The Fallacy Of Composition And The Design Argument

The flaws of the design argument for God's existence are deep and numerous, ranging from the arbitrary nature of the points at which orderliness is said to "prove" the existence of God to the fact that the world is not be proven to be designed unless a designer has already been proven.  Nonetheless, the popularity of this "proof" is immense, and is the subject of thorough discussion between those of wildly different worldviews.  The errors of the design argument might be overlooked by the vast majority of all theists, but they can still be identified by genuine rationalists.  Moreover, there is an additional error in the approach that some, but perhaps not all, supporters of the argument succumb to.

The belief that one can tell that nature is designed simply from observing it is ultimately derived from unverified intuitions (which have no place in accurate epistemology) in many cases, but it is also often derived from casual, unrelated experiences involving other humans.  In other words, it is far from obvious that nature is "designed," and many people only suppose that nature is designed after they have repeatedly observed human design, especially where technology and architecture are concerned.  Proponents of the design argument extrapolate from everyday experiences and, in doing so, commit the fallacy of composition.

It does not follow from the reality of human ingenuity that the external world is itself designed by a higher consciousness, and yet this is exactly what people who advocate for the design argument sometimes suggest: according to at least some of them, familiarity with human creative functions illuminates the nature of the external world's origins.  Human and divine creations are related in that they both involve matters of causality; however, they are distinct in that even the existence of human creative powers and the seeming design of the natural world combined do not prove that God exists.

The appearance of design is epistemologically worthless even if one has witnessed various processes of human design on a repeated basis.  After all, a designer must be proven to exist before the appearance of design is equated with confirmation of design [1], as nature is otherwise only hypothetically designed by the intentions of a grand mind.  To prove that the natural world is "designed," one must first prove that an uncaused cause exists [2], which bypasses the need to bring up the issue of design and perceptions of design altogether, as the existence of the uncaused cause is revealed as a logically necessary thing that is not illuminated by observations of nature.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/11/why-design-argument-fails.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-uncaused-cause.html