I LOVE TO WATCH nature programmes on TV. Over recent years advances in film technology have enabled us to see the lives of plants and animals with incredible detail and beauty. But I have to admit, it’s usually an experience which leaves me not knowing whether to laugh or cry.
The other day I watched a documentary about dragonflies. They are amazing creatures on so many levels, for instance the way they fly. Thanks to their four independently operated superbly engineered wings they can fly forwards, backwards, sideways, straight up, straight down, hover dead still in the strongest wind, and even glide.
The narrator told me that they developed this phenomenal agility all by themselves.
“Bravo!” I cried, “What clever little chaps! How ever did they manage that?” The answer, of course, is that despite the theories nobody really has much of an idea.
You see, to me it seems massively more logical to accept that the dragonflies themselves did not develop their ability to fly—they were simply designed that way.
I am put in mind of what the Apostle Paul said about people of his day:
They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever! Amen (Romans 1:25).
When we ignore the existence of God and attribute to an insect or animal or plant the power to perform miraculous feats of evolution, are we not ‘worshipping the creature rather than the Creator’?
From our standpoint in the scientifically enlightened 21st Century we look back at the religions of past ages with bewildered amusement—how could they have worshipped beetles and birds and animals as gods? I believe that we are heading for a new age, which will be much more enlightened than this one. Maybe in the Kingdom of God, when the world’s population is instructed in God’s ways (Isaiah 2:1–4), they will keep copies of our nature programmes in the archives, and watch them with the same bewildered amusement!
Doug Potts