Not Intelligent Design

Tim Minchin said it best,

"Isn't this enough? Just...this? How does the natural universe so fail to hold our imaginations, that we have to diminish it with man-made myths and monsters?"

Let's assume for a moment that there is an intelligence that created this universe (and all the others). It would have to come from outside the universe. So alien as to be incomprehensible (you can't think 11 dimensional thoughts with a three dimensional brain, after all). No more capable of having a personal relationship with us, than we are of having a personal relationship with any one of the millions of nutrinos that are passing through our collective thumbnails at this very moment.

I think the only thing we could possibly have in common, is our imperfection. Nothing is perfect, nor should it be. Since, by definition, it's impossible for a perfect being to create anything imperfect, our hypothetical creator must be subject to error. Indeed, a perfect universe could not exist because the universe exists by virtue of imperfection.

An event. A broken symmetry. A point of reference.

While perfection, and, to some extent, infinity, can be imagined, they cannot exist because the physical laws of this universe prevent it. Were it otherwise, perfection would be a static, sterile thing. Probably the closest thing to absolute nothingness I can imagine. You see the paradox.

Much more likely, I think, is that this universe, and everything in it, is a very tiny part, perhaps even an unintended side effect, of some grander creation.

All of that being said, the end result ends up being the same for us. No heaven, no hell, no grey-bearded old man judging whether we have sinned by wearing two different types of fabric, or planting two different types of crops, or marrying the wrong person, or eating the wrong food, or working on the wrong day, or any of the myriad of silly rules imposed by a primitive belief system that does nothing to explain us or our place in the universe.

The question ends up being meaningless because the result of his existence is the same is that of his non-existence.