Apollo and Daphne

Suppose you discovered Bernini's Apollo and Daphne on a desert island. The island has no human inhabitants. And there's no other evidence that it ever had human inhabitants. Still, you conclude that the statue is an artifact. It didn't pop into existence uncaused. It did not and could not have a natural cause. 

That's analogous to the cosmological argument. But that's very coarse-grained. A more fine-grained argument is the teleological argument. That's more powerful, runs much deeper.

The original slab of marble didn't select for that particular sculpture. There are so many different sculptures that might be made from the same block of marble. And they're mutually exclusive. If a sculptor carves it one way, he can't carve it another way. He has to make a choice.

Possibilities greatly outnumber actualities. Although the size, shape, and texture of the material impose built-in limitations on the number of potential sculptures in that block of marble, yet for every sculpture, there's ever so many alternate sculptures. So it's not just a question of why there's something rather than nothing, but why there's this particular something rather than another something.

The block of marble doesn't really contain the sculpture. Rather, the sculpture began as an idea. The sculpture represents the union of something conceptual with something concrete. A relation between the block of marble and something outside the marble. The sculptor has a mental image which he instantiates in the physical medium of the marble. 

It would be absurd to say time and chance can produce the sculpture. Rather, it takes intelligence to make a selection from the panoply of abstract possibilities and actualize that one possibility to the exclusion of all other candidates. In a sense, intelligence is a simplifying device.