You: Let us consider, then, a huge, destructive tidal wave. Hundreds of millions of water particles work together in a very specific way to create a tidal wave. Still, you would not say that the particular arrangement of molecules is important to the way that the wave works or that the wave has any particular meaning.

Aaron: In a wave parts are working together in the sense that they are mindlessly interacting, and I agree that this does not prove that they were designed to work in that way. I would not say that two people running into each other on the sidewalk were acting as part of a grand design just because they were interacting. Fortunately, this has nothing at all to do with my pocket watch example.

In a watch, the parts do more than interact, they cooperate. Each part helps the whole achieve a particular end, and the removal of any part would harm the system. One could add and remove buckets of water from a tidal wave at will, and change it very little. It is this interdependence and cooperation that proves design.

How do you respond?

  1. There is not any cooperation in living beings. Go
  2. The concept of cooperation cannot be used in your argument. Go