Tom Parson's List: The Design Argument

• There are various philosophical objections to this argument, many of which can be found in the Secular Web's section on "Argument to Design." For my part, I've always felt that the most elegant objection was to point out how the argument sabotages itself with its own logic before it even gets off the ground. The whole argument rests on the premise that organized complexity must be the product of an intelligent designer. Yet, in the conclusion, this very premise is violated without so much as the batting of an eyelash! A being of organized complexity (God) is conjured up without a designer. This is not playing by the rules laid out in the argument. In fact, it is a gross violation of the rules, since God would likely be the most complex being of all.
• • Organized complexity is the product of conscious design or natural selection. 
  • Intelligence is an example of organized complexity.  
  • Thus, intelligence is the product of conscious design or natural selection.  
  • Intelligent beings are capable of designing intelligence (i.e. computer artificial intelligence programmed by humans).  
  • However, only one mechanism has been discovered that can produce intelligence without requiring the existence of a prior intelligence. That mechanism is evolution through natural selection.  
  • Thus, the first intelligence evolved.  
  • Evolution requires:  
     
    1. Self replication (heredity) with slightly imperfect copying fidelity (mutation).  
    2. An environment that can favor one replicator over another (competition).  
    3. Time for (a) and (b) to manifest themselves.  
     
  • None of the conditions in (7) were present before the existence of the universe.  
  • Thus, intelligence did not exist prior to the universe.  
  • Therefore, the universe did not have an intelligent creator. 

• William Paley's Natural Theology
• For what makes an artifact an artifact is the fact that it was made: not that it is something of mind-boggling complexity; but that it is something of a kind which does not grow on trees, and is not to be found in untrodden territories.
• But now remember Hume's fundamental insight, that we do not and cannot know a priori that any particular thing or sort of thing either must be or cannot be the cause of any other particular thing or sort of thing. For anyone maintaining either that these characteristics cannot result from interactions between entities not themselves possessed of them, or that they cannot correctly be attributed to anything through and through material, the crucial question--as always absent special revelation--is how this is supposed to be known. For our only natural knowledge of such characteristics is obtained because, and in as much as, they are characteristics possessed by ourselves and by other members of that very special class of creatures of too, too solid flesh to which all of us belong.

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• According to the cosmological argument to design, or fine-tuning argument, even if the origin of all life on Earth can be explained in terms of impersonal natural processes, the mere fact that the universe allows life to exist in the first place is evidence of intelligent design.
• For instance, for life as we know it to evolve, there must be an unlikely combination of just the right initial conditions and just the right values of a wide variety of physical constants (so-called anthropic coincidences). If any one of the values of several dozen physical constants wasn't "set" to a value extremely close to the actual value we find, then life would not be possible in our universe. The unlikelihood of the universe forming with just the right conditions to allow life by chance is presented as evidence that those conditions were actually set by an intelligent being in order to produce life.

  • Surely this can never be proved or disproved??

• While preparing, it dawned on me that the case against evolution foundered on an ambiguity between two meanings of the simple word "creation": the concept of general creation, and the concept of special creation.

     

  To believe in the theological doctrine of general creation is merely to believe in a God who created the universe. Clearly, I could, without inconsistency, believe in general creation and also believe in the Theory of Evolution. I simply had to regard Darwinian natural selection as one of the laws of nature that God built into his creation.

     

  To believe in special creation is to believe in addition that God, in a series of subsequent acts, created the first living organisms and then, at different times, each of the different species.
• Yet I still wasn't ready to abandon the gods altogether. For a time I sought intellectual comfort in the best arguments of natural religion: the First Cause and Design arguments. Both have appeal to those who don't believe in revelation but still believe there must be some sort of Supreme Being or Higher Power who made the universe the way it is. Without being aware of the fact, I was embracing the position of the deists - thinkers like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and David Hume - none of whose writings I'd yet read.
• For then you've got two things whose existence demands to be explained. And appeal to a third, then a fourth, and so on, only increases the burden. Asking for explanations within the universe is profitable. But asking for explanations of the universe launches you on a quest for a cause that eludes you forever.
• singling out remaining gaps in our understanding of biological phenomena as suitable places for inserting the hand of God. Why pick on the unknowns of evolution, I wondered? Why not invoke the almighty to explain what yet remained for science to discover about the precise mechanisms behind the occurrence of earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes? Or diseases, for that matter? The Old Testament made God the direct cause of all such dread occurrences. Yet Creationists were silent on the issue.
• Evolutionary theory itself doesn't pretend to explain biogenesis, how the first forms of life began. That is the province of other areas of science: organic chemistry and molecular biology among them. So far as I know scientists haven't yet reached a consensus on which account will stand the test of scientific scrutiny. But there's no good reason to suppose that present gaps in our understanding can't be filled in future.
• According to them the hand of an intelligent designer is needed to explain what they call the "irreducible complexity" of some organisms - those whose simpler parts, in their view, would not have had survival value and hence could not have been put together by the mechanisms of evolution. Alleged examples include biogenesis, the flagella of E. coli, and the human immune system.
• Behe, for example, accepts the broad outline of evolutionary theory. He accepts the idea "that all organisms share a common ancestor", for instance. But he insists that irreducible complexity can only be explained by the intervention of an intelligent designer. Behe accepts evolution so long as it is punctuated with acts of creation. His position can be described as that of a theistic quasi-evolutionist.
• The chattering classes seldom explore the details of Behe's position. What matters to them is that here we have a biochemist proclaiming that no-one working in his discipline has managed to understand how life works at the molecular level. The result of their cumulative failure, Behe claims, "is a loud, clear, piercing cry of 'Design'." Continuing, he writes: "the result is so unambiguous and so significant that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements of the history of science."
• Eighteenth century William Paley had argued that these could only have been produced by a Great Watchmaker. Dawkins argues to the contrary, that the laws of nature themselves - including those of evolution - have worked by themselves to produce all the wonders of nature before which we stand in awe. Nature is the designer: it is a "Blind Watchmaker" that has no prevision of its final product.
• What can they say when confronted by evidence of the age of the cosmos and our planet? Or evidence that life began on earth over 4 billion years ago, that dinosaurs became extinct some 63 million years ago, and that fossils of our hominid ancestors have been shown by potassiumargon dating to be well over 3 million years old?
• But, of course, they don't say this. Rather, they tack on an ancillary hypothesis that "saves" their story by making it unfalsifiable. They adopt the ploy of nineteenth century Philip Gosse and say that God created the universe with all this contrary evidence - all the accoutrements of grand deception - built into it. They can then say that God put the fossils, for example, in place so as to "test our faith". It seems not to bother them that this hypothesis makes God the perpetrator of an enormous hoax as well. A great deceiver, not just a great designer. Of course, a God who would play that sort of mind-game could also have created the universe just two minutes ago, replete with all evidence to the contrary including our pseudo-memories of having been alive well before that. There's no way to disprove that creation story either.
• So you don't know how nature could have been assembled the parts of an organism exhibiting complexity? Label the complexity "irreducible" and attribute it to an intelligent designer.
• Faith-based. Not evidence-based.
• The vague postulate that the designer is some intelligent being or other isn't falsifiable. So ID theory doesn't even meet this requirement for scientific status.
• And there's another problem. Suppose you've settled on the text favoured by most ID supporters: the Bible. Then, whether you're a biblical literalist or figurativist, you're faced with a dilemma. Either God doesn't mean what he says in his texts, or he doesn't know how to say what he does mean. So either his word can't be relied on, or he's linguistically incompetent. Neither quite fits with the theistic concept of a perfect being.
• If you think an intelligent designer designed the universe, then how about the unsavoury aspects of his design? Disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes.
• Or do you think you can stop just one tier up? We know that the spatio-temporal world exists. Why not stop there and accept it as a brute fact? Why postulate a creator and then - refusing to set foot on the infinite regress of explanations - take his existence, instead, as a brute fact? Isn't it more comforting, as well as more rational, to believe in design by impersonal forces of nature rather than design by a personal deity who's guilty of wanting it that way?

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• • Demea plays somewhat the role of Galileo's  Simplicio. His main role is to pose arguments that the other two players can  demolish, or to ask questions that give the other two characters  opportunities to elaborate their positions. He believes God is so unknowable  and inscrutable that any effort by humans to describe God borders on  sacrilege by assigning to God the limited and corrupt attributes of human  beings. He states his position pretty clearly in Part III by saying
   
   

   

   

  The infirmities of our nature do not permit us to reach any ideas, which  in the least correspond to the ineffable sublimity of the divine attributes.

   

   

   
   
  • Philo is the hard-headed skeptic who sees paradoxes  and inconsistencies in every line of argument, sees alternate  interpretations for every observation, and who thus essentially believes  nothing can be known for certain. His arguments are most nearly those of the  modern skeptic. Hume at times lets him go over the top and express extreme  ideas, which are then tempered a bit for the sake of more sensitive  readers.  
     
   
  • Cleanthes is the pragmatic skeptic, who is keenly aware of the limitations  of logic and observation but who nevertheless believes our mental picture of  sense impressions and logical inferences is too real to dismiss entirely. It is  Cleanthes who articulates the Argument From  Design.
• Outline of the Book
• Demea is mortified at the comparison of God to a human artisan. Philo argues that we cannot validly argue by comparing what we observe in a small part of the universe to the universe as a whole.
• Cleanthes points out that what is actually observed in nature could hardly be more surprising, or more clearly indicative of intelligence.
• Cleanthes demolishes Demea by pointing out that a mind which has no thought is not a mind, and a view of God that makes him utterly unknowable is not very different from atheism.
• and pretty well lays out the modern skeptical opposition to the Argument from Design, asking why, if ideas in God's mind organize themselves without cause, why matter couldn't do the same thing.
• He points out that humans are in no better position to judge whether the universe is well designed than an illiterate peasant is to evaluate the Aeneid.
• Philo argues that the appearance of order in nature could simply derive from the nature of matter itself. Cleanthes argues that the features of nature that are advantageous to humans proves the existence of a benevolent intelligence.

• The Case Against the Argument From Design

     
   
  • We cannot validly reason from earthly parallels to the Universe as a whole.
   
  • Since the creation of the universe was a unique event, we cannot say  anything about it.
   
  • The order in nature could equally well result from the intrinsic  properties of matter itself.
   
  • The existence of pain and suffering cast serious doubt on the existence of  a benevolent Intelligence.
• • Matter and the laws of nature are defined a priori to be separate  from any intelligent design.
   
  • Order in nature is shown to be the result of the laws of nature and the  properties of matter
   
  • Therefore order in nature is not the result of intelligent design

• In Part VII, Philo describes that in Indian mythology, the universe was spun by a great spider, and goes on to say:

     

     

  And were there a planet wholly inhabited by spiders (which is very possible) this inference would there appear as natural and irrefragible as that which in our planet ascribes the origin of all things to design and intelligence, as explained by Cleanthes.

• This argument is so wonderfully naive and blatantly anthropomorphic one hardly knows where to begin. A good starting point is to say duh..., any primitive intelligent species is likely to picture God as a larger version of itself. Spiders on this planet don't, as far as we know, have any conception of God so we don't need to worry about what they think, if indeed they have any more cognition than a personal computer.

     

  So Philo's hypothetical spider planet would have to be inhabited by intelligent spiders. Just as human thinkers in Hume's day had long since concluded that it was mere imagination to picture God in human form, by the time Philo's spiders reached a similar level of development, the more intelligent ones should have gotten over their primitive arachnomorphism and reached the same conclusion. No doubt their artists would still picture God as a spider, but they would realize that was an image, not necessarily reality. (The only people on our planet who really seem to believe God is an old man with a long white beard are cartoonists and atheists.)
• Spider webs, of course, are a matter of biology rather than conscious effort, but a race of spiders that remained at that level would be unlikely to have enough consciousness to speculate about God. Who knows what sorts of webs intelligent spiders might spin? (Just imagine the webs a spider mathematician might weave!) And even if we postulate a race of spiders that did nothing but spin webs and engage in philosophy while waiting for hapless flies, this argument still embodies the fundamental circularity of assuming that complexity in nature (spinnerets and spider webs in this case) are not the result of design, then using their "naturalness" to "prove" that the complexity is not the result of design.
• Moral: If something looks complex enough to be of intelligent design, one possible interpretation is always that it is of intelligent design. It may not be, but in the absence of disconfirming evidence, intelligent design is always a viable hypothesis. We can say that it's not the only possible explanation, maybe even that it's not the most likely explanation, but it's extremely hard to dismiss the idea entirely. Intelligent design is always a possible interpretation of any sufficiently complex object.
• Hume accurately described the Argument From Design as "useless"
• Still, it's legitimate to raise the possibility that order in the universe arises solely from the properties of the universe itself. Or is it? We know that some cases of complex order are the result of intelligent design. We do not know that any other origin for complex order is possible. What basis do we have even for postulating such a possibility?  The bottom line is that none of the criticisms of the Argument From Design are compelled by any empirical or logical evidence; they are inspired solely by the desire to discredit the Argument From Design for the sake of discrediting it.
• By way of analogy, consider a chess board well into the game. Is this a product of intelligent design? The pieces might very well look randomly arrayed, although a skilled player could easily spot that some arrangements cannot be achieved in normal play. For example, one side cannot lack a king, or have a pawn in its own back row. There is a checkmate position involving a king and two knights against a lone king, but it cannot be achieved in normal play (the lone king can always evade checkmate). But there would be many positions that are ambiguous. For every masterful position Cleanthes cites as clear evidence of intelligence, Philo cites one with two passed pawns. Cleanthes suggests that some positions are artificially created as problems; Philo accuses him of creating ad hoc excuses to avoid acknowledging failures of the design hypothesis. Cleanthes argues the pieces are clearly of intelligent manufacture; Philo notes that seashells are even more intricate and are wholly natural. Cleanthes points to the geometric regularity of the board; Philo cites crystals and honeycombs as equally regular but natural structures.
• The reason chess has been played as long and seriously as it has is not because people like the pieces and the board (a nice chess board and set has esthetic appeal because of our reverence for the game), but because a very sparse set of rules leads to a fantastic variety of possible outcomes. And it's in the rules, not in the pieces, the board, or any particular arrangement on the board, that we must look for intelligence. (Chess isn't a perfect analogy. There are ad hoc rules like capturing en passant. The Japanese game Go might be a better analogy for pure intelligent design, but chess is more familiar.)
• Philo, of course, has not been asleep at the wheel. He would point out that the beauty of chess is rooted in the underlying laws of logic and mathematics in the universe. He would also point to hypotheses that perhaps there are many universes, and we merely occupy one where the laws of physics allow matter to evolve into complex forms.

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• People can, and are, going about extensive observing programs looking for planets around other stars, with a good deal of success recently. So not only can they exist, but we now know a few that actually do. 

    On the other hand, there is no way to observe any universe other than our own. This is not a practical issue (like there not being good enough telescopes), but rather a fundamental theoretical issue. By definition, our universe is self-contained. No other universe can affect anything in our universe, so we cannot gather evidence about its existence. 
• People can, and are, going about extensive observing programs looking for planets around other stars, with a good deal of success recently. So not only can they exist, but we now know a few that actually do. 

    On the other hand, there is no way to observe any universe other than our own. This is not a practical issue (like there not being good enough telescopes), but rather a fundamental theoretical issue. By definition, our universe is self-contained. No other universe can affect anything in our universe, so we cannot gather evidence about its existence. 
• People can, and are, going about extensive observing programs looking for planets around other stars, with a good deal of success recently. So not only can they exist, but we now know a few that actually do. 

    On the other hand, there is no way to observe any universe other than our own. This is not a practical issue (like there not being good enough telescopes), but rather a fundamental theoretical issue. By definition, our universe is self-contained. No other universe can affect anything in our universe, so we cannot gather evidence about its existence. 
• People can, and are, going about extensive observing programs looking for planets around other stars, with a good deal of success recently. So not only can they exist, but we now know a few that actually do. 

    On the other hand, there is no way to observe any universe other than our own. This is not a practical issue (like there not being good enough telescopes), but rather a fundamental theoretical issue. By definition, our universe is self-contained. No other universe can affect anything in our universe, so we cannot gather evidence about its existence. 
• People can, and are, going about extensive observing programs looking for planets around other stars, with a good deal of success recently. So not only can they exist, but we now know a few that actually do. 

    On the other hand, there is no way to observe any universe other than our own. This is not a practical issue (like there not being good enough telescopes), but rather a fundamental theoretical issue. By definition, our universe is self-contained. No other universe can affect anything in our universe, so we cannot gather evidence about its existence. 

• The Answer

     People can, and are, going about extensive observing programs looking for planets around other stars, with a good deal of success recently. So not only can they exist, but we now know a few that actually do. 

    On the other hand, there is no way to observe any universe other than our own. This is not a practical issue (like there not being good enough telescopes), but rather a fundamental theoretical issue. By definition, our universe is self-contained. No other universe can affect anything in our universe, so we cannot gather evidence about its existence. 

  • Use in essay
• People can, and are, going about extensive observing programs looking for planets around other stars, with a good deal of success recently. So not only can they exist, but we now know a few that actually do. 

    On the other hand, there is no way to observe any universe other than our own. This is not a practical issue (like there not being good enough telescopes), but rather a fundamental theoretical issue. By definition, our universe is self-contained. No other universe can affect anything in our universe, so we cannot gather evidence about its existence. 

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• In fact, this argument was presented more than a century ago by the astronomer Laplace, who  was the first to present a complete theory for the origin and evolution of the solar system, a theory, by  the way, that it is still considered pretty much correct. He presented his theory to the National  Academy of France, and Napoleon was there. At the end of his presentation, Napoleon asked Laplace,  "Monsieur Laplace, what about God?" And Laplace looked at Napoleon, and he said, "I don't need  that hypothesis anymore." And there lies the key. God is a hypothesis that we formulate, that we  could come up with, when we don't understand what is really going on.
• In fact, this argument was presented more than a century ago by the astronomer Laplace, who  was the first to present a complete theory for the origin and evolution of the solar system, a theory, by  the way, that it is still considered pretty much correct. He presented his theory to the National  Academy of France, and Napoleon was there. At the end of his presentation, Napoleon asked Laplace,  "Monsieur Laplace, what about God?" And Laplace looked at Napoleon, and he said, "I don't need  that hypothesis anymore." And there lies the key. God is a hypothesis that we formulate, that we  could come up with, when we don't understand what is really going on.
• In fact, this argument was presented more than a century ago by the astronomer Laplace, who  was the first to present a complete theory for the origin and evolution of the solar system, a theory, by  the way, that it is still considered pretty much correct. He presented his theory to the National  Academy of France, and Napoleon was there. At the end of his presentation, Napoleon asked Laplace,  "Monsieur Laplace, what about God?" And Laplace looked at Napoleon, and he said, "I don't need  that hypothesis anymore." And there lies the key. God is a hypothesis that we formulate, that we  could come up with, when we don't understand what is really going on.
• In fact, this argument was presented more than a century ago by the astronomer Laplace, who  was the first to present a complete theory for the origin and evolution of the solar system, a theory, by  the way, that it is still considered pretty much correct. He presented his theory to the National  Academy of France, and Napoleon was there. At the end of his presentation, Napoleon asked Laplace,  "Monsieur Laplace, what about God?" And Laplace looked at Napoleon, and he said, "I don't need  that hypothesis anymore." And there lies the key. God is a hypothesis that we formulate, that we  could come up with, when we don't understand what is really going on.
• In fact, this argument was presented more than a century ago by the astronomer Laplace, who  was the first to present a complete theory for the origin and evolution of the solar system, a theory, by  the way, that it is still considered pretty much correct. He presented his theory to the National  Academy of France, and Napoleon was there. At the end of his presentation, Napoleon asked Laplace,  "Monsieur Laplace, what about God?" And Laplace looked at Napoleon, and he said, "I don't need  that hypothesis anymore." And there lies the key. God is a hypothesis that we formulate, that we  could come up with, when we don't understand what is really going on.

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