Today's Creation Moment

Many creatures have complex and beautiful mating rituals. However, few are more wondrous or dramatic than the firefleas' ritual. Ref: "Romantic Lighting." Discover, Feb. 1988. P. 16. See also http://books.google.com/books?id=DNrTfH5PcWoC&pg=PA49. Illustration: Cypridina mediterranea. (PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Ouch! You've just gotten a paper cut on your finger. What's the first thing you do? If you're like most people, you'll probably put your finger in your mouth. If you think about it, you probably have no idea why you put your finger into your mouth. Actually, when a dog licks its wounds or you put your paper cut ravaged finger in your mouth, you are beginning medical treatment. Ref: "An Aid to Healing that Simply Can't Be Licked." Discover, April, 1986. P. 10. Diagram: Protein structure of mouse epidermal growth factor. (PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

The monarch caterpillar feeds on milkweed. Milkweed manufactures a powerful toxin that can, in most cases, stop the heart of any creature who eats enough of it. However, the monarch caterpillar itself is unharmed by this poison. In fact, the caterpillar stores the poison in its body, and this poison remains even after the caterpillar has turned into a butterfly. Ref: Walker, Tim. "Butterflies and Bad Taste." Science News, Vol. 139. P. 348. Photo: Viceroy butterfly. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Despite modern medical advancements, pain management remains a difficult problem today. Man has used various forms of aspirin to manage pain for thousands of years. While more potent drugs can be used today, our primary approach to pain has changed little over the millennia. Recent advancements now promise to show us how to deal directly with many forms of pain. Ref: McKean, Kevin. "Pain." Discover, October, 1986. P. 82-92. Illustration: Brandykinin (PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

According to the claims of evolutionists, the dawn redwood trees lived from the time of the dinosaurs until about two million years ago. Then they became extinct. At the very same time this was the official scientific teaching, Chinese rice farmers were planting the tree because it was a good indicator of fertile rice fields. Ref: Wolf, Thomas H. "The Object at Hand." Smithsonian, Sept. 1990. P. 26-28. Photo: Dawn redwood on the campus of San Jose State University, taken by John Pozniak and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

It can be forty feet long. It can have many mouths and just as many stomachs. It swims along in the darkness more than 1,500 feet beneath the sea, reaching out for food with its lethal tentacles. Ref: Discover, February, 1986. Illustration: Siphonophore (PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

How long does it take to petrify wood? Scientists who believe in those millions and billions of years that evolutionists are always talking about have never tested the answer to this question. They simply assumed that it must take hundreds or thousands of years to petrify wood. It wasn't until the 1970s that scientists bothered to explore this question. Ref: Chittick, Donald E. The Controversy. Multnomah Press, 1984. P. 240-241. Photo: Petrified log at Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona. (PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

It is always as dark as night 2,000 feet beneath the ocean's surface. Yet, a rich variety of life thrives in the darkness. The strategies for life, however, are quite different far beneath the waves. Ref: Discover, February, 1986. P. 67. Picture: Jellyfish by Pexel (Pixabay.com) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Back in the 1990s, new fossil discoveries in China were greeted by evolutionists as among the most spectacular of the century. The fossils, said evolutionists, represented some of the earliest multicelled creatures. Evolutionists publicized these fossils as evidence for evolution. However, it's not difficult to see how these fossils support creation rather than evolution. Evolutionists admit that the fossils show that the first multicelled creatures appeared suddenly. This confirms creationist claims that life appeared suddenly and without evolutionary ancestors. Ref: Wilford, John Noble. "Fast Evolutionary Jump Led to Complex Life, Study Says." Star Tribune, Wednesday, April 24, 1991. P. 4A. Photo: Fossil (PD). © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

The relationships between two or more creatures are sometimes so well-designed and complex that there is no conceivable way that they could have evolved. Sacculina carcini is a microscopic crustacean that begins life as a free-swimming larva. The female first seeks out a crab for a host then she searches for a tiny hole in the crab's leg joint. Finding one, she inserts a hollow tube through the hole and squirts a few cells that are herself into the crab, leaving most of her body behind. As she grows as a large bulge on the underside of the crab, she is also sending tendrils throughout the crab's body. Ref: Discover, 8/00, pp. 80-85, "Do Parasites Rule the World?" Image: A parasitical barnacle on a female swimming crab, from the Belgian coastal waters by Hans Hillewaer CC By SA 4.0. © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Research is showing that we can forget just about everything we ever learned about how we taste food. To begin with, we don't taste with our tongues but with our brains. Remember those tongue maps that we all learned about in school? They show that we taste sweet on the tips of our tongues, salt and sour flavors on the sides, and bitter tastes at the back of our tongues. In truth, research shows that we taste each of these flavors all over our tongue. And, no, those little bumps on your tongue are not taste buds. Rather, each of those bumps contains many taste buds. Ref: Discover, 7/00, pp. 70-75, "Tourist is a taste lab." Photo: Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Evolutionary scientists are often hard‑pressed to explain human or even superhuman-like intelligence in animals. For example, let's say that you last saw your child when she was four months old. It is now four years later. Are you certain you could pick out your child in a room full of a hundred four‑year‑old little girls? Ref: Science News, 7/29/00, p. 69, "Mom, is that you? Seals show family recall." Photo: Northern male fur seal and females. © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

The Bible mentions "the fountains of the deep" several times. During the Flood, we are told, God opened the fountains of the deep, suggesting seismic activity. When God ended the flooding, we are told that God closed the fountains of the deep, suggesting that they continue to exist, albeit with less water than at creation. In 1997, scientists said that they may have found an astonishing reservoir of water deep in the earth. Ref: New Scientist, 8/30/97, pp. 22‑26, "Deep Waters." Painting: The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge by Thomas Cole. © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

How big is the largest living organism on Earth? We all know that the giant Redwoods of California grow larger than any whale. However, there are other living organisms that dwarf even the Redwoods. Ref: Minneapolis Star Tribune, 8/5/00, p. A17, "2,400‑year‑old Oregon fungus is largest living organism." Photo: Strawberry Lake in Malheur National Forest, Oregon. (PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

New archaeological evidence supports the factuality of the Greek legend about the prophet, or oracle, of Delphi. Ref: National Post Online, "The oracle of Delphi – high on ethylene?" Photo: View of Delphi, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Tropical passion vines have a unique defense against insects that would nibble on their leaves. Its leaves contain sealed packets of cyanide that are made inactive by being linked with sugar molecules. There are other sealed packets with an enzyme that releases the sugar molecules, activating the cyanide. When an insect chews on the leaves, both packets are broken, the cyanide is activated and another predator is gone. Ref: Science News, 7/22/00, p. 59, "How butterflies can eat cyanide." Photo: Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License - Version 2.0. Copyright 2008, Alex Popovkin. © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Many people have wondered at the abilities of savants. These are people who have very low intelligence, yet they can do seemingly impossible mental tasks. Some savants have been able to instantly name the day of the week when given any date within the last 6,000 years. Others have been able to instantly give a correct solution to tedious mathematical calculations. Could such abilities reflect a throwback to the mental abilities the human race once had? Ref: Nature, 5/11/00, p. 139, "Lie detection and language comprehension." Photo: Polygrahp testing (PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

The fact that they must breathe air would seem to limit sea creatures like whales, dolphins and sea turtles. But these creatures are so well designed that their abilities amaze even the most informed scientists. Ref: "Yertle:1, Orca: 0." Discover, Sept. 1987. p. 14. Photo: Leatherback turtle at Sandy Point National Wildlife Reserve (NWR) (PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

While many people think that the octopus is an ugly creature, the octopus is intelligent. The mother octopus puts a lot of love and effort into the care of her young. Ref: Ruggieri, George D., with Norman David Rosenberg. 1978. "The healing sea." Science Digest, Aug. p. 18. Photo: A Pacific Giant Octopus (PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Bee-eaters are birds whose way of life and behavior are both intelligent and unusual. Bee-eaters make their living catching and eating bees and wasps with stingers. The poison in many of these stinging insects is powerful enough to kill bee-eaters, but the birds are not only skilled at avoiding stings, they know how to remove the poison from the bee when they eat it. Ref: Clanbake. Natural History, Mar. 1990. p. 94. Photo: A male Blue-throated Bee-eater presents his mate with a captured insect. Photo taken by Lip Kee Yap and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Several years ago, Canadian and U.S. papers were filled with the results of polls in both countries that tested members of the public by asking some scientific questions. The problem is, both polls were heavily stacked with questions that resulted in so-called "wrong" answers if the respondent didn't believe in evolution. Since more than 10 percent of the questions dealt with evolution, we can assume that the real purpose of the "poll" was to make belief in evolution look the same as "scientific literacy." Ref: "Read it and weep." The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Mar. 1, 1990. p. A7. Photo: Evolution’s progression of man. (Pixabay) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Do you and I think? Or do we just think that we think? If you believe that we were created by God, your answer to that question will be that we actually do think. But if you believe that life is just a chemical accident, you might agree with those evolutionists who actually believe that we do not think. We only think we think. Ref: Hoffman, Paul. 1987. "Your mindless brain." Discover, Sept. p. 84. Photo: "The Thinker" by Auguste Rodin, 1902. © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

The aspirin tablet has been hailed as the miracle drug of the twentieth century. Although it took the twentieth century to flavor, coat and stamp little letters on aspirin, people have been using aspirin for centuries. The most common form in which aspirin has been taken is as willow bark tea. Ref: Shodell, Michael. 1983. "The prostaglandin connection." Science 83. p. 78. Photo: Aspirin (Pixabay.com) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Scientists have found that the usual explanation for lightning is not quite true. School children are taught that as a cloud moves through the air it picks up electrical charge because of turbulence. This eventually causes lightning. Ref: Lampe, David. 1978. "Lightning research strikes a windfall." Science Digest, Apr. p. 25. Photo: Lightning strikes during the eruption of the Galunggung volcano, Indonesia, in 1982. By R. Hadian, U.S. Geological Survey CC BY SA 1.0 © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Inside your body there is a large and amazing family of chemical workers who, although they usually last less than a minute, make life possible. There are so many different kinds of these chemicals, called prostaglandins, that science is just beginning to learn how important they are to life. Ref: Shodell, Michael. 1983. "The prostaglandin connection." Science 83. p. 78. Photo: Scanning electron micrograph of blood cells. From left to right: human erythrocyte, activated thrombocyte (platelet), leukocyte.(PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

The surface of the Earth 50 to 150 feet below the great living canopy of the rainforest is a dark, humid, still world dominated by great columns of tree trunks. Within those trunks and some of the giant hollow branches extending from them lie the secret of the life of the canopy itself. Ref: Perry, Donald. "Life in the treetops." 1978. Science Digest, Oct. p. 26. Photo: Rodrigues fruit bat. Pixbay.com © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Today, lasers do many important jobs in manufacturing and medicine in addition to serving in weapons that once existed only in the minds of science-fiction writers. But if our small imaginations can think of amazing things, we shouldn't be surprised to learn that our Creator's limitless imagination can think of even more incredible things. As science studies the handiwork of the Creator, we are learning about His imagination. Ref: "Fashioning see through metal." Science News, July 8, 1989. p. 31. Photo: Gas giant planets such as Jupiter may contain large amounts of metallic hydrogen. © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Evolutionary scientists have been amazed by the discovery that the very oldest artifacts left by humans indicate written language and mathematical ability. Creationists, on the other hand, are as pleased as can be at the findings, since they predicted that it would be possible to find that humans have had language throughout their history on Earth. After all, they were created by the Word of God – who later took human flesh upon Himself. And before the Fall away from God into sin, humans were able to speak directly with God. Ref: "Ice age artists open doors on early man." Science Digest, May 1978. p. 87. Photo: Middle Babylonian legal tablet is an example of cuneiform script. © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Can ants count? It seems so! When scout ants find an item of food, they take it back to the nest. If the food item is especially good but too big to carry, the scout will return to the nest to get help. Scientists have discovered that ants apparently size up the task ahead before getting help so they can return with enough help, but not too much. Photo: Fire Ants (PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

When an engineer builds a building, a bridge, or some other structure, he must build it so that it can withstand both stretching and compressing forces. In designing the structure to withstand both kinds of these forces, he must anticipate how much of each force the structure might face in its lifetime. Photo: Study of Skeletons, c. 1510, by Leonardo da Vinci. © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

In our rapidly modernizing world, engineers are kept busy solving problems. Take, for example, all of the various kinds of transportation. There are millions of problems in this area alone that keep engineers busy inventing better solutions. Illustration: Sagittal section of right knee joint. (PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Ants love to work and live in sunlight. They will spend hours clearing their little backyards of leaves and even plants and shrubs. Ants are also known to wander far from their local area. One scientist from the University of California tagged ants with colored dyes and then watched their meanderings. No matter how far they wandered, they didn't seem to get lost. Photo: Leaf-cutter ant by Charles Sharp CC BY SA 4.0 © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Do evolutionists believe that life always becomes more complex and sophisticated? Does evolution ever go backward? Photo: French-born Belgian paleontologist Louis Dollo (1857-1931). © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Have you ever noticed that many who believe in evolution depict early humans as so primitive that they had to live in caves while many kinds of animals build much more sophisticated shelters? This inconsistent thinking is built on the evolutionary assumption that intelligence, like everything else, has evolved. Creatures that evolutionists think evolved much earlier must be less intelligent. Ref: Timm, Robert M., and Barbara L. Clauson. 1990. "A roof over their feet." Natural History, Mar. p. 55. Photo: Common tent-making bats (Uroderma bilobatum) in the gardens of the Arenal Nayara Hotel, Costa Rica by Charles Sharp CC By SA 3.0 © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

The entire forty-first chapter of the book of Job describes a creature called "leviathan." As in his earlier description of "behemoth," the Lord is impressing Job with the wisdom and might of His creating power. Photo: Restoration of Tylosaurus proriger with a tail fluke by Dmitry Bogdanov CCA 3.0 © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Most of us have heard of plants like the Venus flytrap and the pitcher plant, which eat meat, even if we've never seen one. But did you know that there are mushrooms that also eat meat? Photo: Courtesy of Jean-Pol Grandmont, Sept. 2006_CCA BY SA 3.0. © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Some Christians believe that God's words in Genesis 1:3, "Let there be light" are a biblical description of the Big Bang that some scientists say created the universe. But, perhaps, we Christians should be a little more careful about assuming that modern science knows very much about the origin of the universe. Ref: "Galaxy clumps may shed light on cosmic creation." Minneapolis Star Tribune, Feb. 23, 1990. Photo: Sloan Great Wall courtesy of Willem Schaap and licensed under GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2. © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

For generations it was a rule that reptiles were cold-blooded. And turtles, being reptiles, were therefore called cold-blooded as well. Being cold-blooded, it was expected that the body temperature of turtles would be close to that of the surrounding water. Ref: Discovery. Bible Science Newsletter, Apr. 1973, p. 2. Image; Leatherback turtle. (PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

We have all seen it many times. A mother walking in a crowd with a small child loses track of her child and begins calling and searching for the little one. But can you imagine a crowd of 70 million mothers and children all looking for each other? Ref: "Some mothers don't forget their children." Science 84, June. p. 8. Image: Mexican Free-tailed bat (PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

We all learned about photosynthesis at school. For this particular chemical reaction to take place, you need the chemical chlorophyll together with the essential ingredient, sunlight. For thousands of years, man has known that for green plants to prosper, they need the sunlight. Ref: Discover, 1/06, p. 36, Anne Sasso, "Photosynthesizing Life-Form Exists Without Sunlight." Image: White smokers at Champagne Vent, Eifuku, Japan . (PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

While many creatures create structured music – shall we say, songs? – it was thought that only man makes use of objects in the environment to get specific tone qualities. In other words, it was thought only man makes musical instruments. That claim has now been challenged by a frog! Ref: Science News, 12/7/02, p. 356, S. Milius, "Frogs Play Tree." Photo: Bornean Tree-Hold Frog by Arshiya Urveeja Bose CCA 2.0 (Wikipedia) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Scientists have long known that ants lay down scent trails, using pheromones, to mark the trail to goodies for their nest mates. While this is an efficient method for food gathering, it has been found that when a food source is exhausted, the ants leave a "Do not enter" sign that saves fellow ants from wasting time on this trail. Ref: Science News, 11/26/05, pp. 340-342, S. Milius, "Unway Sign." Illustration: Leaf cutter ans by Pjt56 (Wikimedia CC BySA 4.0) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

All green plants, some algae, and even some bacteria are able to make food out of nothing more than air, water, light and a few minerals. The process is called photosynthesis, and without it we would run out of food to eat as well as oxygen to breathe. Image: Ivy on trellis. Courtesy of R.J. Michaud © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Each one of us can learn about God's way of working with us from a fresh water snail that is often preyed upon by crayfish. Ref: "Snail's pace picks up if hunted; it gets bigger and lives longer." Minneapolis Star Tribune, Feb. 24, 1990. Photo: Fresh water snails by Jess Van Dyke CCA 3.0 US © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Throughout the centuries, people have noticed, whether or not they believed in a Creator, that there is a mathematically precise structure to the universe and everything in it. Ref: Murchie, Guy. 1979. "The exquisite mathematics of nature." Science Digest, Apr. p. 48. Photo: Oak tree foliage and acorns. Courtesy of Nick Shaforostoff. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

If all life evolved from, and is related to, earlier forms of life, then closely related animals should also have similar kinds of chemicals in their bodies. As the science of biochemistry has grown, those who believe in evolution have held high hopes that creatures that look similar to each other would also have similar chemicals. For example, insulin from a shark should be more like insulin from other fish than insulin from mammals. Notes: Illustration: Relaxin 1 protein hormone. (PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

Most of us have heard a few of the theories that are offered to explain how birds are able to migrate for thousands of miles to an exact spot. The arctic tern migrates 22,000 miles a year to winter in the same spot where it wintered the previous year. But most birds seem to have this amazing ability even if they don't use it as often or to travel as far. Ref: Cook, Patrick. "How do birds find where they're going?" Science 84. p. 26. Image: P puffinus griseus (PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

On Creation Moments we regularly look at unusual plants and animals that show the unlimited inventiveness of our Creator. Unusual living things are also fascinating because, since they are clearly unrelated to any other living things, each one is a challenge to evolutionary theory, which says that every living thing is related to other living things. Ref: "Very small flower found in Mexican jungle has its sex orientation reversed." Minneapolis Star Tribune, Feb. 4, 1990. p. 5E. Image: Photo: Diagram of a typical mature flower. (PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

The eye, with its incredibly sensitive color vision, is increasingly being recognized as a marvel as we learn more about how it works. The eye is able to detect the smallest measure of light known to physicists. These units are called photons. Notes: Discover, 1/06, p. 36, Anne Sasso, "Photosynthesizing Life-Form Exists Without Sunlight." Image: White smokers at Champagne Vent, Eifuku, Japan. (PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.

We at Creation Moments are often asked, where do evolutionists get all those millions of years? It seems they are always finding rocks and fossils that are tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions of years old. Notes: Jackson, Wayne. 1990. "Scientific red faces." Reasoning from Revelation, v. II, n. 1, Jan. p. 3. Image: US Army Star emblem. (PD) © 2024 Creation Moments. All rights reserved.