On reading the first dialogues of Hume, I found myself drawn into the argument of the existence of a supreme designer, especially as I was watching Our Planet on Netflix in parallel. But during my travels I thought about it vis a vis evolution and was less convinced. This also came out in the later dialogues with Philo’s skepticism. Thinking about it further, we look at nature and its offering essentially at a point in time. But nature is continuously moving and changing. To use analogies like that of a well designed watch is wrong, as the watch is a final product and thus has a defined final design. Anything in nature is just it’s current design at that point of time. So when we look at something spectacular in nature, we cannot thus conclude it was created by intelligent design, but rather that it is part of a continuous process of design improvement that nature is carrying out that has lasted for an almost infinite amount of time and will continue forever. Thus, there is no deliberate design, and thus a result of the design. I assume this thought essentially describes what we call evolution.
If we take the beginning of life itself and it just keeps taking billions and billions of different arrangements randomly, for which all it needs is time, the abundance of which nature had, the result will be many variations of life form, some which will survive, some which will not – and this just continues.
So now I find myself in a position in which I am skeptical of an intelligent designer by looking at nature. However, could it be that the evolutionary process is the intelligent design or is that just the result of randomness of very large numbers (remember the theory of infinite monkeys with typewriters and infinite time will create Shakespeare’s writings). I am left completely questioning the intelligent design view.