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I Design Websites, Therefore, God Is

October 8th, 2008 in Web Design Worldview

by: Matthew Griffin

The majority of the most exceptional men and women in the historical landscape of  philosophy have acknowledged the absolute necessity of a supreme being. Those who did not and were honest with the implications of their conclusions were forced into absurdism. But today, in a culture that is increasingly shallow and intellectually lazy, you'd be hard pressed to find an individual (educated or not) who knows anything of Thomas Aquinas' five rational proofs for the existence of God or has any concept of Aristotle's "unmoved mover".  The words of these great thinkers are most often used by quote miners looking for nuggets to rip out of context and paste together into warped shadows of what once was. And fortunately for them we're none the wiser. We gained a little bit of knowledge about how this universe works and became so obsessed with our discoveries that we stopped asking why. We are not unlike Haley's man who, after stumbling upon a pocket watch in the forest, declares himself to be the master watchmaker (or that there must be a blind watchmaker).

Reduced to Pragmatism

Thought has become pragmatic. We have no idea what we're actually trying to do as human beings. We just know that we should be doing something. And we know that we like this and don't like that—we prefer this and not that. There is no end, no purpose, no ultimate goal. We educate our children because we prefer that they are able to support themselves rather than not. We go to work because we prefer to eat rather than starve, to have air conditioning rather than not, to have cable rather than not. We think that the only purpose of our existence is to fall on the preferable side of as many situations as possible. And in the finite cycle of tiny victories over the things which we do not prefer, humanity seems to have been at least partially successful—drowning out the ever present hum of approaching death.

Thomas Aquinas' Necessary Purposer

The pragmatic cycle is escapism at its core and it doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. In response, I'd like to take a little stab at waning thought in western civilization by resurrecting one of Aquinas' proofs for the existence of God and showing how it relates to the vocations of design. Rene Descartes, himself a Christian and a brilliant mathematician, was most famous for his reductive maxim cognito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). Thomas Aquinas probably would have said,  "I create, therefore God is." In Aquinas' fifth rational proof for the existence of God he proposed that if any facet of any system in the universe has a purpose or order, a purposer must exist. The popular modern response to this proof is to deny that real purpose or order exists at all. What we see that looks like purpose is really just randomness and chaos. We must continually close our eyes and turn our heads from the overwhelming sense of order, design, and purpose, and tell ourselves, "It just looks like purpose. Don't let it get to you. It's all just an illusion." Much like Dorthy closing her eyes and clicking her heals together hoping that Oz will just go away, we click our heals and wish away purpose.

But that's just the beginning of the problem with the refutation of Aquinas' fifth proof. The real problem is that we ourselves are supposedly products of this blind purposeless chaos. And we can't stop short at our physical bodies. Our very thoughts and ideas—our reasoning—is a product of blind purposeless chaos as well. The obvious conclusion being that anything and everything in the physical world (man-made) or otherwise cannot be labeled "design". To do so would be completely irrational. And yet, the most hardcore atheist out there would probably agree that I design websites. In doing so, however, he or she is admitting that design exists. And if design exists, according to Aquinas, a designer must exist. In order to be a consistent atheist, you would have to say that my website design is an aberration—a mere appearance of design. And even then you are left with the problem of very idea of design. The proposition that pure chaos can become aware of its antithesis is absolutely laughable.

The Resulting Situation

The situation is pretty grim for the honest atheist. Friedrich Nietzsche understood this position as he worked out Darwin's theory of evolution in his philosophy. He liked Darwin's concept of natural selection but he disagreed on one important point. Darwin saw natural selection as a force propelling life in a continuously expanding upward spiral—destined to produce ever more sophisticated forms of life. Nietzsche saw this idea as a gross violation of the laws of entropy. The idea of a purposeless purpose was ridiculous to him. On this point I agree with him. He  went on to assert that true purposelessness would be forced into a cyclical pattern in which rise and fall would occur over and over again in a never ending cycle. The only force left was the will to power. On this point I must take my leave. I would rather stand with Aquinas saying, "I design websites, therefore God is."

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