Design or Order?
When people say they see design in the universe, what they are really seeing is order, a very different thing. Order is what you should expect from a world in which A is A, which entails the corollary that what a thing does is determined by what it is. These laws of identity and causality necessarily produce order. And since to exist is to exist as something with a specific nature, no alternative to order is conceivable. The consequences of this point are significant for the God question. George H. Smith puts it well in Atheism: The Case Against God : It is a mistake to confuse "order" with "design." If there is design in nature, there must be a designer, but the same is not true of order. Order does not presuppose an orderer; it is simply entailed by the nature of existence itself.