God Has Created the Beautiful World of Plants

A rain drop on a leaf

Violets, hyacinths, daisies, roses and other flowers are such sweet-smelling natural wonders. Cherries, peaches, apples, grapes, strawberries, oranges and other fruits offer their wonderful flavors and caches of vitamins. Pines, cypresses, poplars and other trees supply oxygen for living things. These are among the wonderful blessings that God has given to human beings.

Every one of these plants displays the wonders that God has created with His eternal power. They are too beautiful, have systems too complex, and provide advantages too indispensable for them to be in the least attributable to chance. This is as true for a tiny seed as for the tree that will grow from it to a height of several hundred meters.

In the Qur'an (55: 10-13), God speaks to those who claim that these beautiful things are the work of blind, unconscious processes:

He laid out the earth for all living creatures. In it are fruits and date-palms with covered spathes, and grains on leafy stems and fragrant herbs. So which of your Lord's blessings do you both then deny?

The tiny seeds you see in these pictures contain 60 times more information than in all of the Encyclopedia Britannica. When planted in the ground, the information in the seed will later turn it into a lily or a willow tree, a violet or an oak. From every seed emerges a plant different in taste, smell, color and size than every other. To imagine that such extraordinary information has come into this seed by chance is nonsense.

"Have you thought about what you cultivate? Is it you who make it germinate or are We the Germinator? If We wished We could have made it broken stubble . . . ." (Qur'an 56: 63-65)

"As for the earth, We stretched it out and cast firmly embedded mountains in it and made everything grow in due proportion on it." (Qur'an 15: 19) "And We put livelihoods in it both for you and for those you do not provide for." (Qur'an 15: 20)

"And the earth: how We stretched it out and cast firmly embedded mountains onto it and caused luxuriant plants of every kind to grow in it, an instruction and a reminder for every penitent human being." (Qur'an 50: 7-8) "We sent down cascading water from the clouds so that by it We might bring forth grains and plants and luxuriant gardens." (Qur'an 78: 14-16)

"The keys of the Unseen are in His possession. No one knows them but Him. He knows everything in the land and sea. No leaf falls without His knowing it. There is no seed in the darkness of the earth, and nothing moist or dry which is not in a Clear Book." (Qur'an 6: 59)

"He Who created the heavens and the earth and sends down water for you from the sky by which We make luxuriant gardens grow—you could never make their trees grow. . . ." (Qur'an 27: 60)

Together, black soil and a small seed can produce colorful flowers, sweet-smelling aromas and perfumed fruits. That is just one of the creative miracles of Almighty God.

Israeli biophysicist Lee M. Spetner writes:

Plants do not proliferate in a field to the point where they become crowded. They do not engage in a "struggle for existence" where natural selection would preserve the strong and destroy the weak. Plants tend to control their populations by sensing the density of the planting. When the growth is dense, plants produce less seeds; when growth is thin, they produce more seeds.11

"It is He Who produces gardens, both cultivated and wild, and palm-trees and crops of diverse kinds, and olives and pomegranates, both similar and dissimilar. . . ." (Qur'an 6: 141)

". . .He created all things and He has knowledge of all things. That is God, your Lord. There is no god but Him, the Creator of everything. So worship Him. He is responsible for everything." (Qur'an 6: 101-102)"

The diversity of plants that appeared suddenly in the fossil record put evolutionists in a great difficulty. This problem even left Darwin stunned, and he admitted as much:

Nothing is more extraordinary in the history of the Vegetable Kingdom, as it seems to me, than the apparently very sudden or abrupt development of the higher plants.12

"In the earth there are diverse regions side by side and gardens of grapes and cultivated fields, and palm-trees sharing one root and others with individual roots, all watered with the same water. And We make some things better to eat than others. There are Signs in that for people who use their intellect." (Qur'an 13: 4)

The wide variety of plants in the natural world is only one of the proofs that they are not the work of chance. The flawless systems and extraordinary design of these esthetic, sweet-smelling plants couldn't be formed by the chance agglomeration of atoms. This claim would be as nonsensical as the assertion that clothes in a store could make themselves by the accidental coming together of fabric and thread.

"Do you not see that God sends down water from the sky and then in the morning the earth is covered in green? God is All-Subtle, All-Aware." (Qur'an 22: 63) "It is He Who made the earth a cradle for you and threaded pathways for you through it and sent down water from the sky by which We have brought forth various different types of plants. Eat and pasture your cattle." (Qur'an 20: 53)

Dr. Eldred Corner of Cambridge University is forced to admit the all-too-clear fact of creation:

... I still think that, to the unprejudiced, the fossil record of plants is in favour of special creation. If, however, another explanation could be found for this hierarchy of classification, it would be the knell of the theory of evolution. Can you imagine how an orchid, a duckweed, and a palm have come from the same ancestry, and have we any evidence for this assumption? The evolutionist must be prepared with an answer, but I think that most would break down before an inquisition.13

"He laid out the earth for all living creatures. In it are fruits and date-palms with covered spathes, and grains on leafy stems and fragrant herbs." (Qur'an 55: 10)

For millions of years, the countless, varied plants on the Earth have known what they must do and when they must do it, thanks to a program stored in their seeds; and they remember this program and carry it out without error. A peach tree never grows from a cherry pit, nor does a strawberry ever come from the seed from a lemon tree. It is surely impossible for a piece of wood with no brain, eyes or intelligence to put such a perfectly working program into operation by itself. The idea that this system can have been functioning perfectly for millions of years due to the success of chance occurrences is a fantasy that all sensible people will find ridiculous. It is God Who creates plants.

"... and gardens of grapes and olives and pomegranates, both similar and dissimilar. Look at their fruits as they bear fruit and ripen. There are Signs in that for people who believe." (Qur'an 6: 99)

Dr. Lee Spetner writes: How does an acorn know it has to grow into an oak tree and not into a sunflower? . . . The science of biology took a pivotal turn about 40 years ago when biologists began to learn how information plays its role in living organisms.

We have discovered the location of the information in the organism that tells it how to function and how to grow, how to live and how to reproduce. The information is in the seed as well as in the plant; it's in the egg as well as in the chicken. The egg passes the information to the chicken it becomes, and the chicken passes it to the egg it lays, and so on.14

"God is He Who splits the seed and kernel. He brings forth the living from the dead, and produces the dead out of the living. That is God, so how are you perverted?" (Qur'an 6: 95) "Do you not see that God sends down water from the sky and by it We bring forth fruits of varying colors?" (Qur'an 35: 27)

The Prophet, peace be upon him, says: God is beautiful and loves beauty…15

Even a rose, whose smell has not changed for millions of years and whose variously colored smooth petals give it a beautiful esthetic appearance, disproves the evolutionists' claims. For years, trained experts have tried in experiments to duplicate the smell of a rose in the laboratory. But a rose, with more "intelligence" than the experts, has been producing this incomparable scent for millions of years.

A rose's special smell, color, softness and wondrous design show God's incomparable creative artistry.

All the plants have the structure that is most appropriate for each one. For example, the seeds of a coconut palm float in the water—even seawater—for long periods of time; for this reason, their shells are very hard and have a special composition to protect them from the water. Because of this, they can make long journeys over water—downstream, even from island to island.

Over the course of this journey, they need more nourishment to sustain them, and within their shells is stored just the kind of nourishment they require.

Moreover, the coconut does not germinate while in the water; instead, it waits until it reaches the land and germinates at that exactly appropriate time.

Unconscious atoms cannot calculate all this by chance! The evident truth is, an All-knowing and intelligent Creator is behind this design. This is just one of the many examples of God's incomparable creative art.

When various atoms come together within a plant, they form complex molecules that produce their beautiful smells. And for plants all over the world, this process is the same. If there were the slightest variation in these compounds, for instance; if there were a difference in the atomic number of one atom, either the scent would completely change or be destroyed. But the formula never fails; the smell production laboratory in the plant never makes a mistake. Thanks to this ongoing perfection, flowers of the same species everywhere have the identically same smell.

The production of a scent is a very delicate matter, in the course of which molecules are assembled with very complex structures. For example, it requires between three and ten different compounds to produce the scent of a rose. A water lily uses six, and white freesia uses ten; and every plant uses a different chemical formula for its distinctive aroma. Anyone who has received no training in this field would find it difficult, if not impossible to understand these chemical formulas, which plants produce in areas that can be seen only with a microscope. Human experts work for years to produce varied and beautiful scents such as these.

Who gives these plants their awareness, their intelligence, the knowledge that only a chemical engineer could have? These organisms, more successful in producing scents than any laboratory, reveal God's artistry in creation for

As Niles Eldredge, a well-known paleontologist and curator of the American Museum of Natural History, writes,

Indeed, the only competing explanation for the order we all see in the biological world is the notion of Special Creation.16

God's Messenger, the Prophet (peace be upon him) says: Use olive oil as a food and ointment for it comes from a blessed tree.17

Bananas contain various carbohydrates and an important quantity of potassium which, when eaten by humans, ensure the development of cells and muscles, adjust the level of water in the body, and keep the heart beating normally. Together with these advantages, God tells in the Qur'an (56:28-33) that bananas are among the fruits of paradise: "Amid thornless lote-trees, and banana-trees [with fruits], one above another. And extended shade, and water flowing constantly, and abundant fruit, neither intercepted nor forbidden." Like all other blessings, the bananas in Paradise will surely be perfect compared with those on Earth. But in this world, God has created something similar to the blessings of Paradise to benefit human beings.

". . . Those you worship besides God have no power to provide for you. So seek your provision from God and worship Him and give thanks to Him. It is to Him you will be returned." (Qur'an 29: 17)

Evolutionists cannot bring about even a single pea! If the most famous scientists in the world—including all those who have ever lived—were to gather together and spend years using the world's newest and most advanced technology, try as they might, never would they be able to produce a single pea. They couldn't originate even one of the single cells that make up a pea. This is one of the most important points that evolutionists ignore: It is God, the Lord of the Worlds, Who has created everything from nothing.