Arguments from design

Nature can strike us in different ways. Depending on who you are, you will take notice of different things about it, and draw different conclusions about the general character of its operation. Depending on your conclusions, you may be led to think that it was designed, and conclude from this thought that there is a God.

I think that, generally, four kinds of relevant conclusions are arrived at.

0. Contents

1. Nature’s operation is artful
2. Nature’s operation is useful
3. Nature’s operation is lawful
4. No conclusion

1. Nature’s operation is artful

One may, upon examining nature, immediately conclude that it was designed; the character of its working seems immediately to be something that arises out of thoughtful contrivance.

If this happens immediately, it is not concluded from any particular characteristic of the operation of nature which may be stated without reference to art, contrivance, or design; no argument to show that nature is designed is produced. Nature is simply clearly designed, and therefore a designer exists.

Since no arguments can arise from this, none do. We know that it happens because some people report it to be their experience, or because their report seems to imply it. I think it does happen to some people, wherefore I included it; some poetic praises of nature seem to me to communicate it.

2. Nature’s operation is useful

Various things in nature, especially the bodies of living things, are very well adapted to fulfilling various purposes which living things have for them; whence it is concluded that they were designed to fulfill those purposes. Here, purpose has specifically the sense of use: a living creature has some goal in mind, and the operation of nature conveniently concurs with her design.

Arguments for the existence of God that focus on the usefulness of nature may fittingly be called watchmaker arguments, after the most famous example, William Paley’s Natural Theology. There were various watchmaker arguments before and after it, and there will continue to be for as long as people continue to find nature useful.

The earliest watchmaker argument I know of is in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, book 1, chapter 4. Aristodemus admits that “it is reasonable to believe that the things which are good and useful are the workmanship of reason and judgment”, and Socrates points him to the usefulness of the senses for sensing, the usefulness of the teeth for chewing, the usefulness of affections for reproduction, and so on; wherefrom the conclusion follows.

Cicero’s argument in On the Nature of the Gods, book 2, chapter 34, also focuses on the usefulness of nature. “All the parts of the world are so made up that they could not be better fitted for use, or more beautiful to behold”; he explicitly compares it to a clock, prefiguring the pocket watch Paley would employ.

It seems that modern arguments based on “fine-tuning” are also watchmaker arguments, in the sense employed here. The universe is mightily useful for the existence of life.

3. Nature’s operation is lawful

Nature may also seem to run “like clockwork” in another sense: not of being useful, but of being regular – in the sense of “rule-bound”, from regula, not in the weaker sense of “predictable”. Nature’s operation seems to be the result of rules, rather than only described by them; it seems that it could not possibly act differently.

“All nature, indeed, is nothing but a combination of phenomena which follow rules; and nowhere is there any irregularity. When we think we find any such, we can only say that the rules are unknown.” * Arguments that focus on this property are those which I think are most properly called teleological, since Aristotle’s final cause, whence the word is derived, was precisely a metaphysical principle of regularity in nature.

Accordingly, I think Thomas Aquinas’s Fifth Way is the typical example of a teleological argument in the proper sense. On the more popular level, Chapter 4 of G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy runs much in the same vein. “The mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational”; it is perfectly imaginable, Chesterton argues, that things happen otherwise than as the laws of nature would predict them to, and the fact that they don’t is rather strange and wonderful indeed.

4. No conclusion

Finally, you may look at nature and see no art, use or law to it. Its operation is the result of “chance”; its usefulness is no wonder, given evolution; and its so-called laws only apply very frequently, even constantly as far as we can see it, but not necessarily. This is the opinion which used to be ascribed to David Hume, though the IEP now warns me against doing so. “There is no physical necessity, either in laws or in nature itself. There is no intermediate state between logical necessity on the one hand and sheer contingency on the other.”

It is my opinion that this is the sort of opinion which every atheist must have regarding nature; either way, it seems that this is the opinion which, most frequently, they do have. Sometimes, however, they claim that while the regularities are physically necessary, and not logically, this is a kind of “blind necessity”; things just happen to act for an end.