What have led me to believe in intelligent design? As a person, personal experiences, as a scientist, the unsolved mysteries of science gave me the evidences.

In recent years, the most interesting topic and field of science that has strengthened my faith the most, is the one that deals with the fine-tuning of the Universe. The most briefly I could summarize this is that there are laws in the Universe that seem to have been created and are just like that to support the emergence and survival of intelligent life. The properties of space and time, the size of the Universe, interactions and their special and strange manifestations, but most of all the constants of physics are the ones that have become the focus of increasing interest in recent years. Precisely because it has been discovered that the slightest change in any of the components makes the existence of intelligent life impossible, and in fact, some changes would not allow even the simplest life, but there are also such small differences that simply would not allow the existence of the Universe.

For example, see three-dimensional space. It’s incredible, but in any other space, there can be no stable planetary systems, that is, a world with a number of dimensions other than three would have to be redesigned in every detail, and I can’t even say now whether it could support life even if it were redesigned.

And I could list countless signs of fine-tuning, about which, fortunately, exhaustive knowledge is now available in more and more books. So I don’t want to list them now, they provided just enough evidence for me to believe that the world is tuned to intelligent life, to an amazingly improbable degree.

Just a few examples of the most important finely tuned properties: the ratio between expansion and gravity, the proton-neutron mass ratio, the nuclear efficiency, the weak interaction, the tunneling effect, the Pauli exclusion principle, the special properties of water, the ratio of gravitational and electromagnetic forces, the zero value of entropy at the birth of the Universe, quantumness, and I could list more.

I must mention the most astonishing and convincing feature, which cannot be attributed to anything other than fine-tuning, to intelligent design: this feature is the stability of the Solar System. And if that were not enough, this stability can be observed throughout the Universe. A stable arrangement is an extremely unlikely configuration for systems operating under the influence of gravity, under the influence of each other’s attraction. Chaotic behavior is much, much more likely. In the case of the Solar System, a very small modification of the orbit of Mercury would lead to chaotic behavior of the entire system. And yet the Solar System is stable, which cannot even be proven by mathematical means; the best proof is experience itself.

And if we accept that such luck cannot exist solely due to chance, then the other possibility remains: design. This requires an intelligent designer, whether he is the God of believers or a powerful intelligence that is hidden somewhere unknowable to us, this is undecidable. For a believer, the natural choice is God, who also plays the role of the Intelligent Designer and who created the conditions necessary for intelligent life during Creation. He also created intelligent life in the image of man, but for this to survive in the long term, that fine-tuning is also needed. Agnostics do not call the creator and implementer of fine-tuning God, but an Intelligent Designer, thereby leaving open some philosophical and religious questions.

For me, there is no doubt that our world is well designed by God, the Creator. However, there are still some problematic issues that I have called the paradox of intelligent design.

One is the question of evolution and its justification. In the beginning, there was only hydrogen and helium. Then stars and galaxies were born, in these the chemical elements were created, from which planets were born, and one of the planets became the birthplace of intelligent life. My question is: why didn’t the Creator create the world in its present form? Is evolution necessary for survival? Of course, the world may have actually been created in its present state, but then why does it contain so many traces and memories of evolution? For a person who believes in the Bible’s creation story, this is of course not a problem. However, I believe that the Bible speaks to the soul, while the mind adheres to the facts of science, and if science also points in the direction of an Intelligent Designer, we must examine this path as well.

The other part of the paradox is moral, philosophical, and I feel this is much more important now, because the events of my individual life and history, as well as the current increasingly hopeless situation in the world, make this problem glaring.

We have accepted that the world is incredibly finely tuned, attributing it to the existence and work of an Intelligent Designer. And what do we see? In contrast to the perfection of the Universe, life on earth is full of suffering, disease, and all sorts of evil.

We can say that Adam and Eve are to blame, or the free will we were given, or selfishness, greed, envy.

In a perfectly fine-tuned Universe, are suffering, pain, and unhappiness necessary?

The most difficult book in the Bible for me to accept, the book of Job, is about this very thing. And I accept that I have no basis whatsoever for asking questions about whether the world could be better. But God created me in His own image, and I ask Him to forgive me and to forgive me for having Job’s doubts. And I know that “my Redeemer lives, and at the last day I will stand upon the earth,” but now I am here in a finely tuned world, among suffering people, and because of their suffering I suffer too. And this is incomprehensible to me; the paradox of Intelligent Design is insoluble to me.

A Universe entirely designed to support intelligent life, and the wildlife and human civilization that currently exist on Earth, which is a world of suffering, pain, unhappiness, and unanswered questions.

Is this really what this world is about, and can we only be happy in that other world that the Savior prepared for us with his sacrifice?

Is there another answer that we are here in this world to discover, we intelligent beings?

‎‎Nyíregyháza, June 7, 2025 – September 4, 2025