“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. – Dobzhansky.
One popular argument for God’’s existence is the argument from design.
It suggests that the purposeful complexity of life points towards a designer / creator. The organs of living things clearly have purposes: Wings are for flying, eyes for seeing, mitochondria for producing ATP.
But what is the source of these purposes? The argument from design claims that only an intelligent creator could explain how such purposeful complexity arose; most defenders of the argument take this creator to be God.
Charles Darwin’’s theory of evolution holds that the purposeful complexity we find in nature results from what he called natural selection. This theory has since become the foundation of modern biology.
Today the ‘‘intelligent design’’ movement is trying to revive the argument from design, and make it part of a scientific view of life. However, like the ‘‘scientific creationists’’ who preceded them, proponents of intelligent design spend most of their time repeating bad old arguments against evolution.
In fact, the argument from design has no place in science: It produces no predictions that we can test. Evolutionary biology continues to be a well-tested, successful science. Like all of our knowledge, it remains incomplete. Intelligent Design proponents advocate a quick-fix for this, filling in gaps of knowledge by hanging a ‘‘God did it’’ sign over them. But this would be the death of science, not its completion.
Come re-visit an old topic through the unique perspective of a philosophy scholar.