I am, in case you don't know who I am, I'm Dr. Aaron Portman. I'm one of the professors of biology at Sun & End University.
The thing that most people know me for is that I'm the snake guy.
Or the spider guy, or the scorpion guy.
My dissertation that I did at the University was on rattlesnakes.
So I got to do radio telemetry on rattlesnakes, which is
radio transmitters, let them go out in the south of the Linn Docks,
and then go see where they went and how they moved and things like that.
And so I wrangled my sure-front snakes.
At the research I currently do, I don't deal much with rattlesnakes anymore.
I work with students and I work with one of my colleagues and I'm studying spiders and scorpions.
There is a local scorpion around here, the forest scorpion.
The southern unsriped scorpion is a name, I don't know if anybody's seen a scorpion since around here.
There's one species around here.
So I have a little bit of work on that.
I mean, work with some students.
Let's see, yeah, one publication of that.
The thing I'm involved in right now is studying an invasive spider.
Who's heard of the Joro spider?
Okay, alright, a couple of you.
So yeah, this is an Asian spider that's come out from, yeah, landed outside of Atlanta just a few years ago.
It was 2014, somewhere in there.
And it has been springing ever since.
And we've been monitoring and trying to maybe model where that spider may move next.
And if it actually is a species that's actually causing detriment to local species.
And where some of the first, maybe have some suggestions that it might.
So in places where we see huge abundances of that invasive spider, we see lower numbers of normal native species.
So yeah, if you see a weird spider and want to know what it is, you can send me an email.
And yeah, the Joro spider is actually pretty big.
So their bodies are about the size of big golden colored webs.
So they're part of the golden worm heathens.
So anyway, that's what I'm doing.
So I want to talk to you about today is design.
You get the opportunity to teach a couple of classes related to science and faith.
And so I get to share with students how to see design in the natural world.
And so I want to start by, let's see if I can jiggle a cable here to give it some work.
What design.
Focus back. All right.
So yeah, let's just go back to the beginning, Genesis one.
And we see here, the very beginning of everything that says in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
It should kind of be a very first words of the Bible, demonstrating God is our creator.
And I want you to get into it a little bit more.
The next verse talks about the earth was formless and empty or formless and void.
Yeah. These are words to talk about how the God does two things.
This is the preface to the rest of what happens in Genesis.
Formless is just he's forming habitats, essentially, is what he's doing.
And then filling them. So empty there, he's filling them.
And so here is a table from a theologian I find useful.
I see these tables in several places.
The entire structure of what happens in Genesis is one where God is forming a habitat in the first three days of creation and then filling it with stuff.
So the best examples of that are day two, what does he create? Separates waters from waters, as it says, the atmosphere and the sea.
And then what does he do on day five?
Fill them up with creatures, right?
So there's the sky creatures, the birds and stuff, and the creatures that's sworn in the oceans.
He is making a habitat and filling it. And the same thing happens if we can parallel day three.
What is it creating on day three?
The land that comes out of the waters, right?
And so what does he fill up with?
Creatures.
The land and creatures. And at the very end of that day, what does he make?
People.
He makes people.
And so throughout we have this, a lot of those passages where we see this collection of God sees that he makes it on each one of those days.
And what does he say about most of those days? He can see that all the places where he says that it is good.
And so, yeah, you go through there, the beginning, light.
So like it was good.
The sea, the land and the seas are good.
The slats are good.
The lights in the sky are good.
The sky is the sea creatures.
They are good.
The land creatures are good.
Now, the interesting one is the last one there.
So this is our scripture for today.
It's Genesis 131.
God sees everything.
It's actually interesting, it's the seventh instance of God calling things good in Genesis 1.
And is it just good?
Very good.
It's very good.
What does that suggest about what God is wanting for his creation?
Or what he intended for his creation?
Time with him.
Is it just that each part separate is good and everything separate is good?
Holiness.
There's a wholeness there.
He's looking at every single piece and what does he say?
It's very good.
When they're all together as a whole, it is now very good.
He's wanting all the pieces to work in harmony with all the other pieces.
He wants all the pieces to be mutually supportive of all the other pieces in creation, right?
And I think when you start diving down and looking at the details of biology, you start to see that at every level.
So what I want to do is sort of go into something that I show to my class when I sometimes teach anatomy and physiology.
So this is the very front of the anatomy and physiology textbook.
It's talking about these levels, kind of hierarchy of levels of complexity that life exhibits.
All right.
And of course, so you can see there, so with atoms and molecules and then cells and then cells, a group of a single type of cell in your body,
if you group it together, it's called a tissue, if we group tissues together in specific ways, we can get organs.
If we group organs in the way we get an organ system, then if we group all the organ systems together, what do we get?
An organism.
You or I or a kangaroo or a scorpion or a spider, right?
Let's just dive down into some of that.
Let's just start looking at some of the simplest things.
It turns out you start looking at the nature of just fundamental laws of physics and chemistry, how molecules work.
You see that they seem to be designed, there's intentionality seems to be there for life to exist.
Physicists sometimes call these fine tuning arguments, where it's just like if just a little bit we're different about certain fundamental forces,
life as we know it couldn't exist.
And so, yeah, let's look at a few of these.
This is kind of just the atoms the human bodies may know, where it looks like we're mostly by weight, I think is what we're talking about here.
So we're more, a lot of oxygen.
The second one there we see is carbon, and then you see hydrogen, nitrogen, and then it repeats with some other stuff, calcium, phosphorus, things like this.
All right, well, it should not sound like that exciting.
They said let's dig into one, probably the most important one of that list.
Obviously, oxygen is important.
We breathe it.
You gotta breathe it.
If you didn't breathe it, you would quickly expire.
Your body couldn't keep up with the energy demands of your body if you didn't breathe oxygen.
But actually, oxygen is a part of the molecules that make up your body as well.
And a lot of that, these complicated molecules your body is made out of, are really a function of one of those atoms, which is carbon.
Carbon is a pretty unique and awesome element.
I'm not going to go into all the details, but it has the ability to form bonds and be able to facilitate complex molecules in a way that no other atom does.
And that's why there's two branches of chemistry.
We did like I did when we studied biology, you had to take lots of chemistry.
So when I was an undergrad in the general chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry, that kind of stuff.
And we find that organic chemistry exists because carbon is complicated.
It's really organic chemistry is just the study of compounds that made using carbon.
And you can see there, we have identified about 10 million of these compounds that include carbon in that.
And that covers many more, it's the order of magnitude, the center order is magnitude more than any of the other compounds that we know about that don't include carbon.
So if you're going to study organic chemistry, oh my goodness, there's a lot to study.
That's why it's so disciplined right.
If you're studying inorganic chemistry, I mean, that's the important thing.
You make, you know, there's of course, there's less compounds to study, right, half a million versus greater than 10, right.
And so carbon has this ability.
Now people have speculated about other molecules or other atoms that might, you know, maybe an alien somewhere on another planet to use silica instead of carbon because it sits similar in place on a periodic table, my guess.
But again, anything we know about, if you dig into the details, now we have it.
And so for all intents and purposes, the only type of life that can exist with the laws set up, that's going to set them up, are life forms like us that are carbon based.
And so carbon is pretty amazing.
Some of those compounds, carbon compounds, we call them biomolecules.
And those are just several classes of biomolecules that we see there.
There's lipids, so lipids are fats.
A lot of times we talk about these classes when we talk about diet.
Right, so lipids are the fats.
We don't really have a study board for any flake acids, but this is this energy, the information storage within a cell.
It deals in the flake acid. There's a few other things they do.
Carbohydrates you want to write back from diet, right.
These are energy storing molecules. This is what the, yeah, if you're eating HOSTA or something, it's the carbosome that we think about, right.
Then there's proteins.
Proteins, again, you think about them as just something that we need to get enough of, right.
We've got to get our, get enough protein. That's kind of the message from the whole audience here in popular media surrounding health.
You've got to get your protein.
You're going to need to get your protein, and you know, so eat your beans.
There you go, get your protein that way.
But actually protein is so much more than that.
So let's dive down to a little more gluten.
Let's just start with those nucleic acids.
So anybody probably recognize this double-UH structure?
What do we know of this?
This is famous.
Discovering, what was it, 1953 by Watson and Crick.
Discovering the structure.
And then shortly after figuring out that this is an information coding molecule, it was a sequence hypothesis.
The idea that certain arrangements of chemicals in a specific order along the rungs of this ladder actually form a, literally form a code.
And that code is for, it probably does more than you know, even now.
But at least at the time, you recognize it, say, it's information that can build certain proteins.
But this is information storage.
Now, information storage surrounds us right now.
Got my computer up here.
Probably everyone has one of these in their pockets, right?
And they always measure it in terms of how much gigabytes of memory it does, and gigabytes of memory over here and stuff like that.
So there's information storage surrounding us.
However, this DNA by itself, it's actually rather amazing.
It is no matter, you know, whatever technology we've come up with, in terms of the amount of information that we stored in the smallest possible states,
DNA is by far and away the most information-depth medium that exists.
So we haven't been able to do that with God yet in terms of information storage.
So let me just tell you what that looks like.
This was an estimate I found out there.
They say by saying a coffee mug full of DNA that's thinner theoretically home all the world's data that we can produce.
All right.
This is super dense information storage, right?
So you can imagine, you know, the entire blue frame for, let's say, every frozen in your body is stored up in a tiny little nucleus of the cell in your body,
that's smaller than a period at the end of the sentence or something that's maybe in your hymn or something, in the biology that we're talking about.
See, that's the level we're talking about.
So, yeah, you can see here that the estimate I found very late is roughly, what is it, a hundred centibytes of data that we have produced.
And that's increasing exponentially every year.
And so, yeah, what is that in terms of gigabytes?
So what's that number there?
The number is 10 to the 14th.
So what is that?
A hundred thousand billion somewhere in Netball Park.
All right.
And so DNA can store information at that level.
That's amazing.
All right.
Now, what is the, what is DNA doing?
Well, one of the things we know that it does, again, it's probably doing far more than this, is it is coding for proteins.
Now, we usually think, again, proteins are just what I had on my shake after I worked out this thing.
But when you're a molecular biologist and you're thinking about proteins, proteins are the substance that your body is made of.
It's an amazingly designed machine in many ways.
And you're designed down to the molecular level, tiny, tiny things.
And it's actually very ingenious.
Essentially, proteins are made up of amino acids and they're like beads on a string.
So one bead has this property and another bead has this property.
There's 21 of them that we use.
And if you put them in just the right sequence, the chemistry of each one of those beads will interact and will fold into a three dimensional shape.
And those, whatever shape that is, those three dimensional shapes, they carry out the function in your body.
Let me just show you some of the amazing ones that are right there.
These are a couple of them that are worth talking about.
We have literally molecular nanomachines in our bodies that do stuff.
I know sometimes I've watched sci-fi and I talk about these nanomachines we're going to have.
I don't know, talking about nanites or something like this, stuff we have not invented yet.
I don't know how far away we are from inventing this yet, but that exists inside our bodies.
So a couple of these, the ones that I have up there are, yeah, the one on the left there is what's called ATP synthetics.
Now, who's heard of mitochondria?
Sometimes I know that mitochondria is the color of the cells.
Yeah, so essentially mitochondria in your body is going to take the energy that's in your food and sort of like a chemical refinery.
It's sort of like taking petroleum and taking gasoline.
So it's taking the energy in the food that you eat and turning it into the kind of gasoline that cells run up.
And that gasoline they call this ATP, demzene trichost.
It's actually an amazing system because imagine a form of gasoline you could recycle.
So ATP is set up. If you pull a part off, it releases some energy.
And so if I can pop that part back on, essentially it recycles my gasoline, which is kind of amazing to think about.
But that's what this part of the process of getting that energy from your food and sort of plugging these ATP molecules back together to recycle them is what this ATP synthase is doing.
It's actually using a gradient of hydrogen ions to actually spin the turbine.
And it does it at thousands of revolutions per second inside every one of your cells.
And every time it spins, it's actually taking and popping together back one of those ATP molecules to recycle that gasoline that your cells use.
It's a pretty amazing structure. I mean, it's like a little wignail, obviously.
And you look at that and you say, well, that's got to be designed.
That's the design at the fundamental level. You don't take a chance at national law for producing something like that.
The other one is another interesting one. So your cells and your body have to move things from one place to another.
So if I go to a production site and I build a particular protein, and that protein is something that I need to release, maybe it's like that adjusted enzyme.
So it's down there in your pancreas somewhere and it's an adjusted enzyme to break down the carbohydrate.
You just take some pasta or maybe protein, just get some veggie. And you take your gut and you've got to break it down into the amino acids you need.
And so you need an enzyme to do that. So it's kind of pushing outside the cell.
So it builds it inside the cell and now it needs to get it out of the cell. Right.
And so it uses motor crude. So it puts a little ball around it, a little bicycle.
And then there are these motor proteins. And you can see there it is literally walking.
That's exactly what it does. As the energy gets input from that gasoline molecule, ATP, it changes shape and it steps, steps down.
It actually does it. That's super slow down. It's doing thousands of steps a second.
And the thing it's standing on is part of what's called cytosalism.
It is a microtubule, which is basically, I mean, it gives shape to your cells.
It's involved in cell division to make chromosomes go.
But it also serves as a highway for that little motor protein to grab the, grab the vesicle, move it to the edge of the cell and release what it needs to release.
Again, this is, these are nanomachines. Amazing design.
All from the complexity of a carbon atom, they're not making complex molecules. This ingenious system of being able to plug amino acids together to get these shapes to get a amazing nanomachine like this.
But yeah, the next step up, I got a bunch of these and it's just, you know, we could go take an electromyology class or something.
This is what you're learning about, right? Just how well suited all these proteins are for the roles that they have in your system.
But we get cells, right? So the very simplest cell are maybe 470 proteins. That's the simplest cell, you know, a little bacterium.
That's actually a sexually transmitted disease bacterium.
But anyway, it's the smallest cell we know of with the smallest number of proteins. And then this is a representation of the human cell.
And we've got there 20,000 proteins because the difference here is that those cells in our bodies and all multicellular organisms can get together and work together and harmonize their, the way, you know, the way they use things to make the multicellular organism, which is pretty amazing.
Right. So we've got harmony at the basic levels, working together to make complicated molecules, right?
And we build up those complicated molecules to make complicated cells and those cells can work together here and very selfless ways to make you multicellular organism.
So, yeah, if we move up, here we are. Right. So cells can work together to make a tissue.
We can get tissues together, different cell types together to make an organ. And yeah, let's look at an example on one of those organs. And that is this.
This is your eye. Lots of different cell types go into making your eye.
And you can see the different parts there that all work together. You can see, you know, we got a cornea and a lens that focus the light onto your retina.
And we're going to dive down in here to the retina a little bit because the amazing stuff happens in the retina.
Let's just dive down again. This is another image from the anatomy and physiology textbook that I use.
So what you can see there is up at the top, that's the back, very back of your eye. So the front of the retina is down on the bottom.
The back of the retina is up on top. And up on top, you can see that there is another layer there that has blood vessels in it.
And then you can see right under that, there's a layer of pigmented cells. And those are there that actually don't, you have more acute vision.
So I don't know if you've seen baseball players, or sometimes football players, they put that black stuff under their eyes. What is that for?
It's supposed to help reduce the layer, right? And that's what these dark cells are supposed to do too.
Any strain, any photon gets sucked up by those, so you get a clear image. Let's blur it.
And then right next to under those are actually the cells that detect the light. They're rod cells and they are tone cells.
And rod cells just see a general light that's black and white. Tones see color.
And tones even get more light to register their color. Your rods, that's why you see black and white at night, because the rods are more sensitive than your tones.
All right. But then what's in front of them? If you go look at those rods and tone cells, the next layer of layer on these are just nerve cells
that transmit the information across the surface of the eye to the algemarin eventually to the brain, the sort out the algemarin signals are, so you can actually have conscious vision.
Now, people are pointing out something here, and I've seen a number of, let's say evolutionary biologists who think that your body is sort of cobbled together half-cassidually by evolution,
will look at this and say, I see a problem here. Now this, remember I told you that the bottom of the image represents the front of the retina, and the top of the images represents the back of the retina.
Which way does the same light go? In the front. People say it's going the wrong direction.
In other words, it would be a little bit like me taking this microphone like this and sneaking into this end, right? Because the part that is sensing the light is back behind the watery.
You would expect the light sensing stuff to be towards the light. And you know, so I hold the microphone like this and it talks, right?
And so people say, oh, this has got to be historical legacy from evolution. Your body wasn't designed at all. And stuff like that. So that's been kind of a mystery here.
Now, at first glance, there actually are some potential reasons why I feel like that.
So one of those reasons happens to be that your vision requires a lot of energy. And every time a photon hits one of those cells, it's requiring that of some of the gasoline to actually detect it.
And so you use a lot of HCP every day. So basically, you're looking at me, you're burning through HCP just seeing me.
You're looking at the screen or anything like that. I think ultimately you're burning about your body's weight and HCP every day. So it's simply recycled in your mind.
So a lot of it happens. So if it's requiring a lot of energy and metabolism for you to actually see anything, then those rods and cones better be near a source of blood to get nutrients and give off waste and all that kind of stuff.
And this system, that's really actually not. As I told you, that top layer does a lot of blood vessels. So if you look at the back, that gives you extra blood vessels.
If they were to defraud it, there's a bunch of blood vessels there that's going to give you a few visions.
So there might be some reasons there. You need those rods and cones back there near a good blood supply.
And maybe you can just say, well, the wiring is better able to get light through a ton of blood than blood would be. So maybe that's why it makes sense. Right? Maybe.
However, something amazing was discovered not too long ago that actually really nails down to this system, which really does not show as we put together at all.
And that was that is this. So 2007, that's this paper, but was nutritionally treated as the National Pediatric Science. And they discovered these cells called Mueller cells.
Now they know that they existed before. So Mueller cells are a form of a glial cell.
Glial cells are just cells that help your neurons live and do their thing so that you can think and see and move and all that is. Right?
They're helper cells in the brain. They do lots of different things from helping to fight infections, to forming what's called the blood rain barrier, to making cerebrospinal fluid, to all kinds of stuff like this.
And it turns out your grit is essentially an extension of your brain. All right.
And there were these Mueller cells there and they discovered those Mueller cells are living in phytoactive light channeling cells.
And what they do is they come out and stick out in front of all that wiring and catch the light, bypass all the wiring and send away and transmit that light directly to your rods and cones.
And they do it in a way that actually improves your vision.
So if they weren't there and it was just rods and cones, even if the line wasn't in a way, your vision would not be as good as it was if those Mueller cells were there.
Because they can do interesting things. If it's darker, they can channel light to the right type of color to improve your vision.
All right. So it seems like they might be configured differently in an animal-plus-an-animal than they, but it turns out that they improve your daytime vision in a way that doesn't diminish your nighttime vision very much by channeling the light to the right place, to the right size.
And so we see an elegant solution here. So now the whole picture is complete. Right. Everything is working in our meter. This looks very well designed now.
We need the cells, the rods and cones cells next to the blood supply because they're using a lot of energy to see. Right.
So that means the wiring has to be out in front, but then we have this really neat way of solving that problem and also improving your vision in the process.
So there you go. Pretty amazing stuff.
This is why you're thinking about that coming back to scripture. I think we can all say with a deeper appreciation than we are indeed, carefully and wonderfully made.
We see that lots of places all over the body. Now, let's take a little bit.
So we've gone through this particular hierarchy, right, which stopped a few places and stopped and recognized that there is a lot of design going on at just about every single level. Right.
But are these the only levels that exist?
This is where the anatomy and physiology textbook happens.
But you have to remember that I, I, I tend to study other things. I was out doing Transformation Biology for my dissertation.
And so if you look at the ecology book, we get, we have other levels.
And why is it switching?
There's other levels, right?
The anatomy and physiology textbook starts at organism, but collections of organisms are called populations. Right. And let's say, yeah, we might have a community, the local area with several different species, populations of species interacting.
And that can go to an entire ecosystem. Right. Lots of interactions between organisms, plants and animals, fungi, bacteria, just the general non-living, you know, structure of the environment as well.
Of course, if I put together ecosystems, what do I get?
The entire planet. Right.
And we can see here that ecosystems, even though in our, in the modern world, we could probably argue that the ecosystems we see are fallen. They've been affected by sin. Right.
We still see that things work together in harmony to maintain biodiversity. Here's a classic example of that.
So this is on the west coast of California or out the Oregon or even beyond where sea otters live.
Right. So one of the things is part of Western expansion in our history, we trapped a lot of animals and cut a lot of belts.
And sea otters have the densest fur of any mammal in the world.
So you want the most luxurious fur that you want to sell to make coats out of or whatever. Sea otter was the top of the list.
And so lots of sea otters were wiped out.
And that actually had an effect on the ecosystem.
We now follow this species like a sea otter, a keystone species.
It's a species that I think has taken out of an ecosystem, the entire ecosystem.
And that's happened for this because sea otters are one of the major things that keeps balance in that ecosystem.
In the kelp forest ecosystem where sea otters live, it's the kelp that's really the place, the center of the ecosystem there.
The fish need the kelp. The rest of the diversity needs the kelp as things that eat or whatever.
So there is, is left unchecked, all those things that eat the kelp will take over and the kelp will go away.
When the kelp goes away, the ecosystem collapses from doing lots of free-trade living there to all those nuts.
And the thing that kept things in check is the sea otter.
So the big thing that eats is sea urchins.
The picture I've got there is it's got a sea urchin there on its chest. It's not eating it.
And sea urchins chew and eat the kelp.
Now sea urchins have their place.
The left unchecked, you get what's in one of those pictures there, which is called sea urchin barrens, where there are no wisdom to kill.
And consequently, the ecosystem has collapsed.
We find this in a lot of places.
Let me introduce wolves. That could be also.
We have a huge rebound in vegetation because now the grazers weren't overgrazing.
And we got a huge rebound in biodiversity from just releasing a few wolves and the elves.
This is a subterranean fact of what happened.
I pulled this from a paper talking about this.
You can see there, if you can follow the graphs there at all,
it's basically showing that when the sea otters are present, there are a lot more fish.
And this is actually even good for people because if you're a fisherman and you have fish to catch, that's helpful.
So the sea otters actually help fishermen.
So there's lots of fish.
And we can see muscle growth.
It gets bigger, you get more foods of muscle seed at the water if the sea otters are present.
The diets of some of these other birds and geckos have some shift on.
So geckos can actually eat fish instead of eating other invertebrates.
And so it's actually good.
What we're finding is when all the ecosystem is healthy,
it is working in a heartbeat to maintain that level of biodiversity that's there.
And that's important not just for the creatures in the particular ecosystem,
but we got to remember that we live on this planet too.
And the entire ecosystems provide us with a lot of the things that we need to survive.
This is a list. We call them ecosystem services.
And there's lots of them.
Some of them are actually a recognition of that nature has a spiritual access to it.
So when you go out in nature, do you feel closer to down?
I know I do. I just spend time there.
But other things happen just in terms of like nutrient cycling and topsoil and stuff like that.
And pollinating plants.
All of that stuff we need is the environment, is the ecosystems that provide it.
All right.
And so we got to remember that we're part of the ecosystem too.
Sometimes that's hard, especially since the Industrial Revolution, the technology we have.
We often live in cities and we feel disconnected from it.
And sometimes you feel that the rest of nature is sort of dispensable.
We can live on our own.
We don't need it.
Maybe conservation is just for, you know, other people that doesn't really matter to me.
Things like that.
So that's where we come back to Genesis 131.
What does God intend?
Remember those days of creation on the sixth day, one of the things God made was humans.
And so what is he expecting from humans?
The rest of the creation at the lower levels we just talked about is working in harmony to make life work
and to help the rest of creation thrive.
Then what should be our role in God's creation?
You take care of me.
Now that's not just because, you know, I mean, I think on one level if we just have you take care of it
because God values it and in creation God intended it to all work together and be in harmony.
I mean, that's good, right?
But we also remember we are part of it too.
And that's actually what people are worrying about today.
Actually, I think we can think about this even in deeper level one today of all things.
Because right after Genesis 131 we start to chapter two and this is where God sets apart the Sabbath as holy.
Right? So yeah, but the Sabbath said he finished his work.
He declared it very good.
And now it's time for us to say it is done. It's time to rest.
It's time to, you know, let things move forward in the way that I intended them to move forward.
But we know that yeah, the Sabbath here is a memorial of creation.
It's a time when we tell them worship God, yes, and God asked us to,
but does it have just deeper meaning than God asked us to come to church so we come?
I think the answer is yeah, this is we need to reflect on what does God intend.
Think back to a perfect world when everything was in harmony and there was no death
and everything worked according to God's will.
That's where, that's the great hope, right? Because we're looking forward to that happening again.
We're kind of in this interim part where we sinned and screwed up and things are messed up.
And we can all probably touch that at some point in our lives, whether now or in the past,
or it's going to happen in the future, we're going to run into problems.
We're going to realize on a very gut level that this world is messed up.
And what gives us hope?
Jesus.
It's Jesus, we have a path back to God's perfect creation.
And so when we come on Sabbath to worship, we need to be thinking about what does God intend?
God intends us to love him with all our hearts and soul and strength, right?
He intends us to love our neighbors as well.
And I think he intends us to be the rulers that he intended for us in the garden, right?
He wanted us to tend to keep the garden.
He was supposed to rule creation in his image, right?
So, theologian of Herod, that talks about us, the creation being placed in part of middle management.
The CEO is still over us telling us kind of the guidelines of what we need to do,
but we have some archaeology to follow the CEO's will, right?
That's what God intended for us.
So, we recognize then that things are messed up, right?
We have decided to go our own direction, do something that God said we shouldn't do.
We all have that tendency deep inside us to act selfishly, right?
Just to, yeah, kind of re-decorate things in the sense that our energy is kind of looking to God and what he wants, right?
And then that's about consequences.
So, there's a, I use David to generate that, I'm going to scrimmage that picture,
but it's essentially trying to represent what had have dealt with after sin, right?
The entire creation changed, it seems, and now we have to work hard, right?
It's through, then he was plagued with thorns and thistles and things like this.
And so, we have an impact.
You know, our sin had an impact at the beginning, and currently, the way that we're going,
we also are having negative impacts on God's creation.
The Bible talks about this a little bit, it's talking about Romans 8,
how the rest of creation has feeling the effects of sin, not just on us.
And the phrase there is, it too seems to be looking forward to the Son of God to be revealed,
as if things we do right now can matter in terms of sustaining the rest of God's creation.
But yeah, let's just take for a moment some of the statistics that are out there just to recognize
maybe how much we have impacted the rest of God's creation and continue to do.
This is one that struck me recently, the letter N across,
and this is to explain what's going on here.
This is in reference to Bible, so mammal biome, so you all know what a mammal is,
those types of animals that have hair and they develop them very young, you know.
We are mammals, and platypuses are mammals, and you're a cat, dog, and cat, and that's right.
And cows are mammals.
Alright, so let's, what the exercise here was an estimate, right?
It's like all the mammals in the world, we expect them on a scale, how much would that weigh?
And then, Farsadaw, how much of that would be wobbling?
How much of that would be humans?
This is what they came up with in this study.
Only 6% of the biomass in the world is actually wild animals.
Second on that list is humans.
Humans aren't the top.
We're 36% of the biomass of mammals.
What's the top?
Livestock.
Why is that?
It has to do with food, right?
It turns out that when, you know, we have situated economic developments such that most countries have actually gotten richer,
but as countries get richer, the demand for meat gets higher.
And so, yeah, we have a lot more cows in terms of mass than any other mammal on this planet.
And as a result, I'm eating cows that need a lot of land, right?
They need us to grow food on other large stretches of land to feed them so they can slaughter them and eat them.
And that means we tend to squeeze out other stuff.
Now, this is the most recent estimate.
This is essentially what's kind of us.
I don't know, I guess when you talk about finances, you're talking about the stock market,
and if you try and get a gauge on how well the stock market is doing,
you take a few key stocks and take the average over time of those stocks and see if it's going up or down, right?
That's what's happening here is that these are populations of bird-breed hamlets.
So what do you see?
They actually took 1970s benchmarks, so probably that's well after the Industrial Revolution,
so hebb and hebb destruction I'm sure is preferred by here.
But that's the level we're in, the comparison level.
And since then, this is, yeah, almost a 70% decline in bird recipes.
And so this is why a lot of people, people that do science and get out there and do stuff like this,
think about conservation biology, are just artologists.
They're documenting what's happening.
They're talking about the biodiversity crisis.
Some people use it in terms of, they call it a mass extinction, that we are perpetrated.
The danger that some people see is that could we, and maybe Art Green,
maybe our unwillingness to recognize that God intends for that creation to help sustain the rest of us
and maybe help sustain it, that we destroy nature to the level that it can stop sustaining us.
And that's the worry. So this was another paper, set of papers here by some of these authors
that look at trying what's the biggest threat to humankind.
And you'll see some of the things on that list.
You'll notice that climate change is on there, but it's not the top of the list.
The ones in the red are the big ones.
You can see it over here, it is biosphere integrity.
This is a biodiversity crisis.
So the idea here from this author is an estimate suggesting we're losing biodiversity levels
that maybe are beginning to threaten our civilization.
So the other ones there, some of these are related, these are interrelated.
But you notice another one there is the phosphorus and nitrogen, what's that about?
Is it pollutants? Let me just show you kind of what that looks like.
One of the things we do, we indiscriminately use fertilizers in a way that they get places they're not supposed to be.
They cause problems. So one of the places that happens is if I have my field and I spray with fertilizer
and we get runoff of that fertilizer into streams,
and it runs off, say, into the ocean, which this is a picture, probably hard to see,
because of the nexus around there, what happens is that little light forms there.
The yeast, nitrogen, phosphates are sort of eliminating nutrients, they're fertilizing.
And as they enter into a system where it's not expecting them, the algae explodes.
And then it eats up all those nitrates and phosphates really fast, and then it runs out,
and so all of that material dies.
And if there isn't something there to balance and eat it, if you do that,
it happens every year, like around the last ten places, there's upwellings, ocean currents,
there's manutrients to the top, but nature is queued into it, and you have a huge explosion of life.
So the fish eat the plankton, and you have whales migrating clear from Hawaii
to come eat to the bounty that's there.
And it's a place where biodiversity increases, but if you do that plump from where biodiversity is not expected,
then there's nothing to eat the algae.
The algae die, they sink, and the only thing to decompose in this bacteria
is the bacteria sucking the oxygen out of the water and kills everything else.
And that's an ocean dead cell.
And you can see here from the other graph, places where ocean dead cells have been worse,
and places where there's greatest human population near Kos.
All right, what do we do about this?
Nature is not in harmony.
We're not working in concert with the intended creation.
What can we do about it? Actually, the thing that I have found most interesting in looking into this
is that the things that we do about it are actually the things we've already been counseled to do in Scripture.
Or from other places. Let me show you what I mean. Let's look at this.
So this is older, but I think it still represents what's happening in the Amazon.
Amazon deforestation.
So this is huge forest, huge amounts of biodiversity there, some of it is all the lungs of the planet
because it's producing so much oxygen.
But what causes deforestation?
Humans.
So as you can see, there's two major groups that are causing deforestation.
And the one that you can see here is small-scale subsistence agriculture.
That's about 30.
These are poor people.
And the only way they can make a living is to do what's called slash and burn agriculture,
which makes they go into a place that Amazon deforestation.
They kind of go down and burn it because it turns out that all of the nutrients are trapped in the life there.
And the soil is relatively poor.
And so they burn it to put some nutrients in the soil.
And then they fire it for a little while just to survive.
And then what happens?
It runs out of nutrients. So what happens?
They got to do it all over again.
How can we help prevent this type of deforestation?
Change your lifestyle.
This is caring for the forest.
So what do we do?
Organizations like Azure or others, we go and try and bring people out of poverty.
So if we could go here and bring people out of poverty, give them a better way to make a living, then they don't have to do this anymore.
So that's only a third of this problem, this five-chart.
The other part of the five-chart is cattle ranches, which shouldn't be surprising since cows make up the greatest mass of mammals on the planet, right?
Who are those cattle ranches serving?
Themselves.
So they're getting rich doing it, but who are they selling meat to?
Us, McDonald's.
All right.
It turns out the richer you are, the more resources you tend to consume because you eat meat or you do this.
So the people that are driving this type of economy are the people on the top.
The people on the bottom, we could try to bring up, but what do we need to do for people on the top?
We need to teach them that biblical principles about contentment and caring for people.
And maybe also think about health.
If we ate less meat, then we wouldn't have to have the giant space to raise cattle.
We still would need to grow crops, which might impinge on somebody.
We'd be much, much less. The crops would go correctly to a human now instead of the cow now if it gets to us.
Right?
So that means that caring for the poor and economics come into the question of how we help solve this problem.
Did Jesus teach us to care for the poor?
Yeah.
Did Jesus teach us to be content and that riches come with dangers?
Yes.
So what about the other side of it?
We as Adventists have this message we call it the health.
Right? Look after your health.
And it turns out there's an interesting overlap here.
A plant-based diet is better for your health.
We know that, right?
But did you know that people have also suggested that a plant-based diet is better for the planet?
Because it uses less resources.
There's actually plenty of people now that may know nothing of the gospel,
but do value caring for the planet and their vegetarians as a result.
So it seems like that's the overlap.
It sounded amazing to think that the things, the diet that is best for you is also the diet that is best for the planet.
So it works two ways.
Health and planet health all kind of converge in the same direction.
So that's what I think we should be thinking about.
I think it might be these ideas about how we can help are part of maybe the three angels' messages.
So the first angel, I think this is most clearly seen in the message of the first angel.
In Revelation 14, the first angel besides saying, fear God and give the word to him for the hour of judgment has come,
the first angel also says, worship him who made the heavens and the earth to see and the spirit of life.
Now in Adventist theology, what we have to do is look at that passage and say that's a direct reference to Genesis 1.
And the Sabbath.
So what is the Sabbath memorial about?
It's creation.
And what do we think?
What's the deep meaning of reflection like creation?
It's that God intends on everything to be in harmony and work together.
So I think buried is the first angel message is an aspect of it that might all us to, you know,
really relevant things to say about the current Bible and the Holy Spirit.
And that might be a way of running souls.
How about it?
I will say that is this an ultimate solution to the problem is us getting the other?
For me, I tend to think that maybe selfishness will reign.
Even if everybody every Adventist turn into a good, you know, advocate of environmental stewardship.
Are we going to prevent the end of time from coming?
No, no, no.
And even if we did, we still in a sinful world and things will still go downhill.
So that might seem kind of hopeless.
I would still suggest we need to be part of the solution that part of the problem.
But again, you should think back to Sabbath as a memorial of creation.
Look forward to God setting things right with you.
So this is a quote from one of my favorite and the steel oceans.
That's what you say, the only sufficient permanent answer to fishes difficulties
facing a lost world of which environmental challenges are none of them.
The only solution is what?
His victorious returning the clouds of heaven.
There is the real hope.
All else is standard.
So let's look forward to Jesus coming soon.
Amen.
Let's look forward to a time when harmony is restored, what God intended to restore.
And when we can be a part of that system when God returns and sets everything right.
So, yeah, thank you for listening to this.
And Father, just want to thank you for your blessings once again.
Thank you for the amazing interest, intrepid, see and design that you have put into everything you've created on this planet.
I would ask that we spend time to recognize what you have done on this Sabbath day,
which is a memorial of your creation.
And help us not just to stay there, but to look forward,
help us to understand how we can be part of the harmony that you intended.
Help us to see and understand others and also find ways to look after your creation at the same time.
I ask for blessing on each one here as we go out from here this week.
May your blessing be with each and everyone.
I ask this in Jesus' name, Amen.