Intelligent design or random chance?

Is it one or the other?  Don’t ask me to give up my faith.  Don’t ask me to give up my science.  Who’s right?  Who’s wrong?  What did Darwin say about evolution, about random chance?  What does the Bible say about intelligent design, about God? I refer to the Bible because that is my faith.  To those of other faiths, I apologize for not being able to articulate your beliefs as I wish I could. 

Darwin’s theory is that random genetic mutations occur, those beneficial to the organism are preserved and passed on, and those not beneficial are cutout by natural selection.  With billions of random genetic mutations one cell will develop into a human being.  This is theory, not fact.  An example used to show how this occurs is bacterial resistance to antibiotics.  But, when a bacterium ‘develops’ resistance to an antibiotic, is it evolution or is it simply adaptation?  Was a new organism created or was an existing organism adapting?  Was Darwin observing evolution or was he observing adaptation?

Darwin had doubts about his own observations saying, “And to think the eye could evolve by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd to the highest degree.”  Evolution requires billions of random genetic mutations beneficial to the organism.  But true genetic mutations are rare and beneficial genetic mutations are even rarer.  Evolution also requires the first living cell to spontaneously generate life. Yet, while we cannot create anything as intricately complex as one living cell, we are expected to have the reasoned ‘faith’ that life occurred by chance, spontaneously, in a cell infinitely more complex than Darwin ever imagined.

A man of faith was contemplating God’s existence.  As he mused to himself, he picked up a handful of dirt and quietly said, “God, do you exist?  After all, we are close to making life from a handful of dirt, just as You did.  A quiet voice in his head firmly responded, “Make your own dirt.”  This is not meant to be trite, it makes the point that there is so much more we cannot explain than we can explain. 

In his later years Darwin also said, “. . . to my astonishment the ideas took like wildfire.  People made a religion of them.”  Isn’t this a reasonable perspective on the theory of random genetic mutations creating all life?  Is it more a religion because of the ‘faith’ needed to believe in spontaneous generation of life?  Personally, I cannot accept random chance over intelligent design. The faith, however reasoned, needed to believe in spontaneous creation of life in one cell, and then mutating over billions of years to a human being is just too staggering.  We cannot understand all the complexities of the universe, yet we consider those near infinite complexities may have occurred by random chance rather than by intelligent design.  Which is more logical, more plausible, more reasoned; intelligent design or random chance? 

What of intelligent design?  As I said, my faith is the God of the Bible so I can only write from that perspective.  And if I recall correctly, there are two places in the Bible where God says His time is not our time.  Although I find it a bit dangerous to extrapolate meaning from only two short references, I will proceed to do so anyway. What if God does see time differently?  What if one day to God is 1 billion years, rather than our twenty-four hours?  What if God spent 6 billion years creating the universe in a scientifically understandable way, and then rested for 1 billion years?  Is that inconceivable?  Would that diminish the power of the God of the Bible or would it enhance it?   Doesn’t either way show the power of an Intelligent Designer? 

If there is an intelligent designer who designed the designer?  If the universe is finite, what is on the other side?  If the universe is finite but ever expanding, what is it expanding into?  Both sides can ask each other these types of unanswerable questions.  God is not diminished because we cannot fathom the Designer.  Science is not diminished because we cannot fathom either an infinite universe or an ever-expanding universe not knowing what it is expanding into.

When I try to understand the complexities of the arguments on both sides of this issue, I find I am lacking several PhDs.  But I can sit and consider this with my own logic, however flawed it might be.  I believe spontaneous generation of life is implausible.  I believe to be equally implausible a one celled organism becoming a human being through natural selection, if just allowed enough random genetic mutations and enough time.

Isn’t intelligent design more compatible with the complexity of the universe, the scientific age of the universe, and the mathematical and physical details of the universe?  These questions and observations are meant to be for our consideration. Each of us must make our own choice.  It’s worth some thought.

CORRECTION:  The following quote I attributed to Darwin has a great deal of controversy surrounding it, debating if Darwin actually made the statement.  I should not have used such a controversial quote.  The quote:   “. . . to my astonishment the ideas took like wildfire.  People made a religion of them.”

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