This post continues my 5 Reasons I Believe There is a God post.
The Nature of the Designer
Once you acknowledge the existence of intended and intelligent design, you begin to wonder who the designers or designer is exactly. Who made all this incredible existence happen? What is the nature of this designer? To explore this question I look at the process of design as I can see it. Take, for example, an individual who designs a computer. I can see the product, the computer, is quite different from the person who designed it. Clearly, aspects of the computer can mimic qualities of the creator. For example, the computer can calculate with great speed, perhaps even faster than the individual who made it. However, the computer is limited to the confines of programming. It cannot think or feel or make decisions outside the bounds of its design.
Even if the designer makes a robot with very human-like attributes, it will still always be a robot. Aspects of consciousness and self, will always distinguish the human designer from that which he/she creates. The designer creates but never joins into the created. The designer observes and manipulates but is not an object of or a partner of his/her own creation.
Do Humans Create Life?
Some might argue that a person can create life, a woman gives birth, a scientist clones a lamb, and there are even test tube babies. But these are not creations. The system of birth is not novel. Animal clones and test tube babies come to be, because scientists can use what they know about this physical reality to create situations in which those births can occur. Everything they need is already here provided to us and a part of this existence.
The Creator who created all of this must stand outside those aspects within which we, the created, are limited. What limits us? Well, we are bound by space and time and so our Creator cannot be bound by those same limitations. That Designer cannot be bound by space or time or even gender.
Cause and Effect Indicates One
So I acknowledge intelligent design and an intelligent Designer, how can I conclude that this Designer is only One? I reach the conclusion of the Oneness of God by observing cause and effect. A line of carefully positioned dominoes will not fall until someone pushes the first one. If there is a pencil lying on a piece of paper, it will not write until someone picks it up and writes with it. An empty cup on the counter will not fill with water until I pick it up and hold it under the faucet. For every effect there must be a cause.
There are effects whose exact cause may be difficult to determine, and some argue that relationships are correlational rather than causal, but I don’t need to know the precise cause of any one thing, I only need to understand that a cause is, and must be there, for an effect to occur. In other words knowing that everything has a cause and understanding that some causes also have a cause and taking that line of reasoning back, it will only end if I reach an ultimate singular Cause that has no cause itself, nor need of a cause. That Ultimate Cause is one God, beyond need in any way that we, limited by our needs, can perceive.
Therefore, Reason #3 that God does exist poses that this Universe must be the product of intelligent design and the Law of Cause and Effect proves, by reasoning, the existence of an Ultimate Cause. Please read my other 4 reasons in the posts linked below.
5 Reasons I Believe There is a God
- Reason #1 – The Power of Why?
- Reason #2 – Order in the Physical World
- Reason #3 – Cause and Effect
- Reason #4 – Common Thread of Prophecy
- Reason #5 – The Effect that a Lack of Belief has upon Me