ALice:

One answer, of course, is that we are all Designers, suffering our way through various grades of a self-generated Design School...but the "must have a prior Cause" argument is really irrelevant if you are talking about an entity (or many entities) who are not contained by spacetime in their basic nature. The unidirectional character of time in a matter-and-space continuum (as we know them so far) is not inherently necessary for other dimensions or kinds of existence. This is a hard idea to swallow, to a mind deeply trained in ordinary space-time logic. But I think it proves out in experience, if not in Science. :>)

ALl of which just speaks to what I said earlier about the problems of approaching questions of thought and spirit using scientific method.
Memetics not withstanding. The question that gets left unanswered is who does the memetic engineering, and what happens when the boundary between signal and understanding is crossed -- a qualitative gap rather than a merely quantitative one.

A