Evolution explains design without a designer.

Question

Paley's watch was the strongest pre-Darwinian argument. Darwin disposed of it. Random mutation plus non-random selection produces the appearance of design from below. We don't need a designer for the eye, the hand, or the human.

The Scientist · Answer

Evolution explains the watch. It does not explain the watchmaker's tools.

Even granting the full Darwinian story for biological forms, you have not addressed: why the laws of physics permit chemistry, why the constants permit stable matter, why the universe began at all, why mathematics describes it, why minds exist that can do the science.

The teleological argument has long since moved upstream of biology. The question is not "who designed the eye" but "who set the stage on which design-by-selection can happen."

And the modern fine-tuning literature — Penrose, Rees, Carter — is not theological propaganda. It is mainstream cosmology asking the same question Aquinas asked, with bigger numbers.

Francis of Assisi · Answer

I have spoken to Brother Wolf and Sister Moon.

You give me a mechanism and call it an explanation. But the mechanism is itself a wonder. Selection requires reproduction; reproduction requires a self that can fail; a self that can fail is already a marvel.

Praised be my Lord with all his creatures, especially Sir Brother Sun, who is the day, through whom Thou givest us light. Whether by six days or six billion years, the Canticle is unchanged.

Evolution does not subtract praise. It tells us by how many means God brings the daisy out of the dust.

Thomas Aquinas · Answer

The fifth way does not depend on biological design.

I argued from the regularity of natural agents — the way an arrow flies to the mark a non-thinking thing must be directed by a mind. Selection is a regularity. The regularity itself is what wants explaining.

Secondary causes are real and operate by their own natures. God works through them as the carpenter works through the saw. To say the saw cuts is true; to say the carpenter does not is false.

That a process produces order is not less remarkable than that an artisan does. It is more remarkable, because the process must be designed first.

G.K. Chesterton · Answer

Evolution is a description, not an explanation.

If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly.

But if it means that there is no such thing as an ape or a man — only an endless smudge of becoming — it is a much more daring dogma than any of the Creeds.

I have noticed that men who say evolution makes God unnecessary tend to mean evolution makes morality unnecessary. They have left the door open behind them.

Evolution explains design without a designer.

The objection, in full

I have spoken to Brother Wolf and Sister Moon.

Related objections