Divine Teaching And Directing

This article covers the relationship between Divine Teaching and Directing.

For a man to direct himself in life and distinguish between what is good or bad for him needs a minimum of around fifteen years. However, many animals can do this very soon after they come into the world. A duckling, for example, can swim as soon as it hatches. Ants start to dig nests into the earth when they get out of their cocoons. It does not need a long time for bees and spiders to learn how to make their honeycombs and webs respectively, which are each marvel of handiwork beyond the capacity of man. Who teaches young eels born in the waters of Europe to find their way to their home in the Pacific? Is the migration of birds not still a mystery for man?

How can you explain all these astounding facts other than by attributing them to the teaching or directing of one who knows everything and has arranged the universe with all creatures in it in a way that enables every creature, big or small, to direct its life?

Robins

Amazing facts from the lives of animals

The robin that nested at your door goes south in the fall, but comes back to his old nest the next spring. In September, flocks of most of our birds fly south, often over a thousand miles of Open Ocean, but they do not lose their way. The homing pigeon confused by new sounds on a long journey in a closed box, circles for a moment and then heads almost unerringly for home. The bee finds its hive while the wind waving the grasses and trees blot out every visible guide to its whereabouts. This homing sense is slightly developed in man, but he supplements his meager equipment with instruments of navigation. The tiny insects must have microscopic eyes, how perfect we do not know, and the hawks, the eagle and the condor must have telescopic vision. Here again man surpasses them with his mechanical instruments.

If you let old Dobbin alone he will keep to the road in the blackest night. The owl can see the nice warm mouse as he runs in the cooler grass in the blackest night.

The ordinary scallop whose muscle we eat has several dozen beautiful eyes very like ours, which sparkle because each eye has unnumbered little reflectors which are said to enable it to see things right side up. These reflectors are not found in the human eye. Were these reflectors developed because of the absence of superior brainpower in the scallop? As the number of eyes in animals ranges from two to thousands, and all are different, Nature would have had a big job in developing the science of optics unless [God, the All-Knowing, the All-Determining and the All-Powerful had predestined, predetermined, everything].

The honeybee is not attracted by the gaudy flowers as we see them, but sees by the ultra-violet light, which may make them even more beautiful to bees. From the rays of slower vibrations to the photographic plate and beyond are realms of beauty, joy and inspiration. The honeybee workers make chambers of different sizes in the comb used for breeding. Small chambers are constructed for the workers, larger ones for the drones, and special chambers for the prospective queens. The queen bee lays unfertilized eggs in the cells designed for males, but lays fertilized eggs in the proper chambers for the male workers and the possible queens. The workers, who are the modified females, having long since anticipated the coming of the new generation, are also prepared to furnish food for the young bees by chewing and predigesting honey and pollen. They discontinue the process of chewing, including the predigesting, at a certain stage of development of the males and females, and feed only honey and pollen. The females so treated become the workers.

Honey bee

The dog with an inquiring nose can sense the animal that has passed. No instrument of human invention has added to our inferior sense of smell, and we hardly know where to begin to investigate its extension.

All animals hear sounds, many of which are outside our range of vibration, with an acuteness that far surpasses our limited sense of hearing.

The young salmon spends years at sea, then comes back to his own river, and, what is more, he travels up the side of the river into which flows the tributary in which he was born. If a salmon going up a river is transferred to another tributary he will fight his way down to the main stream and then turn up against the current to finish his destiny. There is, however, a much more difficult problem in the exact reverse to solve in the case of the eel. These amazing creatures migrate at maturity from all the ponds and rivers everywhere—those from Europe across thousands of miles of ocean—all go to the abysmal deeps south of Bermuda. There they breed and die. The little ones, with no apparent means of knowing anything except that they are in a wilderness of water, start back and find their way to the shore from which their parents came and thence to every river, lake and little pond, so that each body of water is always populated with eels.

Animals seem to have telepathy. Who has not watched with admiration the sandpiper flying and wheeling till every white breast shows in the sunlight at the same instant? A female moth placed in your attic by the open window will send out some subtle signal. Over an unbelievable area, the male moths of the same species will watch the message and respond in spite of your attempts to produce laboratory odors to disconcert them.

Vegetation makes subtle use of involuntary agents to carry on its existence—insects to carry pollen from flower to flower and the winds and everything that flies or walks to distribute seed. At last, vegetation has trapped masterful man. He has improved nature and she generously rewards him. But he has multiplied so prodigiously that he is now chained to the plow. He must sow, reap, and store; breed and crossbreed; prune and graft. Should he neglect these chores starvation would be his lot, civilization would crumble, and earth return to her pristine state’ (Morrison, 49-57).

Are all these habits or distinctive ‘instinctive’ acts, which must have their origin deep at the beginning of life on earth, the result of chance or of an intelligent provision? Should we reflect on why certain animals are more developed than man in having certain faculties? Among all living creatures that have roamed the earth none has a record of reasoning power, which may compare with that of man. What we call nature is utterly blind, senseless, unconscious and ignorant. Man, who is the only intelligent being on the earth, can do nothing other than to try to explain all these miraculous phenomena and he has no control over his own body even. Does all this not display a supreme determination, all-encompassing knowledge, and an absolute power and thereby One Who has these?

By Dr. Ali Unal