When I married in 1966 at the age of 21, TIME-LIFE had just begun publishing a series of colourful books called their “Life Nature Library”.  We subscribed to the series and I’ve lugged that set of books around with me as I moved house more than a dozen times over the intervening years.  Now that they belong in a museum I’m finally getting around to reading them in my retirement years.

This Life Nature Library covers quite a variety of subjects, from birds and fish to insects and continents.  One I just finished reading is entitled Animal Behaviour.  Much more information would now be available on the various subjects, nevertheless the books are still an impressive read and they were particularly valued at the time for their thoroughness.

However again and again I find I have issues with these books concerning their evolutionary bias.  Let me hasten to qualify what I’m saying lest anyone should think I still believe in a flat earth.  I am unapologetically a creationist.  I believe the Bible’s Genesis story of God creating this world and its various creatures according to their kind.  However I accept that some natural selection has occurred.  I’m convinced, for example, that God did not create a hundred varieties of dogs.  Some evolutionary development within the various species seems obvious.

My particular gripe with evolution is that it usually allows no place for a Creator God.  I recall a workmate once telling me that evolution disproves God’s existence.  Of course it does no such thing.  But too often evolutionists are opposed even to the idea of intelligent design.  Evolution’s starting point is usually materialistic and it assumes that our origins lie in things happening purely by chance.  Well, imagine you find a wrist-watch while we are out bush-walking.  You ask me, “I wonder how this watch came to be here?”  If I replied that it just happened all by itself you would think I had been out in the sun too long.

There are things in nature that are far more complex than a wrist-watch.  Insects generally have compound eyes.  Those compound eyes consist of many tiny units, each of which may be said to be an ‘eye’ in itself, since each has its own lens and light-sensitive cells connected to the brain.  Those little eyes may number from less than 12 in some cave dwelling animals to more 28,000 in a dragon fly.  So I must believe that a watch cannot just happen by itself but that the 28,000 eyes of a dragon-fly just happened... well, they supposedly did, even if it was over a period of millions of years.  But if we have problems believing that 28,000 dragon-fly eyes can just happen, consider the human eye.  The human eye is characterised by its receptors... some 130 million tightly packed rods and cones which connect to about one million nerve fibres.  And I’m expected to believe that there was no God to design that most intricate part of our anatomy.  The eye just happened?  Yeah, right!  Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary thinking didn’t have this kind of information about the human eye in his day.  I can’t help but wonder whether he would have promoted his evolutionary theories if he had been aware of the amazing complexity of living things – in this case, particularly the human eye.

The other thing that struck me in reading through these TIME-LIFE books is that every so often the authors cheat.  Repeatedly I read that certain creatures were well designed for their environment – the design of a particular set of eyes superbly suits a creature’s needs.  Hold on a moment.  That’s cheating.  If they were designed then who did the designing?  And if they were designed then they didn’t just happen.  The answer often given is, of course, Mother Nature, where nature is attributed with a God-like creative capacity.

That leads me to one other vitally important point.  When I read about the dragon-fly’s 28,000 eyes, I marvel at the awesome God who made the dragon-fly.  When I read about the human eye having 130 million tightly packed rods and cones connected to a million nerve fibres then everything in me want to cry out: How awesome is our God.  But the even greater wonder is that this awesome God took on a human nature (with those amazing eyes) so that Jesus might come to live our life and die our death to restore us into a relation with that awesome Creator God.

John Westendorp