“I am a worm and not a man,” David writes in Psalm 22:6. But which worm did he have in mind?

In this episode of Stars, Cells, and God, Fazale “Fuz” Rana and Hugh Ross explore a discovery from a Judean Desert. Cave researchers discovered a wool fragment about two centimeters across, dyed with kermes—the scarlet dye the ancient world produced from a scale insect known as the crimson worm. The find provides physical evidence for a dye the Old Testament connects to the tabernacle, the priests’ garments, and rites of cleansing—long before David wrote his psalm.

Fuz and Hugh explain why biblical archaeology matters, how Psalm 22 foreshadows the crucifixion, why death and life are interwoven throughout creation, and how fulfilled prophecy points to the Bible’s reliability.

In this episode, they also discuss:

• How archaeologists identified a 3,800-year-old red dye
• What the Bible’s “scarlet worm” meant to ancient readers
• How Psalm 22 describes Jesus’s crucifixion in remarkable detail
• Why David’s word for “worm” matters
• How life through death runs through creation and the gospel

RESOURCES:

Read the paper discussed in the episode HERE

DIG DEEPER:

• 10 Prophecies of Jesus’s Birth in the Old Testament:
• Was Jesus a Real Person?
• Fulfilled Prophecy: Evidence for the Reliability of the Bible
• Spotlight on Fulfilled Prophecy
• Are Scientific Predictions Like Biblical Prophecy?

For a billion years, life on Earth survived without the one process it can no longer live without. The moment that changed might be the clearest evidence yet that we’re not here by accident.

In this episode, Hugh Ross and Fazale “Fuz” Rana explore a discovery published in Science Advances that raises a fascinating question: Was the emergence of biological nitrogen fixation simply the result of natural processes, or does its timing point to something more?

In this episode we discuss:

• The dramatic rise in the abundance and diversity of life
• The transition from prokaryotes to complex eukaryotic life
• The “hard steps” that had to occur for humanity to appear eventually
• Why nitrogen fixation represents such an extraordinary biological challenge for evolution
• Skeptical objections and alternative explanations
• What Psalm 104 reveals about God’s purposes in creation
• How Earth’s history reveals not only God’s power but also his profound care and love for humanity

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📄 The Science Advances paper discussed in this episode: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aec4450

🌐 Nitrogen Fixation Processes https://reasons.org/creation/earth/nitrogen-fixation-processes

Get Hugh & Fuz’s book Origins of Life HERE: https://support.reasons.org/purchase/origins-of-life

A small army of PhD scientists spent 17 years building a protein motor that limps 11 steps down a DNA strand. Your cells build billions of motors—perfectly, instantly, with no research budget. Coincidence, or design?

Astronomer Hugh Ross and biochemist Fazale “Fuz” Rana unpack a Nature Nanotechnology study from Lund University, where a synthetic protein “walking machine” called Tumbleweed was engineered from scratch to move along DNA. They break down how it works—and why it makes a compelling case for a Creator.

In this episode we discuss:

• How Tumbleweed was built, and why it needed a precisely timed chemical wash just to wobble 11 steps
• Why AI (AlphaFold) was needed to do what natural motors do flawlessly on their own
• Why this experiment weakens the “evolution cobbled it together” argument
• What it means to be made in God’s image, and why humans alone do science
• What this discovery means for the biblical case for a Creator
• The future of nanotech medicine

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📄 The paper discussed in this episode: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-026-02211-3

📖 The Cell’s Design: How Chemistry Reveals the Creator’s Artistry https://support.reasons.org/purchase/the-cells-design

📖 Creating Life in the Lab: How New Discoveries in Synthetic Biology Make a Case for the Creator https://support.reasons.org/purchase/creating-life-in-the-lab