Something from nothing
The Reuters headline was eye-catching: "God did not create the universe, says Hawking." The occasion was British physicist Stephen Hawking's new book, The Grand Design, a recap of the history of physics crowned by the assertion that the latest form of superstring theory ("M-theory") renders the God hypothesis superfluous. In England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop of Westminster, the Chief Rabbi, the Chairman of the British Muslim Council and the Astronomer Royal all issued statements to the effect that, although a genius in his own field, Hawking is no oracle. Hawking claims that "philosophy is dead," but the paradoxical effect of his book has been to revive one of philosophy's great debates. Once again, university cafés and Internet chat rooms are abuzz with talk of evidence for divine design.
Early modern versions of the argument from design to the existence of God relied upon a simple analogy: the universe looks like an artifact, and an artifact implies a maker. But as 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out, one would have to have some experience observing universes being made in order to judge that the analogy holds true. It fell to William Paley, in his Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802), to mount a more nuanced, lawyerly defense with his parable of the watch. While acknowledging the dissimilarity between watch-making and world-making, Paley maintained that the functional complexity of organisms—above all the wondrous human eye—warranted an inference of design. But a half century later, Paley's argument shattered at one touch from Darwin's theory: natural selection could account for the wondrously adaptive characteristics of all organisms from beetles to bishops. The argument from design lay in ruins.
Then came intelligent design, a research program seeking evidence from design in the "irreducible" biochemical complexities that have come to light under the powerful microscopes and mathematical models of the present day. Yet intelligent design has run aground, seemingly neither scientific fish nor theological fowl.
