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The Argument From Design: Some Better Reasons for Agreeing with Hume

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Gary Doore
Gary Doore
Affiliation:
University of Washington, Seattle
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Extract

I. The argument from design or ‘teleological argument’ purports to be an inductive proof for the existence of God, proceeding from the evidence of the order exhibited by natural phenomena to the probable conclusion of a rational agent responsible for producing that order. The argument was severely criticized by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and it was widely conceded that Hume's objections had cast serious doubt on the adequacy of the teleological argument, if not destroyed its credibility entirely. However, there has been a recent reappraisal of this claim by R. G. Swinburne, who maintains that none of Hume's criticisms have any validity against a ‘carefully articulated version of the argument’. Using an analogical argument based on temporal regularities rather than on spatial regularities (or arrangement of parts), Swinburne claims to have shown that the teleological argument is a legitimate inference to the best explanation whose force depends only on the strength of the analogy and on the degree to which the resulting theory makes explanation of empirical matters simpler and more coherent. Moreover, he claims to have shown that the argument provides support for the Christian monotheistic hypothesis and not merely for the weak claim that the universe was designed (somehow). This is an important claim since it has long been thought that Hume's most devastating blow was dealt when he showed that the teleological argument (if it is admitted to have any force at all) provides just as much support for the negation of certain propositions considered essential to Christian monotheism as it does for their affirmation.

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Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , June 1980 , pp. 145 - 161
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

page 145 note 1 Swinburne, R. G., ‘The Argument from Design’, Philosophy XLIII (1968).Google Scholar Reprinted in Brody, B. A. (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Religion, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1974), pp. 137–49Google Scholar. (All references are to the latter.)

page 145 note 2 E.g., the proposition that the universe was produced by a single agent, or that the producer of the universe is infinite and disembodied. See p. 160.

page 146 note 1 Olding, A., ‘The Argument from Design – A Reply to R. G. Swinburne’, Religious Studies VII (1971), 361–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Olding thinks the main reason for rejecting the argument is because of its ‘dualist assumptions,’ but it seems to me that most of the important objections can be accepted even by dualists. Olding also thinks that the argument supports ‘polytheism’, but his argument and conception of ‘polytheism’ are bizarre. (We must consider human beings to be gods on the assumptions of Swinburne's argument.) In this paper I will argue that Swinburne's argument supports polytheism in the usual sense of the term. Moreover, Olding does not mention the two important Humean objections and Swinburne's replies discussed in this paper in sections 4 and 4.1 (pp. 152–5). Cf. Swinburne, , ‘The Argument from Design – a Defence’, Religious Studies VIII (1972), 192–205.Google Scholar

page 146 note 2 Gaskin, J. C. A., ‘The Design Argument: Hume's Critique of Poor Reason’, Religious Studies XII (1976), 331–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 146 note 3 Swinburne, , op. cit. p. 138.Google Scholar

page 146 note 4 One reason given for its being riskier is that the universe exhibits many examples of spatial disorder in places (e.g., the arrangement of trees in an African jungle), and one would need a further argument to show that the order exceeds the disorder.

page 147 note 1 Ibid. p. 142.

page 147 note 2 Ibid. p. 142.

page 147 note 3 Ibid. pp. 142–3.

page 147 note 4 Ibid. p. 142.

page 147 note 5 Ibid. p. 142.

page 148 note 1 Ibid. p. 143.

page 148 note 2 Ibid. p. 143.

page 149 note 1 Chislolm, R., ‘Freedom and Action’, in Lehrer, (ed.), Freedom and Determinism, pp. 11–25.Google Scholar

page 151 note 1 Feigl, H., ‘The “Mental” and the “Physical”’, Minnosota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, II (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958Google Scholar); Smart, J. J. C., ‘Sensations and Brain Processes’ in Chappell, V. C. (ed.), The Philosophy of Mind (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962).Google Scholar

page 152 note 1 Hume, David, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A. (2nd ed., 1902), p. 136.Google Scholar

page 152 note 2 Swinburne, , op. cit. p. 145.Google Scholar

page 152 note 3 Ibid. p. 145. The other characteristics should presumably – in the case of a theoretical entity – be such as to have explanatory or predictive value in other cases.

page 153 note 1 Hume, , Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Aiken, H. D. (New York: 1948), p. 28.Google Scholar

page 153 note 2 Swinburne, , op. cit. p. 146.Google Scholar

page 153 note 3 Hume, , Dialogues, p. 36.Google Scholar

page 153 note 4 Op. cit. p. 145.Google Scholar

page 154 note 1 For example, if one were a functionalist of some type, perhaps one might argue that a mind is in many ways like a computer; therefore, the divine mind is probably in many ways like a computer; all computers we have observed have been designed by rational agents; therefore, the divine mind was probably designed by a rational agent!

page 154 note 2 See, for example, Passmore, John, Philosophical Reasoning, (London: Duckworth, 1961), pp. 28–30Google Scholar. It should hardly be necessary to point out the dubiousness of the claim that the ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason’ demands the postulation of a ‘necessary being’ as a first cause, in light of the criticisms that have been made of this claim and of the concept of a ‘necessary being’since Kant. One criticism is that the ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason’ is derived entirely from cases where we explain the existence of contingent beings by reference to other contingent beings, and thus, that there is no warrant in experience for extending the use of the principle to include explanation by reference to non-contingent beings. Furthermore, even if we grant that the principle might be so extended, in what sense do we have a better or more ‘sufficient’ explanation when we posit a ‘necessary being’ that ‘contains the reason for its existence within itself?’ We can still ask what the alleged reason is – or, for that matter, why such a reason is contained within the necessary being.

page 154 note 3 Swinburne, , op. cit. p. 143 (my italics).Google Scholar

page 155 note 1 There is no objection to multiplying entities per se, of course, as long as there is evidence for their existence. Thus it is no objection to the atomic theory that if we accept it we will be violating Occam's razor because of the trillions of atoms and sub-atomic particles whose existence we will be forced to accept. It would be an objection that the theory postulates more kinds of particles than are necessary to explain the facts, if that could be shown.

page 156 note 1 Hume, , Dialogues, p. 40.Google Scholar

page 156 note 2 This seems to be a good place to remark that the analogy may break down at more places than Swinburne thinks. After all, the types of regularities of succession that Swinburne gives as examples of the types produced by human beings (a melody, dance, etc.) are all intermittent regularities and seem very much unlike what is going on in the constant regularities of succession exemplified by the working of natural laws. No doubt this objection could be developed further, although there is not space to do so here.

page 156 note 3 Swinburne, , op. cit. p. 147.Google Scholar

page 157 note 1 In response to the possible objection: ‘Well then, how do you explain the fact that the gods all work so well together? (Telepathy?)’, it might be replied (as Hume suggests) that it is just as reasonable to suppose that the universe was designed by a committee of finite gods as to suppose that it was designed by a single omniscient planner. After all, if (as the saying goes) ‘a camel is a horse designed by a committee,’ then there does indeed seem to be evidence of much committee work in this universe!

page 157 note 2 Hume, , Dialogues, p. 39.Google Scholar

page 158 note 1 Ibid. p. 40.

page 158 note 2 Swinburne, , op. cit. p. 147.Google Scholar

page 158 note 3 Ibid. pp. 147–8.

page 160 note 1 Olding, , op. cit. p. 370.Google Scholar

page 160 note 2 Plantinga, Alvin, God and Other Minds (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 109.Google Scholar

page 161 note 1 Ibid. p. 109.