A Call to Reflection

As you sat watching television, were someone to tell you that the broadcast came, not from any television station, but as the result of electromagnetic waves forming at random in the air and that the television had not been produced in a factory but had come into being spontaneously over the years from the atoms and molecules in your home, what would you think?

(Figure 5) Thanks to the flawless internal structure of the nose as seen in the figure, we are able to perceive scent molecules reaching us from the outside.

You would probably imagine that person was joking. Certainly you would not take his words seriously. When you realized that they were actually serious in making that claim, you would conclude they had lost their reason. That is because in that example, we are dealing with a technological design: A television set is a device specially manufactured with the aim of receiving televised broadcasts. In short, both the television and the broadcasts—and every aspect of the relationship between the two—have been planned down to the finest detail. In this complex system, there is absolutely no room for chance.

Yet evolutionists maintain something even more irrational. The view of Darwin and his evolutionist followers may be summarized as follows: According to their logic, the scent perception mechanism—far more highly advanced than television broadcast technology and which is still not yet fully understood—and the flawless harmony between the countless scent molecules and the nose, came into being as the result of so-called coincidences. (Figure 5)To put it another way, atoms randomly combined to form molecules that make up the different aromas on Earth and at the same time, those same molecules spontaneously brought the nose into being, the organ which is capable of identifying them all separately and of interpreting what it perceives. There is allegedly no plan, design or intellect involved here. According to evolutionists, everything happened over billions of years by means of unconscious, uncontrolled and random events that, all combining together, eventually gave rise to any number of perfectly flawless systems.

Anyone with a little reason and common sense can immediately see the flaws in this evolutionist logic. The subjects described in later chapters of this book will fully reveal the errors that evolutionists make regarding these matters. No doubt the structure in the nose has been specially created to perceive odors, and is a yet another sign of the omniscience of God, its Creator. Every detail you will learn throughout these pages represents a proof of this flawless design and perfect creation.

Indeed, in the Qur'an God has revealed this harmony and flawlessness that can be seen everywhere on Earth:

He Who created the seven heavens in layers. You will not find any flaw in the creation of the All-Merciful. Look again—do you see any gaps? Then look again and again. Your sight will return to you dazzled and exhausted! (Surat al-Mulk: 3-4)

Theories of Scent Perception

You wake up in the morning to delightful aromas emanating from the kitchen. Even as you think to yourself, How good that smells, you are unaware of all the processes going on inside your nose. But just what is happening in your nasal cells at that moment?

Scientists have been trying to answer this question for many years, but have still failed to fully unravel how the scent- perception cells recognize particles in the air. What they do know goes no further than theory. Indeed, less is known about scent perception than about our other senses.

At present, one of the most widely accepted theories, first proposed by R.W. Moncrieff, is known as the steric theory, according to which, scent particles come in different shapes and sizes, and combine with receptors unique to them in the olfactory region. The relationship between the receptors and the scent particles is comparable to that between a lock and a key. In the same way that a lock can be opened only by a particular key, so scent receptors go into action as a result of the effect of certain molecules only.

John E. Amoore developed this theory further, and determined seven main smells, which he termed ether, camphor, musk, flower, mint, sharp and rotten. He then proposed that all scents consist of combinations of these seven "building block" odors.

Another scientist, Luca Turin, proposed the vibration theory of olfaction, maintaining that scent receptors in the nose work like a spectroscope, a device used to measure vibration frequencies, and that they identify molecular vibrations. According to Turin, receptors in the nose are apparently designed to be compatible with the vibration frequencies of scent molecules. This resembles the way in which special cells in the retina of the eye are created to be compatible with specific wavelengths of light. Turin thinks that at the basis of scent perception, there is a complex mechanism based on electron transfer.

Other theories include J.T. Davies and F.H. Taylor's diffusion pore theory, G. M. Dyson's molecular vibration theory and B. Rosenberg's piezo effect theory.

In short, we still do not know how the communication between scent molecules and scent receptors takes place. In other words, the perceptive processes that take place in the receptor cells in our noses have not yet been fully unraveled.

Obviously, however, there is, considerable speculation, and in the following pages, we will devote more space to one view that has gained wider acceptance in comparison to the others.

Laboratories equipped with the very latest devices permit all kinds of scientific research to be carried out. Yet that we still do not understand how our sense of smell works once again shows the perfection of the system in question and the overall creation of human beings. As science unravels the details in the human sensory systems, it lays out the facts for all to see. The sensory organs are the work of a flawless design, and have been created with a delicate equilibrium calculated to be ideal for healthy human life. Another observation that emerges is how thoroughly mistaken is the theory of evolution, which maintains that life is the work of chance.