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Does God Exist – Argument from Design

Teasi Cannon

To Start:

Quick review of:

  • Truth claims – objective vs. subjective
  • Tactics for keeping the ball in the right court

-What do you mean by that?

-How did you come that that conclusion

-Have you considered______?

  • Cosmological argument
  • It is not about being a Know-It-All, it’s about being kind and building relationship.

Today:

I’m going to be introducing one more logical arguments that will give us even more reasons to believe that God existsand affirms the theistic worldview.

We will be looking at the teleological argument: (Greek. Teleos-Design-finely tuned. Precise. Purposeful)

Every design has a designer.

The universe has highly complex design.

Therefore, the universe has a designer.

Premise one is easy to agree with.

We will be giving evidence for premise two from science-just as we did last week.

What is Science :Science is a search for causes. There are two main types of causes:

NATURAL AND INTELLIGENT

  • Natural causes are things like weather, natural disasters, time, etc.
  • Intelligent causes involve a mind and will—they show precision and purpose.

Let’s look at a few examples: The mechanics of a cell and DNA

Not only do the actions reveal a complicated PLAN, but the DNA coding also includes complicated MESSAGES:

  • Bill Gates quote – DNA is like a computer program but far more advanced…
  • Steven Myer quote (a major proponent of the Intelligent Design movement) – all messages come from intelligence…

Principle of uniformity –If something would require an intelligent cause today, it would always have required an intelligent cause.

So…even with a single celled organism like an amoeba:

  • Darwinist Richard Dawkins, professor of zoology at Oxford University, admits that the message found in just the cell nucleus of a tiny amoeba is more than all 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica combined, and the entire amoeba has as much information in its DNA as 1,000 complete sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica. NOT JUST FILLED WITH RANDOM LETTERS…BUT WITH PRECISE MESSAGES.
  • What’s hilarious to me is that researchers who are part of the SETI program would accept far, far less as evidence for intelligence “out there.” Just something like a series of patterned beeps would convince them (beep, beep, beep).
  • BUT THEY MISS THE EVIDENCE FOR INTELLIGENCE FOUND IN EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THE CELLS IN THEIR OWN BODIES.

FIRST LIFE REQUIRES INTELLIGENT DESIGN – which by the way, is a major problem for Darwinian Evolution!

  • Without intelligence, any chemical compounds floating around in the primordial ooze would never be able to combine in such a way to produce something this precise and complex. It’s as ridiculous as dropping a million pieces of red white and blue confetti from an airplane and have them to land in the perfect configuration of an American flag. It just won’t happen.
  • While we’re at it…another piece of evidence for design and also a problem for evolution is the concept of IRREDUCIBLE COMPLEXITY

Irreducible complexity - a principle which describes a system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.

  • Shows that all the parts are necessary in their existing form and arrangement—could not have evolved slowly. Any intermediate form would be non-functional.
  • This is seen in a mousetrap. All the parts have to be in place for it to work.
  • Also seen in many parts of a cell – and specifically in the flagellar motor Bacterial Flagellum- a nano-machine with a short term memory
  • And if that wasn’t enough to show design:

The Anthropic Principle: the evidence of fine-tuning which indicates that the universe and earth have been specifically designed to support human life. There are more than 100 of these, scientists keep discovering more.

Here’s some of them:

Oxygen level on earth

Gravity

Water vapor in the atmosphere

Jupiter- protects us because of its gravitational force

Earths crust

Lightning

Earthquakes

There is virtually zero chance these things could happen this precisely by chance.