Dr. Stuart Burgess discusses the ways in which creation clearly displays design, pointing to an incredible designer.
DEL: So when you look at this field of wheat, does that spur something in you as a design engineer?
STUART: Wheat would be one example of the part of creation which is designed for man, provisioned for man. But whichever part of creation I look at whether it’s birds or trees or plants or land animals, I see everything with a purpose for man, God’s goodness and filling the earth and all the provisions that man needs.
DEL: So Stuart, when you read the details of the creation account for example in Genesis do you see that as details from a design standpoint and an engineering standpoint?
STUART: To me six day creation is totally compatible with what a designer would expect. In fact, the Bible says that God created the earth to be inhabited. Now if that was God’s purpose, then it makes sense that creation would be made in a short period of time like six days because why would a creator wait billions of years if his whole purpose is to have life on the earth. So I teach my students the way to design is not to evolve step by step. I tell them you’ll get nowhere if you do that. The way you design properly is to design top down. You think of the overall functions, the overall system. Then you plan the subsystems that will work together to produce the overall function. And only when you’ve laid out all the systems do you then design the components of those systems. And when you bring all the parts together you have this fully functioning system. So what you see in a system like a bicycle transmission is an irreducible system where many parts are needed simultaneously for there to be a useful function.
DEL: So the bicycle doesn’t work unless they’re all together.
STUART: That’s right. So we live in this very complex world with complex ecosystems and complex substances like water and air. And everything is finely tuned. You only have to have a small change in one of the properties of a substance like water and air, and the whole system breaks down. That’s one of the reasons I think there’s overwhelming evidence for design because the world is far more complex than a bicycle or a spacecraft. There has to be a designer who put everything in place and fine-tuned everything.
DEL: So it’s almost as if God were actually giving an example to us in his creation of how to be a good craftsman, how to be a good engineer and designer.
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