Appreciating nature’s beauty and symmetry without attributing it to a creator

I remember the chill I felt, 27 years ago, when I picked up the latest edition of Scientific American magazine. Pictured on the cover was an object of unnerving beauty — a cutaway of a perfect blue sphere meticulously assembled from tiny identical parts and studded around the circumference with precisely placed green antennas. Inside this flawlessly honed outer shell was a smaller inner sphere, reddish tan in color, and suspended at its center was an ivory capsule, built from hundreds of still tinier spheres.

Small black letters at the bottom of the image gave the object’s identity: The AIDS virus, now called H.I.V.

After hearing so much about the ruthless way the disease ravages the immune system, I hadn’t expected the virus itself to look so orderly and geometric — like something that had been engineered.

When we see such intricate symmetry, our brains automatically assume there was an inventor. Overcoming that instinct took centuries, and it was only then that the living world began to make sense.

Read the full, original story: Creation, in the Eye of the Beholder 

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