Let me try my hand at this again; here's something (admittedly a very heavily edited version of a quite excerpted portion from an extremely rough draft of a work in progress--I hope the ellipses don't make it too choppy) from the book on Islam I'm writing:
Consider what [“the forces of nature”] do to the world. They give it mechanism, organization, structure, intricacy, and what is generally seen as beauty. In other words, all their operationally defining characteristics are the marks of design. Think of a Rubix Cube. It may not be easy to solve the puzzle of precisely how the whole thing works but you can still observe with much ease that it is a designed thing. Its main characteristics are mechanism, organization, structure, intricacy, and (color-based) aesthetics. Would a Rubix Cube have simply happened to come to be somehow if no intelligent being had made it? So it is with the world, as far as we can observe. Do its laws or “forces” not provide it with a great degree of organization and structure by their mere existence? Is the world not intricate? Everyone knows it is, even the infant who has got a single glimpse out of the nursery room window. Are not many things in the way the world works—the hydrological cycle, for example—not mechanism of a sort? Is there not what most would agree is beauty in the world’s rich, lush verdure, gorgeous mountains, dazzling rivers and cataracts, and wondrous colorful caves? There might not be much meaning to any of these characteristics if they were alone (I have found that many people posing teleological theistic arguments make too singular a focus on intricacy) but they all coexist…
Think of the arts—any of them. A painter makes a painting with the use of the three primary colors (blue, yellow, and red), using and combining them in different ways to make his intricate, organized, aesthetic work of design. An author uses the three types of sentences (statements, questions, and commands) to do the same thing when constructing a story. So it is with a composer of music using the three building blocks and shaping tools for the music (rhythm, melody, and lyrics), or an architect with his ceilings, walls and floors. So it is with gravity, the strong nuclear force, and the electro-weak force. They combine with each other in different patterns to produce the world with the same characteristics. Experience teaches us that they could not were there not an Artist behind them…
I hear…all the time from atheists…the appeal to natural selection, an example of the self-negating idea of order from chaos, used as evidence against the notion of the world having been designed. Of what use is this argument when one could at least as easily use it as evidence of the opposite position? To start with the premise that natural selection happens because of impersonal or random things instead of being part of an ultimate purpose, and then use that premise on which to build an argument against the existence of that ultimate purpose, is to form yet one more bit of atheistic circular reasoning…
The agnostic philosopher Bertrand Russell raised objections of his own the better part of a century ago and they are still paralleled or parroted by nontheists everywhere. These objections come from Russell’s famous essay “Why I Am Not a Christian”, in which he spends much less time on the subject of Christianity than the principal subject of God’s existence. He said on the subject of the world’s design by natural law, “Nowadays we explain the law of gravitation in a somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced...You no longer have the sort of Natural Law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion…Where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find that they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance. There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design. The laws of nature are of that sort as regards to a great many of them. They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes the whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was.”
Do you see what Russell’s doing here, dear reader? He’s trying to explain one kind of law (the laws of physics) by appealing to another kind of law (the laws of mathematics). That just brings us back to square one. It’s yet more nontheistic circular reasoning at worst and utter futility at best. The material world itself offers no more actual explanation for the existence of the mathematical laws (or rather the realities they’re describing) than it does for the physical ones. I would respond to Russell with his own words from the same essay:
“It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant, and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, ‘How about the tortoise?’ the Indian said, ‘Suppose we change the subject.’ The argument is really no better than that.”
On the subject of design by law Russell continues, “You are then faced with the question, Why did God issue just those natural laws and no others? If you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted.”…If God exists then by He is a supernatural Being, which means that He is not a part of nature but beyond it. Natural law, by definition, applies to nature. So of course the train of natural law ends before God: how could it not when it’s only natural law? Were God to be subject to any sort of law, it would be a supernatural law, not a natural one, and we have no reason to believe there is any supernatural equivalent to natural law.
But by far the weakest argument Russell makes is: “If you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is merely a flash in the pan; it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions and temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending—something dead, cold, and lifeless.” Will a Rubix Cube last forever? Do paintings not peel, fade, decay? Does the paper on which literature, scripts and poetry are written not peel, fade, decay? Do great works of architecture not eventually fall apart? Do the sounds produced by the instruments of a band not dwindle into silence? Come now! Whether or not something is designed has nothing whatsoever to do with its transience…
In his essay “A Designer Universe?” [Scott] Weinberg admits, “I’d guess that if we were to see the hand of the designer anywhere, it would be in the fundamental principles, the final laws of nature, the book of rules that govern all natural phenomena.” But then he adds: “We don’t know the final laws yet, but as far as we have been able to see, they are utterly impersonal and quite without any special role for life.” Without any special role for life? What, then, do you call the laws making this planet form into the only one of its kind within interminable and uncrossable gulfs, if not altogether anywhere? What do you call the laws which keep this planet spinning in orbit in just the rate we need upon it if we are to remain on it and be graced by cool winds without which our weather would fall apart? Or keeping the earth in an orbit rather than allowing it to drift too close to the sun? What do you call the laws causing living things to grow and thrive? No special role for life indeed! Here’s an exercise, dear reader: walk around outside for just an hour and see how many instances you can spot of physical laws having special roles in our living…
The atheistic scholar Kai Nielsen objects to the concept of design in the world by saying that were the world to be designed via its laws, it would not be like it is today but instead would be more like the growth of vegetation or fungus—another mere assertion. The only way that Nielsen’s argument could work is if the kind of growth in question were a natural mark of design, like the marks I listed in the previous section—but that’s not the case, now is it? Is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel a vegetation-or-fungus-like growth? Is a computer a vegetation-or-fungus-like-growth? Is a Parcheesi board a vegetation-or-fungus-like-growth?
Once more, this is quite an edited excerpt; considering the predictability of atheistic counter-argumentation, though, I'm sure any responses I'll hear to it which aren't covered above will be from the parts I put ellipses over or am already planning for the "atheistic chestnuts refuted" series. So let's hear it.
Some things are best unsaid.
