Thoughts on the argument from design

The basic argument is easy to follow: where you see intelligent looking design, you assume a designer. You see the universe—it looks intelligently designed. Therefore there must be a designer. That designer is intelligent and therefore personal. The argument doesn’t at this point prove the existence of the Christian God but of a personal, very powerful God.

Illustrations are used to make the argument clearer—you assume intelligent design when you see the rock formation that welcomes you to Ontario; Mt. Rushmore is not a random formation; a watch found on a deserted island proves someone else was there; etc.

(Michael Behe’s argument relies on the idea of irreducible complexity and is more than the standard argument from design. For one thing, it focuses from the impossibility of non-intelligent design by undermining some basic principles of evolution—gradualism in particular. This discussion is about the older, weaker, standard argument from design.)

The switch is then made from those things that are designed by humans to those things in nature that have obvious non-human ‘design’. Examples would include things like living organisms and the balance of forces in the universe.

Skeptics of the argument are not convinced, because they see a perfectly good explanation in evolution and natural processes. They may also point out that many things are not apparently designed—do these things prove an opposite hypothesis?

There’s a basic problem for the ‘natural hypothesis’ (that the things we observe all came about without God’s help)—one that will not go away because it is a part of the laws of the universe. We have no experience of non-living things that are able to overcome the law of disorder. Everything tends toward disorder, and even with the help of living things that disorder is extremely hard to overcome. It took Herculean human effort to construct the Great Pyramid of Giza; all it will take to destroy it is time and the law of disorder. For that matter we can simply look to our kitchen sinks or kids’ playrooms to see the law at work. In fact, there is nowhere in our experience where the law is not at work. Any actual example of order increasing always appeals to the help of living organisms.

Why can’t we appeal to the help of living organisms? Because from the perspective of the ‘natural hypothesis’ such organisms arose from a universe of non-living matter, so there had to be a time when, somehow, the universe overcame the law of disorder.

Of course it would be circular reasoning to appeal to the universe itself as an example of order overcoming the law of disorder, since the whole question is whether or not the universe could possibly overcome such laws without any help from something outside itself.

A stock answer to this is that, given enough time, anything can happen, and things that are really unlikely are quite possible. I think this claim rides on a confusion. Given enough time, if I speed I will almost certainly get a ticket. Given enough time, if I take chances with dangerous drugs, I will die from taking those chances. Given enough time, if I hang around sick people I will most likely get sick. Therefore (some say), given enough time, life can rise from non-life. Granted it seems highly unlikely to us, and indeed is highly unlikely, but it is so unlikely and seems so unlikely because we are thinking of short periods of time.

Here’s the problem with this argument. The basic idea is that time will increase the chances of life arising from non-life, because time basically increases the chances of everything. But it’s actually the other way around when you are working against the odds. All the casino needs is a one or two percent advantage and it will always make money in the long run. Always. The more time an individual gambles at a one percent disadvantage, the more likely he is to lose money. Gamblers don’t attend to this basic law of odds, or just hope to defy it in the near future. But casinos never go out of business when they are run according to the odds and are willing to wait for those odds to play themselves out.

The argument that all we need is billions of years for the universe to self-create the design we find all over the place (especially the design seen in living organisms) is only good if during those billions of years the odds are basically in favor of the rise of order. But what if there is a fundamental law working against the rise of order, tipping the scales away from order and toward disorder? Then we would be in just the opposite position: the longer we wait, the less likely design-apparent things (living organisms) would arise. The law of disorder is like a giant casino in the business of taking all the design out of the universe.

Since the law of disorder is so apparent in our own experience—we find that almost all of our energies are expended to overcome it, whether it be repairing relationships or picking up after others who pretend like the law doesn’t exist—the appeal of the argument from design is intuitively profound for everyone.

SGS