Where Did the Elephant Get Its Trunk?

Genesis 1:24
“And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.”

On a previous Creation Moments program, we told you about the elephant’s trunk with its 40,000 muscles. This is 70 times the number of muscles in your entire body! And that amazing trunk can bulldoze a tree or pick up a pin.

Where Did the Elephant Get Its Trunk? But why does an elephant have a trunk in the first place? For the answer to that question, we looked in a very old book called Natural Theology. It was written by William Paley in 1802. Yes, that’s the same William Paley who came up with the famous analogy of a person who finds a watch and deduces that the watch must have had a watchmaker.

According to Paley, “The short unbending neck of the elephant is compensated by the length and flexibility of his proboscis,” or trunk. “He could not have reached the ground without it.” In other words, the elephant needed such a trunk to reach food and water. But, then, a person could ask why does the elephant have such a short and unbending neck? Paley answers that he needed such a neck to support such a heavy head!

Obviously, the elephant was given its trunk by a very wise Creator. As Paley so well pointed out, if the elephant had waited millions of years for his trunk to grow, “how was the animal to subsist in the meantime… until the prolongation of its snout was completed?” It is a question that evolutionists today are still unable to answer.

Prayer: Heavenly Father, thank You that even the elephant’s trunk provides a witness to Your hand in creation! In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

Author: Steven J. Schwartz
Ref: William Paley, DD, Natural Theology, 1809, p. 140. (The Works of William Paley, Ward Lock & Co.)