Martin Goldstein : Whose Write?

A very common way of attempting to prove the existence of God is to use what is called the ‘Design Argument’ which points to the apparent design, order and purpose in the universe as satisfactory evidence of it having been created by God. Cicero and the ancient Greeks used this argument and it is probably the oldest rationale that people used to justify the belief in God. It is what drives many average religious people in their belief in God. They find it persuasive and conclusive although I think it is not a strong argument.

I have no problem with individuals who believe or disbelieve in God and, unlike the militant atheists, I have no agenda to prove to believers that God does not exist. I am not a believer. I am not an atheist. Finally, I am not an agnostic. I am not sitting on the fence. This is hard for people that I speak with to understand because they like to categorize and wish to put me in a different camp than the one they are in since my ideas don’t fit neatly into their category. Alternatively they are so arrogant as to say that I really belong to their camp but I just don’t realize it yet. My ideas on this are for development in another article or post and not for this one which is simply to demonstrate why I think that the design argument is a weak one to use as a logical basis for a belief in God. It seems unlikely that belief in God can be built on any logical foundation. Rather belief/disbelief in God seems to be based commonly on either personal conditioning or, if more consciously arrived at, based on personal choice and desire. I have a lot more to say on all this but let us return to the topic of the design argument.

We are speaking of a ‘teleological’ argument which is based on the evidence of design that people may observe in the world around them, and has the promise of being based on empirical observation rather than on only the abstract reasoning found in arguments like the ontological one (not going there now – look it up in Wikipedia.)

It goes like this: in the world we see complex designs with a purpose, order, regularity that suggests an intelligent, infinitely great designer, a creator who, in English, we call God. Bishop William Paley famously asks us to consider what we would think if we stumbled upon a watch while traversing a desert. Paley says that we ought to deduce that such a complex design created for the purpose of displaying the time is easily known to not have come about by chance, but rather a resultant artifact of intelligent design. Paley compared the universe to a watch, expertly designed, even if we are not aware of its exact purpose.

But is the evidence actually so clear? Paley and several others have directed our attention to such things as the extremely complex (is it not miraculous?) design of the human eye, how the number of teats on animals equal the number of their young, and how if ice didn’t float then life would be unsustainable on this planet. All of these examples, and a host of others, demonstrate complex design, all for discrete purposes. All of this cannot simply be a fluke. They must necessarily be created by a God who has specifically planned the universe for us humans that can write and read articles such as this. This referred to as the anthropic principle directing our attention to the presence of food on the planet, an ozone layer and the amazingly exact values of scientific constants without which the earth would never have formed. The chain of coincidences needed for human life to emerge is so statistically unlikely as make it obvious that it was no coincidence at all.

I will continue this in another post, or update this post.

Members of the Design Argument team involved in this article.