Who has the proof or knowledge that incredibly well-designed natural crystals, the natural arches, or even complicated biological things were designed by someone ‘intelligent’?

From Vinayak

A comment of yours from the article ‘atheism refuted’: “All of us have the knowledge that well-designed things have a designer. “. That is absurd when read in isolation. We know that the airplane is designed by an intelligent man. But we do not have any proof or knowledge that incredibly well-designed natural crystals, the natural arches, or even complicated biological things were designed by someone ‘intelligent’.

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Hare Krishna.
Question from Vinay Prohom. This is a comment on the article Atheism Refuted. When you say all of us have knowledge that well-designed things have a designer, that is absurd when read in isolation.
We know that the airplane is designed by an intelligent man, but we do not have any proof or knowledge that incredibly well-designed natural crystals, the natural arches or even complicated biological things were designed by someone intelligent. Answer. Invisibility is no proof of non-existence.
So when we talk about the design argument, there are two aspects to it. There is argument for design, there is argument to design and argument for design. That argument to design means that there is something very complex which could not have come by chance, by itself.
Now, almost everyone who has studied the complexity and the intricacy of natural phenomena, for example, a cell or even biological organs or that person, this level of complexity within a cell is far more than that in the most complicated human factories. So that level of complexity does not come by chance. So therefore, even if we have not seen any particular designer, for us, if we see natural arches or if we see things in nature, we see a beautiful rose flower, we see just it’s growing.
So what does it mean? That simply means that we don’t see a designer, but our not seeing a designer doesn’t prove that the designer is not present. Suppose we get an email in which there is some image, some movie clip that is attached and as soon as you open it, we see that there is a nice garden scene and in that garden scene, there is a flower bud and the flower rose blossoms and as the flower blossoms into a sparklingly colorful rose, then out of that, the words come out, I love you. Now, what would we do? We will immediately look at who has sent the message, who has designed the movie, who has made the movie.
So whenever we see anything complicated, anything intricate, which we know from our experience, cannot happen by itself, cannot happen by chance, then we infer that it must have a designer. So even if we take a normal rose, a normal rose not in terms of a real rose, but a replica of a rose, say we take a rose painting, to make a rose painting beautifully, it requires artistry. To make a rose craft, an artificial rose, that requires artistry.
To make a rose video, that requires artistry. And what to speak of a real rose, that also requires artistry. So if all these three require designers, if making a rose painting requires a designer, and that actually has only one attribute of the rose, it only has the color and the shape, it only has the color basically, but the shape is there only in one dimension.
A rose, artificial rose, a rose craft, has a color and the shape. So the rose movie may have color and may have some animation within it, but the real rose has not only the color, it also has fragrance, it also has a texture which is nice to touch, soft and soothing to touch, and then it also has a taste. So there are so many attributes.
So by just parity of reasoning, if all these three which have lesser attributes, then the natural rose, if all of them require a designer, then why should the natural rose not require a designer? So it is actually childish to claim that just because we have no knowledge of a designer, that means there is no designer that is required. So therefore, the idea that the designer is required for complex things, that comes by biological inference from our observations of similar things which we see in our day-to-day life, which do require a designer. So therefore, invisibility is no proof of non-existence and things which may be unobservable to us, we do infer their existence based on logical inferences.
So in fact, all of scientific progress has happened because of inference from the visible to the invisible. If Newton, after seeing the fruit falling, had not inferred from the visible fall of the fruit to the invisible principle of gravity, then we would not have had the whole field of mechanics, mechanical engineering, and everything else associated with that branch of physics and that knowledge of gravity and the laws of motion that he subsequently made. My point is that even in science, we move from visible to invisible.
In fact, those who stay fixed on the visible, that is actually the animal level of living. The animal, donkey sees a fruit falling, it simply eats the fruit and goes away. It takes an intelligent human being to look beyond the visible to the invisible.
So rather than limiting oneself to only the material invisibles, science talks about invisibles, but it talks about only material invisibles. So spirituality includes not only material invisibles, but also spiritual invisibles. There is an intelligent designer.
And this is actually done even in day-to-day experiences. For example, when scientists are investigating crimes. So at that time, basically scientists try to find out, not scientists, researchers or investigators who were the people involved in a particular field.
So things can have natural causes or they can have intelligent causes or there can be a combination of natural and intelligent causes. So for example, say a person is found dead with a crack in the skull in a particular room. So investigators may come in and find out.
So first could be that maybe that person just fell down and broke the head. That’s a natural cause. So but if there is a particular wound which is involving a heavy impact and say the person has fallen on the face, but the wound is on the back, then if we see that the wound looks like something that has come from an iron rod, which has been hit with a force, so that this is not caused by an actual cause.
It is caused by an intelligent cause. And third could be that the person was hit on the head and the backside of the head and the person fell on the forehead and both got cracked and then because of the double wound the person died. So then here is a combination of natural and intelligent cause.
So the point here is that even in day-to-day experiences, we look at causes and see whether natural causes are adequate and natural causes are not adequate, then we move towards intelligent causes. So this happens in archaeology also. When archaeologists find a sphere and the sphere has grooves in it, then they try to figure out could it have come by natural causes alone or are those grooves so intricate, so delicate that they would require an intelligent cause.
And if they require an intelligent cause, then that influence is there, then they understand. And even if we don’t know who were the people, what civilization, even if we don’t know anything, still we infer that okay, this is not just a natural, not a result of a natural phenomenon, it is an artifact from some ancient time, some ancient civilization or an ancient group of people. So in this way, even in other branches of knowledge, we move by looking at phenomena and see whether those phenomena or things can be explained purely by natural causes or they require an intelligent cause.
So when we look at the complexity of nature, natural causes alone are not enough to explain. Intelligent causes are also required and that’s why the idea of intelligent design comes up. So it is a logical inference by parity of reasoning from not just an example of designs within nature, but also from, like the rose, but also from the way we operate in various fields like archaeology and crime investigation.
Thank you. Hare Krishna.