Physical Designs in Nature Are Real
and So Is Their Designer

by Raymond Fontaine, Ph.D. February 2007

E-mail no. 204: To the World Union of Deists

To write this article, I sat before my computer and clicked on Microsoft Front Page. There I composed an essay about Nature's God. Later I clicked on the Internet and made my thoughts available worldwide. What a wonderful instrument! Whoever designed the program and the computer was a very intelligent person. No subhuman animal and no inorganic thing on earth could design and fabricate my computer and the Internet. Only very intelligent humans could do that.

Likewise throughout the universe, very wonderful things exist, infinitely more complex than my computer and the Internet. Their design and creation required real  Intelligence.

Recently, someone told me, "It may seem that way but it may not be so anymore than our human notion of time. People say 'I have time or I don't have time'." But time isn't anything real. It's simply a way for humans to measure motion, basing it on the motion of the sun and moon and earth. Time itself isn't a real thing. It exists only in the human mind. 

In the same way, Supreme Intelligence may simply be a novel fabrication of humans to satisfy their curiosity or anxiety about the origin of mankind. Millenniums ago humans thought that superhuman beings, which they called deities, controlled the forces of nature. Later around 800 B.C. Abraham proposed that one God created the world and favored the Jewish people. Still later another prophet, called Mohammed, declared that Allah was the true God favoring the Muslims. Between those two prophets, Jesus was born and later intimated that he was the Son of Jehovah, the Jewish God.

So in effect, the Jews, the Muslims and the Christians agreed that God created and controlled the world, including earth's nature. Holy Writ: the Bible, the Gospels, and the Koran contained that doctrine which priests explained and elaborated in a thousand different ways.

No longer believing this notion of God, some humans looked for evidence of the true creator of the universe, including earth's nature. They found the evidence in the physical structures in nature designed for definite purposes - which requires intelligence. Those designs were formed in chemicals and other physical elements, not made by man. They emerged in natural physical elements. No human put them there. Some other intelligence did - that's a fact. Let's leave it at that. 

E-mail no. 205: Reply From the World Union of Deists

You bring up the beautiful simplicity of Deism - belief in Nature's God. That's it! To paraphrase Thomas Paine, Deism is the belief in God and there it rests.

Albert Einstein gave a very good analogy regarding the designs in Nature and Nature's God and our understanding of them when he wrote, "I'm not an atheist, and I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations."

One of the greatest points of Deism is this simplicity and lack of pretension that we know all and receive or received special direct communication from God. Through reason as applied to Nature, Deism is open to everyone.

Robert L. Johnson
www.deism.com 

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