Irrefutable Examples of Design in Nature – Design evidence seen in the structures and complex behaviors of birds.

Dr. Thomas Kindell has received advanced training in scientific creationism and studied under several of the world’s most prominent creationist scientists. He also has studied at California Graduate School of Theology where he received his M.A. in Biblical Studies. He holds a Doctorate in Philosophy of Theology (major in philosophy of Biblical apologetics) and is the founder and president of Reasons for Faith Ministries, Inc., dedicated to equipping Christian believers to “give every man an answer” for their Biblical faith. For over 40 years, he has engaged in a traveling teaching ministry lecturing on Biblical apologetics and the scientific case for creation.

Students of Petra Christian Academy would like to say thank you to Dr. Kindell and Foundation In Genesis for sharing with our students how God works through His creation to show His glory.

Here is a fragment of Dr. Kindell’s speech:

Doctor Thomas Kendall presents the study of our flying feathered friends. In the parables, Jesus himself said, “consider the birds: they don’t sow and reap and gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.” But today, we’re going to consider birds not just for the fact that they are a symbol of God’s faithfulness in providing for His creatures, but how they provide tremendous evidence of His wisdom in their amazing design.

Now I start by quoting the evolutionist Richard Dawkins, who is one of the most well-known atheists of the world today, and he said, “Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.” Again, we have Francis Crick, Nobel Prize-winning biologist, and he said biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed but rather evolved. But what we see today is that birds show a lot of evidence of the wisdom and power of God in the creation.

Now, again, Richard Dawkins says we have seen that flying things are too improbable and too beautifully designed to have come into existence by chance. So, if even the illusion of design is too complex to have happened by chance, maybe we need a creator after all. He would be willing to believe in a different kind of creator and that’s a creator that he calls the ‘blind watchmaker’. Darwin came along and said we don’t need a watchmaker, somebody that could make a watch so to speak. This complicated device, without there being a watchmaker, can happen by natural processes and that process is called natural selection or survival of the fittest. Now evolution’s watchmaker; natural selection is blind, mindless, and unconscious. Yet blind people can actually do amazing things. You could be blind and be a concert pianist because you still have intelligence and you still have conscious awareness. You can learn a keyboard by touch – a perfect piano concerto. But, if you’re also mindless and unconscious, you can’t do anything.

Now DNA deoxyribonucleic acid is the important ‘blueprint information molecule’ in every living creature. How do living creatures know how to grow and to repair themselves? How do they know how to reproduce? All of that is written down in a book, so to speak, that’s in the form of DNA. Bill Gates said that DNA is far more complex than any of our computerized information machines. DNA is something God made. Today, we know that Darwin did not think just getting one average size DNA molecule or gene is mathematically impossible; it’s way too complex. With what we know today, a conservative calculation of the probability of getting that one molecule by chance… It’s one chance versus a big number.

If you wrote that number out, how many zeros would you have to put after the number one? How big is it? Well, it’s much bigger than the number of atoms in the entire observable universe.  If you have a trillion times a trillion times a trillion universes as big as our universe; you allow every atom in that universe to be replaced by the DNA molecule; and a strand that we break apart randomly reassembles at the rate of a trillion times per second and continues to do so in all those universes for a trillion times of a trillion million years; even then you will not come close to overcoming that probability.

So, when you see something like this, you know that it did not happen by chance, or by accidents, or chemistry, or physics – it is a divine product. It is something that an intelligent author put together because it carries information. But even if we got DNA in the first cell, that cell would have to go all the way up to a man. It’s like from amoeba; how do we get that new information? Well, they claim mutation. Natural selection says mutation simply means change, but when it comes to Darwinian evolution it never means intelligently-directed change.

Now, we’re going to look at bird migration – a navigational nightmare for evolution. You know to migrate effectively, you have to determine where you were on the globe, what’s your latitude or longitude, the exact position on the earth… You also have to know the longitude and latitude or exact position of the target you’re trying to reach and you’d have to figure that out without GPS. But God gave this ability to birds thousands of years before we invented GPS, that’s a big problem for the evolutionists.

Now, where are some of the paths of some of the longest migratory birds? The longest one is the Arctic Tern, and it migrates from the northern Arctic region to the southern region. But it’s not the longest nonstop flight. The longest nonstop flight is by the more humble-looking bird, the shorebird. Scientists suspected that this bird is making very long transoceanic flights because they packed on so much body fat, which is their fuel when they’re flying. They look like flying softballs.

So, the scientist figured they were going to put on these very lightweight micro-tracking devices we have to track them by computer and satellite / and what they found out was that it was the longest nonstop flight in world history. These birds actually migrated from New Zealand all the way across the vast Pacific Ocean to the Korean Peninsula. They move all the way over to Western Alaska, but then when they want to fly back to New Zealand they don’t come back to the Korean Peninsula. They fly directly nonstop from Western Alaska all the way back non-stop. As we shall see, very few of our aircraft go that long without aerial refueling.

Now another master navigator is the Lesser Whitethroat Warbler, which spends its summers in Germany in Europe but likes to fly south for the winter, as many birds do. Not just for better weather, but for more food – often it’s hard for them to find food during the winter. But the amazing thing about the Lesser Whitethroat Warbler is that the parents abandon the young birds before they’re mature enough and have enough muscle structure and body fat to accompany them on the flight. They fly from Germany, out of the headwaters of the Nile River in Africa at Lake Victoria. So, two or three weeks later the little birds have grown mature enough to where they can fly and, even though they don’t know for sure where their parents went, they take off. They fly thousands of miles across the Mediterranean Sea, which they’ve never seen their life, they cross the huge Sahara desert that they’ve never seen in their life, and somehow they are able to navigate and get directly to the same tree on the shores of Lake Victoria where their parents are. Their parents weren’t there to show them how to do it, that navigational capability was programmed by God into those bird eggs, and is every bit as accurate as our modern GPS-based on satellite.