Why is it so hard for many to believe that the Earth and mankind were designed?

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Well, I don’t believe that Earth or mankind were designed, even though I’m a theist and am pretty darn spiritual.

The Earth and humans evolved, they weren’t designed. Being a software developer, I’m intensely familiar with what both of these terms connote. An evolutionary process takes a system as it is right now and makes small changes over time to improve it.

Whereas a design process starts with a picture you have in your head and slowly makes that picture reality. It’s top down whereas evolution is bottom-up.

Now if you want to play semantic games with the meaning of design, then sure, I guess you could get even an atheist to agree that a theoretical God could have designed Earth and mankind, the design process being evolution, but there’s still a problem with that.

You make a design reality through engineering. You take your tools and physically alter the work piece until it fits your design. Those tools leave marks. Our universe has no tool marks.

Instead our universe looks like what it might if some impossibly powerful 8 year old programmed a computer to just simulate something and keep running until you have something interesting. He’s not really interested in exploring something in particular, he just wants to see the thing running and maybe make a few tweaks as it evolves.

If you study the evolution of things, you’ll find that some things back through history have a rich and impossibly complicated history. Sexual reproduction, for instance, came about long before humans did and is just absolutely fascinating. A whole lot of human behavior was decided for us long long before we ever existed, by an evolutionary process that ran in parallel hundreds of thousands of times to smooth out all the edge cases.

I’d just say it’s way easier to imagine a watchmaker God than the Abrahamic creator-God