By RAYMOND DE SOUZA
Part 3
Let us put our thinking cap on, and reason: Whenever you see something whose parts are arranged in order, following a specific logical pattern, you know that someone did it. Furniture in a living room, chess pieces on a board, books in a library. Orderly arrangement cannot be explained except as being due to the activity of an intelligent designer. There is no order without an intelligent orderer.
Imagine that tomorrow morning you go to a bicycle factory, and in one of the workshops you see a number of parts, sorted into different boxes — steel tubing, a sheaf of spokes, wheel-rims, hubs, handlebars, pedals, and boxes of nuts and screws and so forth. Then imagine that a big storm hits the factory, and, when you return some hours later, after the storm, let us say, you find that the entire assemblage of units has been transformed into a dozen new bicycles, each perfect in every detail: Part has been fitted into part with deft adjustment, yielding a result which is a model of ordered arrangement. Amazing how the bicycles fitted themselves during the storm, right?
Only an idiot would suppose that those bicycles were fitted together by the storm. Mere chance would never produce that kind of order! Anyone with a modicum of reason would immediately recognize that it was the work of a mechanic or of a group of mechanics. As simple as that.
Order is unity in variety. Order is the result of intelligent design. Design is the planning of order. The mechanic had in mind or on paper the assemblage instructions, and followed them in order to assemble the bicycles. Order is present when several different things (the parts) combine to produce a single effect or result (the bicycle).
Take another example: your wristwatch. There you see the case, the dial, the hands, a multiplicity of little wheels and other bits and pieces: Each part is fitted to contribute to produce a single result, that is, the convenient indication of the hour. Everybody know that nature does not produce watches. They don’t grow on trees, not even in the Land of Oz. They are made by people for our convenience. Their order necessarily presupposes an orderer, the watchmaker.
Now take a higher example: the human body. Like the bicycle and the watch but in an immensely more perfect way, it consists of a great number of members and organs, yet all help, each in its own way, toward the well-being of the whole: you.
In the human hand that helped make the bicycle and the watch you will find a far more wonderful example of order and ingenuity. Every movement of the human hand causes an interplay of bones, a contraction or relaxation of flexible muscles, a straining or slackening of fibrous sinews. Its framework is composed of no less than 19 bones, while eight more of various shapes ensure strength and flexibility in the wrist. And it is part of a living body, immensely more perfect than all the bicycles and watches in the world.
You know that bicycles demand the existence of mechanics and that watches demand the existence of watchmakers, so how could blind chance possibly have formed the hand, a highly complicated and intricate system of bones and muscles, of sinews and arteries, wherein the several units are working harmoniously for the production of each and every movement of the whole? Moreover, unlike the bicycle and the watch, the human hand is alive!
And, once chance is necessarily excluded, the question immediately arises, where has your hand come from? “My parents,” you will naturally reply. Yes, of course, and your parents came from your grandparents and they came from your great-grandparents and so on and so forth until you ask yourself the question about the origin of the human race, and all life on the planet.
Who, then, is the author of that wonderful reality? Who has caused it to grow to its present shape, to develop so many different tissues, to attain such efficiency?
The answer springs to your lips. Mere chance could never have produced such a perfect being as a living being. Lifeless matter can never produce living matter, because no being can give what it does not have. The Maker of the human hand and of the countless other marvels with which the universe is filled can be none other than the great Master-Worker, whom we call God.
A rough diamond in a mine will not attract your attention, but a neatly cut diamond atop a royal crown will attract it. What is the difference? It is the same element, is it not? The difference is that someone with an intelligent mind knew how to cut the rough diamond and place it on the crown. An intelligent designer was behind the work, even if you never come to know who he was. The only diamond mine where people collect diamonds already cut was in the classic Disney cartoon Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Wild horses will never perform the prancing of the Spanish Riding Horses of Vienna, unless a trainer spends long months working with them, after a few generations of horses in captivity.
Wild bushes and plants in a field will never organize themselves to look like the gardens of Versailles, unless some very patient gardeners work on them.
Yes, there is no order without an intelligent orderer. Order is the exclusive result of the intellect. Your old photographic camera consists of a case in which there is a circular opening for the admission of light. The light passes through the lens, and forms a picture on the sensitive film. The human eye works in a similar way: the eyeball corresponding to the case of the camera, the pupil corresponding to the circular opening, the crystalline lens to the camera lens, and the retina to the film.
In both examples you see that several distinct parts are found united or fitted together to produce a single result, that is, a clear picture on the film and on the retina. You know that the camera was made by someone — but the human eye, the human body, was not? So, the camera came from a factory, but the human body with all its perfections came out of the ground after a few million years? Why don’t cameras do the same? Or could those distinct things, the camera and the eye — have come together by chance?
No. It is perfectly plain that such a combination could have been effected only by an intelligent worker: The camera was made by man, even though you may not know who he was. The human eye was made by a worker no less real, though invisible to our senses. We call such a maker God.
The Last Word
The worker, who could organize matter to behave in the way the eye does, is a worker whose intelligence and power are impossible for our minds to measure. He is the Author and Master of Nature: We call Him God.
Yes, for any mind not afflicted with bigotry or insanity, the order of the universe proves the existence of God. Let Einstein have the last word:
“I want to know how God created this world. . . . The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books — a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.”
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(Raymond de Souza is an EWTN program host; regional coordinator for Portuguese-speaking countries for Human Life International [HLI]; president of the Sacred Heart Institute, and a member of the Sovereign, Military, and Hospitaller Order of the Knights of Malta. His website is: www.RaymonddeSouza.com.)
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