We all know the key to changing society is to win the hearts of children. In just a few years they develop into leaders: of families, communities, and the world. As followers of Jesus, we recognize their eternal destiny will be shaped by their willingness to accept Him as their Rescuer and Lord.
There is a wealth of information available to help people see how trustworthy God and His testimony in the Bible is. Scores of scientists publish articles showing how their finding fit a Creationist worldview far better than Naturalism. However, being written by scientists, things can seem really complicated at first. The key is to explain concepts simply so they can be understood by anyone. This is my goal and I’ve had a lot of fun tackling areas where the world tests our faith.
CS4K is also designed to be a go-to place for finding resources in the Creation Science field. Every time I run into a ministry website, it gets plugged into one of the Links pages. There are a number of Children’s Resources and a growing collection just for Teens.
Keep up with what’s new! You can catch the headlines by email or on Twitter.
If you’re on facebook, not only will you find out about new posts, but also receive lots of encouragement and find out about events in the Creation Science world.
Thank you for visiting!
For from him, and by him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen. Romans 11:36
Another question about how these insects could have evolved is, how did the first insect develop wings in the first place? Evolutionists’ best guess on the ancestor of all winged insects is something like a silverfish. They don’t have anything close to wings!
Here’s one popular idea: An ancient insect used gills to breathe underwater. Slowly, those gills grew larger and larger until they were useful to fly with.
Can’t you picture the poor half-gilled worm? It can hardly breathe and it sure isn’t ready to fly out of the water yet. Plus, silverfish live on land and don’t even have gills.
Archaeognatha (bristletail)
Some Evolutionary scientists couldn’t swallow this story either and looked for something new. This time they started with another bug called a bristletail (it looks kind of like a silverfish with 3 wiggly wires on its back end).
Bristletails like to climb high in rainforest trees. Scientists have watched them drop out of the trees avoiding danger zones using those wires.
They thought, If you gave them enough time, some of these bugs could move those skinny wires up to the front of the body. They could widen out and grow into two sets of proper wings. Then they could learn to pump them up and down to fly.
It’s not as wild as a half-gilled bug, but you still have a bunch of problems:
The hairs are on the completely wrong part of the body. How do you get them to start growing in just the right place for maximum flying power?
Any half-winged critter is going to have a lot of trouble climbing around with the extra baggage. It would be an easy target for bug eaters. Natural selection says only things useful to an organism will survive. Anything useless will be thrown out.
You have to build a whole system of muscles, membranes, supports, and nerves before wings are of any use. The way insects fly is far more complicated than anything people have come up with.
You need a huge dose of belief to picture all the changes the bug has to go through for these things to work.
Tiger swallowtail butterfly
Every creature has many parts. Until each part is fully formed and the rest of the body is working with it, the part is just a drag. An organism with half-baked abilities is a dead organism.
God is powerful enough to make a creature ready to live and thrive from the very beginning. He didn’t have to invent fancy stories about how butterflies or anything else changed to fit its home so perfectly and beautifully, too.
“My hands have made both heaven and earth; they and everything in them are mine. I, the Lord, have spoken!
“I will bless those who have humble and contrite hearts, who tremble at my word. Isaiah 66:2 NLT
“A substantial percentage of the young adults surveyed said they started to doubt the Bible as early as fourth grade.
“While most said they still believe that the Bible is God’s Word, they also said that the idea that the earth is billions of years old was one thing that caused them to doubt the Bible. Also, one of the main reasons they left church is because they thought it was irrelevant and boring.”
The Gutenberg Bible displayed by the United States Library of Congress
There are many reasons young people drop out, but the undermining of the authority of God’s Word is the overarching reason.
Everywhere you look, Christian leaders will tell us the Enemy is going after our kids. We all know it, but what can we do? Parents have a lot of opportunity to guide their own children, but what about the kids whose parents can’t or won’t help them?
Right now, on my computer, is a book written just for these kids. It’s not too long, it is easy to read, and packed with the kind of information they need to face a hostile world.
There is also a cover letter and synopsis with samples in the inbox of the president of New Leaf Publishing Group. It’s normal for a book proposal to spend weeks or months before overworked staff have a chance to look at it. It’s also normal for newbies to have a difficult time being taken seriously.
It wasn’t even my idea to start out this year with the biggest creation publisher. I know the rules: build a platform first with magazine articles, guest posts, and other small things, then convince them my followers will buy enough product to be worth the risk.
But, it wasn’t God’s plan to wait so long. He gave me the assignment and I’ve done everything in my power to get the book ready quickly and well. There also aren’t many publishing options for books taking the scientific establishment head on. Either you print with a tiny publisher or with Master Books (in the USA). The whole point is to get the word out, not to see my name in print (although that does sound incredible!), so my prayer is to get in with Master Books.
Gunsight mounted atop an M-91 .308 caliber sniper rifle
It also isn’t my plan to give you a sob story of pre-rejection/acceptance angst. Last night, Ravi Zacharias brought me to tears when he reminded us of the attack on our youth. Here I am, with an answer all ready, and stuck waiting.
Then I remembered some counsel my dad gave my husband and me when we were heading out as missionaries, “don’t wait until God comes through for you. Bring people in to the faith moment, so they can be part of it and grow too.”
So, I’m asking for your help. If God doesn’t work, nothing worthwhile will happen. But, God is powerful and also loves to hear us ask politely, gratefully, and passionately.
Plus, when God comes through (which He will), you’ll all be part of this and always know Cheri Fields isn’t some super woman who had the way smoothed for her, we all have a calling and it’s all about Jesus!
« A Song of degrees for Solomon. » Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain. It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep. Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate. Psalm 127
Did you know butterflies are hardly the only kind of bug to grow with metamorphosis? Moths, flies, lacewings, caddisflies, bees, wasps, fleas, beetles, and ants all transform from larva with a wormlike body to a completely different adult.
Evolutionists have a hard time explaining such a complicated life cycle. If anything goes wrong, the bug dies without passing on its DNA to a new generation.
Here’s the only story scientists have right now to explain how an insect could go through a worm-like stage before developing into something so different:
Ant larva and Pupae
long, long ago, an insect which was supposed to stay in its egg until it looked like a tiny adult couldn’t absorb its yolk sac properly. So, it grew jaws and munched down on the leftovers.
After it hatched, it was still wormy looking but with this great new mouth it ate its way to dominance. The best part was, now it wasn’t eating the same foods as the adults, so this life cycle quickly became popular among lots of insects.
Does this sound scientific to you?
Moth Proboscis (drinking straw)
How do you get the first caterpillar to grow a leaf munching mouth when the adult only has a straw to drink with? No one thinks you can have so many mutations at once this could happen in just one generation, so the bug would starve long before passing on its DNA.
And what about before the bug got hungry in its egg? How did those “tiny adults” grow in the first place? Such a bug would have had a hard time building up to full size on a liquid diet. If it stayed tiny, it would have had miniature eggs and in just a couple generations they’d shrink out of sight.
Some insects that grow through metamorphosis never eat as an adult. The mayfly is known to be quite low in the fossil record (which means evolutionists think it’s one of the first insects) and doesn’t eat a thing once it has wings. There is no way for it to survive without having a larval stage in place already.
Protective silk cocoon
Then there’s the problem of turning the caterpillar into a butterfly. If the caterpillar is just a stretched out egg stage, it wouldn’t know how to build a new protective covering for the transformation into an adult. The whole set of instructions would have to be there for the very first bug or it dies.
O Lord, what a variety of things you have made! In wisdom you have made them all. The earth is full of your creatures. Psalm 104:24 NLT
This article is excerpted from my book. I just ran into the Insect Man, Mr. Karl Priest, online and asked him to look it over. He corrected one thing and I passed! Enjoy
Ever seen evolutionary drawings of an animal slowly morphing into something bigger and better? How did it grow new eyeballs, ears, or a spleen? People will tell you, “slowly, very slowly. Well, not too slowly or we would see fossils showing evolution happens. So, after around 100,000 years or so.”
To picture this, we’ll have to pretend mutations don’t always break things. Let’s look at some common insects.
A Julia Butterfly Dryas julia caterpillar. And he has a name, it’s Sir Spiney. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Have you ever raised a butterfly? Watching the change from a squirmy, fat caterpillar to a beautiful winged insect is mind-blowing. In the past, some people thought they weren’t even the same creature, but they are!
How does the caterpillar know to make the chrysalis? How can it survive when its cells are being turned to soup for the developing adult to absorb? There are some scientists who spend their whole career studying these processes, trying to better understand what’s going on and how (Butterfly scientists are called lepidopterologists [ lep-ih-dop-ter-ol-oh-gist)
മലയാളം: കോശസ്ഥകീടം അഥവാ കൂടപ്പുഴുവിന്റെ (പ്യൂപ്പ) ചിത്രം (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
When a caterpillar squeezes out of its last skin, it loses everything it once was. Its head comes completely off and every part of its body, including the legs, gets broken down to mush. All that remains are a heart and little spots called “imaginal discs” which begin to build the new adult body.
You already know how different a butterfly looks from its old body. A caterpillar can see dark and light, but a butterfly can see every color we do and more. The caterpillar has munching jaws; a butterfly has a curl-up straw to drink with. They also have long, delicate legs to taste their food with. And then there are the wings; the caterpillar didn’t have anything close to them!
The butterfly isn’t an unusual kind of bug either. Moths, flies, lacewings, caddisflies, bees, wasps, fleas, beetles, and ants all transform from larva with a wormlike body to a completely different adult.
I had to look around for a video that wasn’t about Monarchs. Much as I love them (have you ever seen their newly formed chrysalis up close? It’s one of the finest jewels in the universe!), there are 1,00s of other butterflies to enjoy.
Notes: watch the caterpillar squirm around as it’s chrysalis dries, it’s stretching it into the shape the butterfly needs it to be.
You will also see how the chrysalis has hints of the body and wing shapes from the beginning. It’s kind of like a shaped container making it easier on the developing bug.
Then, check out how fat the abdomen of the newly hatched butterfly is. It doesn’t stay that shape long since it quickly pumps a lot of that fluid into the wings. It’s a lot like a blow up toy, except filling with fluid instead of air. Cool stuff!
Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord from the heavens, praise Him in the heights!
Beasts and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds! Psalm 148:1,10
For more about butterflies’ life cycles, check out:
Cairns Birdwing, the largest butterfly in Australia.
“Aardvarks are a blast from the past. The genetics of the Aardvark goes back 160 million years, back to the Jurassic period” What Do Animals Eat?
Well, not that far back, but aardvarks do go back to just 6 days after the universe got started!
“The aardvark is the last surviving member of an odd and primitive order of ungulates (hooved animals) and might have survived by evolving away from hooves, and developing the incredibly powerful claws it uses to dig sleeping burrows and devastate termite mounds. The aardvarks closest living relative is probably the elephant.” Animal Facts Encycolpedia
“Might have survived by evolving…”? We finally have a set of “fuzzy words” to work with! Sounds to me like they’re dreaming up a just so story.
Elephant shrew
Recent genetic studies (increasingly supported by morphological and palaeontological studies) have suggested that aardvarks are closely related to the dassies (hyraxes), elephants (proboscideans), golden-moles (chrysoclorids), manatees and dugongs (sirenians), tenrecs, and more closely the elephant shrews (macroscelids) Aardvark Africa.org
These genetic studies make fun reading. It used to be the only thing Evolutionists had to go on when putting together a “tree of life” was how something looked and acted. Now, things are getting completely reshuffled because of genetic studies.
Here’s what they won’t think about. When a Lego (or any other) designer plans out a new item, do they make every piece from scratch? Not if they can help it. They repurpose and recycle perfectly good designs from other projects for the next one. Just because a lot of pieces are similar or even the same doesn’t mean one gave birth to the other.
You don’t have to have a common ancestor to have similar plans and parts, a common designer makes just as much sense, or really, way more sense!
I made the earth and all the people on it. I made all the animals on the earth. I did this with my great power and my strong arm. Jeremiah 27:5 Easy-to-read Version
Did you know the aardvark is a Living Fossil? Not only do they show up low in the fossil record for a land animal, they haven’t changed much since then. Are we surprised?
You hear about aardvarks a little more than echidnas perhaps because their name works so well in dictionary searches, but do you know very much about them?
We’ve found enough fossils to know aardvarks used to come in more varieties than we see today and lived in a much wider area (fossils have been found in Africa, Europe and Asia). It’s a good thing for Africa’s ecology that some survived to repopulate it.
Aardvark range
Aardvarks are known for two things: their taste for ants and termites and their digging skills. It’s said they can smell a lion coming and dig a hole big enough to protect their up to 5 ft [150 cm], 150 lb [68 kg] body by the time it gets there. That’s some fast and powerful digging!
Aardvark dens can be up to 30 ft [9 m] long with the largest having several round rooms and multiple entrances. Their ears are designed to fold back to stay clean and out of the way as they climb inside. They spend the hot day curled up inside and head out to search for food in the evening.
But most aardvarks travel for days searching for food, so they’ll dig a quick burrow wherever they end up and settle in for a night or two. When they move on, other creatures move in. This is one of the main reasons they are considered important to the ecology of Africa.
That pig-like snout is extra interesting. It has lots of long hairs to help keep out dust plus flaps of skin to cover them during furious digging. An aardvark’s eyes don’t work too well, but their nose sure does. They walk in a zigzag up to 120ft [36m] sniffing for moving ants or nests. When they find a nest and start digging, they close the flaps to keep bugs from crawling in. Although, one website says they just snuffle any insects that make it up there for dessert. Eeew!
Usually, aardvarks collect their lunch with their tongue. It’s over a foot [30 cm] long and covered with gooey saliva. When the ants or termites try to escape through the hole in their nest, they get gobbled by the 1,000. Some aardvarks have been known to eat over 50,000 bugs in a day.
Aardvarks can break open a cemented termite nest better than a man with a pickax could do it. But, they only eat termites when there aren’t enough ants. During the rainy season, the termites are safe, but the ants have much to fear.
When things dry out, another resident of central Africa gets some vital help, the aardvark cucumber. This unusual plant grows its fruit underground where it would be hard to find for most animals, but that’s no problem for the aardvark! After eating the pulp and seeds whole, another habit of this animal kicks in. They are neat and clean and make sure their stinky gets covered up well. It’s like they were programmed to be the plant’s gardeners!
An aardvark mom gives birth to a roughly 4 lb [2 kg] baby after about 8 months of waiting. The little one stays with its mother for 6 months (if it’s a boy) to 2 years. Girls stay with their mom until a new baby comes along; then, it’s off to the solitary life of the typical aardvark.
Aardvark’s are specially designed to fit in well where they live. They are a little piece in the giant web of life God planned for filling the whole world. Let’s praise and honor the One smart and powerful enough to create them and set them in place!
Lord, all living things depend on you. You give them food at the right time. You give it, and they eat it. They are filled with good food from your open hands. Psalm 104:27,28 Easy-to-read Version
Besides the websites already linked, the zoo keepers journal has lots more information about aardvarks
Somehow I forgot to put up a permanent shopping section for this site. That’s been corrected today! I put it under the “For Parents” heading since I don’t want the site to look commercial. Let me know if there’s another place you love to shop for resources that I’ve missed.
Then, I haven’t mentioned my book on the blog much (have I mention my facebook page is always busy?), but it’s basically done. I’ll probably read through the whole thing one more time before having it printed, but I’ve started the process of securing a publisher for that to happen.
As soon as I post this, I’m giving Answers in Genesis a call and seeing what they recommend me doing to break in with Master Books. It feels audacious going for the biggest creation publishers, but I want this book to reach the most kids possible. It still boggles my mind the book wasn’t written decades ago it meets such an obvious need.
Anyway, you can pray with me that things start to happen. The whole project is God’s, but I’ve poured a huge amount of time into this, so my heart has followed.
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