Did God "Design" The Universe?
Jun 11, 2008
We continue on our quest to see if belief in God is scientific and rational. We have seen that the fact that there is something rather than nothing coupled with the scientific belief that the universe began from an infinitesimally small point which exploded into the creation of matter (The Big Bang) is powerful evidence for the existence of God. But what about the nature of the world around us, the appearance of purpose, design, and end-directed living of the organisms we find on earth? Atheist Richard Dawkins begins one of his books with the startling sentence, "Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose." He then spends the rest of the book attempting to show that this appearance is deceiving. His argument is against William Paley, an Anglican clergyman who with his 1802 book Natural Theology, offered one of the most lasting and irrefutable arguments for God-design. Paley wrote, "Suppose I pitch my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, it had lain there forever. But suppose I found a watch upon the ground, I should hardly think of the answer I gave before." His point was that you don't have to know much about watches to know that someONE designed and made it. In the same way, he argued, we see that same design and intricacy in earth and all of its life forms.
Dawkins believes that Paley was "gloriously and utterly wrong," because Darwin has shown a way that all things could have come about naturally through the process of natural selection. In other words, things have the ‘appearance' of design because they are being fitted by nature to survive. The problem is that while Evolution can explain many facets of biological life, it has clear boundaries that are only transgressed by what Stephen Jay Gould called "Darwinian Fundamentalists," namely those that try use Darwinian evolution to explain everything-cosmology, culture, ethics, politics, religion, psychology, etc. Gould faulted these ‘fundamentalists' for "using a powerful but quite circumscribed theory to account for phenomena that fall entirely outside its biological reach."[1]
As one example of this and as an expansion the last entry, evolution cannot explain the beginning of life. Darwin didn't attempt to explain the origin of life, only the complex progression of life from the first species. We now know that the simplest bacterial cell contains more information than the entire Encyclopedia Britanica, and it contains complicated, multi-faceted, and highly-organized machinery that all works together as a single unit of life. Within the cell is a complex digital code called DNA which programs the cells actions and tells it how to function and when to reproduce. Such was the nature of DNA that Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome project, called it "The Language of God." This means that the cell itself, which would have existed before the process of evolution began (there must be life to select traits for survival), contains the clear mark of design. For over 100 years now, atheistic Scientists have endeavored to create experiments showing how the first life form might have ‘appeared' on the scene, but none have been successful, leading biologist Franklin Harold to confess that the origin of life is one of the "unsolved mysteries of science." Physicist Stephen Barr brilliantly notes Dawkins' error in reasoning:
When examined carefully, scientific accounts of natural processes are never really about order emerging from mere chaos, or form emerging from mere formlessness. On the contrary, they are always about the unfolding or an order that was already implicit in the nature of things, although often in a secret or hidden way. When we see situations that appear haphazard, or things that appear amorphous, automatically or spontaneously ‘arranging themselves' into orderly patterns, what we find in every case is that what appeared to be haphazard actually had a great deal of order built into it...What Dawkins does not seem to appreciate is that his blind watchmaker is something even more remarkable than Paley's watches. Paley finds a watch and asks how such a thing could have come to be there by chance. Dawkins finds an immense automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that he has completely answered Paley's point. But that is absurd. How can a factory that makes watches be less in need of an explanation than the watches themselves? (Italics mine)
"It should be clear from all this that the problem is not with evolution. The problem is with Darwinism. Evolution is a scientific theory; Darwinism is a metaphysical stance and a political ideology...the atheist spin on evolution"[2] Thus, we again find more powerful evidence in science and reason to believe that God exists.
[1] Dinesh D'Souza, What's So Great About Christianity, 147.
[2] Ibid, 152.