The Argument from (apparent) Design

You can just see what each bit is for

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Three kinds of design argument:

1. Analogy: Similar effects probably have similar causes . (Ancient Greeks)

2. Inference to the best explanation. (William

Paley) 3. Effect cannot be greater than its cause.

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1. Argument from Analogy

• If the effects resemble one another, then the causes probably do as well. – E.g. if several similar murders are committed in

the same area, in a short space of time, then they were probably committed by the same person.

– If several pieces are music seem to have a similar style, then they were probably composed by the same person, etc.

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1. Argument from Analogy

• This is an inductive (probable) argument, and so has some degree of strength (e.g. strong or weak).

• The strength of the argument depends on the degree of similarity between the observed effects.

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All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other so precisely that everyone who has ever contemplated them is filled with wonder. The intricate fitting of means to ends throughout all nature is just like (though more wonderful than) the fitting of means to ends in things that have been produced by us - products of human designs, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer by all the rules of analogy that the causes are also alike, and that the author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man, though he has much larger faculties to go with the grandeur of the work he has carried out.

– Hume, p. 181. (in the character of Cleanthes)

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• How strong is the analogy here?

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2. Inference to the Best Explanation

• An explanation (of an object or event) is a story about what caused that object or event, i.e. how it came to exist or occur.

A good explanation is: (i) Adequate: the proposed cause must be

sufficient to predict the object or event. (ii) Plausible: the proposed cause must be

reasonably likely to exist.

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• E.g. a friend of mine once woke up lying by the side of a road, with his bicycle next to him. He had no injury, or memory of how he got there.

1. He might have been abducted by aliens, and later dropped off there. That’s adequate, but not plausible.

2. He might have been struck by a passing car. That’s plausible, but doesn’t predict the absence of injuries.

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• For Paley, as with Cleanthes, the similarity between living organisms and human artifacts like watches is not a matter of the materials used, or the exact structures, but rather the intricate fitting of means to ends.

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Paley’s Argument • If you were crossing a heath and found a watch, you

would be rightly convinced that the watch had a maker, someone who “comprehended its construction and designed its use”. (Paley, p. 213)

• You would be convinced of this by examining the watch, seeing what each part is for, and how they work together elegantly to produce an obvious purpose (measuring time).

“… when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive … that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose …” (Paley, p. 177)

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• You also see that the function of the watch requires very precise shaping of the parts. Small changes would stop the watch or make it inaccurate.

• On the basis of these observed facts, Paley argues that watches are obviously designed by some intelligence. This is best explanation of it.

• An odd conclusion, perhaps, since we already know that watches are human artifacts! But Paley then says that, by exactly the same reasoning, living organisms were designed.

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“Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference … that the contrivances of nature surpass the contrivances of art, in the complexity, subtlety, and curiosity of the mechanism; and still more, if possible, do they go beyond them in number and variety; yet in a multitude of cases, are not less evidently mechanical, not less evidently contrivances, not less evidently accommodated to their end, or suited to their office, than are the most perfect productions of human ingenuity.”

(Paley, p. 179)

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• Note that this isn’t an argument from analogy, even though although it does involve an analogy.

• It would be an argument from analogy (similar effects have similar causes) if Paley used the fact that watches are designed as a premise. Instead, however, Paley argues to the conclusion that watches are designed.

• We are likely to agree that a watch is obviously a product of design, even to someone who had never seen a watch before. So anyone who claims that life is not designed is challenged to find some logical difference between the cases.

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Paley responds to objections

I. We only know that watches are designed because we’ve seen watchmakers (or heard about them). If we just found a watch, then we wouldn’t know where it came from. Also, if we didn’t know how to make a watch, we wouldn’t infer this one had been made.

Paley’s Response: “... all this being no more than what is true of some

exquisite remains of ancient art, of some lost arts, and to the generality of mankind, of the more curious productions of modern manufacture...”

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II. Design flaws • The watch sometimes goes wrong. Surely if it were

designed it would work perfectly? Paley’s Response: Most designs are imperfect. You can still tell

that the thing is designed though. “The purpose of the machinery, the design, and the designer,

might be evident, and, in the case supposed, would be evident, in whatever way we account for the irregularity of the movement ...”

“... these last [apparent blemishes] ought to be referred to some

cause, though we be ignorant of it, other than defect of knowledge or of benevolence in the author” (p. 178)

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III. The watch has parts that seem to have no purpose.

Paley’s Responses: (a) The part may have a purpose that we haven’t

discovered yet. (b) The part may have no purpose. But we can still see

that the watch is designed. (E.g. a bike may have a useless part if it’s too expensive to retool.)

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IV. It’s just an accident The atoms of the watch have to be configured in some

way or other, why not this way? (Same as golf ball landing on a particular blade of grass.)

“Nor, fourthly, would any man in his senses think the

existence of the watch, with its various machinery, accounted for by being told that it was one out of possible combinations of material forms...”

• (Usual Response: Chance isn’t the best explanation

here. Sometimes we do appeal to “chance” in this way, but only if we cannot find a better explanation, that predicts the data more strongly.) 18

The mountain must have some shape!

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“the most annoyingly obtuse argument in philosophy”

“Now there are two errors to be avoided when thinking about extremely low probabilities. The first is to suppose that the extreme improbability of a chance process resulting in a certain state of affairs is a reason by itself to doubt that this state of affairs was the result of chance. …

The second mistake in thinking about low probabilities is an overreaction to the first. It is to dismiss any doubts that something was due to chance simply on the grounds that something had to happen, and whatever did happen was bound to be highly improbable.” (Roger White, NOUS 41:3 (2007) 460-1) [Peter van Inwagen calls the second mistake “the most annoyingly obtuse argument in philosophy” (Metaphysics, p. 67).]

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Watches don’t reproduce!

• A big difference between watches and living organisms is that watches can’t reproduce themselves.

• Thus, for example, it would be impossible for watches to evolve in Darwinian fashion.

• Is this the basic reason why the “design inference” concerning watches cannot be extended to organisms?

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“Suppose … 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, baffles, and other tools – evidently and separately calculated for this purpose …”

(Paley, Chapter II – not in our textbook.) According to Paley, this would strengthen the case

for design, for the watch is now found to be even more complex and improbable that was initially realised.

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V and VII. Self Organisation V. What if matter has some sort of ‘principle of order’, so

that it naturally forms watches? VII. The watch is the product of the laws of metallic

nature. Paley’s Responses: (a) We’ve never seen anything complex (like a watch)

form spontaneously. (b) We have no idea what a ‘principle of order’ is. (c) Laws aren’t agents, and cannot cause anything.

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Self Organisation

• We’ll talk more about this in Week 10, when we discuss science and religion.

• This is, more or less, the standard response to Paley today.

• Present theories of biological and chemical evolution assert (in effect, if not explicitly) that living organisms form naturally by the laws of physics, just as snowflakes, convection cells, vortices, etc. do.

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Self-organised structures

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Hume on Self Organisation

“For all we can know a priori, matter may have a source of order within it, just as mind does, having it inherently, basically, not acquired from somewhere else. When a number of elements come together in an exquisite arrangement, you may think it harder to conceive that they do this of their own accord than to conceive that some designer put them into that arrangement. But that is too quick and careless.”

“Philo”, pp. 181-2

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Complexity and Embryology • Preformation (“evolution”): The embryo “unfolds”

according to a pre-determined plan. E.g. the adult structures exist from the start, in miniature.

• Epigenesis: The structures in an embryo emerge gradually, over time.

“Matter in motion, by itself, would not seem to have the capacity to produce these results. How could matter become formed when it was not? How could the emerging form acquire the capacity to function without some vital force or factor that was not strictly material? This was the problem for materialists.” Maienschein, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, entry on epigenesis.

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Complexity and Embryology

“From our perspective today, the epigeneticists were right; organs differentiate sequentially from simpler rudiments during embryological development; there are no preformed parts. But the preformationists were also right in insisting that complexity cannot arise from formless raw material—that there must be something within the egg to regulate its development.”

Stephen J. Gould, Ever Since Darwin (1977) 205-6.

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3. An effect cannot be greater than its cause?

“That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser

thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation. You'll never see a spear making a spear maker. You'll never see a horse shoe making a blacksmith. You'll never see a pot making a potter.

Darwin’s discovery of a workable process that does that very counter-intuitive thing …”

(GD, p. 141)

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Informational CAP?

• Intelligent Design (ID) theorist William Dembski claims that there is some kind of “conservation of information” principle, similar to other conservation laws.

• The idea of this principle is that information cannot be created out of nothing. An alleged consequence is that complex (“information rich”) objects require complex causes.

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Monkeys and Typewriters

• If there is an informational CAP, then it only makes production of information improbable, not impossible.

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Hume: Regress problem

• Thought precedes matter, according to the design theorist.

• But if the material world needs a designer, then surely God needs one even more! (And God’s designer also needs a designer …) “If the material world rests upon a similar ideal world, this

ideal world must rest upon some other; and so on, without end” (Hume, p. 219)

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Dawkins agrees

“It turns out to be the God Hypothesis that tries to get something for nothing. God tries to have his free lunch and be it too. However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable.”

(GD, p. 138)

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Cranes and Skyhooks

“The first cause that we seek must have been the simple basis for a self-bootstrapping crane which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence. To suggest that the original prime mover was complicated enough to indulge in intelligent design, to say nothing of mindreading millions of humans simultaneously, is tantamount to dealing yourself a perfect hand at bridge…

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Cranes and Skyhooks

“…To suggest that the first cause, the great unknown which is responsible for something existing rather than nothing, is a being capable of designing the universe and of talking to a million people simultaneously, is a total abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation. It is a dreadful exhibition of self-indulgent, thought-denying skyhookery.”

(GD, p. 185)

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Cranes and Skyhooks • A crane of course is a mechanism that stands on the ground

but lifts things into the air.

Natural selection is a “crane” in the sense that it takes simple objects and makes them more complex (gradually, over time).

• A skyhook is a (fictitious) device that supports a building by pulling it up into the sky.

God is a “skyhook” in the sense that he is inherently complex, right from the start. His complexity does not rest upon any simple origin at all.

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Naturalism: the crane

The world starts out simple, but becomes more complex over time.

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Theism: The Skyhook

The world starts out complex, as God is complex. A complex God produces complex biology.

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Darwin on the design argument “I do not think I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley’s

‘Natural Theology’. I could almost formerly have said it by heart.”

Letter to John Lubbock, 1859 “The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which

formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.”

Darwin’s autobiography, 1887.

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But are ‘cranes’ really possible?

• Some theists (often known as theistic evolutionists, or evolutionary creationists) accept the view that natural selection is a “crane” that produces complex objects from simple ones.

• ID theorists (mostly theists, but not all) claim that

natural selection doesn’t really work as a crane. – NS is defeated when coordinated changes are needed, e.g.

in building entirely new proteins. – In empirical studies, NS is merely conservative, ‘weeding

out’ harmful mutations, not creative. 42

Evolution ≠ natural selection

• After Darwin published in Origin of Species in 1859, scientists were quickly convinced that species are not separate creations, always remaining fixed, but rather have arisen through evolution.

• But Darwin’s mechanism for evolution, natural selection, did not gain wide acceptance until the 1930s. Many scientists judged it to be inadequate.

• Today, a substantial minority of biologists still find selection inadequate.

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E.g. escapement mechanisms

• Is it obvious that these could arise in the manner envisaged by Huxley? (Cuvier’s problem of interdependent parts?)

Yet [James Shapiro’s] contention that natural selection’s importance for evolution has been hugely overstated represents a point of view that has a growing set of adherents. (A few months ago, I was amazed to hear it expressed, in the strongest terms, from another highly eminent microbiologist.) My impression is that evolutionary biology is increasingly separating into two camps, divided over just this question. On the one hand are the population geneticists and evolutionary biologists who continue to believe that selection has a “creative” and crucial role in evolution and, on the other, there is a growing body of scientists (largely those who have come into evolution from molecular biology, developmental biology or developmental genetics, and microbiology) who reject it.

• Adam S. Wilkins, reviewing Shapiro’s book in Genome Biology and Evolution, January 2012.

“The vast majority of biologists engaged in evolutionary studies interpret virtually every aspect of biodiversity in adaptive terms [i.e. in terms of selection]. This narrow view of evolution has become untenable in light of recent observations from genomic sequencing and population genetic theory. Numerous aspects of genomic architecture, gene structure, and developmental pathways are difficult to explain without invoking the nonadaptive forces of genetic drift and mutation.”

Michael Lynch, PNAS, May 15, 2007 vol. 104 suppl. 1 8597–8604

“In computer science we recognize the algorithmic principle described by Darwin – the linear accumulation of small changes through random variation and selection – as hill climbing. However, we also recognize that hill climbing is the simplest possible form of optimization and is known to work well only on a limited class of problems.”

R. A. Watson, 2006, Compositional Evolution, MIT Press, p. 272.

(N.B. Watson thinks that adding sexual recombination, lateral

gene transfer and symbiosis allows more problems to be solved.)

Lynn Margulis, Discover magazine, April 2011.

What’s wrong with ‘skyhooks’?

• Why can’t the first cause be complex? • (If the first cause is a logically necessary being, then

it must be a perfectly rational mind, and hence complex, some will argue.)

• N.B. The rejection of skyhooks looks like an a priori philosophical judgement, not a scientific one. Is there a basis for it?

• (Whether or not cranes are possible is a scientific matter.)

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An odd reversal of roles?

• ID theorists claim that cranes are physically impossible, contradicting the laws of physics.

• Dawkins and Dennett say that postulating skyhooks is dreadfully self-indulgent, thought-denying, etc. “… a total abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation.”

• The theists are making a scientific argument, the naturalists a philosophical one!

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Dawkins on the offensive “Hoyle said that the probability of life originating on Earth is no

greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747.” (GD, p. 137)

• Dawkins notes that creationists have used this famous claim to

argue against evolution.

• But the creationists make two key errors, Dawkins says: – They forget that natural selection isn’t a chance process, and

can produce novel complexity – They forget that, if God is complex, then he will also need a

complex cause (by their own logic). “God is the Ultimate Boeing 747.”

• The God theory turns out to be incoherent, and self defeating.

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Hume: why thought?

• Hume notes that, in general, understanding one part of a system doesn’t tell us much about the whole. “From observing the growth of a hair, can we learn any thing concerning the generation of a man?” (p. 182)

• Now rational thought, as far as we can tell, is confined to one “narrow corner” of the universe.

• So why should we dignify thought to the (absurd) extent of making it the cause of the whole universe?

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Hume: why thought?

• “The narrow views of a peasant, who makes his domestic economy the rule for the government of kingdoms, is in comparison a pardonable sophism” (p. 183)

• Is there an argument that can be made here?

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Thought or Generation?

• We see animals and plants arising by “generation” and “vegetation” (i.e. organisms reproducing themselves, not design).

• Hence, the world was more likely brought into being by a process of “generation” rather than design. (See pp. 185-6)

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• Couldn’t the first cause be some sort of living being that produced the world by generation rather than design?

• Is there an argument that thought is a better explanation of the world than generation is?

• Any ideas?

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Hume: Trimming down the creator Even if we accept all you arguments, 1. Creator may be finite 2. Creator may be imperfect. He may even be a ‘stupid

mechanic’, a dependent, inferior deity, a superannuated (past it) deity, who has now died, etc. etc.

3. There may be several creators, a whole committee of

them. (Wouldn’t that explain a lot? Why on earth is the “playground” of the human body right next to the “garbage dump”?)

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• “This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production 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.”

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Stupid mechanic

“If we survey a ship, what an exalted idea must we form of the ingenuity of the carpenter who framed so complicated, useful and beautiful a machine?

And what surprise must we feel, when we find him a stupid mechanic, who imitated others, and copied an art, which, through a long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving?”

(p. 220) (Similar to Darwin’s “crane”. Could it really happen?)

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