Design vs Unguided Nature: Which Makes More Total Sense?
First off, I’m not trying to prove God exists. That’s not what this is.
What I’m offering is a framework, a way of comparing big-picture explanations of reality and asking which one makes the total evidence most expected. Not a gotcha. Not a proof-text parade. An abductive case: given everything we observe, which worldview makes the data less surprising?
The crucial methodological choice comes first, before any evidence gets evaluated. You have two options:
Methodological naturalism says we only allow non-intentional causes in our explanations, even if God exists. Design is ruled out before the investigation begins.
Methodological designism says we allow intelligent, purposive agency as a live explanatory option when the data point that way.
My framework adopts the second. It takes the Bible, read in a straightforward historical sense, as a primary data source about creation, a global Flood, and the life of Christ. It also takes scientific observations seriously. The question isn’t whether to choose between Scripture and science. The question is what the world looks like if physics, chemistry, and biology were designed systems, sometimes deliberately accelerated or steered by their Designer.
The hypothesis: Literal Programmatic Intervention.
Reality is designed by a rational mind. Natural laws and systems operate like robust, elegant programs God wrote. God sometimes performs extraordinary interventions into that system, compressing or stretching processes in time without violating His own underlying order. The Bible is a reliable historical record of some of those key interventions.
We’re not rejecting physics. We’re asking what physics looks like when it’s authored.
The weight of the case comes from consilience: independent lines of evidence that jump together if LPI is true and look more coincidental if it’s not.
Cosmology gives us physical constants sitting in fantastically narrow life-permitting ranges. Under design, that’s unsurprising. Under pure chance in one universe, it’s patched by speculative multiverses that multiply unobserved entities to explain one observed one.
Biology gives us DNA and cellular machinery operating as high-density digital information systems with encoding, decoding, and error-correction. In every other context we know, that sort of complex specified information arises from minds.
Quantum foundations increasingly reconstruct physical theory from information-theoretic axioms. Structure and constraint appear more fundamental than billiard-ball particles. That fits naturally with a Logos picture: rational, word-like order underlying what we call matter.
Earth history shows the rise of dense urban civilizations and writing falling in the same broad window many traditional chronologies associate with a global, civilization-resetting Flood. Numerous ancient cultures preserve large-scale flood traditions. Pattern, not proof.
Cultural history organizes our dominant global calendar around one life. Even BCE/CE keeps the same zero-point. If Christ is, as Christianity claims, the central intervention of the Creator into His creation, it’s at least noteworthy that civilization’s way of reckoning years is organized around that life rather than any other.
The biblical record itself presents a long-lived, historically reliable, internally coherent text with a unified story: designed creation, real Fall, judgment in the Flood, culminating Incarnation. In my framework, that text isn’t a late myth to be fitted into external chronologies. It’s a primary historical witness to the system’s Author.
Formally, this is Bayesian reasoning. Compare two hypotheses: reality is ultimately unguided, or reality is designed and the biblical God has acted as Scripture describes. For each evidence cluster, ask whether it’s more expected under design or under its absence. If multiple independent lines favor design, the posterior probability rises unless you’ve assigned design an astronomically tiny prior before looking at the evidence.
The point isn’t that science proves God. The point is that, on standard rules for updating beliefs, the cumulative pattern pushes a fair-minded observer toward design more than away from it, if we allow design as a live option.
I’m not claiming to have mathematically disproved naturalism. I’m not claiming the Bible solves every scientific puzzle. I’m claiming that once you allow intelligent agency into your explanatory toolkit and treat the biblical narrative as serious historical testimony, the total picture of cosmology, biology, quantum structure, human history, and culture hangs together more naturally under a design-plus-intervention model than under a purely unguided one.
A skeptical but fair-minded person doesn’t have to accept my conclusion. But I’m asking that they see the structure: this isn’t a single God-of-the-gaps move. It’s a consilient, abductive comparison of whole world-pictures.
Consider LPI on its own terms. Consider it as a foil to methodological naturalism. The evidence doesn’t force anything. But when taken as a whole, it points somewhere. The question is whether you’ve decided in advance where it’s allowed to point.