Designed by an Idiot

If you look carefully at the car in this picture you will notice that it contains major design flaws. There are several. You might not be an engineer, so I will point them out to you:

• Notice the front, driver-side wheel. The way that it is bent down on an angle is a major design flaw. That is going to be terrible for gas mileage. It will also affect handling and give uneven wear on the tire. Ideally, all wheels should be straight. 

• The windshield on this car will provide terrible visibility. It will also provide less protection than if the windshield had been designed as one piece of solid glass.   

• The driver-side door also has major problems. The concave design is bad for wind resistance. It is also makes it difficult for the driver to get in and out of the car easily. 

Okay, enough pretending. Obviously this car has been in an accident. However, if somehow I actually thought that this car rolled off the assembly line in this condition, I could only conclude that the car was designed by an idiot.

There are people who make this same mistake when they look at the world we live in. The look around and they see sickness, and earthquakes, and violence. They conclude that there simply can’t be a perfect God who designed this world.

We live in a world of conflicting data. When we look at the world, it is obvious that there are things that point to its design. Even looking at the crashed car, a person can tell that certain parts were designed to fulfill certain purposes. The car was in an accident, but it wasn’t the result of an accident. It wasn’t put together by a tornado in a junkyard. There might even be some parts of the car that still work.

In our world we see a combination of design and disaster. There is beauty and there is ugliness. The world is finely tuned to support life. Statistically, we should be shocked that there is even one planet in the universe that is able to support life. When we think of our bodies, we should be amazed that they work even half as good as they do. But other people look at the world and see all of the things that are badly bent out of shape and ask why would God do that? 

Why do I have this sickness? Why did my family fall apart? Why are there birth defects and diseases if there is a God? Why did my friend die? Many people look at the disorder in the world and conclude that there simply can’t be a God. It just would not make sense. 

In fact, this was one of the motivating factors that caused Charles Darwin reject God and develop his theory of evolution. Nature was red in tooth and claw. In a letter, Darwin wrote:

“There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designed and created the Ichneumonidae [parasidic wasp] with the expressed intention of their [larva] feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that the cat should play with mice.”

Darwin saw too much pain and misery in the world to believe that it was designed by a good and all-powerful God.

There were many people in Darwin’s day who argued for the existence of God based on design. If you walk along the beach and find a watch, you can look at its parts and conclude that it was designed and thus that there was a Designer. But Darwin and others saw the flaws and reached the opposite conclusion. Darwin looked at the pain and suffering in the world and concluded that it could not be the work of a competent Designer. 

The problem was that people had forgotten the Biblical storyline. Creation, Fall, Redemption…

Deistic arguments from design failed because they didn’t take into account the Biblical narrative. And because of that failure there were unable to explain the real world that confronts us. We exist in a world that appears to contain both unfathomable design as well as unexplainable chaos.  Biblical Christianity is able to explain what other worldviews cannot. In fact, this world is exactly the one we would expect if Biblical Christianity is true. 

According to the Biblical story this world was designed and created by God. God is perfect in goodness and unlimited in power and wisdom. When the world that God created rolled off of the assembly line, it was in pristine condition. God inspected His handiwork and certified it as “good” (Genesis 1:31). 

Yet as soon as God handed over the keys of creation we proceeded to drive it directly into a tree. 

Our first parents rebelled against God and in doing so plunged God’s good creation into ruin. This is what we call “the fall.” Since the event of the fall in Genesis 3, this world has been a different place. There is still evidence of design, but the creation is horribly damaged. Romans 5 tells us that because of one man’s sin, death spread to all men. Romans 8:19-21 describes the created order as now being “subjected to frustration” and in “bondage to decay” because of the fall. Although God had created the world as "very good" things are no longer the way they were. 

The car was designed well, but it was in an accident. That’s the world we live in. 

If you don’t realize that, you might say to yourself, Why is my body such a disappointment if I am designed by God? How can there be a God when my aunt or uncle died of cancer? How can there be a God when my family fights so much? If there is a God and things are designed this way, why aren’t my parents together? Why did the person I love die? Why do tsunamis kill thousands? Why is there so much hurt? Why is there so much pain? Why do I struggle with these temptations? Why would God design me with desires that I’m not supposed to have?  

The Bible explains why there are things that are beautiful. It explains why there are so many things that work wonderfully. It explains why we can even be here. The Biblical story also explains why there is disorder and death and cruelty and suffering. It explains the order as well as the disorder. 

God has made a way to fix this broken world. He did this by coming into this messed up world and fixing it from the inside out. By Christ’s perfect and life and death, He is able to make all things new.  

Evidence from Design in the Universe

Design points to a designer. If we see evidence of intelligent design in the universe, then the reasonable conclusion is that this evidence points to an intelligent designer. 

For example, if you see rocks scattered in a random pattern on a beach, you would not assume that someone arranged them.  If you saw that the rocks were arranged so that the smaller ones were closer to the water, and the bigger ones away from the water, you would assume that they had been washed to those places by the waves.  Again, this would not be an example of intelligent design.  However, if the rocks spelled out the words “Nate Archer was here” then you would conclude that someone must have arranged the rocks. 

When you see something that is complex that communicates specific information, you know it was caused by intelligent design.  Let me give you another example.  If you saw a rock formation that looked somewhat like a person, you would probably assume it was a coincidence.  However, if you saw a mountain that looked exactly like the heads of four U.S. presidents, you would never assume that it just happened by chance.  You would assume that someone designed it and made it that way on purpose. 

This isn't a "God of the gaps" argument; instead it is what is known as "inference to the best explanation." Even in the world's fallen state, I believe that when we look honestly at the world around us overwhelming design we see should push drive us to realize that there is something greater than an accident at work. 

We see amazing examples of design in the design of the universe and the planet earth as well as the design of life. There are great books that go into more detail about these examples of design, but here are a few samples about the design of the universe that impress me: 

The Design of the Universe

• The oxygen level on earth is 21%.  If the oxygen level was 25% fires would erupt spontaneously.  If the level was 15%, human beings would suffocate.
• According to a UCLA research physicist, if the gravitational constant in the universe was different by 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000001% our sun would not exist and neither would we.  To get an idea of how precise this is, imagine a radio dial that stretched across the entire universe.  This radio dial represents every possible value that the gravitational constant might have been.  If you moved the dial one inch to the right or one inch to the left, the universe would not be capable of sustaining life.   
• The fine-tuning of the cosmological constant has been called the single greatest problem facing physics and cosmology today.  The fine-tuning of the cosmological constant has been conservatively estimated to be at least one part in a hundred million billion billion billion billion billion.  That is 10 followed by 53 zeros.  That would like throwing a dart at random from the far reaches of space and hitting a bull’s eyes on earth that is smaller than the size of an atom.
• Assuming the Big Bang, if the universe had expanded at a rate one millionth more slowly than it did, the universe would have stopped expanding and collapsed back in on itself before any stars had formed.  If the universe had expanded faster, no galaxies would have formed.
• There are many other factors that need to be just right for life to be possible, including the size of the earth, tilt of the earth, the distance of the earth from the sun, the right kind of star, the transparency of the atmosphere, the existence of the right kind of a moon, seismic activity, Jupiter, water vapor levels, and the list goes on.  Astrophysicist Hugh Ross has calculated that there are 122 of these variables in all (and they are constantly finding more.)  Dr. Ross has calculated that the odds of any planet in the universe having all of these correct variables would be one chance in the number 1 with 138 zeros after it.  This is incredible when you consider that the number of atoms in the entire universe is only 1 with 70 zeros after it!  (And remember, each zero makes the number ten times larger.)  The number of planets in the universe is only 1 with 22 zeros behind it.  Therefore, we would be absolutely shocked that there is even one single planet in the universe with all of the factors needed for life!

A hardcore skeptic might say that we shouldn’t be surprised at the odds because if life were impossible, we wouldn’t be here to notice. They often say that it would be like someone who was about to be killed by a firing squad but survived because all of the guns happened to jam.  The odds are bad for that to happen, but if it didn’t happen the man wouldn’t be around to notice. This is a poor example. If 19 guns jammed all at once, you would naturally assume that someone had sabotaged the guns… an act of design! If billions of guns jammed all at once, no one would assume that it was blind chance!

There are also massive amounts of evidence for design in the design of life. However, I will save that for another post. The design in the universe and the earth is enough to chew on for a while.

Consider these quotes: 

“Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact… I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama.”  -Paul Davis, prolific science writer and former professor of theoretical physics at University of Adelaide, Australia

 “I do not believe that any scientist who examines the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce in stars.”  -Sir Fred Hoyle, eminent astrophysicist

Even though our world is fallen and marred because of sin, I don’t believe that you need to be a scientist to look out at the world and realize that it was designed by an intelligent creator.  I believe that this fits perfectly with that Paul wrote in Romans 1:18-21, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” In fact, the evidence of design in the universe and life is what finally caused the famous atheist philosopher and debater Antony Flew to renounce atheism in 2005.  

See also The Creator and the Cosmos by Hugh Ross, and The Privileged Planet by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards. Examples also drawn from I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be An Atheist by Norman Geisler and Frank Turek, as well as The Case for a Creator by Lee Strobel.  

Related:
The Universe: Caused, Self-Caused, or Uncaused?
Faith With Reasons
How God Lets Us Know He Exists
Just Like Earth?
Universe, Create Thyself