[maurile]

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Now if something as simple as a wooden chair can't just "happen" the book argues that something as complicated as humans, cell structures, plants, animals, countless laws of physics that govern the universe could not have just "happened".

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We already know how chairs are made: people craft them out of wood using various tools and stuff.

We also already know how plants are formed. They grow from seeds. Nobody crafts them using any tools or anything.

If we didn't already know these things -- if we truly came across a chair in a desert and we had never seen a chair before and had no clue as to how they were made -- then we would be foolish to conclude that it was crafted by a designer. Maybe it was, or maybe it was formed more like a plant: it somehow grew from a seed. Or maybe there's some other possibility.

So the analogy fails. You can't say "chairs are made by people, therefore plants are made by people." Plants are not made by people.

The fact is that there are several different ways things can end up looking "designed." One is for them to actually have been designed (like a chair). Another is for them to have biologically evolved (like a plant). And importantly, there is no foolproof way of looking at an object we've never seen before and knowing whether it was designed or evolved (or something else).

(There are certain traits we can look for, however, that will give hints. Forms that have biologically evolved are often "designed" rather stupidly in certain ways due to their peculiar evolutionary history. Thus we see whales with remnants of hind limbs, humans with remnants of tail bones, fish that live in pitch-black caves that have non-functioning eyes, etc. A designer would be unlikely to include such useless features, although we can't rule out the possibility that the designer was just really stupid. So as I said, there's no foolproof way for distinguishing between evolved entities and designed entities.)