William A.Dembski
In its most general form, the design argument infers from features of the physical world an intelligent cause responsible for those features. Just what features signal an intelligent cause, what the nature of that intelligent cause is, and how convincingly those features establish an intelligent cause remain subjects for debate and account for the variety of design arguments over the centuries. The design argument is also called the teleological argument.
The design argument needs to be distinguished from a metaphysical commitment to design. For instance, in the Timaeus, Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.) proposed a Demiurge (Craftsman) who fashioned the physical world, but not because the physical world exhibits features that cannot be explained apart from the Demiurge. Plato knew of the work of the Greek atomists, who needed no such explanatory device. Rather, within Plato’s philosophy, the world of intelligible forms constituted the ultimate reality, of which the physical world was but a dim reflection. Plato, therefore, posited the Demiurge to transmit the design inherent in the world of forms to the physical world.
Often the design argument and a metaphysical commitment to design have operated in tandem. This has especially been true in the Christian tradition, in which the design argument is used to establish an intelligent cause, and a metaphysical commitment to the Christian God then identifies this intelligent cause with the Christian God. Moreover, the design argument and a metaphysical commitment to design tend also to be conflated within the Christian tradition, so that the design argument often appears to move directly from features of the physical world to the triune God of Christianity.
Full-fledged design arguments have been available since classical times. Both Aristotle’s (384–322 B.C.) final causes and the Stoics’ seminal reason were types of intelligent causation inferred at least in part from the apparent order and purposiveness of the physical world. For example, in his De Natura Deorum, Cicero (106–43 B.C.) writes:
When we see something moved by machinery, like an orrery or clock…we do not doubt that these contrivances are the work of reason; when therefore we behold the whole compass of heaven moving with revolutions of marvelous velocity and executing with perfect regularity the annual changes of the seasons with absolute safety and security for all things, how can we doubt that all this is effected not merely by reason, but by a reason that is transcendent and divine? (Cicero 1933, 217–9).
Throughout the Christian era, theologians have argued that nature exhibits features that nature itself cannot explain, but which instead require an intelligence beyond nature. Church Fathers like Minucius Felix (third century A.D.) and Gregory of Nazianzus (A.D. c. 329–89), medieval scholars like Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) and Saint Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74), and commonsense realists like Thomas Reid (1710–
96) and Charles Hodge (1797–1878) were all theologians who made design arguments, arguing from the
data of nature to an intelligence that transcends nature. Saint Thomas’s fifth proof for the existence of God is perhaps the best known.
Since the seventeenth century, design arguments have focused especially on biology. The British physico-theologians of the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, starting with Robert Boyle (1627–91) and John Ray (1627–1705) and finding their culmination in William Paley (1743–1805), looked to biological systems for convincing evidence that a designer had acted in the physical world. Accordingly, it was thought incredible that organisms, with their astonishing complexity and superb adaptation of means to ends, could originate strictly through the blind forces of nature. Paley’s Natural Theology (1802) is largely a catalog of biological systems he regarded as inexplicable apart from a superintending intelligence. Who was this designer of the British physico-theologians? For many it was the traditional Christian God, while for others it was a deistic God, who had created the world but played no ongoing role in governing his creation.
Criticisms of the design argument have never been in short supply. In classical times, Democritus (c.
460– c. 370 B.C.) and Lucretius (c. 99–55 B.C.) conceived the natural world as a whirl of particles in collision, which sometimes chanced to form stable configurations exhibiting order and complexity. David Hume (1711– 76) referred to this critique of design as “the Epicurean Hypothesis”:
A finite number of particles is only susceptible of finite transpositions: and it must happen, in an eternal duration, that every possible order or position must be tried an infinite number of times. This world, therefore, with all its events, even the most minute, has before been produced and destroyed, and will again be produced and destroyed, without any bounds and limitations. No one, who has a conception of the power of infinite, in comparison of finite, will ever scruple this determination (Hume 1779 [reprint], 67).
Modern variants of this critique are still with us in the form of inflationary cosmologies (for example, Guth and Steinhardt 1989).
Though Hume cited the Epicurean hypothesis, he never put great stock in it. In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), Hume argued principally that the design argument fails as an argument from analogy and as an argument from induction. Though widely successful in discrediting the design argument, Hume’s critique is no longer as convincing as it used to be. As Elliott Sober observes, Hume incorrectly analyzed the logic of the design argument, for the design argument is, properly speaking, neither an argument from analogy nor an argument from induction but an inference to the best explanation.
Whereas Hume attempted a blanket refutation of the design argument, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) tried rather to limit its scope. According to Kant: “The utmost…that the [design] argument can prove is an architect of the world who is [constrained] by the adaptability of the material in which he works, not a creator of the world to whose idea everything is subject” (Kant 1787 [reprint], 522). Far from rejecting the design argument, Kant objected to overextending it. For Kant, the design argument legitimately establishes an “architect” (that is, an intelligent cause whose contrivances are constrained by the materials that make up the world), but it can never establish a Creator who originates the very materials that the architect then molds and fashions.
Charles Darwin (1809–82) delivered the design argument its biggest blow. Darwin was ideally situated historically to do this. His Origin of Species (1859) fit perfectly with an emerging positivistic conception of science that was loath to invoke intelligent causes and sought as far as possible to assimilate scientific explanation to natural law. Hence, even though Darwin’s selection mechanism remained much in dispute throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the mere fact that Darwin had proposed a plausible
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naturalistic mechanism to account for biological systems was enough to convince the Anglo-American world that some naturalistic story or other had to be true.
Even more than cosmology, biology had, under the influence of British natural theology, become the design argument’s most effective stronghold. It was here more than anywhere else that design could assuredly be found. To threaten this stronghold was, therefore, to threaten the legitimacy of the design argument as a creditable intellectual enterprise. Richard Dawkins summed up the matter thus: “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist” (Dawkins 1987, 6). God might still exist, but the physical world no longer required God to exist.
Is the design argument dead? Certainly, cosmological design arguments that appeal to the fine-tuning of physical constants remain very much alive (for example, Barrow and Tipler 1986; Leslie 1989; Swinburne 1979). What’s more, biological design arguments are experiencing a resurgence. In his Philosophy of Biology (1993), Elliott Sober concedes that biology has no intrinsic quarrel with the design argument and that the only thing keeping it from being reestablished in biology is the absence of empirically adequate criteria for design. Michael Behe’s (1996) work on irreducibly complex bio-chemical systems and William Dembski’s (1998) on the logical structure of design inferences attempt to meet Sober’s concern.
See also Anthropic Principle; Natural Theology
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barrow, John, and Frank Tipler. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Behe, Michael. Darwin’s Black Box. New York: Free Press, 1996.
Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De Natura Deorum. Trans. by H.Rackham. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933.
Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: Norton, 1987.
Dembski, William. The Design Inference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
——, ed. Mere Creation: Science, Faith, and Intelligent Design. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1998.
Guth, Alan, and Paul Steinhardt. “The Inflationary Universe.” In The New Physics, ed. by Paul Davies. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989, 34–60.
Hume, David. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. 1779. Reprint. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1989.
Hurlbutt, Robert H. Hume, Newton, and the Design Argument. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. 1787. Reprint. Trans. by N.K.Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929.
Jeffner, Anders. Butler and Hume on Religion. Stockholm: Diakonistyrelsens Bokforlag, 1966.
Leslie, John. Universes. London: Routledge, 1989.
Mackie, J.L. The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and Against the Existence of God. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982.
Paley, William. Natural Theology. 1802. Reprint. Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1852.
Sober, Elliott. Philosophy of Biology. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1993.
Swinburne, Richard. The Existence of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
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