Corn and the Hand of God

Genesis 1

11 Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so.12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

So having recently moved to a smaller town in Nebraska, I can attest that the name Cornhuskers is a good mascot for the University of Nebraska. Right now the corn and the beans look fantastic, and as everywhere I go, I see full fields (even right next to the church building), I am reminded how fruitful the earth is and how faithful God is.

This got me thinking about a scientific principle called the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that in a closed system entropy increases. This means that in any system where there are no inputs, things tend to decay or get less orderly.

We see this in ghost towns and abandon houses. Left to themselves things run down. Now the earth is not a closed system because we regularly get an infusion of energy from our sun, but for energy to help a system, you have to a mechanism in the system that can turn that energy into something useful. Random energy increases disorder instead of building up the system.

For instance, electric energy added by a wire to a house that has outlets becomes useful energy. Electric energy added to a house by means of a lightning strike burns the house down.

Now here is where the cornfields help me see evidence of God's hand. I was thinking how much obvious growth had happened over just a space of a few weeks. It is incredible the amount of biological material that is added to the earth in just a month or two. The sun adds energy, which in some circumstances can be destructive (think sunburn or a desert), but with the miracle of photosynthesis, that energy instead is added along with water and minerals and becomes billions of plants. Now this can only happen if a mechanism is already in place to make use of that energy.  Photosynthesis is that biological mechanism, and that mechanism is governed by the information system in the DNA of the plants. But where did the information come from?

Do we, in any other system, see information that springs from nature alone? No, in fact, nature left to itself and following the second law of thermodynamics is observed all the time tearing things apart, not becoming more complicated with more information. The only time nature builds up is when the mechanism is already in place. Nature and random chance do not create the mechanism or create new information.

The information to make use of the sun's energy had to come from somewhere, and it did not come from us. This to me is one of the clear examples of God's hand at work. So when someone tells me that random chance created biological information, I think that argument flies in the face of common logic.

By the way, if like me, you see the hand of God in the intricacy and beauty of nature, what you are really doing is a street (or field) level form of apologetics called the teleological argument. That argument basically says that the observed order in the universe shows that the orderly things were created with a purpose.

If you have any interest in studying these types of things further, then I would encourage you to go to Discovery Institute website here.