Question

I’ve heard you many times present the watchmaker argument as evidence for the existence of God. I’m trying to understand the argument in the modern world.
Evolution can explain why the universe appears so organized without any need for God, as you noted in the discussion in “Head-to-Head.” Still, you argued that the laws that created evolution (the laws of logic, for example) can prove God’s existence, because they point to some kind of order.
This argument seems a bit strange to me. Why should the laws of logic point to order? Isn’t it possible that any set of laws would have led to some kind of existence? The assumption in the argument is that there is order rather than chaos, and that proves someone imposed order. But when talking about the laws of logic, it seems strange to make claims about what would have happened had they not existed, since that is a reality we can’t examine. (That is, we can say that if a person did not have the ability to sweat, he would not be able to regulate his body during exertion and therefore would have gone extinct, because we can empirically test what would happen if reality were different. Not so for the laws of logic. Can we test what reality would look like with different laws? Or without laws? Maybe there would be a better universe? Maybe not.)