Of Pots and People

Even Moana gets it!

By Roddy Bullock, founder of Creation Reformation

Re-post with important correction! Apologies for the double post.

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[Recently I watched Disney’s Moana 2 with a granddaughter. In one scene Moana comes upon a piece of broken pottery inscribed with a map. She immediately (and logically by all human experience) takes it as proof of other civilizations. This scene, in which the natural and obvious ability of humans, even children, to detect obvious design inspired this post.]

Imagine a scene at a National Academy of Sciences convention in which you might overhear the following exchanges.

Archeologist with simple piece of pottery: Look at what I discovered; I wonder who created it.

Scientist: Wow! What a cool pot; who do you think made it?

Biologist with complex DNA code: Look at what I discovered; I wonder who created it.

Scientist: Wow! What a crackpot; why does he think someone made it?

It’s a good thing the Bible does not start with, “In the beginning, God made clay pots.” If it did, archeologists would be out of a job. With little to say about each new find that cannot be turned into a “religious” question, design-inferring archeologists would be relegated to the fate of their like-minded brethren in biology—the realm of “science-cannot-infer-design-because-design-might-mean-God-and-science-and-God-cannot-mix.”

Archeologists be glad. No one forces you to concoct natural explanations for the artifacts you find. You get to freely infer obvious design of objects of unknown origin without facing the “might mean God” obstacle to truth-seeking. In other words, you get to be scientists and infer intelligent causation from obvious design—a luxury not to be taken for granted.

Archeologists are not the exception, they are the rule. Scientists of many stripes infer design all the time. Forensic scientists, faced with a dead body and no witnesses look for evidence to piece together a historical narrative to explain a past event: was the death accidental (unintelligent causes) or murder (intelligent causation)? Simple. And the good folks over at SETI? The name says it all: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Although embarrassed at being compared to their like-minded biologist counterparts, these scientists regularly collect evidence in the form of coded radio signals to determine if the signals are random background radiation from space (unintelligent causes), or coded signals from space (intelligent causes).

Easy. A child can do it.

And biologists? Well, they stand as the exception to that rule, and the imposition of uniquely different rule. The imposed rule is that biologists must suppress entertaining any explanations spurred by logical inferences of design in coded DNA because such thoughts automatically and necessarily lead to “religion.” And, unless it is a God-denying religion like humanism, that’s a bad thing. After all, a respectable scientist expressing “religious” thoughts has not happened since the days of Newton, Boyle, Kepler, Bacon, Pascal, Herschel, Faraday, Joule, and, well, you get the idea.

A savvy evolutionist might quickly jump in here and reply that the analogy to archeology does not hold. It happens, he says, that in our human experience we know that people can, and have, made pottery for generations. And because we have experience with human potters, archeologists need not face the “maybe it was God” line of inquiry. Living systems, on the other hand, are not known to be made by human hands, so we have no basis to infer intelligent creation of living things.

But this response misses the point. Our experience of the world shows that what we recognize as designed coded information invariably reflects the prior activity of conscious and intelligent people who may now be hopelessly unknowable. In the case of a clay pot, yes, it was most certainly made by a kind of potter we are familiar with: people who may forever remain unknown to us. But why must we all pretend ignorance when we consider clay people? Does not the fact of design in people carry great value independently of knowledge of the designer?

Clay people, like clay pots, carry the unmistakable hallmarks of intelligent creation. Presumably, our evolutionists betters must think that were it not for “religion” no one would think to infer intelligent design in biology. But great philosphers of history, like Aristotle and Plato, easily landed in the realm of intelligent creation without regard to any religion! It is the natural and logical end point for true scientists.

But evolutionists are naturalists (or atheists) first, and scientists second. And solely because of a supposed “might mean God” logical inference they desperately demand that a biologists obey their rules. Biologists are prohibited from considering design in what they discover, while their archaeologist colleagues freely infer design without objection.

The disparate rules of desperate scientists create an illogical two-tiered system where a biologist must suppress his private conclusions while his archaeologist friend gets to freely shout, “Hey, look at this pot someone made!”

Why is this?

(C) 2024 Creation Reformation. Roddy Bullock is the founder of Creation Reformation and author of several books related to creation and evolution. For more information, visit www.creationreformation.com, or visit (and follow!) us at Facebook.

Please send editorial comments, including indications of typos and grammatical errors to info@creationreformation.com. If you want to know why there are typos, see my post On the Origin of Pieces by Means of Natural Correction. Enjoy!

And for more info, check out our posts: The Natural Selection Paradox, and Evolution's Fatally Unaswerable Question.