fly, it somehow senses that you’re moving before you even think to move, it can detect polarized, light. It can detect its position on earth, like GPS, and you want to wear those little spikes.

57. 25:47

    Are that come out between every eye there. They’re actually called see Ty and their little hairs and they slow down the evaporation. So the eyes don’t dry out as quickly on the fruit fly. They also reduce dust getting in the eye of a fruit fly. Since it doesn’t have eyelids, pretty incredible the structure, and just these little little animals and I know what that is. It’s a cuddlefish.

58. 26:15

    Yeah. It’s in the same class is an octopus and a squid and these guys can grow up to 23 pounds, the Greeks and Romans actually gathered them for the pigment that came out of it. It’s a brown pigment that it is ejects when it’s excited and it’s called sepia. That’s the brown pigment or CP. I don’t know how you pronounce it in. D.c. don’t know how you pronounce it, Ontario either, but This is a bone inside it called the cuttlebone. And if any of you have birds that sometimes the the bone that they put inside bird cages that birds use to get a source of calcium and it’s actually considered one of the most intelligent of creatures because it has a large Brain to body ratio.

59. 27:04

    And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen cuttlefish but they actually can change color. So I have a video of the Cuttlefish that’s just Absolutely incredible. The Cuttlefish has taken camouflage to the next level. They can change their color shape and texture to blend in with the background. It’s hard to believe looking at these pictures, but all these cuttlefish are exactly the same species. They’re simply changing their appearance depending on what’s around them.

60. 27:44

    It’s called adaptive camouflage and it’s perfect for hiding from those predators and prey. It’s not amazing. I first time I didn’t even see it there and then jumps out for fish. So so not only do they have remarkable eyes that will come to in a minute but their skin is incredible. It’s got these thousands of sex filled with pigment and there’s different colored pigments and there’s muscles on the Cuttlefish skin that that open up different sections and it’s like an LCD screen.

61. 28:18

    You know, your screen on your computer, it can create different patterns with the muscles allowing different pigments to be. Okay, it’s it’s in it’s complicated. It’s too complicated for me to understand or explain the the layers of cells that allow it to create this this color. But what’s interesting is their eyes and they have a different type of I which will talk about towards the end that has no blind spot.

62. 28:47

    And what’s what’s surprising about the Cuttlefish is that it uses its skin not just for camouflage but they think that uses it skin to communicate with other cuttlefish with different patterns that it can commute that way. And I guess what’s remarkable about it is that if you’ve got a fish that’s depending on seeing different colors, you think it’s vision would have really good color vision, but they only have one type of cone in their, in their retinas.

63. 29:14

    So how do they see the color? Well, scientists think it has to do with the pupil of the Cuttlefish so that’s a cuttlefish I closed up and that W is the pupil of the Cuttlefish and that pupil is not a very great shape of pupil in order to focus an image. I don’t know if any of you do photography but it creates an awful lot of what’s called chromatic aberration. If you’ve got a camera, When it has chromatic aberration, it means you’ve got color fringes all around the picture, not each colors in a different Focus, so it’s not a very clear picture for us.

64. 29:52

    So you want a lens that doesn’t have chromatic aberration, but if you’re a cuttlefish that depends on communicating by seeing the color on other cuttlefish skin, you want chromatic aberration because you can interpret the blur of different colors and thus see colors by doing that, and God’s given the Cuttlefish this very strange pupil.

65. 30:13

    Perhaps for that reason, if scientists understand it correctly. So I just think that’s amazing. I’m really glad that wasn’t what I was looking at in the microscope that day at that school because that might have been a little creepy, you know. So does that point to you to a Creator where the eye is perfectly matched to its environment, or does it point to devolution?

66. 30:38

    That is a bay scallop. That’s what you eat. If you eat scallops, you eat one of the muscles inside the shell and they Farm them in Florida. And that’s what you eat at Sea Foods places. But do you see those blue circles? Hundreds of them, those are eyes. The scallop has eyes. I didn’t know that the must have missed that day at school.

67. 31:06

    That’s a close-up of the eyes of a scallop and they have these very bright blue colors because of something called guanine crystals and they call them simple eyes but they’re really not that simple actually because they have a cornea. They have a retina and behind the retina, there’s a mirror. That’s the blue part. And the retina where In two ways, the light goes through it and it senses, light it reflects off the mirror, bounces back through and that detects contrast and the scallop can actually see not really well but it can tell differences between contrast between, you know, shelves of the, on the ocean floor, how murky the water is and that helps it to do its hunting and detect predators.

68. 31:56

    Kind of an interesting set of ice. That’s a shrimp. A mantis shrimp, a crustacean that lives in rivers and oceans. And it’s you don’t see this very often at least I’ve never seen one because I guess it hides in the sediment at the bottom of rivers and it has a compound. I like like the house flies or like the fruit fly that we looked at before, but in each eye, there’s over 10,000 sections or units of its eye. And so these eyes as you can probably guess can look in different directions.

69. 32:29

    One can turn one way and the other can look the other way. And it has completely 360 degree Vision as a result. But this, this animal has between 12 and 16 different cones to see different colors. So, you know, we think we see color, well, that the mantis shrimp can see all sorts of colors, it can see the UV Spectrum, it can see polarized light, and they think that it has all these cones, not to help it. Distinguish colors better, but it doesn’t have the brain to interpret.

70. 33:01

    It like we do. So it’s interprets color by having different sensors and it doesn’t need as much processing. Power to see the colors. I just had to include that picture because it was really strange. Okay, the next few slides, it’s Guess the Animal. Okay. What do you think that is?

71. 33:25

    Yeah. What do you think? It’s a goat. You guys were getting scared. What’s different about it? It’s pupil is rectangular yeah, ours around the Cuttlefish of nice W’s and this one is rectangular, and it gives it better peripheral vision for watching for Pray when it’s grazing blocks out more of the light from above. Because it doesn’t need to see up and the sun would desensitize, its retina and it has great ability to rotate its head.

72. 34:01

    So that when it’s in different positions grazing, those eyes stay parallel with the ground. Very well because it’s well suited for that. A chameleon. Yes, which is a type of lizard. So the two answers, I heard were absolutely correct and some can be aliens can change color. I don’t know if they change as well as those cuttlefish, but they have really good eyesight. These chameleons.

73. 34:27

    They can see UV light, they can detect little insects 10 meters away and you’ll notice something here, the eyelid is actually fused to the cornea, so it doesn’t open and close its eyes. It’s just fused there and there’s a few reasons for that. One is. It’s Camouflage, you know, rather than having a big guy that skin comes right up, it also gives it better focus because it’s got a small pupil like a camera. When we have a small aperture, we get a better focus on our camera and the eyes can move independently. So one can be looking at the pray that it wants to get the other can be moving all around in surveying, you know, for Predators or things that want to attack it. And the eyes bulge out a little bit, to give it a better field of view.

74. 35:12

    And it actually Ashley has a special lens that lets it have depth perception with only one eye looking at something. So I can judge how far something is, because my two eyes are getting different pictures of it, and the Brain interprets that and gives me depth perception. That’s how we can hit a baseball pretty well, because we can judge how far it is. Well, this I has been specially designed because it needs to be looking in different directions.

75. 35:35

    That the lens gives it two different, you know, focuses and the Brain interprets that as depth perception. And it also has Lens. That’s designed very different and is more like a telephoto lens, which is really cool.

76. 35:51

    When is that? It’s a gecko. A gargoyle gecko for yeah, that’s really good. I think it’s neat because the iris kind of Blends in with the skin, doesn’t it? It’s got that cool design for camouflage. Again, not an eye that I really wanted to look at in school in the microscope. But what’s different about this eye?

77. 36:19

    It’s got a vertical slit for a pupil. It also has cones that are 350 times, more sensitive than ours. So our cones don’t work at night. We use our rods to see. Those are the cells that detect light this animal. It’s cones can see at night. And that’s because it’s cones are really much bigger in the retina, and this is actually the pupil of a gecko open, really wide in bright light. This is what happens to the pupil of a gecko. It shrinks down, but it’s not weird. There’s four little pin holes in its pupil and you think we’ll why would there be for pin holes for pupils? In fact, if you had for pupils like that, you would see four of everything, okay?

78. 37:06

    Which wouldn’t be really all that handy. Especially if a trucks coming towards you or something like that. But the gecko behind this Iris has a lens with four different sections to it, and because it’s eyeball is so short. All the colors would be out of focus for it. So, it has a lens that’s multifocal, that allows different colors to focus and independently, and it can actually then see, much, much clearer. And it also allows it to be more camouflaged. It’s also another cool thing about geckos is they they don’t have eyelids and they don’t have those little hairs poking out of them, like the fruit fly, so their eyes would dry out. So there’s this remarkable development and I think this has got to be one of the greatest designs ever to keep the keep the pupil moist.

79. 38:03

    It licks its eye with its tongue, why not? Otherwise it’s I would dry out. I don’t know. I I think there’s no end to the complexity and the variety of eyes that God has created. Don’t you think it’s amazing that God has given us? This wonderful proof of his existence and I just wish scientists might stand still and consider what they’re looking at sometime and take the advice of Romans and be without excuse, because really, there’s no excuse to believe in the god that we, that we have.

80. 38:42

    Now, I really haven’t made much of a scientific argument. I’ve just given you examples of the wonderful creatures that exist upon And I allow you to come to your own conclusion. I know your conclusion but this argument that I’m making actually has a name. The argument for creation that I’m making is an argument. It’s called an argument from design, it’s actually called the teleological argument.

81. 39:09

    So in other words, we believe in God, when we look at what we believe in God, for lots of reasons, but we point to the complexity of Nature and we say there must be a God that exists and this Is best Illustrated in something, you’ve probably heard of in classes before called the watchmaker analogy.

82. 39:27

    So anyone finding a pocket watch in a field will recognize that it was designed intelligent, okay? So if you walked along the path, and you came up on an old fashioned pocket, watch like this, and you looked at all the gears and you spun it and the gears started moving and it kept time. Are you going to think that that just happened to be there? Or are you going to think that there was someone intelligent In that designed and built a watch.

83. 39:54

    Okay. So that’s the watchmaker argument. He says, when we look at Living beings that are similarly, complex or I think I would say, you know, we’ve got a couple hundred years on William Paley, who was the scientist to put this this argument forward when we see things that are much, much more complex that can recreate themselves reproduce themselves, then that must be the work of an intelligent designer.

84. 40:20

    Well, Evolutionists. Of course have a counter argument. And their argument is called an argument from poor design, okay? And they call this the Des teleological argument. In other words, the opposite. So what they say is that if you can see anything in nature that doesn’t have a very good design that would be evidence that it wasn’t created by an omnipotent all-knowing all-powerful God So for example you’ve got an appendix, you can have it out and there’s no problems. So why would we have an appendix humans? Cannot synthesize vitamin C?

85. 41:02

    If we didn’t eat vitamin C we wouldn’t survive. We have to eat it. We can’t make it ourselves and I guess I didn’t know this but some plants most plants and animals can make vitamin C. They don’t have to eat it whales and dolphins, breathe air, but live in the ocean. Like why would you have that kind of a design if you live in the ocean? So they’re talking about suboptimal designs, plants are green and not black.

86. 41:26

    If plants were black, they would absorb more light and they would be better at producing and growing and getting energy from the Sun. So, their argument is this, they say, if there was an omnipotent omniscient, omni-benevolent benevolent Creator, God would create organisms that have optimal design. We see organisms that are suboptimal there for either. God, didn’t create these organisms or God is Not omnipotent on this year.

87. 41:52

    And omni-benevolent. I’ve been in a lot of baptismal interviews, and we’ve never talked about omni-benevolent. We always talk about the other ones. On this sense they they forgot to have. They have a mechanism. What am I missing? Omnipresent, I guess is the one that we have, isn’t it? Yeah, so they’re wrong off. The bat that God isn’t omni-benevolent. That’s where we get into trouble with people understanding suffering and difficulties that come into our life. So that’s perhaps one step that they go. Wrong.

88. 42:24

    But of course they also Are misjudging the things that God creates. Oh, you’ve heard of Richard Dawkins. He’s a scientist and he wrote a book called The Blind watchmaker. First, I thought he was calling God blind but of course, he doesn’t believe in God. So what he’s saying is that that watch that argument that William Paley made a couple hundred years ago, could be explained by a blind process called Evolution, okay? So that watch could be there if we had something like natural selection, and this is what Richard Dawkins says, in his book about the eye because the eye happens to be one of their favorite targets.

89. 43:03

    He says an engineer would naturally assume that the photo cells that would be the rods and cones in your retina would Point toward the light with their wires leading backwards toward the brain. He would laugh at any suggestion that the photo cells might point away from the light with their wires, departing on the side, nearest the light, okay?

90. 43:24

    Now that might be complicated, but what he’s saying is if you were making a camera You would want the sensor to have direct contact with the light and have the cables that come out of it behind it so that they don’t get in the way, okay. Would it make sense to have all your cables in front of the light sensor in your camera? You know they block the light from getting to the sensor and in that sense he’s very right so when you look at the design of us on your left and Squid and cuttlefish Shin octopus on, right?

91. 44:01

    You can see that in our eyes, all the wires that come out of the cells that detect light come out the front part, get in the way of the light and they actually run along the front surface of that and at some point they have to curve out and go out the back of our eye and they create a blind spot.

92. 44:18

    So evolutionists say, well if God had created the eye he wouldn’t have made it that way. Because then there wouldn’t be a blind spot. And the, the fibers wouldn’t get in the way. All right. That’s their thinking, that’s their argument. So, here’s just a little bit of a lesson from optometry school. You’ve seen this picture of your retina, that yellow circle is the optic nerve. And that’s the, the nerve fibers heading out the back of your eye.

93. 44:48

    On the lower section is actually a description of all the little nerve fibers that are actually running in front of the cells, that detect light joining together at that Circle and going out the back of the eye, and there’s 1.2 million nerve. A, and if you do, what’s called a peripheral vision test on a person and you cover their one, I can flash the lights in front of them and they click a button every time they see it, that picture up there is what you get where, there’s a black circle, where they don’t see lights, and you can see how that black circle perfectly corresponds with the, with the nerve leaving the back of the eye. So they’re absolutely right in that, we have a blind spot as a result of that.

94. 45:27

    That doesn’t happen in the cephalopod in the octopus or the Cuttlefish. And Dawkins says, if God had have created it, all the eyes would be like this octopus. I and you think, you know, that that kind of makes sense. But you know what? That diagram doesn’t even do it justice because really what those wires do in the eye, is they come out, these are where the, where the light is sent right here, that’s where the light has to get to.

95. 45:56

    And then the message travels up here, joining some other cells, join some other cells, and then the fibers go to the brain. So the light has to get through all of that to be sensed by your your retina. You know? That’s, that’s a lot of interference for the light, isn’t it? You think we’ll?

96. 46:12

    Why would God make it that way? In fact, it’s even more incredible when you start looking at at pictures instead of diagrams. This is actually a picture. I can see in my office. Now we have a machine called an OCT. It’s almost like an MRI of the back of the eye and anyone who comes into the office, we can look at their retina in this detail and see all the different layers of the retina and the light has to get through all this and get down to this layer right here where it’s cents.

97. 46:39

    And then this is all the processing that goes on, and that’s all in the way of the light getting through, to the back of your eye. Matt also might not look all that bad until you see what it is like with an electron microscope. That’s all the tissue that the light has to get through to get to the rods and cones with her right down here. So you know, these scientists might be right. Why?

98. 47:05

    Why in the world would God make our eyes like this? They, you know, they call it, they say that the, I was made inside out the retina, was inside out to the way that it should have been designed. This is a quote from an evolutionist and 2005 although the design of the eye is brilliant, it betrays the its origin with a Telltale fly.

99. 47:28

    The retina is inside out the nerve fibers that carry the signals from the eyes rods and cones, which sent light sense, light and color lie on top of them. And after plunge through a large hole in the retina to get to the brain, creating a blind spot. No intelligent designer, would put such a clumsy Arrangement now.

100. 47:47

     He’s speaking about Camcorder in a camcorder. And it’s true because it wouldn’t work. And this is just one of hundreds of accidents Frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process. And so they look at that and say, that’s not the way, it should be designed. Hence, God couldn’t have done it.

101. 48:08

     It must have been done by a series of chances and mutations and all sorts of complicated jargon to get to this. It’s incredible. You know, they’re calling into question the creator of the universe and our eyes. I guess are an accident of evolution, one of millions of accidents when you think about it, okay?

102. 48:32

     So that was that’s the science you point but really, what we found out is that they’re not quite right. Because if we take another picture of the eye and we’re just displaying it a different way, you can see all the rods and cones there in those nice colors, those rods and cones are embedded in something. Called the retinal pigment epithelium is going to be a test before you can leave, okay?

103. 49:00

     Okay. We’ll call it the rpe, that’s what we call it. Anyways, we can’t even remember those other words. So it’s called the rpe and it actually turns out that there’s a very good reason. Why our eyes are our retinas are inside out, would anyone here admit that we live a different life than cuttlefish?

104. 49:20

     Yeah. Yeah, they live in the ocean, they kind of have very specific needs for their eyes, but we have very different eyes and those rods and cones that detect light are really high maintenance cells. And remember, there’s over 125 million rods and cones that we see with. So, underneath the rods and cones, there’s a very important layer called the rpe and below it. A Huge network of blood vessels like nowhere else in the body because the eye needs more energy than anywhere else. And in fact, it needs a way to get rid of all the heat that the I produces.

105. 50:00

     And it’s important that this layer is in contact with the rods and cones in. And you know what that layer is? It’s completely opaque, no light would get through it whatsoever. So it’s got to be in this position because this is what rods and cones look like. And the part that detects light are those little discs at the top of the rods and the cones.

106. 50:21

     And every day, every Rod in every cone in your eye sheds, 10% of those disks they don’t work anymore. So they are Shed off. And that layer that’s underneath the rods and cones has to reprocess the photopigments Testa break them down, make them reusable and funnel them back to the cells so that it can recreate those disks so that they’ll work. So every night, as you go to sleep, the cones that have been working all day Percent of them just break off and get reprocessed.

107. 50:55

     And every morning, when you wake up 10% of the rod, discs get reprocessed by that layer of the eye. Okay, that’s about as complicated as by Todd gets tonight, but this is important. So if God made RI the way that they suggested, It wouldn’t work because those rods and cones in those discs that come off. They’d have nowhere to go.

108. 51:19

     They just go floating into that center, part of our eye, and eventually, fill up the eye, and they wouldn’t be reprocessed. Because we live in a very different world than octopus and cuttlefish and in fact, their rods and cones are different, they don’t do that. They don’t have these, these discs that need to be reprocessed.

109. 51:38

     But there’s a little bit more. And this is my favorite part. Because there’s these cells that when I went to school there called Muller cells and when I went to school, they described them as being support cells. They didn’t really know why they were there. And so they said they were support like pillars in a building.

110. 51:57

     So they kind of held the ceiling up in the retina so that it didn’t collapse. you know what new research says about those cells that they’re like fiber optics, So running through the retina are millions of Muller cells that run right from the top where the light hits all the way down to the rods and cones at the bottom. And when the light hits those Muller cells just like fiber optics that bring internet into your house, the light reflects back and forth through that cell and gets right to the bottom of the rods and cones.

111. 52:35

     It’s incredible. And they’ve been able to determine that these are perfectly designed in order to funnel that light to the layer of the retina where it’s needed. So scientists, who told us that our eyes were inside out? We’re totally wrong. And I think they’re going to find that out about everything that they look into and they’re eventually going to learn that God created this world and he created it. The way it was meant to be.

112. 53:04

     Well, what about the blind spots and we’ll just finish off with this, you know, they point to the blind spot as being a horrible thing, but you know what? You’ve got two eyes and the one blind spots over here and the others over here, and your brain fills in the information from one eye and the other. But that’s not all.

113. 53:21

     If you were to cover one eye, if you did that. And look up Is there any part of your vision that’s missing? You see anything? Any anybody missing anything? No, because your brain actually analyzes all the detail around the blind spot and like Photoshop. It fills it in instantly all the time while you’re working.

114. 53:44

     And so God’s given us a brain that processes the information. Brothers and sisters. I don’t know about you, but we are truly wonderfully made and we can’t do any better than to Echo these words from from Psalm 139. I will praise thee, Heavenly Father for. I am fearfully and wonderfully made the more science learns about the complexity of nature, even while they seek to explain away a creator with complex theories of evolution you.

115. 54:16

     And I can Rejoice that God’s creative hand. Is in everything around us. Marvelous are the works of our heavenly father. and that my soul knoweth, right, well, Thank you for listening to the good Christian talks podcast. Please Subscribe for new episodes and leave a review and apple podcast or whatever service you are listening from to help people find the show when they search for it.

116. 54:48

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117. 55:13

     To send a suggestion to good christadelphians talks at gmail.com or message us on any of our social media platforms. Thank you for listening. God bless and talk to you next week.