Who Designed the Designer?

William Lane Craig responds to Richard Dawkins' "central" argument, and the problem of "who designed the designer".

But I think that the most patently obvious falsehood of the six is number 3. 3 says, “The temptation to attribute the appearance of design to a designer is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.”

Dawkins’ claim here is that we're not justified in inferring design as the best explanation for the appearance of design in the universe because a new problem immediately arises, namely who designed the designer? If you say there's a cosmic designer to explain the complex order in the universe then a new question arises: Who designed the designer? He takes that to mean that therefore the hypothesis of a cosmic designer is not a good hypothesis – that this is a bad or false hypothesis. It seems to me that this rejoinder is flawed on at least two counts.

Number one: in order to recognize that an explanation is the best, you don't have to have an explanation of the explanation. In order to recognize that an explanation is the best, you don't have to be able to explain the explanation. Folks, this is an elementary point in the philosophy of science. For example, if archaeologists were digging in the earth and they came across objects that were shaped like arrowheads and pottery shards and tomahawks and so forth, can you imagine one of the archaeologists saying, “Egad, Jones! Look how the processes of metamorphosis and sedimentation have formed these uncanny objects!” Well, of course not! They would immediately recognize that these are artifacts; the products of intelligent design of some unknown people group in the past. In order to recognize that design is the best explanation of these artifacts, the archeologists don't need to be able to explain who the people group was, where they came from, what their origin was, or anything of that sort. They may have no explanation of this unknown people group who produced the artifacts, and yet it's clear that these artifacts are best explained, not by metamorphosis and sedimentation, but by intelligent design. Or, again, suppose astronauts were to find on the back side of the Moon a pile of machinery there that had not been left by American or Russian cosmonauts. What would be the best explanation for that machinery? Clearly it would be some sort of extraterrestrial intelligence that had left the machinery there. And you don't have to have an explanation of who these extraterrestrials were or came from or how they got there or anything of that sort in order to recognize that the best explanation of this machinery is intelligent design. In order to recognize an explanation as the best, you don't have to have an explanation of the explanation.

In fact, when you think about it, requiring that would immediately lead to an infinite regress of explanations. You would need an explanation of the explanation, but in order to recognize that as best you need an explanation of the explanation of the explanation, and then an explanation of the explanation of the explanation of the explanation. So nothing could ever be explained because it would lead to an infinite regress of explanations. So this principle that in order to recognize an explanation is the best you have to have an explanation of the explanation would destroy science. This is a principle that is antithetical to the very project of science at whose altar, of course, Dawkins worships. So ironically Dawkins has enunciated a principle (or presupposed a principle) here which is wholly unscientific and would destroy the entire scientific enterprise if ever taken seriously.

In the case at hand, in order to recognize that intelligent design is the best explanation of the complex order in the universe, you don't have to have an explanation of the explanation. You may not know what the explanation is of the intelligent designer that produced the cosmos, but that doesn't in any way count against the credibility of the hypothesis that the complex order in the universe is best explained by there being an intelligent designer. That was the first point.