Do Trees Make Themselves?

Sunlight, Soil, and Something More

Image: thecoolist.com

“Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree.”¹ How does God make trees? Do trees need any making at all, or do they just manage to make themselves out of seeds, sunlight and earth, without any help from heaven above? Exploring how beautiful natural forms, such as trees, come into being inspires endless curiosity and limitless wonder. And yet, even as science provides much illumination, the processes of creation remain inherently mysterious. While religious faith stands in reverent awe affirming that it is God who creates the symmetry, beauty, and purpose of natural forms, science rigorously reflects on such processes attempting to discover precisely how such forms materialize.

Is there any fundamental dichotomy between God’s creative activity and the natural processes discovered by science? The concept of “laws of nature” certainly does not contend with the concept of God. For the very phrase “laws of nature” originated as a way to express God’s sovereignty and order in his creative activity. Rather than having a purely materialist explanation, the existence of natural laws is still seen by many contemporary scientists and philosophers of science as profoundly mysterious and even to be “bordering on the miraculous.”

Nor is the concept of chance fundamentally opposed to the idea of God’s purposes. Chance is ultimately an expression of human ignorance and can only be asserted as purposelessness through a blind leap of metaphysical faith. It would seem, then, that the only source for potential discord between God’s creative activity and natural processes would be if science discovered material things and processes that were essentially eternal (and did not come into being in the first place). In light of the triumph of Big Bang Cosmology, however, there is presently no scientific case to be made for the eternality of material things or processes. Consequently, one who wishes to argue that God does not create through processes must make a theological case that God only ever creates material things instantaneously.

Only God Can Make a Snowflake

Does the God of the Bible typically create things instantaneously? A survey of Scripture reveals that it is full of examples of God directly creating phenomena that occur through natural processes. For example, the Bible affirms that God directly creates the weather—such as clouds, rain, wind, lightning, and snow. Psalm 135:7 declares that the Creator “makes clouds rise from the ends of the earth; he creates lightning with the rain and brings forth the wind from his storehouses.” Psalm 147:16 similarly affirms God’s direct activity in creating: “He makes snow like wool” and “scatters the frost like ashes.” And Amos 4:13 speaks of God as the one who “creates the wind.” The Bible clearly affirms that God directly creates certain types of weather, but it doesn’t provide any details concerning how God makes it.

While the Bible provides no details with regard to how God makes the weather, scientists know a great deal about the processes through which wind, clouds, rain, lightning, and snow are made—and researchers can even simulate these processes within a number of contexts. Still, there is much mystery in the processes of weather formation. For instance, “while the mechanisms of cloud formation are well understood, no one knows for certain what makes some clouds produce rain and others not.”²

Consider the process of snow formation. Snowflakes reflecting the variety of those found in nature are routinely grown in the lab, and the dynamics of the processes that create snowflakes have been precisely measured. Much is known about snowflake formation, and yet physicist and snowflake expert Kenneth Libbrecht concedes that scientists who study snow “still don’t understand why ice does all of what it does.”³

Mathematical physicists Janko Gravner and David Griffeath agree, remarking, “To this day, snowflake growth from molecular scales, with its tension between disorder and pattern formation, remains mysterious in many respects.”⁴ While every snowflake conforms to only one architecture, each individual snowflake is unique and each is the expression of a distinctive journey. The formation of each individual snowflake is a dynamic development that balances on the edge of deterministic order and unpredictable chaos.

As Libbrecht explains, “Since no two crystals follow exactly the same path through the sky as they fall, each grows into a slightly different shape. So we end up with a myriad of complex, symmetric patterns, with no two alike.”⁵ Scientifically, each snowflake comes into being through the interplay of known processes and mathematical laws on the one hand and fundamentally unknowable circumstances—such as the Butterfly Effect—on the other.

Only God Can Make a Tree

Image: webneel.com

Trees are a lot like snowflakes. Despite the fact that trees are biological and snow is a non-living physical and chemical entity, the growth of both are rooted in the laws of fractal geometry and mathematical branching patterns. For example, the mechanics of a tree dictate that, “if it is not to bend under its own weight, the diameter of the trunk must increase in proportion to the height raised to the power 3/2.”⁶ While tree growth follows strict, ordered rules, no two are exactly alike due to the specific, unique environmental path that each takes during its development.

For trees, like snowflakes, the final shape is determined by their surrounding environment. Slight variations in these factors during growth create unique, one-of-a-kind shapes. The Bible says that it is God who “causes” trees “to grow from the ground,”⁷ even while scientists know many details about how trees grow. And yet, scientifically, there is still much about tree growth that remains mysterious.⁸

Only God Can Make a Me

According to the Bible, God creates and directly orchestrates the events whereby each individual human being comes into existence. For example, in Psalm 139:13–16, one reads: “You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I will give thanks to you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made…My bones were not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret.” According to science individual human beings are like snowflakes and trees—formed through an exquisitely intricate and delicately organized developmental process of which scientists know many details.

“From just one initial cell,” explains one researcher, “an entire living, breathing body emerges, full of working cells and organs…Embryonic development is a very carefully orchestrated process—everything has to fall into the right place at the right time.”⁹ Developmental geneticist Charles Boklage similarly observes that “the building of the human embryo is a biological process of transcendent complexity.”¹⁰ “Science can tell us how the human embryo develops,” says molecular biologist John Wallingford, “and it is an undisputed certainty that embryos develop progressively, building complexity and identity only over time.” Yet, even with all our knowledge about this process, continues Wallingford, “the embryo remains in many ways just as mysterious as ever.”¹¹

The Hebrew word for “made” to describe the non-instantaneous process of God directly creating or forming human beings in the womb is the same word Scripture uses to describe God’s creating or forming of meteorological phenomena, snow, and trees. In all these cases God’s creative activity involves a law-like process which scientists can observe and explore. Such exploration and observation, however, in no way removes the mystery of God’s creation through these processes. God is fully present in both the processes and in the mystery.

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1. Joyce Kilmer, “Trees” from Poetry 2, no. 5 (August 1915): 153.

2. Mark Anderson, “The mysterious workings of the rain cloud,” New Scientist (23 January 2008).

3. Kenneth Libbrecht, Snow Crystals : A Case Study in Spontaneous Structure Formation (Princeton University Press, 2021).

4. Janko Gravner and David Griffeath, “Modeling Snow Crystal Growth I: Rigorous Results for Packard’s Digital Snowflakes,” Experimental Mathematics 15, no. 4 (2006): 421–44.

5. Kenneth Libbrecht, “Morphogenesis on Ice: The Physics of Snow Crystals,” Engineering and Science 64, no. 1 (2001): 16.

6. Phillip Ball, Branches Nature’s Patterns A Tapestry in Three Parts, (Oxford University Press, 2009).

7. Genesis 2:9.

8. Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World (Greystone Books, 2016).

9. Heather Buschman, “‘Junk DNA’ Drives Embryonic Development,” Science Daily, (December 3, 2012).

10. Charles Boklage, “Human Embryogenesis,” in Embryogenesis, ed. Ken-Ichi Sato (Croatia: InTech, 2012).

11. John Wallingford, “Building Embryos” Aeon (May 16, 2024).