The design argument is a well known, and very effective argument for the existence of God. On its own, it does not bring us to the Biblical God, but it does establish that there almost certainly must be a designer. This is simply because the world, as we know it, is incredibly well designed. Everything we know is almost perfectly set up, like a well-oiled machine. So brilliant is this creation that you can even focus on a single element of a single creature and show that it is more brilliant than anything we have come up with.
The most common example is the human eye. The human eye is what's called "irreducibly complex". That is, it is so intricately designed that if any of its design elements were missing or damaged, the eye would cease to function.
Evolutionists have a number of responses to this argument, most of which I do not intend to address in this particular article. Instead, based on a conversation I recently overheard, I want to point out how much ground Theistic Evolutionists have conceded to atheistic Evolutionists by granting the possibility of Evolution. The design argument is extremely effective as an argument both for design and against Evolution, but when you grant Evolution, it fails as an argument for design.
One particular response to the design argument is the puddle analogy. Because water takes the shape of its container, a puddle will perfectly fit whatever hole it is formed in. If that puddle could become sentient, it may well ask "why am I so perfectly designed for this pot hole", but it isn't designed that way at all. The puddle takes the shape of the pot hole, not the other way around. In the same way, we may well ask why we appear to live in a world designed for us, but in reality, we take the shape of the world in which we live.
Objectively, this is nonsense. Whereas a puddle is guaranteed to form wherever enough rain falls on irregular ground, life is not guaranteed to form anywhere in the universe, much less survive after overcoming the insurmountable odds of forming in the first place. It's not even a case of just chance: The world in which we live is incredibly hostile to life. This is to the extent that we constantly fail to deliberately create life. So how could nature do it accidentally?
You see, then, that Christians have a major advantage here. Our book makes so much more sense of the origins of life. Which is more likely: That we consistently won a game that is rigged against us, or that the game was very intentionally rigged in our favor? If God created the heavens, the Earth, and all that is in them in 6 days, just as the Bible says He did, the world in which we live makes perfect sense. Life appears designed because it is designed.
But if God did not create the heavens, the Earth, and all that is in them in 6 days, just as the Bible says, but rather, we are the current end result of a long and brutal process of cause and effect, then actually, the puddle analogy actually works.
Earlier, I mentioned a conversation I overheard. Obviously, as it was overheard, and I don't have it in writing, this will be paraphrased from memory. But the atheist said to the Christian "if you go all the way back to the time of the dinosaurs, and that asteroid hadn't hit, the world would look very different". He spoke about how many mass extinctions there have supposedly been throughout history, and argued that our ancestors basically got lucky. If the dinosaurs had survived, they could have stepped on one of the rodents that would eventually become our species. Evolution could have taken a very different turn.
Now, as a Christian, I do not have to grant that there ever was a "time of the dinosaurs". Of course, I believe dinosaurs exist. I do not believe the devil carved and buried a bunch of rocks, or that scientists work for him, as the caricature goes. But because I believe the Bible, I believe dinosaurs are normal animals, created on the same day as Adam. I do not believe, for one second, that they are millions of years old, and I actually believe God showed one to Job.
The latter claim is more open to interpretation. While the description of Behemoth fits a dinosaur more than any other creature currently recognised by Western science, its concrete identity has been lost to time. Less disputable is the fact that Genesis describes a 6 day creation period, during which God created all life forms according to their kinds. Therefore, to prevent mankind from surviving to the modern day, a dinosaur would have had to step on Adam, not a rodent, to which we are by no means related.
But lacking a firm foundation, the Christian instead chose to grant the possibility that Evolution could have gone a different way. He instead appealed to the fact that though Evolution could have gone many ways, the many ways it could have gone did not occur; this is the way it went. Almost like it was planned.
Almost.
Imagine a coin flip. There are many ways a coin can land. Most commonly, a coin is, of course, going to land with either "heads" or "tails" facing up. It could also land on its side, meaning the odds of the coin landing on heads or tails are not exactly 50/50, but for all intents and purposes, they are. With each successive flip, the odds of it landing the same way increase. Your odds of landing on heads once are 50%. Flip a coin twice, your odds of landing on heads twice are 25%. 3 times, 12.5%. According to Omnicalculator, your chances of flipping heads 58 times in a row are functionally 0.
But ultimately, a coin will land, and although your odds of landing on heads 58 times in a row are functionally 0, it's theoretically possible. In fact, the chance of a coin landing on heads "resets" every time the coin is flipped. Gravity doesn't take a tally and think "hold on, that coin has landed on heads 5 times in a row, I should throw a tails in there to even the score a bit". Thus, if we mark ourselves as the 58th heads in a row, there is still a chance. Ours is the reality that manifested, but we could as easily have been a bunch of talking blue reptiles. Every possibility had an equal chance, and thus it's not very impressive when you try to slip God in through the back door.
But not every outcome has the identical chance. If you remove God from the picture, the most likely outcome - more than any other - is extinction. Even that depends on where we start the clock. If we start the clock at the very beginning of time, we don't even need the design argument, we can just point out that nothing leads to nothing. No magical explosions are going to happen, no matter is just going to, as Richard Dawkins would put it, "just jump into existence", it isn't going to happen. So take God out of the picture and start from square one, there is a 0% chance of our reality, or indeed any reality.
But even if we start at some random point in history, the Earth exists, but there's no life on it, there's still no hope of life appearing on it simply because there are too many parameters that would need to be exactly perfect for it to happen. In some cases, these are even mutually exclusive. The Earth is well designed to support life, and life is well designed to thrive on Earth, but the Earth is hostile to the formation of life.
So if you grant Evolution, you're just slipping God in to what is effectively an inevitability; the coin will land. But if you're being more realistic, the coin is landing on heads with a thousand attentive magpies attempting to steal it mid-air. This is no longer a case of incredible chance, but chance nonetheless. Now, it's a matter of intention. With certain forces preventing the chance occurrence from actually occurring, the occurrence happens in a very intentional way regardless. If there is no God, our world has a 0% chance of looking like it does. With God, it has a 100% chance.
And that's not even just a Genesis thing. You don't need to go back to the time when there were as many dinosaurs as elephants. According to Acts 17:24-28, "God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things. And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also His offspring.’"
When Scripture says God rested on the Sabbath day, it doesn't mean he finished creating the Earth and put His feet up to watch TV while we just sat on his workshop table doing our own thing. He is intimately involved with every event, great and small, throughout history. When a nation forms, that's His doing. When a nation falls, that's His doing, too. The world in which we live is exactly as God formed it, because God formed it. Could Adam have eaten from a tree God never planted? Could Moses have met God on a mountain God never raised? Think about this: God grew the very tree upon which He would eventually hang for us! The one good point the atheist made in the conversation I overheard was his clumsy summary of the butterfly effect. We make our plans, but God directs our steps; everything is within His hands.
If we, as Christians, grant Evolution, we lose all of that. We lose the design argument to the puddle analogy. We lose the sovereignty of God to blind chance. When we grant Evolution, we concede that this world is possible without God, then try to just shoehorn Him in anyway. And that's a problem, because not only is an atheist not motivated to do so, but he is ultimately justified in that motivation. As Richard Dawkins puts it in "The Blind Watchmaker", "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."
As Christians, we need to make it very clear that atheists have no ground to stand upon. Rather than Evolution giving them intellectual foundation, it actually shows the opposite. We don't need to go on the defensive, as if Evolution, as a naturalistic explanation of origins, is credible, but we can still fit God in. No, we can point out that our worldview is so strong, Evolution, preposterous though it is, is the absolute best atheists have managed to come up with in its stead! They should be on the defensive, not us.
Christians who go against Evolutionists, without a strong Creationist foundation, are just going to get manhandled. The atheist is going to say "we have a totally naturalistic way to explain our world without God", and they're going to say "you're totally right, but let's just assume, for argument's sake, that God's behind it all anyway...". But the correct answer is "here's why your naturalistic explanation doesn't work". If you don't believe your own Bible, don't expect to be able to bring an Evolutionist to faith either. But if you don't believe Evolution, they're forced to defend a religion that, with a straight face, concludes that life, as we know it, is the end result of a series of extreme coincidences. Personally, I'm just not willing to take that leap of faith.
Post publication note: Although this article is partially based on a live example, I wish to note that the Christian in the conversation does not necessarily believe in Evolution. In his own words, he has never felt the need to take a strong stance on the interpretation of Genesis. Thus, he only granted Evolution in the passive sense. Unfortunately, the result is the same. One must stand firm on the word of God to defeat the lies of the devil.