Essay On The Teleological And Design Arguments For The Existence Of God

Critically asses the claim that the universe has too many flaws to be designed

The concept of teleonomy has been one pervasive in philosophy since its original subscribers, Socrates for example felt that the structural interdependency of the body that enabled it to function so well, for example the eyelids' protection of the eyeball was indicative of planning in the universe and could not have been down to chance. With regards to the claim that the universe has too many flaws to be designed the purpose of the universe or its teleology is of fundamental importance since some of the more popular 'flaws' that are frequently referred to by critics of the design argument including cancer, natural disasters and genocide become less relevenent if we are unable to agree on the ????? (telos, purpose) of the universe. If for instance every change in the structure of the universe, every chemical reaction occurs in order to better suit the needs of humans the claim will have variable success compared with that if it is balance evenly the needs of every organisms or simply to maintain a chemical equilibrium. These are important distinctions to make before condemning the teleological argument for the existence of God. Perhaps the most notable illustrator of the design argument, William Paley presents his reasoning through the analogy of the Watchmaker in his book Natural Theology. The analogy of finding a watch upon the ground and deciding it must have been made by someone to fulfil the purpose of keeping the time is employed by Paley to represent the necessity of a purpose and therefore an intelligent mind behind the intricately complex universe. He concludes that 'every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.' Empirical knowledge of the world brings Paley to a God beyond the impersonal 'causers' of Aristotle's Prime Mover and Plato's Demiurge, an intelligent designer. In his critique of Pure Reason empiricist David Hume tests Paley's assumption that you can deduce the nature of a creator from their creations, in other words the idea that 'like causes produce like effects'. He finds that if there was indeed a God who designed the universe looking at the evidence of the flaws, this God was a trainee, or maybe senile. Hume feels that it is on the basis of these faults that the design argument for the existence of a Judeo-Christian God fails, he asks how such a benevolent God as that presented in the Bible could allow his most important creations, those made in the imago dei to suffer in a faulty world. In his Traité de métaphysique Voltaire, likewise observed that '... from this sole argument I cannot conclude anything further than that it is probable that an intelligent and superior being has skilfully prepared and fashioned the matter. I cannot conclude from that alone that this being has made matter out of nothing and that he is infinite in every sense.' In other words although the design argument may prove the existence of an intelligent designer it does not indicate that this designer is God. However, according to Danish philosopher Sveinbjorn Thordarson Voltaire was a great supporter of the emphasis placed on induction in the Baconian method, which asserted that if the purely logical arguments for the existence of God were 'cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit,"18 the same could not be said for the argument from design. It was no grand metaphysical construction based on questionable axioms and dubious logic, but an inference based on sound empirical premises. The complexity and orderliness of the world was clear experiential evidence of a creator . There are some such as Bertrand Russell who question entirely the need for dependency and contingency, in a debate with F.C. Copleston on the existence of God he asserted 'that the universe is just there, and that is all."In other words the Universe is just a brute fact there is no need to ask why it is there or what caused it to be there Hume's criticisms highlight the importance of purpose for the Christian God, yet sadly it is not possible to attain a hierarchy of the 'most important' purposes for the universe from the Bible. On the one hand actions such as giving his 'only begotten son' for the sins of the world in order to alleviate human suffuring indicate that one of God's top priorities is human happiness (flaws are a problem for God here). On the other hand it is possible that the world was not created for the enjoyment of humans but quite the reverse; humans were created for the world, this alternative provides, according to the Bible a legitimate challenge to Hume's criticism. The idea of stewardship that humans are managing the possessions of another, namely God is a persistent one in the Bible. In Psalm 50:10, it is made clear that the world is God's property, "every animal of the forests is mine, and the cattle on a thousand hills." The theologian Ken Boa writes in his article Stewardship that humans are all stewards of God's creations and has been given to utilize ethics, communication skills and reason in order that we might protect the world effectively and efficiently. He writes that one day each of us must give an account for how we have used them, he cites 1Corinthian 4:2"Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful". With stewardship the apparent faults such as natural disasters do not necessarily undermine God as intelligent designer, in fact they may incline us further towards the idea that the imperfection of humanity necessitates reminders of the fragility of the world in order that we do not develop complacency towards our duty. In the same vein Natural Disasters may be considered to be required structurally to shape the world and in the case of volcanoes to provide new minerals for the improvement of agriculture. (However this is a very specific example and it may not be possible to explain away every 'flaw' in the same way). Another apparent flaw as identified by Joseph McCabe, a free thought writer of the early 20th century was the existence of parasitic microbes. However, his criticism ignores the Taoist concept of polarity that is that without darkness, there can be no perception of light, and similarly there could be no concept of beauty without contrasting ugliness. Hume also identifies that the formulation of arguments like Paley's rely on the fact that nothing 'could be esteemed impossible or implying a contradiction'. This is seen later in the book by the character of Philo (who is thought to represent Hume's own view point) as a fault in the argument as it enables one to fathom a number of possibilities with no imperative to take one. Immanuel Kant argues that the one humans have chosen to take is that of a complex world were the inexplicable can be attributed to an intelligent designer God; humans see the world as ordered because we want to, because we are unable to posit any other way it could be. This line of thought is termed Gestalt Philosophy and originated from the Berlin School of thought. It is a theory of the 'mind and brain positing that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analogy, with self-organizing tendencies' . Its' relevance regarding the design argument lies in the possibility that humans impose order on the universe so that it sits comfortably with our beliefs and capacity for understanding. In actual fact says Philo is it plausible that 'the final causes is not, of itself, any proof of design; but only so far as it has been experienced to proceed from that principle. For aught we know a priori, matter may contain the source or spring of order originally within itself'. This alternative of Hume's which moves away from the theological and towards the naturalistic seems prophetic of Darwin's revolutionary contribution of the theories of evolution and Natural Selection to this argument in his Origin of Species. At the time of its publication Darwin's book received considerable criticism as not only did it undermine the creationist view from Genesis that God created the world in seven days but also that humans were descendents of apes, a highly offensive idea to many. However, further research into the malleability of the genetic sequence that has facilitated considerable growth in the acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution. There are however, still some that reject his theory because they believe Science and Religion are incompatible. Richard Dawkins a biologist and champion of such an idea asserts that Darwin's discoveries put the final nail in the coffin that is God and his existence. Dawkin's view on the creation of the universe requires no explanation for flaws, in his various publications including The God Delusion he totally refutes the idea of God saying instead that evolution has no goal, no telos change happens simply for the purpose of survival. In the Selfish Gene he adds to this by saying 'We are survival machines-robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes'. Biological determinist views such as this of humans however do not sit well with many. Peter Williams for example accepts that the genetic code does look much like 'a computer disc' but since we are able to understand the computer disc, because it is designed by minds, he maintains that there must exist a supernatural origin not for the DNA itself but for the processes which brings DNA about. Of a similar view was Michael Behe who said he believed in 'common descent, but (that) the root question remains un answered; what has caused complex systems to form?' , that allows the deoxyribonucleic acid to twist and align itself so conveniently. Here argues Christian Biologist Dennis Alexander is a possible scenario which may reconcile the conventionally bitter relationship between the polar perspectives of Dawkin's presentation of Darwin's science and the Christian Creationist views illustrated in law professor Phillip E Johnsons book Darwin on Trial . Johnson's book includes his examination of the evidence and arguments of and on natural selection, genetic mutation, the Miller-Urey experiment (pre-biological evolution) and molecular biology. It opens with the presentation of the Edwards v. Augillard, US supreme court trial which considered the Louisiana law requiring the teaching in schools of creation-science whose subscribers 'strive to use legitimate scientific means both to disprove evolutionary theory and to prove the creation account as described in scri pture" . The case concluded that alternative scientific theories could be taught and two years later the creationist textbook , Of Pandas and People, which attacked evolution omitting the identity of the supposed "intelligent designer". On the other hand the Miller and Urey experiment which tested Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin's hypothesis that, basic organic chemicals were able to develop into microscopic localized systems, possible precursors of the Cell from which primitive living things could develop. Eventually after revisiting Miller's original experiment in 2007 scientists concluded that it is was possible for all of the 20 naturally occurring amino acids that make up the proteins in our bodies to have developed quickly in the early atmosphere. This evidence can strengthen the argument in either direction, either the intelligent designer intentionally placed the specific cocktail of gases that enabled the amino acids to develop in the way they did, or the fact that we are descended from gases shows no need for God and provides reinforcement for the scientific angle. The suggestion that the period of time in which we live is just a calm coincidence, a product of chance in a chaotic universe is often what is thought to be the basis of Natural Selection, the many millions of possibilities that could have occurred have been rooted out and fortunately things have worked out in our favour rather like a cosmological 'survival of the fittest. Evidence for the anthropic argument which is formed on this principle that the cosmos is fine-tuned reveals the delicately balanced nature of the forces, energy and entropy in the universe, the premise of this assertion is that a small change in any of the fundamental physical constants would radically change the universe as we know it, as cosmologist Stephan Hawking put it 'The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. ... The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.' For example if the strong nuclear force (the interparticular force that holds the nuclei of atoms together) was 2% stronger the physics of the stars would drastically alter and perhaps preclude the existence of life similar to that which we see on earth Yet, according to theologians such as Richard Swinburne and Ian Hacking, probability rules this out. As F.R Tennant put it in his The Existence of God 'theology does not profess to base itself on the principle of "the inconceivability of the opposite"'. He goes on to say that 'the ordered oasis is not an isolable fragment. It and the supposed desert or '''chaos' are interdependent'. Swinburne refutes critics of the design argument such as Dawkins from a mathematical point of view. He realised that despite the 'flaws' it was more probable that God existed. This probability is presented by theologian Ian Hacking in the 'the inverse gambler's fallacy' or the 'Bayesian rule'. The fallacy concludes that 'on the basis of an unlikely outcome of a random process that the process is likely to have occurred many times before' . From the formulae,P(M?U)=P(M)(P(U?(M)))/(P(U)), where U represents the unlikely outcome of random process and M the proposition that the process has occurred before it is possible to realise that since P(U|M) = P(U) (the outcome of the process is unaffected by previous occurrences), it follows that P(M|U) = P(M); that is, our confidence in M should be unchanged when we learn U. Furthermore whilst the theory of Natural Selection on which Dawkin's bases his rejection of religion indeed explains the evolution of life on earth it is rejected by Hacking with regards to the universe as a whole. He does not believe that the universe is just 'one in a long sequence of universes' starting with the big bang and that 'the fine tuning merely shows that there have been many other, (poorly tuned universes preceding this one' Empirical knowledge does not indicate to me that the universe has an anthropocentric purpose, it seems impossible that such a vast and complex matrix of chemistry and physics can have been created purely for human enjoyment. As a consequence I do not believe that the idea of flaws in the universe is a valid criticism since they are only flaws because we define them as such, only because they make our lives more difficult. Since I do not believe the universe was designed for humans I see no reason why the flaws that impinge on our lives should undermine the entire creation and its' creator as a whole. Works Cited Behe, Micheal. Darwin`s Black Box. Hacking, Ian. "The Inverse Gambler`s Fallacy: The Argument from Design, The Anthropic Principle Applied to Wheeler Universes." Mind 383, no. 96 (July 1987): 331-340. Hawking, Stephan. ""Hawking receives honour from Obama"." The Guardian, 2009. Johnson, Philip E. Darwin on Trial. Intervarsity Press, 1991. Micheal, Pavcan J. "The Invisible Bible: The Logic of Creation Science." In Scientisits Confront Creationsim , by Laurie R. Godfrey Andrew J Petto, 361. London, New York: Norton, 2007. Paley, William. Natural Theology. 1802. Psychology, David Hothersall: History of. History of Psychology. 2004. Thordarson, Sveinbjorn. "The Philosophes and the Argument from Design: Voltaire and d'Holbach." Sveinbjorn Thordarson. 2007. http://www.sveinbjorn.org/philosophes_argument_from_design (accessed June 6, 2011). Voltaire. Philosophical Dictionary, "Final Causes".