An Intelligent Argument for Intelligent Design

From someone who doesn’t care who wins the debate

By MARTIN REZNY

Look, I don’t hate science or disregard any of its findings, quite the opposite. I’m also not a literal-minded creationist who considers a book to be a proof of fact, the more of one the harder you beat other poeple over the head with it. But there are some things that bother me about how the science people argue in some debates about some of the ardently held scientific positions, especially if they mean pushing unprovable opinions as scientific facts.

One of the big ones is the idea that the universe couldn’t have possibly been created and that anything even approaching a god-creator cannot ever be true. The newest approach taken by the other side of this age-old debate, the believers in divine creation of some sort, is called the “intelligent design theory”. From my point of view, the main shame is that the believers don’t seem to be honestly trying, because approaching it in this way can work.

If you’re not familiar with the debate so far, watch this to get caught up:

Talking about the possibility of a creator of the universe as if it were a scientific theory, while meaning it, is something that can move our understanding of the existence forward. However, what the scientists have to do in order to accomplish that is to allow themselves the possibility of the answer to this question being a confirmation of there being a creator.

All I’ve seen so far from the people with scientific background were counterarguments, attacking what were mostly only pseudoarguments presented by the people with religious or spiritual background. In other words, up until this point, we have been having a debate between people who’d want this to be true so much that they don’t care if their arguments make any sense, pitted against people who are insulted by the notion.

The Actual Analogy for Universe-Making

If you’ve watched the above video or if you are familiar with the main argument for a god so far, you have heard of the watchmaker analogy. If you’ve found a watch in the forest, you’d assume somebody made it. Some creationists still like to use the example of an eye, or some other complex organ. The appropriate response to that was the theory of evolution, pointing out the many suboptimal or plain dumb ways in which organisms are wired.

The logical implication of this is firstly a flawed creator, and since I’m not a Christian, my immediate response to that is why not. Some scientists have taken that as winning the argument and proving that god doesn’t exist, but let’s be fair, an imperfect creator, either a bit of an idiot or a bit of dick, would still be a creator that exists. Also, who says creator has to create a world with the intention of benefiting the creation? Or absolutely everyone within it?

But I’ll get to explaining why the opposite would make complete sense when I actually offer you the most perfect analogy that we’ll ever be able to devise. Bold claim, I know, but it’s so obvious I have no idea why nobody is using that as the go-to metaphor. The second conclusion to draw from the watchmaker versus evolution kerfuffle is that if there is a creator, it would be a creator of the whole process of evolution or of the physics in general. Well, duh.

You don’t create a massive universe to produce a single element of a a single creature at a single point in time. How is that not obvious to absolutely everybody? I propose simply to evaluate the intent of a design primarily on the level of the whole thing the design of which is in question. Or at least on the level of its entire systems, not individual features. I also find it key to accept a creator with flaws, malice, indifference, or selectiveness. Why?

Because all of that is exactly the case whenever any one of us creates a universe. Yes, we do that, a lot. It can be in the form of a story, but that is already an outdated metaphor, because we have the perfect analogue short of the real thing: Programming a simulated universe. One with both physics and actors is generally called a computer game, and even though there’s no reason to expect the creator of the universe to be just like us, games will be games.

Coding a Reality That Doesn’t Suck

Assuming this universe is not an awfully boring game which, as my IT friend pointed out to me, does at least have great resolution, we can try to prove this theory that god is a programmer by assessing if this reality is playable. This immediately easily counters some of the more lame arguments against this universe being created intelligently, such as the one saying that there’s way too much empty space where nothing can live in it. How is space bad design?

What have you wanted or expected of a universe? That it’d be comprised of 100% of space filled to the brim with intelligent self-aware actors? That would be kinda crowded, wouldn’t it? Why do you think there are wide open spaces in games? You could say that it’s only because of us mimicking attributes of the world we live in, because of us trying to achieve verisimilitude of the simulated world for the purposes of believability and immersion. Sure, okay.

But that’s not the extent of it. What fun is a game which has no room for the actors to expand and/or explore in it? What sense would it make? There’s even a whole genre of games containing these words in its own name, the 4X strategy genre — eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate. Fascist overtones of the whole livingspace/Lebensraum idea set aside, life does need space. Even the political thinkers who came up with this called the whole concept organopolitics, trying to liken political systems to natural living things.

And let’s not forget the other half of space, time. Why should we expect a created world to lack dynamics? In many games, there are phases. This concept also has a name, early/mid/late game. Given the science we know already, where life cannot live right now can change on its own and, more importantly, can be changed at will. We may be some time away from practical terraforming of planets, but it is completely possible in principle.

According to the most current scientific knowledge, terrestrial planets are plentiful in our universe and even at slower than light speeds it is possible to travel to other solar systems. Hard? Absolutely. Can we do it yet? Nope. But in time, which is just a real terrain where we haven’t arrived yet, it is completely possible. We can screw it up, but then again, what fun would be a game in which you can’t ever lose? It’s not like existence is too small or short lived for some intelligent actors somewhere at some point being able to not suck at it.

The way I see it, our universe also has these game features in spades:

1. Generative and balancing mechanisms
2. Scalable and playable difficulty
3. Unending dramatic conflict
4. Player characters with roles to play

How To Make a Universe That Works

As our example proves, planets supporting life for eons can form on their own in this reality, on which intelligent actors can emerge (and given enough time, are likely inevitable). Given the game logic (world created for intelligent actors), the time until the emergence of intelligent actors can practically be considered pre-game, irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how long that part lasts because there is no one around to experience it, and for the same reason, there is also no one to interfere with it. As a game setup, it works great.

Relatively soon after the planets form, life can emerge. That means that the chemistry of this reality of which life is the ultimate expression is inherently resilient, meaning it can adapt and improve itself even by failing. Imagine how much more it can do after the self aware intelligence kicks in. While we can technically kill ourselves at any time, according to current science, it would at most be a reset of the game (from the point of view of intelligent actors). Not only would life survive any apocalypse of our making, it would rebound.

As for the balancing of the game, there are very few things that could obliterate us without an advance warning or at least a chance to ultimately survive. The greater and more hopeless the calamity, the lower are the odds of it happening within any tangible timeframe or with a high frequency, and it appears that as the universe ages, it is actually becoming safer overall. Planetary orbits clear themselves of debris, tectonics cool down, more dramatic cosmic bursts grow further and further distant in spacetime, etc.

The Ultimate Movable Goalpost

If we turn our gaze from the cosmic scale to the smallest of human scales, we’ll find that the world still holds up as a game, and pretty great one at that in terms of how it sets up its difficulty. When our intelligence first emerged, it was us against critters, mere NPCs, just like most RPGs begin with the great hero being sent to slay a bunch of rodents of unusual size, much dumber than we are, easily outsmarted and without the ability to keep up with our tech.

Given the nature of evolution itself, we have also started in a natural habitat exactly fitting our biological needs. It was only after we’ve started to expand to different climates that we were forced to develop technologies and tactics to adapt, and we’ve only really started to expand after we started being successful as a species at the starting location. Afterwards it was this success, this passing of the first level, that raised the difficulty, bringing a new enemy.

Yes, it was us. Players were now facing players, who started a technology and strategy race against each other, diminishing natural resources proportionally to how successful they became as civilizations. Conversely, each resource wall caused us to jump ahead in technology even more, creating new dimensions to human experience and entirely novel problems to deal with as we’ve progressed further. Given the limited nature of our planet, we’re now driven to space. Who’s doing it? We may believe it’s us, but really, it is the game itself.

Our Love-Hate Relationship With Suffering

This brings me to one of the major simplistic arguments in this debate, used actually by both sides. One side says that universe must be created because of all the nice things in it, while the other says that it cannot be created because of all the not nice things in it. Well, boo-frickety-hoo. Yes, life hurts, bad things happen to good people. Assuming that the world is created, this doesn’t even mean that the creator is flawed or hates us or that we don’t matter.

Do you know what it’s called when bad things happen to good people? A tragedy. Awful when it happens to you, sure, but isn’t it just awesome to witness when it’s happening to someone else? Why would you say there’s so much violence, so much killing and destruction in our stories and our games? Because it’s interesting. You know what is not interesting? A story where everything is nice and everyone is happy and goes along great all the time.

Now you might think to yourself, wait, are you saying that our suffering is some kind of game to our creator?! Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying. We sure treat the worlds we create in that way. We call the games that we create games, and we create them because we love us some games. If somebody creates a world and then treats it as exactly as real as he or she is and the world that they actually inhabit, we’d consider them a bit on the insane side.

Most creators do actually love their creation, but just look at authors like George R. R. Martin. I’m sure he doesn’t consider killing of a beloved character as equal to killing his equal, a human being. Much like the physics of the created world have no reason to apply to their creator, the life of the created characters is not commeasurate in the eyes of the creator to the life of entities existing on the level of a creator. It may look harsh, but only from down here. It’s likely that suffered tragedy makes us matter more to a creator.

The “I” at the Center of It All

If you don’t accept anything of what I’ve said so far, I hope you at least don’t deny that this universe has players. The one thing that we know with any certainty is that we exist and have agency. It is a quite fundamental attribute of games, since a purpose of creating a simulated world has generally something to do with us being able to experience something after immersing ourselves in a fantasy world. Games do that interactively, hence players.

Especially if you like most scientists believe the world itself to have no consciousness, then it is quite clear that if the universe exists because of anything, it would be us and sentient entities like us. The only semi-counterargument presented by science champions is the anthropic principle — we couldn’t possibly live in a universe that doesn’t allow us. That’s a fine thought and all, but what does it prove? Universes allowing us can be created.

What I’m trying to demonstrate is that you can find ways of proving if a universe is intentionally designed or not, and questions that cannot lead to accomplishing or debunking that are useless. The universe being a computer game can even be approached mathematically, since if it is a simulation, we can for instance try to find mathematical patterns underlying the organization of natural phenomena occuring on any scale, or most tellingly across scales.

But for now, let’s stick to a softer, more social science-y approach. Players not only need to have agency, they also need to have stuff to do. On this level, the idea of roles fits like a glove, which is why we should check first if the glove isn’t man-made. Conventional scientific wisdom says that something like social roles is entirely arbitrary, artificial, not natural. Ignoring the fact that completely natural brains came up with it in this case. Let’s take a closer look.

The question to pose would be, could we have not come up with most of those roles? Can you have a society of intelligent beings in the natural world that can exist continuously without ever developing rulers, warriors, farmers, thinkers, etc.? In other, very dry words, a society of humans that never has to differentiate and specialize social hierarchy or labour? I would personally be highly skeptical of that, and I can give you a number of examples why.

Just by the virtue of natural attributes of life and living environments, once individual people have memory, living longer makes people differently useful. Just like experience points in many games, time spent playing, coupled with effort and skill, in a very real sense make some people better than others at various things needed for survival of the whole group. Groups that specialize tasks for individuals fare better, prosper, procreate, the whole spiel.

Being a parent is also making one very different from being a child, and that is only the beginning of the whole of social relations. Humans are forced to group together as opposed to living alone, and then limited resources force humans to both cooperate and compete, as opposed to allowing them to spend most of their time living solitary, undisturbed, idle, uneventful lives. If survival is a stick, it beats human beings into being proactive, social players.

The Implications of Intelligent Design

If one moves beyond the literalist nonsense of some religious creationists, the theory of intelligent design not only isn’t logically incompatible with the theory of evolution, it is a possible way of figuring out the vaunted meaning of life using the scientific method. If anything, the prospect should excite scientists, not enrage or frustrate them. As even Dawkins has said himself, he wouldn’t mind finding out that aliens have created us, some real entity.

This is exactly like that, only think of it as aliens creating us in a Matrix. Interestingly enough, it could end up scientifically proving at least some aspects of some religious beliefs, and who knows, we may be wired to believe certain things for a reason. But even then, the only dangers this approach to figuring our reality poses are either wasting a bit of time on a wild goose chase, or, if some knowledge is indeed gleaned, becoming better at life.

To me, having some kind of proof that life is in fact a game of sorts would make me more relaxed and more optimistic, even if a bit pissed off at the creator. Come to think of it, it would make sense to design a world that is difficult to be proven as created, answering the old “why does god not prove his own existence” question, since every game tries to do at least a bit of sleight of hand to keep players fully immersed and invested, sacrificing belief in the creator in order to suspend disbelief in the reality of the world.

What do you think? Let’s start having a more intelligent debate.

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