The leap from the "appearance of design" to the claim that design itself can be known to exist is fraught with non sequiturs. Few will acknowledge that, although external objects and the scientific laws that have thus far governed the external world certainly seem designed--at least in a sense, it does not follow that we are observing actual design. All that the senses can report to us are appearances which can give the impression that the material world has a designer. Identifying what does not follow from this is rather simple.
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| The mere presence of complexity does not logically establish the existence of either design or a designer, with the former not existing unless the latter does. Perceptions of design do not mean that design is actually present. |
For millennia, people simply did not have access to an understanding of the precision of variables in the external world. At most, they could recognize that the natural world seemed designed to them. And an intuition or perception proves nothing except that the intuition/perception exists. Advocates of the design argument often overlook or ignore this crucial point. It would expose the flaws in the argument, after all. To maintain their sophistry the apologists who advocate the design argument must not draw attention the the fallacious appeals to probability, myriad of unknowns, and non sequiturs involved in the argument.
Apologists might refer to scientific variables as if they escape the realm of probability and reach the status of proofs of design, with the aforementioned data never actually confirming what these apologists claim: that God exists. Ultimately, the design argument for God tries to fallaciously jump from perceptions of design to a designer, assaulting people with enough miscellaneous examples of seeming design until they forget that the entire argument rests on an unverifiable, subjective sense of probability [1]. Persuasion is not proof, and all the affirmation of apologists cannot transform fallacies into proofs. Thankfully the ability to sort through the correct conclusions does not lay beyond our reach. The truth of the matter is easily demonstrable.
There is design, but to say that the appearance of design proves the existence of design, in turn proving the existence of a designer by extension, is ludicrous. To prove design exists one would first have to prove a designer exists, as that is the only way to prove that the appearance of design reflects actual design in nature. But one could never prove that a designer exists simply by surveying a world with the appearance of design.
For instance, if the universe was past-eternal, there would be no design because the universe would be uncreated, and thus have no designer, for it would have always existed. It is the impossibility of an infinite past that establishes the beginning of the cosmos, and it is reason that reveals the impossibility of something appearing without a cause [2]. Because an uncaused cause exists, the universe is finite and created, and therefore design does exist--but no one can soundly reason this out backwards, as if design can be proven without first proving a designer, and as if a designer/creator can be proven without first proving that the universe had a beginning.
The design argument reeks of assumptions and errors, yet a drastically restructured argument can indeed prove the existence of design. As I have said before, while many think that the design argument for God is a sound and valid argument, what is actually necessary is the God argument for design, without which one cannot establish design to begin with. Many forsake this sequence in their approaches. Reason affirms it anyway because it reflects reality.
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