Reviving The Argument From Biological Design

I solemnly swear I will not deny any well-established biological facts like evolution

I think you can make a pretty good argument for God from the presence of biological design. But not in the way that people like Behe make it, whereby they claim that facts about biology like the evolution of the flagellum are inexplicable on the hypothesis that God doesn’t exist. Instead, I claim that the fact that there is a mechanism like evolution supports the existence of God.

Imagine that we discovered, prior to the universe, that there were a series of buttons that when pressed produced a finely-tuned universe. Would that defuse the fine-tuning argument? No, obviously not! The probability of those buttons existing is far, far higher if there’s a perfect being than if there is not. The phenomenon gets pushed back a level—the surprising thing is no longer “the constants of physics are finely-tuned” but instead “the buttons are such as to produce finely-tuned constants of physics.”

Prior to the discovery of Darwin’s theory of evolution, it seems there was a powerful argument for God from the presence of biological design. The presence of a rich array of complex conscious creatures of a kind that seemingly couldn’t have arisen by chance majorly favors theism.

Fortunately, Darwin swooped in and gave a powerful explanation of the rich array of life. From simple systems that reproduce, it isn’t hard to get, via natural selection, the rich array of life that we observed. This is widely seen to have destroyed the argument from biological design, with only a few cranks thinking that evolution is insufficient.

But how is this any different from the button case? Sure we have a mechanism by which complex life is created. But so do we in the case where there are universe-creating buttons. Even if you have a mechanism of how something might have occurred, sans God, if the probability of the mechanism arising is low, then the probability of life arising is similarly low.

Similarly, in this case, it’s true that we now have a mechanism of how complex conscious life would arise. But it can still be inexplicable that a mechanism like that arose. In the case of evolution, it’s weird that there happened to be self-replicating cells that were, given environmental conditions, liable to blossom into a rich array of kinds of life.

Now, I don’t think this is anywhere near as forceful as the original biological design argument. The prior probability of the initial conditions needed for evolution is much higher than the prior probability of the rich array of life we have arising wholly by chance. Just as it would defuse the find-tuning argument to a significant degree if you could show that a huge number of initial conditions would produce a finely-tuned universe, so too does showing that the initial constraints needed for life like us is laxer than was previously thought weaken the argument from biological design. But it doesn’t totally eliminate the force of the argument.

To be clear, I don’t think this is anything like the best argument for theism and its evidential force is obviously swamped by fine-tuning (for the best arguments, see here). But it has a bit of force!