“because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them” (Romans 1:19).
We can always learn something about a person from the presence of his or her work. At a minimum, we can know that someone lived to create that work, even if he or she remains unseen. For instance, we might associate a high-quality piece of handiwork with the efforts of a skilled craftsman. In a similar manner, sculptures imply sculptors, paintings imply painters, and buildings imply builders.
Just as we can tell the existence of a worker by the presence of his or her work, the world we inhabit also demonstrates the presence of a divine architect. We can associate that architectural evidence with a philosophical assertion known as the teleological argument for God’s existence,. The word “telos” means “end” or “purpose,” and the teleological argument can be stated in three points…
1.) A design implies a designer.
2.) Creation shows evidence of design.
3.) Therefore, there is evidence of a Designer of creation.
The teleological argument says that Creation offers a kind of window through which we can see the reality of God’s existence. In other words, “…what is known about God should be plain to them because God made it plain to them” through the existence of His work. One source expands upon this idea with a readily understandable example…
“…when a rockhound sees small round rocks in a stream, it doesn’t surprise him because natural erosion rounds them that way. But when he finds an arrowhead he realizes that some intelligent being has deliberately altered the natural form of the rock. He sees complexity here that cannot be explained by natural forces. Now the design that we are talking about in this argument is complex design, not simple patterns; the more complex that design is, the greater the intelligence required to produce it…
The design we see in the universe is complex. The universe is a very intricate system of forces that work together for the mutual benefit of the whole. Life is a very complex development. A single DNA molecule, the building block of all life, carries the same amount of information as one volume of an encyclopedia. No one seeing an encyclopedia lying in the forest would hesitate to think that it had an intelligent cause; so when we find a living creature composed of millions of DNA-based cells, we ought to assume that it likewise has an intelligent cause.” (1)
Image Attribution: Burst , CC0 1.0 Universal, via NegativeSpace.co
(1) Geisler, N. L., & Brooks, R. M. (1990). When Skeptics Ask (p. 21). Victor Books.