Last week I bought a hyacinth plant for my wife. It was still in bud at the time, and we couldn’t tell what colour the blooms would be. This morning she showed me, with great delight, that the buds were beginning to blossom into deliciously fragrant tiny white flowers.
Have you ever considered the amazing complexity of a flowering plant? The visual design alone is astounding. Our hyacinth boasts dozens of tightly-clustered blossoms, each one a tiny flower in its own right. Looking a little deeper, the reproductive system of a flowering plant – pistils, stamens, pollen – is both delicate and elegant. And that’s not to mention the myriad of interdependent systems and sub-systems which cannot be seen by the naked eye, but which are all required in order for the plant to function. Each cell in even the simplest living thing is incredibly complex. And of course each of these marvels of engineering depends on the design built in to the chemical molecules that allow it to function. The molecules, in turn, depend on the consistency of design of their constituent atoms. Digging a little deeper, we get into atomic structure and sub-atomic particles, and again we have amazing mysteries of complex design. All this so that a simple flower can bloom!
Small children sometimes like to play with magnetized plastic letters and form words out of them. Suppose I had a collection of several hundred of these plastic letters, and I painstakingly picked out just the right ones to create the text of this blog post, mixed them in a bucket, and dumped them out. How likely is it that the letters would have arranged themselves into the words, sentences and paragraphs in this article?
We all know, of course, that this is extremely unlikely. Probability theory shows that if a monkey were trained to type randomly on a keyboard, it would take about 113 billion years for the 23rd Psalm to emerge. Astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, himself not a Christian, ridiculed the idea that the operating system of a living cell could be arrived at by chance, calling it nonsense of a high order.
Yet evolutionists would have us believe that this is the way flowers – or people, for that matter – came into existence. This conviction defies all logic, and cannot be proven (after all, no contemporary scientist was there to observe evolution from goo to you) but that’s what they believe. The only kind of evolution that is observeable is natural selection within already-existing information (such as happens in breeding different strains of corn, for example). No new information ever gets created in this process; what happens is that the existing information is selected in particular ways to achieve a particular result, under the influence of either the breeder or (in nature) the natural environment. But the very fact that natural selection works at all is actually further evidence for the amazing amount of intelligence built into the DNA of every living thing.
Of course, my wife’s lovely hyacinth did not come directly from the hand of God – it was produced by the labours of horticulturists. But who created the amazingly well-ordered systems that allow these horticulturists to do their work? Although I used to be among those who do not believe, I am more grateful than words can express to my God who opened my eyes and showed me His goodness in Creation, and supremely in Jesus, the Word made flesh. I am now proud to say that no matter what popular opinion maintains, I know without any doubt that the hyacinth can only exist because an amazingly good Creator made it possible. Nothing else makes any sense.
