Tag: engineering

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Cotyledon’s Engineered Preparation for life

Cotyledon’s Engineered Preparation for lifePlant seedlings emerging from the ground use the cotyledon’s engineered preparation for life. You may not be familiar with cotyledons, but you have undoubtedly seen them on newly emerged seedlings.

To get the idea, think about some other engineered devices that serve an essential preparatory function. When skydivers jump from a plane, they use carefully engineered equipment. The first thing they deploy to prepare for landing is a pilot chute. The pilot chute can’t land them safely on the ground. Its purpose is to deploy the main parachute. Perhaps more familiar to most people is the limited-use spare tire for automobiles. Those “donuts,” as many people call them, are not designed for high-speed driving or for driving long distances. They are engineered to get you to the nearest service station where the punctured tire can be repaired or replaced. The pilot chute and the limited-use spare tire are examples of engineered preparation.

Just as the pilot chute is packed into the jumper’s gear and the donut is packed into the vehicle, there is something packed into the seed called a cotyledon. Scientists classify flowering plants (angiosperms) as monocots or dicots depending whether they have one or two cotyledons folded into the seed. As soon as the seed has sent a taproot into the soil, it pulls in moisture and uses the hydrostatic pressure to push up a green shoot bearing the cotyledons. As those “donuts” break through the surface, they inflate to provide temporary, emergency photosynthesis. The seedling begins to drink up the water and nutrients from the taproot and use energy from sunlight to kickstart the photosynthesis process.

As the cotyledon’s engineered preparation for life gets the new plant started, real leaves begin to form. In a sense, the cotyledons have taken the plant to the first service station or deployed the main chute. Now it is ready to go from a seedling to a full-grown plant or tree. The seedling still has many challenges ahead, just as the parachutist or motorist does. But just as having the pilot chute or the donut packed and ready for deployment aids the jumper or the driver, the cotyledon supports the plant. Would anyone suggest the pilot chute or donut are merely accidents? We know those devices would not be possible without engineering design. In truth, cotyledons require far more complex engineering that only the master Designer can do.
— Roland Earnst © 2019

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God’s Engineering Skills

God's Engineering Skills at Sunset Crater
Yesterday we began to tell you about last month’s Canyonlands Educational Tour. It was a week of learning about how God works. In the canyonlands area, we can see God’s engineering skills.

Our trip was a bus tour with 50 people participating. We departed from Flagstaff, Arizona. That area allows us to study the basic rocks from which all other rocks were made, and that is volcanic material. Our analysis of elements in space and the minerals in Earth’s crust show us that all rocks are made of materials found in the interior of the Earth. For example, granite is made up of quartz which breaks down into sand and makes sandstone. Orthoclase is another constituent of granite, and it weathers to produce clay which is a major part of shale. Visiting Sunset Crater (pictured) and seeing the volcanic mountains surrounding Flagstaff allows us to understand the method by which God produced all other rocks.

In the first session of our trip on Sunday evening, before we departed, we pointed out the one basic assumption that underlies our entire trip. That assumption is that God is not a magician who does everything by slight of hand and magic. We see God’s engineering skills as He uses natural processes to produce things in the creation. The Bible tells us that “God planted a garden” (Genesis 2:8) not that He waved a magic wand and a garden appeared. When God created man’s body in Genesis 2:7, he “formed man of the dust of the earth.” The Hebrew word used to describe that process is yatshir which is a word denoting something an artist might do in creating a work of pottery from clay.

God did not “zap” the Grand Canyon into existence with all its many kinds of rocks and embedded fossils. Many religious people want to have God “speaking” these things into existence. The Bible indicates that God commanded the creation elements indicating that other agents were doing the actual work. In our twenty-first century mentality of rejecting scams and con-artists, it is important not to put God into the role of being a trickster. God did His creating process in such a way that we can discover the processes. That is the reason the Bible says we can “know God exists through the things He has made” (Romans 1:20). In Proverbs 8, wisdom personified speaks of God’s engineering skills.

We see the evidence of God’s engineering skills in the creation processes, and we read the Scriptures that tell what happened. Our approach to all of the evidence and the Scriptures is that they MUST agree. If the same God who gave us the Bible also did the creating, they cannot disagree. If there seems to be a conflict between the scientific evidence and what the Bible says, we either have bad science or bad theology or both. There has been plenty of both.

Tomorrow, we will continue to examine more of the things we saw of God’s engineering skills during our week in the canyonlands.
–John N. Clayton © 2018