Let us now return to the claims by Dawkins and others that Darwin’s theory of evolution has decimated Paley’s argument from design. Actually, Paley’s argument has never been refuted. I am not talking of the specific details that Paley cited, but about his general case for design. That case is actually much stronger today than when Paley made it two centuries ago.
Dawkins is too blinded by anti-religious prejudice to see it, but his argument in The Blind Watchmaker actually supports the design argument. To see why, consider the example of a computer. A computer is like Paley’s watch: it shows clear evidence of design. No one could seriously contend that the computer somehow “evolved” through the forces of natural selection. Someone made it and someone programmed it. Now let’s assume that this is not the case with a certain type of software. Let’s assume that this software operates in a kind of “open source” mode. It accepts random changes and somehow the most useful and adaptive programs survive.
Let’s posit that the process here is evolutionary; it is guided by no one. My question is the following: would the fact of evolution in the case of the software in any way undermine the fact of design in the case of the computer? Obviously not. The software may evolve but someone still had to make the computer and install in it the original programming.
Now apply this analogy to the universe. I have in previous chapters offered strong evidence that the universe is the product of design. The universe could not have evolved through natural selection, as the universe makes up the whole of nature. Someone made the universe and prescribed the laws that govern its operations. Now within the universe there are innumerable life forms that correspond in our analogy to the software programs. These life forms are the product of evolution, and Darwin and his successors have elegantly elucidated the modes of transition. But evolution has no explanation for the origin of the universe or its laws. So how can evolution undercut the argument from design as it applies to the universe itself and the laws that govern it? Clearly it cannot. In this case, as with the computer, the evolution of the part in no way refutes the deliberate design of the whole. The overwhelming evidence is that someone planned the whole thing.
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….
