The Argument from Design
Our discussion now shifts to another aspect of our universe, not where it came from but what it is like. I have already said that God as “First Cause” is not only a historical cause, the cause of the beginning (if any) of the universe, but a continuing cause, the cause that each and every instant of the universe is. And just as the universe around us may show traces of creation in the first sense, so it may show traces of creation in the second sense. That is, just as its existence may point to the God who gave it being, so its structure may point to the God who designed it.
The human authors of the Bible were not scientists. They were not interested in the relationships among natural phenomena. For them, the supremely important relationship was the world’s dependence upon God, its creator. The world was God’s handiwork, and everything in it pointed to him and was a reflection of his wisdom and power. The biblical authors saw God’s hand in everything, not only in what we would call miracles, but in quite ordinary events of nature such as rain or snow or earthquakes, which they portrayed as being the result of direct divine interventions. Moreover, in their descriptions of the world, they used the cosmological ideas familiar to them and to their contemporary readers. These ideas, which were those of an ancient, pre-scientific people, naturally seem very primitive to us.
And yet, as non-scientific as the Bible was in its outlook, in a number of ways its message helped to clear the ground and prepare the soil for the much later emergence of science. It did this in part by overthrowing the ideas of pagan religion. In paganism, the world itself was imbued with supernatural powers and populated with capricious beings: the Fates and Furies, dryades and naiades, sun gods and gods of war, goddesses of sex and fertility. All of these were swept away by the severe monotheism of the Bible.1
This explains a historical fact which sounds rather strange at first: the pagan Romans accused the early Christians of the crime of “atheism” or “godlessness,” and persecuted them for it. The reason for this was that Judaism and Christianity were—in the small g sense—“godless.” All of the things which the pagan had learned to venerate as divine were reduced to the status of mere things by Jewish and Christian teaching. The Sun was not a god, but merely, according to the Book of Genesis, a lamp. The animals and other good things of Earth were not to be worshipped by human beings, but rather human beings were to exercise dominion over them. Whatever reverence, awe, or wonder that it was appropriate to have for the ocean or the stars or living things was not on account of any divinity or spirituality that they possessed, but because they were the masterworks of God.
It is often said that science “dis-enchanted” the natural world, in the sense of depersonalizing it and desacralizing it. But to a large extent this had already been accomplished by the Hebrew Bible. The universe was no longer alive with gods, but was a work of cosmic engineering.
As a work of engineering the cosmos necessarily reflected the rationality and wisdom of its creator. This is a constant biblical theme. According to numerous passages in the Bible, it was the divine Wisdom that presided over the creation of the heavens and the earth. In the Book of Proverbs, Wisdom sings of her own role in creation:
From everlasting I was firmly set, from the beginning, before earth came into being.
The deep was not, when I was born, there were no springs to gush with water.
Before the mountains were settled, before the hills, I came to birth;
Before he made the earth, the countryside, or the first grains of the world’s dust….
I was by his side, a master craftsman, delighting him day after day, ever at play in his presence,
At play everywhere in his world. (Prov. 8:22–26,30–31)
Another biblical theme of central importance is that God is a lawgiver. Indeed, Jews call the first five books of the Bible “the Torah,” meaning “the Law.” It was this law that regulated the Covenant between God and the people of Israel. But the Torah was understood by the ancient rabbis to be much more than a set of books written on parchment or rules written to guide human conduct. The Torah was a law that existed before the world began and was the master plan according to which God created the universe.2 In the words of the rabbis, “the Holy One, blessed be he, consulted the Torah when he created the world.”3 The universe, then, was conceived of and created by God according to a law. This law, indeed, was identified by the rabbis with the divine Wisdom.4
This conception of God as the lawgiver not only for human beings but for the cosmos itself is found explicitly in various passages of the Bible. Through the prophet Jeremiah the Lord says: “When I have no covenant with day and night, and have given no laws to heaven and earth, then too will I reject the descendants of Jacob and of my servant David.” (Jer. 33:25–26)
According to Psalm 148, the Sun, the Moon, the stars, and the heavens obey a divinely given “law, which will not pass away.” Moreover, there is even a hint that this law is mathematical in nature. St. Augustine and, later, the writers of the Middle Ages laid great stress on a passage from the Book of Wisdom which says that God has “disposed everything according to measure, and number, and weight.” (Wis. 11:20)
The church’s supposed hostility to science has become such a standard part of anti-religious mythology that many will be taken aback by the idea that Jewish and Christian concepts played a role in preparing the way for science. Yet that is what the work of such scholars as Pierre Duhem, A. C. Crombie, and Stanley Jaki has helped to show. It is becoming more generally realized that it was not an accident that the Scientific Revolution occurred in Europe rather than in the other great centers of civilization. For example, in his recent book Consilience, the biologist E. O. Wilson, discussing the fact that the Chinese civilization, with all its refinement and splendid achievements, did not produce a Newton or a Descartes, had this to say:
Of probably even greater importance, Chinese scholars abandoned the idea of a supreme being with personal and creative properties. No rational Author of Nature existed in their universe; consequently the objects they meticulously described did not follow universal principles, … In the absence of a compelling need for the notion of general laws—thoughts in the mind of God, so to speak—little or no search was made for them.5
This idea of God as cosmic lawgiver was from very early times central to Jewish and Christian thinking.6 It is the basis of the so-called Argument from Design for the existence of God. An early statement of this argument can be found, for example, in the works of the Latin Christian writer Minucius Felix near the beginning of the third century:
If upon entering some home you saw that everything there was well-tended, neat and decorative, you would believe that some master was in charge of it, and that he was himself much superior to those good things. So too in the home of this world, when you see providence, order and law in the heavens and on earth, believe that there is a Lord and Author of the universe, more beautiful than the stars themselves and the various parts of the whole world.”7
It is the beauty, and order, and law that we see in the world which point to its creator.
Over the centuries there have been many other statements of the Argument from Design by believers of every confession. The idea that the universe is a work of supreme craftsmanship or engineering is expressed, for example, in numerous passages of Calvin’s Institutes such as this: “[W]hithersoever you turn your eyes, there is not an atom of the world in which you cannot behold some brilliant sparks at least of his glory.… You cannot at one view take a survey of this most ample and beautiful machine in all its vast extent, without being completely overwhelmed with its infinite splendour.”8 A classic statement of the Argument from Design was given by the Anglican theologian William Paley (1743–1805) in his book Natural Theology. He compared the world to a watch, whose intricate structure proved that it did not arise by accident:
In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there: I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place. I should hardly think of the answer I had given before—that, for anything I knew, the watch might always have been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone?9
Paley went on to observe that the universe possesses a fineness of structure far surpassing that of any watch or other human contrivance. Therefore, like a watch, it must have been designed.
In 1840, a few decades after Paley, the great English historian and essayist Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote:
A philosopher of the present day … has before him the same evidences of design in the structure of the universe which the early Greeks had … for the discoveries of modern astronomers and anatomists have really added nothing to the force of that argument which a reflective mind finds in every beast, bird, insect, fish, leaf, flower, and shell.10
In modern times the Argument from Design for the existence of God has come in for a great deal of criticism. Much of this criticism is made by people who claim that the designs seen in nature have a purely natural, scientific explanation. Before we get into that debate—in the next chapters—it is important to make some distinctions.
Comparing the various statements quoted in the previous section, one can see that there are really two versions of the Design Argument. One of them, which I shall call the Cosmic Design Argument, is based on the order exhibited by the cosmos as a whole: Jeremiah spoke of a law given to “heaven and earth,” and Minucius Felix of the providence, order, and law “in the heavens and on earth.” The most common examples given in the older texts seem to be from astronomy: the law obeyed by the Sun, Moon, and stars, the “covenant with day and night,” and the beauty of “the stars themselves.” Macaulay, too, began by referring to “the structure of the universe,” and mentioned the discoveries of modern astronomers. And yet, all of the specific examples that Macaulay listed are taken from biology. All the “structures” are those of the bodies or parts of bodies of living things: “beast, bird, insect, fish, leaf, flower, and shell.” In these examples, Macaulay was making what I shall call the Biological Design Argument. It is interesting that the Biological Design Argument seems to have come much later historically than the Cosmic Design Argument.
Closely related to this distinction between the cosmic and the biological versions of the Design Argument is a basic ambiguity in the meaning of the word structure. There are really two quite different kinds of structure. On the one hand, there is the kind that comes to mind when we hear the words regularity, pattern, symmetry, and order. It is describable by mathematical rules. This is the kind of structure one sees, for example, in decorative patterns, in the steps of a dance, or in the form of a sonnet. In the natural world, one can see it in the shapes of crystals and in the regular motions of the solar system, to give just two instances. This is what I shall call “symmetric structure.”
But there is another kind of structure, which we find in living things, and which I will therefore call “organic structure.” Webster’s dictionary defines an “organism” this way: “a complex structure of interdependent and subordinate elements whose relations and properties are largely determined by their function in the whole.”11 Note that organisms are inherently complex. Even a bacterium, the simplest kind of living thing, has, according to molecular biologists, an enormously complicated structure. By some reckonings, it would take as great a quantity of information as there is in the Encyclopedia Britannica to describe all the parts of a bacterium and how they are put together. And multi-celled creatures, of course, are vastly more complicated still.
A second feature of organic structure is that the various parts are not related to each other by some mathematical rule. There are formulas that tell you how the molecules in a crystal are arranged, or even the rhyme scheme of a sonnet. However, there is no formula that tells you how liver and lungs and eyelash and tendon are related to each other in the body of an animal. Rather, as Webster’s says, the parts of an organism are related to each other by their respective functions in a complex and interdependent whole.
Artificial machines also exhibit organic structure. An automobile, for instance, has a great variety of parts: steering wheel, headlights, windshield, tires, carburetor, spark plug, camshaft, and so on. As in a living thing, these are related to each other by function.
Both in living organisms and artificial machines, it is not just the parts but the whole itself which has a function or purpose. The function of a car is to get people around. The function of a mosquito, according to evolutionary biologists, is to compete for resources and make more mosquitoes.
It should be emphasized that the two kinds of structure are not mutually exclusive. For example, suspension bridges and buildings have complex functional designs, but they also exhibit simple mathematical patterns. The same is true of living things. One need only think of the spiral shape of the nautilus’s shell, the fivefold symmetry of the starfish, the hexagonal pattern of an insect’s compound eye, or the helical structure of the DNA molecule.
The universe in which we live has many examples of both kinds of structure, the symmetric and the organic, often combined in the same object, as in the “leaf, flower, and shell” mentioned by Macaulay; and both kinds of structure have been seen as evidence of a cosmic designer. It is the first kind that Calvin doubtless had in mind when he wrote that “the exact symmetry of the universe is a mirror, in which we may contemplate the otherwise invisible God,”12 and the second kind when he wrote that “the composition of the human body is universally acknowledged to be so ingenious, as to render its Maker the object of deserved admiration.”13
This is why the comparison chosen by William Paley of a timepiece is so apt. The regular circular motions of a watch’s parts remind one of that cosmic clock we call the solar system, while the intricacy of a watch’s structure and the complex functional interdependence of its parts resemble the structure of a living thing.