A few days ago I shared about the true origins of flight. I mentioned that all great and intelligent inventions come from God. This triggered an interesting intellectual discussion in my aviation network of friends and a new issue was raised.
My friends and I went on to talk about how modern airplanes use sophisticated GPS (Global Positioning Systems) to navigate to their destinations. A pilot just programs the GPS receiver in the airplane and it will calculate accurate way points to the destination. In a few seconds it computes the time it will take you to reach your destination and can also tell you your exact position on the screen. Can you imagine the complexity of the mathematics behind the GPS?
Although it was originally developed for military use by its inventors, Professors Bradford Parkinson and Ivan Getting in the late 1960s, the GPS was later made available to the public, becoming fully operational in 1996. But was it the first automatic navigation system? This is the question I asked my friends and I ask you the same. Think about it. None of my friends could answer that question.
Anyway to cut the story short, do you know that the Prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah foresaw the marvel of the GPS over 2500 years ago? Actually, do you know that God programmed animals with a system that is more complicated than a GPS, millions of years before Professors Bradford Parkinson and Ivan Getting ‘discovered’ the GPS?
Jeremiah 8:7 says “Truly, the stork in the heavens is conscious of her fixed times; the dove and the swallow and the crane keep to the times of their coming; but my people have no knowledge of the law of the Lord”
Whereas our automatic navigation devices may depend totally on satellites, many animals seem to be able to use various navigation methods – from observing landmarks and the sun to detect magnetic fields, distinctive smells and even sounds. This is what the Prophet mentions when he is talking about the migrating stork in the preceding verse. Isn’t God the creator amazing? Today people still marvel at creatures that migrate such as salmon, which can swim thousands of miles in the ocean and return to the stream where they were born.
Some creatures can ‘home’, a skill even more remarkable than the navigation systems of complex jets. For example Investigators took 18 albatross by plane from a small island in the center of the Pacific Ocean to several locations thousands of miles away and released them-some near the Western rim of the ocean and others near the Eastern rim. Within a few weeks, most of the birds had returned home. The birds used their ‘inbuilt GPS technology’ to fly back home.
Pigeons have been transported more than 100 miles to unfamiliar places while under deep anesthesia or in rotating drums, yet after circling a few times, they calculated their position and turned accurately toward home. Our God is indescribable, unfathomable and way more intelligent than any invention man has ever made. Isn’t He amazing?
