Atheists often point to science—especially evolution—as a way to explain the world without needing God. One famous voice to make this case is Christopher Hitchens. In his 2009 debate with William Lane Craig, Hitchens opined,
It’s not very much contested any more that we are not designed as creatures, but that we evolved by a rather laborious combination of random mutation and natural selection into the species that we are today.
Later in the debate, Hitchens would reaffirm, “I don’t believe that we are here as the result of a design.” Both statements were ordered in the debate to block any appeal to design as evidence for a Creative Designer.
But why? Because evolution, as Hitchens sees it, is driven by “random mutation”—that’s to say chance. If things happen by chance, so Hitchens’s argument implies, then they’re not designed—and if there’s no design, then why assume there’s a designer, like God?
But not so fast. Philosophers have pushed back on this idea by challenging the assumption that chance and design are somehow at odds.
In fact, going all the way back to Aristotle, many philosophers have pointed out that chance isn’t a thing that does stuff. It’s not an existing thing out there bringing about effects all on its own. Instead, chance happens when there’s some effect that results from different causes coming together in a way that none of those causes specifically intended.
Let me give you a down-to-earth example.
Let’s say I head to the grocery store to grab some milk so my kids can eat cereal in the morning. At the same time, Joe Heschmeyer goes to the same store to pick up bread for his kids’ toast. We run into each other, and—of course—we start nerding out about philosophy in the cereal aisle.
Now, that meeting was by chance. But notice: I had a goal, Joe had a goal, and both of us were acting intentionally. The “chance” meeting happened because of our purposeful or designed actions. In other words, it was a byproduct of two things that were already aimed at something—what you might call “design.”
Here’s another classic example. Imagine someone digging a grave and stumbling upon buried treasure. The person digging had one goal—to make a hole. The person who buried the treasure had another—to hide something valuable. The discovery wasn’t part of either person’s plan, but it came about as a result of two separate, directed actions crossing paths.
The key point here is that chance doesn’t stand on its own. It’s not something basic or fundamental. It makes sense only within a world where things are already moving toward goals—that is, where there’s already design or order at play.
And guess what! The same idea applies to evolution.
Sure, genetic mutations might be random. But randomness doesn’t happen in a vacuum. For mutations to occur, there must be living organisms already striving to survive and reproduce. Mutations don’t just pop out of nowhere—they depend on a whole framework of life, biology, and physical laws that are already in motion with design.
Also, mutations follow tendencies. A dinosaur might evolve into a bird under the right conditions, but it’s not going to turn into a daisy. There’s a certain directionality built into the process.
And when one thing acts on another—like a chemical or a gene—it produces a specific kind of result. Philosophers would say that’s because each thing has built-in tendencies toward certain effects. An acorn, for instance, doesn’t randomly sprout into just anything—it grows into an oak tree, not a banana tree. That kind of directed behavior is what we mean by “order” or “design.”
The bottom line is this: chance doesn’t cancel out design. In fact, you can’t even have chance without design already in place.
If that’s true, and design points to a supreme designer (as theists argue), then the random aspects of evolution don’t actually eliminate the need for God. They just happen within a system that’s already designed.
So the first objection—that evolution removes the need for an intelligent Creator—doesn’t hold up.
Let’s look at a second objection. Some people argue that if new creatures emerge through chance, then there must be parts of the universe that are outside of God’s control—things that weren’t part of the plan.
Philosophers who believe in God usually respond by going back to what we already said: chance happens when causes come together to bring about some effect in a way that neither cause intended directly. But in the traditional theistic view, those causes themselves exist and operate because of God. Their activity—the very reason they act at all—traces back to God’s divine power.
St. Thomas Aquinas puts it this way in his Summa Contra Gentiles:
All power of any agent whatsoever is from God, as from the first principle of all perfection. Therefore since all operation is consequent to some power, it follows that God is the cause of every operation.
In other words, God isn’t in competition with the causes he created. It’s not an either/or situation. Created causes are real and meaningful because of the divine cause.
This understanding of divine causality led Aquinas to explain two things that make up what we generally call God’s “providence,” which is helpful for us here (see Summa Theologiae I:22:3). First, there’s the plan—the order of all things foreordained toward an end. God holds this in his mind, right down to the smallest detail. This is technically called “providence.” Second, there’s the execution of that plan—how things actually play out, which often happens through a chain of created things causing other things. This part, Aquinas calls “government.”
So if God is the ultimate source of every cause and effect, then he will also know—and include in his plan—the convergences of causes that we call “chance.” Even in evolution, what we see as randomness still fits within both parts of God’s providential plan: his providence and governance.
This leads to one more helpful point: what chance is in relation to causes that converge in their actions is not chance in relation to God.
Aquinas talks about this, too. He says,
It happens sometimes that something is lucky or chance-like, as compared to inferior causes, which, if compared to some higher cause is directly intended (ST I:116:1).
Let’s go back to that buried treasure example. Suppose the person digging the grave is a poor laborer hired by a wealthy man. And suppose the wealthy man buried the treasure himself years ago, then hired the laborer on purpose, hoping he’d find it—but without telling him.
From the laborer’s point of view, finding the treasure was a total fluke. But from the employer’s point of view, it was fully intentional. The chance occurrence, therefore, ultimately reduces to the directing activity of the employer—the intelligent cause.
Same goes for the world. We might experience some event as a lucky break or a random occurrence, but from God’s vantage point—the ultimate perspective—it was part of the plan all along.
Even things like genetic mutations that help species evolve—like dinosaurs developing feathers, or fish adapting to breathe air—might be beyond what the causes themselves “expect” to do, but they’re not beyond what God intends through them, since he’s their ultimate directing cause in the first place.
So the idea that something “escaped” God’s plan because it happened by chance doesn’t really work, either.
In the end, there’s no need for a believer to feel threatened by evolution. The presence of chance in the process doesn’t rule out God. In fact, without design, there wouldn’t even be chance. And since design points us to God, it follows that chance doesn’t eliminate God—it actually depends on him.