Design Arguments

Design Arguments #

Question: Why are we here? (Is there a reason?) #

1. Teleological Explanation #

• God created the world
• Appeal to intentions/desires of an agent (God)

Design Arguments: logical explanation of existence of God #

i) There is no scientific explanation to our existence. ii) The explanation must be teleological. iii) There must exist a God.

• Biological complexity
• Fine-tuning: how was the universe arranged in a perfect way to support life?
• Cosmological argument: stuff exists. Why tho

2. Scientific Explanation #

• no higher agent
• natural/random occurrences

The Cosmological Argument #

Q: Why do I exist? #

• an event must have occurred. (Parents)
  • Why do parents exist? (Grandparents)
    • ….
      • Brute Event: the original event that caused this chain of events to come into existence

The Cosmological Argument suggests that the Brute Event causing the universe to exist explains itself. It must have occurred (not random). This event must be God.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason: everything has an explanation. #

• rules out possibility of random Brute Event (e.g. Big Bang)

• Contingent Truth: something that’s true now, but might not have been otherwise if things turned out differently. Always need an explanation.

• Necessary Truth: always true (2+2=4). Doesn’t require an explanation.

* God is a necessary truth; the universe is a contingent truth.

A Scientific Explanation (?) #

• Quantum Field Theory: everything is a field (a distribution of strengths and weaknesses)
• The vacuum state (field of nothing) is extremely likely to decay into a stable state
  • Criticism: this only explains the configuration of fields, but not how fields themselves came into existence

Biological Design Argument #

→ Biological life is so complex and intricate that it is only logical that it was designed by an intelligent creator (God)

The Watch Argument #

• Watches tell time
• It is more likely that an intelligent creator (a watchmaker) made it rather than natural processes
• Biology is like the watch — natural processes are unlikely to have made life in exactly the correct way

Argument from analogy: weak b/c watches are not similar to biological life.

The Likelihood Argument #

• An observation supports hypothesis H1 over H2 iff P(O|H1) > P(O|H2)
• For Biological Design:
  • LIFE = observation that life exists and survives
  • DESIGN = hypothesis of design argument
  • CHANCE = life is the result of random equiprobable chance

P(LIFE | DESIGN) > P(LIFE | CHANCE)

(The same likelihood-ratio reasoning is the basis of formal hypothesis testing.)

• Likelihood argument is pretty weak — only somewhat affects preconceived notions. Does not suggest plausibility or probability.

prior confidence & very easy to skew by

• Darwin introduces a third hypothesis (Selection).
• Use likelihood argument to suggest (life | selection) > (life | design)

Natural Selection #

• Still up to chance, but ideal outcomes are now selected such that over time, results become more well-designed
• While the Design Argument suggests that organisms are perfect and unchanging, Natural Selection suggests that organisms are imperfect and evolving
  • evidence of imperfection: vestigial organs

The Designer #

Let’s assume there exists an intelligent designer.

Nature of the Designer (possibilities): #

• Designer wants to create intelligent life
• Designer is able to create perfect organisms
• Designer is evil and wanted to make mal-adapted organisms
• Designer does not have capacity to make perfect organisms

Auxiliary Hypotheses: #

• A1. Designer is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good
• A2. Designer is all-good but incompetent

P(LIFE | DESIGN & A1) is very high and makes argument that God is evil invalid.

• A3: Designer wanted to create the illusion of natural selection.
• A4: Designer created Big Bang and let life develop naturally.
• A5: God isn’t a creator and had no interest in biological life.

The Pseudoscience Problem #

• Observation: Auxiliary hypotheses appear ‘unscientific’ because they allow us to massage hypotheses to perfectly fit whatever observations we see.
  • Makes a hypothesis unfalsifiable. (cannot be proven wrong)

Popper’s suggestion: A theory is unscientific if it is consistent with all possible observations. #

• → not always a good test, e.g. theory that a coin is heads 50% of the time
• expansion: A theory is unscientific if it assigns the same probability to all possible observations.
• Whenever we appeal to an auxiliary hypothesis, we must also have independent observations of each individual hypothesis.