Miraculous Achievements

 

I often pass by two young Palm trees as I go to the Mall and admire their leaf structure but other than that I have taken them for granted as most people do. However, last week the gardener decided to remove one of them so chopped all its leaves off and cut its top off. Looking at that doomed tree I realised that there was more to it than I had considered before.

When those leaves emerge from the stem of the tree they are remarkably folded. If you look closely at what looks at first glance to be a fairly solid block of wood in the centre of the tree stump (beside the unfolding leaf) you will find that it is nothing but tightly folded leaves and as they open look at how beautifully they were folded (somewhat like a Chinese fan or a concertina). Now we know that those Chinese fans are designed and folded by very artistic people with considerable ability and on a table, or similar, where they can see what they are doing. Anyone can tell you that a fan cannot design and fold itself inside a cupboard, out of sight; such work takes know how and brains. See all those very tightly folded leaves in the main stem there, well they were folded in the dark, out of sight. What a neat trick!

Incredibly there are people who claim that trees like this, designed and folded their leaves themselves without brains or know how. Now that would take a lot of explaining. I prefer to believe the Bible when it records that God designed all these things and programmed them to do what they do. What people believe is their business of course, but children should be encouraged to recognise God’s remarkable designs in the world around them and look to the bible for answers e.g. where God says that He made everything and it was “Very  good”.  Now just look at this photo I took in our back yard of Milk Thistle seeds attached to their “parachutes” just waiting for a gust of wind to carry them away and deposit them in a new field. What a remarkable God we have who can conceive such a unique method of spreading seeds and then program a plant to do it.

At first glance this seems very simple but it is so complex it is more than our minds can fully comprehend: each of those seeds is no bigger than a pinhead and yet in effect it is a super microchip, as it contains all the information necessary to develop a new thistle plant and “instruct” it to draw on the soil where it has been deposited and gather moisture chemicals and pigment and convert those items into a dark green stem and leaves and develop bright yellow flowers with pollen to attract insects. Those insects will then fertilise the flowers so that more seeds can be formed and programmed to continue the species. Each plant is therefore a Science laboratory in itself and seeing the plant has no brains we have just got to give God the credit. Talking of giving God the credit; how about this daisy, it grows in very ordinary soil in our yard

where there are no obvious colours and yet its roots suck up the necessary ingredients to make these colours and the plant places them in their right order. But if that wasn’t difficult enough, it does it whilst the flower is folded up in the bud! And the flower is not just a pretty face either: it is the plants reproductive mechanism with its centre being laced with pollen and whatever is necessary to attract insects that will fertilise the seed pod behind it. Now all this is so well thought out that we would expect the plant to have a Science degree in Plant Genetics, if not, it must be that God programmed the plant to do all that. Which is what the Bible tells us. The public schools teach children that these just evolved by accident. How ridiculous and what a direct insult to our Almighty God.        Some more food for thought. Best wishes, Tom.