Darrow on Design and Order

In the infamous Scopes "Monkey Trial", Clarence Darrow pointed out the circularity in the argument from design:

"To say that a certain scheme or process shows order or system, one must have some norm or pattern by which to determine whether the matter concerned shows any design or order. We have a norm, a pattern, and that is the universe itself, from which we fashion our ideas. We have observed this universe and its operation and we call it order. To say that the universe is patterned on order is to say that the universe is patterned on the universe. It can mean nothing else."

What constitutes order or randomness, pattern or chaos, communication or gibberish, clarity or incomprehensibility is contingent on the beholder.

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", is often proffered by way of accounting for tastes. There are differences between individuals and cultures across both space and time. Poetry that moved me as a child I now regard with that certain condescension inflected with embarrassment. Should time gentle me through another thirty years to my biblical allotment, I will no doubt be profoundly moved by another set of verses largely incomprehensible to me now.

Piaget and his heirs in developmental psychology have, in a series of ingenious experiments, shown that aspects of our understanding of the real world develop at particular points in childhood. I don't know whether the appearance of these are pre-wired or they are learned. It would seem inasmuch as these are the "origins of order", it might have some impact on the force of Darrow's argument.

If we are pre-wired to recognize object permanence (the belief that objects do not cease to exist when we cease to see them) then it would seem on the face of it that to assume, as Darrow does, that we learn this pattern from the universe, is false. On the other hand, if we assume that this skill evolved, this mechanism for recognizing order in the universe would itself have been the product of that order.