God's Intelligent Design

Preface: This is not a theory related to quantum physics or the inner science of how the universe might work, as it does not try to “solve” the universe. We can't store all of God's knowledge; it is physically impossible. Our job is to work with God, not be God. This text is analogous to representing God’s intelligent design of the universe in a simple-to-understand way.

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The Universe Reflects Intelligent Design

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Code

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It is imperative to begin by understanding the inner workings of computers, starting with code. Most people think code is just some programming language that only a subset of humans know to converse with computers. Instead, code is a communication method in all its forms that can translate an input into a new output.

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What does that mean? A good example is Morse code. For those who do not know what Morse code is, Morse code is a created alphabet in which combinations of long and short signals of dots and dashes represent letters.

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Let’s look at the letter “a,” which is one dot followed by one dash “· -” in Morse code. Someone sending information in Morse code would send “· -” to represent the letter “a,” and a person reading Morse code can know that when they see the “· -” it is a letter “a.” Morse Code can represent the entire alphabet with grammatical syntax.

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So now we see that code is just a communication method of an input to a new output. We’ll use what we learned about code later on.

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Electron Theory

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Next, we will dabble with electron theory. Simply, electricity is the movement of electrons. Atomic theory tells us that all matter comprises atoms, which comprise protons and neutrons, creating the nucleus and electrons that circle it. We don’t need to go deeper into a subatomic level; this level should suffice.

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The periodic table of elements in chemistry can show us an arrangement of chemical elements and their properties. All atoms (usually) have to maintain the same number of electrons as they have protons. Lithium, known for its use in lithium batteries, has an equal number of three protons and three electrons.

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Electricity

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So, how does this correlate with electricity? Well, with chemistry, we can manipulate an element's electrons. Let’s look at this with an example of a light bulb.

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First, we need a good conductor, an element whose electrons can be easily manipulated. Copper is a good element for this, hence we have copper wires. The opposite of this is an insulator, which is not so easily manipulated, so it is not good to use to produce electricity. Rubber is suitable for this, and we can wrap the rubber around the copper wire to separate and support the wire without allowing a current through itself.

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Most people use the analogy of water running through a pipe to represent electricity. However, this is wrong; the pipe is the electricity source. Remember, electricity is the movement of electrons. When a battery connects to a copper wire and a light bulb in a closed circuit, a complete circle creates the perfect recipe for electricity. 

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The battery produces a chemical reaction that dislodges an electron from one of the copper wire’s atoms. Because an electron is removed from the atom, the atom does not like that. It has to maintain the same number of electrons as protons, so it grabs an electron from the atom next to it.

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That other atom also becomes unhappy and grabs an electron from the atom next to it. This event produces a never-ending chain of electrons dislodged from their original atom to a new atom, thus moving electrons.

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This process only occurs when there is a connection between atoms due to the closed circuit. An open circuit is when an opening does not allow for a complete circle. This opening is called a switch, and this opening and closing—all components touching or not—produces the ability for electrons to move.

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That is why a light switch can turn on and off a lightbulb. But how does this movement create an energy source to turn on a lightbulb? While technically electricity is an energy source, it is not the electricity that powers our everyday items. Instead, we need our instruments to convert this into other usable energy.

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Looking back at the lightbulb, we have learned that batteries create a chemical reaction that dislodges the copper wire’s electrons from its atoms, creating a chain of give-and-take, more so take, between the atoms. This event isn’t solely the copper wire but includes the lightbulb’s atoms.

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Intelligent Instruments

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So, how do we get light from the movement of electrons? This movement is clumsy. During this process, electrons bump into other atoms, producing friction. This friction turns the mechanical energy—the movement—into thermal energy. With friction comes heat, which is why electrical objects get hot.

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Inside the lightbulb, there is a piece of metal called filament. This filament must be metals with a high melting point, such as tungsten, which replaced the original carbon used by Thomas Edison.

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It is vital to note that these metals must be able to handle a massive amount of heat. The movement of electrons clumsily produces friction, which in turn creates heat. When things get hot, they can glow bright red. Thus, the filament begins to glow bright because it has become hot.

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The design of the lightbulb uses glass to create a vacuum that contains the heat and gases inside the bulb, preventing energy from escaping. Finally, we get light from a lightbulb.

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Here, one can see that it is not “electricity” that produces light, but rather, the instrument that adequately uses electricity—the movement of electrons—to its advantage. We cannot just manipulate electrons and get something out of them; we need an intelligent instrument to turn the movement into something else we can use to our advantage.

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While it is impossible without the initial electricity—the most essential component—heat is used for our gain. The movement of electrons produces friction, and with friction comes heat. When things get hot, they glow bright. Electricity is nothing without the instrument.

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Computers

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This process is the same for all electrical technology, including computers. The battery inside a computer constantly circulates electricity through it. The maze of wires creates patterns of electricity, and when a specific key clicks, gates (similar to a switch) open and close parts of that maze, revealing a new pattern of electricity.

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The computer's hardware is another intelligent instrument that can make this electricity useful to us. At the most basic level, the hardware understands what each pattern of electricity represents, similar to the communication we observed earlier with the example of Morse code, where an input converts into a new output.

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In technological terms, this is labeled as “machine code.” As you can see, this is not a programming language but a communication method between electricity and hardware. Most movies depict this as a waterfall of 1s and 0s on a computer screen, but 1s and 0s are used to represent the process visually.

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The 1’s and 0’s, similar to Morse code’s dots and dashes, are just two values that represent something else, and for computers, this usually means on and off, true and false, or open and close. These values are called binary, but we’re not dabbling into the computational world of computer science.

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As stated before, the computer’s gates in the maze of wires open (1) and close (0) parts of the circuit to produce new patterns of electricity when you click keys, use the mouse, or whatever actions your computer entails.

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In correlation with the lightbulb, the computer screen also converts the electricity into light divided into thousands of painted pixels, and all of this beautiful behind-the-scenes work gives us something that our brains can comprehend.

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The intelligent instrument takes the properties of electricity and converts them into something useful that means something to us. Think of a computer as layers built on top of each other. After the hardware reads the electricity, we get a layer called “assembly code,” just the human-readable version of machine code. On top of that, we start dealing with the operating system software, and then some browsers give us access to the magic of the Internet.

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The Internet

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Fun fact: the internet is not a magical thing in the clouds, despite the term “cloud” used to label internet storage, but rather, it is a physical, tangible, hardwired thing. The telephone poles you see outside everywhere are the wires of the internet, which span all across the globe, even across the oceans. 

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Before the invention of Wi-Fi, dial-up internet was physically connected to telephone poles. Wi-Fi just uses electromagnetism to transmit the electrical signals to your router, which connects to the telephone poles. This connection, while intangible, is still physical.

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When you click a key, your computer sends electrical signals to the Wi-Fi router, which transmits those signals to other computers worldwide. The Internet is one massive communication pathway, a web connecting computers, hence the World Wide Web, or “www.” Scientists originally invented the Internet to share research papers.

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But again, pressing keys is useless without the intelligent instrument’s capabilities to read them. In the case of the internet, the browser is an intelligent instrument. In the browser, you first enter a domain name, for example, “www.google.com.” A domain name is a nickname for the computer's physical address that hosts a website’s files. You may have heard the term “IP address” before, and the name is correct; it is an address.

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Websites are files, like text documents, but explicitly written in a language browsers can understand. They are hosted on a server, which is a computer that hosts and serves assets such as web files and databases.

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When you enter “www.google.com,” the browser finds the IP address using the Domain Name System (DNS), a phone book for the Internet and then displays the web files served to it. This is a rough overview but still conveys the general gist of the Internet.

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The Universe Functions Like a Divine Code

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Now for God’s intelligent design.

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We are bound to this reality, the physical realm of existence (space and time) God created. God is the essence from which reality derives. Even the word "reality" establishes an identity of existence.

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Humans are super-intelligent computers. Just as we saw computers begin with the properties of atoms, we start with the properties of atoms, being matter ourselves. We know that the universe is made from God, made of God, so our atoms' properties derive from God's same properties.

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We have souls that produce life, the very breath of God, the Holy Spirit. God is the beginning energy source, just as electricity is the starting energy source, and our body’s hardware can convert this energy source into something meaningful for us.

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Plotinus was correct in saying that we emanate from God. This concept also provides evidence for Augustine and C.S. Lewis’ claims that the soul’s hunger for spirituality can reveal the truth about God's existence because, like a rubber band, our connection with God pulls us towards Him.

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Deduction of reality produces a code, written in the language of God’s mathematics, essential for the framework of existence. We learned from before that code is a communication method of one input converted to another.

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The language of God is the input, and reality is the output. This is clear when God speaks to Moses through the burning bush in Exodus 3:14, revealing his name to Moses as "I AM WHO I AM." The Hebrew word for "I am" is "ehyeh," which comes from the verb "haya" (הָיָה), which means "to be."

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God is stating that He is being, that He is existence itself. This is also clear when Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.”, meaning before Abraham, I am being.

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Humans Physically & Spiritually Connect to God

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Humans are superintelligent computers, and we work similarly to the higher programming layers of computers. Just like a computer begins with machine code—the hardware’s reading of the electrical patterns—our intelligent instrument’s hardware can convert the energy source into something meaningful to us.

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The computer’s layers are built from machine code to assembly code, software, and the internet. We, too, have higher levels of programming that give us more abstraction.

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We are not just atoms, but atoms that build to functioning bodies, then brains, consciousness, senses, etc. Our higher levels of programming give us access to reality in ways we could not have deemed possible without them. Imagine the more supernatural layers of reality that we just don’t have the means to observe and make meaning of.

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We are physically connected to the web of the universe and God, just as computers are physically connected to the Internet. Thus, it's reasonable to think that life, too, has an Internet of Things.

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While it may differ from the one used to serve website files, our “Internet” connects us directly with God. Again, not elaborating on physics, but even theories such as Quantum Field Theory, Quantum Entanglement, or even Bohm’s Implicate Order can provide food for thought on the possibilities of how everything in the universe might be connected.

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Our direct communication with God works both ways: us to God and God to us. God knows everything about us and the universe and can intervene however He wishes.

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He knows everything about us, including our thoughts, feelings, actions, etc. He can give us ideas for things and involve Himself to direct the universe's timeline towards His goals. We must still understand that we have complete free will to do as we please, whether that’s to choose God or not choose Him. But God still has the capabilities to govern the universe.

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Although we won’t explore this topic further, we can see this in Theistic evolution. Theistic evolution is the idea that God used evolution to create life on Earth. It reconciles faith in God with scientific theories of evolution, suggesting that evolution is not a random or purposeless process but guided by God’s will and design.

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God speaks to and through us, and we have recorded His revelations and ultimate plan in the Bible. The Bible is a timeless record that has guided humankind throughout history to learn about God, His purpose, and His plan.

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God’s true goal is reconciliation with His people through Jesus, His payment of our debt to Him through Himself becoming man. He explained that we must use the Eucharist to embrace Jesus’ body and blood.

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We have a direct line of communication with God, and He always wants to talk to us. However, we have free will to choose whether to speak to Him.

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Prayer Is Our Direct Line of Communication With God

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So, how can we speak with God?

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We initiate the conversation, similar to starting small talk with another person. And we do so with prayer. There is power through our thoughts and actions since the communication pathway connects our souls directly to God. Prayer is a meditated focus of thought that strengthens the communication pathway to aim with more precision. Think of this as how a stronger Wi-Fi signal helps your internet perform faster.

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The more we pray, the better we get, and the stronger our meditated focus becomes. It is important to note that this is not what some believe as the spiritual concept of “manifestation,” where thoughts and beliefs can bring about positive outcomes in one's life, often through practices like visualization, affirmations, etc. While there is some truth to it, such as the nature of it is the power of thought, which affects us, it is incorrect. 

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We do not just have the powers of the universe at our disposal to reshape it towards our will. God gives us what’s for us, not our paltry and feeble minds trying to hold the universe captive. And we follow what God has for us and communicate with Him through prayer.

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So remember, prayer is our relationship with God. The Blessed Virgin Mary has told us before that the way to save ourselves is through prayer, and the more we pray, the more potent our communication with God becomes. Through prayer, God can speak with us and tell us what we need to do and become.

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Prayer is a conversation with God, and prayers written throughout history that we follow as Catholics are simply conversations with God where we ask Him, praise Him, and love Him using the exact nature of regular speech. Along with regular talk from time to time, prayers written throughout history have been gravely crucial because of their purpose and methodology, which have been proven over time.

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Our most perfect example was given to us by Jesus Himself: The Lord's Prayer.

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Prayer is one of the absolute best things we can do. During prayer, we can initiate conversation with God, and He can speak back to us. So pray as much as you can. 

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Talk to God about how much you love Him, thank Him for all that He has done and will do, ask Him for help solving your problems, and pray for others to help them in times of need.

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In addition, ask God to place you on the path He wants you to be on, the path directly to Him. He will lead you to Jesus, the light that guides us through this darkness on our path to God.

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There is so much power in prayer, so pray for yourselves, for others, and for God.