A Tangled Web

I spent my sec­ond break at work today upstairs in the bike assem­bly area with my good friend Steve C. I often go up there to talk to him on breaks about world events, our Lord, etc, and I have always found it amaz­ing that though there is a twen­ty year age dif­fer­ence and quite a bit of dif­fer­ence in our inter­ests, we have become great friends because of our mutu­al faith. What uni­ty Christ brings!

That isn’t why I’m writ­ing now, though. Today on break, we spent sev­er­al min­utes stand­ing, star­ing up at the ceil­ing just about where the wall meets it, watch­ing a spi­der (a dad­dy long-legs type) in its web wrap­ping up and trans­port­ing a cap­tured fly.

Some­thing so small and seem­ing­ly insignif­i­cant, but we let it amaze us. The intri­ca­cies of the spi­der’s move­ment while wrap­ping up the fly, the attempts to loose the fly from the main web to trans­port it, and final­ly car­ry­ing the fly by a strand of web­bing up into a dark­er area… Did instinct dri­ve it? Or is there intel­li­gence there? It sure looked like the spi­der was apply­ing prob­lem solv­ing with detach­ing the fly. Once it even appeared to be check­ing for any more web it may have missed by pass­ing its leg mul­ti­ple times between the web and the fly.

A few feet away and in much more light, anoth­er spi­der of the same kind had woven a web about a foot and a half across, which had us think­ing about just how per­fect­ly a spi­der was suit­ed to such work, that if the web was scaled up to human pro­por­tions we could mere­ly twist and bend it, but not break it with­out tools.

The beau­ty of the spi­ders and their web reaf­firmed our belief in a Cre­ator. Which would have evolved first? The abil­i­ty to pro­duce web, the instinct to spin a web, or the legs which are unaf­fect­ed by the web? Hav­ing just two of them is rather point­less, and to have all three show up at the same time to make web spin­ning plau­si­ble seems impossible.

For since the cre­ation of the world His invis­i­ble attrib­ut­es are clear­ly seen, being under­stood by the things that are made, even His eter­nal pow­er and God­head, so that they are with­out excuse. Romans 1:20, NKJV