Spirituality and the old question
'Is there a God?'

Intelligent Design in the Universe

'Is there a God?' is a spirituality-related question thats been coming up since time immemorial. As this website refers to yoga, and as originally yoga is practised with the objective of the individual self (that's us) establishing a relationship with the Supreme (God) then the question is quite pertinent. After all, if you go to take on unbelievable austerity by practising meditation in the snows of the Himalayas, but when you come to the conclusion of your yogic method and you find nothing is there, you'd be fairly well peeved off.

Some say that the existence of a powerful original being can be understood through simple observation and a little commonsense. A new breed of scientist promote a concept called 'Intelligent Design'. When they look into the natural world they see intelligence and design, not blind chance. Therefore this indicates that someone somewhere is masterminding the whole operation.

Here is an example, even with no scientific language or jargon. We notice that we have a body with a brain, organs, limbs, etc. We can also look around at the man-made environment and see buildings, cars, computers, etc. Everyone is agreed that computers, for example, were designed and manufactured by human beings. We can observe a certain complexity in computers. They had to have a design and manufacturing process in order to be produced. If we were to wait for the laws of nature to come up with a computer on their own we may be waiting for a rather long time.

If you want to try, imagine yourself in a clearing of a primeval forest. You are an observer of the universe, and you sit around for eons waiting for gravity to make a computer 'fall into place'. You have time, millions of years, billions of years, trillions of years pass. Summoning up reserves of immeasurable patience you wait...
But it just doesn't happen.
Finally you conclude that to get your computer you need Someone to extract petroleum and various metals, manufacture the plastic and alloys, intelligently design a working system, while simultaneously producing and integrating electric current. And then you get your computer.

We can observe that we have a body. Anyone reading this has a body. On a physical level we can note that although the computer that we created above is complicated, our physical body is ultimately very much more complicated. Our body grows, changes size, adjusts to its environment and even produces by-products of itself (new bodies) that outshine man-made machines.

So the crux of the matter is if a computer has an intelligent designer, a human body does also. It's simple logic. A complex computer must have a designer to exist, so an even more complex human body must also have an original designer. That we don't know who did the work is another point, just like we may not know where our desktop comes from. If we investigate were the computer came from we can probably find out, likewise if we investigate were our body came from, we may also find the answer. But that's another story.

One final point on this is that in the Vedic or yogic texts a distinction is made between our soul and our body. We have a body as a possession, but the soul is the possessor. The body is a created thing, but we are eternal spiritual beings, not created at anytime

"For the soul there is neither birth nor death at anytime. He has not come into being, does not come into being, and will not come into being. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain."
Bhagavad Gita 2.20