The Argument from Design

In 1802, theologian William Paley wrote the best known argument for God by design in his “watchmaker analogy”. The treatise, which is still used today by ID proponents, posits that man and the world is too complex, organized and beautiful to have arisen by chance alone. He therefore attributed the appearance of design and fine tuning to God. He states, “suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place… the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other an artificer.” A watch found on a brief jaunt would presuppose a designer in a way that a rock or other natural artifact would not. Biological life, like the watch, appears too intricate to be the product of random causation.

In his 1986 book “The Blind Watchmaker” which I recently completed, Richard Dawkin’s purpose is to illustrate how evolution is better at explaining the existence of complexity in the world than Paley’s attribution of God. This is not to suggest the two are necessarily incompatible, although he does reach that conclusion. In his clear and somewhat acerbic prose, he argues persuasively that Darwinian evolution, like a blind watchmaker creates the illusion of design through cumulative natural selection. Complicated organisms he concedes necessity a special explanation as they have 1) constituent parts that are arranged in a way that is unlikely to have occurred by chance, 2) the appearance of being constructed with qualities specified in advance as if engineered for a purpose. As such, you may combine cells together randomly in billions of different arrangements for a billion years, and would still never reach the organized complexity of biological life. So how is it possible for life to occur?

Darwin states that to reconcile this paradox, we must look to the gradual step by step transformations from “entities sufficiently simple to have come into existence by chance.” (p. 43) That is, each step independently is sufficient to have arisen by chance, but the entire process itself is in fact nonrandom because it is acted upon by natural selection and the theory of the survival of the fittest. Thus, the misconception that evolution is a purely blind process is somewhat of a misunderstanding as the random mutations in the gene pool are acted upon selection which leaves those species best adapted to the given environment and that possess the largest reproductive advantage in nature. The process itself requires countless generations, geological rather than human time in billions of years to occur. The final product of biological life has the appearance of great design because it has had the effects of millions of generations of short-term selection towards simple survival, although this process has no final goal. This is possible due to mutations in the genes determining development. Thus, an eye may be created from no eye if we allow enough simple step transformations to occur in between. “Provided the difference between neighboring intermediates in our series leading to the eye is sufficiently small, the necessary mutations are almost bound to be forthcoming.” (p.79) This is because any degree of sight would confer a survival advantage over creatures with no sight at all.

The process itself is written into the genetic memory and information processing of successive generations. “Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA getting itself transmitted vertically. (passed down through generations)” (p.122) This is due to the horizontal success genetic information confers on bodies, i.e. speed, strength, intelligence, mobility, which creates an arms race between genetic information between species. The basis of evolution is RNA and DNA replication which Dawkins believes must also have arisen through a single step transformation, rather than a deity. There is no unmoved mover because “any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machines itself.” (p. 141) That is, we cannot explain complexity by positing something just as complex as what we seek to reconcile. It leaves unexplained the origin of God. ‘”You have to say something like ‘God was always there.” But if this is the case, we could eliminate a step and state that the process for forming complexity itself was always, or moreover the universe (or multiverse) was always.