Reasonable Faith, Week 4, Dr. David Hunt

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THE TELEOLOGICAL (“DESIGN”) ARGUMENT
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The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows his handiwork. (Psalms 19:1)
For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. (Romans 1:19-20)
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Let us consider now whether all this is accidental, or whether the whole world is so constituted that it could not hold together without the guiding spirit of divine providence. If the works of nature are more perfect than the works of art then, as art achieves nothing without a conscious purpose, nature itself cannot be thought to be devoid of such a purpose. . . . When you see a sundial or a water-clock, you see that it tells the time by design and not by chance. How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is devoid of purpose and intelligence . . . ? (Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods)
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A Classic Statement of the Argument, from William Paley’s Natural Theology (1802)
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In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer that for anything I knew to the contrary it had lain there forever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for anything I knew the watch might have always been there.
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Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone; why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, namely, that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive—what we could not discover in the stone—that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g., that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, or placed after any other manner or in any other order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it.
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After further discussion of the watch, Paley concludes as follows:
the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker—that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who completely comprehended its construction and designed its use.
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Paley then imagines someone objecting that he has never seen a watch made, that the watch before us is not very accurate, that we can’t figure out the purpose of some of its parts, etc. Paley points out that none of these objections would overturn the conclusion that the watch must have had an intelligent maker. The most interesting objection, which he treats at length, is the following:
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Suppose, in the next place, that the person who found the watch should after some time discover that, in addition to all the properties which he had hitherto observed in it, it possessed the unexpected property of producing in the course of its movement another watch like itself—the thing is conceivable; that it contained within it a mechanism, a system of parts—a mold, for instance, or a complex adjustment of lathes, files, and other tools—evidently and separately calculated for this purpose; let us inquire what effect ought such a discovery to have upon his former conclusion.
The first effect would be to increase his admiration of the contrivance, and his conviction of the consummate skill of the contriver. . . .
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The Key Concept
‘Teleological’ comes from telos, Greek for end, goal, purpose.
A teleological object (or teleological system) is anything whose parts are structured, arranged, and oriented toward some end, goal, or purpose.
The stone against which Paley “pitched his foot” is not a teleological object (it isn’t intrinsically organized around some end or purpose, though it can certainly be assigned a purpose: weapon, paperweight, etc.). But Paley’s watch is a teleological object.
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More Examples
A pencil or chair. Though relatively simple, such things satisfy the definition above.
A camera or automobile. Complex teleological objects like these often have parts that are themselves teleological objects, e.g., the camera’s lens or the automobile’s carburetor.
A daffodil or cat. The “natural world” also contains teleological objects, many of them with teleological objects as parts, e.g., the daffodil’s stamen or the cat’s eye. If a camera counts as a teleological object, then surely an eye is a teleological object as well.
What about the Earth, our solar system, or the whole universe? This is more controversial.
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A Simple Version of the Argument
1. Every teleological object whose origin is known is in fact the product of intelligent design.
2. Fluffy the cat is a teleological object.
3. Therefore, probably, Fluffy is the product of intelligent design.
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This intelligent designer is certainly non-human, endowed with superhuman intelligence and power, and self-existent (if Fluffy’s designer is itself a teleological object produced by an intelligent designer, we must eventually reach an intelligent designer who is not produced by a prior intelligent designer, and this intelligent designer’s existence will be self-explained).
Sounds an awful lot like God.
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The “Wrong Properties” Objection
1. Every teleological object whose origin is known is in fact the product of someone with a nose.
2. Fluffy the cat is a teleological object.
3. Probably, Fluffy is the product of someone with a nose.
Reply: Being intelligent, unlike having a nose, helps explain how a teleological object came to be.
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The “Skewed Sample” Objection
Teleological objects come in two varieties: artificial and natural. But all the teleological objects whose origins are known are artificial. Why think that artificial teleological objects are representative of all teleological objects? Isn’t it fallacious to suppose that what is true of artificial teleological objects—that they are the products of intelligent design—will also be true of natural teleological objects?
Compare: polling only Beverly Hills 90210 voters to find out likely results of a state-wide election.
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Reply:
Skewed samples needn’t jeopardize an argument—scientists use them all the time.
Compare: studying only rhesus monkeys to find out likely effects of new drug on human beings.
This is legitimate when the similarities (e.g., humans and monkeys have circulatory, digestive, and other systems in common) are relevant to what is being studied (e.g., carcinogenic effects), and the dissimilarities (e.g., monkeys are thickly covered with fur, humans aren’t) are irrelevant. The Teleological Argument is like the monkey case, not like the Beverly Hills 90210 case.
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The “Alternative Explanation” Objection (a.k.a. Darwin’s Theory of Evolution)
Charles Darwin attended the same school as William Paley: Christ College, Cambridge. Paley’s Natural Theology was required reading for his B.A. exams, and Darwin wrote that it “gave me as much delight as did Euclid.” Nevertheless, Darwin famously went on to propose and argue for a theory of “natural selection” which puts forth an alternative explanation, not involving an intelligent designer, for the very same facts that fuel the Teleological Argument. The consensus of the scientific community today is that this alternative explanation, in its broadest outlines, has been overwhelmingly confirmed by the evidence.
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The difference this makes:
The Teleological Argument as an “argument to the best explanation.” God used to be the only (and hence by default the best) remotely plausible explanation for the teleological features of the world. Now there’s a competing explanation.
Richard Dawkins: “although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” (The Blind Watchmaker)
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Response #1: the alternative explanation is false
This could well be—the scientific community is fallible, and sometimes goes spectacularly wrong. But Christians only look foolish, confirming the worst prejudices about us as arrogant know-nothings, when the non-scientists among us lecture the scientific community about how badly it has done its job.
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Two ways Response #1 can be pursued:
1. By critics within the scientific community (e.g., Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box)
2. By non-scientists who are skilled at identifying metaphysical assumptions underlying evolutionary arguments (e.g., Phillip Johnson, Darwin on Trial)
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My view: It’s best to leave this debate to the scientific community. Science has built-in self-correcting mechanisms—if wrong about evolution, science will eventually come to this conclusion on its own.
Accept that this might take a long time: entrenched ways of thinking impede scientific advance, but eventually the old system can no longer be maintained.
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Example: the seven heavenly bodies. Note this “conservative” reaction to Galileo from some of his own colleagues:
There are seven windows given to animals in the domicile of the head. . . . From this and many other similarities in nature, such as the seven metals, etc., which it were tedious to enumerate, we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven. Moreover these [alleged] satellites of Jupiter are invisible to the naked eye, and therefore can exercise no influence on the earth, and therefore would be useless, and therefore do not exist. Besides, [from the earliest times, men] have adopted the division of the week into seven days, and have named them after the seven planets. Now, if we increase the number of the planets, this whole and beautiful system falls to the ground.
Some of Galileo’s colleagues even refused to look through his telescope. But who won?
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Response #2: revise the argument to finesse evolution
Another approach is to leave the scientific debate to the scientific community and revise the Teleological Argument to focus on other features of the world for which evolution arguably does not provide a competing hypothesis. Many such successors to the classic Teleological Argument have been proposed. I’ll conclude with just one of these, as formulated by the philosopher Richard Taylor. A similar argument may also be found in C.S. Lewis’s Miracles, and a sophisticated defense of the argument has been offered by Alvin Plantinga. Taylor begins with an illustration:
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Suppose that you are riding in a railway coach and glancing from the window at one of the stops, you see numerous white stones scattered about on a small hillside near the train in a pattern resembling these letters: THE BRITISH RAILWAYS WELCOMES YOU TO WALES. Now you could scarcely doubt that these stones do not just accidentally happen to exhibit that pattern. You would, in fact, feel quite certain that they were purposefully arranged that way to convey an intelligible message. At the same time, however, you could not prove, just from a consideration of their arrangement alone, that they were arranged by a purposeful being. It is possible—at least logically so—that there was no guiding hand at all in back of this pattern, that it is simply the result of the operations of inanimate nature. It is possible that the stones, one by one, rolled down the hill and, over the course of centuries, finally ended up in that interesting arrangement, or that they came in some other accidental way to be so related to one another. For surely the mere fact that something has an interesting or striking shape or pattern and thus seems purposefully arranged is no proof that it is. There might always be some other explanation. . . . Our own bodies and their organs seem purposeful not only in their individual structures but in their relationships to one another, and yet there are well-known theories, resting on such nonpurposeful concepts as chance variation, natural selection, and so on, that are able, at least in the opinion of many learned people, to explain these structures without introducing any ideas of purpose and design at all.
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Here, however, is the important point it is easy to overlook; namely, that if, upon seeing from the train window a group of stones arranged as described, you were to conclude that you were entering Wales, and if your sole reason for thinking this . . . was that the stones were so arranged, then you could not, consistently with that, suppose that the arrangement of the stones was accidental. You would, in fact, be presupposing that they were arranged that way by an intelligent and purposeful being or beings for the purpose of conveying a certain message having nothing to do with the stones themselves.
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Our own organs of sense, to say nothing of our brains and nervous systems, are things of the most amazing and bewildering complexity and delicacy. No matter how far and minutely psychologists and physiologists press their studies of these organs, they seem hardly any closer to a real understanding of them, and how they enable us to perceive the world around us.
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So also, it is now suggested, it would be irrational for one to say both that his sensory and cognitive faculties had a natural, nonpurposeful origin and also that they reveal some truth with respect to something other than themselves, something that is not merely inferred from them. If their origin can be entirely accounted for in terms of chance variations, natural selection, and so on, without supposing that they somehow embody and express the purposes of some creative being, then the most we can say of them is that they exist, that they are complex and wondrous in their construction, and are perhaps in other respects interesting and remarkable. We cannot say that they are, entirely by themselves, reliable guides to any truth whatever, save only what can be inferred from their own structure and arrangement. If, on the other hand, we do assume that they are guides to some truths having nothing to do with themselves, then it is difficult to see how we can, consistently with that supposition, believe them to have arisen by accident, or by the ordinary workings of purposeless forces, even over ages of time.