@memester,
Two hundred years ago, the biologist William Paley published a huge book called Natural Theology. It contains detailed descriptions of hundreds of animals, birds, fish and plants - the carefully collated results of a lifetime spent studying and cataloguing nature. Its detail is staggering, and Dr Paley's book remains a landmark in historical biology.
But he didn't intend it as a work of science. In fact, Paley was setting out to demonstrate something quite different: his idea was to prove beyond any doubt that God exists.
The book starts with a simple parable. Imagine you've just found a watch in the middle of a field - one of those old-fashioned clockwork pocket watches, presumably. Now, what is it about the watch that makes it different from the stones and pebbles lying around?
The answer is
design. It's obvious that the watch has been carefully constructed by a human watchmaker. The wheels, pinions, coils and chains inside the watch's metal casing are shaped and assembled with a specific purpose in mind: telling the time. If the parts had been different, or fitted together in different ways, it wouldn't do anything of the sort.
The chances of a watch being constructed by blind chance are astronomically small. Where we have something that's clearly been designed for a specific purpose, we can safely say that a Designer gave it that purpose. Where there's a watch, Paley points out, there must be a watchmaker.
Now Paley invites us to draw the comparison between the watch and the world of nature. A fish's eye is much larger and rounder than a mammal's eye, with a crystalline lens that's good at concentrating rays of light passed through water.
As Paley wrote, "what plainer manifestation of design can there be than this difference?" Surely, if someone designed the watch, then by the same logic
someone designed the fish? And the same goes for every other creature whose design is painstakingly described in Paley's book.
Of course, Paley was hardly the first to come up with this idea. People throughout history have looked around them at the wonders of nature and intuitively asked themselves, "How else can we explain all this except by God?"
But these days there's a problem. In the mid-19 century, Charles Darwin came along with an idea that changed the face of biology forever. His theory of
evolution by natural selection did very nicely what Paley thought was impossible: it described how apparent design in nature can arise without any hint of a Designer. (Nature, to quote a modern-day Darwinian, is 'the blind watchmaker'.)
Darwinism is no real threat to our faith. After all, the Genesis story can be illuminating and meaningful, even if it's not
literally true. But it
is a problem for Paley, although he can't be blamed - he was writing 50 years earlier than Darwin. So was he barking up the wrong tree?
Well, surely there's more in the universe to be explained than the design of a fish's eye? If we agree that we don't need God to explain the design of life on Earth, even then there are some puzzles. For instance, scientists tell us that
the universe itself looks 'designed', and Darwinism can't explain
that.
The universe contains life. But not just
any old universe would allow life to develop in the first place. To get life, you first need spatial dimensions, matter, energy, chemistry, atoms, stars, planets, gravity (and. antigravity, as it happens).
Luckily, our universe has all these things, and in precisely the right amounts to make it possible for life to develop. But without each of these key values being
exactlyone in a billion. And yet - gasp - here we are!
So we're forced to believe both that God exists, and He designed the universe in order to create human life, or that we owe our existence to an astronomically huge coincidence.
For a hardened atheist, the second option might look tempting. But think about it. Imagine that your next-door neighbor wins the lottery jackpot
every single week for a year. Do you go on your merry way, thinking nothing of it? Maybe? ("Ah well, it's an astronomically huge coincidence, but never mind!")
Well, what if, one day, you find out that your neighbor's brother works in the Lottery office and is in charge of handing out prizes? Do you
still go on your merry way, without suspecting a thing? Of course not. A much better explanation for your neighbor's 'winning streak' presents itself - that the whole thing is a fix.
The situation with the universe is similar. I suppose it's
remotely possible that the universe is special 'just by chance', in the same way that it's
remotely possible that my neighbor could have won the lottery every week for a year just by being very, very, very lucky. But, as good scientists, we should prefer any alternative that doesn't depend on such ridiculous coincidences. Dr Paley was a good scientist, so maybe he wasn't so far wrong after all?
