Why 'Life Had To Have Been Designed' Is a Terrible Justification for God's Existence
By Greta Christina, AlterNet
March 13, 2010
"Just look around you. Look at life, and the universe, and everything. Doesn't it seem like it had to have been designed?"
A lot of arguments for religion are very bad indeed. A lot of arguments for religion aren't even arguments: they're deflections, excuses for why the believer isn't making an argument, bigoted insults, expressions of wishful thinking, complaints that atheists are mean bad people to even ask for an argument, heartfelt wishes that atheists would just shut up.
But some believers do take the question "Why do you believe in God?" seriously. Some believers don't want to believe just out of blind faith or wishful thinking; they care about whether the things they believe are true, and they think the question "What evidence do you have to support this belief?" is a valid one. They think they have good answers for it. They think they have positive evidence for their spiritual beliefs, and they're happy to explain that evidence and defend it.
The argument from design -- that life had to have been designed, because it just looks so much like it was designed -- leads the list of these answers. According to Michael Shermer's How We Believe, the argument from design is the single most common reason religious believers give for why they believe.
Since these people are taking atheists' questions about their religion seriously, I want to return the favor, and take their religious answer seriously.
And I want to talk about why this is really, really not a good answer. At all. Even a little bit.
Have You Heard of This Darwin Fellow?
The argument for design argues that the evidence for God lies in the seemingly inexplicable complexity and functionality and balance of life: of individual life forms, of specific biological organs and systems, of the ecosystem itself.
"Look at the eye!" the argument goes. "Look at an ant colony! Look at a bat's sonar! Look at symbiotic relationships between species! Look at the human brain! They work so well! They do such astonishing things! Are you trying to tell me that these things just...happened? How can you possibly explain all that without a designer?"
Not to be snarky, but: Have you heard of this Darwin fellow?
I'm assuming that I'm not talking to creationists here. Creationists definitely do not count as people who care about reason and evidence and whether what they believe is consistent with reality. I'm assuming that I'm talking here to reasonably educated people, people who accept the basic reality of the theory of evolution...but who still think that God had to have been involved in it somehow. I'm assuming that I'm talking to people who understand that the theory of evolution is supported by a massive body of evidence from every relevant field of science (and from some that you might not think of as relevant)...but who still think that evolution, while a jolly clever idea, is still not quite sufficient to explain the complexity and diversity and exquisite high functioning of biological life.
To those people, I say: You really need to study evolution a little more carefully.
The theory of evolution is completely sufficient to explain the complexity and diversity and exquisite high functioning of biological life. That's exactly what it does. The whole point of evolutionary theory is that it explains exactly how life came to be the complex and amazingly balanced web of interconnections that it is, with species beautifully adapted to their environments -- not through design, but through natural selection and descent with modification. It explains it beautifully, and elegantly, and with no need for any supernatural designer to explain anything.
Descent with modification; the survival and reproduction of life forms that are best able to survive and reproduce; great heaping gobs of time. That's all it takes. (Here's a good primer on what evolution is and how it works; for a more detailed explanation, you can check out Why Evolution Is True by Jerry A. Coyne, or The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins, or Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters by Donald R. Prothero, or... oh, you get the idea.) The more familiar you become with evolution, the more you understand that it is more than sufficient to explain what seems at first glance to be design in biological life.
And in fact, biological life is an excellent argument against God or a designer.
Why? Because so much of this supposed "design" of life is so ridiculously piss-poor.
The Three Stooges School of Design
Yes, there are many aspects of biological life that astonish with their elegance and function. But there are many other aspects of biological life that astonish with their clumsiness, half-assedness, inefficiency, "fixed that for you" jury-rigs, pointless superfluities, glaring omissions, laughable failures and appalling, mind-numbing brutality. (Here's a very entertaining short list.) I mean...sinuses? Blind spots? External testicles? Backs and knees and feet shoddily warped into service for bipedal animals? (She said bitterly, getting up to do her physical therapy on her bad knee.) Human birth canals barely wide enough to let the baby's skull pass...and human babies born essentially premature because if they stayed in utero any longer they'd kill their mothers coming out? (Which sometimes they do anyway.) A vagus nerve that travels from the neck down through the chest only to land back up in the neck...traveling 10 to 15 feet in the case of giraffes? Digger wasps laying their eggs in the living bodies of caterpillars...and stinging said caterpillars to paralyze but not kill them, so the caterpillars die a slow death and can nourish the wasps' larvae with their living bodies? The process of evolution itself...which has brutal, painful, violent death woven into its every fiber?
You're really saying that all of this was designed, on purpose, by an all-powerful God who loves us?
Evolution looks at all this epic fail, and explains it neatly and thoroughly. In the theory of evolution, living things don't have to be perfectly or elegantly "designed" to flourish. All that matters is that they be functional enough to survive and reproduce, and to do so more effectively than their competitors. In fact, in the theory of evolution, not only is there no expectation that the "designs" be perfect or elegant -- there is every expectation that they wouldn't be, since every new generation has to be a minor adaptation on the previous one, and there's no way to wipe the slate clean and start over. And the comfort or happiness of living things matters not in the slightest bit to the process of evolution...unless it somehow enhances the ability of that living thing to survive and reproduce.
The argument from design looks at all this epic fail, and answers, "Ummm... mysterious ways?"
Before and After Science
If we didn't know about evolution, the argument from design might have some validity. Even Richard Dawkins, hard-assed atheist that he is, has acknowledged that atheism, while still logically tenable before Darwin, became a lot more intellectually fulfilling afterward.
But once you know about evolution -- not just about Darwin, but about the rich and thorough, broad-ranging and finely detailed understanding of life that evolution has blossomed into in the 150 years since On The Origin of Species -- the argument from design collapses like a house of cards in a hurricane.
The theory of evolution provides a powerful, beautiful, consistent explanation for the appearance of design in biological life, one that can not only explain the past but predict the future. And it's supported by an overwhelming body of evidence from every relevant field of science, from paleontology to microbiology to epidemiology to anatomy to genetics to geology to physics to...you get the point. The argument from design explains nothing that evolution can't explain better. It has massive, gaping holes. It has no predictive power whatsoever. And it has not a single scrap of positive evidence supporting it: not one piece of evidence suggesting the intervention of a designer at any point in the process. All it has to support it is the human brain's tendency to see intention and design even where none exist, leading to the vague feeling on the part of believers that life had to have been designed because...well...because it just looks that way.
And if "it just looks that way" is the only argument you can make for why life was designed, you're going to have to find a better argument.
"If there's no God, then where did all this come from?"
I've written a fair amount about some of the more painfully bad arguments for religion and against atheism. I've written about the argument that religion is just a story, not meant to be taken literally...a story that still somehow makes people get very bent out of shape when atheists point out that it isn't true.
I've written about an assortment of arguments from wishful thinking, from the insulting (and irrelevant) argument that atheists don't stay atheists when faced with death, to the baffling (and irrelevant) argument that religion gives us a needed feeling of mystery.
I've written about the arguments that essentially tell atheists to just shut up. And I've written about the ways that, when asked what evidence they have for their religious beliefs, many believers simply deflect the question. Instead of saying, "This is why I believe what I do," they offer a list of excuses for why they don't have to show us any stinking evidence.
But that's not true for all believers. When asked why they believe what they do, some believers take the question seriously and sincerely -- and they try to answer it.
I want to return the favor. I want to look at some of these more earnest answers to the question, "Why do you believe in God?" I want to take them seriously, and assume the people presenting them mean them sincerely. And I want to point out, in as much detail as I can, that they still don't hold water. They're less bad than a lot of arguments for God -- at least these people are trying to actually answer the question about the evidence for God, instead of treating the question as stupid or meaningless or patently offensive. But in my years as an atheist writer, not one of them has made me stop and think, "Hm, that's a poser."
Today's argument: But All of This Had to Come From Somewhere! Otherwise known as the "First Cause" argument. "Things don't just come out of nowhere," the argument goes. "Everything that exists has a cause. Therefore, the entirety of physical existence itself had to have had a cause. Therefore, God exists."
Yeah. See, there are some big problems with that argument.
For starters: If everything has to have a cause...then what caused God?
And if God can somehow have always existed or come into being out of nothing...then why can't that be true of the universe?
I agree that the question "Where did the universe come from?" is baffling and intriguing. To say that physical existence either has been there forever or somehow popped into being from non-being...it does seem to call into question our basic understanding of cause and effect. It's a legitimately tough question.
But the God hypothesis doesn't answer this question. The God hypothesis simply begs the question. It simply moves the question back a notch. It gives an answer to the question of where the universe came from ("God"), but then we have to ask the exact same set of questions about God. "Where did he come from... and if he just always existed, how is that possible?" "Where did the universe come from" is a legitimately tough question... but "God” is a terrible answer. No, it's worse than that. It's no answer at all.
What's more, the "God did it" answer cuts off further inquiry into the question.
Many astronomers and astrophysicists think the question "Where did the universe come from?" might someday be answerable. In fact, many of them strongly suspect the answer may indeed call into question our basic understanding of cause and effect...in much the same way Einstein's theories called into question our basic understanding of matter and energy and space, and Galileo's theories called into question our basic understanding of the structure of the universe. (For instance: One idea that's being tossed around is that the beginning of the universe was the beginning, not only of matter and energy, but of space-time itself...and that it therefore makes no sense to talk about what happened "before" time itself began.) They think "Where did physical existence come from?" may be an answerable question... and they're busily researching possible answers.
The "God did it" answer doesn't do this. It doesn't pose possible ways of investigating whether the God hypothesis might be the right answer to this question. It basically just says, "Everything has to have a cause... except God, who by definition can do anything." It's a non-answer. It insists that every question have a valid, comprehensible, cause-and-effect answer...except questions about God. It's like a parent answering every question with, "Because I say so." It's what atheists call the "God of the gaps": it takes any question about the physical world that's currently unanswered by science, and says, "Oh, we don't know the answer to that, therefore it must be God." It's like taking every empty space in the coloring book, and reflexively filling it in with a blue crayon.
There have been countless times throughout history when we thought that Phenomenon (X) had a supernatural cause. Must have had a supernatural cause. Could not possibly have been caused by anything other than the supernatural. Why the sun rises and sets; why people get sick; what causes the weather and the seasons; why children look like their parents; how the complex variety of life came into being; etc., etc., etc. We didn't have a clue what caused it, or even the shadow of a clue...so we assumed it was God. (Or spirits, or demons, or whatever.)
And every single time that we eventually got a conclusive answer to the cause of Phenomenon (X), that answer has been entirely natural.
So why on earth would we assume that any currently unanswered question about physical existence -- even a massive and baffling question like how it all came to exist in the first place -- would eventually turn out to be caused by God? It's never been the right answer before. Not even once. Why would we assume it's the right answer this time?
Finally, and most importantly:
There is not a single scrap of evidence that the God hypothesis is true.
There is not a single scrap of evidence suggesting that the universe had a supernatural cause, or that there are any supernatural beings or forces affecting it in any way.
As my wife Ingrid likes to point out: The universe does not look like one in which an independent outside agent is intervening. The universe does not look like one in which miracles happen and physical laws are violated by someone who's above these laws. The universe looks remarkably like a system of physical cause and effect: an unimaginably massive, intensely complex system of physical cause and effect, but physical cause and effect nonetheless. And every single attempt to demonstrate the existence of any supernatural force or entity affecting the universe -- at least, every attempt using careful, rigorous, double-blinded, placebo-controlled, etc. scientific methods -- has fallen flat on its face.
When it comes to the question of how the universe came into being, the only reason for thinking that "God" is the answer to this question is the assumption that "God" has to be the answer to this question -- the assumption that no other answer to this question is possible. And again, throughout history, whenever this assumption has been made in the past, it's been shown to be bullpucky. Countless phenomena once considered not only to have a supernatural cause, but to have no possible cause other than a supernatural one, have been shown to be entirely explainable by natural forces.
We have no reason to think the universe's existence is any different.
If you have evidence showing that the universe was caused by a supernatural creator, I'd be interested in hearing it. But if your only reason for believing in a God who created the universe is, "There had to be a creator because... well, because there just has to be, because everything has to have been caused by something, because I can't imagine a universe without something making it happen"... you're going to have to find a better argument.
By Greta Christina, AlterNet
March 13, 2010
"Just look around you. Look at life, and the universe, and everything. Doesn't it seem like it had to have been designed?"
A lot of arguments for religion are very bad indeed. A lot of arguments for religion aren't even arguments: they're deflections, excuses for why the believer isn't making an argument, bigoted insults, expressions of wishful thinking, complaints that atheists are mean bad people to even ask for an argument, heartfelt wishes that atheists would just shut up.
But some believers do take the question "Why do you believe in God?" seriously. Some believers don't want to believe just out of blind faith or wishful thinking; they care about whether the things they believe are true, and they think the question "What evidence do you have to support this belief?" is a valid one. They think they have good answers for it. They think they have positive evidence for their spiritual beliefs, and they're happy to explain that evidence and defend it.
The argument from design -- that life had to have been designed, because it just looks so much like it was designed -- leads the list of these answers. According to Michael Shermer's How We Believe, the argument from design is the single most common reason religious believers give for why they believe.
Since these people are taking atheists' questions about their religion seriously, I want to return the favor, and take their religious answer seriously.
And I want to talk about why this is really, really not a good answer. At all. Even a little bit.
Have You Heard of This Darwin Fellow?
The argument for design argues that the evidence for God lies in the seemingly inexplicable complexity and functionality and balance of life: of individual life forms, of specific biological organs and systems, of the ecosystem itself.
"Look at the eye!" the argument goes. "Look at an ant colony! Look at a bat's sonar! Look at symbiotic relationships between species! Look at the human brain! They work so well! They do such astonishing things! Are you trying to tell me that these things just...happened? How can you possibly explain all that without a designer?"
Not to be snarky, but: Have you heard of this Darwin fellow?
I'm assuming that I'm not talking to creationists here. Creationists definitely do not count as people who care about reason and evidence and whether what they believe is consistent with reality. I'm assuming that I'm talking here to reasonably educated people, people who accept the basic reality of the theory of evolution...but who still think that God had to have been involved in it somehow. I'm assuming that I'm talking to people who understand that the theory of evolution is supported by a massive body of evidence from every relevant field of science (and from some that you might not think of as relevant)...but who still think that evolution, while a jolly clever idea, is still not quite sufficient to explain the complexity and diversity and exquisite high functioning of biological life.
To those people, I say: You really need to study evolution a little more carefully.
The theory of evolution is completely sufficient to explain the complexity and diversity and exquisite high functioning of biological life. That's exactly what it does. The whole point of evolutionary theory is that it explains exactly how life came to be the complex and amazingly balanced web of interconnections that it is, with species beautifully adapted to their environments -- not through design, but through natural selection and descent with modification. It explains it beautifully, and elegantly, and with no need for any supernatural designer to explain anything.
Descent with modification; the survival and reproduction of life forms that are best able to survive and reproduce; great heaping gobs of time. That's all it takes. (Here's a good primer on what evolution is and how it works; for a more detailed explanation, you can check out Why Evolution Is True by Jerry A. Coyne, or The Greatest Show On Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins, or Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters by Donald R. Prothero, or... oh, you get the idea.) The more familiar you become with evolution, the more you understand that it is more than sufficient to explain what seems at first glance to be design in biological life.
And in fact, biological life is an excellent argument against God or a designer.
Why? Because so much of this supposed "design" of life is so ridiculously piss-poor.
The Three Stooges School of Design
Yes, there are many aspects of biological life that astonish with their elegance and function. But there are many other aspects of biological life that astonish with their clumsiness, half-assedness, inefficiency, "fixed that for you" jury-rigs, pointless superfluities, glaring omissions, laughable failures and appalling, mind-numbing brutality. (Here's a very entertaining short list.) I mean...sinuses? Blind spots? External testicles? Backs and knees and feet shoddily warped into service for bipedal animals? (She said bitterly, getting up to do her physical therapy on her bad knee.) Human birth canals barely wide enough to let the baby's skull pass...and human babies born essentially premature because if they stayed in utero any longer they'd kill their mothers coming out? (Which sometimes they do anyway.) A vagus nerve that travels from the neck down through the chest only to land back up in the neck...traveling 10 to 15 feet in the case of giraffes? Digger wasps laying their eggs in the living bodies of caterpillars...and stinging said caterpillars to paralyze but not kill them, so the caterpillars die a slow death and can nourish the wasps' larvae with their living bodies? The process of evolution itself...which has brutal, painful, violent death woven into its every fiber?
You're really saying that all of this was designed, on purpose, by an all-powerful God who loves us?
Evolution looks at all this epic fail, and explains it neatly and thoroughly. In the theory of evolution, living things don't have to be perfectly or elegantly "designed" to flourish. All that matters is that they be functional enough to survive and reproduce, and to do so more effectively than their competitors. In fact, in the theory of evolution, not only is there no expectation that the "designs" be perfect or elegant -- there is every expectation that they wouldn't be, since every new generation has to be a minor adaptation on the previous one, and there's no way to wipe the slate clean and start over. And the comfort or happiness of living things matters not in the slightest bit to the process of evolution...unless it somehow enhances the ability of that living thing to survive and reproduce.
The argument from design looks at all this epic fail, and answers, "Ummm... mysterious ways?"
Before and After Science
If we didn't know about evolution, the argument from design might have some validity. Even Richard Dawkins, hard-assed atheist that he is, has acknowledged that atheism, while still logically tenable before Darwin, became a lot more intellectually fulfilling afterward.
But once you know about evolution -- not just about Darwin, but about the rich and thorough, broad-ranging and finely detailed understanding of life that evolution has blossomed into in the 150 years since On The Origin of Species -- the argument from design collapses like a house of cards in a hurricane.
The theory of evolution provides a powerful, beautiful, consistent explanation for the appearance of design in biological life, one that can not only explain the past but predict the future. And it's supported by an overwhelming body of evidence from every relevant field of science, from paleontology to microbiology to epidemiology to anatomy to genetics to geology to physics to...you get the point. The argument from design explains nothing that evolution can't explain better. It has massive, gaping holes. It has no predictive power whatsoever. And it has not a single scrap of positive evidence supporting it: not one piece of evidence suggesting the intervention of a designer at any point in the process. All it has to support it is the human brain's tendency to see intention and design even where none exist, leading to the vague feeling on the part of believers that life had to have been designed because...well...because it just looks that way.
And if "it just looks that way" is the only argument you can make for why life was designed, you're going to have to find a better argument.
"If there's no God, then where did all this come from?"
I've written a fair amount about some of the more painfully bad arguments for religion and against atheism. I've written about the argument that religion is just a story, not meant to be taken literally...a story that still somehow makes people get very bent out of shape when atheists point out that it isn't true.
I've written about an assortment of arguments from wishful thinking, from the insulting (and irrelevant) argument that atheists don't stay atheists when faced with death, to the baffling (and irrelevant) argument that religion gives us a needed feeling of mystery.
I've written about the arguments that essentially tell atheists to just shut up. And I've written about the ways that, when asked what evidence they have for their religious beliefs, many believers simply deflect the question. Instead of saying, "This is why I believe what I do," they offer a list of excuses for why they don't have to show us any stinking evidence.
But that's not true for all believers. When asked why they believe what they do, some believers take the question seriously and sincerely -- and they try to answer it.
I want to return the favor. I want to look at some of these more earnest answers to the question, "Why do you believe in God?" I want to take them seriously, and assume the people presenting them mean them sincerely. And I want to point out, in as much detail as I can, that they still don't hold water. They're less bad than a lot of arguments for God -- at least these people are trying to actually answer the question about the evidence for God, instead of treating the question as stupid or meaningless or patently offensive. But in my years as an atheist writer, not one of them has made me stop and think, "Hm, that's a poser."
Today's argument: But All of This Had to Come From Somewhere! Otherwise known as the "First Cause" argument. "Things don't just come out of nowhere," the argument goes. "Everything that exists has a cause. Therefore, the entirety of physical existence itself had to have had a cause. Therefore, God exists."
Yeah. See, there are some big problems with that argument.
For starters: If everything has to have a cause...then what caused God?
And if God can somehow have always existed or come into being out of nothing...then why can't that be true of the universe?
I agree that the question "Where did the universe come from?" is baffling and intriguing. To say that physical existence either has been there forever or somehow popped into being from non-being...it does seem to call into question our basic understanding of cause and effect. It's a legitimately tough question.
But the God hypothesis doesn't answer this question. The God hypothesis simply begs the question. It simply moves the question back a notch. It gives an answer to the question of where the universe came from ("God"), but then we have to ask the exact same set of questions about God. "Where did he come from... and if he just always existed, how is that possible?" "Where did the universe come from" is a legitimately tough question... but "God” is a terrible answer. No, it's worse than that. It's no answer at all.
What's more, the "God did it" answer cuts off further inquiry into the question.
Many astronomers and astrophysicists think the question "Where did the universe come from?" might someday be answerable. In fact, many of them strongly suspect the answer may indeed call into question our basic understanding of cause and effect...in much the same way Einstein's theories called into question our basic understanding of matter and energy and space, and Galileo's theories called into question our basic understanding of the structure of the universe. (For instance: One idea that's being tossed around is that the beginning of the universe was the beginning, not only of matter and energy, but of space-time itself...and that it therefore makes no sense to talk about what happened "before" time itself began.) They think "Where did physical existence come from?" may be an answerable question... and they're busily researching possible answers.
The "God did it" answer doesn't do this. It doesn't pose possible ways of investigating whether the God hypothesis might be the right answer to this question. It basically just says, "Everything has to have a cause... except God, who by definition can do anything." It's a non-answer. It insists that every question have a valid, comprehensible, cause-and-effect answer...except questions about God. It's like a parent answering every question with, "Because I say so." It's what atheists call the "God of the gaps": it takes any question about the physical world that's currently unanswered by science, and says, "Oh, we don't know the answer to that, therefore it must be God." It's like taking every empty space in the coloring book, and reflexively filling it in with a blue crayon.
There have been countless times throughout history when we thought that Phenomenon (X) had a supernatural cause. Must have had a supernatural cause. Could not possibly have been caused by anything other than the supernatural. Why the sun rises and sets; why people get sick; what causes the weather and the seasons; why children look like their parents; how the complex variety of life came into being; etc., etc., etc. We didn't have a clue what caused it, or even the shadow of a clue...so we assumed it was God. (Or spirits, or demons, or whatever.)
And every single time that we eventually got a conclusive answer to the cause of Phenomenon (X), that answer has been entirely natural.
So why on earth would we assume that any currently unanswered question about physical existence -- even a massive and baffling question like how it all came to exist in the first place -- would eventually turn out to be caused by God? It's never been the right answer before. Not even once. Why would we assume it's the right answer this time?
Finally, and most importantly:
There is not a single scrap of evidence that the God hypothesis is true.
There is not a single scrap of evidence suggesting that the universe had a supernatural cause, or that there are any supernatural beings or forces affecting it in any way.
As my wife Ingrid likes to point out: The universe does not look like one in which an independent outside agent is intervening. The universe does not look like one in which miracles happen and physical laws are violated by someone who's above these laws. The universe looks remarkably like a system of physical cause and effect: an unimaginably massive, intensely complex system of physical cause and effect, but physical cause and effect nonetheless. And every single attempt to demonstrate the existence of any supernatural force or entity affecting the universe -- at least, every attempt using careful, rigorous, double-blinded, placebo-controlled, etc. scientific methods -- has fallen flat on its face.
When it comes to the question of how the universe came into being, the only reason for thinking that "God" is the answer to this question is the assumption that "God" has to be the answer to this question -- the assumption that no other answer to this question is possible. And again, throughout history, whenever this assumption has been made in the past, it's been shown to be bullpucky. Countless phenomena once considered not only to have a supernatural cause, but to have no possible cause other than a supernatural one, have been shown to be entirely explainable by natural forces.
We have no reason to think the universe's existence is any different.
If you have evidence showing that the universe was caused by a supernatural creator, I'd be interested in hearing it. But if your only reason for believing in a God who created the universe is, "There had to be a creator because... well, because there just has to be, because everything has to have been caused by something, because I can't imagine a universe without something making it happen"... you're going to have to find a better argument.
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