The Designer Paradox
Why Skeptics Grant Human Designers Powers They Deny to God
Author’s Note
The ideas in this paper have been bouncing around in my mind for years - fragments of arguments, half-formed analogies, intuitions that something was deeply inconsistent in how skeptics treat divine action versus human creativity. I never managed to capture it comprehensively until now.
What follows is a long read. I won’t apologize for that. The argument requires building a case across multiple domains - philosophy, physics, information theory, theology - and addressing the serious objections that any thoughtful skeptic would raise. I’ve tried to be thorough rather than superficial, rigorous rather than merely clever.
If you’ve ever felt that the dismissal of God as “magic” rings hollow, especially in an age when we casually accept that programmers create worlds, set physical constants, and exercise god-like authority over their digital domains - this paper is for you. The inconsistency is real, and tracing it to its roots reveals something profound about both the nature of reality and the nature of the skepticism that refuses to see it.
I think it’s worth your time. I hope you’ll agree.
— JD
Abstract
Modern skepticism routinely rejects divine action as “magical” or “impossible,” claiming that a Creator who sets physical constants, defines natural laws, creates matter, or intervenes in cosmic history would be exercising powers that violate rational explanation. Yet these same skeptics accept without hesitation that human designers exercise precisely analogous powers within information-based environments: game developers set gravitational constants, CGI artists create matter ex nihilo (from the simulation’s perspective), and programmers suspend or rewrite physical laws at will. This asymmetry reveals what I call the Designer Paradox: the more powerful the proposed designer, the fewer causal powers skeptics permit him to exercise. This paper argues that (1) the causal powers attributed to divine creation are structurally identical to those exercised by human designers over virtual worlds, (2) contemporary physics increasingly models the universe as an information-based system, making the analogy more than metaphorical, and (3) the skeptic’s objection therefore fails on its own terms. The paradox exposes an inconsistency in skeptical methodology rather than a genuine philosophical problem for theism.
1. Introduction: The Powers We Accept Without Question
Consider what a video game developer does when creating a virtual world.
She defines the gravitational constant. Objects in her world fall at whatever rate she specifies, whether that matches Earth’s 9.8 m/s² or some entirely different value. She sets the speed of light, determines whether her universe permits faster-than-light travel, and decides if conservation laws apply. She creates entities from nothing (from the game’s internal perspective), placing characters, objects, and entire landscapes into existence by sheer intention. She can suspend her world’s physics for narrative purposes, making a character invulnerable or allowing impossible movements. She can revise the timeline, resetting events or altering history. She exercises, in short, comprehensive creative authority over every aspect of her information-based domain.
Nobody calls this magic. No philosopher objects that such powers are “incoherent” or “impossible.” We recognize this as the normal exercise of intentional agency by a mind operating on an information substrate. The designer stands outside her created system while simultaneously being able to act within it. She transcends her creation’s physics because she authored those physics.
Now consider the traditional theological claim about God. As Creator, God defines the universe’s physical constants, sets its laws, creates matter and energy, sustains its existence, and can act within it according to His purposes. The structural parallel is exact. God exercises over the actual universe the same type of causal authority that human designers exercise over virtual ones.
Yet skeptics treat divine action as categorically different. When a game developer sets gravitational constants, that is engineering. When God allegedly sets gravitational constants, that is magic. When a programmer creates entities within a simulation, that is coding. When God creates entities within the universe, that is supernatural nonsense. When a CGI artist suspends physics for dramatic effect, that is artistic license. When God suspends physics for redemptive purposes, that is an impossible miracle.
This asymmetry is the Designer Paradox. The skeptic accepts comprehensive creative authority from finite minds operating on information systems but rejects identical authority from an infinite mind operating on physical reality. The more powerful the proposed designer, the less the skeptic permits him to do.
Something has gone wrong in the skeptic’s reasoning. This paper identifies precisely what.
2. Human Designers as Proof of Concept
Before examining the theological implications, we must appreciate the full scope of what human designers actually do. The powers involved are not trivial.
2.1 Defining Physics
Modern game engines allow developers to specify physical constants with arbitrary precision. Unity, Unreal Engine, and similar platforms expose parameters for gravitational acceleration, air resistance, friction coefficients, and dozens of other values that determine how objects behave. A developer can create a world where gravity pulls sideways, where objects accelerate upward, or where different regions operate under entirely different physical regimes. The “physics” of the created world is entirely a product of intentional specification.
This extends beyond simple parameter adjustment. Developers can implement non-standard physics engines that violate conservation of energy, permit action at a distance, or allow effects to precede causes within the simulation’s timeline. Nothing in principle prevents creating a virtual world that operates by rules radically different from our own.
2.2 Creating Entities
When a 3D artist models a character and places it in a scene, that character comes into existence (within the simulation’s reference frame) ex nihilo. There was no character; then, through the artist’s intention expressed through the tools of creation, there is a character. The same applies to objects, landscapes, and entire virtual universes. From the perspective internal to the created system, these entities simply appear, called into being by a transcendent cause outside the system.
The scale is impressive. A modern open-world game might contain billions of instantiated objects, complex ecosystems with emergent behaviors, and procedurally generated content that expands the created world beyond what the designer explicitly specified. The creative act can be both direct (placing specific objects) and mediated (designing systems that generate content according to patterns the designer establishes).
2.3 Suspending and Revising Rules
Game designers routinely suspend their own rules for gameplay or narrative purposes. A character might become temporarily invulnerable, move through solid objects, or violate the world’s established physics. Save states and respawn mechanics effectively reverse time within the game’s frame, undoing events that “happened” and restoring prior states.
CGI artists in film do something similar. They composite impossible images, create objects that could not physically exist, and animate sequences that violate every known physical law. When we watch a superhero fly, we accept this as the filmmaker’s creative authority exercised over the visual world they have constructed. We do not demand a physics paper explaining how flight works; we recognize that the creator defines what is possible in the created domain.
2.4 The Designer’s Transcendence
What makes all this possible is the designer’s transcendent relationship to the created system. The game developer exists outside the game, is not bound by its rules, and can access and modify any aspect of it. She can pause the simulation, examine its internal states, alter its parameters, and resume operation. Her causal relationship to the created world is categorically different from the causal relationships that obtain within that world.
This transcendence is not mysterious. It follows naturally from the informational nature of the created system and the designer’s role as its author. The designer wrote the rules and therefore can rewrite them. The designer instantiated the entities and therefore can modify or remove them. The designer sustains the simulation’s operation by running it on hardware and therefore could cease that operation at will.
None of this seems philosophically problematic. It is simply what it means to be a designer of an information-based world.
2.5 A Necessary Clarification: Structural Parallel, Not Metaphysical Equivalence
A potential objection must be addressed here. Human designers do not create ex nihilo in the absolute sense. They rearrange existing matter and energy - silicon, electricity, magnetic states - to instantiate their designs. Divine creation, by contrast, is traditionally understood as absolute origination: bringing being itself into existence where there was nothing.
This distinction is real, but it does not undermine the argument. The Designer Paradox does not claim that human and divine creation are metaphysically identical. It claims that the form of creative authority - the ability to define laws, set constants, create entities within a domain, suspend rules, and exercise comprehensive control over a system - is coherent when exercised by minds over information-based domains. This structural parallel holds regardless of how the underlying substrate is itself grounded.
The skeptic’s objection is not usually “divine creation would be more fundamental than human creation.” The objection is that the very powers involved - law-setting, constant-defining, entity-instantiating, rule-suspending - are “magical” or “incoherent” when attributed to God. But if these powers are coherent when exercised by finite minds (as simulation-acceptance shows), then they are coherent when exercised by infinite mind. The metaphysical depth differs; the form of causal authority does not.
Indeed, if anything, the greater metaphysical depth of divine creation makes the case stronger, not weaker. If finite minds working with pre-existing matter can exercise such comprehensive authority over their created domains, how much more could infinite mind exercising absolute creative power? The objection inverts the logic: it suggests that creating from nothing is harder to accept than creating from something, when in fact the former simply extends the latter to its ultimate ground.
3. Physics Increasingly Models the Universe as Information-Based
The Designer Paradox would be merely an interesting analogy if the physical universe were fundamentally different in kind from designed information systems. But contemporary physics increasingly suggests otherwise. The universe, at its most fundamental level, may be information all the way down.
3.1 Wheeler’s “It from Bit”
Physicist John Archibald Wheeler, who coined terms like “black hole” and “wormhole,” spent his later career arguing that information is the foundation of physical reality. His famous slogan “it from bit” expressed the thesis that every physical quantity derives its ultimate significance from information-theoretic description. As Wheeler wrote in 1990:
Every it, every particle, every field of force, even the spacetime continuum itself, derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits.
This is not metaphor. Wheeler was proposing that the physical world literally reduces to information, that the seemingly solid reality of matter and energy is, at bottom, a pattern in an information substrate.
3.2 The Holographic Principle
The holographic principle, developed by Gerard ‘t Hooft and Leonard Susskind, makes Wheeler’s intuition more precise. It holds that the information content of any region of space can be fully encoded on its boundary, with a maximum information density of one bit per Planck area. This suggests that three-dimensional space is, in a well-defined sense, a projection from a two-dimensional information surface.
Black hole thermodynamics provides the strongest evidence for this principle. The entropy of a black hole (a measure of its information content) scales with its surface area rather than its volume. If the interior of a black hole stored information volumetrically, entropy would scale with volume. The area scaling indicates that the information is somehow “stored” on the boundary, with the interior being a kind of holographic reconstruction.
If the holographic principle is correct, then the universe is structured more like a computed simulation than like a mechanical clockwork. The “stuff” of reality is information, and spatial extension is how that information manifests to observers embedded within the system.
3.3 Quantum Information Theory
Quantum mechanics has always had informational aspects, from the role of the observer in measurement to the no-cloning theorem’s prohibition on copying quantum states. But recent work has pushed further, suggesting that quantum theory is fundamentally about information rather than about waves or particles.
Quantum error correction research, particularly work by John Preskill and others, reveals that the structure of spacetime itself may emerge from quantum entanglement patterns. The “ER=EPR” conjecture by Juan Maldacena and Susskind proposes that quantum entanglement (EPR correlations) is geometrically equivalent to wormhole connections (Einstein-Rosen bridges). If correct, the fabric of spacetime literally is woven from information-theoretic relationships.
This makes the simulation analogy more than metaphorical. The universe does not merely behave as if it were a computation; at the fundamental level, it may be a computation, with physical law emerging from information-processing constraints.
3.4 Digital Physics and the Computational Universe
The tradition of digital physics, pioneered by Konrad Zuse, Edward Fredkin, and Stephen Wolfram, takes the computational view to its logical conclusion. Zuse proposed in 1969 that the universe is literally a cellular automaton, with discrete states updating according to deterministic rules. Fredkin developed “finite nature,” the hypothesis that at the Planck scale, space, time, and physical quantities are discrete rather than continuous, making the universe computationally tractable.
Wolfram’s work on computational irreducibility shows that simple programs can generate arbitrarily complex behavior, suggesting that cosmic complexity need not require complex specification. A few lines of code can produce patterns that appear random, exhibit long-range correlations, and support arbitrarily complex emergent structures. Seth Lloyd has calculated the universe’s computational capacity, treating it as a quantum computer that has been running since the Big Bang, performing roughly 10^120 operations on 10^90 bits.
The implications are significant. If physics is ultimately computational, then the universe has the same ontological status as a running program. The question of what “runs” the program, what hardware sustains the computation, becomes pressing. And the causal relationship between a programmer and a program becomes directly relevant to understanding the relationship between Creator and creation.
But there is a deeper question that information-theoretic physics raises, one that points beyond mere computation to its necessary ground.
3.5 The Rational Structure Beneath Information
Every information system - every computation, every simulation, every program - necessarily conforms to the three fundamental laws of logic: identity (A = A), non-contradiction (not both A and not-A), and excluded middle (either A or not-A). No code violates these laws. No working program produces logical contradictions. This is not a design choice; it is an absolute constraint. Illogical code does not malfunction - it cannot exist as functional code at all.
The same holds for physical reality. Across 13.8 billion years (granted for this argument), across every scale from quantum to cosmic, no violation of logical structure has ever been observed. No particle has failed to be identical to itself. No state of affairs has been both actual and not-actual simultaneously. The conformity is absolute and exceptionless.
But why? Matter is inert. Particles do not “know” they cannot violate non-contradiction. There is no physical force called “logic” that pushes things into rational order. Logic is not made of anything; it has no mass, no charge, no location. Yet physical reality conforms to it with perfect fidelity.
This conformity cannot be a brute fact - that would abandon explanation at the most fundamental level. It cannot be self-grounding - the universe would need to use logic to establish logic, which is circular. The only remaining option is that logical structure is grounded in something that transcends the physical system: a rational mind whose thinking constitutes the order that reality reflects.
This is what the Logos doctrine claims. Reality is rationally structured because it flows from Rationality itself. The necessary conformity of contingent physical processes to necessary logical laws finds its explanation in the necessary rational being who prescribes that structure. Information is not merely pattern; it is rational pattern. And rationality, wherever we encounter it, traces to mind.
3.6 The Simulation Hypothesis and Its Theological Parallel
The simulation hypothesis, popularized by philosopher Nick Bostrom, argues that we may be living in a computer simulation created by a more advanced civilization. While often treated as science fiction, the hypothesis follows rigorously from premises that many naturalists accept: if consciousness can be substrate-independent, if computational power continues to increase, and if advanced civilizations would have reason to run simulations, then simulated beings may vastly outnumber non-simulated beings, making it probable that we are among the simulated.
What makes this hypothesis relevant is not its truth but its acceptance by otherwise skeptical thinkers. Elon Musk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and numerous philosophers have expressed openness to the simulation hypothesis while maintaining skepticism toward traditional theism. But the simulation hypothesis is structurally identical to the doctrine of creation. Both posit that our reality is designed and sustained by a transcendent intelligence operating outside our physical laws.
If the simulation hypothesis is coherent (as these skeptics apparently believe), then divine creation is coherent. The only difference is the nature of the designer: an advanced alien civilization versus an infinite personal God. The skeptic who accepts the possibility of one while rejecting the possibility of the other on logical grounds has revealed that his objection was never about logic.
But there is a deeper problem with the simulation hypothesis as an alternative to theism: it explains nothing. If advanced aliens simulate our universe, we must still ask what explains their universe’s existence, what grounds their physical laws, what fine-tuned their constants for life capable of building simulators, and what grounds their consciousness. Every question we asked about our universe reappears one level up. The regress continues indefinitely.
Classical theism terminates the regress in necessary being - something that exists by its own nature and requires no external cause. This is not an arbitrary stopping point; it is the only coherent stopping point. Contingent things (including hypothetical alien simulators, their hardware, and their universe) require explanation. Necessary being does not.
Some will object that both sides end in brute facts - the naturalist says “the universe just is,” and the theist says “God just is.” But this badly misunderstands the nature of necessary being. A brute fact is an arbitrary stopping point, a shrug of the shoulders, an admission that explanation has run out. Necessary being is the opposite: an infinite wellspring from which explanation flows.
Consider what classical theism actually claims. God is not merely “a thing that happens to exist without cause.” God is infinite being, infinite knowledge, infinite purpose, infinite rational structure. This means:
Ontologically: All finite existence participates in and derives from infinite existence. There is no bottom to being; finite things are grounded in inexhaustible depth.
Epistemologically: All knowable truth derives from omniscient mind. Every question has an answer because infinite knowledge contains all answers. Discovery has no floor.
Teleologically: All purpose derives from infinite purposive will. The universe is not accidentally organized but intentionally structured toward ends.
Mereologically: The relationship of parts to wholes, the structure of composition itself, is grounded in the mind that conceives unified complexity.
A hidden assumption underlies much skeptical thinking: that complexity requires complex origin. But this is demonstrably false. Consider the Mandelbrot Set - the most complex structure in mathematics, exhibiting infinite detail at every scale, patterns within patterns without end. Yet it is generated by an extraordinarily simple formula: z → z² + c. The complexity is not added to the simplicity; it flows from it. You can zoom forever and never exhaust the depth, because infinite complexity is implicit in the generative simplicity of the formula itself.
This is precisely what divine simplicity claims. God is metaphysically simple - no parts, no composition, no internal complexity - yet creation exhibits extraordinary, layered, inexhaustible complexity. The naturalist assumes this is paradoxical: how can simplicity produce complexity? But the Mandelbrot Set answers: generative simplicity is how you get infinite complexity. Complex origins produce finite complexity; simple generative grounds produce infinite depth.
The same rational structure appears at every scale of reality - from quantum mechanics to cosmic structure - because it all derives from the same unified Source. Finite minds can explore infinitely because they are exploring the infinite depth implicit in simple ground. Divine simplicity is not a philosophical embarrassment to be explained away; it is the only adequate ground for the inexhaustible complexity we observe.
The naturalist’s “brute fact” is a wall. The theist’s necessary being is a door - or rather, an infinite corridor. When the naturalist says “the universe just is,” inquiry terminates. When the theist says “God is the ground,” inquiry has just begun. We have a source of infinite science: finite minds exploring infinite wisdom never exhaust what there is to discover.
This is why the “both sides have brute facts” objection fails. A brute contingent fact (the universe with these laws, for no reason) and a necessary infinite ground (being itself, knowing itself, willing itself) are not the same kind of terminus. One is arbitrary; the other is principled. One ends explanation; the other grounds it inexhaustibly.
The simulation hypothesis, far from being more parsimonious than theism, multiplies entities and defers explanation indefinitely. Theism posits one necessary ground; simulation theory posits an infinite regress of contingent grounds or an inexplicable brute stop. The former is metaphysically serious; the latter is evasion dressed as sophistication.
3.7 But This Is No Simulation
Having established the structural parallel, we must now mark a crucial distinction. Christianity does not claim we live in a simulation. The simulation hypothesis, even if true, would leave us in a universe of uncertain meaning, created perhaps for entertainment, research, or purposes entirely alien to our flourishing. Simulated beings might be deleted, reset, or forgotten when the simulator loses interest. Their suffering might be no more significant to their creators than the “deaths” of video game characters are to us.
The Christian claim is radically different. This universe is not a game, not an experiment, not a disposable projection. It is real creation with real stakes, and God has demonstrated this in the most decisive way possible: by entering it Himself.
The Incarnation is the ultimate refutation of any theory that treats creation as less than fully real. In Christ, God did not observe the simulation from outside or manipulate variables from a safe distance. He became flesh, submitted to the constraints of the world He made, experienced human suffering from the inside, and died a real death. The Creator’s blood spilled on the Creator’s ground.
This changes everything about what creation means. A simulator might care about the simulation; the Christian God became part of His creation and gave His life for it. A simulator might find the suffering of simulated beings interesting; God found human suffering so significant that He bore it Himself. A simulator stands permanently outside, untouched; God entered in, was touched, and bears the scars eternally (John 20:27).
The simulation hypothesis, at best, gives us a clever designer who might or might not care about his creation. Christianity gives us a Creator who demonstrated the ultimate care by dying for creatures who had rejected Him. The logical structure of design may be parallel, but the moral meaning is incomparably different.
This is why the Designer Paradox, while exposing skeptical inconsistency, does not reduce Christianity to simulation theory. The paradox clears the ground; it shows that design is coherent. But Christianity builds on that ground a structure of meaning, sacrifice, and redemption that no simulation hypothesis can approach.
4. The Skeptic’s Inconsistent Standard
Given the structural parallels between human design of virtual worlds and divine creation of the physical world, and given physics’ trend toward information-theoretic foundations, why do skeptics accept the former while rejecting the latter?
4.1 The Objection Stated
The typical skeptical objection takes some form of this argument:
P1. Divine action would require suspending natural laws, creating matter, or altering physical constants. P2. Such actions would be “supernatural” and therefore either impossible or inexplicable. P3. We should reject explanations that invoke the supernatural. C. Therefore, we should reject divine action.
But notice what happens when we apply this reasoning to human designers:
P1’. Human design action requires (within the created system) suspending simulated laws, creating simulated matter, or altering virtual constants. P2’. Such actions would be “supernatural” from within the simulation and therefore either impossible or inexplicable. P3’. Simulated entities should reject explanations that invoke the supernatural. C’. Therefore, simulated entities should reject the existence of their designers.
The parallel is exact. Yet no one thinks C’ is reasonable. We would recognize immediately that simulated entities denying their designers on grounds of methodological naturalism were making a category error, failing to recognize that causal explanations appropriate within a system need not exhaust the causal explanations relevant to that system.
4.2 Why the Asymmetry?
If the arguments are parallel, why do skeptics accept one while rejecting the other? Several possibilities suggest themselves.
Scale confusion. Perhaps skeptics intuitively feel that the universe is “too big” to be designed, while virtual worlds are “small enough” to be products of intention. But this reverses the logic. The greater the effect, the greater the cause required. If finite minds can design complex virtual worlds, infinite mind can design infinitely more. Scale is an argument for divine design, not against it.
Substrate confusion. Perhaps skeptics believe that because virtual worlds run on physical hardware, they are “really” physical processes, whereas divine creation would have no physical substrate. But this confuses the substrate of implementation with the nature of the causal power. The game developer’s creative authority operates at the level of information, code, and intention, not at the level of electron movements in silicon. If information is fundamental (as contemporary physics suggests), then the information-level description is not less real than the physical-level description.
Methodological naturalism mistaken for ontology. Science methodologically brackets supernatural explanation in order to focus on natural mechanisms. This is useful for investigating how the world works. But some skeptics slide from “we don’t invoke supernatural causes when doing science” to “supernatural causes do not exist.” This is a non sequitur. Methodological choice tells us nothing about ontology.
Chronological snobbery. Perhaps the real objection is aesthetic: divine creation sounds too much like ancient mythology, whereas simulation theory sounds appropriately modern and scientific. But truth is not determined by what sounds contemporary. If the ancients were correct that reality has a transcendent intentional source, that claim does not become false merely because it is old.
Directional prejudice. Consider an asymmetry we rarely notice: we have no difficulty accepting transformation from the physical world to the virtual world. A programmer, embodied in physical matter, creates an informational domain with its own laws, entities, and structure. Physical mind generates virtual reality. We find this utterly unremarkable.
Yet skeptics balk at transformation from the spiritual to the physical - at the idea that spiritual Mind could generate physical reality. But why? The form of the causal relationship is identical in both cases: a mind transcending a domain, instantiating that domain, and exercising comprehensive authority over it. The direction of the transformation is irrelevant to the coherence of the act.
If physical minds can create “downward” into virtual substrates, why cannot spiritual Mind create “downward” into physical substrates? The skeptic accepts one direction without hesitation and rejects the other as inconceivable. But the inconceivability is not in the logic; it is in the skeptic’s unexamined assumption that physical minds are real while spiritual Mind cannot be. That assumption is precisely what the evidence of fine-tuning, rational order, and information calls into question.
An antiquated target. Perhaps the deepest source of the asymmetry is that skeptics are rejecting a God who does not exist - a caricature rather than the real article. The “God” dismissed as “magic” is typically an invisible wizard, a bearded sky-grandfather, a supernatural being within the universe who occasionally intervenes by breaking his own rules. This conception is indeed problematic. It is also not what classical theism claims.
Classical theism understands God as Being itself - not a being among beings, but the ground of being as such. God is not an entity within the universe who manipulates it from inside; God is the reason there is a universe at all. The Logos is not a supernatural add-on to an otherwise self-sufficient nature; the Logos is the rational structure that makes nature intelligible in the first place.
When we reframe divine action in these terms, the supposed incoherence vanishes. God setting physical constants is not an old wizard twiddling dials; it is the ground of rationality specifying the parameters of the rational order that flows from it. God creating matter is not a magician conjuring rabbits; it is Being itself giving rise to particular beings. God sustaining the universe is not supernatural intervention in an otherwise independent system; it is the continuous dependence of contingent existence on necessary existence.
The Designer Paradox works because it forces skeptics to think about God the way classical theism actually does - as a mind exercising comprehensive authority over an information-based domain. Once framed this way, the parallel to human designers becomes obvious. The skeptic’s real objection is not to the coherence of such authority but to the antiquated picture he has mistaken for the genuine article.
4.3 The Paradox Crystallized
We can now state the Designer Paradox precisely:
P1. Human designers can create information-based worlds where they (a) define physics, (b) create entities, (c) set constants, (d) suspend rules, and (e) intervene at will.
P2. Skeptics accept that human designers exercise these powers without considering such powers “magical” or “impossible.”
P3. God, as Creator of the physical universe, would exercise identical causal powers over a system that contemporary physics models as information-based.
P4. Skeptics reject divine exercise of these same powers as “magical,” “impossible,” or “incoherent.”
C. Therefore, skeptics impose constraints on a divine designer that they do not impose on human designers, revealing an inconsistency rather than a principled objection.
The paradox is not merely rhetorical. It identifies a genuine logical flaw in the skeptical position. If comprehensive creative authority over information systems is coherent when exercised by humans, it is coherent when exercised by God. If anything, the infinite case should be easier to accept than the finite case, since infinite mind faces no limitations that finite minds must overcome.
But coherence is only the beginning. Consider probability.
The physical constants of our universe are fine-tuned to extraordinary precision. The cosmological constant alone is calibrated to one part in 10^120. The ratio of electromagnetic force to gravitational force, the strong nuclear force coupling, the mass ratio of protons to electrons - dozens of independent parameters fall within the narrow ranges that permit complex chemistry, stable atoms, stellar fusion, and ultimately life. The combined probability of this configuration arising by chance is not merely small; it is so vanishingly tiny that “improbable” fails to capture it. We are in the realm of effective impossibility.
The naturalist faces what we might call the inestimable probability paradox: the very existence of a life-permitting universe on naturalistic assumptions is so improbable that no rational person would bet on it, yet here we are. The responses are familiar: brute luck (which explains nothing), multiverse (which multiplies entities and defers the problem), or necessity (for which there is no evidence). None of these is an explanation. They are ways of avoiding the question.
Now consider what we know about designers. When a game developer sets gravitational constants, she sets them precisely where she wants them. When she fine-tunes parameters for gameplay balance, the result is not lucky accident but intentional calibration. We observe this every day. Designers set parameters. Designers fine-tune systems. Designers produce specified complexity. This is not speculation; it is universal experience.
On the design hypothesis, fine-tuning is not merely possible but expected. A rational designer who intends certain outcomes (life, consciousness, relationship) would calibrate the system to achieve those outcomes. The astonishing precision we observe is exactly what design predicts. The probability of fine-tuning given design approaches unity.
The contrast could not be sharper. On naturalism, our universe is an inexplicable statistical miracle. On theism, it is the predictable product of intentional calibration. One framework renders our existence a paradox; the other renders it intelligible. The skeptic who accepts that human designers fine-tune parameters but denies that a divine Designer could do the same has not followed the evidence. He has refused to.
5. The Connection to Logos
The Designer Paradox connects naturally to the theological concept of Logos, the divine rationality through which all things were made.
5.1 John’s Prologue
The Gospel of John opens with a striking claim: “In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:1-3).
The Greek term Logos carries connotations of reason, order, structure, and communicative expression. John’s assertion is that the rational structure of reality derives from divine rationality, that the universe is comprehensible because it flows from comprehending Mind. This is not primitive mythology but sophisticated metaphysics, and it aligns remarkably well with what contemporary physics reveals.
5.2 Information Requires Mind
If the universe is fundamentally informational, we face a question: What is the source of that information? Information, in any context we observe, originates from mind. Code requires coder. Data requires input. Specified complexity requires specification.
Consider what code actually is. Every program ever written, every algorithm ever designed, every simulation ever run operates on logic and mathematics. Code is logical structure made operational. There is no such thing as illogical code that functions - the very concept is incoherent. When we write software, we are not inventing logical relationships; we are implementing them. The logical structure precedes and constrains what we can create.
This reveals something profound. If the universe is computational (as contemporary physics suggests), then the universe runs on logic. But logic is not physical. It has no mass, no energy, no spatial location. It is not a force that acts on matter. Yet matter conforms to it absolutely. The question is unavoidable: what grounds this conformity?
A clarification is needed here, because naturalists sometimes argue that “information” can arise from blind physical processes without intent. This conflates two fundamentally different concepts.
Shannon information is a measure of uncertainty reduction - the number of bits required to specify a state from among possibilities. It is purely syntactic and quantitative. A random string of bits has high Shannon information (it takes many bits to specify), but it has no meaning, no function, no purpose. Noise is information-rich in Shannon’s sense.
Specified functional information is something else entirely. It is pattern that performs a function, that means something, that achieves an outcome. The genetic code does not merely have high Shannon information; it specifies the construction of proteins. It is a set of instructions that a cell reads and executes. This is not reducible to syntactic bit-counting. The sequence ATCG is just chemistry unless there is a system that interprets it - and the existence of such interpretive systems, perfectly matched to the code they read, is precisely what demands explanation.
Every instance of specified functional information we have ever traced to its source originates in mind. Code implies coder. Instructions imply instructor. When we encounter a system that reads, interprets, and executes encoded instructions to build complex machinery, we have left the domain of blind physics and entered the domain of engineering. The question is not whether random bit-sequences can arise naturally (they can) but whether functional codes with semantic content can arise without intelligence. We have no examples of this. Not one.
Information is meaningful pattern, and meaning is a category that exists only relative to interpretation. The genetic “code” is genuinely code because its sequences specify functional outcomes. But codes presuppose the context that makes them meaningful. The sequence ATCG is just chemistry unless there is a system that “reads” it, and the existence of such a system raises the question of how the meaningful relationship between sequence and function was established.
The Logos doctrine answers this question at every level. Divine mind is the source of the meaningful patterns that constitute physical reality. The universe is comprehensible because Mind made it so. The laws of physics are rational because Rationality authored them. The “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” that puzzled Eugene Wigner finds its explanation in the mathematical character of the Logos through whom all things were made. Logic governs reality because the Logos - divine reason - is reality’s ground.
5.3 Created in the Image
If humans can design information worlds, this is itself explicable within the Logos framework. Genesis records that humans are made in the “image of God” (imago Dei), which traditional theology interprets as including rational and creative capacities. Human designers mirror divine creative authority because human minds participate in the Logos.
This explains why the analogy between human and divine design works so well. Human creation of virtual worlds is not merely analogous to divine creation; it is derivative of it. We can create because we are made by a Creator. We can author information systems because we are authored by the Author of information. Our creative powers are not independent of God’s creative power; they are finite reflections of it.
The Designer Paradox, on this view, reveals something about human dignity as well as divine authority. Our capacity to create complex information worlds is not a mere evolutionary accident but an expression of our nature as image-bearers of the Logos.
6. Addressing Objections
Several objections might be raised against this argument.
6.1 “Game Developers Are Inside the Universe”
Objection: Human designers are part of the physical universe, using physical brains and physical computers. Divine design would require a designer outside the universe, which is a different category of claim.
Response: This objection confuses the substrate of implementation with the nature of the causal relationship. The game developer’s creative authority operates at the level of information, intention, and design, not at the level of physics. When she decides to set gravity to a particular value, the causation is intentional, not physical. The fact that her brain runs on neurons and her computer runs on silicon is incidental to the nature of her creative act.
Moreover, the objection proves too much. If being “inside the universe” delegitimizes transcendent creative authority, then we cannot coherently speak of game developers transcending their games. But they obviously do transcend their games. The game exists within a larger context that includes the designer, and the designer’s causal relationship to the game is categorically different from causal relationships within the game. The same structure applies to God’s relationship to the physical universe.
6.2 “Human Design Is Explicable Through Physics”
Objection: We can explain human creative activity through neuroscience, computer science, and physics. Divine creative activity would be inexplicable, a brute intervention with no mechanism.
Response: This objection conflates different levels of explanation. We can describe the physical processes correlated with human creative activity, but such descriptions do not capture the intentional content of creative acts. When a developer decides to make gravity repulsive rather than attractive, no physical description of neuron firings explains why she made that choice. Intentional explanation (she wanted a novel gameplay mechanic) is irreducible to physical explanation.
Divine creation involves intentional explanation at a higher level. God created the universe with these laws because He intended certain outcomes (life, consciousness, relationship). This is explanation of the same type as human intentional explanation, differing in scope but not in kind.
Furthermore, if the skeptic demands physical mechanisms for divine action, the same demand can be turned back: by what physical mechanism does human intention implement itself in the world? The mind-body problem is unsolved. If we can act on intentions despite not knowing the mechanism, so can God.
6.3 “We Have No Evidence God Exists”
Objection: The analogy assumes God exists, which is the very point in question. Without evidence for God, the Designer Paradox proves nothing.
Response: This paper does not aim to prove God’s existence. It aims to expose an inconsistency in how skeptics evaluate design explanations. The skeptic who says “divine creation is impossible because it would require magical powers” is making a claim about coherence, not evidence. The Designer Paradox shows that the coherence objection fails: the powers attributed to a divine Creator are structurally identical to powers skeptics already accept as coherent when exercised by human designers.
The evidential question is separate. There are independent arguments for God’s existence based on cosmological, teleological, moral, and historical considerations. The Designer Paradox clears the logical ground for those arguments by removing a spurious objection to their coherence.
6.4 “The Universe Might Not Be Information-Based”
Objection: The information-theoretic interpretation of physics is contested. If the universe is not fundamentally informational, the analogy breaks down.
Response: The analogy does not strictly require the universe to be information-based; it requires only that the causal powers in question are coherent. Even if physics is not fundamentally computational, the powers of setting constants, creating entities, and defining laws are coherent, as demonstrated by our acceptance of them in the human case.
However, the information-theoretic trend in physics does strengthen the argument by showing that the analogy is more than metaphorical. The universe’s behavior increasingly looks like what we would expect from a designed information system. This creates additional explanatory pressure toward the design hypothesis.
6.5 The Asymmetry of Acceptable Speculation
A revealing pattern emerges when we examine what explanations skeptics find acceptable versus what they reject.
Acceptable to many skeptics: A multiverse of 10^500 unobservable universes, generated by mechanisms that themselves require fine-tuning, supported by string theory that has produced zero experimental confirmations in four decades. Acceptable: “Abstract necessary structure” - something non-physical, universal, and necessary that constrains all reality, yet somehow not a mind. Acceptable: Probability measures that are “contested” and “non-trivial,” as though the difficulty of calculating exact odds dissolves the problem rather than highlighting it. Acceptable: Alien simulators in a higher universe - themselves unexplained, themselves requiring fine-tuning, themselves pushing every question back one level.
Unacceptable: One necessary being who grounds rationality, information, and existence itself.
The asymmetry is striking. But it becomes worse when we recognize what these alternatives actually are. Many-worlds interpretations, multiverse theories, and cyclical cosmologies share a common structure: they defer explanation rather than provide it. Each is a sophisticated repackaging of the infinite regress fallacy.
Consider: If our universe’s fine-tuning is explained by a multiverse, what explains the multiverse generator? If the multiverse generator’s parameters are fine-tuned (and inflationary models require their own precise conditions), what explains that? The regress continues. Many-worlds quantum mechanics faces the same problem - it multiplies entities with every quantum event but never explains why the wave function has the structure it does. Cyclical cosmologies push the question back through infinite iterations but never answer why there are cycles at all, why they have the character they do, or what sustains the cycling.
Mathematical formalism can make these proposals look rigorous, but complexity does not transform fallacy into explanation. An infinite regress dressed in equations is still an infinite regress. Turtles stacked in Hilbert space are still turtles all the way down.
Classical theism terminates the regress not by arbitrary fiat but by identifying the only kind of terminus that makes sense: necessary being. Something that exists by its own nature, that could not fail to exist, that depends on nothing external. Contingent things - universes, multiverses, quantum fields, cyclical iterations - require explanation. Necessary being does not, because necessity is self-explanatory. This is not special pleading; it is the recognition that explanation must bottom out somewhere, and only necessity provides a principled stopping point.
Skeptics will entertain unfalsifiable frameworks, multiply entities by factors of 10^500, defer explanation indefinitely, and posit abstract structures that do the work of mind without admitting they are mind - all to avoid the inference to a Creator. The “different burdens” they assign to these posits is not principled methodology. It is the Designer Paradox in action: the more powerful and comprehensive the proposed explanation, the higher the barriers erected against it.
This reveals a crucial misunderstanding about what theism actually claims. The objection assumes “God did it” is a gap-filler, a deus ex machina invoked to paper over ignorance. But classical theism does not offer “God did it” as a terminus. It offers God as the system - the ground from which all rational structure flows, the source of all information, the reason explanation is possible at all.
The Logos is not invoked to explain one puzzling phenomenon while leaving others untouched. The Logos explains why there is intelligibility, why mathematics describes physics, why logic constrains reality, why fine-tuning produces life, why consciousness exists to recognize any of this. It is not a hypothesis competing with physics at the same level; it is the metaphysical foundation that makes physics possible.
When the skeptic posits “abstract necessary structure” to explain logic’s universality, he has already conceded most of the argument. He has admitted that something non-physical, necessary, and universal governs all reality. He has accepted the explanatory structure of Logos. He simply refuses to acknowledge that rational structure implies rationality, that thought-like order implies a thinker. He has accepted Logos and denied only that Logos is personal.
But this is where Christianity presses further. The Logos is not an impersonal abstraction. The Logos “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). The rational ground of reality entered that reality, suffered within it, and demonstrated that creation is not a cosmic accident but a personal work of a personal God. Abstract necessary structure does not become incarnate. Abstract necessary structure does not bear scars.
The skeptic who accepts depersonalized Logos while rejecting personal Logos has not followed an argument to its conclusion. He has made a choice - a choice to accept the explanatory structure of theism while refusing its personal implications. That is not philosophy. It is evasion.
6.6 The Two Types of Skeptic
At this point, we must distinguish between two types of skeptic, because the Designer Paradox affects them differently.
The first type is the crude dismisser - the skeptic who waves away theistic explanation with “that would just be magic” or “you can’t explain anything by appealing to supernatural powers.” This skeptic’s position collapses entirely under the Designer Paradox. He accepts that human designers exercise comprehensive creative authority over information systems without calling it magic. He accepts simulation hypotheses as coherent. He may even accept “abstract necessary structure” as grounding logical order. But he balks at divine creation as categorically impossible. This is not philosophy; it is prejudice dressed in philosophical vocabulary. The crude dismisser has no consistent position.
The second type is the refined non-theist - the skeptic who grants that design is coherent, acknowledges the force of fine-tuning, takes information-theoretic physics seriously, and posits some form of necessary ground (whether “abstract structure,” “brute physical law,” or “necessary mathematical truth”) while denying that this ground is personal. This skeptic deserves serious engagement. But notice where the engagement occurs: not over whether reality has a necessary, non-physical, rationally ordered ground - the refined skeptic has already conceded this. The dispute is solely over whether that ground is Mind.
The Designer Paradox fully refutes the first skeptic and substantially narrows the disagreement with the second. What remains is a single question: Is the necessary rational ground of reality personal or impersonal? We turn now to objections that bear on this question.
6.7 “Finite Agents and Necessary Beings Are Different Categories”
Objection: Human designers are finite, contingent agents operating within a larger physical context. God is supposed to be necessary, omnipotent, and ultimate. These are categorically different posits with different evidential burdens. Accepting the coherence of finite designers doesn’t commit one to accepting the coherence of an infinite necessary designer.
Response: This objection reverses the logic of possibility. If finite minds with limited power can exercise comprehensive creative authority over information systems, then infinite mind with unlimited power can do so a fortiori. The skeptic is claiming that more power yields fewer permissions - that capability possible for the lesser is impossible for the greater. This is not a principled distinction; it is special pleading.
The objection also conflates coherence with evidence. Yes, finite designers and necessary beings differ in their metaphysical status. Yes, the evidential considerations may differ. But the Designer Paradox targets coherence objections - claims that divine creative authority is logically impossible, conceptually incoherent, or intrinsically “magical.” Once the skeptic grants that law-setting, entity-creating, rule-suspending authority is coherent for finite minds, he cannot consistently deny its coherence for infinite mind. The evidential question is separate; the coherence question is settled.
If the skeptic retreats to “I grant coherence but deny evidence,” then the Designer Paradox has done its work. The door is open for cosmological, teleological, moral, and historical arguments. The “magic” barrier has fallen.
6.8 “Logic Is Necessary Abstract Structure, Not the Thinking of a Mind”
Objection: Many philosophers treat logic as necessary abstract structure - something that constrains all possible worlds without being the product of any mind. Both minds and matter are subject to logical laws; neither “imposes” them. This view accommodates the universality of logic without requiring a Logos.
Response: “Abstract structure” is a label, not an explanation. The skeptic has posited something non-physical, non-spatial, non-temporal, necessary, and universal that perfectly constrains all physical reality. What is this structure? Where does it exist? How does it exercise its constraining power over matter? The questions are not answered by calling it “abstract.”
Notice what the skeptic has conceded. He has admitted that something non-physical and necessary governs physical reality. He has accepted that this something has rational character - it is the structure of logic, not chaos. He has granted that reality conforms to it perfectly across all time and space. He has, in short, accepted every attribute of Logos except personhood.
The remaining question is whether rational structure implies rationality - whether thought-like order implies a thinker. The theist says yes: rationality is the product of reason, order is the product of an orderer, the intelligibility of the universe reflects the intelligence of its source. The skeptic says no: rational structure just exists, free-floating, governing everything while being thought by no one.
But this leaves unexplained why the universe is so thoroughly intelligible to finite minds. “Abstract structure” might constrain reality; it does not explain why that structure is knowable, why mathematics developed by human minds maps perfectly onto physical law, why Eugene Wigner’s “unreasonable effectiveness” obtains. The Logos hypothesis explains this: our minds participate in the same rationality that structured reality. The abstract-structure hypothesis offers no such explanation; it simply labels the phenomenon and moves on.
Furthermore, abstract structure does not become incarnate. It does not enter history, suffer, die, and rise. If the ground of reality is impersonal, the Incarnation is impossible. If the Incarnation occurred, the ground of reality is personal. The historical evidence for the resurrection thus becomes directly relevant to the metaphysical question.
6.9 “Fine-Tuning Probabilities Are Contested”
Objection: Assigning probabilities over possible values of physical constants requires a measure on parameter space. Such measures are contested and arguably arbitrary. Claims that fine-tuning is “astronomically improbable” rest on controversial assumptions.
Response: The difficulty of calculating exact odds does not make the problem disappear. Note what the skeptic is notclaiming: he is not denying that the constants fall within narrow life-permitting ranges, not denying that dozens of independent parameters are calibrated with extreme precision, not denying that most possible configurations would yield universes inhospitable to complexity. He is saying we cannot assign precise numerical probabilities to these configurations.
Grant this. The qualitative problem remains. We observe extraordinary specificity across multiple independent parameters. This pattern - narrow tolerances, multiple coincidences, integrated precision - is exactly what we observe when designers calibrate systems. It is not what we expect from unguided processes. “We cannot calculate exact odds” does not transform an evident pattern into a non-pattern.
Moreover, the skeptic’s objection cuts both ways. If we cannot assign probabilities to constant-configurations, then naturalistic appeals to “it had to be something, and here we are” are equally groundless. The skeptic cannot simultaneously claim that fine-tuning is unquantifiable and that it poses no evidential problem. Either probabilities are assignable (and the numbers are devastating to naturalism) or they are not (and neither side can make probabilistic arguments). What the skeptic cannot do is invoke probability-skepticism selectively to neutralize theistic arguments while retaining naturalistic assumptions.
6.10 “Multiverse and Inflation Are Live Research Programs”
Objection: Multiverse cosmology and eternal inflation are serious scientific research programs, not mere hand-waving. String theory’s landscape, inflationary cosmology, and many-worlds quantum mechanics represent ongoing attempts to explain fine-tuning through physical mechanisms. Dismissing them as “evasion” is uncharitable.
Response: “Live research program” is a sociological description, not an epistemic achievement. Many research programs in history were mathematically sophisticated, attracted brilliant minds, and consumed decades of effort while producing no empirical confirmation. Astrology was a live research program for centuries. Ptolemaic epicycles generated precise predictions. Phlogiston theory was defended by leading chemists. The question is not whether people are working on these ideas but whether they actually explain anything.
String theory has produced zero experimental confirmations in forty years. The multiverse is unobservable in principle. Many-worlds quantum mechanics multiplies entities with every quantum event while explaining nothing about why the wave function has the structure it does. These are not criticisms of the physicists pursuing these ideas; they are observations about the current state of the evidence.
More fundamentally, even if these programs succeeded on their own terms, they would not answer the question at issue. Multiverse models might explain relative frequencies within an ensemble - why, given a landscape of 10^500 universes, some portion are life-permitting. But they do not explain why the ensemble exists, why it has the structure it does, what generates it, or what grounds its mathematical character. The regress problem remains. A multiverse generator requires explanation just as a single universe does.
The same applies to cyclical cosmologies and many-worlds interpretations. They defer explanation; they do not provide it. Each pushes the question back one level without answering it. Theism, by contrast, terminates the regress in necessary being - the only kind of terminus that does not itself demand further explanation.
6.11 “Why Personal Rather Than Impersonal?”
Objection: Even granting that reality requires a necessary ground, why should that ground be personal - a mind with intentions, knowledge, and purposes? An impersonal necessary structure seems more parsimonious. Personhood adds complexity without explanatory gain.
Response: Three considerations favor personal ground over impersonal structure.
First, rational structure implies rationality. Order of this specific kind - mathematical, logical, information-rich, intelligible to minds - is precisely what minds produce. We have no examples of rationality without a rational source. The universe’s structure looks like thought because it is thought; it is intelligible because Intelligence made it so. To posit rational order without a rational orderer is to accept the effect while denying the kind of cause that always produces such effects.
Second, information implies mind. Every information system we have ever encountered traces to intelligent source. Code implies coder. Specified complexity implies specification. If the universe is fundamentally informational (as contemporary physics suggests), then the question of information’s source is pressing. “Impersonal necessary structure” is not an information source; it is a label for the pattern we are trying to explain. Mind, by contrast, is an information source - the only kind we know.
Third, the Incarnation. If the ground of reality is impersonal, then the Christian claim that God became man is impossible. If the Incarnation occurred - if the Logos became flesh, suffered, died, rose, and still bears the wounds - then the ground of reality is personal. This is not an a priori argument; it is an appeal to historical evidence. The case for the resurrection (empty tomb, post-mortem appearances, origin of Christian belief, willingness of witnesses to die for their testimony) is strong enough to take seriously. If the evidence is sound, the metaphysical question is settled.
The skeptic who prefers impersonal ground must explain why rational, information-rich, mind-intelligible reality looks exactly like what personal creation would produce. He must also dismiss the historical evidence that the Creator entered creation. Both moves are possible; neither is costless.
6.12 “A Refined Skeptic Can Still Escape”
Objection: Even after all these arguments, a careful skeptic can maintain a coherent non-theistic position. He can accept necessary abstract structure, treat fine-tuning as suggestive but not decisive, acknowledge that multiverse theories are speculative, and still deny that the evidence compels theism. Philosophy does not force him into Christianity.
Response: Correct - in the sense that philosophy rarely forces anyone anywhere. Humans are remarkably adept at resisting conclusions they dislike. The question is not whether escape is possible but whether it is reasonable.
Consider what the “refined skeptic” has accepted: Something necessary, non-physical, and rationally ordered grounds all reality. The universe is fine-tuned with extraordinary precision for life. Information is fundamental to physical structure. Logical order pervades existence. The multiverse does not actually solve the problem. Simulation hypotheses just defer it.
What the refined skeptic denies: That the necessary rational ground is personal.
This is the entirety of the remaining disagreement. The refined skeptic has accepted the explanatory structure of Logos theology - necessary ground, rational order, information-based reality, fine-tuned for life and consciousness. He balks only at the final step: acknowledging that rational structure implies a Rational Structurer.
But notice the pattern of his resistance. When asked why rational order doesn’t imply rationality, he says “it’s just abstract.” When asked why information doesn’t imply mind, he says “that’s contested.” When asked about fine-tuning, he says “measures are controversial.” When asked about the Incarnation, he says “I’m not convinced by the historical evidence.” Each response is a deferral, not an answer. At no point does the refined skeptic offer a positive account of how impersonal abstraction generates rational, information-rich, mind-intelligible, fine-tuned reality. He simply denies, qualifies, and defers.
This is not a counter-position. It is a series of retreats dressed as sophistication. The refined skeptic has been pushed off every piece of ground except the bare denial that Mind lies at the foundation. He clings to that denial not because he has positive reasons for impersonal ground but because he has run out of room to retreat further.
At some point, the accumulation of coincidences, patterns, structures, and evidences that all point in the same direction becomes its own argument. Rational order, information, fine-tuning, intelligibility, the historical evidence for resurrection - each independent, each pointing to personal Creator. The refined skeptic must maintain that all of these are coincidence, misinterpretation, or irrelevance. That is possible. It is not plausible.
7. Conclusion: Resolving the Paradox
The Designer Paradox admits of only two resolutions.
The first resolution is consistency in favor of design: accept that intentional design is a coherent mode of explanation at any scale, and evaluate theistic and non-theistic hypotheses on their explanatory merits. This does not require accepting theism, but it removes a spurious barrier to considering it.
The second resolution is consistency against design: deny that even human designers exercise genuine creative authority over their created systems. Perhaps human “creation” is merely rearrangement of pre-existing physical elements, with no genuinely novel causation. But this view is deeply implausible. It requires denying the obvious: that game developers really do determine the physics of their games, that CGI artists really do create images, that programmers really do write code. Such elimination of intentional causation leads to absurdities.
What cannot be maintained is the current skeptical position: accepting creative authority in the human case while rejecting structurally identical authority in the divine case. This is not principled philosophy but special pleading.
The Designer Paradox reveals that modern skepticism has painted itself into a corner. The more we learn about information, computation, and the structure of physical reality, the more the universe looks like exactly what we would expect if it were designed. And the powers required to design such a system are precisely the powers we already grant to finite designers every day.
Nothing in logic warrants a universe that can be designed by humans but cannot be designed by God. The skeptic who accepts the former while rejecting the latter has not offered a rational objection. He has revealed a prejudice.
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James (JD) Longmire
Northrop Grumman Fellow (unaffiliated research)
ORCID: 0009-0009-1383-7698
Correspondence: jdlongmire@outlook.com
Soli Deo Gloria