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Thank you for your reply!

Yes, but to my primitive, 4-D brain, such a designer is difficult to distinguish from a deity. And I still don't see how he/she/it could foretell the future of its designs unless equipped with god-like omniscience. Besides, I think that proposing such a "designer" wouldn't help the ID folks in their quest to appear "scientific" enough to slip their conjectures into the classroom as a realistic alternative to evolution.

There are so many things that our vision and minds cannot “see” but which are revealed by mathematics. That is at the root of the theory of the extra temporal dimension. But if such a dimension exists, our not being able to perceive it naturally would not make it any less true – nor would it be an appeal to omniscience outside of the hypercube, the geometry of space/time (including multi-verses and branes).

IOW, a cosmic ancestor designer who had the ability to see and think in the extra dimensions which are beyond our senses would be able to know in advance the consequences of his design without being outside of space/time.

Here’s more about that extra time dimension:

Physics News 347, November 19, 1997

SPARE TIME. Descartes gave us co-ordinate geometry, with its three spatial dimensions. Einstein put time on an equivalent footing, creating 4-dimensional spacetime. String theory added six more spatial dimensions, and M theory added yet one more for a total of eleven (see Update 329). Now Cumrun Vafa of Harvard has added still another----an extra element of time---to make the existing theories more compatible with each other. Because of possible side effects, such as faster-than-light travel or questionable causality (time would not be measured sequentially along an axis but would spread out into a plane), Vafa's "F Theory" has not found many adherents yet. (New Scientist, 1 November.)

Cumrun Vafa: Evidence for F-Theory (pdf)

Ebook: Strange Matters, Chapter 10, Page 248 excerpt (Two Timing Universe)

Two time dimensions are simply what you need to make sense out of certain versions of string theory, Vafa contends. Maybe a second time direction seems odd because nobody knows where to look for it—it might come into play only in strange places, perhaps at the center of black holes. So it was too soon, he said, to dismiss the notion that a second time dimension could somehow be real. “As to what that would mean,” says Vafa, “I could only say that time will tell.”

So far time hasn’t told anybody very much. The idea of a second time dimension hasn’t grabbed the spotlight among efforts to understand M theory and the relationship of space and time to reality. But the idea hasn’t gone away, either. Papers on the second time dimension still turn up from time to time—some advocating the idea, others critiquing it. (It is, after all, one of those ideas that might turn out to be wrong.)

If it’s not wrong, though, the key to understanding a second time dimension would be in figuring out why, if it exists, nobody has noticed it. And why it doesn’t mess up the world as we know it. For as University of Pennsylvania physicist Max Tegmark has pointed out, it’s hard to reconcile a second time dimension with the existence of life.

In a paper he published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, Tegmark pointed out that the existence of observers in the universe requires three qualities: complexity, stability, and predictability. That may explain why the universe has only three noticeable space dimensions. …

Personally, I find the objections to the second time dimension rather unscientific since it amounts to a refusal to look because all our 4 dimensionally limited vision and minds are able to perceive naturally is grounded in physical causality (cause/effect and timelines).

Here’s what additional dimensionality might be like if we could sense them:

The Curse of Dimensionality (pdf)

Naturally, an extra time dimension sensitive cosmic ancestor-designer would not preclude the existence of God who would be beyond the hyper-cube.

The fact of a beginning is the most clear scientific evidence that God exists. All modern cosmologies require there must be a beginning - either in tiers and hierarchies of multi-verses, inception of cyclic universes, collisions of branes - or good, old fashioned big bang inflationary theory. The bottom line is that since the 1960's we've known the universe is expanding, thus space/time is finite and had a beginning. Therefore there must have been an uncaused cause and the only possible candidate is God.

So naturally, whenever we speak of Designer - the most logical of the potential candidate designers for biological life (as with the universe) is God. The existence of cosmic ancestors and collective consciousness do not have any scientific evidence comparable to the fact of the beginning of space/time.

As a Christian, I know God exists. His son and I are on a first name basis. But on these threads, I try to speak as an objective third party academic to see the world through the eyes of intellectual agnostics.