Is God a Poor Designer?

Intelligent Design theory is often (as here, for example) countered by complaints that organisms are so poorly designed, and break down so badly, they could not have been built by a God who knew what he was doing. As an objection to ID as science, this misses completely: the scientific program does not attempt to identify the designer, and is only trying to establish the fact of design, beyond what could reasonably have been produced by unguided causes. That's all. The fact that my 15-year old Camry is starting to rattle does not mean it wasn't planned by intelligent engineers, and the fact that life is not perfect does not begin to prove it did not come from an intelligent source.

This charge that God did a poor job calls for a Biblical clarifying response, though, apart from the ID question. What was God intending to do when he created? Did something go wrong? And if so, what was it?

I believe that the God of the Bible was the creator of the universe. That belief, for the record, is not necessarily linked with Intelligent Design, although certainly in my opinion, the Designer for whom the ID program is seeking an empirically identifiable mark in natural history is none other than God. I also believe that God's creative work can be (and is) known, even if his mark in nature is not written in just the way ID is seeking to demonstrate it. Neither of those convictions is essential to ID theory. (I have to make that clear before proceeding, because so many ID opponents have accused ID of being something other than it is.)

Did God design us poorly? Does the fact of illness, injury, infirmity mean that God was not quite up to snuff when he created us? There are two possible theistic answers: one is that God, in fact, didn't do a terribly good job in the first place; the other is that he built it right but something has gone wrong. I'm convinced the latter is true, and that this really helps us understand who God is, and to have better insight into the mess we're in.

There's no denying it's a mess. One of my very good friends was in the hospital yesterday with a very frightening bleeding episode. He's recovering well now, with much thanks for the medical help he received. Others do not come out as well, and in the end, we all die.

And we might as well throw another difficulty into the mix as well. I lost a cousin last week to an act of truly senseless violence. (I think I'll probably write about that when I get ready to, but I'm not there yet.) This illustrates--quite vividly for me, I assure you--the horrifying, rampant evil that exists along with all of our physical weaknesses.

Today in a podcast I heard Os Guinness point out that Christianity, alone among the major worldviews, sees things like these as really anomalous. Take the materialist/secularist viewpoint, in contrast: on this accounting, life has been roughhewn, violent, combative from the start; and the unfriendly, unhealthy situation we're in now has actually been normal forever. It's how life got to where it is now. Why, in that case, would it seem so absurdly wrong?

We can't escape that it does, though. Something is amiss. If we propose that a good, powerful Creator made it all, we have to wonder how it turned out this way. Let's consider the Biblical explanation, and whether it makes sense. Set aside for a moment the matter of whether the details of creation were literally as described in Genesis or figuratively so (and if so, just how figurative). There is a main outline there that we can look at here, apart from that most contentious question.

God created the heavens and the earth, and pronounced them good. The same for all life therein, including humans. (As an aside, when Adam was yet alone, God pronounced that not good--even though the failure I'm about to describe hadn't happened yet. It was the only not-good thing. It's a powerful message that we are made for relationships, to be there with one another and for one another.)

God's creation was very good, in fact. The original humans, once Adam had a companion in Eve, had a perfect relationship with each other and with their God. They lived in an ideal setting, not moping around bored but charged with the care of the world--a world that was not, at that stage fighting back the way it does now. Imagine the joy of planting a garden and cultivating it, without the weeds, and with never a sore back! Write that same feeling much, much larger, and you get the picture. Humans were not subject to death or illness. If you wanted to see Intelligent Design exemplified by life with no imperfections, there it was.

That was a long time ago, lost to history except in the Bible and in other tales of a lost Golden Age, which I believe quite likely survived in altered form out of an ancient memory of this real situation. I contend, in fact, that the racial memory of Eden still lives in us, expressed in the outrage we feel at a world gone wrong.

What happened? When God created the first humans, he gave them a choice: they could follow him or not. Following him involved all the good things he offered: life, fulfillment, ruling the earth under God's direction, health, perfect relationships, peace. Only one thing was forbidden out of all the plenty there, which was the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. For all we know, this was a very literal fruit on a very literal tree, placed in the Garden just so that humans would have a choice. If there was nothing they could do that could possibly be wrong, then there could be no real meaning in anything they did right. For virtue and freedom to have any reality at all, there had to be a non-virtuous choice somewhere at hand, a wrong answer to be rejected. As to the tree's name, "knowledge of good and evil," it referred to experiential knowledge: they knew no evil originally.

They were deceived, as Genesis says, by Satan, the head of the spiritual forces of wickedness who had preceded them into disobedience. And they ate that fruit. God had warned them that in the day they ate of it, they would "surely die." Physical death did not follow instantly, but spiritual death--being cut off from their perfect relationship with God, and finding themselves in a state of shame and alienation in their own selves and with each other--did happen immediately. Physical imperfection and decay took place from that point on. The first human deceptions occurred immediately, and the first murder followed very soon after.

The imperfection in the world we now see was not original. It was introduced by rebellion against God. God did create things perfectly, as the skeptics suggest he should have done. Sin--the term for this rebellion--has messed it up utterly. We still suffer its effects.

Well, as I said, that was a long time ago. Is it even possible that it's true? Christians and believing Jews can rely on the message since it is so strongly affirmed as a part of the Word of God. Does it make sense apart from that faith? I think so. It explains why we all know so clearly that something is so out of kilter in our world. As I said above, the secularist viewpoint seems to say that things are just right: this is all normal, it's the way things have always been. It's hard to see where it was, along the way, that this turned into something that now should not be. (Eastern religious viewpoints, with their view of the world as existing in endless cycles, do not explain it any better.)

I do not mean to say that secularists say the world is just right; we all know better than that. I am saying that the secular or material viewpoint, followed through to its consistent conclusion, seems to say that it's just right. Os Guinness also spoke (about 23 minutes into the podcast linked above) of W.H. Auden's experience in a theater in Manhattan in 1938. Auden, says Guinness, was a Marxist/Freudian liberal, of the optimistic opinion that human goodness would flourish if only certain obstacles were removed. This theater experience "shattered him." He was there along with a largely German-speaking audience, watching film of the brutal invasion of Poland by Hitler's army. Much of the crowd was yelling in German, "Kill them!" They were cheering the invasion. Auden was appalled, not just by the audience, but by his inability to say that there really was something wrong there. He had "no view of human nature to account for" such murderous behavior, and worse, as Guinness said, "he had no absolute by which to judge it as wrong. And he said 'he left the cinema with a clear sense of the fatal flaw of liberalism of that time' . . . and he went on search for a perspective by which he could judge wrong as wrong."

The Genesis account uniquely provides that perspective. (Auden came to a belief in Christ not long after.)

I'd like to call on the scientists and thinkers who say there couldn't have been an Intelligence behind creation because of its flaws, to take the time to learn better whereof they speak. They are not the first to notice the problem. Christianity, and Judaism before it, have recognized it for many centuries, and have had a clear and ready answer. Most of the time it seems these writers don't even know about it.