It is difficult not to feel amazed by the surrounding world. Millions of neighboring galaxies and planets, each with their own unique size and elegance, stretch across the cosmos. Here on Earth, breathtaking wonders abound—from the shimmering northern lights to thundering waterfalls and towering mountain ranges. And all of this beauty is made even more remarkable by the immensely complex human brain that perceives and appreciates it.
The Remarkable Order of the Universe
What is striking, and perhaps surprising, about the natural world is certain attributes it possesses—attributes it did not have to have. For example, consider the order of the universe. One does not need to look far to see a structure, sequence, and consistency in the cosmos. Things typically do not pop into existence without a cause; objects do not move unless an external force acts upon them; when something is dropped from some height, it falls to the ground; the astronomical bodies move as they have for eons, and so on. The universe has a recognizable order, pattern, and sequence. These ordered regularities were true in the past, and now scientists know there are deeper laws that explain why such consistencies exist.1
The universe could have been completely disorderly and haphazard with no laws (or at least no recognizable laws).2 Moreover, these patterns or regularities of nature are demonstrably consistent. There are rarely deviations from scientific laws, and if there is an irregularity, it is an exception to the rule.
Scientists can remain confident that current and future information will align with established patterns and structures. Consistency and order allow scientific knowledge to progress because previous laws are assumed not to change arbitrarily. When a scientist begins studying the world, she presumes (and rightly so) that the universe is ordered. This expectation of order explains the remarkable discoveries and advancements in fields such as medicine, cosmology, physics, and genetics.
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga explains, “For science to be successful, the world must display a high degree of regularity and predictability….The world was created in such a way that it displays order and regularity; it isn’t unpredictable, chancy or random. And of course this conviction is what enables and undergirds science.”3 The order and consistency of the universe provide a rational basis for anticipating future phenomena, something that complete chaos could never support.
Astrophysicist Abraham Loeb of Harvard says,
I am struck by the order we find in the universe, by the regularity, by the existence of laws of nature. That is something I am always in awe of, how the laws of nature we find here on Earth seem to apply all the way out to the edge of the universe. That is quite remarkable. The universe could have been chaotic and very disorganized. But it obeys a set of laws much better than people obey a set of laws here.4
Order permeates and grounds the cosmos. The renowned theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and atheist, Stephen Hawking, summarizes this property of the universe well: “The overwhelming impression is of order. The more we discover about the universe, the more we find that it is governed by rational laws.”5
The Comprehensible Cosmos
Next, consider what Albert Einstein, perhaps the greatest physicist ever to have lived, said about the universe: “‘the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility’….The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.”6 One of the fascinating things about the cosmos is that it is comprehensible; it is intelligible.7 It is almost as if the universe wants to be explored, uncovered, and understood. Something can be ordered and structured but still not be intelligible to other agents. Again, this feature is not required; the universe could have been entirely unintelligible rather than comprehensible.
Physicist John Polkinghorne writes, “We are so familiar with the fact that we can understand the world that, most of the time, we take it for granted. It is what makes science possible. Yet it could have been otherwise. The universe might have been a disorderly chaos, rather than an orderly cosmos. Or it might have had a rationality that was inaccessible to us.”8 The universe is complex, but its inner workings and deepest structures are perceptible and are being uncovered slowly but surely.
The Beauty of Creation
Not only is the universe orderly and comprehensible, but it also possesses tremendous elegance and beauty. Physicist Stephen Barr writes,
As one goes deeper and deeper into the workings of the physical world, to more and more fundamental levels of the laws of nature, one encounters not ever less structure and symmetry but even more. The deeper one goes the more orderly nature looks, the more subtle and intricate its designs….Science has given us new eyes that allow us to see down to the deeper roots of the world’s structure, and there all we see is order and symmetry of pristine mathematical purity.9
One need only look at the Seven Natural Wonders to come face to face with the beauty here on Earth. The celestial elegance of the surrounding stars and galaxies is just as wondrous. Honest observers do not require a syllogism to see the elegance in the natural world. No doubt there are violent, ugly, and disturbing things in the universe. However, most of this brokenness is not inherent to the universe but caused by agents. Even so, the grandeur seen in the vast cosmos far outweighs the darkness. Paul Gould writes, “Beauty is found everywhere, and abundantly: in the mathematical laws that describe the physical universe as a whole, in the starry heavens, in the medium-sized things and people on earth, and within the microscopic (e.g., cells, DNA strands, and ice crystals).”10 There is a beauty, vibrance, and richness that is not required. Richard Swinburne notes, “But beyond that an orderly world is a beautiful world. Beauty consists in patterns of order. Total chaos is ugly. The movements of the stars in accord with regular laws is a beautiful dance.”11
Tracing the Hand Behind Creation
With these various attributes of the universe in mind (comprehensibility, order, consistency, and beauty), it is prudent to ask why the universe is this way.12 If following the evidence is foundational to one’s worldview, then asking what the most plausible explanation of a universe with these properties is only fitting. As mentioned before, the universe need not have been this way. It could have been unintelligible, disorderly, inconsistent, ugly—just a chaotic mess.13 Instead, we see just the opposite.
One plausible explanation is that an ordered, consistent, intelligible, and beautiful thing—be it a universe or something else—indicates it has a designer. Intuitively, people recognize that most things that possess these qualities are not the result of mere chance but have a deeper cause, intentionality, and explanation.14 This explanation of intelligent design is all the more likely if the properties are to a high degree.15 In other words, the more orderly, beautiful, intelligible, and structured something is, the more likely there is a designer.
Think of a painting, a musical piece, an automobile, a poem, or a piece of architecture. Why does virtually everyone recognize that these have an intelligent designer rather than arising through chance or necessity? In part, it is because these things have certain attributes that we accurately associate with design—things like comprehensibility, order and structure, elegance and beauty.16 We may not always be correct in our assessment of what is designed or not, but experience has given us a generally reliable detector. One need not have any idea where the art or building came from to know that it was designed rather than cobbled together through chance or necessity. Lacking answers to the how, who, when, why, or where does not discount that something or someone designed it.
Moving from something having the properties or marks of design to a designer is a natural step. Philip Tallon notes, “It is a natural inference to move from the beautiful design of creation to the hand of a designer.”17 Swinburne explains, “Humans see the comprehensibility of the world as evidence of a comprehending creator.”18 With this in mind, consider the following syllogism:
The universe is profoundly ordered, consistent, comprehensible, and beautiful.
Things with these properties usually do not result from chance or necessity but have a designer.
Therefore, it is plausible the universe has a designer
Of course, the Judeo-Christian tradition has long taught that this apparent design in the universe cries out for a Creator—a God who creates, designs, sustains, and guides.19 St. Athanasius (died 373 AD) wrote, “…Creation, as though in written characters, declares in a loud voice, by its order and harmony, its own Lord and Creator.”
A Designer Revealed Through Creation
But what can be known about this Designer? At a minimum, this Designer appears to have several properties. It would likely be a single Designer. The principle of parsimony (otherwise known as Occam’s razor) states that the simplest explanation is to be preferred, all things being equal. If a vase were to fall off a table, the most likely explanation is that someone accidentally knocked it over. To suggest it was two people or animals, while possible, would be the less likely explanation. Therefore, when looking at the universe’s design, a single Designer is more likely than two (or more) designers.
This Designer would also be exceedingly powerful. Designing and sustaining such a massive and complex universe would require immense power. Given the order and comprehensibility of the universe, it would seem plausible that the Designer is quite intelligent. Furthermore, the beauty of the universe suggests a good Designer. This does not lead precisely to the God of Christianity or any other religion, but that is not what this argument intends to do. It concludes with a single, extremely powerful, intelligent, and good Designer of the space-time universe. Then one can examine the various claims of the world religions and philosophies to see whether this Cause has revealed itself to humanity.
There are Newton’s laws of motion, the laws of thermodynamics, gravitation, electromagnetism, and Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, to mention just a few. There is even the so-called ‘Theory of Everything,’ a hypothetical, all-encompassing framework to explain these inner workings of the universe.
Richard Swinburne gives a helpful definition of a ‘law’ when he says, “Now the laws of scientific theories are simply regularities in the powers and liabilities of particular substances” (Is there a God? [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010], 31). Or, as physicist Stephen Barr says, “Rather, the laws of nature are simply patterns which we discover empirically in the world around us, but which could have been otherwise” (Modern Physics and Ancient Faith [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003], 77). It is important to note that the laws of nature describe nature and its rhythms, but they do not explain them. Philosophy Ludwig Wittgenstein explains, “The laws of nature describe the universe, they describe the regularities. But they explain nothing.” Wittgenstein, Ludwig. “Science and Miracles.” Christian Medical Fellowship. September, 2015. https://www.cmf.org.uk/resources/publications/content/?context=article&id=26376.
Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, & Naturalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 271-272.
Isaac Chotiner. “Have Aliens Found Us? A Harvard Astronomer on the Mysterious Interstellar Object ‘Oumuamua.” The New Yorker. January 16, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/have-aliens-found-us-a-harvard-astronomer-on-the-mysterious-interstellar-object-oumuamua
Gregory Benford. “Leaping the Abyss: Stephen Hawking on black holes, unified field theory, and Marilyn Monroe.” Reason: Free Minds and Free Markets. April, 2002. https://reason.com/2002/04/01/leaping-the-abyss-2/. Ingrid Faro writes, “Daily, we witness the order and regularity of nature with the confidence that the laws of gravity, magnetism, and so on, will function as intended, that is, that the earth will rotate around the sun, that seeds planted under the right conditions will grow, and so forth…. Because of the dependability of these laws, a person stepping off a cliff will fall, and the one who touches a live wire will receive a shock. Tides will rise and fall. Tectonic plates will shift and collide. The sun will shine, and the rain will fall on the just and unjust alike…. The movement of the stars and planets can be calculated with precise accuracy” (Demystifying Evil: A Biblical and Personal Exploration [Downers Grove, ILL: Intervarsity Press, 2023], 53).
Ideas and Opinions by Albert Einstein, trans. by Sonja Bargmann (New York: Crown Publishers, 1954), 292.
Paul Gould, in a A Good and True Story: Eleven Clues to Understanding Our Universe and Our Place in It writes, “We know a great deal about the universe. The world is intelligible to us….this intelligibility is partly explained by the fact that the universe is ordered, hierarchical, and rational” (Grand Rapids: BrazosPress, 2022), 105.
John Polkinghorne, Science and Creation: The Search for Understanding (London: SPCK, 1988), 20-21.
Barr, 81 & 87.
Gould, 176.
Swinburne, 49.
Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and astrobiologist, in an article with The New York Times, explains the pressing question of why, when he says, “The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion — all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do?... Over the years I have often asked my physicist colleagues why the laws of physics are what they are. The answers vary from ‘that’s not a scientific question’ to ‘nobody knows.’ The favorite reply is, ‘There is no reason they are what they are — they just are.’ The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational. After all, the very essence of a scientific explanation of some phenomenon is that the world is ordered logically and that there are reasons things are as they are. If one traces these reasons all the way down to the bedrock of reality — the laws of physics — only to find that reason then deserts us, it makes a mockery of science.” Paul Davies. “Taking Science on Faith.” The New York Times. November 24th, 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/opinion/24davies.html.
One might respond that for sentient agents to exist at all, the universe must be ordered, consistent, comprehensible, and beautiful. Otherwise, sentient beings simply could not exist. This is sometimes called the anthropic principle, otherwise known as the observation selection effect. But it is not clear why sentient agents could not exist in an ugly, chaotic, incomprehensible, unstructured world. It certainly seems like agents could exist in this type of chaos, even temporarily. It could even be a patch of order no larger than our solar system in a sea of mayhem, for example.
The sentient agent(s) could even be a ‘Boltzmann Brain,’ a single brain which fluctuates into existence out of the quantum vacuum and temporarily observes an ugly, chaotic, incomprehensible, unstructured world. What this shows is that the type of seemingly designed universe we observe is not the only one possible for sentient agents.
Swinburne suggests, “The very success of science in showing us how deeply orderly the natural world is provides strong grounds for believing that there is an even deeper cause of that order” (Swinburne, 62).
Something can be ordered, comprehensible, and beautiful, but to such a low degree that it may not require a designer as an explanation. Or, hypothetically, something could be ordered without being intelligible or elegant. These are likely examples of things that came about by chance.
There are other properties that point to a designer. For example, purpose, language, similarity to other designs, and so on.
Philip Tallon, Two Dozen (or so) Arguments for God: The Plantinga Project (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 323. Gould writes, “works of art are rarely beautiful without artistic intent….If naturalism is true, then there is no divine artist to create a beautiful universe. Hence, from the standpoint of naturalism it is very surprising that the universe is saturated with beauty” (177).
Swinburne, 49.
See Psalm 19:1-2; Prov. 8:22-31; Rom. 1:19-20. As the early Christian apologist (died 250 AD) Marcus Minucius Felix explained, “If upon entering some home you saw that everything there was well-tended, neat, and decorative, you would believe that some master was in charge of it, and that he was himself much superior to those good things. So too in the home of this world, when you see providence, order, and law in the heavens and on earth, believe that there is a Lord and Author of the universe, more beautiful than the stars themselves and the various parts of the whole world.”