The design argument The existence of God GCSE Religious Studies Revision CCEA BBC Bitesize

Table Of Content

• thoughts on “The Design Argument — six critical questions”
• 4 Can We Expect a Designer to Design?
• Contradictory premises lead to an infinite regress[change change source]
• Intelligence may not be God
• The Nature of the Maker
• The existence of GodThe design argument
• 1 The Argument from Fine-Tuning for Design Using Probabilities

But in some cases, the specifics of the agent explanation in questionmay appeal to some prior level less plausible or sensible. Forexample, suppose that one held the view that crop circles were to beexplained in terms of direct alien activity. One could, upon gettingirrefutable video proof of human production of crop circles, stillmaintain that aliens were from a distance controlling the brains ofthe humans in question, and that thus the responsibility for cropcircles did still lie with alien activity.

thoughts on “The Design Argument — six critical questions”

Because we lack this essential background information, we are not justified in inferring that there exists an intelligent Deity who deliberately created a universe capable of sustaining life. Meyer’s reasoning appears vulnerable to the same objection to which the argument from biochemical complexity is vulnerable. It is precisely because we have this background knowledge that we can justifiably be confident that intelligent design is a far more probable explanation than chance for any occurrence of information that a human being is capable of producing. In the absence of antecedent reason for thinking there exist intelligent agents capable of creating information content, the occurrence of a pattern of flowers in the shape of “Welcome to Victoria” would not obviously warrant an inference of intelligent design. What I have called the “Biological Design Argument” is often referred to as the argument from Intelligent Design (ID).

The Fine-Tuning Argument for God - Catholic Answers

The Fine-Tuning Argument for God.

Posted: Fri, 21 May 2021 07:00:00 GMT [source]

4 Can We Expect a Designer to Design?

Paley’s argument, unlike arguments from analogy, does not depend on a premise asserting a general resemblance between the objects of comparison. What matters for Paley’s argument is that works of nature and human artifacts have a particular property that reliably indicates design. Regardless of how dissimilar any particular natural object might otherwise be from a watch, both objects exhibit the sort of functional complexity that warrants an inference that it was made by an intelligent designer. The design argument provided an intellectual foundation for much of Western thought.

Contradictory premises lead to an infinite regress[change change source]

While this retreat oflevels preserves the basic explanation, it of course comes with asignificant cost in inherent implausibility. Sober argues thatwithout additional very specific assumptions about the putativedesigner we could specify no particular value for \(P(e | h)\) —e.g., the likelihood that a designer would produce vertebrate eyeswith the specific features we observe. Depending on the specificassumptions made we could come up with any value from 0 to 1 (e.g.,Sober 2003, 38). Jantzen argues that the same problem applies to anylikelihood involving chance as an alternative hypothesis todesign.

Recent proponents

Just as the purposive quality of the cumulative-step computer program above is best explained by intelligent design, so too the purposive quality of natural selection is best explained by intelligent design. The problem with Paley’s watchmaker argument, as Dawkins explains it, is that it falsely assumes that all of the other possible competing explanations are sufficiently improbable to warrant an inference of design. While this might be true of explanations that rely entirely on random single-step selection mechanisms, this is not true of Darwinian explanations. As is readily evident from Huxley’s description of the process, Darwinian evolution is a cumulative-step selection method that closely resembles in general structure the second computer program. The result is that the probability of evolving functionally complex organisms capable of surviving a wide variety of conditions is increased to such an extent that it exceeds the probability of the design explanation. Paley’s watchmaker argument is clearly not vulnerable to Hume’s criticism that the works of nature and human artifacts are too dissimilar to infer that they are like effects having like causes.

Intelligence may not be God

Since chance-driven evolutionary processes would not select organisms with the precursor, intelligent design is a better explanation for the existence of organisms with fully functional cilia. The next important version of the design argument came in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Pursuing a strategy that has been adopted by the contemporary intelligent design movement, John Ray, Richard Bentley, and William Derham drew on scientific discoveries of the 16th and 17th Century to argue for the existence of an intelligent Deity. William Derham, for example, saw evidence of intelligent design in the vision of birds, the drum of the ear, the eye-socket, and the digestive system.

The Nature of the Maker

In such cases, then, the prospect that the subspecies with the precursor will continue to thrive, leave offspring, and evolve is not unusually small. The evolutionary process results immediately and automatically from the basic property of living matter—that of self-copying, but with occasional errors. Self-copying leads to multiplication and competition; the errors in self-copying are what we call mutations, and mutations will inevitably confer different degrees of biological advantage or disadvantage on their possessors.

If so, then perhaps theparameter intervals that are in fact life-permitting are notfine-tuned after all. The question of whether probabilities either do not apply or have beenimproperly applied to cosmological fine-tuning continues to drawinterest. For more, see Davies 1992, Callender 2004, Holder2004, Koperski 2005, Manson 2009, Jantzen 2014a (sec. 18.3), andSober 2019 (sec. 5.1). Manson (2018) argues that neither theism nornaturalism provides a better explanation for fine-tuning.

1 The Argument from Fine-Tuning for Design Using Probabilities

This volume is the only comprehensive survey of 2,000 years of debate, drawing on both historical and modern literature to identify, clarify and assess critically the many forms of design argument for the existence of God. It provides a neutral, informative account of the topic from antiquity to Darwin, and includes concise primers on probability and cosmology. It will be of great value to upper-level undergraduates and graduates in philosophy of religion, theology, and philosophy of science. Cosmological arguments often begin with the bare fact that there arecontingently existing things and end with conclusions concerning theexistence of a cause with the power to account for theexistence of those contingent things. Others reason from thepremise that the universe has not always existed to a cause thatbrought it into being. In broad outline, then, teleological arguments focus uponfinding and identifying various traces of the operation of a mind innature’s temporal and physical structures, behaviors and paths.Order of some significant type is usually the starting pointof design arguments.

Behe and Dembski conclude that an intelligentdesigner likely intervened in the evolutionary course of events. The idea is that one can infer the existence of intelligent design by looking at an object. The teleological argument says that because life is complex, it must have been designed.

Given all these universes, it would be no surprise that we find ourselves in a universe with the right constants of nature. After all, the universes with the wrong constants don’t have any intelligent observers to wonder about these questions in the first place. While Hume did in fact devastate the argument by analogy, it was largely an argument of his own creation. There are other types of design argument that, while seriously challenged by Hume, are not obviously defeated by him. In fact, Hume provides some of the most important rebuttals to his own critique, rebuttals that others like Paley will use to keep design arguments alive. Let’s first take a moment to introduce Hume and the book that had such an impact on natural theology.

Critics and advocates include not onlyphilosophers but also scientists and thinkers from other disciplinesas well. Discussion will conclude with a brief look at onehistorically important non-inferential approach to the issue. Some phenomena within nature exhibit such exquisiteness of structure,function or interconnectedness that many people have found it naturalto see a deliberative and directive mind behind those phenomena.

At the end of this period, it compares all of the sequences with the target sequence METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL and keeps the sequence that most closely resembles it. For example, a sequence that has an E in the second place more closely resembles a sequence that is exactly like the first except that it has a Q in the second place. Unlike the first program which starts afresh with each try, the second program builds on previous steps, getting successively closer to the program as it breeds from the sequence closest to the target. This feature of the program increases the probability of reaching the sequence to such an extent that a computer running this program hit the target sequence after 43 generations, which took about half-an-hour.