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WillowOne's Positions

Teleological Argument - Argument from Design

Form

The classical version (William Paley, Natural Theology, 1802):

  1. Living things exhibit complexity and apparent purpose, like a watch found on a heath.
  2. Complexity and apparent purpose are the products of intelligent design.
  3. Therefore living things were designed, and the designer is God.

The modern "fine-tuning" version (William Lane Craig, Robin Collins):

  1. The constants of physics fall within the narrow range that permits life.
  2. This is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.
  3. It is not due to necessity or chance.
  4. Therefore it is due to design.

My Positions

  1. The classical argument was answered in 1859. Evolution by natural selection produces the appearance of design without a designer, and does so from observable, well-understood mechanisms. Paley's watch is an argument from Personal Incredulity: he could not imagine how complexity could arise without a mind, and so concluded that it could not.
  2. The "design" in living things is poor design. The recurrent laryngeal nerve, the inverted vertebrate retina, the human birth canal, and the appendix are what one expects from an unguided process constrained by its history, not from an engineer starting fresh. See Darwinian Evolution.
  3. The fine-tuning argument assumes what it needs to prove: that the constants could have been otherwise. We have no theory of how constants are set, and no evidence that they are free parameters rather than necessary consequences of a deeper theory. "Not due to necessity" is asserted, not shown.
  4. "Chance" is dismissed on the basis of a probability we have no way of calculating. A probability requires a distribution, and we have a sample of one universe. See Appeal to Ignorance.
  5. The argument commits a selection effect error. Observers can only find themselves in a universe that permits observers. This is not an explanation of the constants, but it does mean that our finding them life-permitting is not surprising (Anthropic principle; Survivorship Bias).
  6. The universe is not, in fact, hospitable to life. Almost all of it is empty, cold, and lethal, and almost all of its history contained no life. A universe fine-tuned for life would look rather different. If anything is fine-tuned, it is life to the universe, which is what evolution predicts.
  7. A designer capable of fine-tuning a universe would itself be at least as complex and improbable as the thing it explains, and the argument would then apply to the designer. The theist exempts God from this by fiat (special pleading). See Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, chapter 4, "Why there almost certainly is no God".
  8. Even granting design, the designer need not be God. It could be a committee, a previous universe, a simulation, or something we have no concept of. The argument cannot distinguish between these.

Also see