Also known as the teleological argument, the argument from design is one of the most popular proofs for God’s existence. I’ll recount a version I saw on an instagram street interview. For background information, the street interview involved an atheist in a jacket and another man, a preacher, who attempted to prove God’s existence to him. Here is how it went:
Preacher: I will prove to you God is real within 30 seconds. Consider your jacket. Do you know the maker of the jacket?
Atheist: No, I do not.
Preacher: I see. But you assume that the jacket-maker is a real person, right? The jacket, with it’s beautiful leather and intricate folds could not have arisen randomly, correct?
Atheist: Yes, I could agree with that.
Preacher: Ok. Well, what if we took the same analogy, but instead of a jacket we considered the world. Would you agree with me that certain aspects of the world, like our hand, or our eye, could not have arisen randomly?
Atheist: Yes, that makes sense to me.
Preacher: Well, by the same logic, something must have given our hand/eye purpose. The intricacies of our anatomy cannot be explained pure randomness. There must be someone who created us this way. And that creator is God.
Atheist: But how do I know God exists?
Preacher: Did you know the Jacket maker exists? No, you just admitted that you did not. But because both you, and the jacket, were designed for a purpose, it is reasonable to assume that just like there exists a jacket-maker, there exists a God.
The atheist agrees with this logic, and the preacher then pronounces the atheist a believer and hands him a religious book. Hurrah! Problem solved, God exists, and we can reverse centuries of religious bloodshed and warfare….Not really. I presume that in this situation, the atheist was probably a little too shocked to find the cracks in the Preacher’s argument, as there are some obvious ones. To be impartial, in defense of the theory, this preacher’s argument is not exactly the most concise representation. Here is a more well-thought out argument below, from a Princeton theology class.
(1) It is an indisputable and yet remarkable fact that many natural objects appear to have been designed for a purpose: the eye for seeing, the hand for grasping, etc.
(2) The only reasonable explanation for this appearance of purpose is that natural things are ultimately the product of an immensely powerful supernatural intelligence, namely God.
(IBE) If an hypothesis H is the only reasonable explanation of a remarkable fact F, then it is reasonable to believe that H is true.
(3) Therefore, it is reasonable to believe is that God exists.
(IBE) represents something called inference to best explanation. It is a logical tool that licenses a conclusion when a single explanation emerges as vastly more reasonable than any other. In that case, we are obliged, according to our principle, to infer that the best explanation is the true one.
Within the first premise, “designed for a purpose” can be taken to mean many things. As with the street interview, it can mean intricacy, but it can also mean function. Intricacy all alone can be somewhat problematic: a garbage patch in the middle of the ocean can be “intricately” adorned, yet that does not mean it has any apparent purpose. More likely, purpose can mean function: in the way that a foot has the function of moving us or the nose has a the function of smell. Still, this is not universally applied. Does a rock, even the most intricate one, have any particular function? Not really, but a large enough amount of things have a function for it to be reason to think our universe has a maker. Lastly, a third “purpose” of the universe has to do with the fundamental intricacies in the laws of nature themselves. This is something that kind of relates to the weak anthropic principle: the idea that the universe was shaped with laws of nature that necessarily had the correct values for life to arise, or else we wouldn’t be here to observe it. This idea can also be applied to the existence of God. If our world was so carefully constructed, and constants were so carefully balanced to create an environment fit for us, is that not the most telling evidence that the universe was designed?
A flaw with the teleological argument is that it implicitly assumes the creator of purpose to be God. We can assume that the jacket-maker is associated with the jacket because, although we may not know the individual jacket-maker, we understand that as an overarching profession, jacket-making is what a jacket-maker does. This logic does not extrapolate to the conception of God. As God, in most definitions, is infinite in all ways, he is firmly outside our intellect, meaning we have no a priori experience with him, unlike our relationship to a jacket-maker. Therefore, premise two, the fact that “natural things are ultimately the product of an immensely powerful supernatural intelligence, namely God” does not make sense. I propose that evolution has designed us in such as way that our function is somewhat complex/intricate. Evolution is in no way a type of God, but a natural law, a force that governs that natural world, which feeds off of mutations and keeps the best of what changes. Every thing has their own prerogative to survive, and with that arises mutations, complexities, and design specifications that bring about what some could attribute to God.
The argument also implicitly assumes the validity of something called the principle of causal adequacy. The PCA was something primarily associated with Descartes, which assumes that the cause of an effect must possess at least as much reality as the effect itself. The principle manifests itself in this argument in the immediate assumption of God as the originator. Since God has the maximum level of reality, or strength, or whatever criteria imaginable, it somewhat exists outside the system of causality—the ultimate cause. This is why God was referred to by Aristotle as the “Unmoved Mover”—everything originates within God. Philosophers like Hume reject this notion, this idea that everything has to have an ultimate cause. This goes back to Hume’s empiricist idea that true causality is impossible to truly recognize, and therefore, creating a casual chain of events is just a silly little mind game. In other words, Hume would wholeheartedly reject any formulation of the IBE, or the inference to best explanation. Therefore true causality is immeasurable, causal chains have very little significance, meaning we can neither deny nor prove the existence of the start of a chain—something like an “unmoved mover”—we just disregard it.
Additionally, one could argue that randomness is too quickly dismissed. As the famous saying goes, within an infinite time frame, Monkeys could fully reproduce the works of Shakespeare. Infinitely impossible things can happen in an infinitely long amount of time. What’s not to say that our bodies just randomly developed these functions, and that no force, or creator, like God or evolution contributed to where we are now? While unlikely, we can’t disprove this account of our existence.
Lastly, if we zoom out, the analogy makes even less sense. Sure, we can agree that something like a hand, or a leg, or a foot can be created with some purpose or function in mind. But what about the entire universe? How can we say that the entire universe was created with a purpose if we have no clue what that purpose is? While we know that a watch and a jacket are created with exact purposes: to tell the time, and keep heat in, respectively, the universe is far less certain. Sure, we could say that God and God only knows the true purpose. But where does that get us? A belief based on faith—not rational arguments.
Although the Argument from Design for God’s existence is a handy “Gotcha!” proof for street interviews, it holds little weight. The analogy is just too weak, and the principles of causality are too tenuous.