3.3.3 Teleological/Design Argument

Explains the unknown through reference to the known

An a posteriori deductive argument

Machines and boats

If things in the world which exhibit design and purpose have been built by intelligent creatures the assumption, by analogy, is that the world has been designed by an intelligent being.

P1. The world contains objects which have been designed and made for specific purposes.

P2. These objects have been designed and made by intelligent creatures

P3. The natural world appears to have been designed and made for a specific purpose.

C1. By analogy, the world has been designed by an intelligent being. 

C2. This intelligent being is God.

Order, Unity, Coherence, Design, and Complexity

• Begins ‘In crossing a heath…’

• Paley imagines finding a stone upon a heath and assuming its been there forever 

• However, if he came across a watch on the same heath, he would instead conclude that the watch has a designer who created it

• Why?

  • It exhibits spatial order and purpose 

    • It has several parts made with the right materials (like brass wheels and steel springs)  which work together for a purpose (to produce regulated motion)

  • This indicates that it has been designed 

  • Even though:

    • We don’t know the exact design process, its properties still mean we can conclude it has a designer

    • It may be faulty (for Paley this doesn’t mean it hasn’t been designed)

    • There is a possibility that it came to be due to some unknown natural process/law (even if this were true Paley argues that the law needs a law-maker)

    • There is a possibility that watches can make other watches so the one on the heath is just a product of a prior watch (but the watchmaking watch still exhibits spatial order and purpose so is designed)

A watch

The eye, a spider’s adaptation to be able to spin a web to catch its prey when it cannot fly

P1: Human artefacts (such as watches) are products of intelligent design 

P2: The universe resembles human artefacts (due to the spatial order and purpose it exhibits) 

C1: Therefore, the universe is a product of intelligent design. 

P3: The universe is complex and gigantic in comparison to human artefacts 

C2: Therefore, there is a powerful and vastly intelligent designer who created the universe

Spatial order is concerned with regularities of co-presence which is the arrangement of objects in space

Temporal order is concerned with regularities of succession which is the patterns of behaviour of objects over time

He highlights that the reason for evidence of design in nature may be a result of natural processes (like evolution) suggesting that nature is able to make living organisms which appear similar to ‘machines’. 

This explains the ‘regularities of co-presence’ in animals and plants.

P1. We observe spatial order in the universe, or things with complex structures, like a chameleon’s ability to camouflage

P2. Nature, or evolutionary theory, is responsible for this spatial order. It can be likened to a ‘machine-making machine’

P3. Humans make both machines and machine-making machines

C1. By analogy, nature is a machine-making machine and that requires a creator of the machine-making machine

Nature is only a machine-making machine with respect to specific occurrences in the universe and one shouldn’t conclude that nature itself is a machine-making machine. 

He admits the argument is fallacious due to its reliance on the ‘God of the gaps’.

Things which happen because of what came before, regularities of succession

• they occur either

  1. a)as the result of human free action (like when a human plants a seed)

     • explained by rational free agents with the intelligence, power and freedom to act

  2. b) as a natural phenomena (like when a seed is dispersed by the wind)

     • explained by more fundamental laws of nature (like gravity as the seed falls to the ground)

States that within a closed system the degree of disorder will always increase over time

1. Swinburne references the inviolable second law of Thermodynamics (the law that states that within a closed system the degree of disorder will always increase over time) 

2. This suggests that the universe should not be the ‘cosmos’, and as orderly, that it is.

3. So whilst everything within the universe conforms to the laws of nature, the existence of the universe itself does not. 

4. The explanation for why can therefore never be accounted for by science as science must assume the existence of natural laws and work within them.

5. As temporal regularities produced by human agency are similar to those produced by the laws of nature, BY ANALOGY, temporal regularities resulting from laws of nature could be explained by reference to a rational agent

6. Swinburne argues that a ‘divine orderer’ is the best explanation for temporal regularities resulting from laws of nature

7. The existence of a God as this is more probable than the universe being as it is due simply to chance.

‘A cosmos when conceivably it could have been a chaos’.

P1: Temporal regularities can be explained either by rational free agents with the intelligence, power and freedom to act or by fundamental laws of nature

P2: The existence of fundamental laws of nature violates the inviolable second law of Thermodynamics 

C1: Therefore, the fundamental laws of nature and existence of the universe cannot be explained by science as science must assume the existence of natural laws and work within them

P3: As temporal regularities produced by human agency are similar to those produced by the laws of nature,

P4: By analogy temporal regularities resulting from laws of nature could be explained by reference to a rational agent

P5: This is a more likely explanation than the universe existing due to chance

C2: The universe exists due to a divine rational agent

If the Universe has those properties which allow life (intelligent) to develop within it at some stage in its history, then one of the following must be true:

1. There exists one possible Universe designed' with the goal of generating and sustaining observers' (theological universe). Or...

2. The Universe is a fluke, a random object and we are just lucky it turned out with the right conditions.

3. The Universe is not fine-tuned, quite the opposite, life conditions are very rare, but life is robust. Plus, there can be other forms of life besides carbon-based life.

4. An ensemble of other different universes is necessary for the existence of our Universe (multiple universes)

The world is compatible with a single throw of dice and common sense is not foolish in suspecting the dice to have been loaded

Rather than relying on rare occurrences within the universe to make his argument, he references laws which apply to the universe as a whole.

He also evades the ‘God of the gaps’ problem as he illustrates that a natural, scientific explanation for the universe will never be found (as it violates the inviolable second law of thermodynamics).

Philo

Is God uncreated?

• If the order, complexity, design, unity and coherence of the world means that it must have been created by a complex mind, why not assume that this mind (which surely exhibits the same qualities) has a creator. 

• Why assume that God is the uncreated creator of the universe as by analogy, he too may have been the product of another mind.  

Is God good?

• Philo argues the presence of evil in the world suggests that the ‘good’ God Cleanthes credits may not be good after all. 

• Or if God is good, then he cannot be all-powerful as otherwise evil would not exist in his creation.

• Imperfections present in the world thus suggest that any God who created the world must himself be imperfect, in the same way that an unskilled mechanic might build a faulty boat. 

Lots of Gods?

• It does not follow that the world was created by just one God. 

• A boat may have many designers and mechanics building it so maybe the world has many designers

An incompetent God?

• The world may simply be a prototype for a superior world.  

• A perfect boat is the result of an art which ‘after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving’. 

• Maybe the planet is one of these mistakes having been ‘been botched and bungled’ by some incompetent being

The epicurean hypothesis 

• The appearance of design in nature may just be the result of natural processes -  the Epicurean hypothesis

• In the way that plants and animals exist as the results of natural processes, Philo suggests that their apparent coherence and design may simply be the result of these processes

Philo thus never denies the possibility nor the probability of God’s existence as a creator of the world, simply the nature of God himself through his previous criticisms. As put by Cleanthes, Hume, through Philo, never gets rid of the hypothesis of design in the universe, but are obliged at every turn to have recourse to it.’

• When the design argument describes spatial order, we expect to see throughout the universe the incredible arrangement of the different parts of the natural world, fitting together and working to some purpose.

• But this is not what everyone sees. 

• Philo imagines asking someone who hadn't seen the world to describe a universe made by a powerful, wise and benevolent God. 

• The universe they would describe would be very different from this one - as this universe, Philo notes, contains too much 'vice and misery and disorder' to justify belief in such a God. 

• So, the design argument ignores all the spatial disorders, faults and flaws in the universe.

• Philo is proposing that this disorder in the arrangement and running of the universe is because the creator/designer of the universe lacked the power, skill or love to create a universe with less disorder.

William Paley is aware that spatial disorder presents problems to the design argument but he doesn't think the issue of spatial disorder is fatal to the design argument

Paley argues that whether or not a watch actually works well is irrelevant; what is important is that the watch has qualities that indicate to us that it has been designed. 

The same goes for the universe - spatial disorder does not matter if there is evidence of an arrangement of parts functioning together for a purpose.

Hume does not believe that we can observe causation; instead, we should think of causation as our experience that two events are 'constantly conjoined?

• ‘Caused’ really means ‘Constant conjunction' - constantly (always) observed together (conjoined)

  • So Event X causes event Y  really means We have repeatedly observed events of type X in conjunction with events of type Y'

    • e.g. me releasing my pen caused it to fall actually means I have repeatedly observed that the release of my pen is followed by it falling

• So "X was designed by Y” really means “We have repeatedly observed designed objects of type X in conjunction with designers of type Y”

• We have observed event Y which is the existence of the universe, however we have never observed event X which caused the existence of the universe, and so we cannot make any inference about the cause of the universe as we do not have any knowledge of how a universe is brought about.

P1 Design arguments make the inference that this universe and its properties were caused by a designer. 

P2 We can make an inference that X caused Y' only if we have repeatedly observed event X conjoined to event Y. 

P3 We have observed only one universe - this universe - and its properties are a unique case. 

P4 And we have never observed the origins of any universe. 

C1 Therefore we cannot make any inference about the cause (and origins) of this universe and its properties. 

C2 Therefore design arguments are based on an invalid inference.

Argues that experts such as cosmologists often make inferences (for example, that there was a Big Bang) based on unique cases (for example, background cosmic radiation) when studying the universe.

• Hume/Philo proposes that the appearance of order/design may be due to 'generation or vegetation' - natural processes analogous to the growth of plants.

• Hume's speculations have been confirmed by Darwin

• Hume offers another naturalistic explanation, known as the Epicurean hypothesis, which can also account for order in the universe without reference to God. 

• There is a very high probability that a random system, over a very long/infinite period of time, will have periods of order and stability. 

• This universe could currently be in that period of stability and appear to us as if it were designed.

Immanuel Kant states that the design argument does not warrant the conclusion that God exists, as the cause must be in proportion to the evidence. 

For Kant, when we examine human artefacts, we are entitled to conclude that they have properties that indicate they were designed - and that there was a designer. 

But, crucially, designers such as watch-makers use materials that are available to them - they do not create the materials (the glass, the metal, the leather)

Kant concludes that the most the design argument demonstrates is a worldly architect', but not a creator of the world.

In the late twentieth century, Richard Dawkins (1941-) proposed that the central unit of natural selection was the gene, and that it was genetic mutation that leads to a variation in physical characteristics. 

Some of these characteristics enable a plant/animal and their offspring to be better able to survive and reproduce - the organism becomes better "adapted' to its environment.

Uses the term ‘Blind Watchmaker’ to describe evolution

Design arguments from analogy take this form - 

P1 X and Y have similar features

P2 Xs are caused by a designer

C Therefore Ys are caused by a designer

• Analogies are strongest when the things being compared are very similar and weakest when there are very few similarities

  • Philo suggests that there are very few similarities between the universe and a machine

  • Plus Cleanthes has to infer from a tiny observable part of the universe to the universe as a whole (fallacy of composition)

  • So the analogy is weak

• Philo thus argues that there is very little we can conclude about what, if anything designed the universe

• Cleanthes aims to show that the universe is like a machine

• Philo suggests it resembles something more organic like a plant not a watch 

• Any appearance of functioning parts working towards some goal may be caused by ‘generation or vegetation’ not by ‘reason or design’

• Plants have no designer and are the result of natural processes

• By analogy the ordered universe doesn’t need a designer, may be the result of natural processes

Cleanthes ignores bad traits of a designer which could render its product crap, links to the criticisms of the conclusion