This argument is no stranger to any philosopher (or biologist) since this archaic idea has been debated for over 100 years. It’s strange that this considerably old argument somehow gets packaged in new ways and that alone seems to keep this argument alive. But I guess you can’t say much for a religion that worships a zombie. This argument should not be taken lightly in terms of its popularity, since a poll taken by Sulloway and Shermer showed that 28.6 percent of applicants who believed in God reported that their reasons for belief were “Arguments based on good design/natural beauty/perfection/complexity of the world or universe.” Thus, I give you the design argument.The most famous of these examples is the watchmaker example by William Paley (1743-1805) introduced in his long-windily titled book, “Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature.” He wasn’t the first to introduce the general underlying argument, but he did create the watchmaker analogy, which seems to prop up here and there in ID debates still.The argument goes like thi: suppose you stumble upon a watch on a deserted island. You would not conclude that the pieces of the watch, the springs, the gears, the glass, the frame, the chain, etc. would simply fall together by themselves. In fact, it would seem immensely unlikely that putting those parts in a box and shaking them would create an object of such design. If additionally the watch were capable of reproducing itself, one would be even more impressed by the design of the watch. Nature is filled with these designed structures and this proves the existence of God, the ultimate intelligent designer.David Hume wrote a devastating critique to the design argument titled “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” in 1779. One of his objections argues that the design argument is committing the fallacy of false analogy. When it comes to watches, paintings, Mount Rushmore, etc. they are specifically designed and things that we know to be designed. On the other hand, biological things, not to mention the universe as a whole, are things that we do not know to be designed and in fact have very different attributes about them compared to watches, houses, paintings, Mount Rushmore, etc. that does not warrant the analogy. Animals, plants and all other biological things have four properties that are not like watches: biological things 1) mutate, 2) reproduce, 3) go through the process of natural selection, and 4) have molecules that have natural affinities towards each other. Watches do not have these properties.Often times, ID advocates will say the universe is finely tuned so if the physical constants were changed even a small amount, there could not possibly be any life. They add that the probability of this happening is extremely small. Therefore there must have been an intelligent designer. Of course, they never explain what the data set is. When it comes to probability, you have to explain very carefully what the population pool is and unfortunately we do not have the many different hypothetical universes where the physical constants have changed. In fact we have very little knowledge of the mechanisms of how universal constants got to be the way they are. In a way, it is a tautology. Of course this universe has these finely tuned constants: if they were otherwise, we wouldn’t exist.Intelligent design advocates always use the “best of nature”, a few examples of the things that look extremely well “engineered”, like the bacterial flagellum. Of course, they don’t ever highlight the many things that look unintelligently designed. For instance, human beings have a tailbone, wisdom teeth and a vermiform appendix. Childbirth is extremely dangerous because a baby’s head would often be larger than the mother’s pelvic opening, and without the modern surgery of caesarean section, this would often lead to the death of the mother. The human eye has a blind spot because the retinal nerve lies on the surface of the photoreceptors, something that could have definitely been “engineered” better. That is only biology. If we get into physics, we are presumably on the only planet, in this vast galaxy that can sustain life (one part in 10^58 to ballpark it). The Earth can sustain life on some of its surface, some of the time; a pale blue dot, floating around a sun that will in approximately 7.5 billion years turn into a red giant and swallow the Earth, which exists in a galaxy that supposedly will collide with the andromeda galaxy in approximately three billion years. I could hardly call this universe designed with us in mind. Hume pointed out that the design argument is self-defeating. In science, we usually take a bottom-up method that argues for simpler origins, and simpler mechanisms that grow in complexity. Yet the design argument takes a top-down approach in explaining the universe. Of course it turns out that you haven’t explained anything if you say God did it. It doesn’t say what the properties of God are, how he did it, why he did it. It explains absolutely nothing and so it begs the question, who designed the designer? There is an underlying supposition that all things must be designed with the design argument and so it just creates more questions than answers (a mark of pseudoscience): who designed the designer, who designed the designer of the designer, who designed the designer of the designer of the designer, ad infinitum.The irony is that Hume published his criticisms 25 years before Paley’s example. Paley did not even give a response to Hume’s argument since Hume was considered an atheistic writer and most Christians did not take his arguments seriously. I assume that many of you will read this and think nothing of it. After all, I’m just an atheist.

Ken Ueda is a senior math, physics and philosophy triple major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].