In my last column, I explored why the universe doesn’t require a designer. However, one of the most powerful counterarguments for the existence of a god is that life is just too complex to have evolved by chance. Look at DNA! Look at the sheer number of species! Look at the complexity of humans, our minds, eyes and other parts! Surely, this intricate web of life must have had an architect?

Let’s take a step back (or maybe a few billion steps back) and see why life, just like the universe, does not need a designer.

Evolution: The Slow and Steady Climb

Biologist Richard Dawkins, in his book Climbing Mount Improbable, describes evolution as climbing a gentle slope rather than scaling a sheer cliff. This analogy explains how tiny, incremental changes over millions of years can lead to the astonishing complexity we see today. If evolution required massive, sudden jumps, like a fish suddenly sprouting wings and taking flight, then yes, that would be absurd. But evolution isn’t about leaps; it’s about small, manageable steps accumulating over time.

The result? A dazzling variety of life, from single-celled organisms to the intricate beings that are us.

Life: Beautiful, Messy, and Imperfect

If a flawless designer created life, then we’d expect life to be flawless. Yet, reality tells a different story. Living things are often messy and inefficient and break down easily. People die from minor infections. Our spines are a chiropractor’s dream. And why on earth do we have wisdom teeth, those useless, pain-inducing relics? They don’t seem very “wise” to me.

But worst of all are viruses. If a perfect creator meticulously designed life, why include entities that exist solely to wreak havoc? The Ebola virus, for example, is a horror show of biological engineering, causing rapid organ failure, internal bleeding, and an agonizing death, sometimes within days. Thankfully, this virus is rare, but the recent pandemic of COVID-19 has killed over 7 million people worldwide, and it’s not finished yet. This is the work of an intelligent designer? That’s some “design.”

DNA: Order from Chaos

DNA certainly is incredibly complex. It’s a mind-boggling molecule carrying instructions for life itself, and at first glance, might seem like something too intricate to have arisen naturally, almost like a natural supercomputer. But that’s precisely the power of evolution—simple processes, repeated over time, can yield astounding results.

Nature doesn’t need a grand blueprint; it simply follows the principle of trial and error. Mutations occur; some are beneficial, some not, and natural selection does the rest. Given enough time (and we’ve had billions of years), order emerges from the chaos.

The Structure Is In You

We see the universe as structured because we are structured beings. Our brains are wired to seek patterns, to impose order on randomness. It’s no wonder we look at the complexity of life and assume it must have been designed—we’re wired to think that way through some very complex wiring we call “the brain.” But life is the product of countless tiny changes shaped by natural forces over unimaginably long time spans.

Yes, the universe and life are astonishingly intricate. But do they need a designer? Not at all. They evolved into order, and we continue to seek it as creatures shaped by that order. It’s literally in our DNA.

Additional articles by Andrew