Welcome to The Creator Revealed.
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I'm Tim
Standish, I'm a scientist.
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And being a scientist,
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I was taught not to
believe in the Creator,
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but when we
look at the creation,
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we not only come
to the conclusion
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that there is a
Creator behind it all,
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but it tells us the
most fascinating things
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about His nature, His
personality, if you will.
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Absolutely.
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You know, that's what
Paul wrote to the Romans
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that in Romans 1:20,
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he says,
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"That God's invisible attributes
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are seen in the
things that He made."
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And we're so glad
you're joining us today.
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This is already
becoming a very popular program.
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In our first segment,
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you're going to get
just a little bit of science.
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And in the second segment,
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we'll be giving you a
practical application.
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And I'm just very thrilled.
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What are we talking about?
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We're talking
about relationships,
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relationships between
organisms and their environment,
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and relationships
between one kind of organism
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and another kind of organism.
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All right.
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I'm ready to learn.
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All right.
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I love this topic
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because it tells us
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so many beautiful things
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about not only ourselves
but also God who created us.
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This photograph,
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I took one day on the
campus of Loma Linda University.
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These poppies are
such beautiful flowers,
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and it's fascinating
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to watch the bees
buzzing around them.
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The thing that struck me,
when I was looking at these,
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was these two
organisms are working together.
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They are not in some
kind of struggle to the death
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with one another.
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Right.
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Everything is cooperative there.
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Yeah.
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And it got me
thinking about what the...
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Not only cooperative
but dependent really.
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Interdependent,
they are interdependent.
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Yes, the bee
gets obviously sugar,
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ultimately, from the flower.
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And the flower is
pollinated by the bees.
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So there's a
nice trade off here,
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both of them are
benefiting in a beautiful way.
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So as a biologist, I, you know,
started thinking about things
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because one of the things
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that I was taught over
the course of my education
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was that a central principle
of life is competition,
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competition not cooperation.
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So organisms
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that are in this kind
of struggle to the death...
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A survival of the fittest.
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That's right, the
survival of the fittest.
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But in reality, I
started to think about...
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In reality,
could life even exist
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if that was
really the principle?
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When we look at living
things, we see cooperation,
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interdependence
all over the place.
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When it comes to bees,
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let's say,
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how do you get a bee?
Where does a bee come from?
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How does a bee exist?
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There's a
relationship between bees
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and their environment obviously.
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Without air, the bee
wouldn't be able to fly.
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Without atoms to be made out of,
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the bee couldn't exist.
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Really, in my
thinking, it sort of walked me
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all the way
back to the universe.
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Without a universe,
the bee couldn't exist.
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But the universe has to
be a just right universe.
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There are all kinds of factors
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that have to be
just precisely right
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if you want to
get a bee, or a puppy,
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or a human or a
puppy for that matter.
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You mean, just to sustain life,
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when you're talking
about all these factors,
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to sustain life, we've
got Mars that they're saying,
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you know, perhaps
they're learning a little more,
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but we are a
planet on which everything
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comes together
perfectly to sustain life.
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Oh, yes.
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This planet is a
very, very special planet,
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that's becoming quite obvious
from the study of these planets
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that they're
finding out there in space.
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Ours is special, it's
a very special planet,
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there's no doubt about that.
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But I'm going
bigger than the planet.
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Okay. I'm going
the whole universe.
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The whole
universe operates by laws.
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And we're not going to talk
about all of them, don't panic.
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But let's talk about
one of them, gravity,
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because gravity is something
that we all understand.
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It turns out that
gravity is just right
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so that our sun can exist.
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Our sun is actually a
great big hydrogen bulb
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up in the sky.
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It's made out of
primarily hydrogen,
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and gravity pulls
that hydrogen together
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so that in the
center of the sun,
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the pressure is so high
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that the hydrogens
are fusing together,
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and when they do that,
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they release
enormous amounts of energy.
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And that's what's
going on up there.
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It's just right.
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If gravity was a bit stronger,
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you would think,
"Well, that might be good,
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because we could
somehow rather have a hotter sun
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or something, it'd be more
nuclear fusion going on there."
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But the problem is that
if we sped up that fusion,
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so much energy would
be coming off the sun...
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We'll burn up.
That we would burn up.
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Not only that, the orbit
of the earth would change,
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the earth would
have to be adjusted
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in many, many different ways.
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But there probably isn't
a way of adjusting things
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so that life
could possibly exist.
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If it was strong, the
earth would be orbiting closer,
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we'd actually have
to rearrange things
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and put the
earth a long way away.
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But it's not just the amount
of radiation light coming off.
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It's also the kind of light.
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There are certain
kinds of light like X-rays.
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We don't see it,
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but we know that those
can do a lot of damage to us.
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So that would be
a problem as well.
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Getting everything to
work with stronger gravity
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might well be and
probably is impossible
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for life to exist.
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So what would happen
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if we made it a
little bit weaker?
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What if we made it
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so that the
fusion is not going on
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so rapidly inside the sun?
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Well, then the
sun would be too cold,
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and we wouldn't have enough
light energy hitting the earth,
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the earth would freeze.
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Ice Age. Yeah.
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We'd be in a permanent Ice Age.
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And again, the
bee couldn't exist,
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and neither could the flower,
neither could the human being,
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neither could the elephant,
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no life could exist if
gravity wasn't just right.
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That's amazing.
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So bear in mind, yeah,
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it takes a
universe to make a bee.
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This is just one of many things
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that need to be
just exactly right.
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So that's a relationship thing.
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For the relationship
to exist between life
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and the rest of
the physical universe,
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things have to be just right.
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We've got to get
them exactly perfect.
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Now, let's get
back to this business
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of how organisms
relate to one another.
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Charles Darwin wrote about that,
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and here is what he thought.
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This is in the
Origin of Species,
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his most famous book, he wrote,
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"It is the most
closely allied forms,
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varieties of the same species
and species of the same genus
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or related genera,
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which, from having
nearly the same structure,
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constitution and habits,
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generally come into
the severest competition
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with each other.
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Consequently, each
new variety or species,
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during the
progress of its formation,
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will generally press
hardest on its nearest kindred
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and tend to exterminate them."
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That's a solemn
thought, isn't it?
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You can see, by the way.
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You can see why it is that
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people regularly take
this kind of thinking,
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and Charles Darwin
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also spells it out quite clearly
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and apply it to human beings
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and say, "Well, there
are other human beings
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who need to be exterminated,
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because we're in
competition with them."
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And that's not a
hypothetical situation,
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that is something
that has been acted on
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over the course of history.
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But think about it.
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The most closely
related are the ones
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that are in the
severest competition
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according to
this way of thinking.
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There is no competition...
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Sorry, no cooperation.
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That's a coincidental
thing that, you know, whatever,
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but the rule is competition,
the rule is struggle,
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the rule is
survival of the fittest
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in that
particular way of thinking.
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And you can see
that in some ways
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like in a lion and a pride
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where the dominant
male will kill his cubs
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or something like this.
00:10:06.87\00:10:08.20
So there's sometimes
that if you look at that
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in that isolated
incident, that may be true,
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but not overall.
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Well, here's the
interesting thing
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about something like that.
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Don't you viscerally respond
to a situation like that?
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Oh, yes. Absolutely.
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Isn't it awful?
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Isn't a terrible thing?
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Haven't we all
seen nature programs
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where lions are not
just killing each other,
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they're killing all
these other gazelles.
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And the gazelles
are beautiful creatures.
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Why it that we know
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that there is
something wrong about that?
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The secret is actually...
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It's not a secret, it's stated
quite plainly in the Bible.
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We know that that is wrong.
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We know that's wrong,
because that wasn't God's plan.
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Yes.
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God did not create lions
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to tear gazelles to
pieces and eat them.
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This is the fall,
this is the result of sin.
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And the good news
is, in the new earth,
00:11:06.63\00:11:09.53
the lion and the
gazelle will lie down together.
00:11:09.56\00:11:11.90
Exactly.
00:11:11.93\00:11:13.27
So let's look
00:11:13.30\00:11:14.64
at another
example of cooperation
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that's evident there in nature.
00:11:17.57\00:11:19.71
Of fungi,
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we usually don't think
of fungus as doing anything
00:11:21.11\00:11:24.01
other than
breaking down dead stuff.
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But in fact,
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they play a very
important role in nature.
00:11:28.38\00:11:31.79
They also taste good
if you eat mushrooms.
00:11:31.82\00:11:34.56
But when you see a mushroom,
00:11:34.59\00:11:36.83
what you're seeing is
really the tip of the iceberg.
00:11:36.86\00:11:39.19
So let's go way back
00:11:39.23\00:11:40.80
to the very
beginning with mushrooms.
00:11:40.83\00:11:43.13
And we need to start
looking at the tips of roots.
00:11:43.16\00:11:47.94
These could be tree
roots or any other plant root.
00:11:47.97\00:11:51.07
What you commonly find
there, way out of the root tips,
00:11:51.11\00:11:55.41
is that there are
things called mycorrhiza
00:11:55.44\00:12:01.12
that are growing
into the root tips.
00:12:01.15\00:12:04.52
Those are fungi.
00:12:04.55\00:12:07.69
When you look at a mushroom,
that's the tip of the iceberg.
00:12:07.72\00:12:12.06
The rest of the organism
is this hair-like structure
00:12:12.09\00:12:19.03
that's growing
down there in the soil
00:12:19.07\00:12:21.70
into the roots of plants.
00:12:21.74\00:12:24.77
And people thought,
"Oh, those must be parasites
00:12:24.81\00:12:29.54
stealing stuff
from these poor plants."
00:12:29.58\00:12:31.95
In fact, the opposite is true.
00:12:31.98\00:12:33.85
When we start looking at
00:12:33.88\00:12:37.62
what the plant
gets from these fungi,
00:12:37.65\00:12:41.62
it's quite amazing.
00:12:41.66\00:12:42.99
First of all, they get water,
00:12:43.02\00:12:44.63
and obviously water is
very important for plants.
00:12:44.66\00:12:47.26
It increases the
size of their root system,
00:12:47.30\00:12:50.80
the surface area,
00:12:50.83\00:12:52.17
so they can absorb
water, pass it on to the plant.
00:12:52.20\00:12:54.60
In addition to that,
00:12:54.64\00:12:55.97
the fungi help
to absorb minerals
00:12:56.00\00:12:59.37
that the plants need to grow,
00:12:59.41\00:13:01.51
and they give
protection to the plant.
00:13:01.54\00:13:04.28
They stop other things
00:13:04.31\00:13:05.71
that might come in and
want to eat the plant or.
00:13:05.75\00:13:09.12
And finally, and this is
one of the most amazing things,
00:13:09.15\00:13:12.69
they actually have
a communication system
00:13:12.72\00:13:16.16
that they use from
one plant to another
00:13:16.19\00:13:18.19
through these mycorrhiza.
00:13:18.23\00:13:19.96
I see fungus all
the time at the root
00:13:20.00\00:13:23.10
or at the base of our oak trees.
00:13:23.13\00:13:25.93
Didn't realize they were
doing the tree some good.
00:13:25.97\00:13:28.47
Quite possibly they are.
00:13:28.50\00:13:29.84
It depends,
obviously, if the tree is dying,
00:13:29.87\00:13:32.51
the fungi will
help to break it down
00:13:32.54\00:13:34.44
and recycle it.
00:13:34.48\00:13:36.21
But when everything's
alive and thriving, it's great.
00:13:36.24\00:13:40.08
So what does the fungus get?
00:13:40.12\00:13:41.45
It gets sugar from the plant
00:13:41.48\00:13:43.99
and that's mostly it.
00:13:44.02\00:13:47.56
But they are
interdependent somewhat.
00:13:47.59\00:13:49.09
So they are interdependent.
00:13:49.12\00:13:50.76
This is an exchange
that they're making.
00:13:50.79\00:13:54.30
This brings to mind
this text in Proverbs.
00:13:54.33\00:13:58.93
"There are three things
that are too amazing for me,
00:13:58.97\00:14:02.00
four that I do not understand.
00:14:02.04\00:14:03.54
The way of an eagle in the sky,
the way of a snake on a rock,
00:14:03.57\00:14:07.54
the way of a
ship on the high seas,
00:14:07.58\00:14:09.71
and the way of a
man with a young woman."
00:14:09.74\00:14:12.58
So all relationships.
00:14:12.61\00:14:13.95
All relationships,
the bird and the air,
00:14:13.98\00:14:17.75
the man and the woman,
cooperating, working together.
00:14:17.79\00:14:22.99
So what does this
ultimately tell us
00:14:23.02\00:14:24.93
about the Creator?
00:14:24.96\00:14:26.90
The Creator loves these
beautiful relationships,
00:14:26.93\00:14:30.13
relationships
between bees and flowers,
00:14:30.17\00:14:32.97
those sorts of things.
00:14:33.00\00:14:34.44
He gets joy
00:14:34.47\00:14:35.80
from these
cooperative relationships
00:14:35.84\00:14:39.04
that we see in ecology,
00:14:39.07\00:14:40.94
and His desire for
cooperation with humans
00:14:40.98\00:14:44.18
and the rest of
creation is evident
00:14:44.21\00:14:47.15
in the interdependence
we see among all things,
00:14:47.18\00:14:51.09
the living part of the universe
00:14:51.12\00:14:54.26
and the inanimate universe.
00:14:54.29\00:14:58.36
So ultimately,
the created things
00:14:58.39\00:15:00.96
reveal the Creator's desire
for harmonious relationships.
00:15:01.00\00:15:05.93
And that is exactly
what we want to talk about
00:15:05.97\00:15:09.64
in the second segment.
00:15:09.67\00:15:11.14
So we ask you to
stay tuned with us.
00:15:11.17\00:15:13.71
We'll be back in 60 seconds.
00:15:13.74\00:15:15.48