Since I wrote my previous post, I got to go to lunch. As I walked through down-town, I looked at how the snow was melting on the lawns, how water trickled across the sidewalk, and even the cracks that were in the concrete.
There are patterns everywhere once you look for them. Consider that a twig looks like a tree branch (only smaller). A crack in the highway looks like a river with its tributary system. A grain of sand, magnified, looks like a mountain.
All these things are similar to one another. And that got me to thinking, especially since I could see the sidewalk upon which I was walking.
We know that the sidewalk is man-made. Even had we never seen one before, we could look at it and see that it is man-made because of how straight the edges are and how repititious the sections are. Such things are never found in nature. Instead, nature exists more randomly.
Yet even in that randomness, there is an internal order. How else could a crack in the sidewalk look like a river tributary? Despite the fact that both of these things are randomly generated, they still fit an orderly pattern. That is, they each have tolerances which they fit into.
We can tell the difference between cracks in the sidewalk that are caused by nature and those that are put there when the sidewalk is laid down. The man-made cracks are straight. The natural cracks are jagged. Yet when we think about the subject of scale we get a different picture.
Zoom in to the “straight” crack in the sidewalk. With enough magnification, you begin to see the individual bumps and jagged pieces that comprise this “straight” line. Zoom in yet further and the concrete begins to look like a mountain range. There are jagged peaks and sharp valleys, flat vistas and shallow dips. Zoom in enough so that you are focused on just one “mountain” and you’ll see that this mountain is just as ragged as the outline of any mountain peak you see in real life too.
It is only the level of scale that makes such lines appear to be straight for us.
So here’s the thing. If we see these straight lines of concrete in the woods, we know that there is human agency behind them. We know that because we know that humans like straight and orderly lines, that people will put the concrete where they wish it to be and in the pattern they wish it to have. We see the same types of patterns in other human buildings: houses that are square like the square tiles on the sidewalk, etc. Thus, looking at the patterns that are produced and seeing the same pattern in other places, we know that the same designer is behind it. In this case, humanity.
But consider that when you “zoom” in on any of these human things, you’ll find that no matter how straight we make our lines they are still composed of edges with random variations throughout. And these random variations look identical to many other things that occur in nature on different scales. These things are universal.
If the same patterns show us when a human agent is doing something, could we not conclude from the patterns in every single bit of matter that there is likewise the same designer behind all that matter?
Atheists, I know, will say that it’s just “nature” behind it. But regardless, there must be something there controlling all of matter. How else could you explain the universality of these “random” occurances?
