The Design Proof is the simplest and clearest argument for the existence of G-d. In fact, it is so intuitively obvious that a common response is – “This sounds too simple to be true.” Check it out yourself and experience the clarity.
The classical design argument is remarkably simple. There is complex design all around us demanding some source or explanation. As examples, consider the complexity of the human eye and the human brain:
a. “As light enters your eye, about seven million cone-shaped color sensors automatically fine tune your color contrast and detail vision depending on the lighting conditions. Whenever there isn’t enough light for an accurate color picture, the cone-shaped sensors sign off and about 127 million rod-shaped, ultra-sensitive black and white sensors switch on. Meanwhile, a computer in your optic nerve receives signals from those 127 million sensors, re-codes them and zaps them down a few hundred thousand nerve fibers leading to your brain at about one billion impulses per second. While all this is going on, the pupil is monitoring and maintaining the level of light within your eye, a stereo focusing system is maintaining maximum image sharpness and a sophisticated image-enhancer is clarifying tiny blurs in your vision caused by motion or darkness.” (The Eye of A Needle, pp. 155–157.)
b. “An average human brain has about ten billion nerve cells. Each nerve cell sprouts between 10,000 and 100,000 fibers in order to contact other nerve cells in the brain. Taken together, the number of these connections is approximately one thousand million, million (that’s one quadrillion — mathematicians call it 10 to the 15th power; a 1 followed by 15 zeros)…
“Despite all these connections, this forest of fibers is not a chaotic, random tangle, but actually a highly organized network where most fibers have specific communication functions and follow regular pathways through the brain. If only 1/100th of the brain’s connections were specifically routed, that would still add up to more connections than in the Earth’s entire communications network!” (The Eye of A Needle, pp. 155–157.)
Could it Have Happened by Chance?
Prominent scientists have spoken about how unlikely it is that a specifically random process of development could explain the tremendous complexity of life:
a. Nobel laureate Sir Fred Hoyle famously wrote – “The chance that higher life forms might have emerged… is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.” (Fred Hoyle – The Intelligent Universe, 1983, p. 17, and Nature, 294, 1981, p.10.)
b. Professor Sir Ernest Chain, Nobel Prize-winning drug researcher, said, “To postulate that the development and survival of the fittest are entirely a consequence of chance mutations seems to me a hypothesis based on no evidence and irreconcilable with the facts. These classical evolutionary theories are a gross oversimplification of an immensely complex and intricate mass of facts, and it amazes me that they are swallowed so uncritically and readily…” (Quoted in Francis Hitchings, The Neck of the Giraffe: Where Darwin Went Wrong, New York: Ticknor and Fields, pg. 82.)
And as difficult as it is to imagine a random process beginning with a single-celled amoeba and ending up with a human being, the distance between inert matter and that single-celled amoeba is enormously greater.
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Rabbi Asher Resnick serves as a senior lecturer at Aish HaTorah’s Executive Learning Center, and is a senior training lecturer for Aish’s Rabbinical Ordination program. As a close student of Rav Noach Weinberg, zt”l, he developed a special expertise in addressing fundamental issues in Judaism, as well as in bringing classical texts to life. As a bereaved parent, Rabbi Resnick’s extensive writings on loss, suffering and trauma provide a sensitive Jewish perspective on coping with these fundamental life cycle issues. OlamiResources.com is happy to highlight several essays over the coming months featured on his website JewishClarity.com. This essay should be l’zechut ul’iluy nishmat Ruchama Rivka, a”h, bat Asher Zevulun.
