Pete, from what I hear on TV and blogs, Neil deGrasse Tyson and others have questioned whether what we think of as "nothing" is really void of everything that is capable of growing into something. I really don't know too much as to what I'm talking about but I'm picking up on an idea that has been described. What is the nature of "nothing"?

The philosophical problem is that if a god were the First Cause, then would it not be fair to postulate that something else caused the First Cause making it the Second Cause? That's the Cosmological Argument as I understand it.

Quantum mechanics also seems to take issue with the Teleological Argument that somehow everything was made perfect by a god, the basis of the book "The Blind Watchmaker" by Dawkins which assumes that using the analogy of the air liner, some one idea made that perfection happen. It of course was man made and some would argue that it wasn't perfect. There are flies in the Evolutionary ointment as well with such creatures as the lungfish, who was a transition from amphibian to terrestrial life, a complete "flop" as it were being neither good at sea or on land.

When the so-called perfection of a bacteria was used as evidence to suggest that a god made it because it was so self-contained, it was revealed that it had antecedents that were less so and were a part of its development, in the Kitzmiller vrs. Dover, Pennsylvania case defending "creationism". There was a dramatic moment in which the "perfection" of this bacteria, which was said to be self-contained in its perfection was shown to be a part of an evolutionary process disclosed by a number of scientific books dumped on the table of the creationist lawyers. Hence, perfection was relative.

The so-called grand design has peculiarities which could be called flaws if it were done by a supreme engineer.