Are We Intelligently Designed?

The short answer is yes and no.  Most people question how they came into being and what it means to exist.  Is there an intelligent designer?  If a supernatural creator put us here, what were his or her motivations?  What is our purpose for living?  Yet, what many people seem to ignore is the likelihood that nothing paved the way for the human species, other than millions of years of selective reproduction, or natural selection.

To understand these questions, we must first know how we each individually got here.  The birds and the bees discussion is quite handy.  Most caring parents at some point or another discuss this with their children at maturity.  Yet, it appears that when people question their existence, they don't think about the birds and the bees.  Each individual can determine whether or not their parents are intelligent, but the problem is that they take their mom and dad out of the equation completely and look toward a god for help in understanding their questions.

Human parents are the creators of baby humans and their parents were their creators.  The logical conclusion here is that there had to be a first human, the first common ancestor.  Surely, they were created by a god right?  No.  Evolution points to tranistions between species.  We have to look further into the past at the first single-celled organism as the common ancestor to all life on Earth.  Was that cell intelligently created?  Science tells us that the world and universe are constantly changing.  Particles enter and exit each other all of the time.  The first lifeform came into being because the particles needed to sustain life came together.

If we look at statistics, the likelihood of such particles coming together was astronomical given that Earth has water, a fluid substance.  We call this chance and people don't like that they were created by chance.  Chance makes it more difficult to determine self-purpose.  The question then becomes if we weren't created by a god, then what is our purpose for being here?  Humans are silly creatures.  We must know why and how everything works.  People also like having mentors help them through the difficult and winding path that is life.  They like thinking that there is a supernatural sky daddy watching over them.  They like wondering if this sky daddy gave them a pre-determined destiny.

The cool thing about not having a divine purpose is that we get to decide our own purpose.  Just as we have our parents to thank for our existence, we also have our parents to thank for our specific skills and talents, due to genetics.  Such skills and talents are often what people use to determine identity, friendships, love interests, and occupations.  Other than that, it is up to each person to figure out how they want to live, given that they live in a country that supports free will.