Intelligent Design?

It's so tempting to want to believe that God exists, that God is the intelligent designer and creator of everything we perceive through our physical senses. The very fact that we exist to consider such seems miraculous. Some cite the wonder of the eye as proof that we are designed by a supreme intelligence. The Penultimate, The Higher Power.

Some, less sanguine about the existence of such a power, often point to the awful things humans do to each other, as inheritors of the survival of the fittest instinct inherent in Nature. It's a huge leap of faith to believe that we as inheritors of raw Nature are actually beneficiaries of God's will.
We are surely inheritors of Nature, but beneficiaries? I don't think so.

With friends like these---------?

Those who believe in Intelligent Design don't accept Evolution as a way to explain the existence of humans, and for that matter, all of Nature. They can't bring themselves to believe, let alone understand, that what is perceived by our senses, reality, is the result of unnumbered genetic mutations over unnumbered increments of time.

But now and then one of those unnumbered mutations actually results in a reality in our space and time, which might challenge even the most hopeful, prayerful believers in a beneficent God and an Intelligent Designer.

Here is a link to an article in today's news, which provides some details and facts as observed and reported by those whose credibility is dependent on being accurate.

I am the father of a son who has recently benefited from stem cell infusions in his quest for therapy to arrest the advance of the destruction of his physical being from the ravages of Multiple Sclerosis.

It would be so convenient to attribute improvement, let alone success, to a loving God. Actually my son with MS does. I'm not about to challenge that which has kept him going for twenty years. It works for him.

To me the miracle of stem cell therapy is that humans have used their hearts and their minds to develop such a treatment, and to apply it to those who suffer.

I guess I am what is called a Humanist. I believe that humans should look around and see the suffering, and the fact that we all die and decide to comfort each other, not increase the suffering and hasten the death. That would truly be miraculous. I cannot do it consistently, but I wish I could.

I am also an agnostic, based on the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition: "One who holds the view that ultimate reality(as God) is unknown, and probably unknowable".

I think that there has to be a force, a power of some kind which created the Universe and set in motion a process of development, physics and evolution which has brought it to what we perceive today. I'm inclined to think of it a The Great Spirit of American Indians, who thanked the spirit in the buffalo who contributed his body to their sustenance. That's as good as any other believe from my point of view.

Leanderthal, Lighthouse Keeper