When it comes to design I think that there are too many chance occurrences that direct the development and flow of our lives to say that everything is set in "order" and "God ordained." Obviously, everything that happens will happen within the domain of God's allowance or forbearance, but do you really think Peyton Manning's 6 interceptions were "the will of God?" Or did the San Diego defense have any say in the matter, or the sloppy field?
That's where I use the "casino analogy." Every game in a casino, by law, must have a random outcome. Nobody knows what's going to happen until the dice are rolled, the lever is pulled or the wheel is spun. However the one thing that you can count on is that at the end of the day, the casino is going to make a bank deposit.
All of the random events in each game is funneled through mathematical filters so that the house always wins. Also, the nature of the game itself determines the outcome. Holding the dice in your hand, you know that the outcome will be random. However it's not so random that you'll roll a 14. The shape and number of the dice determines that you must roll some combination between 2 and 12. Given the six sided nature of the cube, the most likely outcome is 7, so all of the dice games are built around the number 7 in such a way as to make certain that the odds are always in the house's favor.
In his book Vital Dust, Christian De Duve shows how that the nature of the carbon atom is such, that given the right environment, it will begin to "automatically" form more complex molecules. Given the right circumstances further, and some "chance" events, the complex carbon based molecules will become self replicating. This is why he calls life an "imperative." Given the right environment life will "just happen" in a lengthy series of "chance" encounters. But the outcome of those "chance" encounters between molecules and atoms are filtered by the very nature of the atoms themselves. It's almost as if "someone" "designed" the atoms to self assemble into living organisms. However, that "someone" (or some One) planned it so that the likely environment would be so excruciatingly rare that for all intents and purposes, life is limited to a single environment.
Someone pointed out this pic to me recently:
Threaded Mode
