Intelligent design |
I agree, it seems like there is an intelligent designer. But thinking about it carefully raises some strange questions.
Is the intelligent designer just God? Or is he (I refer to him as "he") another supernatural being, and archangel or something like that? If Satan is a (fallen) archangel and he can wreak havoc, perhaps the intelligent designer is the same category of creature?
Christian intelligent design advocates use intelligent design arguments to oppose evolution, which is to say, that new species came into being by random mutations that were magnified by natural selection; this, because the mutations improved the organism's ability to procreate and pass on the mutated DNA.
Yet these Christian intelligent design advocates seem to allow for this evolutionary process for changes within a species, for micro-evolution. And so, it would seem, the intelligent designer only intervenes occasionally, when he determines a new species is needed.
From the above it is clear that intelligent design is incompatible with young earth creationism, in which all species (or kinds) were created by God within a few days. So intelligent design assumes an old earth.
Since the intelligent designer creates all new species (in other words, he creates all species), this implies he created all the bad horrible designs too, and is therefore responsible for all the suffering of conscious creatures. (Does this make him evil, or merely limited?)
Maybe you could say that the intelligent designer only created creatures having good designs; that bad designs happened on their own (by evolution) or that Satan intervened and wrecked the good designs. If Satan plays this role, and if the intelligent designer is God, then this means that Satan has as much power as God (or more) in creating creatures.
All of biological life, all organisms, are constructed from cells. All cells are complex chemical machines having interacting and crisscrossing chemical reactions. This is why a tiny tiny virus having a a small snippet of RNA can cause such damage in its host. This is why a tiny quantity of poison can painfully kill an organism.
And so, the intelligent designer has to do his work within this context. He has to mimic evolution with its random mutations, by himself triggering mutations in the DNA. And he has to do this successively in stages over generations to finally result in a new species.
The atoms and molecules of all organisms are all moving around and interacting within the laws of nature; mainly the electrostatic force of the electron (-) and proton (+). And this all occurs within the context of quantum mechanics. And so, the intelligent designer has to choose when to "push" an electron to move in a direction and with a different velocity than it would normally. Quantum mechanics allows for such kinds of random events.
But the point is, that the intelligent designer has to do his work by working at the level of electrons, by pushing them around in probabilistically unlikely ways. Creating new species for the intelligent designer is not a high-level activity but, rather, the extreme of micromanagement.
But also necessary for new species are various environmental factors such as: (1) whether there are predators or not, (2) whether there is competition for food and nutrients, and (3) whether there is another new species that can exploit the environmental conditions to successfully evolve via natural selection.
The intelligent designer would have to take all these complex factors into account when choosing where and when to create a new species. The complexity of all this is staggering.
And he would have to choose the proper base species to use in forming the new species. This, because each new species arises from an existing species. And he would have to create the proper sequence of species in the proper order to finally achieve his final goal, the pinnacle of biological development — humans.
And what if random mutations did accidently result in a new species, outside of the intelligent designer's control? Does he have to perform anti-intelligent design to reverse this, to destroy these stray species?
And as I note above, since there is suffering as animals eat each other alive and bacteria trigger horrible symptoms, is the intelligent designer evil? If the intelligent designer is just God, does this mean God is evil? Or is all this suffering justified because God has an over-arching purpose which morally justifies him causing (or allowing) all this suffering?
I doubt that those Christians who wish to impose the teaching of intelligent design in schools; I doubt they plan to discuss any of these questions.