There are some great lines in 'BttF ll', such as this one from E. Brown (the Doc!):
"Roads? Where we're going we don't need... roads"...
But it's back to reality - where personal travel still requires us to use roads (at least most of the time!).
The link to the picture above (of US Presidents faces carved into Mount Rushmore), is that things - whether in the past or present - betray the hallmarks of design. So, whether it's a 'flux capacitor' a DeLorean motor car, or carved faces in a stone cliff face, we instinctively recognise design. We instinctively know that those faces in that rock were not derived from the battering of the elements over a long period of time!!
However, a very odd thing happens when we switch to the biological world. All of a sudden, any notion of design is swiftly denied and rebuffed - and in absolute terms! Why?
It's perhaps rather obvious - because evidence for actual design in living things, rather than apparent design has philosophical consequences!...
Professor Richard Lewontin once wrote:
"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."
(The New York Review of Books, 9 January 1997, p. 31)
Just lately, I've been reading more and more about cells, DNA, genetics, epigenetics etc., etc., and the more I've read, the more convinced I become of the most amazing design which has been brought to bear in the living world - within the Creation of our universe.
The 'argument from design' is an old one, I know, but here's the thing; although the argument from design has historically lost some of its traction (like a wheel-spinning DeLorean) it is gaining ground as we discover more and more about the world around us.
I'm very fortunate to live in one of the most beautiful cities in the world - Cambridge, UK - full of old, beautifully designed architecture...
No-one would believe that any of these buildings (images below, which I took recently) were the result of some random, non-designed process - so why not consider the thought of a designer being responsible for our biosphere? After all, it's far more complex that anything we've produced!!