Intelligent Design | jesusforgives.co.uk

Intelligent design - It's everywhere!

Just as a building requires a builder and a painting requires a painter, the earth demands a Creator. If we look closely and open our eyes to what's around us, we notice that everything looks as if it has been designed!

Anything that has been designed has to have a designer. Lets take leaves and flowers as an example, the pattern and design in nature is clear for all to see!

We can tell by nature that God is very creative and this is the reason that humans are also very creative. We were created in His image.

God wants us to use our creative gifts to benefit those around us and to bring Him honour!

In education, I got 11 A's and 4 B's, to the glory of God. I studied three advanced highers in my last year of school, one subject being advanced higher biology! Studying science only ever increased my faith, as I discovered how incredible the design of many creatures are!

Plants have been intelligently designed

Not only do plants provide food and shelter, they are so essential in giving us the oxygen we breathe while we give them the carbon dioxide to use in photosynthesis. Many plants even provide us with medicine: one-quarter of all prescription drugs come directly from or are derivatives of plants. Plants make up the backbone of all habitats and regulate the water cycle: they help distribute and purify the planet's water. They also help move water from the soil to the atmosphere through a process called transpiration. Plants store carbon, and have helped keep much of the carbon dioxide produced from the burning of fossil fuels out of the atmosphere.

- Leaves have a large surface area to absorb more light

- They are thin so that carbon dioxide has only a short distance to diffuse into leaf cells

- Chlorophyll absorbs sunlight to transfer energy into chemicals

- The network of veins supports the leaf and transports water and carbohydrates

- Stomata allows carbon dioxide to diffuse into the leaf

- Specialised cells called guard cells help to regulate the rate of transpiration by opening and closing the stomata

- Plants can minimize their water loss by controlling how wide their stomata are open, as well as what time of day they are open. Now that's intelligent!

The design of different leaves

The eye!

The human eye is one of the most incredible and intricate designs from the living God.

The eye consists of around 2 million working parts
It has the ability to distinguish about ten million colors
It has automatic focusing and can handle an astonishing 1.5 million messages simultaneously!
Evolution could never fully explain the initial source of the eye or the brain.
If the human eye was a digital camera it would have 576 megapixels!
There are around 6 to 7 million cone cells and around 130 million rod cells, in the human eye!

Such intricacy could never come about by chance, our common sense tells us that it must have been created by an intelligent mind who is God Himself, who has a mind, far above ours. He knows all things and nothing is impossible for Him.

King David stated in Psalm 17:8, "Keep me as the apple of Your eye; Hide me under the shadow of Your wings." Those who belong to God are the apple of His eye! How special is this? To be the apple of our Creator's eye! Such love He has for us.

In Luke 11:34-36, Jesus talks about our eyes being the lamp of our body; "The lamp of the body is the eye. Therefore, when your eye is good, your whole body also is full of light. But when your eye is bad, your body is also full of darkness. Therefore take heed that the light that is in you is not darkness. If then your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, the whole body will be full of light, as when the bright shining of a lamp gives you light".

In the Bible, Jesus opened the eyes of many blind people and not just those who were physically blind but also those who were spirtually blind!

There is an example of one man who Jesus prayed for twice. 'Then He came to Bethsaida; and they brought a blind man to Him, and begged Him to touch him. So He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the town. And when He had spit on his eyes and put His hands on him, He asked him if he saw anything. And he looked up and said, “I see men like trees, walking.” Then He put His hands on his eyes again and made him look up. And he was restored and saw everyone clearly. Then He sent him away to his house, saying, “Neither go into the town, nor tell anyone in the town.”' - Mark 8:22-26

There is a beautiful promise in the Bible for those believe and trust in Jesus;

1 Corinthians 2:9 - 'But as it is written:

“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard,
Nor have entered into the heart of man
The things which God has prepared for those who love Him.”'

The Apostle Paul, who experienced extreme persecution for sharing his faith, had a dramatic conversion experience whereby he had what was like 'scales' come off of his eyes. He encountered Jesus while on the Road to Damascus. After the encounter, he was transformed from someone who persecuted Christians to becoming the person who wrote most books of the New Testament! He encourages us to fix our eyes on Jesus. What a testimony of God's saving grace and mercy in someone's life!

"Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God." - Hebrews 12:1-2

DNA

Similar to how a computer programs information with the binary code e.g 101100110100

DNA programs gentic information, it it made up of four chemicals Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine and Guanine. These are arranged in the human cell like this - CGTAGTGACTCG.

There are about three billion of these letters in every human cell!

These are chemicals that instruct, that code in a very detailed way exactly how the person's body should develop.

'Natural, biological causes are completely lacking as an explanation when programmed information is involved. You cannot find instruction, precise information like this, without someone intentionally constructing it.'

If one base pair is lost, its partner on the other strand of the double helix is there and the right one is able to be replaced, which prevents the loss of information.
In order for a human to create a computer game, they have to make the coding themselves with their intelligent mind, how could random mutations and chance from nature create such amazing coding with its clever helix structural shape?

Mind blowing fact - the moon is only about 250,000 miles away, so all your DNA would stretch to the moon and back almost 1500 times. The sun is 93,000,000 miles away, so your DNA would reach there and back about 4 times!!

Common sense would dictate that any highly organized mechanism, capable of performing complex tasks, beautiful and elegant must have a designer. Random chance does not produce highly structured order.

The human brain

Your brain consists of about 100 billion neurons. There are anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 synapses for each neuron. There are 100,000 miles of blood vessels in the brain.

At birth, your brain was almost the same size as an adult brain and contained most of the brain cells for your whole life. The capacity for such emotions as joy, happiness, fear, and shyness are already developed at birth. Information can be processed as slowly as 0.5 meters/sec or as fast as 120 metres/sec (about 268 miles/hr).

The human brain processes more than a million messages a second.Your brain weighs the importance of all this data, filtering out the relatively unimportant. There is an intelligence to it, the ability to reason, to produce feelings, to dream and plan, to take action, and relate to other people.

Only humans can wonder, "Why am I here?" and "What is the meaning of life?" This sets us apart from all other species.

We even have the knowledge beween good and evil which is explained in the bible,

"For God knows that in the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." - Genesis 3:5

The Lord God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil..." - Genesis 3:22

The human brain is truly amazing and is great evidence of an intelligent designer!

Answering objections to intelligent design

When someone makes an argument against intelligent design, they will often point out things which they believe are 'poorly designed'. The problem with this however is that they are still saying it was 'designed' in the first place, only that the Creator should have done something different. Another problem is that they claim science cannot make assertions about design because it is unscientific. This argument of 'poor design' assumes that there is purpose in nature and is therefore a theological argument, not a scientific one. Answered below are some common objections to the intelligent design argument:

Q. Why do we have the same tube for eating and breathing, as many people have choked on food and died because of it?

A. Many people claim that the human pharynx is a poor design because we have the same tube for both eating and breathing. However, the pharynx is a very complex design, serving as a single passage for three different systems including for respiration, digestion and communication. Although this design has the possibility for choking, it allows for speech.

The structure of the pharynx is very important, allowing for the mouth and nose to alternate for breathing which is essential when the nose is blocked or when the mouth is closed for eating. A two-tube design would require two separate mouths and tongues - one for eating and one for speaking. The more openings there are in the body, the higher the chance is for pathogens to enter. Also, our sense of taste is very closely related to our sense of smell, food would have no taste if our sense of smell was not involved.

Q. Why is the human knee joint prone to breaking down?

A. This is often the result of overuse of the joint. Evolutionists are unable to explain how the very complex knee joint could have came about in the first place. The knee is called a condylar joint which connects the femur to the tibia. Two cruciate ligaments cross each other, holding the knee in place. Between the condylar joint, there is no known evolutionary intermediate.

Q. Why do we have a blind spot in our eye?

A. The blind spot in our eye allows the information which the retina picks up, to be sent to the brain via the optic nerve. The optic nerve must have a way to get out of the eye and this is where we have our blind spot. As we have two eyes, we tend not to notice the blind spot.

For answers to so-called 'vestigal' organs, follow this link - The Evolution Myth