5. TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENTS and NATURAL DESIGN: PALEY & HUME

With the rise of the Christian right in the United States as a powerful political entity, the last two decades have seen a re-emergence of the kinds of theological arguments that were dominating philosophical thought in the 18th and 19th century. Indeed, these kinds of debates about the existence, proof and nature of God go back to antiquity and the emergence of the Western consciousness; they have permeated philosophical discourse ever since. These arguments have exerted powerful influence over the ways in which we view and exercise our most fundamental social institutions and understand our relationship to nature and the society in which we live. And, it does appear that certain societies at certain historical periods show themselves to be more fervently engaged in this discussion than others––as it is today in the United States, so it was in England and Scotland in the 18th and 19th century. We will be looking at the perspectives of two thinkers from this period who held diametrically opposed views with regards to the debate around what has come to be known as ‘Intelligent Design.’

With the Scientific revolution well under way and the Industrial Revolution just around the corner, David Hume (1711-1776) and William Paley (1743-1805) found themselves on either side of a dispute about whether or not the existence of God could be proven by demonstrating design in nature. For some, science––and the new definitions of reason associated with it––presented a challenge to faith because it offered a paradigm for ‘evidence’ or ‘proof’ in which religion could not take part. While there were some who claimed that faith itself was a distinct faculty of understanding and did not need to qualify itself rationally; and others who took the position that reason’s true purpose is to serve faith, suggesting that the tools of reason cannot be directed properly with out it; it did seem to many that a growing scepticism fuelled by the increasing predominance of scientific reason was beginning to threaten faith in the Church. As a result, we notice in this period a renewed interest in the project to marry Reason and Faith which had been such a concern for St Augustine; attempts were made to create rational, logical, and emperical arguments which could secure the place of religion and God in a world increasingly dominated by a new scientific epistomology and philosphical/political thought which began to question theological assumptions.

Philosophically inclined thinkers, such as Paley, laboured to shape what begins essentially as intuition, into a more formal, logically rigourous inference. The theistic arguments that resulted tend to focus on plan, purpose, intention and design, and are thus classified as teleological arguments––or, more commonly, as arguments from or to design. As opposed to cosmological perspectives, which start from the position that there are contingently existing things and finish with conclusions concerning the existence of a maker to account for their existence; or ontological arguements which posit that God must nessicarily exist because to deny him is absurd; teleological arguments focus on finding evidence of cognitive design in nature. They begin with a specific group of special properties and conclude with the existence of a designer possessing the intellectual powers (knowledge, purpose, understanding, foresight, wisdom, intention) necessary to design the things exhibiting the special properties in question. Some type of order is the starting point of design arguments and as a result design arguments are often viewed as the most persuasive of all purely philosophical theistic arguments.

The basic positive argument for design generally goes something like this: nature exhibits such beauty of structure, function, and interconnectedness that is impossible not to see a deliberative and directive mind behind it; the necessary mind in question, being prior to nature itself, is of course taken to be supernatural: God. While this kind of argument is at the heart of the position that Paley takes in his Natural Theology, he gives it a modern, machinal interpretation (ie. the watch) in order to foreshadow his design argument which is aesthetic and quasi-legalistic. There is a subtil difference between Paley’s thought and the ‘classic’, comparative teleological arguement that allows him––to a certain extent at least––to deal with Hume’s critical view of the design arguement. Before we examine this however, we will need to have a look to the logical chain of analoguous teleological reasoning as well as Hume’s critique of it.

As we have implied above, design arguments are generally analogous arguments—various parallels between human artefacts and natural entities being taken as supporting parallel conclusions with regards to final causation (the mind of man or of God) in each case. This is summed up very well by Hume’s Cleanthes:

“Look round the world; contemplate the whole and every part of it: You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance; of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since, therefore, the effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble; and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man, though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the work which he has executed. By this argument a posteriori, and by this argument alone, do we prove at once the existence of a Deity, and his similarity to human mind and intelligence.”

We can follow the analogous/comparative chain of reasoning in this way: entity ‘e’ within nature is like specified human artefact ‘a’ (e.g., a machine) in relevant respects ‘R’; ‘a’ has ‘R’ (relevant aspects/teleological aspects) precisely because it is a product of deliberate design by intelligent human agency; Like effects typically have like causes (or like explanations, like existence requirements, etc.) Therefore: it is (highly) probable that ‘e’ (entity) has ‘R’ (relevant teleological aspects) precisely because it too is a product of deliberate design by intelligent, relevantly human-like agency (in this case, GOD).

David Hume held a view that was critical of this line of reasoning. Hume denied the the analogy between nature and human artefact, ironically suggesting that nature more closely resembled a living organism than a machine. He claimed that even if the analogy could be made, it would not necessarily constitute anything like a traditional conception of God: natural evils or apparently imperfect designs might suggest a less than perfect designer or a group of designers; if phenomena instrumental to the production of natural evils (e.g., disease ) exhibited ‘R’s (teleological aspects), then they would presumably have to have come from the designer as well, further eroding the designer’s resemblance to the good and perfect God. And, according to Hume, even the most comprehensive empirical data could establish only finite power and wisdom, rather than the infinite power and wisdom usually associated with divinity. More famously however, is Hume’s argument against the empirical certainty of causality which is central to the analogous chain of reasoning; for Hume causality is psychological, a habit of the mind which occurs through regular conjoinment of events––the basis of his famous scepticism. Hume’s critique of the analogous chain can be summed up in this way: if we are to go as far as to say that human artefacts (a) may be said to resemble natural phenomena (e) it is only by way of causality (like effects typically have like causes) that we can obtain this resemblance and therefore infer ‘R’ (relevant aspects/teleological aspects). Hume claimed that any number of alternative possible explanations could be given in place of causation of allegedly designed entities in nature–– eg. chance or saturation of the relevant space of possibilities. Thus, from Hume’s position, even if we could point to fundamental resemblance between ‘a’ and ‘e’ ––which Hume doubted–– the analogous chain does not necessarily lead us to the conclusion of inferring ‘R’.

It seems possible that Paley would have been aware of Hume’s position and of the problems with the teleological argument outlined above. Paley attempted to position his argument from a perspective which did not rely on explicit references to human artefacts and the causality––or constant conjunction––which Hume was so sceptical of. He sought to found his evidence for a cognitive force behind natural phenomena in a more intuitive fashion. Paley attempted to capture natural properties that in and of themselves offered evidence of design and which were not wholly dependent on analogous reasoning. For Paley, beauty and purpose when combined with intricate, dynamic and stable functioning was sufficient to be taken as suggestive of cognitive design; it seemed the sort of thing that minds and only minds were capable of producing. Thus the more perfect the balance and relationship of these above elements were, the more certain Paley was of intent, will, mind and therefore design:

“[T]he eye … would be alone sufficient to support the conclusion which we draw from it, as to the necessity of an intelligent Creator. …”

Paley’s deductive (inferential) reasoning can be summed up in this way: natural entity (e) is too complex, orderly, adaptive, purposeful, or beautiful to have occurred randomly or accidentally; (e) must have been created by a intelligent and purposeful being; God is that being; therefore, God exists.

With Paley, the direct dependance on human artefacts has dropped out of the argument; the argument is no longer comparative, it has become deductive. While Paley’s discussion of the watch does play an analogous role, it is by way of demonstrating of design inferences rather than as the analogous foundation for an inferential comparison; it is necessary only in as much as it destroys potential objections to concluding design in the watch. He is laying the foundation by which we can begin to claim evidence of design and designers in general terms. The analogy here is paradigmatic rather than correlative to particular instance.

Indeed, even if one sides with Hume in taking the view that nature is more organic than mechanic, it is difficult to deny that nature is full of things that look designed (on their own terms) and seem to be purposeful in terms of function. From an aesthetic point of view Paley’s arguement for design is compelling. However, the existence of a designing mind existing apart nature need not be the only explanation for such phenomena. Another position could be that nature itself is its own designer; intelligence as we understand it exists in nature as a provable phenomenon simply because we are; and that although this intelligence (our own) is itself a natural phenomenon, it cannot be reliably used to explain the universe as it constitutes only a small fraction of its (nature’s) expression and thus will be skewed to view and interpret nature from the narrow perspective of human cognition. Of course this gets us nowhere if our goal is to prove or disprove the the existence of God and raises questions of whether such a task is even sensible: can God, faith or religion be rationalised? is it within the capacity of human rational faculties to know, to some degree at least, the mind of God? Can questions about God and the mystery of life/existence even be properly posed? Why do we (some of us anyway) so desperately need answers to these kinds of questions when there are multitudes of things in the world that we can come to some relative understanding of?

“What can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.” ––Wittgenstien