Flight of the Monarchs

In Defense of a Designer

Posted on December 16th, 2008 by Brian.
Categories: Writing.

This post is part of a discussion I got into on this discussion list:

I can’t fly in the design for an airplane. I can’t drive the design of a car. The design of a watch won’t tell me the time. Dear ID advocates, please tell us by what means the intelligent design of nature became implemented. I know how the design of a car gets translated into a car by means of industrial production processes. How does the design of nature get translated into actual nature? Remember, you’re trying (or at least some of you are) to present ID as a scientific idea.

Heresiarch

To Heresiarch:

Imagine that your perception of time was different and you could see a universe such as ours being formed in the blink of an eye; to your eye it would have simply materialized. The design could have been contained in the very substance of the matter that was formed, and there could have been a specific signature on each element of nature that was inherent to it’s purpose in the formation of the whole. The forces acting on each would appear much less random, but completely intentional. Whoever had signed those elements would therefore be the designer. You as an element of that design would be unaware of the design itself, as it had originated from outside of your universe, but to your naked eye, the signature would still be apparent.

Simply because you have the intelligence to reverse engineer something, as time was slowed down enough for you to comprehend it (mildly), doesn’t make you as intelligent as the original designer. Somehow through the increase in our understanding of the laws of the universe, we have made the false assumption that our having “discovered” them somehow negates the reality of the one who had first established them, as if the mere comprehension of the design somehow destroys the reality of it having been designed in the first place. Where our appreciation of the designer should be increasing as the beauty and elegance of the universe is revealed, we take the opposite prideful response which is to attempt to disregard the designer, as if we could have invented such a thing ourselves.

As much as the designer of the airplane “materializes” his or her design by forming and fashioning its parts from the forces and elements available, the airplane itself is seemingly unaware of its having been designed. Oddly enough many humans fall into a similar condition. As an aside, ask me if that same airplane would have materialized without a design and I would say it would be a highly unlikely event at best. Even if it were possible, I would attribute the event to the original designer of the universe within which it had been created. That designer being God.

-Me

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