• Question: How do you believe plants came to be, I believe God made them.

    Asked by to Amelia, Clem, Izzy, Sarah on 13 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Isabel Webb

      Isabel Webb answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      Lots of people have lots of different theories on how plants and other species came to be on our planet.

      Some people believe that God made every species as he intended – the story that is told in the Bible.

      I believe in something called the theory of evolution. This theory, originally suggested by Charles Darwin. This theory suggests that all organisms on the planet came from one original bacteria-like organism, and that over time we evolved different strategies of surviving. One of these strategies is the ability to use oxygen to respire, which all organisms do. Another strategy is the ability to use carbon dioxide and water to make sugars, and this is photosynthesis, which plants do. As things evolved with different strategies they started to have different features and need different things, and so evolved even more and looked even more different. Plants evolved in one direction, and animals (and then humans) evolved in another. Plants then evolved even further and that is why different plants look different. This theory is believed by most scientists as it helps to explain lots of results that we find in our research and also helps us to plan new experiments or know what to look at next.

      Some people believe a combination of these – for example, some people believe that God did not make every species as it is, but instead has an influence over evolution and designs new species how he wants them to be.

      There are a lot of people with a lot of different ideas about how the world was formed, and it is a personal opinion what you think. I personally believe what science tells me to believe, which is that species evolved to become what they are today. Many people believe in God but also believe in evolution.

    • Photo: Amelia Frizell-Armitage

      Amelia Frizell-Armitage answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      This is how I think plants came to be:

      Billions of years ago there was no life on earth, only chemicals. By amazing chance some of the chemicals in the sea came together to form DNA which is what all life is based on! This sounds really like a crazy thing to happen.. you would have to be very lucky for the exact right chemicals to come together at the exact right time and form DNA.

      But it did happen, and this DNA started to produce proteins and replicate. The protein produced from the DNA meant that cells could form. Chemicals reacted inside these cells, and the cells became a type of bacteria! Eventually some of these bacteria became a bit like the green algae that you might have seen in ponds. These algae were able to photosynthesise! They took the carbon dioxide out of the air and turned it into oxygen.

      The algae kept adapting and changing to become better, some moved onto land, some algae joined together to form bigger plants. Sometimes the changes were so big that a whole new species was formed. This process of change to form new species is called evolution. In this way all other species of plant came to be!

      All this happened over millions of years and relied a lot on the right thing happening at the right time.

      Some people do believe that God created all life, this is called creationism, but there is a lot of proof that evolution did happen. If you think carefully about it you may not have to choose – it is possible to believe in God AND evolution. One of my friends is a christian, believes in God and is a very good scientist. She doesn’t believe that God created life. Instead she believes that evolution did happen, but it happened because God wanted it to, who helped along the way 😀

    • Photo: Clemence Bonnot

      Clemence Bonnot answered on 13 Mar 2014:

      You know science and religion are not incompatible. I have a lot of friends from various religions that are scientists and even work on evolution.
      One of them told me that his way to see this was that looking closely at life as a scientist and looking at evolution it seems way to complex to be due to luck.
      He told me he thought evolution was true and that all organisms have a common ancestor like bacteria and that the process by witch evolution drove the apparition of so many different species could only be by the will of god.
      This is not the way I see it but his belief is valid.
      The truth is that right now we do know that organisms evolved and we start to know by which molecular mechanisms but we do not know everything. And something we don t know is how did life appears at first on earth… We have hypothesis but this is all we have. And we know even less about the universe… So I guess their is some space for religion.

    • Photo: Sarah Harvey

      Sarah Harvey answered on 17 Mar 2014:

      I think these guys have pretty much summed up everything I’d want to add!

      Like them, I believe that plants are the way we see them now because of the process of evolution over millions of years, with advantageous characteristics spreading though plant populations due to natural selection. I’m not really sure whether this was totally random or whether there is a God who helped the process along but I do think it’s possible to be a great scientist and believe in a God.

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