Amazingly, it’s the chief objection raised to religious belief by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. It’s also a complaint you hear all the time in response to intelligent design. Regarding the “natural temptation…to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself,” Dawkins replies:
The temptation is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.
Is that a zinger? Or not? In just slightly less sophisticated language, one of our kids, age 9, asked me recently with a look of puzzled concern, “Who made God?”
Whether you think of the problem in terms of a designer or a deity — intelligent design has good reason for not specifying — here’s a quick video in which Discovery Institute’s Jay Richards dispatches Dawkins in just two minutes and 14 seconds. Watch it.