Since my late teens I've been an admirer of the design argument for the existence of God. It was probably the first intellectually serious argument for God's existence I studied - prior to that I'd mainly become familiar with crude presentations of the moral argument or question-begging arguments for the validity of the Bible (e.g. 'The Bible says its the word of God, so it must be!'). My first encounter with the design argument was reading creationist Jonathan Sarfati's By Design. It was an interesting book, but the argument it presented was a little bit simplistic. Overall, Sarfati's argument made two significant leaps in logic: (1) his argument leaped from the inadequacy of neo-Darwinian explanations (which he exposed quite well) to the reality of design, excluding other possibilities too quickly, (2) he leaped from 'designer' to 'God of the Bible', with little or no argument for such a leap.
I later moved on to the works of Intelligent Design theorists such as Stephen C. Meyer and Michael J. Behe. Here, I think, I found more rigorous argument. ID theorists are acutely aware of the accusation that their views are 'religious' - which, in the minds of the accusers means 'not rational' - so they have worked hard to present a meticulous case for design that is based exclusively on standard scientific and philosophical reasoning. (I would, of course, challenge the assumption of many critics of ID - both religious and anti-religious - that religious thinking is necessarily antithetical to rational thinking and the further assumption that the naturalistic/materialistic approach to science is the epitome of rational thinking.) Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box (1996), presented one of the most rigourous arguments for design to that point. More recently, Meyer's Signature in the Cell (2009) was a masterpiece followed up by an equally compelling Darwin's Doubt (2013). Meyer's overall argument in these two books was a compelling mix of empirical, mathematical and philosophical argument, which neatly summarised the best research of the ID movement since the early 1990s. Among the strong points of Meyer's books is that he (and other design theorists) focused on presenting a more detailed exposition of the logic of design inferences (a term coined by William Dembski) and avoided leaping to the conclusion that the designer must be God, distinguishing between empirical/mathematical arguments to design and philosophical arguments from design for theism.
So, to make it clear, I think that the two core conclusions of the ID movement are sound. These conclusions are:
(1) that natural processes or mechanisms, such as neo-Darwinism, are inadequate to explain the existence and diversity of life on earth
(2) that it is highly plausible that intelligence has played a key role in the origin and development of life on earth.
(For those interested in doing some follow-up reading I would recommend to following articles: here, here, here, here, here, here and here.)
One may wonder, then, why I entitled this blog post a 'critical discussion', if I'm such a fan of ID. Well, ID founders not at the level of science, but where the design inference is then used to support a theistic design argument. As it stands, the modern biological design argument (and all arguments derived ultimately from William Paley's classic biological design argument) fails to get you all the way to God, in the sense in which the term is most commonly used. Paleyan (yes, that's a word) design arguments can get you to a designer, or a god, but not God.
Let me expand on that last comment a little. As anyone who has studied up on the various uses of the term 'god' knows, it has many different meanings. More significantly (as I noted in a previous post) the different uses of the term often have radically different implications in philosophy. There are the gods of polytheism (who are part of the cosmos), the 'God' of deism (that is powerful, without necessarily being omnipotent, intelligent, without being omniscient, good, without being morally perfect, etc.) and the God of classical theism.
What the design inference does is get the arguer to is the conclusion that some kind of intelligence was involved in the origin of life on earth. Some might argue that this does not even exclude naturalism, because it may not exclude the possibility that intelligent life elsewhere in the universe created life here. Actually, that is probably not the case, because a large part of Meyer, Behe and other ID advocates' argument is that it is not only prohibitively unlikely that life would originate here by natural processes, but that it is equally unlikely (if not more unlikely) to have originated elsewhere in the universe. In other words, the problem for Darwinism is not planet earth only, but nature itself is uncooperative. So, no directed panspermia.
The difficulty for directed panspermia (or any kind of panspermia) is further compounded by the rare earth hypothesis, which has been strongly supported by a variety of books in recent decades, such as Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee's Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe, Michael Denton's Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe (see article), Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richard's The Privileged Planet (see documentary), Simon Conway Morris' Life's Solution, and John Gribbin's Alone in the Universe. These books conclude that the likelihood of earth-like planets with the potential to sustain intelligent life is extremely small - even given the immense size of the universe (hundreds of trillions of stars). So one can conclude that aliens are incredible (i.e., not credible) as a source for the origin of life on earth.
This still leaves gods and 'God' as alternatives to God, and the design argument cannot get us beyond that point - an issue admitted by ID theorists. So, Paley's design argument (and similar contemporary arguments) can get us to the existence of an intelligence that itself is not the product of natural processes. One could, of course, use additional philosophical arguments against polytheism to show that the gods are as equally incredible as aliens. That would still leave you with 'God' or God, and no way for the design argument, on it own, to discern the difference. Admittedly, this is a long way from atheism and naturalism, and because of this the design argument has considerable argumentative power against these philosophies. However, in order to get all the way to the God of theism, design arguments would have to piggy-back on other theistic arguments, e.g. the cosmological or moral arguments as well as other versions of the teleological argument (e.g. the argument from order).
In contrast to some critics of the design argument, I don't regard this as a fatal objection to the design argument, but obviously the argument has basic limits. If this were the only argument for the existence of God, it would still go a long way toward the rational support of theism vs. naturalism. (This probably explains the considerable popularity of design arguments in the wake of Hume and Kant's critiques of the classical arguments for the existence of God.) But it's not the only argument for the existence of God, despite the best efforts of Hume and his intellectual descendants. So, I've moved from focusing on design arguments (despite my remaining scepticism of neo-Darwinism and admiration for ID) to studying other arguments that deal with more fundamental metaphysical issues.
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