Design Implies a Designer

Last Modified: February 4, 1995

The design/designer argument is usually phrased as follows: One sees a watch
and notices the perfection with which it carries out its task and serves a
purpose and infers that it must have been designed -- thus watches prove the
existence of watchmakers. The analogy that follows is that each of man's
internal organs as well as his overall structure is so perfectly attuned to
his environment that we can infer that man too must have a designer -- god.

The key problem with this argument is simply that the analogy is so accurate
that it disproves the very argument it is claimed to prove. Imagine if you
stumbled upon a broken watch -- would you think it was any less designed? Of
course not. You infer design because you know, as fact, that watches are
man-made and cannot occur in nature, that is, without intelligent
intervention, -- the laws of physics don't make watches themselves.

Suppose you were on an archaeological dig and you found a rock. If someone
claimed that the rock was `designed' by aboriginies to kill prey, would you
check to see how well it killed prey? No, a natural rock might kill well.
You would look for marks that indicate that it had been chipped or shaped.
You would look for things that you know do not arise by themselves.

Suppose further you flew over Mars in a space ship and saw channels that
might have been fashioned by Martians to irrigate their fields. You wouldn't
see how well they carried water to decide if they were made by Martians,
would you? Natural streams carry water as well. You would check for patterns
or shaping that simply could not occur in nature -- for example, extremely
straight runs or star shaped distribution patterns. (Better yet, metal
structural supports)

The fact is, men only infer design when they see things that appear nowhere
in nature. How well a device or object serves what we may hypothesize is its
purpose is irrelevant because we have not yet established that the device
has a purpose -- much less what it particularly is.

When we switch to the man - god analogy, we see clearly that in man we do
not see anything not found in nature (man is found in nature). To say that
man `serves his purpose well' is to say nothing -- the concept of purpose
only applies to an object after we know it has been designed and thus cannot
be used to establish its design status which is logically prior.

If broken watches ocurred in nature but working ones did not, the
design/designer argument would have credibility. But since it misrepresents
the way people actually do infer design, its reasoning is flawed from the
very beginning. I am honestly surprised that people still take it seriously.
The flaw I have discussed here is very well known and understood.

A closely related argument claims that the improbability of life arising `by
chance' proves that it must have been designed by god. First of all, no one
believes that life (in its full complexity) arose `by chance' any more --
the evidence against it is just too overwhelming.

In fact, concepts like evolution help to explain how complex forms of life
could arise without invoking extraordinary degrees of chance. In fact,
evolution makes it inevitable for simple forms of life to lead to complex
forms (given certain conditions).

But even if we grant the premise that the existence of life (or anything
else for that matter) is terrifically unlikely, are we forced to conclude
that it could not have happened by chance?

Roll a one-million sided die. No matter what number comes up, the odds
against it are a million to one. Not impressed? Roll a billion sided die or
ten billion.

Improbable events are very probable. They happen all the time. A raindrop
falls to the earth on a particular spot at a particular speed after
following a particular path, but no one proposes that god needs to direct
each individual raindrop. We are quite happy to `explain' these
one-in-trillions events as due simply to chance.
An of course, as we saw in the case of miracles, few blame god for the
one-in-a-million bad things that come to pass; they only credit him with the
one-in-a-million good things. A bullet takes a one-in-a-billion ricochet to
hit an innocent four year old boy. Do we need to propose that god directed
the bullet's path to explain it?
God doesn't explain the improbable, chance does.
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