Design Argument for the Existence of God

Table Of Content

• 3 Cosmology and the Existence of God
• Does Fine-Tuning for Life Require a Response?
• thoughts on “The Design Argument — six critical questions”
• Does not prove the existence of God[change change source]
• a. The Argument from Irreducible Biochemical Complexity
• Fine-Tuning for Life: the Evidence
• 1 Analogical Design Arguments: Schema 1

The mere fact that certain sequences take a certain shape that we can see meaning or value in, by itself, tells us nothing obvious about the probability that it is the result of intelligent design. Attempts to apply the notion of logical probability tofine-tuning for life are beset with difficulties as well. Criticsargue that, from a logical point of view, arbitrary real numbers arepossible values of the constants (McGrew et al. 2001; Colyvan et al.2005). According to them, any probability measure over the realnumbers as values of the constants that differs from the uniformmeasure would be arbitrary and unmotivated.

3 Cosmology and the Existence of God

Concerning your last point, there is no reason to posit that the intelligent cause is constrained. After all, the cause of everything can not be constrained by anything external to it. We aren't claiming God is constrained, or forced, to make atoms, molecules, planets, life, stars, or galaxies.

Does Fine-Tuning for Life Require a Response?

From the classical Greek era through the time of modem science, leading thinkers, from Plato to Aquinas to Newton, have maintained that nature manifests design. However, Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion leveled a devastating attack on the classical design argument, one from which many believe the argument never fully recovered. Hume pointed out various problems with the analogy of order in Nature to a designer.

thoughts on “The Design Argument — six critical questions”

It's entirely possible that there are many fine tuned universes "out there" that an intelligent God created. But their existence is entirely speculative and beyond science with no relevance to the fine tuning argument. So while a religious person might choose to believe in them for one reason or another, it wouldn't help atheistic scientists escape the conclusion of an intelligent cause. Your intelligent designer produced our solar system with a finite life; the sun, a nuclear furnace, as it consumes its fuel, will expand and destroy the earth and the rest of the solar system. Your intelligent designer also produced genetic defects, harmful bacteria and viruses with devastating effects on human beings and numerous other examples of poor design.

Does not prove the existence of God[change change source]

His strategic approach was deeply rooted in the conceptual frameworks of physics and the Brisker Method for Talmudic analysis. After an eleven-year career, Aaron retired and now channels his intellectual energy into studying various branches of knowledge, including the Talmud and physics. The most remarkable case of fine-tuning surfaced with the 1998 discovery that the cosmological constant (a number that determines the expansion rate of the universe) was fine-tuned to about 120 decimal places! If it was even a little bigger, then the early universe would have expanded too quickly and galaxies would never have been able to form.

Life or objects are described as "orderly" or "ordered", which shows that an intelligent designer has ordered them. However, in real life, there are examples of systems that are non-random or ordered simply because it is following natural physical processes, for example diamonds or snowflakes. In more recent times (1802), William Paley proposed his famous analogy, comparing the complexity of life to a watch. Just as one would never believe that a watch happened to emerge by chance without a skilled watchmaker, Paley argued that the same is certainly true for our entire universe which is much more complex than a single watch. This idea was very popular until Charles Darwin's book "On the Origin of Species" in 1859. Darwin showed how complex life forms could develop from simpler ones through natural processes like natural selection and survival of the fittest.

Let C stand for a fine-tuned parameter with physicallypossible values in the range [0, ∞). If we assume that nature isnot biased toward one value of C rather than another, theneach unit subinterval in this range should be assigned equalprobability. Fine-tuning is surprising insofar as the life-permittingrange of C is tiny compared to the full interval, whichcorresponds to a very small probability. It might be held that (6) is known in the sameconceptual, nearly a priori way in which we knowthat textbooks are not producible by natural processes unaided bymind. And our conviction here is not based on any mere induction fromprior experiences of texts.

Fine-Tuning for Life: the Evidence

"Poor design" is consistent with the predictions of the scientific theory of evolution by means of natural selection. This predicts that features that were evolved for certain uses are then reused or co-opted for different uses, or abandoned altogether; and that suboptimal state is due to the inability of the hereditary mechanism to eliminate the particular vestiges of the evolutionary process. The watch analogy simply states that if you were to look at a watch and examine its inner workings so perfectly put together, in synchronicity you would never claim it just created itself – he therefore asks how on this premise could you assert the same about a human being or the world as a whole. The fine tuning argument on its own can't prove divine providence, but it can lay the foundation for a further argument to build upon. It's still worthwhile and important to take the first step and show that by using science and philosophy we can know that God exists. The idea that underlies naturalness is that the phenomenadescribed by some physical theory should not depend sensitively onspecific details of a more fundamental (currently unknown) theory towhich it is an effective low-energy approximation.

1 Analogical Design Arguments: Schema 1

An intelligent creator is inconsistent with an infinite number of universes that are disordered (and in which order only appears by change in the infinite garbage. That god is infinitely powerful, yet not intelligent. It actually isn’t meant to; it’s meant to show that postulating multiverses doesn’t necessarily eliminate a Creator - as you say.If we could work out what the physics of an alternative universe was and create the same conditions artificially we could presumably open a “gateway” between universes. Whether such a thing is technically feasible - or would be safe to do if it were - is another matter. It is entirely possible that universes fine-tuned in different ways give rise to differently structured and functioning intelligent observers. That in itself does not mitigate against a Creator; the Creator may indeed have created variants of our universe.

The problem, of course, is not the notion that great variety may arise by chance and be narrowed by differential survival—this is the basis of natural selection as it is now understood. Rather, the implausibility of Paley’s scenario is the scale at which he considered the process. Specifically, he envisioned an unconstrained morphospace in which drastically divergent species continually pop into existence. This lies in stark contrast to Darwin’s later emphasis on small-scale variation arising within species and then being sorted generation by generation. Just because there is only one solution to the design argument (God), doesn’t imply that an intelligent God could only make one type of universe. After all, it clearly deviates from the well-established scientific method rooted in the process of hypothesis, experimentation, and observation.

The “teleological argument,” better known as the “argument from design,” is the claim that the appearance of “design” in nature—such as the complexity, order, purposefulness, and functionality of living organisms—can only be explained by the existence of a “designer” (typically of the supernatural variety). In its most familiar manifestation, the argument from design involves drawing parallels between human-designed objects (e.g., telescopes, outboard motors) and biological counterparts with similar functional roles (e.g., eyes, bacterial flagella). The former are complex, often indivisibly so if they are to maintain their current function, clearly perform specific functions, and are known to have been the product of intentional design. The functional complexity of living organisms is far greater still, it is argued, and, therefore, must present even stronger evidence for the role of intelligent agency. A designed organism would, on the face of it, be in contradiction to evolutionary theory.

Such cases are oftenlinked to alleged gaps in nature—phenomena for which, it isclaimed, there can be no purely natural explanation, there being a gapbetween nature’s production capabilities and the phenomenon inquestion. It is simply not true that explanatory inferences cannotproperly extend beyond merely what is required for known effects. As avery general example, based on the few observations which humans hadmade during a cosmically brief period in a spatially tiny part of thecosmos, Newton theorized that all bits of matter atall times and in all places attracted allother bits of matter.

One of the most plausible arguments for the existence of God is the argument from design. This argument proceeds by pointing out how all things in the world seem fitted to one another, something that is also true of all the elements of each organism. It then points out that, when we find design in created things – from watches to books – we know that they were created by someone. Reasoning by analogy, the claim is that the world must also have a creator, only one with much greater intellect and power than any human being.

Inphysics, a property found for almost all of the solutions to anequation requires no explanation; it’s what one should expect.It’s not unusual, for instance, for a pin balancing on its tipto fall over. The argument for fine-tuning can thus be recastsuch that almost all values of C are outside of thelife-permitting range. The fact that our universe is life-permittingis therefore in need of explanation. There is also the potential problem of new, previously unconsideredhypotheses all lumped together in the catch-all basket. Withoutknowing the details of what specific unconsidered hypotheses mightlook like, there is simply no plausible way to anticipate the apparentlikelihood of a novel new hypothesis.

Reconsidering Hume’s Critique of Design Thinking - Discovery Institute

Reconsidering Hume’s Critique of Design Thinking.

Posted: Wed, 12 Jul 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Since the works of nature possess functional complexity, a reliable indicator of intelligent design, we can justifiably conclude that these works were created by an intelligent agent who designed them to instantiate this property. As Darwin noted, Paley’s thesis that the appearance of design must in fact be the outcome of design was refuted by the advent of a workable theory of evolutionary change. Nevertheless, 150 years later, biologists are still awed—but are no longer stunned—by complexity in natural systems.

Schlesinger’s fine-tuning argument also appears vulnerable to the same criticism as the other versions of the design argument (see Himma 2002). While Schlesinger is undoubtedly correct in thinking that we are justified in suspecting design in the case where John wins three consecutive lotteries, it is because—and only because—we know two related empirical facts about such events. Without at least one of these two pieces of information, we are not obviously justified in seeing design in such cases. While there is much more to say about fine-tuning and about why the multiverse is a bad philosophical theory, to fully clinch the argument it’s even more important to formulate a clear, coherent, compelling idea of God that answers commonly raised questions against the theory of an intelligent cause. Nevertheless, we hope this basic presentation can help you appreciate that the fine-tuning argument from modern physics is a prime representative of the ancient design argument in the modern world.