I just came back from feeding my chickens and gathering the eggs. Only one egg today from seven hens! That's not a very high percentage of productivity. The hens must realize they're only a hobby and that I'm not all that serious or concerned about what they do. Then again maybe it's the cold weather. I'm thinking of threatening them with an invitation to a chicken dinner unless they supply me with eggs for breakfast!

In your letter I received today you make a good point. I realize that those who believe everything came into existence without any God believe that life evolved ever so slowly from basic building blocks of life that randomly came together in very simple and rudimentary forms of life.

There are a lot of scientists, however, who find that this idea doesn't make sense. They believe that some of the basic building blocks of life, such as DNA or even a single replicating molecule, are far too complex to have come into being by evolving from something even simpler.

Do you have a mousetrap in your house? It doesn't matter. Just picture one, OK? I came across an argument for the existence of a Creator that uses a mousetrap to make the point. It was developed by a university biochemist named Michael Behe. He calls the mousetrap -- now get this -- "an irreducibly complex mechanism." Exactly what does that mean?

The mousetrap consists of five parts: a base, a spring, a hammer, a latch, and a bait holder. You need all five parts to catch a mouse. You can't catch a few mice with the base, a few more when you add a spring, a few more yet when you add the latch, more yet when a hammer is attached, and still more when you finally add the bait holder. It just doesn't work that way. The mousetrap doesn't work without all five parts.

This scientist, Dr. Behe, says that many things in nature are irreducibly complex. That means you need all of the parts in fully developed form in order for the thing to function. I was reading that one day Behe and a fellow biochemist were discussing the minimum systems necessary for life to have started by chance from some kind of chemical soup. It became obvious to them that it would have required too many systems to have all come together already fully developed. His firm belief is that it simply couldn't have happened. That makes sense to me. When science takes us into small places like cells, DNA strands, and molecules, we find them to be irreducibly complex parts and in the finding I believe we see evidence of a creator God at work.

All of this talk about mousetraps reminds me that we have one set in our furnace area. I'd better check it out to see if those five irreducibly complex parts caught anything!

A fellow seeker after truth,

Dave