Even without Darwin, intelligent people would have seen the undeniable connections between all living things. Some are obvious, others require microscopes or tools we have yet to invent. At the core, everything is symbiotic. Life survives through relationships , cooperation and competition woven together into one field. When I speak of intelligent design, I don’t mean a magician in the sky or a puppeteer with infinite hands. That idea is absurd. There’s no logic in imagining an infinite being micromanaging a finite universe. The premise is infinitely stupid. If there is design, it lies in the laws themselves: chemistry, physics, and evolution , a system unfolding without constant interference. The intelligence is nature, refining itself through trial and error, failure and adaptation.
Religious dogma cheapens this truth. Stories of a six-day creation collapse under their own contradictions. Time didn’t even exist before the sun and the orbit of the earth. If creation required days, they could have been trillions of years long. A better metaphor is software, endlessly updating, never finished. That is what we observe: a system prototyping, correcting, evolving. Life itself testifies to this. Getting started was nearly impossible, but once sparked, it wanted to endure. Its beauty lies in its insistence on improvement. Survival is not only about strength but also cooperation. Competition itself is part of the cooperation that keeps the whole alive.
This is the strongest evidence for what some call God: the unity of cause and effect. We share atoms and molecules with everything that has ever existed. Evolution is not a challenge to divinity but its most elegant expression. The “imperfection” of mutation is in fact the perfection of a system that doesn’t need to be finished. And still, the bigger riddle remains: is reality itself an illusion? Perhaps it is a dream, a mirage, a hallucination. But even if so, the illusion has rules. Rocks fall, fire burns, organisms adapt. The dream behaves like reality, consistent enough to demand our attention.
So does it matter if this is an illusion? Not really. Pain still hurts, love still heals, death still frightens. If this is a dream, it is one we all share. The better question is not whether the world is real but what we will do with it while we are here. Evolution, then, is poetry, not threat. It reveals that the best chance for life is diversity, cooperation, and balance , even competition has its place. Whether reality is solid or a dream, the responsibility is the same: to work with the tools we have, to honor the connections between all things, and to play our part in the great experiment.