However, what he says is true. If something has been designed, it has to have had a designer. Obviously. So that's God proven, and we can all go home, right? Of course not, because the whole argument is nonsense. You are not proving anything here, nothing at all. You are merely giving a definition for a word. Of course a design must have a designer, because that is the nature of a design. It's something which has been designed by someone, and someone who designs things is, by definition, given the name 'designer'. Similarly, use the words 'creation' and 'creator' in the same way.

So the question, the argument, or the 'proof' that there must be a designer (in this case God) is nonsense, because it assumes that we have established, indeed proven, that what we are talking about (the universe) is actually something which falls under the category of 'design', or 'creation'.

At no time do those who use this argument attempt to justify their claim that the universe was designed. They start from the unproven base point that the universe was designed. It just was. No debate, no justification. That's what they assume. Incorrectly assume, of course.

But how much design went into universe? We can look at its beauty, look at the stars and the galaxies, and imagine that someone put them all there in a visually pleasing arrangement, but that's all we are doing, imagining. The fact that galaxies form certain patterns is fascinating, but it isn't evidence of design. It's evidence that the laws of physics are acting upon the contents of space, matter, energy, and all the building-blocks of the cosmos, and at a particular place in the universe a galaxy formed, according to those laws.

If this is design, then are we saying that if I throw a handful of sand into the air, the particular pattern its millions of grains of sand leaves was purposefully designed by me? Did I know how those grains would fall to the ground? Was I ever able to influence their final positions? No, because all I did was set the sand in motion, and the laws of physics took over and led to the final pattern at my feet.

This is not design. However, it is an example of cause and effect. Without the cause, ie the fact that I picked up the sand and threw it, there would be no effect, in this case a scattering of the sand on the floor. Going back to the universe, we can now apply 'cause and effect' to everything we see, rather than 'design equals designer'. The universe exists (we know that because we can see quite a lot of it), so we have an 'effect', namely 'the universe got to be the way it is'. So the big, big, big question is, naturally, how? Or in other words, what is the cause? What put in motion something so huge that the end result was our universe?

Science says 'the Big Bang', and has a substantial amount of solid evidence to back up that rather large claim. Christianity, and indeed Judaism, says, 'God did it', and offers a couple of lines in Genesis to make its case, along with many intellectual arguments, essentially all of them faith-based, with no backing from hard, scientific evidence whatsoever.

Lack of solid evidence for God's involvement aside, is this proof that God was the designer of the universe? No, because if God created the universe, he used the Big Bang to do it. We know that, because the science behind the Big Bang Theory (reminder: in science, theory = explanation) is so solid and all-encompassing. If anything, the Big Bang was the most cataclysmic 'throwing of sand' possible. All energy and matter expanded from a single point at tremendous speed, and after approximately 14 billions years it all ended up where it is now... although I've missed out a few details there, naturally!

At best, this is a deist version of God, setting the process in motion but having no further influence on events. Such a God did not sit down and design anything, and certainly did not have a plan in mind. Did God, a supernatural being, cause the Big Bang? We don't know. Did 10,000 supernatural beings cause the Big Bang. Equally, we don't know. What then gave rise to the Big Bang. Again, we simply do not know.

The universe happened. We know that because we live in it. And although we don't know why it came about, we do know a lot about what happened once things had been set in motion. We know that the universe was not designed. We therefore know that there was no designer. The universe as we see it was not created 'as is', so there was no creator. We cannot prove that God, or a team of gods, or a hive-collective of Borg-like beings did or did not set the universe in motion, 14 billion years ago. So the nonsense statements from people like Kirk Cameron, that a banana is evidence of God's wonderful design skills, or that creation must have a creator, are just that - nonsense. These people never at any point attempt to prove that 'creation', as they call, it was actually created. They just say it was, and hope you didn't notice. They have no proof, no evidence, no argument. No chance.