CREATION PROCLAIMS GOD’S GLORY NOT CHANCE’S GLORY

I am awed by the world – its intricate and harmonious dance among its parts, its beauty and functionality, and how it seems to have been designed with us in mind. If I was instead a naturalist/materialist who believed it all just happened naturally, I don’t think that I would be quite so awed. Chance provides little basis for awe, even less for praise.  Instead, the Creator is a more worthy candidate, who evidently had us in mind when He created and gave us the ability to enjoy and to understand His creation. Even science points beyond itself and the material world to the One who created it and sustains its laws in a predictable manner, enabling understanding.

Trees are more awesome than you might have imagined. They are able communicate intricately, even magically. In his forward to The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, Tim Flannery has written:

·       Trees also use the senses of smell and taste for communication. If a giraffe starts eating an African acacia, the tree releases a chemical into the air that signals that a threat is at hand. As the chemical drifts through the air and reaches other trees, they “smell” it and are warned of the danger. Even before the giraffe reaches them, they begin producing toxic chemicals. Insect pests are dealt with slightly differently. The saliva of leaf-eating insects can be “tasted” by the leaf being eaten. In response, the tree sends out a chemical signal that attracts predators that feed on that particular leaf-eating insect.

Life itself is a precisely choreographed dance among many essential and irreducibly-complex systems, like the transportative, digestive, eliminative, reproductive, restorative, perceptual, and respiratory systems. However, the abilities of trees are even more amazing and confounding. The African acacia has to perceive a threat, interpret it accurately, and respond appropriately, but it doesn’t stop there. It communicates to its fellow acacias by sending to them just the right communication, an air-born chemical, which other acacias must decipher and act upon.

Therefore, Flannery concludes that trees are social creatures, even “compassionate” creatures:

·       But the most astonishing thing about trees is how social they are. The trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive. Only some stumps are thus nourished. Perhaps they are the parents of the trees that make up the forest of today.

The “intelligence” and “cunning” of trees goes much further, according to Wohlleben:

·       When it comes to some species of insects, trees can accurately identify which bad guys they are up against. The saliva of each species is different, and trees can match the saliva to the insect. Indeed, the match can be so precise that trees can release pheromones that summon specific beneficial predators. The beneficial predators help trees by eagerly devouring the insects that are bothering them. For example, elms and pines call on small parasitic wasps that lay their eggs inside leaf-eating caterpillars.

In order for the trees to protect themselves against their predators, so many complex systems have to be in place all at once. Michael Behe called this “irreducible complexity” (IC), which points to the fact that if just one item is taken out of this extensive equation, the trees are left defenseless.

How does evolution explain the ubiquitous examples of IC? It doesn’t. While random mutation and natural selection can account for some adaptive modifications, these are all evolutionary dead-ends. This is because these modifications result in a loss of information, the corruption of the genome. For example a loss-of-function mutation which degrades a single amino acid component of hemoglobin inhibits the growth of malaria, but cannot lead to any subsequent positive developments. In Darwin Devolves, Behe concluded:

·       The large majority of mutations are degradatory, meaning they’re mutations in which the gene is broken or blunted. Genetic information has been lost, not gained.

·       Sometimes the degradation helps an organism survive. (Terrell Clemmons, Salvo Magazine, Summer 2019, 16)

All of this leaves us to wonder, “How much more evidence of the awesomeness of creation and the failures of Darwin’s theory will lead the evolutionist admit out-loud, ‘We need a new theory?’” It’s already happening!