Argument from design
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Revision as of 07:18, 26 February 2011
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The argument from design, also known as the teleological argument, is an argument for the existance of God that may be summarized as follows: When I see a complex object such as a watch, I know it has been designed: therefore, when I see a complex object such as a tiger, I should infer that it has been designed. This act of comparing two objects and drawing similar conclusions based on similarities (while ignoring important differences) is a prime example of a false analogy.
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History
It is commonplace to associate the argument from design with William Paley, so much so that it is often referred to as "Paley's argument". However, the argument is not original with him: by the time he wrote his version, the argument had been advanced by the naturalist and clergyman John Ray, and by William Derham, author of the Artificial Clockmaker and Fellow of the Royal Society; the argument from design had also been discussed critically by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
It is equally an error to charge Paley with plagiarism on this count: he was writing about an opinion so widely known in his time that it was not necessary for him to disclaim originality; and it is not his fault that subsequent generations have tended to give him the credit for the argument.
The argument from design was quickly adopted by creationists as part of their arsenal to toss out during a Gish Gallop but it has found its true home with the intelligent design movement. ID's whole argument is one giant argument from design, its core claims such as irreducible complexity are nothing more than Paley recast in modern genetics.
A fallacy
The argument from design, used as an argument for the existence of a creator, may have been useful to theists in Paley's day, but it is utterly futile in the hands of modern creationists.
Paley and other theists argued that the appearance of design shows the existence of a designer, addressing his arguments to people who knew of only one cause for the appearance of design, namely a designer.
The creationist, on the other hand, argues that the appearance of design shows the existence of a designer, addressing his arguments to people who know of two possible causes for the appearance of design, namely: the existence of a designer; and evolution by random mutation and natural selection.
Take the particular example given by Paley of the resemblance between the eye and a telescope, for example. It is no use arguing that the eye resembles a telescope and so must have been specially designed for that purpose when talking to someone who understands the evolution of the eye.
To draw a parallel, people used to know about fire as a source of heat and light, but not about nuclear fusion as a cause of these same two effects: and so in those days people quite sensibly based their reasoning on the idea that the Sun was a fire, since it resembled one. We might call this the Argument from Fire. But it would be foolish for someone living today to say: "We know that fire produces heat and light: therefore the Sun is on fire: therefore the Sun is not powered by nuclear fusion."
Not only has biology moved on since Paley's day, but so has design. It is now commonplace amongst engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians not to design complex structures, but rather to hand the problem over to a computer which simulates the processes of reproduction, mutation, and selection to produce a design fit for a given task. Paley in his day could point to a man-made object such as a telescope, and say "It is complex, so it had a designer". Today, even looking at an object we know to be man-made, we cannot make that inference. To resume the parallel with nuclear fusion, the creationists' use of the Argument from Design is like continuing to use the Argument from Fire even after nuclear fusion has been produced artificially in the laboratory.
Further fallacy
Argument from design also fails on another level: it assumes that evidence of design is an objective quality obvious to all viewers. In reality, the ability to discern design is largely a function of familiarity and cultural context. Paley's "watchmaker" analogy presupposes that anyone finding a complex man-made object would immediately conclude that it was designed; however, there have been cases where observers from cultures unfamiliar with such objects have concluded that they were natural. For example, accounts exist of Melanesian tribesmen attempting to hatch an "airplane's egg"--actually a bomb--in a fire. While anyone familiar with modern technology would immediately discern design upon seeing a bomb, those unfamiliar with such technology saw no such evidence.
What does the expert on debunking God have?
In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins writes:
“”But of course any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized as the machine itself. Far more so if we suppose him additionally capable of such advanced functions as listening to prayers and forgiving sins. To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like "God was always there", and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say "DNA was always there", or "Life was always there", and be done with it.
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Argument from fine tuning
The argument from fine tuning is a variant on the argument from design, bolstered with concepts from modern cosmology, biology and physics as well as mathematical probability. This theory asserts that the conditions able to support life, at least of the kind that exists on Earth, are so specific and narrowly defined, and the odds of such conditions emerging by random chance are so remote, that a deliberate guiding force or creator is a more reasonable explanation.
Cosmology without God still begins with something, minimally a vacuum state plus a blueprint for transformation. Since we are alive we can confidently say that the blueprint permits life to exist. But a change of only a few percent in any one of the 80 values called out on that blueprint (such as the delicate ratio between nuclear and electromagnetic force) spells disaster. "Dis Aster" in Latin is literally "Bad Star." Change the blueprint of transformation and the sun fails.
We also know there is not enough mass in the universe to cause the expansion to slow down, stop and reverse to cycle all over again. Indeed the expansion seems to be accelerating, not slowing down, due to a repulsive counterforce to gravity called dark energy that is much weaker than gravity, but which falls off with distance much more slowly, thus making itself felt at very long range. So we've got a one-shot universe, a once-in-an-eternity reality which just coincidentally happens to have a blueprint for transformation which permit suns and planets and life to exist.
The nearest exact twin of the sun is Delta Pavonis, which is 18.6 light-years away from us. To get there, we go east 3.8 light-years, south 6.4 light-years, and down 17.0 light years. Will we find another Earth, complete with life?
- It requires a candidate world roughly at the same distance Earth is from our sun, that is also large enough to retain an atmosphere.
- It requires a gas-giant planet at about 5 times the candidate world's distance from Delta Pavonis to vacuum up deadly inbound comets.
- It requires a giant moon around the candidate world to stabilize the 60 to 80 degree wobble introduced by the comet-sweeping world's gravity, or climate shifts will be too violent.
- It requires a day shorter than 30 hours, so it doesn't get too hot in daytime and cold at nighttime, but longer than 20 hours so Coriolis forces don't make your hurricanes unmanageable.
- It requires a global thermostat to somehow be in place to maintain life as the star Delta Pavonis heats up and reaches its plateau temperature of middle age.
- It requires enough liquid water to form a medium for the birth of life.
- It requires an active geology to build land against erosion, otherwise your highest life-forms will be swamp things.
This can be numerically presented in with constructs such as the Drake Equation.
However, the fine-tuning argument can also be countered due to the sheer size of the universe; with one hundred billion stars in the galaxy, and as many galaxies in the universe, even a minuscule chance of life arising makes it extremely likely that it will occur somewhere. Moreover, no matter how unlikely an event is, once it occurs, the probability of it having happened is 1.
Fine-tuning arguments based on the physical constants are even easier to refute. The delicate balance of, for example, the tri-alpha fusion which created all the carbon in our bodies relies on the temperature and pressure of stars being exactly right for this form of fusion. However, the pressure and temperature of the interior of a star changes depending on whether or not fusion is occurring. Similar links between other physical constants are likely and can explain their apparently delicate balance.
See Also
Footnotes
| Articles about intelligent design | ||||||
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| Main concepts of ID | ||||||
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| Reductio ad absurdum | ||||||
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