There are various different ideas to combat this assumption. I believe that if there are so many millions of different universes, then one of them had to have the right conditions for life to survive, there surely must be one of the trillions that is perfect, and that is this one. There is also a new Inflation theory written by an American scientist. This theory proves that the Big Bang (the process in which all the galaxies where created) could not have happened any other way apart from the way that it did happen. This shows that God may not have designed the universe, as there was nothing to design, as the creation could not have happened any other way. However, this theory is still very new and hasn’t yet been accepted by the science world.
Many atheist’s would argue that if everything complex has to have a designer, then who designed God? He must be very complex to have created everything and everyone. Christians retaliate with the fact that the bible comments on God being ‘eternal’ – everlasting, therefore no-one created him he has always been around.
Even if Paley’s Design Argument points to a Designer God, who’s to say he’s a loving kind guy? The world has a lot of awful things happening in it: babies born without brains, good people suffering monstrous tortures, evil people basking in the sun and enjoying power, Volcanoes erupting, earthquakes rattling the planet, hurricanes and tornadoes blindly wiping out thousands of lives a day. The defenders of Design say that these things only seem awful to us because we are ignorant of God's plan and vision and cannot know how good these awful things really are in this plan. By saying these things, they are contradicting themselves. If we can't know what's good and what's not, we can't know whether the design, if any, is good or bad.
Besides, there are reasons why it is only called the design argument. That’s all it is really, an argument lacking sufficient evidence. There is no proof to conclude this argument, and there never will be until someone cracks the secrets of the Big Bang.
I am Agnostic, and I do not believe that the design argument is sufficient evidence to say something as groundbreaking as God exists. There are too many faults and unanswered questions in the argument for it to be classified as proof. I believe in science however, and I think that science provides several answers to these questions, most of which have a sound basis in scientific fact. Science have been trying to wrap up this argument for years, but religion has always found a way of cancelling out any ideas that scientists may have that solve the problems. However, in some aspects the bible and science facilitate each other e.g Science has proved that there was a Big Flash preceding the Big Bang, and the opening lines of the bible are ‘In the beginning, there was light’. I think that the design argument is very useful in our understanding of the way God works and it has influenced people into changing their lives e.g. A Czech scientist, Johannes Grobel, was converted from a devout Satanist to a devoted Christian whilst he was working on proving the design argument in the name of science. I also believe that without the design argument, people would know less in general about the way our universe works.
CHRIS NASH
