Wondrous Eyes and Parasitical Worms
Believers like to point to the "design" in nature and life as a proof that God exists. That move has real but limited value. Design might prove that more than one God exists and even if we knew only one God existed we couldn't tell from the creation if he/it was all-powerful or all-wise or all-benevolent. Maybe (as John Stuart Mill and others have suggested) a god less than all-powerful and a bit less than all-wise and all-benevolent created the universe.
David in Psalm 19 and Paul in Romans 1 told the truth when they said the heavens declare the glory and power of God but they were saying what they knew via inspired teaching rather than by philosophic argument. And the God they were talking about, who revealed his power and glory in creation, was Yahweh or the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ rather than some conclusion to a syllogism. We mustn't make less of a biblical statement than its own claim. Paul claimed that Yahweh (who was now shown as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ) is seen in the creation. That's not an "argument"; it's a proclamation.
It's increasingly true that people in the West are utterly dissatisfied with the god "chance" and are looking for a "Designer" to explain the utterly miraculous degree of adaptation we see everywhere we look. Witness the effect of Dembski's work and the confession of the late Fred Hoyle who repudiated "chance" not long before he died. It isn't just the intricacy of one thing that astounds these scientists, it's the inter-relatedness of a host of incredibly complex systems that overwhelms their scepticism so that they move from speech about "adaptation" to speech about "design". Distinguished scientist George Wald confessed that to get from inorganic material to us was "impossible" and yet, he said, here we are, the result of the "impossible". Many scientists just glibly assert that "given enough time anything can happen" but modern computer technology is burying that notion under a universe of "odds against". At the Wistar convention in Philadelphia nearly forty years ago mathematicians were already digging the grave for that non-scientific claim.
It isn't just "adaptation" that has to be faced; it's simultaneous adaptation of a host of things. Whole reproductive systems have to emerge simultaneously before creatures can live without water. Eggs have to develop tough covers or they'll dehydrate but the creature within has to get out so it must develop a way to get out. The tough covers can't develop in the water and don't have the time in one generation to develop out of the water. The gill systems have to be replaced, the sense to bury eggs must occur, the fertilisation of eggs system has to be replaced. I know there are scientists who dismiss such talk as silly and ignorant but that's part of the reason so many people are turning from "chance". They're offered assertions instead of explanation (or even part explanation). The existence of water creatures, amphibians and land creatures is supposed to assure us that they must have found a way but it already assumes the theory of transmutation. We're ceaselessly told how like the animals we are and rarely told how unlike them we are.
Is there an omnipotent, omniscient and omni-benevolent Creator? I'm sure there is. But television programmer David Attenborough put the really fundamental question that bothers people. For fifty years he's been looking at fantastic adaptation and has no wish to deny the force of the argument. He said he sees the incredible eye, which the creator is said to have made but he also sees the worm that bores into the eyes of tens of thousands of children. Did God create that worm also? And isn't it an incredibly complex creature? Where do we go from there?