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Design Demands A Designer
| by | Kyle Butt, M.A. |
Sir Isaac Newton was a famous mathematician and scientist who strongly believed in God. The story is told that he had an atheistic friend who did not believe in God. Sir Isaac devised a plan to try to convince his friend that God did exist and had created the Universe. One day, he went to a carpentry shop and asked the owner to make a model of our solar system. This model was to be to scale, intricately painted, and designed to resemble, as closely as possible, the actual solar system.
Several weeks later, Sir Isaac picked up the model, paid for it, and placed it in the center of a table in his house. Some time later, his atheist friend came over for a visit. When the friend arrived at Dr. Newton’s house, the model of the solar system caught his eye, and he asked Sir Isaac if he could inspect the model more closely. Of course, that was fine with Sir Isaac. As the atheist inspected the model, he stood in awe of the fine craftsmanship and beauty of the various pieces. After some time, the atheistic friend asked Dr. Newton who had crafted this wonderful model of the solar system. Sir Isaac promptly replied that no one had made the model; it just appeared on his table by accident. Confused, the friend repeated the question, and yet Newton stubbornly clung to his answer that the model had just appeared, as it were, “out of thin air.” Finally, the friend became upset, and it was at that point that Sir Isaac explained the purpose of his answer. If he could not convince his friend that this crude replica of the solar system had “just happened by accident,” how could the friend believe that the real solar system, with all its complexity and design, could have appeared just by time and chance? Point well taken! Design always demands a Designer. As a case in point, let us look at one beautiful example of design.
THE THOUGHT OF DESIGN
Inside your head is an organ that weighs about 3 pounds. Doctors who operate on this organ say that it feels like unbaked bread dough when you touch it or hold it in your hands. But this “doughy” organ we call the brain certainly is not a loaf of bread. On the contrary, it is the most complex “computer” the world has ever known.
The brain is composed of over 10 trillion different cells. These cells work together to send electrical impulses at a rate of 273 miles per hour (393 feet per second). Nerve cells in the body send 2,000 impulses to the brain every second. These impulses come from 130,000 light receptors in the eye, 100,000 hearing receptors in the ears, 3,000 taste buds, and over 500,000 touch spots. As this is happening, the brain does not move, yet it consumes over 25% of the body’s oxygen and receives 20% of all the blood that is pumped from the heart (which is pretty amazing, considering that the brain makes up only about 2% of the body weight of an average man).
And if all these “brainy” abilities don’t impress you, consider that the brain serves as the “doctor” for the rest of the body. It produces more than 50 drugs, ranging from painkillers (like endorphin) to antidepressant drugs (like serotonin). In addition, the brain allows you to remember words, smells, pictures, and colors. In fact, the brain is so good at allowing a person to remember information, it has been estimated that it would require 500 sets of encyclopedias to hold the information found in the brain. Let’s be honest; if we were walking through the forest one day and found a laptop computer that weighed less than three pounds and yet could perform more complex tasks than any computer on the market, would we say it “just happened by accident?” If we use our brains, we can see that the design found in the brain demands an intelligent Designer.