Wait a second, are we positive that crocoducks don’t exist?

Thanks the tireless efforts of Growing Pains star Kirk Cameron, atheists no longer have a leg to stand on when they show up with their pesky science and rational thought. The crocoduck? Flawless argument! Point: theists.Unfortunately for Cameron, his rather lackluster rebuttal of evolution has already been done. And even more unfortunately, thanks to the wonders of scientific method, lots of people haven’t had any trouble seeing through the holes.

The “Argument from Design”(or the Teleological Argument for God’s Existence) is old hat. William Paley came up with that one years ago. 207 years ago, in fact. Essentially, Paley says that we can prove God’s existence by the fact that we (humans) are too complex to have happened “accidentally”. If we see a watch in the field, we know it was designed by someone because it is too complex to have just formed by coincidence. Humans, in turn are so complex that we were obviously designed, ergo, there must be a designer, ergo, God is the designer, ergo, God exists. Ta da!

There are a lot of problems with this argument, and well written refutations can be found in excess on the internet… And in most first-year philosophy classes.

The key problems are as follows:

Even if we concede that complex objects must have more complex designers (watches must have been created by humans, humans must have been created by something more complex, etc.) this line of thought simply turns into an argumentum ad infinitum. For, if all complex things need a creator, who created God? There is no logic in the argument that validates exempting God from the argument from design. Argumenta ad inifinita don’t prove anything, they’re just rhetorical tricks.
The ultimate designer is simply assumed to be God. The classic refutation of the argument from design is Richard Dawkins’ book The Blind Watchmaker. There is no logic in Paley’s (or Kirk Cameron’s) argument that would lead us to believe that if a designer exists, it must be a sentient, personal God. Dawkins successfully argues that the examples of perfect and specific design commonly used for the argument from design, (e.g. the human eye, or bat echo-location faculties), were, in fact, designed. A strange stance for an internationally reviled atheist. However, he contends that the forces of natural selection and evolution were the designers. These forces, like gravity or friction, are not agents: they just are. Gravity doesn’t have an intention when it sucks you down to earth, nor does natural selection have an intention when it weeds out undesirable genes. Highly complex and specialized objects cannot not exist, for if they didn’t fulfill a desirable function perfectly, natural selection would have prevented the genes from passing on.
And finally, the argument from design, even without the first two problems, could only possibly prove the existence of a God, not the God. However, the most vocal theists that have glommed onto this idea are Christians. More specifically, fundamentalist Christians. The argument doesn’t go, “… ergo, God created humans, the Christian God exists.” Once again, no logic in any version of the argument from design proves the existence of the Christian god. The argument from design could perhaps be used to make a case that humans were designed by aliens, who were designed by talking dogs, who were designed by… Wait, I see where this is going.