In Dawkin’s God Alister McGrath says that the Paley-style “Argument From Design” for God’s existence is a “local historical contingency” linked “with the specific historical circumstances of eighteenth-century England” and “is not typical of the Christian tradition,” (pages 52 and 72-73).
So my question is this - is the Argument from Design still kicking? Perhaps not in the Anglican Church, which McGrath knows best, but isn’t the whole “Intelligent Design” movement based around exactly this? Any illustrative examples? I’ve seen the Youtube video about the Banana that proves God’s existence, but maybe these guys really aren’t representative.
I’ve seen people use the Paley argument all the time, so I have to think it is still active. Now, I can see someone saying that the argument itself is based on the growth of machines around that time, since they were complicated enough to be clearly designed. Paley did his argument before another mechanism was known for creating apparently designed things that were neither humanly or divinely designed, so you can’t blame him too much for the argument. People who use it today though, are either ignorant of the alternative “design” methods or refuse to accept them.
I think evolution ended any serious discussion of the argument from design (as it pertains to living organisms) a long time ago. There was some resurgence of interest with Michael Behe’s argument that living creatures contained structures that displayed irreducible complexity, but he was quickly proven to be (a) wrong and (b) lacking any intellectual honesty whatsoever. Thus, the only people who still talk about irreducible complexity are people on the fringe, like Duane Gish. RIP, argument from design as pertaining to biological systems.
But the argument itself is still around, it just has a different target–the entire universe. The physical constants of the universe fall within a fantastically narrow range required for the development of any form of intelligent life whatsoever. This suggests to many that the universe itself displays evidence of design. Discover magazine had a very interesting article on this a few years ago. There is a lively (and very much mainstream) debate in philosophy of religion over this question.
Unfortunately, Kirk Cameron and Roy Comfort are all too representative. The Intelligent Design arguments don’t seem terribly well thought-out. I think that arguments appealing to omnipotent, invisible entities don’t lend themselves to rigorous examination well. It all seems to boil down to ‘God did it’ and then looking for the how, why, or when becomes insignificant.
Sure, people like Kirk Cameron and Charlie Daniels still talk about the argument from design as it pertains to biological systems. But it is not a serious contender to make belief in God rational anymore, as I noted above. The fact that it is advocated by a huge mass of people lacking scientific literacy or a handful of fringe fanatics in the scientific community doesn’t mean the argument is still *rationally * viable. The argument from fine tuning (the argument from design as applied to the apparent ‘fine-tuning’ of the universe) is a far more serious contender, IMO.
ETA: What I am saying is that mainstream philosophers of religion and theologians don’t advocate the argument from design WRT biological systems anymore. It is a dead letter. Other people advocate it, but people who know the science and know the arguments recognize that the argument has been undermined. As Aristotle would say, if you want the truth, consult not the many, but the wise.
But remember the biological argument was a rational one until Darwin figured out the alternative. Thus it is reasonable to expect that physicists will find an alternative for the fine-tuning one. Anyhow, we don’t know what percent of time in a very loose sense is taken up by the existence of our universe. The existence of a universe supporting life might be a drop in the ocean of all universes.
True, but the multiverse theory doesn’t have a lot of support from experimental data yet, so the situation is not precisely analogous to evolution. But even the possibility of a multiverse seriously undermines the argument from fine-tuning, since if you have two plausible explanations for the apparent fine-tuning of the universe (God vs. the multiverse) and no reason to prefer one to the other, then the argument is inconclusive. If (as I suspect they will) physicists eventually give us compelling reasons to accept the existence of the multiverse, then the argument from fine-tuning will wind up on the dust heap of history, too.
BTW, I wonder if this is true. Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which were published decades before Paley’s Natural Theology, attack the argument from design, so the argument was obviously in play long before Paley wrote it down. And, to pick a nit, Hume was Scottish. And the *Dialogues * were written a while before they were published, as Hume arranged to have them published posthumously (they were a little too hot for him to publish during his lifetime). Further, Aquinas’ Fifth Way is recognizably a version of the argument from design, and obviously Aquinas predates Hume and Paley by centuries.
Before Darwin the evidence for evolution was sitting around, but no one recognized it. (Except Wallace.) For all we know the evidence for a multiverse is sitting around also.
The reason for favoring a multiverse explanation is that we’ve not seen the hand of God in any of the other billion observations we’ve made, so why in this one? Plus, even if a deity (or bored grad student) created the universe, so what? He clearly is not the god of any Earthly religion, who got it all wrong. Maybe God created the universe in a black hole, and cannot visit us. So, even if I grant an intelligently designed universe, it doesn’t help believers one bit.
Well, I don’t know that it’s exactly sitting around in the sense that the fossil record was sitting around. Michiu Kaku, an advocate of the multiverse theory, has said that putting the multiverse theory on a firm footing will involve launching new satellites capable of measuring subtle variations in the cosmic background variation, plus working out the theoretical details of how multiple universes arise.
ETA–Some physicists worry that since the other universes would be completely separate from ours, that the multiverse theory is in principle incapable of verification. So again, that would be a strike against it. But as I noted above, the multiverse theory is at least as plausible an explanatory hypothesis as God, and so it undermines the argument from design, even if it cannot be proved. The argument from design is an inference to the best explanation, so if you can present another equally good explanation (i.e., the multiverse theory), then the theist can no longer claim his is the best explanation.
This is a good point. If other places where we would expect to see intelligent design (e.g., humans) do not display evidence of intelligent design (but instead often display evidence of haphazard design, which means they weren’t designed, at least not by a perfect being), then it would be odd to expect evidence of design in the universe itself. And if God created the universe and then let it run on by itself, and humans arose out of the haphazard and opportunistic (and frequently jury-rigging) method of evolution, then you are correct that this is not the God most people are concerned with.
But there are reasons to prefer the multiverse theory, one of it’s other scientific rivals, or nothing over the God hypothesis. For example, because using God as an explanation doesn’t explain anything, and violates Occam’s Razor. What made God ? What’s he made of ? How does he function ? And why God out of a near infinity of other explanations ? And so on. At least we know that there are such things as universes, as we live in one; it’s much less of a stretch to postulate many universes than it does to postulate one God.
As well, as pointed out, the God explanation has always been wrong before. Always.
And another reason is that the God-theory makes no testable predictions. Not even in principle or theory, since he’s supposed to be hiding from us for some stupid rationalized reason. It’s pure faith, in a highly implausible idea.
As a fellow atheist, I sometimes cringe at the enthusiasm of my brothers in arms. The words, “…doesn’t have a lot of support from experimental data yet…” implies that at least *some *“experimental data” exists to support the multiverse theory; enough to support the conclusion that the multiverse theory isn’t “…precisely analogous to evolution…”.
Isn’t it true that no such experimental data yet exists, so much so that it isn’t “not precisely analogous to evolution”, but not analogous to evolution at all?
Isn’t that right?
Your premise is correct, but your conclusion is incorrect.
If you have “two plausible explanations…and no reason to prefer one to the other…then the argument[s] is/[are] inconclusive. …”
That reality doesn’t "seriously"undermine either explanation. They are on equal footing.
It is best if we do not get too far out in front of science; which may, in fact, one day soon make the answers conclusive.
Indeed.
Until that day, however, it is best if we not take on the qualities of religion; the very institutions we are laying siege to. For example, wouldn’t there be equal merit in the theist’s comment,
“If (as I suspect He will) God eventually gives us compelling reasons to accept the existence of the Him and his creations, then the argument from multiverse will wind up on the dust heap of history, too.”
In other words, “faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see”, or so the religionists say.
In what way are your words above intellectually different from those sentiments?
Two reasons why my position is different from that of the theist. First, atheism has a better track record than theism of being right on issues like this. Since so far all the natural phenomena that allegedly required a theistic explanation have turned out to have a much better non-theistic explanation, I anticipate that the nature of the universe will be no different. Second, I have compelling independent reasons for thinking that God doesn’t exist, and so a have prior reasons for thinking that the theistic solution to the problem of fine-tuning is not the correct solution.
I think you misunderstand my point here. The argument from fine tuning is an inference to the best explanation: the apparent fine-tuning of the universe is best explained by positing a theistic designer. I was merely pointing out that the existence of an alternate hypothesis–the multiverse theory–which is scientifically plausible, and in no way inferior to theism as a hypothesis, undermines the argument from fine tuning. It challenges the conclusion that theism is the best explanation for the data by pointing out that there is another, equally good explanation which the theist hasn’t ruled out. So yes, both hypotheses are on an equal footing–which means that the argument from fine-tuning for God’s existence is inconclusive.
What I mean by “just laying around” is that often when you have a paradigm shift, and actually finally understand something, you find all sorts of supporting evidence for it which before was either not understood or thought to be not very interesting. I’ve had a few, not in physics, so I can testify to this. You think, “of course, that is why the value of the electron is …” and wonder how you ever missed it.
I’m with the rest of your posts, except to add that there might be other non-theistic explanations besides the multiverse one. You can’t really say one is better than the other, as long as they don’t contradict any current knowledge and are mathematically consistent. But N theories doesn’t mean the probability of each is 1/N - the probability for all is unknown.
It’s worth noting that Kirk Cameron has since acknowledged that the banana-fits-the-hand thing was not a sound argument. I don’t think he’s abandoned creationism though - just that particular argument.
Perhaps you mean science has a better track record than theism on issues like these.
On the one hand, it is refreshing that science practices a higher level of intellectual honesty than religion. It is, by definition, an objective discipline. It is unencumbered with emotion, tradition, superstition or other subjective nonsense.
On the other hand, science surely must be silent on matters where it doesn’t know, (and in the case of the existence of Capital G God will never know) and circumspect on issues where it doesn’t know yet.
Lastly, as the mutual fund warnings state, “Past performance is no indication of future returns”, we can’t use past [proven] discoveries to impute merit to a theory that remains untested and unproven. The good news is that science is not tied to dogma (or shouldn’t be!) and we may yet prove this theory. (or reject it in favor of a better one.)
In the meantime, we’re best to not overstate our case.
This may be true, but we shouldn’t count our chickens before they’re cloned.
I’d also caution you that many of these ‘explanations’----as far as science is concerned----play to a stalemate. I’d be cautious in using words like “all” as many of these questions are unanswerable, by science anyway.
Perhaps one day science will totally eviscerate religion. For now we live in anticipation. Frankly, that sounds enough like religion to be unnerving though.
Is this not simply a definition of bias? Than in itself is not necessarily bad; if the basis of the bias is sound. And I believe yours is.
Still, I think it is good to separate what we can prove by science, and the subjective beliefs that spring from it. In time, as science may very well turn many of those subjective beliefs—or theories----into objective fact.
For now, it is best that we not ascribe credit to science for things it has not yet figured out, or in some cases not even contemplated.
“There has probably never been a more devastating rout of popular belief by clever reasoning than Darwin’s destruction of the argument from design. It was so unexpected.”
– Dawkins in The God Delusion
I find the “fine tuning” argument fatuous and anthropic. Douglas Adams’ puddle seems applicable there.
I trust you have no actual experience with science? While it is true that an idealized science has no brook with emotion, the real science, done by humans, has quite a bit. People hold on to discredited hypotheses due to emotion. When people review papers, they tend to give better grades to those papers saying their field is important. No, plenty of emotion. Why science works is that it accepts this, and has mechanisms for overcoming it.
Again, no. There are plenty of speculative papers. What science must do is not to claim knowledge greater than the evidence supports. That is a place where it is particularly more effective than religion.
I don’t think there is a claim that the lack of success of religion in explaining natural phenomena proves anything. It does make the sides unequal, though. As an example, we don’t know for sure psychic phenomena do not exist, after 70 years of testing, but the lack of positive results means that we don’t have to consider ESP as a primary or even reasonable explanation for anything.