I still recall my dissatisfaction twenty years ago when one of my college philosophy professors said that, of all the arguments for the existence of God, the argument from design was the weakest. It had great appeal for me. One version of the design argument goes something like this: The physical universe exhibits order to a staggering degree, from the workings of galaxies down to the interaction of cells that constitute life; this order must be either (1) the product of random chance or (2) the result of intelligent design. From our knowledge of the properties of randomness, it is horribly improbable that (1) is the case; from our knowledge of intelligent design (the classic example proposed by William Paley [1743-1805] was that of the watchmaker and the watch), it is highly likely that (2) is the case. The “watchmaker,” as it were, of a mechanism as vast and as ordered as the universe must be God.
My professor claimed even if one were to accept the design argument’s premises and conclusion, the universal watchmaker it posits can be only very old but not eternal, very powerful but not omnipotent, and very wise but not omniscient. This does not satisfy the Christian, whose biblical God is eternal, omnipotent, and omniscient. He added to this the argument of David Hume (1711-177 6) against inference from causality, which says that our ideas go no farther than our experience, and, since we have no direct experience of divine attributes or operations, we cannot sensibly hypothesize about the transcendent.
I was mulling over the design argument most recently, believe it or not, during a weekend surf session at a local beach. Even on the most productive day, time spent surfing is about twenty-five percent riding waves and seventy-five percent waiting for them. So, if you’re surfing alone, there’s a lot of time to think.
Here in Southern California the best time to surf is early, around dawn. The wind is calm or, even better, blowing lightly off the shore, smoothing the faces of the breaking waves and holding them up for that extra second or two it takes you to launch your board down into their vertical motion. The rising sun behind you as you sit facing the incoming swells bathes them in warm light, free of glare. Black cormorants and white pelicans dive-bomb schools of smelt, which leap like quicksilver darts into the air. Sometimes pods of porpoises pass within yards, their smoke-colored backs rollercoastering in and out of the still water; or the inquisitive heads of seals pop up nearby then disappear, their bodies moving beneath you seconds later like shadowy torpedoes headed straight for the heart of the sea.
Up near the next point of land to the north of me a line of swells appeared. I paddled farther out, gauging them. A dozen waves at various points along the stretch of beach steepened one by one. In a physical event itself governed by design-a precise, predictable geometry of wave sine and height and bottom contour-the curve of the wave faces increased as they galloped shoreward until their tops pitched forward. The offshore wind combed the spray off the back of the waves into white manes. Tangled in each mane a rainbow appeared for a few bright seconds and, as the wave dissolved to a roil of whitewater, was gone.
All this is random? I thought. Not a chance.