Put another way, books don’t just happen, they require authors, coherence and communication. If the author is absent, the book doesn’t come into existence. Yes, this is at one level a variation on the Paley Watchmaker argument that design requires a designer.
But I would contend the argument by analogy — just as a book requires an author, so the universe requires a designer — is an expression, not merely of common sense, but of a recognition of a fundamental characteristic of reality
“THINK ABOUT THIS: Why Atheists’ Books Are Evidence God Must Exist” at Hillfaith
There’s been quite the shelf of such books in recent years, as the Congress blog notes, but it also notes that Steve Meyer’s The Return of the God Hypothesis seems to be giving the Darwinian materialist atheists some serious competition:
For his part, Meyer, who is the director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture and who earned his PhD in the philosophy of science from Cambridge University, argues three main points in making the case for Intelligent Design (ID) of the universe:
“(1) Evidence from cosmology suggesting that the material universe had a beginning; (2) evidence from physics showing that from the beginning the universe has been ‘finely tuned’ to allow for the possibility of life, and (3) evidence from biology establishing that since the beginning large amounts of new functional genetic information have arisen in our biosphere to make new forms of life possible,” all of which, he contends, implies “the activity of a designing intelligence.”
“THINK ABOUT THIS: Why Atheists’ Books Are Evidence God Must Exist” at Hillfaith
Yer News hack can testify to the impact of Meyer’s book. Last Christmas, two quite unrelated people — of whom I had no reason to expect any special interest in the topic — asked me what I thought of Meyer’s book.
[Me: You’ve heard of Meyer’s book? Wow. Guess I better finally get round to reading it… ]
Well, it was bound to happen that someone would answer all those blowhards.