ORDER & REgularity
Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God - Thomas Aquinas
Regularity: the world seems to work in accordance with “laws of nature” that don’t vary and which make things predictable. Where do these laws come from? Why are they consistent and understandable?
Purpose: more controversially, the universe (to many people) seems to be working towards an end or purpose; everything seems to be in place to bring about human life so that we can understand the cosmos and perhaps one day explore it.
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Benefit: the structure of the world makes life possible, particularly human life. Gravity, atmosphere, ecosystems, all of these are just right to support life on this planet. This requires many conditions to be met - and they are met. Is that just luck?
Beauty: again controversially, the universe seems to be more than just functional or beneficial: it’s actually beautiful! It excites feelings of awe and wonder.To many people, this suggests it’s got a meaning and purpose behind it.
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YES
Just because we're used to the natural world, we shouldn't take it for granted. It doesn't have to be this way. One of the appealing things about the Design Argument is that it makes us see the world around us "with fresh eyes", paying attention to the order that we're inclined to overlook.
Even if some amount of order can come about naturally, through chance and blind processes operating unintentionally, there's still too much order for it to be unintentional. It's not just order: it's BENEFICIAL order that produces creatures like us, that are intelligent and self-aware and moral. This is the sort of thing that God would do but chance wouldn't.
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NO
Just because there's order, it doesn't follow that an intelligent Designer must have put it there. Order might come about on its own, unintentionally. This is attacking the soundness of the Design Argument's premise that order is always the product of an intelligent agent.
The order in the universe only seems beneficial because we've been created by it. If the laws of nature had been different, different sorts of creatures would have developed, but they would also think that the order in the universe was beneficial for them. In reality, they evolved to fit the world, rather than the world being designed for them.
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This sort of regularity is very striking in nature. People who point out the complexity of the eye or an ecosystem like a rainforest or the fact that a woodpecker's tongue wraps round its brain to stop itself getting concussion from pecking at trees are pointing out spatial order - regularities of co-presence.
This sort of spatial order can be very impressive - like the woodpecker's tongue - and it seems to lie behind Aquinas' idea of "beneficial order" and Paley's "Analogy of the Watch on the Heath"(see below) as well as Cleanthes' argument in David Hume's book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). Many religious people offer this sort of spatial order as proof of God's existence. However, Swinburne doesn't regard regularities of co-presence as particularly convincing examples of design. |
Woodpeckers - not easily concussed
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Infinite monkeys
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Spatial order can come about by chance. If you throw a stack of books in their air then they could all land in a stack in alphabetical order. If you try that an infinite number of times, then eventually they will land this way. This is sometimes referred to as the "infinite monkey theorem". It's the idea that, if you gave a monkey a typewriter and left to bash away randomly at the keys for an infinite amount of time, eventually it would type the complete works of Shakespeare, not deliberately, but by chance. Some versions of this propose an infinite number of monkeys, all bashing away at typewriters.
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The universe might so naturally have been chaotic, but it is not – it is very orderly - Richard Swinburne
YES
While orders of co-presence are more "eyecatching" and superficially exciting, the fact that we live in a universe with predictable and consistent laws is rather more mysterious. It's the "laws of nature" that make nature look designed, rather than the interesting arrangements those laws produce from time to time.
It's not just that the regularities of succession are predictable and consistent, they're also understandable. There's no reason to expect human minds to be capable of grasping the laws of nature - but they are! This leads religious believers to suggest that those laws were designed by a mind like ours - the mind of God.
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NO
We don't know if this is the only universe. If there are lots of universes that all have different laws, then most of them will be chaotic places with no life. The fact that this universe has stable laws might be down to chance: a bit like the "infinite monkeys theorem", with infinite universes, one of them is bound to be orderly.
Maybe we don't really understand the laws of nature at all. Maybe we're just creatures who have evolved to see cause-and-effect in things so we interpret nature as if there were laws governing it. In fact, as we start to study sub-atomic physics, scientists are discovering chaos rather than orderly regularities of succession.
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