When was the last time you took a trip to the zoo? What about an afternoon at a marine park to be entertained by dolphins and seals? The late fellow evangelist and Tomorrow’s World telecast presenter Richard Ames and his wife once paid us a visit when we lived near Toronto, Canada. While there, we stopped at a Butterfly Conservatory near Niagara Falls and I must confess, I’d driven by it numerous times without feeling a tug on the steering wheel to turn in. However, we all found it more interesting than I expected, especially the butterfly that liked sitting on my shoulder. It doesn’t matter where you look, our world is filled with beautiful, amazing, strange, and fascinating life forms: giant elephants, long-necked giraffes, or sure-footed mountain goats. Each one is uniquely and marvelously designed. There is seemingly no end to the variety of birds: eagles, vultures, ducks and geese, parrots, and doves. Then there are reptiles: snakes, lizards, crocodiles, and turtles, to name a few. What about amphibians? And we haven’t even considered the incredible variety of fish and other sea creatures. This program doesn’t give me enough time to mention all the varied life forms seen in the air, on land, and in the waters. There is also the huge subject of plant life. Some maintain that all living flora and fauna are the result of blind chance through evolutionary processes, but the more we learn about life, the more scientists and laymen are coming to conclude that it is mathematically and logically impossible for life to be the result of chance. But none of this would be possible without the dirt beneath our feet. To put it in grander terms, how did the universe get here? Astronomers and cosmologists have been forced to conclude that matter had a beginning. So, whether one refers to it as the big bang, the cosmic expansion, or something else, a beginning means there was a time when matter did not exist. How then did the universe come to be? On this Tomorrow’s World program, I’m going to focus on one tiny bird that hovers in the face and stares down Charles Darwin.
