The Great Designer

Claude M. Hathaway, the designer of the “electric brain” for the U.S. National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics at Langley Field writes in an essay entitled “The Great Designer” of what he thinks of the rational bases of his belief in a supernatural God. He states, most pertinently that “design requires a designer.” As an engineer he had learned to appraise order and to appreciate the difficulties associated with design which brings together the forces, materials and laws of Nature in such a way as to accomplish a desired objective. He had, in short, learned to appreciate the problem of design by being faced with the problems of design:

“It was my job, several years ago, to design an electric computer that would rapidly solve some complicated equations encountered in two-dimensional stress theory. This problem was solved by an assembly of hundreds of vacuum tubes, electro-mechanical devices, and complicated circuitry, and the completed “brain”, in a cabinet about the size of three large pianos, is still in use by the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics at Langley Field. After working on this computer for a year or two and after facing and solving the many design problems which it presented, it is completely irrational to me to think that such a device could come into being in any other way than through the agency of an intelligent designer.

Now the world around us is a vast assembly of design or order, independent but interrelated, vastly more complex in every small detail than my “electronic brain.” If my computer required a designer, how much more so did that complex physio-chemicalbiological machine which is my human body—which in turn is but an extremely minute part of the well-nigh infinite cosmos?

It is the perfection of the functioning and intricacy of design of the universe, which brings us to the conclusion that it must be the creation of some divine mind.