If Living Things Had an Intelligent Designer, How Would We Know?

 I dread taking the path I am going to have to take in order to make my point about creation. That's because anything regarding the COVID-19 virus has been absurdly tribalized. Once something becomes so, minds become closed not just regarding the subject but anything that touches it. This article may be an example of that. I've tried to make the point I am making here on several online forums and it is positively frightening how minds switch off and simply cannot even get to the point I am trying to make. 

It doesn't matter if I am talking to a YEC who did not finish high school or a Research Scientist with a Doctorate. They and all points between have an unsettling propensity to act like two bands of chimpanzees hurling poo at one another. It is all about what side you are on, not what the facts are. Even if for my purposes it does not matter who is right regarding the question of the origin of COVID-19. They can't seem to get to what I am saying about the fact that there is a controversy because both sides seem to be utterly convinced that all dissent from their position is illegitimate. This even though the World Health Organization hasn't even released their report on the origin of the virus yet, and that report may be meaningless anyway because China is editing it. Intelligence is no defense against tribal thinking short-circuiting reasoning. That said, here goes. 

The former Director of the Centers for Disease Control, a virologist with access to inside information by the name of Robert Redfield, has publicly said that he does not believe that the COVID-19 virus outbreak started at an animal market. Rather, the evidence suggested to him that the virus was the result of gain-of-function experiments from the nearby Wuhan weapons lab and that the release was an accident. Dr. Anthony Fauci was quick to denounce this view, but then he was connected to the outfit which authorized and supported the viral-gain-of-function research to occur at that lab. Even if Redfield has found the truth, it might be a hard truth for Dr. Fauci to accept. Indeed it would be hard for a lot of well-placed individuals to accept, and this may be related to the fierceness with which dissenting views on this issue are suppressed. 

That is not to say that Redfield is right. It is not necessary for him to be right in order to make the point about creation that I wish to make here. It is only necessary to acknowledge that there is a legitimate question on the matter. It is a disgrace that this has become so difficult. We are are in an environment where everything is politicized, conclusions are rushed, and even smart people take their cues from their chosen authority figures and quickly decide that dissent is somehow immoral or ignorant or both. 

If you are mentally independent enough to acknowledge that it is genuinely difficult for experts to determine whether this virus was subjected to engineering or not, then you should be able to appreciate the real point of this article: If they can't tell whether or not a virus from a known area in a known near timeframe was or was not genetically engineered, then how can they tell whether or not the emergence of dozens of phyla in the Cambrian, or the sudden diversification in the Ordovician were engineered? 

Naturalists assume that the evolutionary mechanisms we are familiar with are able to make all of these changes even during the short periods of dramatic change. But that's not driven by scientific proof, but rather the extrapolation of known data to vast lengths. "It must have been nature because nature is all there is" is circular. We know that nature has some power to shape organisms. We don't know, scientifically, whether this world is strictly the result of natural processes or if nature was being guided from beyond to produce a beautiful and complex world that would never have developed on its own. We simply can't know that via science. 

There are several instances of what I would call "anomalies" in the development of life on this planet. I've documented a few on this blog and won't go into them here, but I seriously doubt most of the kind of intervention I am talking about could even be detected with our current science. The dust-up about the virus only confirms that to me. The truth is, we don't have a thousand different biospheres to observe. We have one. We don't know if a thousand others, or a billion others would naturally turn out to be as integrated and complicated as ours or if what we enjoy here is not the result of nature alone, but Divine input. In an article about "Creation-Evolution Wars" I mused that many actions could fit the definitions of both creationism and evolution. Naturalism is the odd man out there.

Genesis chapter one says that God told the seas and earth to bring forth living creatures, but then subsequently says that He made or created them. This points to a creation which cannot do God's will without God's help. This is exactly the kind of creation one would expect were Christianity correct, because it also teaches that we cannot do His will without His help, and that our obedience is far from perfect. 

Just as we can't figure out for sure if the changes that made the Wuhan virus so deadly in such a short period of time were from nature or design, we can't answer the much much harder question of whether the biosphere as a whole is the result of nature or design, or some combination of both. Partisans on both sides will holler that we can, and view dissent as disease, but this is not the path of the noble mind. 

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