Epistles to Ansgar: Letter 08 God and Design
2 December AD 2024,
First Sunday in Advent
Dear Godson,
Today is the onset of Advent, the season of penitential waiting, filled with sorrow for our sins but overfilled with joyful hope in the coming of the Lord.
We have lit the first candle of the Advent wreath, named the prophecy candle and which stands for hope. So it behooves us to stand ready to answer to every man that asks you a reason of the hope that is in you.
The main criticism by atheists is that our hope in based on faith, that all faith in supernatural things is blind faith, merely a misplaced trust in tale too fantastic and silly to be true, like belief in the Tooth Fairy, or in UFOs.
In a prior letter, we have seen that faith is a cure for undue doubt, for irrational doubt.
We have seen that faith is not merely a mood or sentiment where one treats something as certain which the reason says is uncertain: faith is an act of the will to put aside doubts the reason says are doubtful doubts, irrational doubts, night-terrors or childish fears, or, in the case of the atheist, and irrational argument against the self-evident prompted by pride, or some other human weakness.
Faith is sticking to your guns once you have already been convinced by reason and experience.
Reasonable doubts can be answered with reason.
Philosophy says monotheism offers the most coherent and satisfying answer to the fundamental questions of the universe, an answer that fits into a logical and meaningful view of the cosmos, whereas the atheist answer fits neither logically with itself nor with the observed universe.
Evidence includes, first, physical evidence, such as the Shroud of Turin or the Mantle of Juan Diego, and, second, eyewitness testimony, such as written accounts of the Resurrection. These will be addressed in future letters.
As for unreasonable doubts, it will require a number of future letters to address those.
The Church teaches, and a short hour of honest introspection confirms, that unaided human reason can deduce from the unavoidable basic truths of the human condition, of the cosmos and our place in it, that an intelligence superior to human, and, indeed, superior to nature, designs and creates and governs nature, is the ground of being, the explanation for rationality, the end of volition, is cause of causation, the source of beauty, the authority of law.
We may break this philosophical argument into seven steps: an argument from design; an argument from the nature of being; an argument from the nature of reason; an argument from the nature of free will and final cause; an argument from first causes; an argument from beauty; an argument from conscience.
The current letter deals only with the first of these: let us address the argument from design.
If we see that there is design in the universe, this implies a designer, much as finding a pocketwatch implies a watchmaker.
We may take it as given that nothing comes from nothing, nothing happens for no reason. Neither a watch, nor a universe, springs into being out of nonbeing of its own accord.
But surely (a skeptic might object) accidents happen for no reason. A watch might imply a watchmaker, but a leaf does not imply a leaf-smith. We do not know how or why the natural universe came into being, so it may have been an accident, an unintentional or spontaneous act.
To answer our skeptic requires a word of clarification.
Let us ask what an accident is.
An accident is when aims clash. Two things are happening, as when, let us say, a tree is growing or a lightningbolt is falling, and both those things happen for a reason.
The act of being struck by lightning is accidental to being a tree — it does not need to be struck by lightning to be a tree — and likewise the act of striking a tree as opposed to a lightning rod is accidental to being a lightning bolt — it does not need to strike a tree to count as a real lightning bolt. The accident is not essential to either tree or bolt.
This raises the question of what is not an accident. Anything that is essential is not accidental. In this example, the aim of its green leaf and buried root of the tree is to gain nutrition from sun and soil for the sake of growth. A tree that does not grow does not live and so it not a tree: it is lumber. Likewise, the aim of the lightning is to equalize charge between earth and sky, and the path of the lightning cannot be understood, nor its cause be known, without this aim being known. An electric charge that remains in the cloud as electrical potential does not equalize charge and hence is not a lightning bolt.
The clash of aims, true enough, is accidental, in the sense that it happens with no aim in mind. An accident is not meant to happen for a purpose. It could just as easily not have happened. The tree would still be a tree and the bolt would still be a bolt if the two had never met.
But the tree is not a tree if it lacks leaf and trunk and root, nor can the color of the leaf, the existence of veins and sap, the shape of the roots, be understood if the aim of the tree to take in energy from the sun and nutrition from the soil is not understood.
And, again, likewise, the lightningbolt is not a lightningbolt if it is not a flow of positive and negative energy between sky and ground attempting — that is, aiming at — to come to an equal balance and cancel out.
With this in mind, let us ask what an aim is.
Philosophers call this final cause: the reason why a thing is what it is and not otherwise cannot be answered without understanding the purpose the thing serves, if it has a purpose.
The aim of a thing can be deduced from its form, or, rather, to be specific, when the aim of the thing is not known, the form cannot be explained.
Suppose a savage came across a box on the beach flung up from some distant shipwreck, and found a clew hammer, a screwdriver, a pocketwatch, a housekey.
What these things are for is not a matter of opinion. It can be honestly debated only by the ignorant.
A hammer has a flat and heavy head to pound nails, a claw for prying them up, and a handle to act as a moment arm, to give mechanical advantage to the swing.
A screwdriver is to drive screws, and a Phillips screwdriver has a cross-shaped blade to prevent slipping offcenter.
A pocketwatch marks the hours. The mainspring is meant to drive the hands, and the escapement prevents the hands from advancing at an irregular rate.
A housekey unlocks the front door lock of the one house on Portobello Road in Notting Hill whose number is etched on the bow. The pattern of teeth and ridges is meant to fit the pins of the lock to prevent the latch from turning save when the proper key is fitted.
It is true that we might use a handy stone to pound a nail if need be, or try to turn a screw with a thumbnail, but the very unfitness of these things for those purposes shows that they are not meant for this purpose. The result will be awkward, and the screw not tight.
In other words, a stone used to hammer nails is a tool only accidently: it is a non-tool being used as a tool. A hammer being used to hammer nails is a tool essentially.
That is what it is designed for. And this can be seen when it functions as designed. Screw and screwdriver fit.
The savage might not know any of these things. Had he never seen a nail, he would not understand why the warhammer was so small, and the screwdriver would look like a particularly ineffective dirk. The pocketwatch he might think a castanet, something meant to make a pleasing ticktock rhythm, and the key a shiny trinket.
However, once he sees a nail or a screw, or is taught to read the numbers encircling the watch face, or is brought into the house on Notting Hill, he will see and know the purposes and aims of all these tools.
Some aims of the tool he can deduce. Others must be revealed to him.
If it can be deduced from the form of hammer or screwdriver what these things are for, or the purpose of a pocketwatch or housekey once the watchmaker or locksmith reveals it, then likewise form of the eye of a cat or wing of an owl allows its purpose, night vision or stealth flight, to be deduced.
One might not know why the weaver bird builds her nest nor the squirrel hides his nuts until observing these animals over the course of a season. But the weaver bird builds her next upside down to hinder snakes from stealing her eggs. The squirrel hide nuts as a winter larder store, difficult for others to raid.
Likewise, it might not be obvious until revealed that the differences in body and spirit of man and his mate are meant as lock and key to fit each other, and serve the purpose of lifelong monogamy, to serve the purposes of love and romance, homemaking and childrearing, but, as when one turns a screw with a thumbnail, primitive tribes and pagan nations which do not know the meaning of marriage carry out the purpose badly. Divorce and polygamy produce more woe than they avoid: the screw is not tight, and the social order rattles and sags.
One need but contemplate the order and beauty and harmony of parts in the eye or the wing, one need but observe the weaving of bird nest or the hoarding of winter nuts, one need but have revealed the institution of marriage to see that these things are ordered by design for the purposes they serve.
Now, as said above, the word accident refers to an event where two things that have an aim suffer a clash of aims, so that the outcome is essential to neither of them. In this case, the Darwinians argue that the aim of all organisms is to flourish and reproduce, and the various accidents of environment eliminate the organisms and instincts less well fitted to flourish and reproduce, so that those more well fitted flourish and reproduce in greater numbers, until breeds and even species with the unfit organs and habits are eliminated.
This argument merely substitutes the aim of flourishing and reproduction for the specific several aims of the organs or instincts in question.
By this argument, a bird’s wing is ill fitted for flight, but is merely used for that purpose accidently, like using a thumbnail to turn a screw.
And even the purpose or aim of reproduction itself is not purposeful, it is merely the long chain molecules of the DNA spiral gathering duplicates of itself out of the surrounding medium, duplicating unintentionally, not as a mechanism meant to duplicate.
The DNA molecule in that sense is no different from an animate molecule. It just so happens to replicate itself whereas other long-chain molecules just so happens not to.
In our analogy of the lightningbolt and the tree, neither the tree necessarily aims at being struck, nor does the bolt necessarily aim at the tree. A bolt striking a tall rock or tower nearby is still a lightningbolt, still acting according to the essential nature of lightning.
Here, the Darwinians claim the organs and instincts none of them aim at the purposes they obviously serve. The organism is aiming at reproduction, and grows myriad random organs or indulges in myriad random behaviors, until the lightningbolt of natural selection weeds out the unfit, leaving only those perfectly yet unintentionally fit for their various purposes.
As if one were to say that the housekey fits my front door on Notting Hill not because the locksmith made it so, but because some random process of volcanic eruption or natural erosion just so happened to produce a million keys, each of which attempted the door, and the ones whose teeth more closely fit the pins were allowed in the house, where a locksmith shop made more of them. After countless generations, only the key whose teeth perfectly fit the pins could unlock the door. Of course, the lock was undergoing a similar ever-changing reproduction at the same time, so the fact that each fits the other is doubly impossible.
This argument fails for three common sense reasons:
First, the eye of a cat is suited to the cat in the same way the eye of a fish or the eye of a hawk would not be. The fit is too precise to be accident.
The eye is essentially for seeing the way a hammer is essentially for pounding nails, in that its purpose cannot be understood without an understanding of what it is for. More to the point, the cat’s eye is essentially for night vision in the precise way a hawk’s eye is designed for distance vision. A frog’s eye is so well designed to see insect motions that the optic nerve will not even register movements outside this range. The frog’s eye literally cannot be used for night hunting or distance vision.
Second, there is no evidence of any organism, not even one, whose organs are random and purposeless, much less the myriad number needed to allow nature to select between them. As if we saw a bird with gills and nine stomachs, each meant to take in a different sort of food, and those stomachs bringing in food the bird could not use make those birds die, so that eventually one bird with one stomach fitted for bird seed survives. And then he and his brothers all form different shapes of gills and beaks and mouths and jaws, dying by starvation across the generations, until one by accident hits upon the proper bill, woodpecker or duckbill, to eat the food suited to the stomach just created. This is simply not what we see.
There are no intermediate forms nor failed experiments visible in nature, or reflected in the fossil record.
Extinct animals did not go extinct because their organs and instincts were not suited to their environment, any more than nations go extinct because their soldiers went to battle using spoons and forks, tools meant for eating, rather than spears and swords. No, indeed, the defeated side in any battle is armed with weapons designed to be weapons. The loss was an accident.
Third, life cannot arise from inanimate matter by natural selection. Even within the Darwinian theory, there must already be a race of organisms, capable of reproducing, therefore having the final cause or aim of reproduction, before natural selection operates. So even if we grant the Darwinians that no particular organ or instinct is directed by design toward its purpose, life itself by definition must be.
If the Darwinians were correct, the question “what is it for?” would have no answer and could never have an answer. A wing would be a feathery forepaw, nothing more, and the hollow bone structure would literally be an accident, and the fact that the hawk had hawk eyes would again be accident, because his eyes would not be “for” distance viewing — he could just as easily have cat eyes and still be a hawk, by this reasoning, or have ears or tongues or some other organ growing out from his eyesockets. Such things are not seen outside nightmare: mutants born with such defects die immediately, not after many generations.
So we may take it as inescapable that nature shows evidence of design. It is inescapable because, in the same way the veins on a leaf cannot be understood without understanding the need of the tree to carry nutriments to its parts, neither eye nor wing nor any organ can be understood without understanding its essential purpose. A purpose cannot be essential if it arises by accident, and the Darwinian theory is that all organs and instincts arise by accident.
The Darwinian theory is based on a the mistake of post hoc ergo propter hoc: an animal born with a crippled limb will not prosper and survive, therefore a healthy limb is whatever is left over once all crippled are killed off by natural selection. But this is not what a healthy limb is. A healthy limb is one that serviceably serves the purpose for which it is designed. It is the crippled limb, born because of accidental mutation or mishap, that is the accident.
Light is not the mere absence of darkness, nor pleasure the mere absence of pain. A healthy organism is not one which merely lacks the mutations and mischances that cripple and kill it. Nor is an organism fitted to its environment merely the absence of the unfit.
It is because an organism is fitted to its environment, fitted by design, that we know what a misfit is. We know a bird born with forefeet or fins is a misfit because he cannot fly, and this is not because birds born with forefeet or fins died off leaving only winged birds behind.
The Darwinians have it backward, and say whatever misfit survives the environment comes to be fitted to it. The reverse is true: animals are fitted to the environment, and whoever is misfit fails to survive.
Armies fight with sword and spear. The Darwinian says the armies fought with fork and spoon, perhaps with stick and flail, and those who fought less awkwardly died in fewer numbers, hence carried on with ever better weapons, under the fork became a battle fork, and a butterknife became a sword.
This is pure nonsense: a sword is made by a blacksmith to be a weapon of war.
The sword is fitted to its purpose not because spoons and forks are unfit. It is fitted to its purpose because it is a tool. Likewise, the wing is fitted to its purpose not because forefeet and fins are unsuited for flight.
We see myriad animals and all their breeds and generations, and all their organs are directed toward the several purposes of each organ, fitted to their instincts, and fitted to their whole species each reproducing after its kind. The animal suited to survive because it is fitted to the environment by design.
Design implies designer. Our savage who finds a pocketwatch and a housekey washed ashore after a shipwreck can deduce a watchmaker and a locksmith must exist, even if his savage imagination cannot imagine these beings nor their purposes. He may not see what the watch is for, but he knows all the intricate parts and gears are clearly fitted together with remarkable balance, precision, and efficiency.
Clearly, man did not design woman, nor the mechanics of childbirth, nor the psychology and spirit needed to incline the passions toward romance and childrearing. And yet man is fitted to woman as key to lock.
Likewise the weaver bird did not design her nest. Nonetheless, the shape and structure of the nest, more intricate even than some engineering works of man, cannot be understood without understanding the purpose the nest design is meant to serve.
Nor did the squirrel hit upon the idea of burying nuts by accident, nor did a philosophical ancestor of the race ponder and deduce the wisdom of hoarding provider secretly during these scarce months.
Nothing in nature could design these organisms and fit them with instincts and drives so precisely suited to maintain their lives.
A study of inanimate nature, of the course of stars and planets, the designs of galaxies and of atoms, reveals mathematical and geometrical symmetries and ratios so perfectly organized we call them laws of nature. Again, it defies common sense to think these things arose by accident, because the essential property that makes a natural law a law of nature is that all nature adheres to the particular mathematical grand design.
The argument is aided if we live in a universe that arose on a given date, fifteen billion years ago, out from a singularity about which nothing more can be said, because in this case there is clearly an act of creation from which nature arose, and before which there was neither matter nor energy, time nor space, nor anything that could be called nature.
That all matter and energy exploded outward into the void in the form of electromagnetic energy, as if a supernatural voice commanded “Let there be light!” — this merely adds a certain elegant neatness to the argument, but the argument that creation implies creator would follow even were the act of creation not so obvious and dramatic.
Even if we lived in a universe whose beginning was unknown, or was infinite in duration, the order seen in nature necessitates an ordering principle; and if the order is rational, this requires a rational mind to ordain it.
Whether there was unformed chaos before the order was imposed, or whether there was nothing, or whether the order extends through all time without limit in a world without a beginning, does not change the core argument.
If, as the pagan Greeks feigned, the gods sprang from titans who sprang from chaos spontaneously, these are all natural beings, brought forth by nature operating according to laws which were not ordained by chaos, titan, or god.
These so called gods are no more than superhuman beings, no different from the Martians of H.G. Wells, superior in man in power and intellect, but not superior to nature, and not the source and creator of nature.
Nature has no ability to design the creature in nature. The design is clearly deliberate, that is, aimed at a purpose. Therefore a designer designed nature, and a creator created nature.
This creator, whatever else may be true of him, must be above and outside of nature, having the power to ordain nature to his several purposes, and across geological ages of time. Having all power over nature, we call omnipotent.
The wisdom and beauty of the natural design is beyond the most magnificent of the palaces or aqueducts or aircraft of man, and shows providence and prescience beyond human.
If he stands outside nature (as he must, in order to craft nature) and therefore stands outside of time, the ends of all things must be known to him, and his providence must be perfect: this we can rightly call omniscient.
This all men know to be God.
The rationality, creativity, authority and providence of this Creator we must study in further letters. As of the close of this letter, we proof only that the Creator is God, rational and omnipotent, providential, omniscient, but further proofs must wait.
Yours,
John Charles Justin-martyr Wright
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
