Cheap Seats 2023 By Rich Trzupek

Intelligent by Design - 07/26

By Rich Trzupek
  Imagine coming home after a long trip abroad. You open your closet and you find that all your clothes that you had sent out for cleaning before you left are neatly arranged within. And not just neatly arranged, but meticulously arranged. Your suits came together in one spot. In another all of your trousers. In yet another all of your button down shirts, etc. Within each group all the clothing is arranged in spectral order according to their color. Each group starts with red proceeds through the visible spectrum to indigo before ending with white and black.
  It could be that this arrangement happened by chance. There is no physical law that prevents it. But isn’t the more likely possibility that someone purposely arranged your garments in that order? And the more pieces of clothing involved, the more unlikely it gets that the patterns emerged from randomness.
  This is the way that a scientists who is also a person of faith considers the notion of intelligent design. The author of the universe’s arrangements is unseen but the evidence of the arranging becomes clearer all the time. And one of the ways that evidence becomes ever more clear is through scientific discovery.
  Many people who are not among the faithful equate the doctrine of intelligent design to that of creationism. It is true that both ideas necessarily involve a creator. But that is where the similarities end.
  Creationists envision a Creator who brought the world into existence in its present form through one massive act that replaced nothing with everything, more or less in the same kind of forms we have today. For the hardcore creationist the fossil record, the geological record, cosmological observation, and the myriad of other evidence that points to a world that slowly evolved over billions of years are irrelevant and misleading. An all-powerful God could pull off this trick. He could theoretically create an earth and stars and planets that appear far older than they actually are. A more candid soul might acknowledge this minute possibility but would argue, as I have, that the God who has revealed Himself to us over the ages is unlikely to be a prankster.
  Creation requires a Creator, at least the faithful believe that to be so. If that creation is going to have meaning and purpose then certain laws should apply. These laws apply not for the purpose of guaranteeing particular outcomes, but rather so that creation is able to function and grow and learn in a constructive way. This is what is meant by intelligent design. Like many scientists who are also believers I find nothing incompatible with believing that time and space begin some 14 1/2 billion years ago with the Big Bang. And I believe existence proceeded in a predetermined general direction made possible by the details of the universe’s design put in place by its Creator.
  Consider the strong nuclear force that keeps the nuclei of atoms together. Most secular atheists who understand something of atomic physics will argue that the fact that the strong nuclear bond exerts exactly the right amount of force is pure coincidence. Perhaps. But I find it remarkable that if the strength of that force drifted slightly out of a very narrow window in one direction or the other life could not exist. Any slight deviation would result in a strong nuclear force that would only allow only the element hydrogen to exist or only the element helium to exist. Life as we know it could not come into being in such a universe.
  Or consider our life giving sun. When hydrogen atoms fuse within the sun they create a helium atom. Helium is an inert gas. It should not react with anything. If that were true the life of the son and many other stars would be substantially curtailed, perhaps to the point that life would not have time to evolve. But it just so happens that every once in a while 3 helium atoms will collide with each other within the sun at exactly the same moment and it is that situation that allows the sun to generate energy from its helium. And it’s that reaction that gives yellow stars like our sun their remarkably long lives. It is again either a remarkable coincidence or assign of a guiding hand.
  There are too many cases like this for one to even attempt to cover a fraction of a fraction in a short work such as this. But the more we learn of the functioning of the universe - the physical, chemical, biological laws that allow life to exist - the more clues we get that the mechanisms of creation involved a guiding hand. It is in this way that science moves us closer to God everyday if we only dare to recognize that simple fact.
  E-mail: richtrzupek@gmail.com