Welcome to The Creator Revealed.
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I'm Tim Standish,
and I'm a scientist.
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But like most scientists
and perhaps surprisingly,
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in some people's minds,
I love beautiful things.
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Amen. Who doesn't?
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You know, I'm Shelley Quinn,
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we just want to thank
you so much for joining us
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I believe you will really enjoy
this particular presentation.
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We are talking, in this series,
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about how God's
attributes are revealed
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in the invisible
things that He created,
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even His power and His Godhead.
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And today, we've got
a special presentation.
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There we go.
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And in fact, we're gonna
talk about visible things today.
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His attributes,
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you can see
them in the creation.
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One of the things
that I love about the Bible
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is the encouragement that
it gives us to look for beauty
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in the creation.
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Amen.
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And probably one
of the best known
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and most encouraging text about
that was written by Solomon.
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In Ecclesiastes 3:11, he
wrote, "He," this is God,
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"has made everything
beautiful in its time.
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Also He has put
eternity in their hearts,
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except that no one
can find out the work
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that God does
from beginning to end."
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Amen.
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That last bits used to
confuse me quite a bit.
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What He mean we
can't figure it out?
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No, this is wonderful news.
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The more you look,
the more you discover.
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And God, who is infinite,
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apparently has created
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something that is going to
be infinitely interesting to us.
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We're not going to get to heaven
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and after a
billion years thinking,
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"Oh, I've got
that all worked out."
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There is nothing new to do.
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I wish that it was all
over us. I think now I'm bored.
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Not at all, it simply
gets more and more wonderful.
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As does He, you know,
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the more I get
to know about God,
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the more you realize how
little you know about God.
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And His character
is so multifaceted
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as His creation is.
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He's an incredible...
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I mean, He is the
lover of our souls,
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but it's incredible to even
consider the wonder if at all.
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Yes.
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And to me, it's not humiliating,
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it's encouraging
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that we will never
quite have it all figured out.
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There's always more,
more wonderful things.
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So I want to actually start
out by looking at a work of art.
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Okay. A beautiful work of art.
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This is Moses, and
I chose him because,
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well, he's the
one who wrote Genesis,
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he's the one who
wrote those immortal words,
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"In the beginning God created
the heavens and the earth."
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This is obviously a work of art.
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The real Moses... Michelangelo?
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Michelangelo, right.
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And when you look at this,
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it's not really Moses,
obviously Michelangelo never,
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didn't have Moses there to
sort of model his sculpture off.
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This is the artist conception
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of what Moses
might have looked like.
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Now I have a question. Yeah.
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Here he has hair like mine
or what is on top of his head?
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You know, that is something
that has been a mystery to me.
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Can you see those things?
Yes, they look like horns.
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And I wondered and wondered and
wondered for years about that,
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I asked many
artists that I knew,
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"What's going on with
those horns on Moses head?"
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I didn't think anyone knows.
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But I have heard a theory
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that makes a
reasonable amount of sense.
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And the theory is this
that when Moses came down
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after getting
the Ten Commandments
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and being with God,
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his face shone and the
people couldn't look at him.
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In the Latin
translation of the Bible,
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apparently that was
mistranslated in some way,
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the beams of light
came out as horns of light.
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And so this actually tells
us something about Michelangelo.
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He was probably
looking at the LatinVulgate,
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we call it the Bible in Latin.
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And he read that,
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and he was trying to
be true to Scripture.
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And that's why we have
the horns on Moses' head.
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So there we have an illustration
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of how a work of
art tells you something,
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gives you some sort of
insight into the artist,
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whoever that artist might be.
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Now I want you to
consider this wonderful view
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that we read about
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that the Bible gives us
of nature and everything,
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God has made
everything beautiful.
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And I want you to compare it
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with this very
solemn statement really,
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sobering statement
that Charles Darwin made
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in his autobiography.
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This is what he was
writing when he was an old man,
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and he said, "Formerly
pictures gave me considerable,
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and music very great delight.
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But now for many years
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I cannot endure to
read a line of poetry.
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I have tried lately
to read Shakespeare,
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and found it so intolerably
dull that it nauseated me.
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I have also almost lost my
taste for pictures or music.
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I retain some for fine scenery,
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but it does not cause
me the exquisite delight
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which it formerly did."
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Wow!
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How telling is that?
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What happened to this man?
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Hell, hell.
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Awful to think that a person
could go from loving music,
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loving art, loving
nature, the beauty,
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the wonder that is out
there, how can that be lost?
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But don't you
think that your mindset,
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your perspective on things
if you have a negative mindset,
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and you're always
looking for what's wrong,
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suddenly
everything becomes still.
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Exactly, exactly.
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And that is the horror,
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really one of the
most terrible things
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about the view of life
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that Darwin has
passed down to people.
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It takes away the beauty.
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He wrote this in
a letter, he said,
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"What a book a Devil's chaplain
might write on the clumsy,
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wasteful, blundering low,
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and horribly
cruel works of nature!"
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Darwin obsessed
about these things.
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And, of course, as Christians,
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we don't deny
that nature is broken.
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And, of course,
the Bible gives us
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an explanation
for what's going on.
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It also gives us
hope that this...
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But notice in this,
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there was a premise
in what Darwin is saying
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and that premise is,
"Hey, this seems wrong to me."
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And yet, within his theory,
it's the way it should be.
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Everything should be
in a state of struggle
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and things shouldn't be perfect,
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they should be
broken, and the things...
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The more broken
things should be eliminated
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by natural selection.
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How could he just depose
those two statements though?
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It's like so
contradictory. Exactly.
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It's like a logical tension
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that you find in
much of what Darwin writes
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because we know the
cruel things we see in nature,
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the broken things,
there's something wrong there,
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there's something wrong.
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We know that in
the core of our soul...
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And ironically,
Darwin was saying,
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"That's what made
us what we are today."
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Wow!
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But what it took from
him, what it sapped from him.
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I want us to look at
a few natural things.
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Yeah, just sometimes it's
okay to just step back and say,
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"What is there? What's this?"
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So this is a butterfly.
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You'll notice that I like
taking pictures of butterflies
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and things.
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I mean, everywhere
you look, you know,
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if you had this biblical
view, everywhere you look,
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there's something
beautiful and wonderful
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and in unexpected places...
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This is the eye of a butterfly.
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This is what's called a
scanning electron micrograph.
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So it's not in color,
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but I love the
geometry that's in there.
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Look at that, each of those
is a little facet of its eye.
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What a... I'm not kidding.
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I thought that it
was a honeycomb at first.
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Yes.
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Well, that
hexagonal shape shows up
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in multiple places in nature.
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But it's just kind of
beautiful and interesting and...
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Oh, this shocked me.
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You know, different butterflies,
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lay different kinds of eggs,
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and they have different
patterns on the surface.
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I would never have noticed this,
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but I happened to
be working on a film,
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and we wanted some
pictures of butterfly eggs.
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So we got some butterfly eggs
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and put them under
the electron microscope
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and each one is different.
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Each one is just fascinating.
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But it's not just the eggs,
it's not just the tiny things
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when you zoom back
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and you look at a bunch
of butterflies together,
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these are monarch butterflies,
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and this particular
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group of monarch
butterflies actually meets
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during the winter on
the coast of California.
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And that's where
they spend the winter.
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They're smart, there're
some humans do that as well.
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You know, I didn't realize
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how many
butterflies we had in the area
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until we planted
three butterfly bushes
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of their back deck
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and now we have
butterflies everywhere.
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They love those bushes.
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The diversity,
the beauty of them...
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So much...
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But it's not just the animals,
it's everything in nature.
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Why is it that every
sunset is a masterpiece?
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Anytime you can see a
sunset. It's just wonderful.
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And why did God have
to make it so beautiful?
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Why did He give us senses
to appreciate this and minds
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that will praise
Him? As a result...
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Or, you know, sometimes...
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He could have made
everything monochrome.
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He gave us vision with color...
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Just the
abundance of everything.
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Sometimes I go hiking up in
the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
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And again, everywhere you
look, there is this beauty,
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you could spend all day just
looking at one scene up there
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and never get bored with it.
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It's tremendous.
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And if you go
out to the universe,
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it's fabulous out there.
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This is just one galaxy.
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And there are billions
of these things out there.
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And every one of
them is different.
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I would love to had
Charles Darwin meet you.
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You know, the sad reality is
00:11:27.72\00:11:29.98
once you
embrace this philosophy,
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you're in trouble.
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The beauty is gone.
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The idea of
evolution without a God.
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The beauty is gone. It's gone.
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It's all about
utility and does it work?
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And I don't think it
works so therefore it's bad.
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And in reality, the more we look
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the more beautiful
and wonderful it is.
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Oh, I love these
bird-of-paradise flowers,
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but we could have
done endless flowers
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and you look inside some flowers
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and you find
things like this bee,
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and you might have
picked up that I like bees.
00:12:00.48\00:12:03.12
It's all wonderful.
It's all just fabulous.
00:12:03.15\00:12:08.69
And these little birds, these
little birds that fascinate me.
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Big birds are wonderful as well.
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But the little
birds we don't notice
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and they all look like
just little brown things
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and we don't stop
to really look at them
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and just the sparkle
in its eye and wow, wow.
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This one here.
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Oh, you know,
doesn't it look like
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it's singing God's praises?
00:12:28.44\00:12:30.08
Yes, yes. Singing there.
00:12:30.11\00:12:32.55
Jesus encouraged
us to look at nature
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and see the beauty
that says, He said,
00:12:36.69\00:12:38.49
"Why do you
worry about clothing?
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Consider the
lilies of the field,
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how they grow, they
neither toil nor spin,
00:12:42.39\00:12:45.26
yet I say to you
that even Solomon
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in all his glory was not
arrayed like one of these.
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Now if God so clothes
the grass of the field,
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which today is, and tomorrow
is thrown into the oven,
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will He not
much more clothe you,
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O you of little
faith?" Amen and amen.
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You know, God,
He wants us to look
00:13:03.18\00:13:06.45
at the beauty out there.
00:13:06.48\00:13:07.82
And what does
that beauty tell us?
00:13:07.85\00:13:09.58
Well, it tells us about
God's flawless aesthetic taste.
00:13:09.62\00:13:14.22
God is an artist
00:13:14.26\00:13:18.63
and if He cares about
that, He cares about you.
00:13:18.66\00:13:22.56
And, you know, when
you look at a newborn baby
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and how perfect they are
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and consider
all the little parts
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that how they were
knit together in the womb.
00:13:30.67\00:13:33.61
You see that God is a
God that His creative ability
00:13:33.64\00:13:39.05
goes beyond anything
you and I could fathom.
00:13:39.08\00:13:42.15
And when we have the
hope and the joy of the Lord,
00:13:42.18\00:13:45.75
I think it opens our eyes
to see all of these things.
00:13:45.79\00:13:48.19
Exactly.
00:13:48.22\00:13:49.56
And poor Darwin had neither
so all he saw was the negative.
00:13:49.59\00:13:53.96
Well, we are going
to take a quick break,
00:13:54.00\00:13:57.63
but we want you to stay tuned
because in our second segment
00:13:57.67\00:14:01.47
we have a special
guest who's going to give in
00:14:01.50\00:14:05.01
life application of this.
00:14:05.04\00:14:06.61