A Brain to See God's Handiwork

Acts 17:29

Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man's device.

One of the most difficult problems for those who believe that we are the product of millions of years of evolution is the human brain. The human brain has ten billion times 25,000 neural connections. If you work it out, this means that a miracle would have to take place if we evolved from an ape like creature on the time scale that evolutionists propose: every generation would have had to have many thousands more neural connections than the last!

Even more astonishing is the fact that we are not born with a brain that is a blank slate. Several studies have shown that even infants as young as three months expect things to behave in certain ways. In one study, three month old infants showed surprise when researchers made an object they were looking at disappear. Another study showed that young infants expect inanimate things not to move by themselves. But they expect living things to move all by themselves. Such built in "programming" in the brain enables us to progress more quickly as we learn about the world around us.

The problem of the complexity of the human brain, and the fact that it seems to come preprogrammed, ultimately caused Alfred Russel Wallace, an influential evolutionist, to switch to belief in a Creator. The more we learn about what God has created, the more likely we are to conclude that we are indeed the work of a wise Creator. He has even given us a brain capable of seeing that.

Prayer: I thank You, dear Father, for the intelligence You have given me. Amen.

References: Natural History, 9/97, "The Nature of Learning," pp.42 45.