The Design Argument

Overview

Recall questions on the design argument as inductive and a posteriori, Paley's watch and his two kinds of design, analogy and regularity, the anthropic principle, Swinburne's cumulative case, Hume's objections, evolution by natural selection and the problem of deism.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Explain why the Design Argument is called a posteriori and inductive, and what that means for what it can establish.

   Model answer

   It starts from what we observe in the world - order, complexity, apparent purpose - rather than from the meaning of the word God, so its premises come after experience. Its reasoning is inductive: the conclusion is not guaranteed by the premises but offered as the best explanation of them. That is why its defenders normally claim only that a designer is probable, and why a rival explanation can weaken it without formally contradicting it.

2. 2

   Why do two people look at the same natural world and only one of them sees design?

   Model answer

   Because the argument turns on how evidence is read rather than on disputed facts. Believer and sceptic agree that eyes focus light and that planets keep to their orbits; they disagree about what those facts show. One reads them as the marks of intention, the other as what unguided processes throw up. The argument is therefore an invitation to compare two interpretations of a shared world, not a discovery of new data.

3. 3

   What did W Paley argue with the watch found on a heath?

   Model answer

   Paley said a stone on a heath needs no explanation, but a watch does: its parts are shaped and fitted together so as to produce motion, and if any part were different it would not work. That contrivance forces the inference to a maker, and it does so even if we have never watched a watch being made, even if the watch runs badly, and even if some parts baffle us. He then argued that the eye, the joints and the muscles show contrivance of the same kind on a far greater scale.

4. 4

   Explain the difference between the two sorts of design Paley pointed to.

   Model answer

   Design as purpose is the fitting of parts to an end inside an organism - the eye assembled for seeing. Design as regularity is the large-scale orderliness of the whole system, such as the stability of planetary orbits and the laws that keep them. Paley used both: the first shows intelligence at work in fine detail, the second shows a single mind behind the arrangement as a whole.

5. 5

   How does analogy work in this argument, and where is it vulnerable?

   Model answer

   It reasons that like effects have like causes: since natural objects resemble machines in their ordered complexity, their cause probably resembles the cause of machines, namely intelligence. Its strength is that we do reliably and correctly infer design from artefacts. Its weakness is that the inference is only as good as the resemblance, and organisms differ from machines in obvious ways - they grow, they reproduce and they repair themselves, and no machine does any of that.

6. 6

   Explain the two kinds of regularity a design argument can appeal to.

   Model answer

   One is order among things existing alongside each other, the way the parts of a body or an ecosystem are arranged so as to fit one another; Swinburne calls this co-presence. The other is order across time, where the same kind of event reliably follows the same kind of event, which is what a law of nature is; Swinburne calls this succession and thinks it the stronger basis, since the sheer fact that the universe runs on simple laws at all is what most demands explaining.

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