Fighting over sand and concrete

It seems obvious to me that the universe was designed.

My assertion has been objected to: "Well, duh, that's because since you're a Christian you're biased towards Creationism!" True, but that's not the only relevant fact here. I submit that the reason people look at the universe and don't (or won't) conclude that the universe was created/designed, is because they are resistant towards the religious and political implications of such a belief. Let's divorce all implications from the concept of design vs. random chance. The best way to do so is to study an object that is nowhere near controversial--a chair, for example.

Nobody who looks at this chair will think to himself, "This chair happened on accident--by pure random chance." Wait, the objector might say, this is because we know by our own experience that chairs are designed. Perhaps we've seen one being made, or you know the carpenter who was bragging about his work. OK, let's say you come across an invention you've never seen before--like a sophisticated tool used on space shuttles. You have no idea what it is or what it does. But you assume that it's designed. Why? Because when the politics of this discussion--inextricable from the universe-origin debate--are absent, we think without bias and we realize the obvious.

How can we look at a chair or a space shuttle tool, and instinctively know they are designed, yet vigorously deny that the universe in all its mathematics, physics, and overall amazing complexity, happened by pure random chance? It's absurd.

Richard Dawkins, in The Blind Watchmaker, argues that the "pure random chance" concept is not actually what Darwinism/Evolution espouses. He describes cumulative selection, which is basically the idea that thousands (millions?) of miniscule changes--each one in itself probable, or at least not statistically impossible--to organisms is sufficient to explain the slow evolution of life. In other words, evolution doesn't hang its hope on one huge unlikely chance, but on multiple probable chances. Dawkins defends it well and with respect to his opponents. Still, my mind still caught some snags. Perhaps I'm reading Dawkins wrong, but here's what I found.

To show how cumulative selection can work, Dawkins describes an experiment he did with his computer, seeing how long it would take to randomly arrive at Shakespeare's phrase, "Methinks it is like a weasel," with 28 characters possible, and allowing the computer to build on previous results of the random selection. He writes,

[the computer] now "breeds from" this random phrase. It duplicates itself repeatedly, but with a certain chance of random error--"mutation"--in the copying. The computer examines the mutant nonsense phrases, the "progeny" of the original phrase, and chooses the one which, however slightly, most resembles the target phrase.

After 30 "generations" of building off the results of random selection, the computer has come up with "METHINGS IT ISWLIKE B WECSEL"--pretty close to "Methinks it is like a weasel." It finally arrives at the correct phrase with generation 64.

Okay. That all makes sense except for one thing: in order for that to work, the computer needs to know the phrase it was aiming for in order to adjust its selection and "choose the one which...most resembles the target phrase." What guides the selection process in evolution? From where does evolution get it's "target phrase"? In the selection I read, Dawkins doesn't explain it.

Another problem I have with Dawkins is his illustration of order coming out of disorder--the pebbles on the beach being arranged into strata by the waves.

The waves have no purpose and no intentions, no tidy mind, no mind at all. They just energetically throw the pebbles around, and the big pebbles and small pebbles respond differently to this treatment so they end up at different levels of the beach. A small amount of order has come out of disorder, and no mind planned it.

Granted, the pebbles were in disarray before the waves came and organized them over time. But the order of the beach was a direct result of certain laws of physics already in place. The order which was already there in the laws of physics is what imposed itself onto the pebbles. If gravity was not a law, if the moon was not pulling the tides in and out, if water could not exert a force on pebbles, nothing would have happened on the beach. The illustration is incomplete. Evolution, or natural/cumulative selection, cannot account for the creation of ordered laws ex nihilo. Evolution cannot account for the cause of the universe. What other logical option is there? Design.

Now, I believe that anyone can come to this conclusion without formulating a single religious belief. But it is from this point that religious and political implications begin, which is why many folks would rather deny the design and sidestep the religious issues that follow. It's just easier.

Once a creator/designer is established, we have a supreme being. From a supreme being we get God. In God we have an arbiter of ultimate truth, a standard by which to judge. Yet absolute truth is anathema to the intellectual foundation of the postmodern world. Hence the foundational denial of any supreme intelligence that gives life meaning. Unfortunately for relativists, their philosophy is inherently flawed and does not compute with the logic of the universe.

It often seems fruitless to argue policy points with people who disagree with certain fundamental ideas--like the origin and nature of Truth. I think, "these folks aren't rooted in the same soil, so why should their tree of conclusions look anything like mine?" While it is true that political and religious adversaries occasionally find themselves on the same side of an issue, it is usually for different reasons; there is still a wide gulf between basic beliefs.

That gulf is where the primary focus of discussion should be. People argue over peripheral ideas, and each person thinks his own conclusion is obvious--but he's rooted in different soil than the guy he's discussing with. Of course their trees look different! They are standing on different foundations. Think of our your system as a house. Instead of arguing over the cosmetics of the shutters on the third floor, we should be focusing our attention on the sandy or concrete foundations (Hat tip: Matthew 7:24-27)

UPDATE: I wrote this post and wrestled with this issue in my mind with no thought of the current debate on what to teach in schools or what Americans think about it according to the latest polls. How odd that the day I finalize this post, Chuck Colson's BreakPoint focuses on this debate; he even mentions Dawkins:

[T]he two central elements of Darwin’s theory—gradual changes and the blind sifting of natural selection—were proposed expressly to get rid of design and purpose in biology, that is, to get rid of God. As Richard Dawkins, the Oxford professor, confided, Darwin made it intellectually respectable to be an atheist.