Intelligent design and non intelligent design
Published on September 28, 2019
Religious discourse often argue that the world around us is so complex that an intelligent designer is necessary to explain it. How objects so well designed and purposeful than a human heart can exist without a designer to create it? I think that this stems from a confusion. Design can exist without an inelligent designer behind it. Evolution, with its trial-and-error process, can produce extremely well designed objects. The end product does look engineered. However, no inteligent person participated in the design. When “developing” the heart, nobody had its purpose in mind.
As humans, we are used to crafting objects, and it is true that objects produced by intelligent and non-intelligent design look similar. If you asked an engineer to create a heart, maybe he would come up with a similar design than nature did: a pump, with cavities, pipes going in and out… However, even if the end product may be similar, the process to create it is very different and leaves very different traces behind. An human-engineered heart would leave traces such as a specification stating its purpose and a long list of requirements and design plans. Evolution leaves very different traces: no such specification exists, but a long trail of fossilized organisms. The time-scales of engineering and evolution is also very different: it might take some months, or some years for an engineer to develop a heart. For evolution, that’s a different matter: we are talking about millions of years.