There is nothing very natural about "Nature". The wisdom, power, and beauty in this universe is so astounding, amazing, and wonderful that any sensible person should view it with awe.
     Our purpose in the following web pages is to illustrate the wisdom, beauty, and power of Creation. It's not foolish to believe all reality has been designed and created by a personal Creator. We aren't talking about a "one planet god". We mean a Creator who is eternal and has the wisdom, the power, the resources, and the purpose to create and maintain all that we humans know about and experience. A person is not foolish to give up what he can't keep to receive what he can't lose. And  a person is no fool who feels gratitude to and dependence on the one who deliberately created us to teach us what we need to know about real life, eternal life.
     We know that it takes tremendous resources to form and operate a manufacturing company to produce and sell products that people need in everyday living. How great are the resources needed to design, create, and maintain the universe that we find ourselves in? What a tremendous investment our Creator has made is us. And we have no ability to pay Him for anything that He supplies to us. It's only fair and right for us to feel grateful and to do what we can to find out His purposes for us.
     Where did electrons, protons, neutrons, and other subatomic particles come from? How is it that all matter in the universe is made of these? I think it's a beautiful and wonderful mystery that the various atoms and molecules have such a wide and amazing variation in their properties. Not only has our Creator designed and created the 109 elements in the Periodic Table, but the individual elements have a marvelous and systematic structure. It's easy to believe that all of these have been designed and made by a super engineer and scientist. What we know to be Nature, both inorganic and organic, is full of living and non-living things that fight for survival in a wonderfully integrated system. What is the underlying purpose? Are we not here to learn how to live and how to love each other? Isn't it plain common sense to believe that our world of nature is an obstacle course, or school of learning, to teach us what we need to know for a much more important and lasting life, eternal life?
     On our amazingbeauty.org web site we have created the following pages to illustrate the beauty of our Creator's biochemical work:
1.0  The Amazing Beauty of Embryology
2.0  The Amazing Beauty of Baby Development
3.0  Facial and Eye Embryology
4.0  Embryology of the Baby Heart
5.0  The Periodic Table of Basic Elements
6.0  The Amazing Beauty of Biochemical Engineering
7.0  The Amazing Beauty and Technology of Eyes

     On our web site we have created additional pages to ullustrate the beauty of our Creator's work in what we call Nature:
1.0  Grand Canyon and Other Sites of Amazing Beauty
2.0  Sunsets, Lakes and Other Scenes of Amazing Beauty
3.0  Flowers, Fruit and Birds of Amazing Beauty
4.0  Wild Animals of Amazing Beauty
5.0  New England Foliage of Amazing Beauty
6.0  Space Photos of Amazing Beauty
7.0  Earth & Moon Photos of Amazing Beauty
8.0  Sky Photos of Amazing Beauty
9.0  God's Magnificent Universe Gives Us Scenes of Amazing Beauty
10.0  Scenes of Amazing Beauty from all over America

Our Creator: Reasonable, Powerful, Kind     I believe that all things have been planned, designed, created, and sustained by a reasonable, powerful, and kind Creator. Why should I consider anything else? After all, I'm a living being. I'm not just a biological body with blood, skin, bones, and organs. I think, feel, and make decisions. I can love, be joyful, grieve, and I can hate. Why should I think of myself as something only physical and without eternal significance?
    I ask questions like, Why am I here? Where have I come from? Where am I going? Who should I thank for my existence? Is it foolish for me to believe in a wonderful Creator who is reasonable, powerful, and very kind?
    I've spent my whole career in research, development, engineering, and quality control. I've done a lot of designing, creating, and controlling of machines and processes. It comes naturally for me to see everything in this world as designed and maintained creations of a Creator who is reasonable, powerful, and kind.
    The basic elements do look designed to me. Neutrons, protons, and electrons are the common particles in all atoms. Why do these subatomic particles exhibit the properties that we see in the 109 atomic elements in the Periodic Table? Amazing.
    Just as astounding, why do the atoms of these fundamental elements combine to form millions of different molecular compounds? Why do different molecules have the wide variety of properties that

enable them to exist in all the known materials in the universe?     And why are there basically three different bonds that cause atoms to combine and become molecules: covalent bonds, ionic bonds, and hydrogen bonds? Why do we have ionic bonds for electrical conductivity. And why do we have weak hydrogen bonds in the DNA that allow for chromosome replication? Because of these weaker bonds we also have the RNA working together with the DNA in the process of protein formation. These are just a small sample of the amazing technology we find in this marvelous world we live in. (Figure from p. 189 Biology, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986)

Amino Acids Being Translated Into Protein (Click on Photo for Bigger Photo)

    What shall we say about the magnificent way that all living organisms and their biological components are developed, integrated, and maintained. Water, carbohydrates (sugars, etc.), lipids (fats), proteins (and amino acids), nucleic acids, and other compounds work together to form and function in all the tissues, organs, and other structures and processes that make up Life on our amazing Planet Earth. The wonder of all this overwhelming complexity defies any natural explanation, no matter how much faith we have in human science and naturalism.
    All of us who have produced children (or have been children) have marveled as we have seen them come into this world and grow up. I have also marveled at the scenes of metamorphosis from egg to pupa to butterfly, moth, or dragonfly, or from egg to tadpole to frog or toad. PBS illustrates dramatically the evidence for a powerful and wise Creator (though typically crediting evolution) in a video on Nature -- "The Body Changers" (available at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/bodychangers/) Another amazing science program ahown recently on PBS and available on video cassette is Unlocking the Mystery of Life at www.illustramedia.com/ This video treats the wonders of microbiology as products of a wise and powerful Designer and Creator.
    We also have the wide variety of nonliving things we experience in fields, rivers, lakes, oceans, mountains, volcanoes, glaciers, deserts, clouds, rain, ice, snow, etc. All of these play roles in the formation and maintenance of differing environments. And what about living things? We ourselves live with millions of different kinds of other organisms. Our wise and powerful Creator has designed, created, and sustained all this amazing variety for a purpose. He expects us to know that He is there just as we know that boats, autos, planes, busses, trains, houses, and skyscrapers were designed, created, and sustained by wise and powerful human beings.
    We don't have to be scientists to realize that our world has meaning and purpose. We only have to be wise and have humble common sense. We can't let our superior intelligence or our intense pride get the better of us. We know that violence, disease, death and life-threatening events may limit our lives and the numbers of our descendants. But we should avoid the error of attributing life and wonder to the negative natural forces of death. Our Creator has designed living organisms to survive, and we should avoid giving that credit to time, chance, and "Mother Nature." Nature may seem wonderful to us, but nature is simply part of our Creator's overall system. He has integrated all that we know about into a system we call the Universe, World, etc.
    Lets's not make the mistake of thinking that we don't owe honor, loyalty, and trust to this wonderful Creator. He is not only wise and powerful, but He is fair and kind. He expects us to search for Him, to thank Him, and to be kind with everyone we live with. He doesn't always look for high intelligence and scientific prowess, but He does want us to love Him and to love each other. He has good attitudes and common sense as His top priorities. Someone wrote long ago,

"God loves you and has chosen you as his own special people. So be gentle, kind, humble, meek, and patient. Put up with each other, and forgive anyone who does you wrong, just as Christ has forgiven you. Love is more important than anything else. It is what ties everything completely together."

Intelligent and Wise Being, or Reproduction?

   Which came first? We all know that two living persons can reproduce other living beings that can reproduce other living beings. The key to this is that one member of each pair is male and the other is female. The offspring can be either male or female. All of the parents or offspring are always intelligent living beings, but everything about their lives varies in quality and quantity.
    The big question is, Which came first? Intelligent beings or reproduction, the chicken or the egg? Human manufacturing organizations can and do engineer factories with machines and processes that produce simple to complex parts and machines. Some factories are even automated to produce complex parts and machines. These factories continue to need intelligent human involvement, once the factory is financed, designed, built, staffed, supplied, started up, and operated.
    But no one has ever known of an automated factory that came into existence without the action of intelligent human beings. We know that human beings can design, create, and manufacture complex factories and machines. But, can anything like a factory or machine produce intelligent beings? Can automated factories even reproduce automated factories?
    Isn't it likely that a being, much wiser and more powerful than humans, has designed and created all that we know about? Is such a theory or idea unreasonable or foolish?
    We know that populations of living organisms reproduce and adapt to a wide variety of environments in competition with other living organisms. So, there is a sense in which populations specialize with individuals that can be genetically different than individuals in older populations. Some of these populations have adapted genetically to such different conditions that they can no longer interbreed with older parent populations.
    This is usually called micro evolution. Does this micro evolution explain how the original parent populations came into existence? Does it explain how the process of reproduction came into existence? Does it even explain how the raw materials involved came into existence?
    It seems reasonable to me that a being much more powerful and wiser than human could design, manufacture, and maintain systems of living populations. And these populations continue reproducing and adapting. What seems unlikely to me is that any population of organisms could with time and chance originate its own design, adaptability, ability to reproduce and become the living world that we know.
    Is there anything unwise or unintelligent in the idea that a highly intelligent, wise, powerful being had to exist first, before there is any reproduction, adaptability, and micro evolution? What could be simpler and more reasonable than this idea?

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The greater the technology involved, the greater the need for intelligence, wisdom, power, and living being to explain its existence.