Take a stroll with me. We are walking in a botanical garden. What do you see? Plants, trees, flowers, birds and other creatures? Look closer. You are the unwitting witness to architectural feats, bio-chemical marvels, innovative aviation and extremely complex data processing.

Most of us have plants in our lounge rooms as decorations to add colour and freshen the air, but we don’t often consider the complexity of even simple processes of plants, like turning towards the light. One of my favourite subjects in Biology was auxins, which are hormones found in plants that produce phototropism (moving in response to light.) Something that is so simple is incredibly complex! The plant is measuring the light, interpreting the evidence, and moving in response to the data. The plant will produce more of the auxins (hormones) on the dark side of its stem which cause it to grow more on that side, and thus move towards the light. This is a simplistic explanation I know. A plant will respond to a single flash in a dark room. Plants, trees and all the leaves on them will bend and twist in response to light.

Everything in nature is recycled without pollution. A large tree will pump 100s of litres of water every day without electricity. Trees mastered the art of aviation millenniums before man even contemplated it, with tiny parachutes, helicopters and gliders that can travel 100’s of meters and sometimes even kilometres, as in the case of thistle seeds. I was once working on a Science degree where I was expected to believe by faith that this incredible complexity and wonder was a product of chance. Even more so, I was expected to believe that a whole range of different plants evolved the same amazing solution to the challenge of propagation through flight. I eventually decided that it all took more faith than I could muster. I came to realize that it all just had the same designer.

As we stroll together, consider even the complexity of the process by which we see all these things. Light is striking the eye through a lens that has 2,000 infinitely fine layers of transparent fibers and then this is all interpreted via a system of cells called rods and cones that receive through the lens inverted images. These are then transported via the optical nerve to the brain which puts the image back up the right way. The instant focusing of far and near is something that no camera can yet achieve.

So, which evolved first the lens, the photoreceptors, the optic nerve, or the rods and cone cells? Because the eye cannot function without any of these, so what use would a half-evolved eye be. If the eye evolved what did the body do while it was waiting 10 million years for sight to develop and switch on the lights. Evolution would have us believe (by faith because there is no proof) that at some time in the dim dark past there were creatures running around with half evolved eyes. Evolution does not make sense at all when you really think about it.