Part 1 of 4 –The Taxonomy of Life
When I was in high school, I worked for the summer at the Gulf Research Lab in Ocean Springs, MS. The outcome of that work was a paper entitled, "A Taxonomic Key to the Marine Plankton Diatoms of the Mississippi Sound." Why would anyone care about this little paper by a kid in high school? Well, taxonomy is the means of classification based on shared features for groups of creatures. These millions of tiny one-celled creatures were important to commercial fisherman.
You'll find the fish you want to eat hanging out eating the plankton lunch they prefer! BTW, the tiny phytoplankton in our oceans produce about half of the world's oxygen with the other half produced by trees, etc. on land. This important work is reserved for plankton.
I learned deep things while pulling that plankton net through the water and designing the taxonomic key to the identification of these beautiful little single-cell plants. Mainly, God drilled into me that He was indeed the Creator. There was no way that chance could produce what I was seeing with my own eyes. He designed it. He did it for a purpose. The variety, engineering, intricacy, and beauty of each little diatom was the result of His imagination and generosity. Each little diatom had a role to play in the world, a job to do that it's design was imminently suited to do.
Taxonomy can act as a metaphor for classification that works in other aspects of life. Before we are done with this 4-part blog, we'll build that taxonomy. My philosophy of effective ministry derived from the truths I learned about HOW God makes things and the Taxonomy of Life demonstrated in His world and His Word.
Taxonomy of Life Principle #1: God makes things according to their kind. (Genesis 1: 11-12, 21-25)
Diatoms, babies, and chipmunks do not start life as one thing and end up another. Nope. DNA, God's grand internal code for "kind," provides a blueprint to make an adult chipmunk out of a couple of little chipmunk cells, just as a baby is made from a couple of human cells. It's in the plan.
Because "kind" is in the plan, we can observe creatures (now even at the DNA level) and be pretty certain that the description of similarities and differences in creatures is a reliable way of defining a kind. Not only that, but, because kind is true, we can realize pretty quickly the purpose for that kind of life. The purpose of diatoms in creating oxygen is just as vital to the earth as it was when the first diatom was created. Had diatoms not been created, the world as we know it could not exist. The diatom kind has a critical purpose.
Taxonomy of Life Principle #2: All created things have a purpose.
Now, think about bees. If we don't have bees we won't have most of the food in the world, because without bees to pollinate them many food plants soon become extinct! We'd have to have an enormous army of people with little brushes running around performing bee work! So bees are meant to pollinate plants so plants can reproduce. It's in the nature of a bee to do it – because they were created for the purpose.
Darwinists have a different view. They think, but cannot prove, that purpose is something that somehow evolves as a creature develops the capacity to do in the course of adaptation to an environment. The crazy thing about believing that is that all the earliest creatures would have died while bumbling around un-adapted to the environment. How did they do that and leave no evidence behind? This is a seriously reductionist view to believe that human life in all its complexity is the result of purely random events. It seems so much more logical to recognize that hands were built from the start for purpose! Purpose becomes even more evident as intricate designs emerge – design is for purpose – and design requires a creative intelligence.
Darwinists want us to believe in a personified "Nature" to whom they ascribe characteristics of a mind -- but it is a random, aimless god of theirs who has to make a gazillion guesses because there is no plan.
Taxonomy shows us, however, that creatures of a kind are similar and if a creature of a kind did migrate up from water to land, it was absolutely created to migrate or it could not have been done.
Because purpose is built in, if we can discover what purpose suits a kind, and what kind suits a purpose, we can reach some meaningful conclusions about life on purpose! Biologists do it every day.
Taxonomy of Life Principle #3: Kind and purpose help define identity.
Once we know we are a human, If the purpose for our kind can be determined, then one might have a clue about one's identity.
If identity and purpose are known, we have a head start on success in life because we would be doing the thing that we were created to do. So we'll think more about the Taxonomy of Spirit in Part 2.
(Part 2 Coming Soon)
