Christopher Hitchens on The argument from design
Hitchens saw the design argument as refuted by evolution and undermined by the sheer cruelty and waste of the natural world.
Hitchens was not a scientist, but he understood the scientific case against design well enough to prosecute it in debate. His primary weapon was the manifest cruelty and inefficiency of the natural world: parasites, predation, extinction, waste on a cosmic scale. If this is design, he argued, the designer is either incompetent or malicious.
He pointed to specific biological horrors — parasitic wasps that lay eggs inside living caterpillars, the recurrent laryngeal nerve in giraffes that takes an absurd detour, the overwhelming majority of species that went extinct long before humans appeared. None of this looks like the work of an intelligent, benevolent designer. It looks exactly like what evolution by natural selection would produce: functional enough to survive, indifferent to suffering.
Hitchens treated the design argument as fundamentally pre-Darwinian — an argument that once had some intuitive force but was rendered obsolete by the discovery of natural selection. Anyone who still advances it, he implied, is either ignorant of biology or dishonest about it.
“Is it too modern to notice that there is nothing intelligent about the design?”