A
physico-theological argument from intelligent design is any type of argument purporting
to demonstrate the existence of an intelligent agent of or orderer by citing as
evidence the appearance of an ultimate design, intention, or purpose in the
natural world. Scottish philosopher, historian, economist and essayist David
Hume is widely cited as having articulated the argument for design through the
character of Cleanthes in “Part II” of his 1779 philosophical work Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion as follows:
Look around the world…You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines…All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy…The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly…the productions of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since therefore the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer…that the author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man…By this argument a posteriori…do we prove at one the existence of a deity, and his similarity to human mind and intelligence.[1]
Hume’s character
of Philo, however, warns that such an analogy is not philosophically sound[2]:
What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain, which we call, thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe? Our partially in our own favor does indeed present it on all occasions; but sound philosophy ought carefully to guard against so natural an illusion.[3]
Hume recognizes
that an argument against design that the two cases are too dissimilar to
support an inference that they are like affects having like causes[4];
that is to say that they are so dissimilar as to disallow analogy; through an
examination of the nature of analogy[5]
is not sound without the relevant rule of analogy, which he states:
The exact similarity of the cases gives us a perfect assurance of a similar event; and stronger evidence is never desired not sought after. But wherever you depart, in the least, from the similarity of the cases, you diminish proportionably the evidence; and may at last bring it to a very weak analogy, which is confessedly liable to error and uncertainty.[6]
In the
teleological argument it is assumed that everything in nature fits so well and
functions so perfectly that we must assume that the universe is being directed
to achieve some end purpose. Cleanthes likens the universe to a manmade
machine, but Hume suggests that the cosmos much more closely resembles a living
organism than a machine[7]:
The experimental reasoning, which we possess in common with the beasts,…is nothing but a species of instinct or mechanical power that acts in us unknown to ourselves.
Likewise,
Cleanthes argues that no one can be so stupid as to reject the view that the
universe resembles an artifact[8]
in having “an accurate adjustment of the parts to each other” and “an adaptation of means to ends”[9],
and that a “purpose, intention and design strikes everywhere the most
careless, the most stupid thinker.”[10]
Cleanthes argues that things that are very familiar and present to us need no
reason to establish the truth, and that it is perverse and unnatural to deny
that the various parts of the body and the way in which they are suited to our
environment, such as the knowledge that food nourishes the body, are “incontestable
proof of design and intention”[11].
However, Hume rejects the analogy between the universe and any particular human
artifact[12], arguing
that nature and the various things in it exhibit substantial difference from
human artifacts.[13]
Physico-theological
arguments proceed by implying that all of the sophistication, intricacy and
interconnectedness we observe in things in nature are intelligible only if we
suppose the involvement of a human-like creative mind.[14] Cleanthes goes on, in “Part II” of
Hume’s Dialogues, to state that the only
rational argument for god’s existence is one based on experience. Hume, however
argues that this is incompatible with Cleanthes’ own previously articulated
teleological analogy because unlike with manmade objects, we have not witnessed
the creation of a world. Therefore, he argues, we obviously lack adequate
justification for the a posteriori claim that the universe has an intelligent
cause[15]
because, according to Cleanthes’ statement, we would need to have experience
with the design of universes in order to know whether the material world was
the result of design.[16]
He puts this objection into the mouth of Philo:
If we see a house, Cleanthes, we conclude…that it had an architect or builder; because this is precisely that species of effect, which we have experienced to proceed from that species of cause. But surely you will not affirm, that the universe bears such a resemblance to a house that we can with the same certainty infer a similar cause, or that the analogy is here entire and perfect. The dissimilitude is so striking, that the utmost you can here pretend to is a guess, a conjecture, a presumption concerning a similar cause.[17]
In “Part V” of his
Dialogues, Hume builds on Philo’s
analogy of architectural construction to point out a further fault in using the
argument from intelligent design to prove that the god of classical theism
exists: there is nothing about the sophistication of the material universe to
suggest that there exists only one designer:
What shadow of an argument…can you produce, from your hypothesis, to prove the unity of the deity? A great number of men join in building a house or ship, in rearing a city, in framing a commonwealth; why may not several deities combine in contriving and framing the world?...By sharing the work among several, we may so much further limit the attributes of each, and get rid of that extensive power and knowledge, which must be supposed in one deity, and which…can only serve to weaken the proof of his existence. And if such foolish, such vicious creatures as man, can yet often unite in framing and executing one plane, much more so those deities or demons.[18]
It should be noted
at this point that Hume was by no means alone in pointing out the fallacious
nature of builder variation of the intelligent design argument. Nearly a
century after the posthumous publication of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning
Natural Religion, English naturalist and
geologist Charles Darwin would write, in a June 17, 1860 letter to British lawyer and geologist
Sir Charles Lyell:
I have said that natural selection is to the structure of organized beings, what the human architect is to a building. The very existence of the human architect shows the existence of more general laws; but no one in giving credit for a building to the human architect, thinks it necessary to refer to the laws by which man has appeared. No astronomer in showing the movements of the planets are due to gravity thinks it necessary to say that the law of gravity was designed that the planets should pursue the courses, which they pursue. –I cannot believe that there is a bit more inference by the creator in the construction of each species, than in the course of the planets.[19]
Hume then backs up
the argument even further, pointing out that even if something like the stated conclusion were established[20],
that is if the resemblance between the universe and human artifacts justified
thinking they have similar causes[21],
and even if the universe is indeed designed, it is unreasonable to justify the
conclusion that the designer must be anything like the traditional concept of
an omnipotent, omniscient, all-perfect god. To illustrate this point, Philo
argues in “Part V” that the designer may have been defective or otherwise
imperfect and suggests that the universe may have been a poor first attempt at
design:
A man who follows your hypothesis is able, perhaps, to assert, or conjecture, that the universe, sometime, arose from something like design: But beyond that position he cannot ascertain one single circumstance, and is left afterwards to fix every point of his theology, by the utmost license of fancy and hypothesis. This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect…and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity…it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity…it is the product of old age and dotage in some superannuated deity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him…these, and a thousand more of the same kind, are Cleanthes’s suppositions…From the moment the attributes of the deity are supposed finite, all these have place. And I cannot…think that so wild and unsettled a system of theology is…preferable to none at all.[22]
In a way, this
extrapolation of the human-like properties of the orderer recalls the Greek
origins of teleology. Hume also argues in “Part V” that any number of
alternative possible explanations could be given of allegedly designed entities
of nature[23], for
instance chance or the saturation of the relevant state space of possibilities[24]:
Many worlds may be botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labor lost, many fruitless trials made; and a slow, but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world-making. In such subjects, who can determine, where the truth…who can conjecture where the probability lies, amidst a great number of hypotheses which may be proposed, and a still greater which may be imagined.[25]
Previously in
“Part IV” Hume, through Philo, pointed out that other analogies might suggest
very different inferences and conclusions[26]:
If reason I mean abstract reason, derived from inquiries a priori be not alike mute with regard to all questions concerning cause and effect, this sentence at least it will venture to pronounce, that a mental world, or universe of ideas, requires a cause as much, as does a material world, or universe of objects; and if similar in its arrangement, must require a similar cause. For what is there in this subject, which should occasion a different conclusion or inference? In an abstract view, they are entirely alike; and no difficulty attends the one supposition, which is not common to both of them.
Back in “Part II”
Hume, in the voice of Philo, argued that it is impossible to infer the perfect
nature of a creator from the nature of his creation:
But surely, where reasonable men treat these subjects, the question can never be concerning the being, but only the nature of the deity. The former truth…is unquestionable and self-evident. Nothing exists without a cause; and the original cause of this universe whatever it may be we call god; and piously ascribe to him every species of perfection…But as all perfection is entirely relative, we ought never to imagine, that we comprehend the attributes of this divine being, or to suppose, that his perfections have any analogy or likeness to the perfections of a human creatures. [27]
This is at least
partially in response to, and is in a way in agreement with, Hume’s character
of Demea, who argues that although god clearly exists, we cannot come to know
the nature of god through reason. Demea claims that every thing about god’s
nature and attributes is beyond the capacity of human understanding; that god’s
nature is “unknown and unintelligible”.
Again, we find Hume’s views mirrored closely in the writings of another, in
this case English philosopher
Thomas Hobbes more than a century before Hume, who wrote in his 1651 book Leviathan that “the narrow limits of our fantasy” put knowledge of god beyond the scope of human
understanding[28]:
Whatever we imagine is finite. Therefore there is no idea or conception of anything we call infinite. No man can have in his mind an image of infinite magnitude, nor conceive infinite swiftness, infinite time, or infinite force, or infinite power…and therefore the name of god is used, not to make us conceive him for he is incomprehensible, and his greatness and power are inconceivable, but that we may honor him. Also because whatsoever…we conceive has been perceived first by sense…a man can have no thought representing anything not subject to sense.[29]
It is at this
point, in “Part VII”, that Philo at last feels justified in responding, fairly
directly, to Cleanthes’ original assertion of the teleological argument back in
“Part II”, interestingly enough utilizing much identical terminology:
You need only look around you…to satisfy yourself with regard to this question. A tree bestows order and organization on that tree which springs from it, without knowing the order; an animal in the same manner on its offspring; a bird on its nest…To say, that all this order in animals and vegetables proceeds ultimately from design, is begging the question; nor can that great point be ascertained otherwise than by proving, a priori, both that order is, from its nature, inseparably attached to thought; and that it can never of itself, or from original unknown principles, belong to matter.[30]
It is assumed in
the physico-theological argument that the exquisiteness of structure and
incredible intricate detail of the universe as a whole and of some phenomena in
the world in particular could not have occurred by chance.[31]
In “Part IX”, Demea explains that
the world operates on a system of cause and effect, so there must be an
original cause to have started the world in motion. Having apparently abandoned
the analogy of the universe as a whole to a particular manmade machine,
however, Cleanthes demurs:
In such a chain, too, or succession of objects, that which preceded it, and causes that, which succeeds it causes, each part…but the whole, you say, wants a cause. I answer that the uniting of these parts into a whole, like the uniting of several distinct counties into one kingdom, or several distinct members into one body, is performed merely by an arbitrary act of mind, and has no influence on the nature of things. Did I show you the particular cause of each individual in a collection of twenty particles of matter, I should think it very unreasonable should you afterwards ask me, what was the cause of the whole twenty. This is sufficiently explained in explaining the cause of the parts.[32]
However, unlike
with French philosopher, mathematician and writer Rene Descartes’ 1641
philosophical treatise Meditations On The First Philosophy; wherein the cosmological argument in Descartes’
Third Meditation, “Concerning God, That He Exists”, that something cannot arise
from nothing leads to the ontological argument in his Fifth Meditation,
“Concerning The Essence Of Material Things, And Again Concerning God, That He
Exists”, that god must necessarily exist; Hume draws the conclusion, in “Part
IX” of his Dialogues, that the
words “necessary existence, have no meaning; or what is the same thing, none
that is consistent”[33].
So dangerous is it to introduce the idea of necessity into the present question! And so naturally does it afford an interference directly opposite to the religious hypothesis.[34]
In “Part XI”, Hume
even goes so far as to reject that it is absurd to deny that there must be a
cause for everything that comes into existence[35]:
To oppose the torrent of scholastic religion by such feeble maxims as these, that it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be, that the whole is greater than a part, that two and three make five; is pretending to stop the ocean with a bulrush.[36]
In the same
passage, Hume also rejects the claim, articulated in Descartes’ Meditations, that it is impossible for any effect to have
perfections that its cause lacks.[37]
In “Part XI”, Philo again replies to Cleanthes’ teleological argument in “Part
II” by mirroring it:
Look around this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organized, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind nature, impregnated by a vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children![38]
The conclusion
that Hume comes to, via Philo, in “Part, XII” is that, while the physico-theological
argument might constitute some limited grounds for thinking that “the cause
or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human
intelligence”[39],
it establishes nothing else whatsoever[40]:
In the whole of natural theology…resolves itself into one simple…at least undefined proposition, that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence: If this proposition be not capable of extension…If it affords no interference that affects human life, or can be the source of any action or forbearance: And if the analogy…can be carried no farther than to the human intelligence and cannot be transferred with any appearance of probability to the other qualities of the mind…what can the most inquisitive, contemplative, and religious man do more than give a plain, philosophical assent to the proposition…and believe that the arguments on which it is established exceed the objections which lie against it?[41]
Hume makes his
criticism of revealed religion very clear in “Part XIV”: that even if religion
does not put itself “in direct opposition to morality”, it nevertheless puts forward a “frivolous
species of merit” that suggests “a
preposterous distribution” of praise and
blame based upon a perverted moral standard that is disconnected from any real
human needs and interests.[42]
He argues that the existence of evil poses a problem for the traditional view
of god:
The more exquisite any good is…the sharper is the evil, allied to it…The sprightliest wit borders on madness; the highest effusions of joy produce the deepest melancholy; the most ravishing pleasures are attended with the most cruel lassitude and disgust; the most flattering hopes make way for the severest disappointments…no course of life has such safety for happiness is not to be dreamed of as the temperate and moderate, which maintains…a mediocrity, and a kind of insensibility, in every thing. As the good, the great, the sublime, the ravishing are found eminently in the genuine principles of theism; it may be expected…that the base, the absurd, the mean, the terrifying will be equally discovered in religious fictions and chimeras.
Hume was far from
the first to extol the virtues of moderation. In 325 BCE, the Greek philosopher
and scientist Aristoteles wrote about his “Doctrine of the Mean” in his book Nichomachean
Ethics:
Again, it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the unlimited…and good to that of the limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult—to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult); for these reasons also, then, excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue; for men are good in but one way, but bad in many.[43]
Nor was Hume by
any means the first to grapple with the problem of evil. The conclusion that
Philo drew back in “Part X” was that “the course of nature tends not to
human or animal felicity”[44]—which
brought us back to “Epicurus’ old questions” which remain “unanswered”[45]:
And is it possible…that after all these reflections…you can still persevere in you anthropomorphism, and assert the moral attributes of the deity, his justice, benevolence, mercy, and rectitude, to be of the same nature with these virtues in human creatures? His power we allow is infinite: whatever he wills is executed: but neither man nor any other animal is happy: therefore he does not will their happiness. His wisdom is infinite: he is never mistaken in choosing the means to any end: but the course of nature not to human or animal felicity: therefore it is not established for that purpose...In what respect, then, do his benevolence and mercy resemble the benevolence and mercy of men? Epicurus’ old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?[46]
The “old
questions” to which Hume is referring here are attributed to
ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus by the author Lucius Caecillius Firmianus
Lactantius, advisor to Roman Emperor Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus
Augustus, in his De Ira Dei [On
the Anger Of God] in 318 CE:
God, he says, either wants to eliminate bad things and cannot, or can but does not want to, or neither wishes to nor can, or both wishes to and can. If he wants to and cannot, then he is week and this does not apply to god. If he can but does not want to, then he is spiteful which is equally foreign to god’s nature. If he neither wants to nor can, he is both weak and spiteful, and so is not a god. If he wants to and can, which is the only thing fitting for a god, where do bad things come from? Or why does he not eliminate them?[47]
In order to
understand why it is that I find both Cleanthes’ arguments for intelligent
design and Philo’s arguments against the traditional concept of god so
profoundly and thoroughly unconvincing, it is first necessary to recognize the
gulf in the exponential growth human knowledge about the universe that exists
between Hume’s late-18th-century Scotland and my own early-21st-century
America. At the time that Hume wrote his Dialogues, science had yet to discover any of its present
knowledge of the electron, the atom, or the cell. For perspective, at the time
that Hume’s Dialogues was published, the man who first classified the human
species as belonging to the family of great apes, Carolus Linnaeus, had died
only the year before[48],
and the man who discovered the force of universal gravitation, Sir Isaac
Newton, only half a century before that. No one in the world would hear of
Charles Darwin or the theory of natural selection for another three quarters of
a century.
However, as
thoroughly as the natural and biological sciences, especially micro-biochemistry,
have been shown to debunk the claims made by the argument from design, the
scientific discovery that single-handedly renders very nearly Hume’s entire Dialogues pointless philosophical hand-waving was made in the
mid-19th century with the devising of the fist law of
thermodynamics: the law of the conservation of energy.
Doctor Carl Nave, Associate
Professor of Physics at Georgia State University, states the law this way: “Energy
can neither be created nor destroyed.”[49]
Tom Chandler, an Adjunct Assistant Professor and Associate research Scientist
at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University phrases
it similarly: “Energy cannot be created nor destroyed.”[50]
Mike Farabee of the General Geology Faculty at Maricopa County Community
Colleges states: “Energy can be changed to one form or another, but
it cannot be created or destroyed.”[51]
Of course, as was
the case with Hume, the concept of conservation was by no means an originally
19th-century proposition. In the 5th century BCE, the
Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles wrote in his poem On Nature that:
The elements…do not come to be or perish…nothing comes to be or perishes.[52]
Therefore, since
the act of creation has been rendered a physical impossibility, all of Philo
and Cleanthes’ debate on whether or not the universe was created for human
life, and whether life was created for a purpose, is set as to naught.
I do, however,
find myself in strong agreement with Philo’s criticisms of the amorality of
religion and the dangers of blind faith.
I consider Epicurus’ age-old questions [“Is god willing to prevent
evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he
is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”[53]]
to be perhaps one amongst the most damning challenges ever posed to organized
monotheistic religion as we know it today. Hume, however, is not easily fooled, and correctly makes the
observation in “Part X” that “Polytheism or idolatry was, and must
have been, the first and most ancient religion of mankind.”:
The heroes in paganism correspond exactly to the saints in popery, and holy dervishes in Mohammedanism. The place of, Hercules, Theseus, Hector, Romulus, is now supplied by Dominic, Francis, Anthony, and Benedict. Instead of the destruction of monsters, the subduing of tyrants, the defense of our native country; whippings and fasting, cowardice and humility, abject submission and slavish obedience, are become the means of obtaining celestial honors among mankind.[54]
In driving a wedge
between religious belief and morality, Hume effectively argues, in “Part XV”,
that atheism is morally preferable to theism:
Hear the verbal protestations of all men: Nothing so certain as their religious tenets. Examine their lives: You will scarcely think that they repose the smallest confidence in them. The greatest and truest zeal gives us no security against hypocrisy: The most open impiety is attended with dread and compunction. No theological absurdities so glaring that they have nor, sometimes, been embraced by men of the greatest and most cultivated understanding. No religious precepts so rigorous that they have not been adopted by the most voluptuous and most abandoned of men.[55]
In what I believe
to be by far and away his most scathing and contemporarily relevant criticism
of the religious, he echoes, at least in word use, Philo’s earlier warning
against leaping to conclusions such as intelligent design:
What a noble privilege is it of human reason to attain the knowledge of the Supreme Being; and… enabled to infer so sublime a principle as its supreme creator?…Survey most nations and most ages. Examine the religious principles, which have…prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are any thing but sick men’s dreams: Or perhaps will regard them more as the playsome whimsies of monkeys in human shape, than the serious…dogmatic asseveration of a being, who dignifies himself with the name of rational.[56]
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[18] Archie, 2011
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[34] Echelbarger, 1975
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[40] Pfau, 2008
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