The Hearing Ear - Proverbs 20:12, part 2

The hearing ear and the seeing eye, The LORD has made both of them.
​Proverbs 20:12

Yesterday we looked for a few moments at the seeing eye.  We learned how the eye points us to God - a God who created us by His infinite wisdom and understanding.  Today, we want to take a look at the human ear - and see how God again reveals His power, glory, and amazing work through it.  It is my belief that these two organs alone should bring evolutionists to their knees in wonder and awe at what God made.  But since this issue is not about proof, but about an unwillingness to acknowledge, thank, and submit to God, I do not think that the world of evolutionists will be abandoning their incredible faith in their pseudo-science to turn to God any time soon.

One of the first things we should know about our ears is that they do far more than just hear things.  They are our source of equilibrium - and what allows us to walk upright.  Without our ears we would greatly lack balance and would not be able to stand or sit without losing our balance and falling to the ground.

What is truly amazing about our ears is that they consist of three different parts - each with their own function in hearing and equilibrium.  These parts of the ear first focus sound into a canal which operates by the way the air is bounced around by sound waves.  Once inside the ear though, these air and sound waves hit our tympanic membrane - which most of you know as the ear drum.  This is where the sound waves are turned from an air phenomena to a water-based impulse.  Once the sound waves hit this drum - the waves produced by it work through three of the smallest bones and muscles in the entire human body.  These three bones take these waves and interpret them, amplify them, and at times decrease them to where they can be passed on to a liquid medium where the sound will continue to be processed.  This liquid medium is then moved through a circular canal filled with what looks like little tiny hairs.  These hairs take the disturbance of the water in the middle ear and translate it into the various aspects of sound.  Pitch, loudness, quality are all detected as the waves move through the watery canal - and even things like distance and direction are detected as well.  These little hairs take these waves and code them into electrical impulses that are then sent along the auditory nerve into the brain.  The reason we have two ears is that this allows us to hear in stereo - which in turn helps us deal with direction and distance of sounds that come to us.  As all this is coded specially so that the brain can then interpret all these codes and allow us to know what is being heard.

What is truly astounding is how sensitive our ears are to sound.  Our ears can hear a mosquito buzzing - which I realize to many of us is not that much of a blessing.  But when you understand that a mosquito buzzes at a level of one quadrahonth of a watt - it is amazing that we can detect that sound at all.  One quadrahonth of a watt is 1/100 quadrillionth of the amount of power it takes to light up a reading lamp - yet with only that much power behind it, we can still hear this sound.  The ability of our ears to detect different pitches is also astounding.  The piano has over 100 keys on it, each representing a particular pitch, but the human ear has the ability in between each of these pitches to have multiple other pitches it can receive.  The sensitivity of the human ear to do this is amazing to a degree almost beyond comprehension. 

The human ear takes energy in the form of sound waves and then translates it into mechanical energy as the sound waves are collected by the outer ear, moved into the ear cavity, and then strike the tympanic membrane.  They are now no longer sound wave energy, but mechanical energy.  As this mechanical energy moves through those tiny bones and muscles, it is translated into hydraulic energy in the liquid within the middle ear.  This hydraulic energy is then moved through the circular cave of the ear where the little hairs are located.  At this point the hydraulic energy of sound is translated by these little hairs into electrical energy over 30,000 neurons which make up the auditory nerve. Coded into electrical energy - they now move over the cable system of the auditory nerve which then carries these codes into the brain where they are decoded and we experience sound. 

To think this all happened by chance is the height of both arrogance and foolishness. Engineers who have looked at this incredibly complex system marvel at its precision and astounding abilities.  What is even more incredible is that we havn't even touched upon the wax system within the ear which deals with impurities - or the way that equilibrium is maintained through the water helping us balance and walk upright - or any of the chemical reactions that have to take place in order for us to translate things in from the hydraulic to the electrical phase of hearing.  These would honestly blow our minds if we tried to take the time necessary to understand them.  What is truly astounding is that some refuse to see a designer in all this - only random, accidental happenstance. 

Once  again the human ear blows our minds - and shows us the creativity of God as well as His ability to design systems which baffle engineers today.  What we should come away with here is the realization that indeed God did create the seeing eye and the hearing ear.  For those of us who are wise enough to see and hear such things from God - there is an aspect of worship that should come from such knowledge.