“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the expanse proclaims the work of his hands. Day after day they pour out speech; night after night they communicate knowledge.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Some things, once you see them, are hard to imagine not seeing. Consider the average optical illusion. When you look at some of them, they initially look like nothing or else perhaps something totally other than they actually are. Once you have learned to see them for what they truly are, though, you can’t not them that way even if you try. Knowing things works the same way. Some truths, once you learn them, shape your view of the world so profoundly that you literally can’t fathom not knowing them any longer. I was reminded of this yesterday while checking out a bunch of bees. Let me tell you about it.

Honeybees are amazing little creatures. Given their size, they can’t have brains that are much bigger than the head of a pin, and yet they are capable of such wonders that scientists are regularly learning how to engineer and navigate more efficiently by studying them. Imagine that: humans learning from bees. We who have figured out how to build ships that can travel through outer space, who can create nanorobots that hold the potential of curing blindness, learning from a little bee how to better engineer something. It’s a wonder.

Yet honeybees are incredible, so learn we do. In spite of not being capable of rational thought or having no sense of self, they build hives that are architectural wonders with their perfectly hexagonal design. They are responsible for so much of the plant pollination that happens which allows us to enjoy beautiful flowers and eat delicious food. They create wax that can be used in all sorts of handy ways. They fly for miles to find flowers to pollinate and yet can always find their way back to their hives. They communicate precise GPS coordinates to other bees through a dance routine which remember them perfectly such that they can travel to a place they’ve never been before on the first try. They make delicious honey which is one of natures best and healthiest sweeteners. There’s even more than this, but that’s a pretty good start of how marvelous they are.

How on earth could they possibly be capable of such wonders as these? One possible answer is that they have simply evolved this way. Yet to look at all they are capable of and the intricacy of their design as creatures; to ponder for a moment the sheer volume of specified and complex information that enables them to do what they do, makes pure chance seem awfully insufficient as an explanation for how they came to…well…bee (I couldn’t resist).

Yes, it’s possible to survey these amazing creatures and the things they do and build which rival and even surpass things we have built with great cleverness and ingenuity and conclude it all just happened by one happy accident after another; that it was nothing more than a quirk of evolution; that one of those single-celled organisms that just happened to spring into being when lightning struck an ancient pond to zap the atoms in it into not just any strand of DNA, but the precise strand of DNA necessary to direct the formation of the proteins that could create the cells that became a honeybee just happened, but the more you think about everything that had to happened in order to make honeybees in the first place, let alone all they are capable of doing, the sillier and sillier pure, unguided chance seems as far as an explanation goes.

Instead, perhaps David was right when he declared that the heavens declare the glory of God. No, bees aren’t from the heavens, but David is talking there about all of creation. Creation itself proclaims the existence of a genius designer who precisely created all of its various parts and pieces. Paul told the Roman church that God’s existence is so self-evidently true by simply looking at the world around us that it is entirely inexcusable for someone to claim they didn’t know God existed. Or to perhaps put that in another way: atheism is irrational.

The exquisite design of every part of creation fairly well screams for the existence of a designer behind it. Often over the last century or so Christians have been accused of using God as an explanation for things they just hadn’t done enough work to properly understand for themselves. Belief in God, it was charged, was nothing more than a fig leaf for ignorance. And yet now that we understand so many parts of creation in so much more detail and nuance than we once did, many scientists are coming back around to the idea that the existence of God or at least some sort of a designing intelligence is the only possible way to make sense of it all.

Creation, as it turns out, really does declare the glory of God. And the more and better we understand it, the harder that conclusion is to escape. All of the other explanations for why something like the wonderful honeybee exist and are able to do what they do gradually fall away like so many houses of cards. In the end, there’s just one left standing that has any merit: God did it. His works really are wonderful.