Bird’s-eye View
Bird’s-eye View
Ask the animals, and they will instruct you; ask the birds of the sky, and they will tell you. . . . Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? (Job 12:7, 9)
By Accident?
The agnostic astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle argued that life is so complex, the chance that it originated by accident can be completely ruled out. “Divine design” is all around us.
Consider the woodpecker. This living jackhammer hits its head against a tree hundreds of times a minute with a force of deceleration up to a thousand times the force of gravity. He survives this because woodpeckers have extra strong neck muscles and a special layer of cartilage in the skull that acts like a shock absorber. They also have extremely tough beaks and a special film that closes over the eye, keeping the eyeballs in and the wood chips out.
Or by Design?
A woodpecker feeds on insects it reaches with its sticky tongue, which is 4.5 times longer than its skull! But this poses another problem—what to do with the tongue when it’s not in use? Fortunately, woodpeckers have another special feature—a tongue storage compartment, which wraps around the skull and attaches in the beak region. It’s like a tape measure that winds up. In evolutionary thinking, which came first: the storage compartment or the long tongue? Without the tongue the birds would starve; without the storage compartment they would choke on their long tongues. Do woodpeckers look like the product of chance and accident? No way! They are the product of Divine design.
Bottom Line
How much more fearfully and wonderfully has God made you than the woodpecker!