Today's Quick Word
Today’s Quick Word
Psalm 115:4-6 But their idols are silver and gold, made by human hands. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see. They have ears, but cannot hear, noses, but cannot smell. […]
Psalm 115:4-6 But their idols are silver and gold, made by human hands. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see. They have ears, but cannot hear, noses, but cannot smell.
There is an excellent article in the current CMI ‘Creation’ Magazine (Vol. 48, No. 3, 2026), written by Grant Williams, BA, MEd, (who is the brother of Greg Williams, a former Science teacher at Shire Christian School), entitled “Reading, not a ‘happy accident’”.
Grant writes: “Let’s be honest. Reading – what you’re doing right now – isn’t something you somehow ‘evolved’ to do. It’s not something which would, for example, have helped your ancestors avoid being eaten by a sabre-toothed cat. Yet here you are, most likely reading this article fluently and without effort. Your brain is recognising symbols, decoding phonemes (the sounds the symbols represent), processing grammar, and extracting meaning all at the same ime. That’s not an evolutionary fluke. It is powerful evidence of design. … …
Neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene refers to the ‘neural recycling hypothesis’ about reading. According to this idea, our brains did not evolve new structures specifically for reading, Instead, they repurposed existing neural systems, particularly those responsible for visual processing and spoken language. If so, this is not evidence of gradual evolution. It reflects adaptive efficiency. And it is exactly what what one would expect if human beings were created by God with the innate capacity for symbolic thought and communication.”
He then gives many examples of how this is borne out in the history of human development and culture, and especially how God’s Word, the Bible, and translaton work by missionaries such as Wycliffe Bible Translators, plays a significant part in demonstrating the truth of his claims. Grant concludes the article with: “Reading is not a biological accident. It is a convergence of neural structure, symbolic capacity, and spiritual significance. The design of the human brain, the emergence of writing systems, and the global impact of the Bible all tell the same story. We were made to read. We were made to read God’s Word. ‘Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy …’ (Revelation 1:3)”.
This seems to me to be the point the Psalmist is making in Psalm 115. Modern man, ‘made in the image and likeness of God’ has become very clever with AI technology, Robotic Man, etc (my grandchildren have spectacles that ‘hear’ and take photos), but we are still a long way from reproducing ‘ourselves’ from clay and wood and gold, but even if some day we do manage to achieve something like this, we are only showing that there must be a ‘Designer’ behind our brains!
– Bruce Chrisitan
