Contemplating the beautiful laws of nature, many physicists have quite understandably taken them as evidence of design, and, as has been noted above, the apparent ‘fine tuning’ of the fundamental constants of nature has lent additional weight to this way of looking at things. It should be clear of course that this talk of ‘fine tuning’ is not to be taken as by itself implying a fine tuner: if so the argument would become both quick and circular. This argument from ostensible fine tuning is the currently fashionable form of the traditional ‘teleological argument’ for the existence of God. Sometimes this is called ‘the argument from design’ but this, like a too literal construal of ‘fine tuning’, would be question begging. Years ago Norman Kemp Smith suggested that the argument should be called ‘the argument to design’. Equally we could call it ‘the argument from apparent design’, or for brevity ‘the design argument’.
Unlike some other traditional arguments for the existence of God the design argument was never meant to be apodeictic. In contrast the ontological argument was meant to be quite a priori and the cosmological argument almost so, requiring only the assertion that something contingently exists. The design argument is best thought of as an argument to the best explanation, such as we use in science and everyday life. The best explanation for the appearance of design in the world is said to be a designer.
(J. J. C. Smart, "Atheism and Theism," chap. 1 in Atheism and Theism, 2d ed., by J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane, Great Debates in Philosophy, ed. Ernest Sosa [Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003], 6-75, at 21-2)
Note from KBJ: Do you see why it's question-begging to refer to the teleological argument as "the argument from design"? The pithiest statement of the teleological argument I can come up with is this: The universe appears to be designed, so it probably was.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 