Undesigned Order Is Unmysterious
Part of the modern intelligent-design argument for God goes like this: in the human world complex things like computer programs have been designed. In fact, they go on, we have no experience at all with such things that have not been designed. Therefore, when we find complex "coding" in the nonhuman world, say, DNA, it is reasonable to conclude -- indeed we have no rational alternative to concluding -- that a designer was responsible. That designer we call God. (An example is here at 13:45.) So observe the premise: no complex orderly processes exist in the human world that were not first designed by human beings . But that's patent nonsense. At least since the Scottish Enlightenment (Adam Smith, David Hume, et al.), and I'm sure going back to ancient Greece, philosophers have been aware of complex, orderly, and undesigned processes in the human world, society in general and the marketplace in particular. In 1782 one of those Scottish thinkers, Adam Ferguson, descr...