Self-Evolving Nature and the Design Argument for God

Some essential problems with a popular argument for theism

Image by NASA, from Pexels.com

The natural order is replete with things that couldn’t have just popped into being purely by chance, things such as stars and planets and the myriad creatures on Earth. We know that the artifacts we create are made possible by our intelligence since we design them to work as they do. Doesn’t this mean, by analogy, that everything in the universe was designed to work as they do by some divine intelligence?

This teleological argument for God’s existence was criticized especially well by the philosopher David Hume who pointed out that the analogy isn’t as strong as it may first appear. For example, machines such as computers or automobiles are typically designed and engineered by teams so the analogy would imply polytheism rather than the more fashionable monotheism.

The Broader View of Nature

However, there’s a more glaring problem with the design argument, which is that the analogy assumes a static, parochial view of the universe. If you look up at the night sky, you see myriad twinkling stars and you might wonder how they came to be so bright that their light could reach us from so far away.

The mystery of how things came to be is magnified, of course, if we confine our observations to snapshots that provide us with only minimal information. This is like the Hindu parable about blind people who try to explain what an elephant is when each person grasps a different part of the animal and has only a skewed inkling of the whole. From our comparatively brief vantage point, what we call the natural order appears fixed: stars proceed along their orbits, the seasons come and go, and everything is regular and reliable — just like how our artifacts generally function. There’s the odd hiccup or malfunction, but because we live for only eighty years on average, whereas a star lasts for billions, a star as we see it in our paltry lifespan looks all the more like a finished product.

We know now from scientific models that the universe wasn’t always as we currently perceive it. For example, the Hubble telescope presented us with images of nebulas or “stellar nurseries” in which you could see how stars are…