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Spencer Deegan
Mrs.Debock
English 4
11 november 2015

Real World Narrative: Intelligent Design

When I was first pegged with the responsibility that is Senior Exploration the stress it
gave me could be cut with a knife. What could I possibly be involved with enough to want to
write a paper on? I searched through endless lists of topics until the deadline forced me to pick
Intelligent Design. As the project progressed, I came to understand my topic and I began to
realize how important my topic actually is. My first paper showed me that although Intelligent
Design is important, most legitimate people in the scientific community dismissed it as it lacked
proof or evidence to its cause. along with that, the theory that rivaled Intelligent Design,
evolution is consistently backed up with evidence of its legitimacy. Learning this made it hard to
understand how any person follows a religion when Intelligent Design is fundamental in the
beliefs of any religious person. So for my service hours, I chose to spend my time trying to
understand the ideology of someone who believes we were designed.
The best way I saw to understand why people follow religion was to interview people
who were trusted amongst their community to teach it. I went to six different churches and
interviewed six different pastors.There names are John, Thomas, Scott, Tony, Shane, and Brian.
These men taught at these churches: St.Michael's Catholic Church, Solid Rock Baptist Church,
Shepherd of the Sea Lutheran Church, Christian Church of Surfside, Trinity Church, and Belin
Memorial United Methodist Church. The first question I asked them was why they thought we

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were created. The general consensus is that with how complicated yet beautiful the world is, it
seems more reasonable to believe that we were created. Along with this none of them dismissed
science. The idea is if we were created we were created with the ability to understand the world
around us. I was told that the bible is more about the message of the information and not so much
about the literalness. This coincides with the point about science not being rejected, the
consensus was that science was the way our creator created us and everything else.
The next question I asked seemed like the most logical one. Why, if we and the world
around us were created, is there any bad in the universe? What I was told is that when we were
created, we were created to love our creator. The thing that's special about us is that our creator
wanted to give us the choice whether or not to love him. The idea is bad in the universe exists to
broaden our spectrum of choice. To explain, if we only know love and good then how could we
feel any thing else thus taking away true choice. We live in a world that is free and wild, because
of this our minds have a extensive grasp of good and evil. Understanding this gives us a
standpoint of our own choosing. I was told our creator gives us such a broad view of things so
that we will exercise faith and chose to love him.
Lastly these men believe in Intelligent Design because of certain beautiful moments and
beautiful humans. The beauty of the world convinced theses men that the world was created, they
cite specific examples such as having a child. They say that the ability to produce something so
complicated yet wonderful makes them believe that there is no doubt that the world is created.
They insist that moments like this are something that must be experience to fully understand the
beauty of them. Along with this they expressed the complexity of each individual and how many
experiences each person has. Their message being there is too many significant things going on
for this world to be a product of chance.

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Doing this service gave me a basic understanding for the ideology of someone who
believes in intelligent design. The service hours I did for this project have bettered me as a
person, even though doing this project added stress to my life I am happy with the things I have
learned. The progression of my understanding of the topic is evident though this project and I
feel as though doing all of the work that comes with this project has made me a smarter human
being.