What do mutual relationships between living things say about God's creation? - Dr. Kurt Wise

 

Taken from "Beyond Is Genesis History? Vol 2 : Life & Design." Available in full here:

http://bit.ly/2QlPtQV

Explore the fascinating fields of biology, genetics, and intelligent design with 16 in-depth interviews featuring Del Tackett and six scientists from the film.

In the Pocket Wilderness, Tennessee, paleontologist Kurt Wise explains how God created the world as a series of complex, interconnected, mutual relationships that can be seen in plants, animals and bacteria.

☞ Purchase all three in the series here: https://bit.ly/2MWY7Tx

Dr. Wise earned his BA in geology from the University of Chicago, and his MA and PhD degrees in paleontology from Harvard University. He founded and directed the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College and taught biology there for 17 years. He then led the Center for Theology and Science at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for 3 years, before founding and directing the Center for Creation Research and teaching biology at Truett McConnell University for the last 7 years. His fieldwork has included research in early Flood rocks in the Death Valley region, late Flood rocks in Wyoming, and post-Flood caves in Tennessee.

For more information on Dr. Kurt Wise, please go to https://bit.ly/2zUN3U9.

Intro

Kurt, this is an amazing place.

You've been here before, I understand?

Yeah, I used to come here with my family.

As my family was growing up,

we would come out here and swim in the creek,

and spend an afternoon enjoying God's creation.

Oh this would be an awesome place to spend some time.

Yeah, it's a great place

to spend an afternoon with the family,

and - actually to raise a family out here, in a sense.

You know, there's something about being in nature,

if you want to call it that, you know.

I mean out in places like this, it just is -

I don't know, it just makes you feel good.

I guess we were made for that.

We are.

We are, exactly.

I believe God created the entire universe

for the purpose of us knowing him.

He put his nature into those things

that are made.

When we get out into those things that are made,

we get to know him.

He wants us to know him, which is an astonishing thing.

Why would a God like that wish us to know him?

But he does.

The beauty of God

So he wanted us all to see his nature,

his invisible attributes,

in those things that are made,

so he put the beauty into the creation.

The creation drips

with beauty from one end of the creation to the other.

We see beauty in the stars,

in the galaxies, we see it in the planets,

and we see it in the trees, and the animals.

We see it - well,

some of us see the beauty of the rocks,

and so on and so forth.

We see it in every scale,

at every place, the beauty is deep,

meaning at every scale, it's ubiquitous, it's everywhere.

There's even beauty to the beauty.

It's sparkling, changing, vibrant beauty.

We get just a little picture of the beauty of God

by the beauty that he puts into the creation.

But every attribute of God, not just the beauty of God,

but the diversity of the Godhead,

God the Father, God the Son,

God the Holy Spirit.

We look up around us,

we have all sorts of species of plants and animals

that demonstrate God's love of variety.

Even the difference between -

among us is there because he loves variety.

So even in the midst of a judgment,

he makes sure that coming out of that judgment,

the earth is restored to illustrating -

the entire creation is restored -

to illustrating the very nature of God.

And those pieces

The unity of the Godhead

of the creation, it seems to me,

and you've written about this,

and that's what I love

about the things that you've done,

and you teach on,

because it's this -

the evidence of this unity of the Godhead

in these relationships that we see throughout all of -

even beauty itself,

to some extent,

we could say that a pixel by itself may not be,

you know - right,

but when you put all of those together,

it's this -

the relationships that strike me.

And those are still here.

And you see them

from the bottom all the way to the top, don't you?

Yeah, and that's,

of course, another attribute of God.

He's a God of relationship.

He isn't just a force out there.

He isn't just a great and powerful and beautiful God,

he's also a God of relationship.

God the Father, God the Son,

God the Holy Spirit.

There's love, and relationship among them.

And of course then he desires us to love him,

and he pictures even the relationships

Its all about us

that characterize himself in the things that are made.

So it's all about us.

It's in places that people don't recognize it,

don't see it.

It's obvious, perhaps,

in the relationship between a hummingbird and a flower,

if its pollinated by the hummingbird.

It might be obvious in the relationship

between a squirrel and a tree,

but it's true at not just those scales

where we can see them.

It's also true in the invisible world,

the world we cannot see.

It's true in the dirt, it's true in the water.

You take the drop

of water and put it under a microscope,

and you find it teeming, alive with all sorts of organisms.

You take a spoonful of soil,

and there's billions of organisms, living organisms,

in that soil.

There's organisms everywhere,

and they're relating to one another,

and amazingly,

the relationships among and between those organisms is

almost always cooperative.

They're sharing, they're giving,

they're producing more than they need to survive.

They're producing what they need to survive

plus what other organisms need to survive.

Mutualism

That's what you term mutualism, right?

So there's a win-win

that's going on even in that little drop of water?

Exactly.

The mutualism is describing a long-term relationship

that is beneficial to both parties.

That's what we call mutualism,

and we see that all over the place.

In fact, it's profound in places we never think about it,

When you look at me, you probably see one organism.

One person.

When I look at you, I see one individual,

but in fact you are a community of organisms.

Thousands upon thousands of organisms.

Microorganisms that you cannot see.

They're active in your body.

For example, you've got organisms in your intestines

that are helping you digest

your lunch that you can't digest by yourself.

You can't digest plant material.

For example, cellulose.

But those organisms can.

So you're feeding them by eating food and giving it to them,

they're breaking the food down,

and they're breaking down more than they need to live,

they're also breaking down enough to supply

what you need to live,

so you're each benefiting in this process.

So I provide a place

Mutualistic relationships

for them to live, and they -

And protect them.

And protect them,

and in turn they give me nourishment

out of the stuff I stick down my throat.

That's exactly -

and there's hundreds of such species living in us.

We only know the functions of a few of them,

but we have a strong suspicion that when we -

as we learn the functions of the others,

we're gonna find them to be beneficial.

There's mutualistic relationships -

every organism in the planet

that you see is not just one individual.

There's gonna be organisms within it.

I like to show my students, under the microscope,

cells like the cheek cells of a human.

They get kind of excited, grossed out at the same time.

It's seeing their own cells.

But then I show them cells of bacteria,

and I have them calculate the sizes of them

as they're looking at them under the microscope,

and realize that even individual cells in our mouth,

or the individual cells of the little microorganisms

that are swimming in the water,

you can put thousands of bacteria inside one

of those cells.

And so there's - actually,

even one celled organisms have mutualistic relationship

with even smaller one celled organisms inside them.

It's astonishing.

At every level,

we've got organisms relating to other organisms in mutual

and symbiotic relationships.

The way we ought to interact with one another,

the way we should be interacting in our churches, for example,

where multiple people get together,

and there should be mutualistic relationships,

long-term relationships that benefit everyone.

Supposed to be what the family is doing.

Long-term relationships,

multiple people, everyone benefiting,

and it's all supposed to do

that because it's picturing the very nature of God himself,

with the perfect mutualistic relationships among the members

of the Godhead.

I guess in the Fall, we have to swim against that,

Human relationships

at least from the human perspective.

You know, we have to work to make our relationships right.

But in the world around us,

it seems like they don't have to fight for that.

I mean, the relationships

that we see all around here they seem to be doing

what they were made to do.

Well, they are,

but all relationships have been damaged by the Fall.

There's - they've all been marred in some way,

there's - the entire creation was cursed.

Not just humans.

Not just the relationships between humans

and the environment.

Not just the relationships between humans and mosquitoes,

for example.

The entire creation was cursed

But in fact,

all relationships have been marred to some extent.

Yet, if you step back and look at it,

you see yes,

it is difficult, it's a struggle,

but we're not far from that perfection

that God initially created.

It's still true that the mutualism is profound.

It's still everywhere about us.

It's still the most striking characteristic of life.

I mean, it is everywhere.

Refer to the water,

there's all sorts of microorganisms in there.

Some of them are taking nitrogen from the atmosphere.

Nitrogen is an incredible molecule.

The reason it's so abundant in the atmosphere is

because it's nonreactive.

It doesn't engage in chemical reactions.

So it makes things safe,

because if the atmosphere was full of oxygen,

I mean it would be good for breathing,

but fires would spontaneously burn everything.

So we need the only 21% oxygen in the atmosphere,

so you gotta fill the atmosphere with something,

you got to have enough pressure in the atmosphere

that we could breathe easily.

See, you need another gas.

But you don't want a gas that engages

in chemical reactions and burns things.

So there's where nitrogen comes in.

So you got nitrogen two,

N2, two atoms of nitrogen held together with three bonds,

really powerful.

And that's why it won't engage in chemical reactions.

But we need the nitrogen.

We need the nitrogen in most of the molecules of our body.

The nitrogen cycle

So how do we get the nitrogen

out of the atmosphere and get it into our -

we can't do it.

No animal, no plant, no fungus, no microorganism, no protozoan,

no algae can actually break down

or tear apart those two molecules and give it to us

as we need it.

There's only bacteria -

certain kinds of bacteria, nitrogen-fixing bacteria.

Some of them live in the water, some of them live in the soil,

that can do that.

And that's what they do for a living,

I guess you'd say.

They take the nitrogen from the atmosphere,

they split those bonds, get - bathe in the heat,

in the energy from the splitting,

toss off nitrates

that turn out to be then the nutrients for the plants

that then passes the nutrients on to us.

They play a role in what we call the nitrogen cycle.

So there's a process,

there's what - God has created a cycle of provision

for every single element that we need in our bodies,

and that every plant, animal needs in their bodies.

And the cycle involves a storage location

for that molecule,

so that there's always enough for everything in the world,

and then there's something that takes

that out of the storage and puts it into a form we can use,

specially designed organism that can do that,

and then once it's in among the plants,

then consumption of the plants

by the animals spreads it through all the organisms,

then there's another group of organisms

that returns that element to the storage again,

and so the cycle continues.

So we always have what we need.

So nitrogen is one example, there's -

we need molybdenum.

How about that?

Maybe most people haven't even heard of molybdenum.

Honestly, when I woke up this morning,

I didn't think about that.

Molybdenum is a rare mineral, a rare element.

It's - we mine it for putting into steel,

making steel harder.

But even where we find it in the highest concentrations,

it's extremely rare.

You know, ounces per ton,

kind of like what you get gold out of ore.

How in the world -

and if you chewed that ore which contains it,

you wouldn't get any molybdenum out of it.

So how in the world do we get molybdenum?

It's only in a couple of molecules that -

but they turn out to be important molecules.

We only need one atom for each molecule,

but where do we get it?

There's no animal, no plant, no - that whole list again,

that can mine molybdenum out of rock,

where it's stored.

But we've discovered a bacterium that can do it.

A bacterium that releases a chemical,

a molecule, it kind of looks

like the spacecraft that landed on the moon?

It's got legs,

it's got a platform, it's got a blob above that.

So that bacterium releases the molecule,

molecule lands on the rock like the Eagle landed on the moon,

it then burrows straight into the rock,

finds one atom of molybdenum, as soon as it connects with it,

it jettisons that blob out in -

leaving the, leaving the platform behind,

and jettisons it into the water,

and the bacterium comes, swoops down,

picks up the molybdenum combined with the molecule,

and then that organism gets eaten by others,

and it gets spread through the -

it's astonishing.

We're finding - this is crazy.

They're organisms specially

designed to mine absurdly difficult elements

so that we can have them.

And he's got other organisms designed to put it back,

and for every element in our bodies, sulfur,

The biomatrix

oxygen, nitrogen, carbon,

and there's scores of these things,

and we're discovering a biogeochemical cycle

for each one of them.

It's part of what we have come to call,

in creationism, the bio-matrix.

In the old film, Matrix,

I guess it's ancient nowadays for people,

but in that film, The Matrix,

there's this concept that behind the world we see,

there is this unseen world that actually makes it up.

Well this is the idea

that beyond the world that we see about us,

the trees and the rocks we see,

there's a living world that makes it possible

for us to live here.

If it was just rocks,

and water, and that's - we wouldn't be able to survive.

We can't get the nitrogen we need,

we can't get the -

no plants, no animals, could survive at all.

So we need this incredible world

of the unseen to support the world of the seen.

That which is the things we see are made of things

that do not appear,

that we cannot see, even such things as the plants.

You got these beautiful trees,

trees need water in their leaves for photosynthesis,

you got to get the water from the roots up to the leaves,

and a big tree in the middle of the summer will generate -

will need about a hundred gallons of water every day.

The fungi

How does it get all that water into the tree

and up to the leaves?

The first step is getting the water into the tree.

Experiments have indicated

that the roots of a tree do not have the capacity

to pull that much water in.

And so it turns out that there are microorganisms,

specifically mycorrhizal fungi,

that live in and out of the roots.

If you saw the root of a plant, you'd see this fungus

that penetrates the root and reaches out of it,

you think, oh no, you know, it's hurting the plant.

No it isn't,

it's actually sticking out of the plant to suck in water,

pumps water into the plant

which supplies the water to the plant,

then when the plant makes sugars in its leaves,

and then sends that food back down to feed the roots,

it also feeds the fungus.

And so the fungus is watering the plant,

and the plant is feeding the fungus,

and it's because fungi are designed -

extraordinary designs, too -

they're very efficient at sucking things in,

at sucking water in from their environment,

like lichens in the desert,

the fungi that you see on the outside of rocks

in the desert are capable

of taking water out of the atmosphere

when there's less than 10 percent humidity,

pulling it in and creating a pool of water,

if you wish,

for the algae that's within the lichen.

It's extraordinary.

There's all these relationships that you do not see

that turn out to be necessary for the organisms you do see.

The bio-matrix of life.

So with all of the bacteria that's unseen to us,

and the fungi

that have been created in such a way

that they are actually allowing us to live,

because without them it sounds like we wouldn't live.

That's correct.

We have a Mother's day and a Father's Day,

maybe we need a bacteria day,

or - I think bacteria are so under-appreciated.

We need more than that.

There are thousands and thousands of species

of bacteria doing incredibly important,

essential things,

and we - we don't recognize it.

I wonder, do you think that all of that unseen -

The unseen matrix

that matrix, that bio-matrix,

that is unseen to us, I almost have a sense

that God was wanting us to find that,

to discover that,

and as we did,

to then bring him glory for what we see.

Yeah, I think you're dead on.

God created these things in the world

for us to know him.

He created us with the ability to see them,

to observe them,

it's not likely that any other organism knows

anything about these these bio matrix organisms.

No one else is gonna appreciate it,

but he gave us the ability to do so.

We should recognize we didn't make it,

the creation didn't make it, they didn't evolve on their own,

We were created to worship God

they were specially designed in this incredible design

to show the very nature of God

that suggests they're part of that creation of God.

He created us with the ability to find them, to recognize

that it was made by God,

and when we affirm that, we bring glory to God.

That's what they're for, and what we're here for.

That's what we're supposed to be doing.

Is that why you love science so much?

Yeah, it's so - it's not just that - most people recognize,

you could go into the creation and be -

your soul will be restored.

But as you learn more about the creation,

you learn more about the one who created it.

That's what you're supposed to do.

You learn more about the one who created it.

You can't help -

I can't help but just erupt into worship

of this incredible being

that even desired me to know to - know him.

But I've been created to do that.

I've been created to worship God.

I think there are some situations

where believers think

that worship is one of those things you have to do

but it's not necessarily fun.

I got to go to worship service,

or something like that.

No, worship has been designed by God to delight us,

and to delight him.

He created the universe, the Bible tells us,

because it was his delight to do so.

He delights in the creation.

He created us to be delighted.

He created us able to be delighted,

and he's delighted when we're delighted.

And science, in my opinion is this extraordinary way

to see things about God,

and to get delighted in the nature of God in ways

that other people never have the opportunity to.

Scientists worship God

Science is like a worship for you, isn't it?

It is.

And it ought to be -

I believe this is a great reason to go into science.

Science is an opportunity

for someone to take things that - I mean,

most people look at rocks and they don't get excited.

They don't see God, okay?

But here's an opportunity

for someone to take the things of creation and to teach

the rest of the people in the church about God,

and to worship God through this.

We've been created to be priests of the creation,

and I think that's what scientists are.

They are supposed to be the priests

who have supervision over the creation,

pointing to God through the creation,

both to those in the church and those outside of the church.