If the laws of physics did not have their finely tuned features in line with the anthropic principle, stars like the sun would not burn in the slow and steady way that they do, giving life in general—and human life in particular—time to evolve. Evolution itself requires a finely tuned designer universe. John Barrow and Frank Tipler argue that physics has supplied a new “design argument remarkably similar to that proposed by Paley.” Biologists who insist that evolution operates according to principles of time and chance often forget that it also depends on the laws of a universe that is not the product of time and chance.
Even if God did not override the laws of nature in order for mankind to emerge, who programmed the cell with its digital code? Who gave it the capacity to make copies of itself? Who made a universe with the laws that could produce mankind? What is the ultimate explanation for why reality is structured in this way?
Physicist Stephen Barr writes: 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 of 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 explanation than the watches themselves?
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