Top Ten God-Glorifying Creatures
The Bible goes to great lengths to praise God for His wisdom in Creation, and scientists above all should know why. From systems that stretch for trillions of miles to infinitesimal particles, God has woven together a universe to support life. And not just any life, but more than a million species, each one specifically tailored to thrive in a certain set of conditions. God can beautify a tropical rainforest with vibrantly colorful plants and animals, or He can populate even the harshest desert or the crushing abysmal depths with hardy creatures. And He did so with nothing preexisting to go off- just His own wisdom, power, and love. And this is just in a world that’s cursed to futility. Do you ever imagine what Creation will be like in the New Heavens and the New Earth when there is no death or pain? While we await that consummation, here are ten species that particularly impress me as specimens of God’s creative wisdom:
1. Arctic Foxes- These animals have a magnificent white fur coat that enables them to withstand the lowest temperatures of any animal, but it sheds out and is replaced by a more practical brown one in summer. This animal can dress for any Arctic occasion. It is a remarkably hardy and resourceful creature, surviving being trapped on an island where the human population wanted nothing more than to exterminate it, namely Viking Iceland. It is an accomplished traveler, crossing miles and miles of barren northern territory and ice.
2. Cheetahs- A cheetah is an incredible piece of biological machinery. A streamlined build, long legs, and every muscle and bone geared for speed means this animal has the acceleration of a sports car. It takes them 3 seconds to hit 60 miles per hour. At full gait, this animal comes as close to flying as a terrestrial animal can, and they have agility to match their speed. Their slim design and camouflaged coat of yellow with black spots makes them a gorgeous creature to behold. Even their appendages work for speed. Their tail gives them balance, and their claws give them traction. Not to mention, God used delicious irony to make such a big animal purr like a tabby cat.
3. Elephants- Who would have thought of making a nose a grasping appendage and teeth utensils for digging and manipulating? Elephants are among the smartest of animals and for the most part congenial. They convey majesty and awe-inspiring power, but do not typically abuse that power. They are actually very sensitive and will mourn their dead. Their power makes them what is called a keystone species, in that their actions, like uprooting an acacia tree, have an outsized impact on their habitat, for the most part beneficial. Like so many animals, they have senses beyond what we can imagine, communicating in low frequencies we cannot hear over distances no human can achieve without technology.
4. Hummingbirds- Hummingbirds win the fashion show in the animal world with their bold and iridescent colored plumage. You usually cannot even see their wings moving, which they can do in any direction, and they are the only birds that can hover. Their agility makes them a match for much bigger creatures. If their plumage is an almost infinite variety, so also are their bills. God has given them all shapes and lengths of bills to tailor them to specific flowers. Their metabolisms are shockingly fast, and they must down prodigious quantities of nectar and water to sustain them. Every waking hour for them is in fast forward.
5. Octopuses- For a creature without a backbone, this is one smart animal. Aquarium workers soon learn that all the locks on the tanks containing octopuses are not for keeping people out but for keeping the octopus in. What is surprising is that a lot of their nervous system is in their tentacles, not their brains. They can learn by observing humans, use tools, and change their color. With no skeleton, their only constraint to passing through something is their beak, the one hard part of their body. This creature is creepy to some, but to me it is elegant and brilliant.
6. Owls- These are the avian equivalents of stealth fighters. They are superbly adapted for life at night. Their large eyes let them see in darkness that would blind you or me. Since they are so large, they cannot focus close up, so God gave them sensitive feathers around their beak for close-in sensory perception. They have asymmetrical ears that allow them to hear prey even under the cover of snow and gauge their distance and direction from it. Their special feathers are designed to keep anything from hearing them in turn as they fly overhead. Their calls run from the spooky and shrill to the cute and endearing. Superstitious humans considered the “kew-ick” “huouh” duet of a tawny owl pair a bad omen, but I find it delightful that they make a little night music together.
7. Pandas- God was in a good mood when He made this creature. It seems designed to elicit an “aww” from mankind. Its chubby cheeks, which allow it to concentrate jaw muscles that can crush bamboo their keepers have to cut with a chainsaw, give it an appearance like a human infant. Not to mention those adorable ears on top and beautiful coloration. When one sees the lives of these animals at Zoo Atlanta or the Smithsonian Zoo, you realize that the secret to happiness is to be the cutest thing in the room.
8. Sharks- If there is one defining characteristic of a shark, it’s sense. In addition to keen scent that can detect faint traces of blood in a vast ocean, they have the ability to sense electrical activity. Their jaws are filled with rows of teeth of limitless variety and design, perfectly suited to a particular diet. While the ultimate objective of all this sensory perception and dental variety is killing and eating, they are not mindless predators with nothing better to do than scarf humans alive. Sharks in captivity can learn tricks, and sharks in the wild rarely seek out human prey. There are plenty of animals more dangerous to man than these. Not to mention the beautiful, streamlined, torpedo-like design of so many species.
9. Sperm whales- It takes a gutsy air-breathing animal to dive down nearly two miles to catch prey as big as itself with eight arms and two tentacles. Sperm whales are well-equipped for this task, however. They have especially good hemoglobin for binding with oxygen and muscles that can retain oxygen as well. In an environment where sight is all but useless, they use echolocation, bouncing sound waves off the prey to find it in the dark like sonar. One of the theories for the spermaceti organ in their head is that they use it to aid in diving and ascending by varying its density, or otherwise that it helps with the echolocation. As the largest toothed predator in the world, it is not surprising that it also has the largest brain in the Animal Kingdom.
10. Wolves- These clever, hardy predators make my list because their canine descendants come in a vast variety of sizes, coats, and colors. From this one animal sprang individuals as different as a Chihuahua and a Saint Bernard, or a Doberman and a Maltese. Their descendants make loyal companions who can be trained to perform any number of vital tasks, from guiding the blind to sniffing out bombs. Wolves’ sense of smell is extraordinary and their endurance incredible.
I don’t have the space here to go really deeply into the arguments for intelligent design, such as the irreducible complexity of all these adaptations that rules out their having evolved gradually from a series of random slips in the DNA replication process. Or consider how no one has ever brought a dead cell back to life even though it has a vastly better “head start” on getting the elements of life together than any natural process ever conceivably could. I’m hoping to encourage you to revel in the practically limitless expressions of God’s creativity He has written into the world we live in. Reflecting on just my favorite examples of God’s amazing design, I close with the words of the Psalmist, “O LORD, how manifold are Thy works! In wisdom hast Thou made them all. The earth is full of Thy riches” (Psalm 104:24, KJV).