Preview

Intelligent Design

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1019 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Intelligent Design
“In the beginning” the declaration that announces the start of creation we find the avowal that “God created the heavens [plural] and the earth” (Genesis 1:1, Holman Christian Study Bible). Therefore, as I need not belabor the obviousness of beginning, I will offer this as a point of agreement. This essay will promote the theory of Creation with an Intelligent Design as an explanation of how it all began.
The Cause for Intelligent Design The Bible decrees that God was the intelligence that brought all that is into existence. This idea is reflected in church history as seen the writings of the “Fourth Lateran Council (1215)”, which surmised that creation by God was, “ex nihlo (i.e. ‘from nothing’)” (Bird, 2013, p. 158). This God, as
…show more content…
Byrne took issue with Cardinal Christoph Schönborn’s argument for intelligent design suggesting that a neo-Darwinian theory of evolution was counter to church doctrines (2006). I too have problems with the totality of Byrne’s view, yet some points are worth mentioning. At the heart of the conflict is the consideration of design verses randomness. One concedes no matter how or who creation came to be there is form and function and thus design. Moreover, Byrne cites William Paley, who wrote, “there cannot be design without a designer” (p. 655). The article continues and debates whether evolution, randomness or divine purpose caused creation on earth to advance and the conundrum that emerges in this treatise is not necessarily the who, but why is most important. This means that while the identity of creation’s designer can neither be proven or discredited, the remaining concern is why did things not remain static; what caused them to grow, to change, to evolve – why would to be selective or opportunistic development in creation. Why did it happen? Randomness cannot support the conclusions (p. 661). This awareness was an ah-ha moment because it lends further support to creation designed by an intelligence, with a

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Consistently from the dawn of human existence, the idea of “God”, or simply the questions of the place from whence the human body has come from forced any individual to consider the religious value or idea of God regarding God’s responsibility for every piece of matter in which makes up life. One of the most critical arguments that claim that there must be a God is the Kalem Cosmological argument, which uses the universe’s mere existence or the beginning of the universe’s existence to claim that whatever has a beginning, must have a cause, insinuating that the cause of the universe’s beginning is in theory, God. Though with creative intellect in further questioning it’s impossible for one not to question that the Cosmological argument may be correct in theory, but does the cause of the universe have to be God? Throughout this paper, I’ll be focusing on the argument that God’s existence does not have to be the direct cause of the begging of the universe, nor does the cosmological argument actually prove the existence of God for that matter.…

    • 644 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    If God was created by an intelligent creator, then that means the creator that created God was also created and so on. There are infinitely more powerful creators creating each…

    • 481 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Part Two: the Question of Origin: God has created all things (Gen. 1:1). “God is the first cause” (Weider & Gutierrez, 2011, p. 56) in creation, meaning He initiated the Ex Nihilo process of creation. Jesus Christ has created everything and is, and will always be, the sustainer of life (Colossians 1:16-17).…

    • 488 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    To explain cleric Paley's creationism lets open with his argument, he said that things are so perfectly set up that it has to be a designer behind it, this is the core essence of creationism. It is understood in this belief that a sequence of random events can not allow the scenery we live in, where the planet rotate around the sun just perfectly for us to not die, or how we have everything to survive at the hands of nature. That is to say, all this it is thought as an intelligent design executed by a grand architect, God. This faith is not only promoted by the countless coincidences we live in but also it is also supported by the inexplicable complexity that things are made. For instance, we know that living organisms are made of cells,…

    • 397 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Keller rebukes this by quoting Francis Collins in his book The Language of God, saying “the very fact that the universe had a beginning implies that someone was able to begin it.” (133). This statement captures perfectly one of the fatal flaws in the Big Bang theory; something outside of nature had to create nature itself. How more perfectly can one describe the person of God?! God not only fits this description, but it parallels John 1:3 when John says that “all things were made through Him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (ESV).…

    • 1168 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Design arguments, also sometimes known as teleological arguments, from the Greek ‘Telos’ for goal and ‘Logos’, meaning reason, hence reasoning for a goal or purpose and that purpose being God’s existence. These arguments endeavour to ascertain God’s existence, by inferring from evidence of design and purpose in the universe, and claim that there must have been a designer of this. Design arguments start from experience, so they are a posteriori and use inductive reasoning, as we infer from a specific observation, a general conclusion.…

    • 1575 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    To him, if anything that has parts organized to serve a purpose is designed, and nature contains things which have parts that are organized to serve a purpose, nature certainly is designed. Consequently, assuming that nature was designed by a mind that is distinct from nature, such mind, or a higher being,…

    • 1278 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    At the outset of the nineteenth century in Britain, religious faith and the study of the sciences tended to exist in harmony with each other. The study of God’s Word, in the Bible, and His Works, in nature, were assumed to be two versions of the same ultimate truth.1 When William Paley published Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity in 1802, he reinforced the concept of a designing God after positing that natural objects show evidence of design, emphasizing nature as God’s creation.2…

    • 1118 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    The teleological argument attempts to prove the existence of God by explaining that the world, in its seemingly perfect and ordered state could not have come about without the existence of a designer. The argument attempts to demonstrate that complexity, order and purpose are not attributes that can occur randomly, but must be implemented by a designer. By analogy, a form of induction, the argument compares the way the universe works, with its complex phenomena and intricacy, to that of an object, and in the case of William Paley, a watch. A watch has many different parts and shows all the marks of contrivance and design. Just as the existence of a watch implies a watchmaker, the existence of the world implies an even greater designer: God. We also do not need to know the purpose of the watch to infer a designer, simply that design implies a designer.…

    • 1207 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Give an account of the fundamental ideas of the Design Argument for the existence of God…

    • 1541 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    Teleological Argument

    • 1906 Words
    • 8 Pages

    “With such signs of forethought in the design of living creature, can you doubt they are the work of choice or design?” (Socrates) The Design argument looks at the order and purpose, or telos, in the world and states that it implies that there must be a designer who made the world ‘just right’ for human existence. Religious believers go on to state that this designer is God. The argument states that if one uses one’s senses to look at order, such as gravity and the motion of the planets, which exists in the world, it is likely that one will accept that there is a designer God who created the world and gave it this order. Thus, the argument is both a posteriori, based on experience, and inductive, containing a conclusion that we are likely to accept if we believe the premises to be true. Although the argument was one of Aquinas’ five ‘ways’ in his book, Summa Theologica, the most famous version of the Argument from Design was put forward by William Paley in his book Natural Theology (1802), and therefore, this essay will focus mainly on Paley’s version of the argument.…

    • 1906 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Design Argument Analysis

    • 1467 Words
    • 6 Pages

    There are approximately 7 billion people that inhabit this Earth. With there being as many people as there are, there are millions of views that each individual has. Some may believe that aliens exist, and others may even believe that the moon is made out of cheese. Regardless of what somebody believes, they usually have their reasons. A discussion that is very controversial is the debate for the existence of God. People that believe in the Judeo-Christian God have different reasons for why they believe in God. Conversely, Atheists also have their own take on why God does not exist, as well. A popular argument is known as the Design Argument. In this paper, the Design Argument will be discussed and analyzed.…

    • 1467 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Better Essays

    The argument for design has evolved over time as both theologians and philosophers have needed to adjust their arguments supporting this theory to address an ever changing landscape of scientific, biological and cosmological discovery. Despite this the essence of the argument remains intact those in support of the theory would argue that our existence on this earth and in this universe is far too complex a chain of events to have happened by chance. That in fact the existence of the universe is itself the result of a set of such improbable circumstances that there has to be intelligence behind its creation an architect, a creator or in religious terms a God (Chappell, 2011, p. 55). The versions of this argument are in my opinion interesting…

    • 1633 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    The theory of the Design argument was first put forward by Socrates who was a Greek Philosopher who lived in 400 BC, one of the main strengths of Socrates proposing this theory is this means it is a Pre Christian idea and also that it has withstood the test of time. Socrates said ‘With such signs of forethought in the design of living creatures how can there be any doubt that they are the work of choice or design.’…

    • 3121 Words
    • 13 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Darwin's Black Box Theory

    • 1193 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek in their book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist agree, saying, “The irony for the Darwinists is this: if Intelligent Design is not science, then neither is Darwinism. Why? Because both Darwinists and Intelligent Design scientists are trying to discover what happened in the past. Origin questions are forensic questions, and thus require the use of the forensic science principles we already have discussed. In fact, for Darwinists to rule out Intelligent Design from the realm of science, in addition to ruling out themselves they would also have to rule out archaeology, cryptology, criminal and accident forensic investigations…” (156). Intelligent Design is also supported by cell structure and DNA. While giving an interview, science philosopher Stephen C. Meyer’s overviews the main argument of his book Signature in the Cell saying, “The DNA molecule is literally encoding information into alphabetic or digital form. And that’s a hugely significant discovery, because what we know from experience is that information always comes from an intelligence, whether we’re talking about hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or a headline in a newspaper. If we trace information back to its source, we always come to a mind, not a material process. So the discovery that DNA codes information in a digital form points…

    • 1193 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays