REASONING ABOUT DESIGN
The "Electric Brae" is a hill in Scotland that appears to go down but this is an illusion: it actually slopes up. If you take the brakes of your car, it will roll "uphill" by itself
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The "Fata Morgana" is a mirage that occurs in the sea between Sicilly and Italy. Ships and mountains seem to float in the air above the horizon.
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A "Fata Morgana" style mirage sighted in China - a floating city in the clouds
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These illusions tell us that our senses cannot always be trusted. Because of things like this, a posteriori arguments may not always be sound. However, illusions and hoaxes can eventually be "exposed".
Ambiguity is different. "Ambiguous" means "having more than one meaning" or "open to more than one interpretation". If an experience is ambiguous, then there's more than one way to interpret what it means and you may never be able to "get to the bottom of it". This was an important idea for the liberal Christian philosopher John Hick (Faith & Knowledge, 1957): |
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the universe is religiously ambiguous. It evokes and sustains non-religious as well as religious responses - John Hick
the same thing appears in either slightly or considerably different ways to different people owing both to their varying spatial locations in relation to it and to differences in their sensory and mental equipment and interpretive habits - John Hick
A leap of faith - Søren Kierkegaard
YES
If all we ever know are phenomenon, then God is always going to be a mystery: believers and non-believers in design can never be 100% sure they're right. They can try and persuade each other of their own interpretation, but they also have to tolerate and respect each other when interpretations differ.
If religion is a leap of (or to) faith, then you don't arrive at faith because of the Design Argument. It's the other way round. Once you've made the leap of faith, then the Design Argument becomes persuasive and true. Faith is a choice, not something you're forced to have because of evidence or argument. John Hick argues this gives us "spiritual freedom" to use our freewill.
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NO
If we can never get past the phenomenon to figure out the Noumenon, then religion is never anything better than a guess or an opinion. Even science can't provide a true picture of reality: it's just another interpretation. Some people feel this is giving up on the search for truth, which is what philosophy is all about.
There may be clues to noumenal reality. John Hick thinks religious experience is a way of getting closer to the Noumenon. We can never completely understand what God is like, but we can get a partial idea. Hick is a believer in religious pluralism - he thinks there's underlying truth in all serious religions, even ones that seem to contradict each other.
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