God. Real. Right.

The teleological argument is also called the argument from design. It goes like this:

• Things that are designed have a designer.
• The universe is designed (as appearances reveal).
• Therefore, the universe has a designer (what we call God).

David Hume points out a major problem with that argument in this way: Sometimes it is not so apparent that the world is well-designed. A night sky is fine, but what about spiders that eat their mates, or children who starve to death? The response of Christians is generally eschatological in nature–that is, it appeals to a future, perfected state. “Of course things don’t appear perfectly designed right now, but that’s because of the fall. Once Adam sinned, the design became marred or obscured by evil.” But then Hume’s point hits home. “You want me to believe an argument based on the appearance of design yet claim that the design actually is not apparent, but will be at some point in the future. That kind of argument appeals not to reason but to a leap of faith into invisible data. It’s not rational; it’s purely religious.”
The interesting thing is that evolution can do exactly the same thing. Consider some feature of a population, say “X”. The question is whether X is a result of evolution or not. If X is survival-beneficial (like having teeth, or a large brain) then it is easy to assign it as a product of evolution. It is the very definition of evolution that survival-beneficial features tend to dominate a population or species. Such a claim is certainly not proof that evolution actually produced X, but given the context of evolutionary theory, it “obviously” did, simply because, well, “there it is in a surviving organism.”
But suppose X is not necessarily survival-beneficial, at least not in any apparent way (like having an appendix, or a leftover naval mark, or not having a third eye in the back of the head). If X is not apparently survival beneficial, the evolutionist’s response may be theoretically absolute or may be chronological. But either way, it is oddly similar to the religious answer Hume points out in the teleological argument. That is, as a theoretical claim, evolutionists simply point out that evolution is a sufficing mechanism, not a perfecting one. That is, it is sufficient to promote survival, but not to produce perfection. Now on the assumption (a big one, but necessary to evolutionary thought) that perfection is optimal survivability, any as yet imperfect features should be weeded out given enough time and variation. So the theoretical answer actually collapses into the chronological one, which is this: that even though X may not promote survival, it is a product of an as-yet (and perhaps permanently) incomplete process, not of an already fulfilled reality.
Odd, isn’t it? Features which promote survival are given as evidence of evolution just as features of design are given as evidence of a designer. Features which lack any survival-promoting appearances are presumed evidence of an incomplete process just as features of imperfect design are presumed evidence of an incomplete process. Yet few evolutionary thinkers with which I am familiar recognize the religious nature of their loyalty to the as-yet-unfulfilled core of their paradigm. But perhaps that current faith in a theory will one day be replaced with the hard evidence of a fact once survival’s perfection is achieved and Charles Darwin finally returns to the Eastern Gate.