quintilis's blog

Thinking about the awesome power available to a Designer, this morning I began to wonder what if any limits such a Designer might have on His actions. If the very fabric and laws of the Universe were created by the Designer, then even logical contradictions could coexist peacefully. If the Designer controls how logic itself works, then the Designer could make exceptions to it. An example would be the ability, say, for the Designer to Design Himself. Or (in an example already known to physicists) a photon could be both a particle and a wave simultaneously.

Today I found myself marveling at the clean efficiency of free markets. Isn't it amazing that a completely unregulated economy, left to function freely, will always produce the goods and the markets necessary to sustain itself?

This grows out of a discussion from another of my blog posts, inspired by a post by hblavatsky about a possible temporo-spacial anomaly on Noah's Ark

One would think that Noah would be able to accomplish just about anything in building his Ark, since the directions supplied by God (the designer) might have included all sorts of clever "hacks" allowing end-runs around the restrictions of conventional physics, chemistry, and biology. Such hacks would allow actions similar to entering and exiting the Matrix (as in, the global simulation depicted in the movie having that name). I can imagine that a clever designer could include pressure points and worm-holes in the structure of the Universe allowing those who knew of their existence to bypass its normal laws. These would be similar to the Easter Eggs I mentioned in an earlier blog post, but they'd be UTILITARIAN as opposed to REVELATORY. (I can see that soon we're going to be needing a glossary of terms for our newly-emerging field of Metaphysical Designer Theory.) By building things having certain specific shapes and features that tap into these Utilitarian Easter Eggs (UEEs), someone receiving instructions from God could make space ships, time-traveling devices, teleporters, perpetual motion machines, and even (perhaps) fountains of youth. Even if the UEEs didn't exist at the beginning of such a project, an interactive designer, approving of some human's technological project, could intercede to create a UEE after the fact, sort of like Microsoft creating a new API (Application-Program Interface) allowing some new internet service to communicate with Internet Explorer. So someone building something in faith (like the crude airport built by a Polynesian cargo cult) might actually be able to access unimaginable power beneath the scrim.

Intelligent Design is the study of a complex (and hitherto unacknowledged) technology underlying vast swaths of nature, a technology that clearly suggests a much bigger world of understanding than can possibly be explained under the current mainstream scientific paradigm. Obviously this technology has a source, and that source, were it to be tapped by OUR engineers, would have a vastly transformative potential. Imagine if we could somehow open a channel of communication to whoever designed the flagellum! It would make Wikipedia and Google look like Conservapedia by comparison. He, wherever and whatever he is, could provide us great wisdom and perhaps intercede in matters where we are too weak to accomplish things. Perhaps, for example, the ability to fly through space at greater than the speed of light is possible if only we could get the hand of the Designer involved. Maybe we could also find a way to arrange some middle ground where our lives transition into an afterlife in Heaven without us having to go through a miserable dozen years of dementia, nursing care, and death. And as for Moore's Law, what limits would there be to computation if we could tap into technological omnipotence? Today's octal-core Pentium Snackfoodeons would seem like the 6502s of yestermillennium.

Western science has largely been built through a series of increments and minor revolutions (I refer the reader to Kuhn's the Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Every twist in the road leads us closer to the fundamental truth about the Universe. With physics we start with the geocentric and "desire-based" gravitational theories of Aristotle, which are subsequently codified by Ptolemy. Then Copernicus suggests something new that is refined by Galileo and Kepler, and finally codified by Newton. The science behind Newtonian physics is so precise it can put a man on the moon and bring him back, but even it is fatally flawed in a fundamental (though usually insignificant) way and Einstein makes the correction.

Imagine what the universe would be like if the Darwinists were correct, if we were all here by blind accident, somehow alive on a speck of dust in the vast ocean of space, but with no reason to be here, and no one who put us here. It would be like discovering that we had no parents, but were orphans with no one caring about us one way or the other. How sad would that be? It would be a little bit like the way it is to be born into a Hindu family, perhaps, where the religion around you is all completely false. But it would be even worse than that - because you would be AWARE that you were alone and there would be NO hope for salvation or an afterlife.

We in the Intelligence Design community spend a lot of time disabusing people of the notion that our scientific views (support for Intelligent Design) have anything to do with our religious views (mostly fundamentalist Christianity and Orthodox Judaism, or, in Turkey, fundamentalist Islam). It's important for us to personally decouple these ideas in addition to publicly proclaiming their irrevelance to each other. The reason for this is that otherwise we can quickly run aground into a mushy mess of illogic where we're forced to call in the airstrikes of miracles and the supernatural to win our arguments against Darwinists. Though this might make perfect sense to us, it's no way to win an argument with an unbeliever. Darwinists correctly point out that we can win ANY argument if we're willing to resort to the supernatural. Universe too big for starlight to get to our eyes in 6000 years? No problem, God MAKES the light between us and the stars when he makes the stars. That sort of thing.

Intelligent Design is the science studying the origin of life as designed robots, mostly at a nano-robot level. Most Intelligent Design scholars don't make any claims about the nature of the designer entity, though we all know this is because the anti-God hysteria in our debased culture has caused many religious people to pursue their religion in secret, much as Jews did during Inquisition-era Spain.

But as I've already shown in a number of blog entries, the designs made by a designer say a lot about that designer's interests and motivations. The iPod was made so that its battery would die in 18 months and no provision was made to replace it, so one could argue that Steve Jobs (the ultimate controlling designer of the iPod) had a plan to force iPod purchasers to buy a new iPod every 18 months. I can't help but think this was intentional; the lifespan characteristics of rechargeable batteries are well known even by laypeople, and anyone sealing them in a box knows what he is doing.

Imagine being able to go an entire multi-century lifetime and only needing to drink a few spoonfuls of water every month or two and never needing to sleep! Imagine being able roll around on our paved highways without a need for fossil fuels! Imagine being able to reproduce without the embarrassing, possibly sinful, and suspiciously enjoyable activities that often accompany sex! These are all things we COULD have been able to do had our designer decided, in his wisdom, to give us metabolisms powered by fusion reactions, had he decided we might get around better with wheels, and had he made it possible to exchange genetic information in the form of a clean, crisp, compact flash card. Surely the designer knew there would come a day when we would have paved over more than a quarter of the developed world, a time when wheels would prove far more useful than legs (which seem to me, at least, an unnecessary red herring likely to tempt the foolish into thinking we bear a relationship to animals). He also knew about how making sex pleasurable would make it into a worrisome obsession. And he surely must have had the lowdown on how fusion works, since this is how he chose to power the stars. The question then is: why did our designer, who surely had special plans for us, design us to be like nothing so much as hyper-intelligent apes? My guess is that either there was a little designer humor going on here (and don't discount the idea! How else to explain the appearance of the Star Nosed Mole?) Another possibility is that the idea was to give us a little humility along with our gifts. But this is an explanation I could never accept because, after all is said and done, I do not feel I am the least bit similar to any lowly soulless animal. (That is, I do not feel humble - this is partly reflected in my faith in Intelligent Design - a science that provides some hope for the specialness of humans in the world.)

While I suspect that the intelligent designer of our universe was careful to cover his tracks and make it appear as if natural phenomena could account for the existence of all things, I think it would be wise to initiate a hunt for evidence of the designer's "Easter Eggs." By Easter Eggs, I mean carefully-hidden indications of intelligence in situations that might otherwise be explained as natural phenomena. There are many places where a designer could hide such EEs. One place would be the fossil record.