Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the universe was designed.
Not merely that it had a cause. Not that something preceded the Big Bang, or that there is some deeper physical structure from which our observable universe emerged. Let us grant considerably more than that. Suppose there really is intelligence behind the universe: that some mind, agency or collection of agencies deliberately selected at least some of its fundamental properties.
This is an enormous concession to the design argument. It is also where the interesting problem begins.
For the moment I am not interested in whether design can actually be demonstrated. I want to ask a different question. If we discovered tomorrow that the universe really was designed, what could we legitimately infer about the designer from the thing designed?
Rather less than traditional natural theology sometimes assumes.
And some of what we could infer might be distinctly uncomfortable.
Finding the Watchmaker
William Paley famously imagined finding a watch while crossing a heath. We recognise that the watch differs from a stone because its parts appear arranged for a purpose. From the watch, Paley thought, we may infer a watchmaker.
There is a useful point here which tends to disappear beneath two centuries of argument over Paley's biology.
Finding a watch would justify an inference to a maker. It would not tell us very much about the maker.
Examine a Rolex without knowing anything about Switzerland and you might reasonably infer considerable technical ability. You could infer familiarity with metallurgy and mechanics. You might perhaps infer that its maker understood the behaviour of springs, gears and oscillators.
You could not deduce that the maker was morally perfect.
You could not deduce that the maker knew everything.
You certainly couldn't deduce that the maker loved you.
Still less could you deduce that the maker was one being rather than a workshop full of them.
Those conclusions require evidence additional to the watch.
The same restriction applies, with rather greater force, to the universe.
If apparent design is admissible as evidence for a cosmic designer, then the whole design is evidence. We don't get to point at the parts we admire and declare those characteristic of the architect while classifying everything awkward as an unfortunate consequence of something else.
The peacock and the parasitoid wasp came in the same box.
What We Might Reasonably Infer
Let us be generous.
If the universe were known to be deliberately designed, its designer would presumably possess extraordinary capabilities by human standards. Whatever produced spacetime, matter, fields and the laws governing them would operate at a level so far beyond human engineering that "powerful" scarcely seems adequate.
We might infer intelligence, although even that requires some care. Human beings are increasingly familiar with systems capable of producing complex results which were not individually specified by their designers. Evolutionary algorithms are an obvious example. A sufficiently advanced creator might establish generative rules rather than separately design stars, beetles and kidneys.
The universe certainly exhibits remarkable mathematical regularity. General relativity can describe the behaviour of gravitating systems across enormous scales. Quantum field theories predict experimental results to astonishing precision. A designer responsible for that structure would apparently favour, or at least employ, stable regularities capable of generating tremendous complexity from comparatively compact principles.
That is interesting.
It doesn't get us to Christianity.
It doesn't even get us reliably to monotheism.
A designed universe might have one designer, several designers, a hierarchy of designers, a designer working within constraints imposed by some still deeper reality, or something sufficiently unlike human agency that our word "designer" is itself misleading.
A cathedral tells us something about medieval engineering. It doesn't establish that there was only one mason.
The Peculiar Economy of the Design
There is another feature of the universe which deserves rather more attention than it usually receives in popular discussions of design.
Most of it appears to have absolutely nothing to do with us.
The observable universe is about 93 billion light-years across. It contains hundreds of billions, probably trillions, of galaxies. Nearly all of this is permanently inaccessible to human beings. Because of cosmic expansion, much of what we can presently observe will eventually pass beyond our reachable horizon.
Even within our own galaxy, biological life appears to occupy an almost ludicrously small fraction of the available environment.
Our own planet is mostly hostile to unprotected human life. Remove technology and clothing and put me at random somewhere on Earth's surface and my immediate prospects aren't especially encouraging.
Yet all of this enormous machinery existed for billions of years before anything remotely resembling a human being appeared.
If humanity is the principal objective of the design, this is an extraordinarily indirect way of producing us.
That doesn't prove we aren't the objective. Perhaps the designer likes large universes. Perhaps physical law makes the scale necessary. Perhaps other life exists. Perhaps there are purposes of which we know nothing.
I don't know.
But "I don't know" matters here. Once those possibilities are admitted, the physical universe has ceased to provide the evidence for human centrality that the argument was supposed to extract from it.
Design by Attrition
Life itself creates a still stranger problem.
If biological evolution is part of the designer's method, then the method is breathtakingly profligate.
Something like 99 per cent of all species that have existed are extinct. Evolution proceeds through reproduction, mutation, competition, environmental change, predation, disease and death. Natural selection has no evident foresight. It produces structures that are good enough for the circumstances in which organisms reproduce, often by modifying whatever happened to be inherited from their ancestors.
This produces marvels.
It also produces recurrent laryngeal nerves.
In humans the recurrent laryngeal nerve descends into the chest, loops beneath an artery and returns towards the larynx. In giraffes the same inherited arrangement produces a detour of several metres. It makes perfectly good sense as an evolutionary inheritance from vertebrate ancestors whose necks were rather less ambitious.
As fresh engineering, it is peculiar.
This doesn't disprove design. A designer could deliberately employ evolution. Indeed, many religious believers think exactly that.
But then evolution itself becomes part of the design specification.
So do its costs.
For hundreds of millions of years animals were being eaten alive, parasitised, starved and killed by disease before anything plausibly describable as human moral freedom existed. Whatever explanation one offers for human evil, the usual appeal to free will does very little for a trilobite.
This is where design arguments become curiously selective. The bacterial flagellum is evidence about the designer; the Ichneumonidae apparently aren't.
Darwin noticed the difficulty. In an 1860 letter to Asa Gray he wrote that he could not persuade himself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have deliberately created ichneumon wasps with the express intention that they feed within living caterpillars.
Darwin wasn't making a cheap emotional objection. He had noticed an evidential asymmetry.
If biological features permit conclusions about the creator, unpleasant biological features don't suddenly become inadmissible evidence.
The Problem of Suffering Is Also a Design Argument
This gives the traditional problem of evil a slightly different form.
Usually it is expressed as a challenge to belief in an omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good God: why would such a being permit apparently gratuitous suffering?
But once the universe itself is treated as an artefact from which the designer's attributes may be inferred, suffering becomes part of the positive evidence.
Consider the life cycle of Onchocerca volvulus, the parasitic worm responsible for river blindness. Or childhood cancers. Or the evolutionary arms races between predators and prey. Or pathogens exquisitely adapted to exploiting the bodies of other organisms.
These aren't intrusions into nature.
They are nature.
A Christian may have theological explanations for them: the Fall, soul-making, regular natural law, eschatological compensation, limits on creaturely understanding and so forth. Some of those responses are considerably more sophisticated than their internet caricatures.
But notice what has happened.
We are no longer inferring God's goodness from the design.
We are bringing an independently held belief in God's goodness to the evidence and constructing a theology capable of reconciling the evidence with it.
That may be legitimate theology. It isn't an inference from design.
Fine-Tuning and What It Would Actually Establish
Fine-tuning provides perhaps the strongest modern version of the argument.
Certain physical parameters appear to occupy ranges compatible with complex chemistry, long-lived stars and eventually life. There are serious disputes about probability measures, parameter independence, selection effects and the extent to which deeper physical theories might constrain values that currently appear contingent.
Set all that aside.
Suppose fine-tuning is real, deliberate and conclusively established.
What follows?
At most, something intended a universe capable of producing some form of complexity or observers.
Notice how quickly the adjectives disappear.
We haven't established that the designer is omnipotent. Perhaps these were the only parameters available.
We haven't established omniscience. Perhaps the designer experimented.
We haven't established perfect goodness.
We haven't established uniqueness.
We haven't established that human beings rather than life, intelligence, black holes, complexity itself or something we haven't noticed were the intended outcome.
And we certainly haven't established the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, biblical inspiration or anybody's preferred theory of salvation.
Those propositions require their own evidence.
There is a persistent tendency in apologetics to smuggle an entire theology through a door opened by a much smaller argument.
Even a successful fine-tuning argument would get us to something like "the parameters may have been selected".
That is philosophically interesting. It is nowhere near the Nicene Creed.
Perhaps We Are the Exhaust
There is another possibility which anthropocentric design arguments rarely consider seriously enough.
We may be incidental.
Human beings naturally examine the universe from the only location available to us and notice how remarkably suitable certain conditions are for human existence. But puddles, as Douglas Adams memorably observed, have a similar epistemic difficulty.
The analogy is imperfect, but the warning is sound.
A universe designed for some entirely different purpose could contain observers as a secondary consequence. Perhaps the production of black holes is important. Perhaps maximum computational complexity is important. Perhaps the designer is interested in consciousness generally. Perhaps universes are artworks. Perhaps ours is somebody's doctoral project.
I am being deliberately speculative because speculation exposes the logical gap.
Once a designer is admitted without independently specifying its intentions, an enormous range of hypotheses becomes compatible with the same observations.
A Christian creator is one.
So is a deistic creator.
So is a committee.
So is a simulation architect.
So is an incompetent creator working at the limits of its abilities.
So is a creator of immense power and complete moral indifference.
The universe alone doesn't obviously discriminate between them.
The God of Cosmicism
And this is where cosmicism becomes unexpectedly relevant.
Lovecraft's fictional universe is populated by entities possessing powers that, from a human perspective, might readily be mistaken for divinity. They are ancient, vast and largely indifferent to human welfare.
That isn't evidence that Azathoth exists, which I feel ought not to need saying, although experience suggests otherwise.
The philosophical point is subtler.
Power does not entail goodness.
Creation does not entail love.
Intelligence does not entail moral perfection.
Being responsible for our existence doesn't even entail being particularly interested in us.
Those connections have to be argued separately.
A creator compatible with the universe we actually observe might therefore look rather more cosmicist than traditionally theistic: immensely powerful, perhaps intelligent, perhaps responsible for the conditions under which consciousness arose, but with intentions that are opaque and no obvious concern for individual human flourishing.
I don't think the evidence establishes that creator either.
The point is that design by itself doesn't rule it out.
What About Beauty?
There is, nevertheless, evidence pointing in a more attractive direction.
The universe is beautiful.
That statement is partly about us, of course, but it shouldn't simply be dismissed. Spiral galaxies, Saturn's rings, nebulae, snowflakes, biological forms and the extraordinary mathematical elegance of some physical theories regularly provoke something very close to awe.
If the universe were deliberately designed, aesthetic intention would at least be a reasonable hypothesis.
Yet beauty presents the same interpretative difficulty as suffering.
The Tarantula Nebula is magnificent. A supernova seen from a safe distance would be magnificent. At an unfortunate distance it sterilises planets.
Nature's beauty and its indifference aren't opposites. Quite often they are the same phenomenon viewed from different distances.
Anyone who has watched a peregrine falcon hunt has seen the problem in miniature. It is an astonishingly beautiful piece of biological engineering unless one happens to be the pigeon.
Perhaps beauty genuinely tells us something about a creator. I am not entirely sure what.
The Limits of Reverse Engineering God
There is a deeper methodological problem beneath all this.
Engineers can infer intentions from artefacts because we already know a great deal about engineers.
We know what cars are for. We know that bridges cross obstacles. We recognise tools because we have extensive prior experience of toolmakers and their objectives.
We possess no comparable reference class for universes.
We have one observable universe and no confirmed examples of universe-makers.
That makes reverse engineering the intentions of a hypothetical creator exceptionally difficult.
A feature that looks wasteful to us might be unavoidable. Something that looks elegant might merely follow necessarily from deeper laws. Apparent fine-tuning might be selection bias. Apparent cruelty might be an unavoidable consequence of autonomous biological systems.
Or not.
The irritating thing is that almost every observation can be absorbed into sufficiently flexible theology.
Order demonstrates God's rationality. Randomness permits freedom. Beauty demonstrates goodness. Suffering permits soul-making. Divine visibility reveals God; divine hiddenness protects freedom. A universe full of life demonstrates fecundity; an apparently empty universe demonstrates humanity's special status.
At some point one begins to wonder what the universe would have to look like for the hypothesis to count against anything.
That is not proof that the hypothesis is false.
It is a question about how much explanatory work it is actually doing.
The Most We Can Say
So suppose tomorrow we find the maker's mark.
Perhaps encoded in the cosmic microwave background is an unmistakable mathematical message saying, in effect, "Yes, this was deliberate."
It would be the greatest discovery in human history.
I would change my mind immediately about whether the universe was designed.
I would not thereby become a Christian.
I would want to know who or what did it.
I would want to know whether there was one creator or many. Whether it still existed. Whether it created from nothing or manipulated something already present. Whether it designed the laws or merely chose initial conditions. Whether our universe was unique. Whether consciousness was intended. Whether we were intended.
And, rather importantly, whether the creator was friendly.
Those aren't insolent questions posed after discovering God.
They are the questions required to discover what sort of thing we had actually found.
From a deliberately created universe we might infer extraordinary causal power, intelligence of some kind, and perhaps an intention to produce particular physical possibilities. With stronger evidence we might infer more.
But omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, personhood, uniqueness and love don't follow merely from authorship.
Still less does any particular earthly religion.
If the universe is an artefact, then we are entitled to examine the artefact for clues about its maker. But we have to examine all of it: galaxies and guinea worms, mathematics and childhood cancer, consciousness and extinction, beauty and predation.
Perhaps somewhere in that strange mixture lies evidence of purpose.
Perhaps the universe has an architect.
But if we are going to judge the architect by the architecture, we should at least have the courtesy to look around the entire building.
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