Download The Design Argument (Part 1)

The Design Argument (Part 1)
Colin Crowder
(Dialogue, Issue 1)
The design argument is the third of the classic ‘theistic proofs’, or.arguments for the
existence of God. Students often heave a sigh of relief when they reach it. First, it appears
to be a great deal more ‘user-friendly’ than the ontological and cosmological arguments
which so often precede it in both courses and textbooks. Second, it seems to be
refreshingly ‘modern’ (or relatively so), at home in an intellectual atmosphere which we
breathe more easily than we do that of Anselm, say, or Thomas Aquinas.
Yet appearances can be deceptive, and the design argument is neither modern nor unfortunately - simple. A historical enquiry could show you just how old the design
argument really is. But this is a philosophical enquiry, and so I shall try to show you that
the argument is complex - but all the more interesting for that.
What I want to do is to bring the design argument into focus. We need to ask what it tries
to do, what it fails to do, and what value, if any, it might still have. So my paper is
composed of three sections:
a: a statement and analysis of the design argument;
b: a critique of the argument at four levels;
c: a contemporary perspective upon the argument.
Part 1 of my paper, in this first issue of Dialogue, is devoted entirely to section A. To
help you to think about the argument, I look at some logic; to encourage you to read
about it, I suggest a bit of further reading.
Part 2 of the paper, in the next issue of Dialogue, takes in sections B and C. I should add
that my remarks about religious language there, like the logical remarks here, can be
applied to many other philosophical topics.
A: Statement and Analysis of the Argument
(1) Let us begin by considering the best-known English champion of the design
argument. William Paley (l743-1805) was a churchman with a strong interest in
apologetics - the defence (apologia) of the truth of Christianity by appeal to ‘natural
reason’ rather than to ‘revelation’. The apologist need not rule out a subsequent appeal to
revelation, provided he or she gives good reasons for believing that any purported divine
revelation (such as the Bible) is, in fact, what it is said to be. But that only underlines the
fact that the apologist’s real job is to argue for the truth of Christianity in ways acceptable
(at least in principle) to all rational people, whether religious or not. This is very much
what we see Paley doing in more than one of his works. As an apologist of a distinctively
eighteenth-century kind, moreover, Paley liked to talk in terms of the ‘evidences’ of
Christianity. What such talk gives us a sense of, perhaps, is the self-understanding of the
apologist, as one who trusts to the facts of the matter, the hard evidence available to one
and all; it places the apologist in the sober company of the scientist, the historian and the
lawyer. This is Paley’s rhetorical strategy, and it is nowhere better displayed than in his
treatment of the design argument.
This treatment is found in Paley's Natural Theology of 1802. Paley imagines himself
walking upon a heath, and coming across a stone. He would not be puzzled by finding it;
no explanation would be needed. But suppose that he had found a watch there instead. He
would be puzzled by its presence; he wouldn’t simply treat it (as he had the stone) as the
sort of thing that might have occurred naturally. The difference between the two cases is
twofold:
the watch (unlike the stone) is composed of finely adjusted parts manifesting orderly
behaviour, and the interaction of these parts serves a specific purpose - telling the time.
Because of these two aspects of the watch - order and purpose - we are obliged to believe
that it is the product of an intelligent designer. Now we reach the crucial stage of the
argument: Paley says that nature is full of things which resemble the watch in those key
respects of orderly complexity and purposeful arrangement. What we recognise in the
watch, we must recognise in the world, only to a vastly higher degree:
[Everyl indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design,
which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with a
difference, on the side of nature, of being greater and more, and
that in a degree which exceeds all computation. I mean that the
contrivances of nature surpass the contrivances of art, in the
complexity, subtlety, and curiosity of the mechanism; and still
more, if possible, do they go beyond them in number and variety:
yet, in a multitude of cases, are not less evidently mechanical, not
less evidently contrivances, not less accommodated to their end,
or suited to their office, than are the most perfect productions of
human ingenuity.
The conclusion seems obvious: if we must argue from watch to watchmaker, we must
argue from world to worldmaker. What watch and world have in common are orderly
complexity and purposeful arrangement, only on a very different scale in each case.
Correspondingly, what watch and worldmaker have in common is that both are intelligent
designers, and again, the difference between them is one of scale.
Paley goes on to devote most of his book to piling up examples of design in the natural
world. From this point onwards the reader is in the hands of the clergyman naturalist, an
exquisitely English type; but that means that the philosopher has done his work. Paley
may continue to illustrate his design argument, but the statement of the argument as such
is now complete.
Let us recall what Paley has done. He has considered a mechanism (the watch), and
identified in it certain features. These have compelled us to ascribe the production of the
watch to an intelligent designer. (So far, so good: we know from experience,
independently of the argument, that watchmakers are indeed responsible for watches.) He
has then argued that the natural world is full of things with the same features, things
which are, in effect, also mechanisms showing orderly complexity and purposeful
arrangement. And he has concluded that we must make the same inference as we did in
the case of the watch - namely, to an intelligent designer. It is a case of ‘similar effects,
similar cause’. The known designer (that is, the watchmaker), and the postulated designer
(that is, God), are therefore similar in kind, but dissimilar in degree. And this is the same
distinction that was deployed to express the ways in which our machines and the natural
world are alike and not alike.
(2) Before I attempt to ‘unpack’ these ideas a little more, I would like to give you another
example of the design argument. It is taken from the work of David Hume (1711-1776),
a Scottish philosopher and historian, who crops up in connection with the design
argument just as often as Paley does. His key work in this connection is Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously (in 1779), but drafted over twenty
years earlier - hence predating Paley’s Natural Theology by nearly half a century. The
Dialogues are much more entertaining than any treatise, since in them Hume creates three
memorable characters who try to outmanoeuvre one another, not always very fairly, in
arguing about the existence of God. Although a sceptical character (Philo) is allowed to
run rings around the others, a somewhat Paleyesque character called Cleanthes makes a
lot of the early running. The speech from which the following summary of the design
argument comes is, perhaps, his finest hour:
Look round the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it:
You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided
into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of
subdivisions, to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties
can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their
most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy,
which ravishes into admiration all men, who have ever
contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends,
throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds,
the productions of human contrivance; of human design, thought,
wisdom, and intelligence. Since therefore the effects resemble
each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the
causes also resemble: and that the Author of nature is somewhat
similar to the mind of man; though possessed of much larger
faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work, which he has
executed. By this argument a posteriori, and by this argument
alone, we do prove at once the existence of a Deity, and his
similarity to human mind and intelligence.
There are a couple of technical ideas there which I will come back to shortly. For now,
what we should note is the way in which Hume’s statement (through Cleanthes) of the
design argument brings out the ideas we saw at work in Paley’s formulation:
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note again the idea that the world and its parts are mechanisms, comparable to the
ones we ourselves produce;
note again the concern with both order (the accurate adjustment of parts to one
another) and purpose (the adaptation of means to ends) in natural mechanisms;
note again the principle of ‘similar effects, similar causes’, which is the argument’s
backbone;
note again the concern with proportion; although the makers of ‘artificial’ and
‘natural’ mechanisms are similarly intelligent, there is a huge difference between
them corresponding to the huge difference between their products. This is essentially
a matter of scale: the unknown designer must be like the known, human designer,
only much more so since the work of the former so completely dwarfs the work of the
latter which it otherwise closely resembles.
By now we should be getting a little clearer about what is going on in the design
argument. Obviously, it isn’t just a matter of saying ‘there must be a God because the
world is so complex and amazing’ - although, as I hope to indicate later, I don’t want to
ignore the element of awe from which the argument profits. But the design argument as
an argument needs patient unpacking. So far I have tried to set out some of the basic
stages of the argument, at least as it appears in the work of Paley and Hume. What I want
to do now is to carry the analysis a little further, by asking how the design argument
should be characterised.
(3) (a) I can begin by quickly mentioning some informal characteristics of the argument the ones which strike us first, and perhaps linger longest in the mind.
What I have in mind is the argument’s ‘user-friendly’ character, which I mentioned at the
beginning of this paper. It is easy to get the hang of the design argument, even if we don’t
understand its inner workings particularly well - and we can’t say that of all the classic
theistic proofs. The argument presents itself as vivid, accessible, and ‘common-sensical’,
with its feet firmly on the ground. It makes use of things with which we are familiar in
daily life - clocks and houses, plants and animals - and is flexible enough to range from
gastropods to galaxies in its tireless accumulation of examples of purported divine
design. It can capitalise on moods as distinct as scientific curiosity and religious awe,
reserving its suspicion for philosophical abstraction, which it seeks to replace by a nononsense appeal to our everyday experience of the human and natural world. Is it any
wonder that its persuasive power outstrips (as we shall see) its logical force? Even the
great German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who punctured the pretensions
of the ontological and cosmological arguments, and who seemed set to deal the design
argument a devastating blow, went out of his way to cushion his criticisms of it:
This proof always deserves to be mentioned with respect. It is the
oldest, the clearest, and the most accordant with the common reason
of mankind.
He is not alone in having a soft spot for an argument he nevertheless believes to be false.
As arguments go - not least theistic arguments - this one is downright amiable.
(b) It is time to turn to some formal characteristics of the argument. Setting these out will
help us to see rather more clearly what the argument is, and is not.
First, the design argument is an a posteriori argument, not an a priori one. We shouldn’t
let the Latin tag dazzle us, since the distinction being made here is quite
straightforward. In the case of propositions, one that is a priori (‘from what comes
before’) can be known to be true or false without reference to experience. One that is a
posteriori (‘from what comes after’) can only be known to be true or false by reference to
experience, to how things actually are in the world. Take an example: ‘All bachelors are
unmarried’. We don’t need to conduct a survey to find out if this is true - we can see it is
true because of the meaning of the words themselves. It is therefore true a priori (just as
‘No bachelors are unmarried’ is false a priori). But if I say, instead, ‘all Norwegians are
unmarried’, the truth or falsity of the proposition depends upon an actual state of affairs.
You must know something about the relevant facts to be able to judge the truth or falsity
of an a posteriori proposition. In the case of arguments, the a priori ones are staking
claims on the back of the corresponding propositions. This is what the ontological
argument does, in attempting to deduce the existence of God from the concept of God
alone. The design argument is an a posteriori argument, because it relies upon things
being a certain way not just in the order of concepts but in the order of reality too. (It is a
relatively rich a posteriori argument, it might be added, in typically appealing to a lot of
facts, often highly specific ones; the cosmological argument, by contrast really depends
upon one fact, a highly general one at that: the sheer existence of the universe.) This
characteristic, then, is the logical foundation upon which is built that sense of the design
argument as being ‘down to earth’, ‘factual’, ‘scientific’, and so forth.
Second, the design argument is an inductive argument. This isn’t quite so obvious as the
formal characteristic I have just noted, and so my claim needs to be developed a little.
Again, let us consider the alternative, by asking what the design argument would look
like if it were a deductive argument instead. Deductive arguments are particularly strong
ones, since their conclusions follow ‘automatically’ from their premises. So, for instance,
if we have two premises:
(a) ‘Socrates is a man’
(b) ‘All men are mortal’
Then the conclusion (c), ‘Socrates is mortal’, is just as sound as the premises, which in
this case are certain. To deny the conclusion would be to deny the premises; alternatively,
the premises can be said to ‘contain’ the conclusion, which we simply have to ‘bring
out’. Not surprisingly, then, many arguments would like to join the deductive club,
because deduction provides such a ‘strong’ logical connection between premises and
conclusions. But look what happens if we state the design argument in a would-be
deductive form:
(a) ‘Nature is full of designed things’
(b) ‘Designed things are attributable to designers’
(c) ‘Therefore, nature is attributable to a designer’
There is more than one logical sleight-of-hand here, but what really matters is that the
conclusion can be no better than the weakest premise. This premise is the first one, which
asserts something which the design argument is, in fact, obliged to prove. I could tighten
up the argument above in order to remove some mismatches (between things in nature
and nature as a whole, between designers and a designer), but I couldn’t eliminate the
unacceptable premise. At best I could put the weak link elsewhere:
(a) ‘Nature is full of orderly structures’
(b) ‘Orderly structures are products of intelligence’
(c) ‘Therefore, nature is the product of intelligence’
Now it is the second premise which assumes what has to be proved. Again, the
conclusion is unproven because a key premise is unproven.
There is no alternative, then, but to reconstruct the design argument in inductive terms. In
induction, we move from premises about some things of a certain kind to conclusions
about other or all things of that kind: we could argue, for instance, that ‘All swans are
white’, on the basis of those swans that we know about. If not as ‘strong’ as deduction,
induction can still be very secure in certain cases. Consider how this affects the design
argument. The ‘weak premise’ identified above needs to be defended, because the whole
argument rests upon it. But it can only be defended inductively:
(a) ‘Some orderly structures are products of intelligence’
(b) ‘Therefore [it is reasonable to believe that] all orderly structures are products of
intelligence.’
Well, perhaps. There are, of course, ways in which the inference from ‘some’ to ‘all’
here can be frustrated. But at least we can see that inductive reasoning will have to have
a place in the design argument, and that it is deceptive to dress up the argument as a
deductive proof relying upon self-evidently true premises. (Moreover, the distinction
being made here will become clearer when we consider the next formal characteristic of
the argument.)
Third, the design argument is analogical. Following the pattern I used with regard to the
previous two characteristics, let us first try to imagine what a non-analogical inductive
design argument would look like:
(a) ‘Most [or all] other universes are known to be the product of intelligent design’
(b) ‘Therefore, this particular universe is probably the product of intelligent design’
The problem with this, obviously, is that universes don’t come in batches. The very
concept of the universe puts it in a class of one, and this means that we cannot argue
straightforwardly (i.e. non-analogically) from some members of the class of universes to
another member. The kind of argument outlined above works well enough for machines,
say, but cannot work for universes.
But my mention of machines should remind you of the way in which the design argument
actually operates. It starts with things held to be analogous to the universe (or parts of it),
such as machines, and argues that the cause of apparently ‘designed’ properties in the
universe must therefore be analogous to the known cause of undoubtedly designed
properties in machines. Put simply, the world is similar to a watch, so the worldmaker
must be similar to a watchmaker - making the necessary adjustments for the scale of the
handiwork, of course.
You should now think back to the quotations from Paley and from Hume’s Cleanthes,
and consider the way in which they manifest this analogical character of the design
argument. You should also note that analogical reasoning is weaker than straightforward
inductive reasoning: it forces us to deal with two classes of things rather than one, and it
is perfectly possible to make the wrong comparison between the classes at the outset.
But analogical reasoning certainly isn’t valueless. (Hume, interestingly, goes too far at
this point: he suggests we cannot form rational hypotheses about the cause of this
universe because we don’t have any experience of other universes to give us something
to go on. Well, if we had the relevant experience, we wouldn’t need to argue analogically
in the first place, would we? We could argue directly from items in the same class.
Moreover, if Hume was right we couldn’t trust any analogical arguments, or say anything
sensible about apparently ‘one-off’ phenomena either. Think what this would mean for
theories about the Big Bang, or the evolution of life. So, Hume’s reminder about the
‘singularity’ of the universe is important, naturally, and can stop us from falling into
some kinds of logical nonsense. But it does not, in itself, mean the end of the road for the
design argument, which is an analogical argument precisely because of the otherwise
insuperable problem of the singularity of the universe.)
In the next issue of Dialogue I shall investigate whether the logical structure of the design
argument - as set out here - helps it to stand up against the attacks of its critics, or
whether it is the logic in particular which is its problem. I shall also ask if the design
argument has anything left to say to us if it cannot prove to us what it sets out to prove.
In the meantime, you could conduct your own analysis of the argument, and develop your
own ideas concerning its philosophical persuasiveness and religious value, for
example. Here are some ideas for further reading:
Most of the modern introductions to the philosophy of religion have useful sections on
the argument, e.g:
H.D. Lewis, Philosophy of Religion (1965)
T. McPherson, The Philosophy of Religion (1965)
J. Hick, Philosophy of Religion (2nd ed., 1975)
B. Davies, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (1982)
J.C.A. Gaskin, The Quest for Eternity (1984)
C.S. Evans, Philosophy of Religion (1985)
There are many other introductions like these, so my list – of believers and atheists,
Catholics and Protestants, conservatives and liberals – is merely a starting-point.
Paley’s Natural Theology turns up in a variety of old editions; some libraries have a
handy abridgement, edited by Frederick Ferr (1962). The secondary sources tend to
quote most of the important parts anyway.
Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion can be found in many modern editions,
the ‘standard’ one being that of Norman Kemp Smith (1935/47). Stanley Tweyman’s
Routledge paperback edition (1991) contains lots of good critical material; Martin Bell’s
Penguin paperback (1990) is slim, cheap, and worth buying. Although it is quoted at
length in the secondary sources there is much to be said for reading the original,
especially for Hume’s wit.
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The Design Argument (Part 2): Why it Fails
Colin Crowder
(Dialogue, Issue 2)
In the last issue of Dialogue I subjected the Design Argument to an analysis which was
intended to reveal its logical workings. The remainder of my paper - which presupposes
Part 1 - is concerned with the critical problems raised by the Design Argument, and the
further issue of whether the argument amounts to any more than a would-be ‘proof’
which proves absolutely nothing.
B: Critique of the Argument
There are many objections to the Design Argument, varying in character, complexity, and
quality. I suspect that the best way to encounter them is through a reading of Hume’s
Dialogues. But a more systematic (if much duller) survey of these objections at least has
the merit of giving a sense of what one should be looking for amid the intellectual and
stylistic fireworks of Hume’s work. I shall attempt to offer that kind of survey in this
section. (But please note that not all of Hume’s objections are mentioned here; nor, in
fact, are all the objections mentioned taken from Hume.) My strategy is to show that the
critique of the Design Argument operates at a number of distinct ‘levels’: thus, even if the
Design Argument is given the benefit of the doubt at one level, the critique can simply
start again at a deeper level. For the sake of convenience, I will identify four such levels
at which the critique creates serious problems for the Design Argument - but remember
that other ways of organising the critical material are possible, and may, indeed, be more
desirable.
1. Is the Scope of the Argument Exaggerated?
Orderly complexity and purposeful arrangement are said to be common to our
machines and to things in nature such as animals and plants. This is the basis for the
analogy which, together with the principle of ‘similar effects, similar causes’, seems to
justify a belief in an intellectual world-designing being. But consider this idea more
closely: things in the world, like animals and plants, are indeed composed of inter-related
parts which serve particular purposes (such as survival and reproduction), but that does
not tell us anything about the world as a whole. We have only seen a small part of the
universe, after all; and even if we accept, using an uncontroversial inductive argument
that the laws of science in this part of the universe obtain everywhere, we are still only
ascribing ‘orderly complexity’ to the whole. The Design Argument gives no reason to
believe that the world as a whole is a ‘teleological system’, a system serving some
purpose (telos), even though many such systems exist within it. So the Design Argument,
upon closer analysis, can at best compare parts of nature with a machine; it is in no
position to talk about nature itself in the same terms. And that means that the argument
can’t point to a ‘worldmaker’ quite so unequivocally as the ‘watchmaker’ comparison
seemed to suggest.
2. Is
the Analogy used by the Argument Arbitrary?
Even if we concede the point about the scope of the argument, what the Design Argument
compares the world (or parts of the world) to is a machine - although any kind of human
artefact will do. The Design Argument, in other words, relies upon a mechanical analogy.
Must we make this particular comparison once we recognise orderly complexity and
purposeful arrangement in the world?
Hume’s alter ego Philo thinks not. Can we not think of the world, he asks, as analogous
to an animal or plant rather than a machine? Of course - there is a case for using an
organic analogy, just as there is a case for using a mechanical one. But whereas both are
compatible with talk of order and purpose, only the mechanical analogy suggests that the
world is the product of intelligent design. The organic analogy takes us in a different
direction: just as animals and plants come into being by generation, and not by intelligent
design, so the same could be true of a world significantly resembling animal or plant life.
Well, this move is certainly imaginative, but it could easily be said to issue in stalemate.
For it to be really effective, we would need to know that animals and plants are not in any
sense the products of design - but that is exactly the point at issue, since the Design
Argument is saying that animals and plants are ultimately designed, that they can be
comprehended by the mechanical analogy
It is probably best, then, to treat that particular criticism as a spanner thrown in the works,
and to direct our attention to a more serious point. Hume seems to be interested in the
organic analogy not for its own sake but as a way of exposing the arbitrary nature of its
mechanical counterpart. And he is interested in this because he wants to argue that the
world’s order can be explained without recourse to the idea of intelligent design. The
order we observe in the world, Hume suggests, need not be the product of divine
intelligence: order might well emerge naturally from the motion of matter over immense
periods of time, or order might (for all we know) be inherent in matter itself. In this way
Hume gives an airing to naturalistic explanations of phenomena which the Design
Argument accounts for ‘supematuralistically’, for want of a better word. He didn’t have
the benefit of later scientific theories of course, but it is easy to see how certain kinds of
cosmology and evolutionary biology are the heirs to Hume’s alternative explanations of
teleological systems.
It is perfectly possible, needless to say, that a naturalistic explanation - say, Darwinian
biology - will prove compatible with a more ‘ultimate’ explanation in terms of God’s
action. Given that there are still some who haven’t heard that the so-called war between
science and religion is over - if it ever really existed in the way popularly imagined - this
talk of ‘compatibility’ is most welcome. But it won’t do any good against Hume. The
post-Darwinian tendency to incorporate naturalistic explanations within an over-arching
supernaturalistic explanation (‘evolution is the way God works’) masks the fact that the
Design Argument has beat a hasty retreat: once it was thought obvious that nature’s
‘machines’ were designed by God, just as our machines were designed by craftsmen, but
now it isn’t ‘obvious’ at all. The argument urged people to think about what they saw in
the world, but the development of well-organised competition means that their thoughts
may not move in a theistic direction. Look what’s happening here: Hume’s sketchy
alternatives to the design theory don’t need to be better explanations of teleological
systems in nature, they just need to be possible ones, and then the Design Argument’s
aura of ‘self-evidence’ fades away. So: can we show that theism is compatible with one
or more of the alternative explanations? Fine. But what is the basis of that theism in the
first place? We can’t say ‘the Design Argument’ any more since it is the Design
Argument’s own success which has been thrown into question by the partial credibility of
these other explanations. The point, then, is not whether the design theory fits other
theories, but whether it fits the facts it purports to explain: examples of orderly
complexity and purposeful arrangement in nature. Perhaps it does. But perhaps other
theories do too, and they may have the edge in certain respects (such as simplicity and
economy).
Hume’s organic analogy has to be understood in this kind of context. It breaks the
mechanical analogy’s stranglehold on our thoughts by its very existence. And in so
doing, the ‘obviousness’ of the Design Argument’s way of reasoning from the world to
God is called into question, and space is created in which naturalistic explanations may
flourish.
3. Is the Conclusion of the Argument Justified?
Even if we concede that the world (and not just parts of it) constitutes a teleological
system, and even if we consider it properly and primarily analogous to a machine, what
exactly does the Design Argument prove? The answer seems obvious: the existence of
God. But, once again, Hume subjects the structure of the Design Argument to close
examination, with surprising results. In this case, he exposes a gap between real and
desired conclusions - between what the argument yields, and what we think it yields.
Hume opens up the possibility that the Design Argument, like sinners, falls short of the
glory of God: even if it was a perfectly sound argument up to this point, it could not
justify belief in the God of theism. Just as we are not forced to see the argument's ‘raw
material’ (as it were) in mechanical terms, so we are not forced to see its ‘finished
product’ in theistic terms.
Let us consider three different ways in which the conclusion of the Design Argument can
be questioned:
First, why should the thesis that there is an intelligent designing being be treated as a
conclusion at all? What explains the being which (in turn) explains order and purpose in
nature? Isn’t there an explanatory ‘infinite regress’ with each new explanation crying out
to be explained?
Now, a Cleanthes might say that once we reach the designing being, explanation comes
to an end: we don’t need further explanation. But a Philo might say exactly the same
about, say, the ultimate laws of nature and if Philo isn’t allowed to stop explaining when
he reaches the laws of nature, he won’t let Cleanthes get away with stopping explanation
after one more move - to a being responsible for those laws. If order needs explaining, so
does an orderer. (What is needed here, of course, is an account of why the buck stops at
God in religious thought; of why the familiar question ‘Who created God?’ is a pseudoquestion. Hume’s point, then, has no universal validity, but it does make life difficult for
the Design Argument, which has to preserve its facts-and-common-sense public image by
playing down or ignoring the special character of language about God.)
Second, given that the Design Argument suggests an analogy between human design and
divine design, why is it assumed that intelligence is the only significant factor common to
both? Designing involves body as well as mind; shouldn’t we say, then, that a divine
designer analogous to human designers must have a body too? Design projects often
involve several people; shouldn’t we say, then, that there are many divine designers?
Hume, naturally, isn’t interested in making theism ultra-anthropomorphic, or in turning
monotheists into polytheists either. What he wants to show is that there is nothing in the
Design Argument as such which can rule certain aspects of the analogy between human
and divine design ‘in’ and others ‘out’. The Design Argument itself, therefore, cannot
produce orthodox religious conclusions (such as that God is a spirit, for example, or that
God is one), and so they are supplied from other sources. And yet the argument is
supposed to concentrate, exclusively, on the facts of nature, and to draw only commonsense conclusions. (There may well be some legitimate ways of making judgements here,
however: the uniformity of basic order in the world, for instance, tends to support the
one-designer theory against its rival. Nevertheless, Hume still has much to teach us about
the problems of the Design Argument as an example of analogical reasoning.)
Third, doesn’t the Design Argument confuse the concept of a superhuman designer with
the concept of God? Let me explain this idea with reference to the analogy between the
watch and the world. It is a well established principle that what is ascribed to a cause
should be proportionate to the effect it is said to bring about. So, in the case of a watch,
we would be right to infer that the watchmaker responsible for it was intelligent to a
degree proportionate to the work, but wrong to infer that he was rich or tall or alive – or,
indeed, a ‘he’ at all! These factors are strictly irrelevant to the task of deciding on the
kind of cause which is sufficient to explain this effect. Exactly the same applies, argues
Hume, to the case of the world. Even if we make all the concessions noted so far, we
cannot conclude that the God of traditional belief exists - only that there is some kind of
design-producing being. This being must be considered highly intelligent, but not
necessarily omniscient; powerful, but not necessarily omnipotent; capable of designing,
but not necessarily capable of creating. And that’s it. Other theistic attributes (such as
eternity or omnipresence) are not in the picture at all: they can never be conjured out of
an argument which is about positing a cause sufficient to explain order and purpose in the
world. Even if - and we now know that it is a big ‘if’ - we make all the concessions
described so far, the Design Argument still points us to a shadowy cosmic architect, not a
creator
4. Is the Evidence Considered by the Argument Limited?
At this point things are looking pretty bad for the Design Argument, but there is still one
way in which they can get significantly worse. Note that most of the criticisms
considered so far have been directed towards aspects of the analogy which the Design
Argument sets up between ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’ mechanisms, between the order and
purpose established by humans and the order and purpose visible in the world around us.
As we have seen, there are questions to be asked about the scope of the analogy, about
the necessity of using this analogy alone, and about the kinds of conclusion which the
analogy could possibly sustain. But we should remember that the Design Argument is not
only analogical - it is, even more fundamentally, a posteriori, geared to ‘the way things
are’. And it is the argument’s own desire to deal justly with ‘the evidence’ which leads us
to the heart of the final criticism to be considered.
Up until now, we have not had to consider the moral character of the evidence used by
the Design Argument. It has been more or less neutral, morally speaking, or perhaps the
kind of thing which could be described positively (the argument could claim, for
example, that the arrangement of parts in a given animal is geared to purposes which
include the animal’s general wellbeing.) But has all the evidence been considered? The
critic of the argument could claim that it ignores inconvenient evidence - and in
particular, suffering. The natural world is full of apparently gratuitous pain: if this doesn’t
count as morally negative evidence, what does?
The spectre of suffering is raised towards the end of Hume's Dialogues, not by Philo but
by the pious Demea who places the Paleyesque Cleanthes in a difficult position. For
while Demea believes that eternity will compensate for the miseries of this life, Cleanthes
cannot ‘solve’ the problem of evil so easily. He knows he must stick to the ‘facts’ and the
hypotheses which the facts clearly support, or else forfeit the claim to commonsense
rationality which is so vital to the Design Argument. In other words, he knows - even
before Philo rubs it in - that evil and suffering cannot be missed out of the equation. His
only option, then, is to minimise suffering, claiming that pleasure far outweighs pain even
in this life, so that the goodness of the designing God can still be inferred from the way
things are.
Philo’s criticisms of Cleanthes’ position are very instructive. For example, can we be so
sure that pleasure ‘outweighs’ pain? And even if it does, what does the presence of any
suffering tell us about the character of the designing being? Well, we all know that the
problem of evil can be addressed in different ways, so that evil in the world doesn’t
reflect badly upon God, as it were. Usually, an extra hypothesis is thrown in so that the
reality of evil and the reality of God don’t appear to be contradictory: for example, ‘It is
better for God to give us free will (which can be used for good or evil) than to make us
like robots’. Well, alright, but notice what Cleanthes has just done: he has told Demea
that invoking heaven won’t prove that God is good, since the issue is not whether an
extra hypothesis helps the God-hypothesis, but whether the God-hypothesis fits the facts.
Then he gets into trouble, and Philo pounces, forcing Cleanthes to be absolutely
consistent. Cleanthes has looked at the evidence optimistically, and thinks that the
residual evil of the world is compatible with God’s goodness, but (says Philo)
‘compatibility’ isn’t the point The question is not this:
‘How can the theory cope with the bad evidence?’
- but this:
‘What kind of theory does all the evidence suggest?’
In other words, Cleanthes still seems to be introducing extra hypotheses - as Demea had
done -rather than letting his initial hypothesis (about a designing God) be properly
informed by the evidence. And this evidence, Philo insists, is of a morally mixed
character. What should we infer about its designer? Here Philo returns to the
inventiveness which gave us, as we saw earlier, the possibility of a physical deity, or
design by divine committee. Now he canvasses new possibilities. Does the mixed
character of the evidence suggest a morally good designer plus a morally bad one? Or a
designer indifferent to morality? Or an incompetent designer? Or a designer struggling
with evil materials which cannot be bent fully to his will?
As usual, Hume does not seem to advocate one particular inference. Whether it is the
unity or the goodness or the power of God which ‘has to go’ is, in a sense, beside the
point. His concern is to expose the unacceptably selective character of the Design
Argument, and the way in which it evades its own promise to argue solely from the facts
to nothing but the hypotheses which are needed to account for them. In introducing the
problem of evil, Hume once again subjects the Design Argument to an examination too
searching for it to bear.
So Hume’s enquiries suggest two things, perhaps:
 that the Design Argument does not, in reality, live up to its ‘evidential’ and ‘commonsense’ reputation;
 and, even if it were fully consistent, it could not hope to demonstrate the existence of a
being
anything like the creator God of the monotheistic religions.
C: Understanding the Design Argument Today
Many philosophers have treated Hume’s criticisms as the last word on the Design
Argument, in effect saluting the Dialogues as the most comprehensive demolition job in
the history of philosophy. Is this going too far? You must judge for yourself how secure
Hume’s objections are, of course. But I have already registered caution on a couple of
occasions. (For example, recall that the ‘singularity’ of the universe proved no bar to the
Design Argument, which is analogical for precisely this reason; and that the organic
analogy did not prevent us from thinking organisms were ultimately products of design).
On the other hand, Hume’s critique isn’t like a chain, only as strong as its weakest link. It
is more like a web, composed of interconnected strands, many of which can be broken
without endangering the total structure. So, although some of Hume’s objections must be
abandoned or modified, the flexibility of his approach means that it remains an
impressive and daunting critique of the Design Argument.
Nevertheless, the Design Argument keeps cropping up to this day. On this occasion I can
only point to a couple of ways in which the argument has been revived recently, although
in each case one may wonder whether the ghost of Hume has been properly exorcised or
not.
First, it is possible to think that our understanding of the evidence to which the Design
Argument appeals has changed dramatically - so much so that theism becomes the oddson favourite explanation, with naturalistic explanations looking like also-rans. This brings
us to the ‘anthropic cosmological principle’, which I can hardly explain in a few lines.
For our purposes, we simply need to note that it is a scientific claim, arguing that
intelligent life could not have evolved if the most basic physical constants of the universe
had been even slightly other than what they are. Put even more crudely, the universe
looks like it has been set up with the specific object of producing us. Not surprisingly,
some proponents of the Design Argument can’t believe their luck: respectable scientists
are handing them on a plate the kind of ‘evidence’ which was beyond their wildest
dreams.
So, has the Design Argument been vindicated after all? First, perhaps, we should recall
and apply Hume’s comments on restricted evidence - and therefore ask about the
character of a designing being who seems to value the emergence of intelligent life
absolutely, but seems indifferent to all the suffering that attends it.
Moreover, and more importantly, most of Hume’s objections to the Design Argument are
logical: it isn’t clear that these will go away just because things are looking up on the
evidence front. (I ought to add that the anthropic cosmological principle itself comes in
different forms, and that the ones which assert most are the ones most open to new kinds
of logical objection.)
Second, it is possible to think that our understanding of the method which the Design
Argument employs has changed significantly. Some maintain that the Design Argument
has learned the lesson of ‘pride before a fall’. So it has cleaned up its logical act; it treats
naturalistic explanations with the respect they deserve; and its conclusions are far from
extravagant. In this humbler modern form, it has been argued, the Design Argument still
has something to say. Philosophers of religion who take this view may seek to do no
more than to show that the design hypothesis is plausible: there is a residue of good sense
in the argument’s basic analogy which should prevent us from ruling out the possibility
that the world is designed. More ambitiously, they may seek to show that the design
hypothesis is more probable than a naturalistic account, yet without suggesting that it
could ever be proven true. There are, on the philosophical market today, a number of
complex ways of calculating such competing probabilities. But that isn’t all:
many of the same proponents of the Design Argument believe that if one puts together
several theistic arguments that have been similarly humbled, one can build a cumulative
case for theism - with the better features of one argument making good the deficiencies of
another, as it were. And so the Design Argument’s modest post-Hume claims are
supplemented by the equally modest claims of other reformulated theistic arguments, in
order that a more convincing claim can be built up.
What are we to make of this? Well, since this approach to the Design Argument begins
by conceding many of Hume’s criticisms, it is less vulnerable to attack. (Having said that,
some still argue that Hume’s most important objections have the logical power to wreck
any restatement of the argument, actual or potential.) What is most interesting here is the
celebration of the argument’s genuine and very modest conclusion, which I think Hume
found to be so minimal as to be virtually worthless. But then again, the new heirs of
Cleanthes have a place for that conclusion in a cumulative case for belief in God, where,
we must presume, every little helps. Cumulative case arguments, however, have been
dubbed ‘the ten leaky buckets approach’: ten leaky buckets hold no more water than one
leaky bucket, and several faulty theistic arguments prove no more than one. This last
judgement is a rather extreme one, I think, but is symptomatic of an understandable
feeling, a concern that partial rehabilitations of deeply flawed arguments should be
carefully inspected. One can be forgiven for being cautious about the claim that failed
would-be proofs still somehow ‘point towards the existence of God’, both individually
and collectively.
For these reasons and others, I don’t like to rest much hope in the prospect of a Design
Argument revival. But I do agree with the various heirs of Cleanthes that the argument is
far too impressive to be abandoned altogether. Why is this? Even if Hume’s affectionate
tributes to the argument at the end of the Dialogues are entirely ironic, why did Kant and
many others since his day find the argument so fascinating, not so much logically
persuasive as psychologically compelling? I suspect that this isn’t like admiring the
ingenuity of the Ontological Argument while declaring it philosophically bankrupt, an
outrageous philosophical fraud. Rather, the Design Argument seems to have a certain
profundity about it which has made critics like Kant soften the impact of their objections.
I think we have to try to understand the roots of this, if we want to understand the Design
Argument today.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the claim that there is evidence of design in
nature is an unsound one, and cannot be revived. Perhaps, then, we should be looking for
a less ‘formal’ way of talking about the amazing teleological systems we see all around
us? It is along these lines that some have talked of an impression of design in nature,
suspecting that the Design Argument distorts that impression by trying to build upon it a
formal proof of God’s existence. What are we to make of the idea of an ‘impression’ of
design? First, it is people who have impressions, so to talk of an impression of design
may be to talk about a ‘subjective’ state. In that case, perhaps we are making a mistake,
‘getting the wrong impression’; or perhaps we can’t avoid imposing order and purpose on
the world we perceive, since they are part of our mental furniture. So the question may be
whether there is anything ‘out there’ corresponding to our (subjective) impression of
design. Therefore, second, we may look for ‘objective’ causes of this impression. I
presume these can’t just be teleological systems in themselves, or else we are back in the
Design Argument proper: we might have to say that the ‘impression’ of design was a
vague feeling attending what was still an inference from facts to hypothesis. The
‘impression’ approach seems to be looking for something rather different, in order to
bypass the Design Argument’s assumptions and procedures. But what else could cause
the impression? And if we can’t say, how could we ever know if our impression of design
was a right or wrong interpretation of its objective cause? (Perhaps it is a
misinterpretation sometimes?)
Confused? So am I. It is difficult to see how this kind of unpacking of the Design
Argument’s strange attraction can be more credible than the argument itself. Let’s try a
different angle.
I tend to agree that the Design Argument transposes something significant from one ‘key’
into another, and that this is the secret of the argument’s failure to convince and its
refusal to fade away. But I don’t think that the transposition takes place when some kind
of hazy ‘impression’ is misinterpreted as hard ‘evidence’. I’m more inclined to think that
religious discourse is misconstrued as philosophical discourse. In a moment I will sketch
what I mean by this. But please note that in making this claim I am asking you to think
about the ways in which perceptions are related to language, and about the ways in which
individuals are related to communities. Knowing that these shifts of emphasis are going
on will help you to understand the kind of claim I am advancing.
A few philosophers of religion think that the Design Argument can be found even in the
Bible, although its ‘expression’ is obviously not the same as it is in Paley or Hume. This
is the kind of example they give:
When I look at thy heavens, the work
of thy fingers, the moon and the
stars which thou hast established;
what is man that thou art mindful
of him, and the son of man that thou
dost care for him? (Psalm 8:3-4)
But I suspect that any similarity between what is going on here and the Design Argument
is fairly superficial. Admittedly, both involve contemplating (in some sense) the world
around us. But in the psalm there is no obvious reference to issues of order or purpose, no
explicit analogical reasoning, and above all no inference from the natural facts to a
supernatural designer. God is not identified with the result of any argument at all. It
doesn’t take much imagination to see that many of the typical concerns of the Design
Argument are missing, and many other concerns are present in their place. So I think it
won’t do to say that the only difference is one of ‘expression’, as if the psalmist should be
grateful to philosophers who have come along to rescue him from the limitations of his
rudimentary logic.
What, then, is so distinctive about the ways of contemplating nature found in the Bible?
Since we read that ‘The heavens are telling the glory of God’ (Psalm 19:1), why not treat
texts like these as so many early versions of the Design Argument? Well, I think that the
context in which the biblical authors write is all-important. Their belief in God is not
something added on to ‘common-sense’ beliefs about the world, but a framework for
thought and action, the ‘atmosphere’ in which they move. That doesn’t mean belief in
God can’t be shaken, but it does mean that such belief affects perceptions, imaginings
and thoughts, just as it is affected by them in turn. In other words, there is a two-way
traffic between belief in God and various aspects of human life.
The Design Argument, by contrast, presupposes a one-way traffic system. It assumes that
there is a common experience of the world which is fundamental to believer and
nonbeliever, and that the believer has the right interpretation of it. The character of
religious belief as I describe it above, however, leads me to think that that picture is false.
Instead, I would suggest that the believer’s experience of the world is shaped by her
belief. There is no way in which we can contemplate the world independently of our
perspectives, whether they be those of faith or of unbelief. Therefore perhaps we should
see religious perspectives on nature as bound up with the whole of life for religious
believers and communities - not as something established (even in principle) by arguing
from a ‘neutral’ body of evidence which everyone perceives in the same way. There can
be no such neutrality, because belief and unbelief make a difference to the way we see
the world: the world of the believer is, in an important sense, not the same as the world of
the atheist.
Nothing I have said so far is incompatible with what we know about belief and unbelief,
and in particular that people are converted to religion, or lose their faith. All I am doing is
asking what it means to come to see the world as charged with God’s presence and
creative power, or to fail to find the hand of God in the world. In both cases, we need to
investigate the language and the practices in which these responses are found. The
richness and the complexity of what lies before us in such cases is, I submit, ill-served by
the Design Argument. It tries to codify religious responses to the world, but distorts their
character by treating beliefs as the problematic superstructure raised over an
unproblematic universally agreed foundation. It also tries to arbitrate between the claims
of belief and unbelief, but distorts the conflict between them by presenting it as a
difference of opinion over what can be inferred from mutually agreed premises.
Perhaps we can move away from thinking of religious responses to nature as primitive
attempts at constructing a design argument, and towards thinking of the Design
Argument as a distortion of these religious responses. The distortion, of course was wellmeaning, in the interests of rational apologetics. But the character of religious reflection
on the world was bound to be affected by the Design Argument’s assumptions, as I have
indicated above. The argument’s peculiar problem is that it is motivated by religious
perspectives, but tries to situate itself outside of the communities and traditions in which
religious perspectives on nature are embedded. (To think that we can impartially judge
whether the believer or nonbeliever is ‘right’ about the world is odd; to think that the
Design Argument is capable of doing the judging is, perhaps, odder still.)
If there is something in all this, then it is hopeless to imagine that the atheist could ever
be convinced by the Design Argument as such. It can only ‘work’ for those who have no
need of it, whose perspectives on the world are generated and sustained by nonphilosophical currents - which, nevertheless, run beneath the argument’s deceptive and
distorting surface. Could it be that the Design Argument’s unwitting testimony to the
enduring power of these currents is the secret of its continuing attraction?
Some would undoubtedly say that this kind of analysis is a bit of a con, evading the real
issue. To them, the Design Argument works or it doesn’t, because the world is designed
or it isn’t. They would say that my look-beneath-the-surface approach to the Design
Argument is futile at best, dishonest at worst, since the argument must stand or fall by its
visible merits. I think there are problems with this ‘either-or’ attitude, and especially with
the refusal to look at the wider context of an argument, but I will let them pass.
Instead, let me note a final irony. It is often assumed that revisionary analyses like the
one sketched above have nothing in common with the honest apologetics of an earlier
age, which understood itself to be in the business of proof, and nothing else. That this is
true to a certain extent, at least, is obvious. But it isn’t the whole story. No-one these days
reads more than the first few chapters of Paley’s Natural Theology, with which we began,
but if they did they would find the heart of Paley’s devotion to design expressed in these
terms:
... If one train of thinking be more desirable than another, it is that
which regards the phenomena of nature with a constant reference
to a supreme intelligent Author. To have made this the ruling, the
habitual sentiment of our minds, is to have laid the foundation of
every thing which is religious. The world thenceforth becomes a
temple, and life itself one continued act of adoration. The change
is no less than this: that whereas formerly God was seldom in our
thoughts, we now scarcely look upon anything without perceiving
its relation to him.
You could say that this ‘train of thinking’ is all very well, provided that the Design
Argument is made logically watertight first. Or you could say that this ‘train of thinking’
explains how people get an ‘impression’ of design, because religious conditioning makes
them expect design in the world. But I am inclined to take a different view, and a more
charitable one at that. For Paley, in this context at least, seeing the world as God’s world
appears to involve celebrating rather than interrogating nature: it is a moral and spiritual
discipline, not an intellectual achievement. (Alternatively, the lesson may be that
nature’s mediation of the presence of God takes the form of ‘sacraments’ rather than
arguments, ironically making Paley, of all people, an unwitting herald of the move from
eighteenth-century rationalism to nineteenth-century Romanticism. But there is no need
to push this argument.)
Unlike Paley, I’m not sure that the Design Argument as such is an appropriate means for
preserving and communicating this profound vision - and it is, I think, genuinely
profound. In saying that, I am not forgetting that there are many factors which make such
a vision culturally impossible, or even morally unacceptable. Perhaps it cannot be
revived; perhaps it should not be revived. Given what we have done to our planet,
however, it is a vision which surely deserves the exercise of a critical but imaginative
understanding. And it would be unwise to leave that task entirely to the philosophers.