And the Humble Unified Theory of Almost Everything

The distinction designed-undesigned is somehow weaker than that of created-uncreated.

However, given the Intelligent Design movement, people less often, if at all, speak about the second distinction and prefer the first one.

I will argue that it actually poses no problem of infinite regression, as it’s commonly claimed to happen.

Take, for instance, this very sentence. As you noticed, it has an end in the word ‘sentence’. Someone who would not understand the meaning of the ending word would ask if there’s a word before that word. And there is. But before? Yes. And so on.

To a person that is not able to make sense of a string of words, it’d be natural to always have word before the words already given. Ad infinitum.

But clearly, the state of facts is that the string of words has a beginning and an end. There’s nothing that requires a specific length: 1, 5, 7 or infinite. The length is as much as it is.

Now going back to the designer’s designer regression, we can see how, in the same way, the series of designers can have only one item, two, five or any other number.

What’s interesting though, is that the series ends with our Universe. Our universe is not a designer, so the series has an end. One could naturally ask, what could stop us from accepting that it also has and end on the other side, where there’s an undesigned designer? Nothing, I assume.

Since it’s commonly accepted that the Universe could be in fact undesigned, it should be also accepted that there could be an undesigned designer.

Moreover, it’s interesting how the Universe is not of the same kind (essence) with the designers (one, or more). So we have the series: {U, D₁, D₂, D₃…, D_N}, where N = {1, 2, …, ∞}. To differentiate between the two kinds of entities (at least with respect to their roles), one could write the series as {U, D}, where D is the set of designers that contributed to the existence of our universe U. D, of course, could be void, but it also can have at least one entry.

If D is not void, then there’s an entity that designed the Universe. This means that there could be an order beyond the material Universe and we can’t a priori rule out other forms of existence. Hence, we can’t expect science to tell us everything about what there is.

And, more importantly, we can’t have specific expectations on what kind of evidence we should see for the existence of the designer. That’s because the act of designing the Universe is an act of willingness. That designer was aware of their act of creation. Being self-aware and having a reason, we can only find out their reasons by effectively communicating. So it’s possible that the designer has effectively communicated with us in some form, according to a specific reason and purpose.

I conclude that there’s a non-zero probability that spirituality is a plausible form of relationship between humans and a possibly existing designer/creator.

People are then free to choose for themselves. One to be religious of one kind, other of another kind, or not religious at all. Each choice implies a risk. The greatest risk of them all is to be blinded by pride. If it’s possible to find the right path, then pride and stubbornness are two certain impediments to finding it.

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