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The Argument from Design



Below is my response to the question "is the teleological argument strong enough to convince an atheist?" within Yahoo!Answers:

[The regular reader of the blog, or even someone who has just glimpsed at the title of this blog, will be unsurprised to see that the bulk of it consists of a quotation from the works of William James.]

Obviously, if someone is an atheist, it is because that person has not been convinced by such arguments (all adult atheists have heard such arguments). So in a sense the answer is trivially "no."

But you may want to know whether the argument has sufficient force to persuade an ideally rational atheist. I have to say that in its usual forms anyway, the argument seems to me rather week.

William James put his finger on one of the weaknesses of the argument when he wrote (in a footnote to lecture 18 of VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE), "When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them, are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain types of arrangement ... so interested that whenever we find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our attention. The result is that we work over the contents of the world selectively." You probably get the gist, so I'll halt the quote there.

http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=1637&C=1632 

Comments

  1. I am an atheist, and I do not take the argument from design seriously. But I do not think that James is correct to say that the presence of disorder is a weakness in the argument. If the presence of order were a valid argument for theism, then it would be a valid argument even if there were disorder as well as order. A theist could argue that a god had to be responsible for the order, regardless of whether he also created disorder or allowed disorder to stand.

    James has a second argument, which is that order and disorder are "purely human inventions." That is false. The fact that the planets circle the sun on a regular path, and that the earth completes a rotation every 24 hours, are objective facts and objectively constitute order.

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    1. I recognize that James, as an exponent of pragmatism, does not believe in objective facts. Even so, he would acknowledge that some truths, such as the two I mentioned, work best unequivocally and can be distinguished from other truths that, even as James defines "truth," are less certain.

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  2. Henry,

    I believe that implicit in James' observation here is the notion that however exactly "order" and "disorder" are defined, -- and every DEFINITION of such a pair of terms will be a "purely human invention" every possible universe is sure to contain plenty of both. Thus the fact that this universe contains both order and disorder tells us nothing about its origins. It only tells us that what is actual is possible. But these are deep waters, and I hope to come back to them to map them more properly in a fuller post soon.

    In the meantime, I'll observe that there has been an alliance, in the development of the philosophy of religion, between fideists and unbelievers. Those who contend that reason cannot prove the truth of a certain creed, which is good, because it leaves a function for faith [very roughly, James' position], have something in common with those who disbelieve the creed altogether. Both factions dispute arguments intended to prove the creed in question. This shows up in some mutual borrowing of the counter-arguments. I gather that you, as an unbeliever, are rejecting the proposed alliance. I find that commendable.

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    1. Christopher,

      Thank you. It is interesting that fideists, if I understand your account, celebrate that reason cannot prove the existence of God, because it leaves a function for faith. I had thought that fideists would prefer to be able to prove the existence of God and not have to rely upon faith. For no one finds faith an acceptable reason to believe non-religious assertions. Suppose that you and I are in a windowless room, and you ask me what the weather is outside. I reply that the sun is shining, and you ask me how I know, in light of the fact that I cannot see outside. I reply that I have faith that the sun is shining. You might rightfully recommend that I see a psychiatrist.

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    2. Replying eight years later: in the cosmic case, your sunny disposition may in fact be part of the weather at issue. You should read A HITCHHIKERS GUIDE. Just the first book -- not the whole series. There is a passage in which Adams is explaining how the people of different planets can understand each other. There is a "babel fish" which you can stick in your ear and it serves as a universal translator.

      The babel fish is something so incredibly useful to have come about naturally that it clearly argues ... against the existence of a God. After all, consider an atheist arguing with God. God says "I need faith. Without faith I am nothing." The atheist replies, "Ah but you invented the Babelfish, which gave the game away didn't it?" God disappears in a puff of logical smoke. Theologians generally reply, Adams informs us, that the argument is a load of dingo kidneys. But that hasn't stopped Oolong Colluphid from making it the centerpiece of his philosophical blockbuster "That about does it for God then."

      I suspect Adams, a very erudite guy, had Immanuel Kant in mind here. Consider the argument. God says "I need faith. Without faith, I am nothing." Atheist says, "Ah, but according to Paley the solar system is a wonderful clock. You made the solar system and gave the game away didn't you." God is about to disappear into logical dust when Kant runs into the scene, saying, "Hold on! Laplace and I have worked out a model involved a disc-shaped cloud of dust. On these presumptions one can get a wonderful clock-like solar system without design."

      Most philosophers would regard all this surely as a load of dingo kidneys. But that didn't keep Kant from writing a philosophical blockbuster, "Critique of Pure Reason," which in its first draft was titled "That about does it for rationalism then."

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