Philosophy: The Basics

by Nigel Warburton

The Design Argument

Summary; One of the original arguments for God’s existence is the Design Argument. Also known as the Teleological Argument - from the Greek word telos, which means ‘purpose’. This argument argues, if we look around us at the natural world, we noticing how everything in it, is suited to the function it performs - everything bears evidence of having been designed for that pacific purpose. For example: we examine the eye, we see how its minute parts all fit together, each part cleverly suited to what it was made for - seeing. Supporters of the Design Argument, such as William Paley (1743–1805), claim that the complexity and efficiency of natural objects, such as the eye, is evidence that they must have been designed by a creator, “God”. Just as by looking at a watch we can tell that it was designed by a watchmaker, so to, they argue, we can tell by looking at the eye that it was designed by some sort of Divine Watchmaker. This, is an argument from an effect to its cause - we look at the effect (the eye or the watch), and from that we try to tell what caused it (a watchmaker or a Divine Watchmaker). It relies on the idea that, a designed object like a watch is in some ways very similar to a natural object such as the eye. This sort of argument, based on a similarity between two things, is known as an “Argument from Analogy”. Arguments from analogy rely on the principle that, if two things are similar in some respects they will very likely be similar in others. Those who accept the Design Argument, tell us that everywhere we look, particularly in the natural world, we can find confirmation of God’s existence. Because these things are far more ingeniously constructed than a watch, the Divine Watchmaker must have been correspondingly more intelligent than the human watchmaker. Indeed, the Divine Watchmaker must have been so powerful and so clever, that it makes sense to assume that it was God as traditionally understood by Theists. However, there are strong arguments against the Design Argument which we will look at next.

Weakness of Analogy

Summary: One objection to the argument just set forth is that it relies on a weak analogy, it takes for granted that there is a significant resemblance between natural objects and objects which we know to have been designed but is this obviously the case? Arguments from analogy rely on there being a strong similarity between the two things being compared. For example, a wrist watch and a pocket watch are sufficiently similar for us to be able to assume that they were both designed by watchmakers. They both consist of similar parts, working together in a similar way, producing the same outcome. But if the similarity is weak, then the conclusions that can be drawn, on the basis of the comparison, is going to be correspondingly weak. Although there is some similarity between a watch and an eye - they are both intricate and fulfil their particular function, it is only a vague similarity - They are not made up of similar components, they do not work in a similar way and they do not produce the same outcome. So any conclusions based on the analogy will, as a result, be correspondingly vague. There are other criticisms of this argument to.

Evolution

Summary The existence of a Divine Watchmaker is not the only possible explanation of how it is, that animals and plants are so well adapted to their functions. Charles Darwin’s (1809–82) theory of evolution by natural selection, explained in his book The Origin of Species (1859), gives an alternative explanation of this phenomenon. By a process of, survival of the fittest, those animals and plants best suited to their environments, lived to pass on their characteristics to their offspring. Scientists have been able to account for the mechanism of evolution in terms of inherited genes. This process explains how such marvellous adaptations to environment as are found in the animal and plant kingdoms could have occurred, without needing to introduce the notion of God. Of course Darwin’s theory of evolution in no way disproves God’s existence and many Christians accept it as the best explanation of how plants, animals, and human beings came to be as they are. They believe that God created the mechanism of evolution itself. However, Darwin’s theory does weaken the power of the Design Argument since it explains the same effects without any mention of God

Limitations on Conclusion

Summary; Even if, despite the objections mentioned so far, you still find the Design Argument convincing, you should notice that it does not provide any evidence for the existence of one God or as it is known: monotheism – the view that there is only one God. Even if you accept that the world and everything in it clearly shows evidence of having been designed, there is no reason to believe that it was all designed by one God. If we extend the analogy, it takes a team of people all working together to design, manufacture and build multiple watches, so would it not stand to reason that it was a team of Gods that built the universe and everything inside of it? It also takes different group of humans, specialised in different disciplines, to build complex structures like nuclear power stations or the large hadron collider, so again, is it not reasonable that it was a group of different Gods specialised in different disciplines who built the different complex structures of the universe? Another thing that goes against this argument, is that the universe has a number of ‘design faults’ when we look closely at nature. For instance, the human eye has a tendency to short-sightedness, and to cataracts in old age, some humans and animals are born disabled and people develop cancer often. Hardly the work of an all-powerful creator, wanting to create the best world possible. Finally, on the question of whether the Designer is all-knowing and all-good, many people find the amount of evil in the world counts against this conclusion. An all knowing God, would know that evil exists, an all-powerful God would be able to prevent it occurring and an all-good God would not want it to exist. But evil continues to occur.

The Fine Tuning Argument

Summary Despite the powerful arguments against the Design Argument, some recent thinkers have tried to defend a variant of it known as the Anthropic Principle. This is the view that the chance of the world turning out to be conducive to human survival and development was so tiny that we can conclude that the world is the work of a divine architect. God must have controlled the physical conditions in our universe, and fine-tuned them to allow just this kind of life form to evolve. This view is bolstered by scientific research indicating the limited range of suitable starting conditions for a universe in which life could develop at all.

The Lottery Objection

Summary Imagine that you have bought a lottery ticket. There are millions of tickets, but only one will win. It doesn’t follow from the fact that, because your winning ticket was chosen, from all the many millions of losing tickets, that this must have been the result of something more than a random selection. Anything which is statistically unlikely, still can happen. The mistake that defenders of the Fine Tuning argument make is to assume that when something happens which is unlikely, there must be a more plausible explanation of it than that it arose naturally. It is not surprising that we are in a universe where the conditions were just right for beings of our kind to emerge, since there would be no chance whatsoever of us emerging elsewhere. So the fact that we are here cannot be taken as proof of God’s design. Furthermore, the Fine Tuning argument is also vulnerable to the range of criticisms of traditional versions of the Design Argument outlined above.

The First Cause Argument

Summary The Design Argument and its variant the Fine Tuning Argument are based on direct observation of the world. As such they are what philosophers call empirical arguments. In contrast, the First Cause Argument, sometimes known as the Cosmological Argument, relies only on the empirical fact that the universe exists. The First Cause Argument states that absolutely everything has been caused by something else prior to it - nothing has just sprung into existence without a cause. Because we know that the universe exists, we can safely assume that a whole series of causes and effects led to its being as it is. If we follow this series back we will find an original cause. This first cause, so the First Cause Argument tells us, is God. However, as with the Design Argument, there are a number of criticisms of this argument.

Self-Contradictory

Summary The First Cause Argument begins with the assumption that every single thing was caused by something else, but it then proceeds to contradict this by saying that God was the very first cause. It argues both that there can be no uncaused cause, and that there is one uncaused cause, God. It invites the question ‘And what caused God?’ If the series of effects and causes is going to stop somewhere, why must it stop at God? Why couldn’t it stop earlier in the regression, with the appearance of the universe itself

Not a Proof

Summary The First Cause Argument assumes that causes and effects could not possibly go backwards forever, in what is termed an infinite regress - a never ending series going back in time. It assumes that there was a first cause that gave rise to all other things but why? if we use the analogy, you can always add one number to the highest number infinite times to forever get a bigger number, you can similarly take one number away infinite times to forever get a smaller number, so it is plausible to have causes and effects go on backwards for infinity Why then shouldn’t the effects and causes extend backwards into the past to infinity?

Limitations on Conclusion

Summary If we assume their was a start to the universe and that something powerful had to start it off, there are still serious limitations on what can be concluded from the First Cause Argument, as it does not present any evidence for a God who is either, all-knowing or all-good described by theists Also Just like the design argument, this argument still has to attend to the problem of evil if we except this God is all-knowing & all-good

The Ontological Argument

Summary The Ontological Argument is an attempt to show that the existence of God necessarily follows from the definition of God as the supreme being. According to the Ontological Argument, God is defined as the most perfect being imaginable or, in the most famous formulation of the argument, given by St Anselm (1033–1109), as ‘that being than which nothing greater can be conceived’. One of the aspects of this perfection or greatness is supposed to be existence. A perfect being would not be perfect if it did not exist. Because this conclusion can be drawn prior to experience, it is known as an ‘priori argument’. The Ontological Argument is very different from the previous three arguments for the existence of God in that it does not rely on evidence at all.

Absurd Consequences

Summary We can quite easily imagine a perfect beach, with perfect wildlife, on a perfect island and so on, but it obviously does not follow from this that this perfect island actually exists somewhere. Either the argument’s structure must be unsound, or else at least one of its initial assumptions must be false

Existence is Not a Property

Summary A bachelor can be defined as an unmarried man. Being unmarried is the essential defining property of a bachelor. Now, if I were to say ‘bachelors exist’, I would not be giving a further property to bachelors. Existence is not the same sort of thing as the property of being unmarried: for anyone to be unmarried they must first exist, If we apply the same thinking to the Ontological Argument, we see that the mistake it makes is to treat the existence of God as if it were simply another property, like omniscience, or omnipotence. But God could not be omniscient or omnipotent without existing, so by giving a definition of God at all we are already assuming that he or she exists. Listing existence as a further essential property of a perfect being is making the mistake of treating existence as a property rather than as the precondition of anything having any properties at all.

Evil

Summary Even if the Ontological Argument is accepted, there is still much evidence that at least one aspect of its conclusion is false. The presence of evil in the world seems to oppose the idea that God is all-good.

Knowledge, Proof, and the Existence of God

Summary Knowledge in this context can be defined as a true, justified, belief. If we were to have knowledge that God exists, it would have to be true that God actually does exist. But our belief that God exists would also have to be justified, it would have to be based on the right sort of evidence. It is possible to have beliefs that are true but unjustified. eg: I looked at a newspaper to get the day, Monday, thinking that it was today’s newspaper, but it turned out to be a week old newspaper, however the day was that of Monday, so I knew the correct day but I didn’t have a justification for it being the correct day Are there any arguments which could conclusively disprove the existence of the God described by the Theists?

Saintliness

Summary Some people have argued that, though the presence of evil in the world is clearly not a good thing in itself, it is justified because it can lead to greater moral goodness. Evil allows the supposedly greater good of this kind of triumph over human suffering. However, such a solution is open to at least two objections; First, the degree and extent of suffering are far greater than would be necessary to allow saints and heroes to perform their acts of great moral goodness and besides, much of this suffering goes unnoticed and unrecorded, and so cannot be explained in this way. Second, it is not obvious that a world in which great evil exists would be preferable to one in which there was less evil and as a result fewer saints and heroes.

Artistic Analogy

Summary Some people have claimed that there is an analogy between a work of art and the world. Just as a piece of music usually involves discords which are subsequently resolved or a painting typically has large areas of darker as well as lighter pigment. In a similar way, so the argument goes, evil contributes to the overall harmony or beauty of the world. This view is also open to at least a couple of objections. It is hard to understand how somebody dying in agony could be said to have been contributing to the overall harmony of the world. If the analogy with a work of art is really the explanation of why God permits so much evil, then this is almost an admission that evil cannot satisfactorily be explained since it puts the understanding of evil beyond a merely human comprehension. It is only from God’s viewpoint that the harmony could be observed and appreciated. If this is what is meant when theists say that God is all-good, then it is a very different use of the word ‘good’ from our usual one. A God who allows such suffering for merely aesthetic purposes–in order to appreciate it in the way one appreciates a work of art, sounds more like a sadist than the all-good deity described by Theists.

The Free will Defence

Summary By far the most important attempt at a solution to the Problem of Evil is the Free Will Defence. This is the claim that God has given human beings free will, the ability to choose for ourselves what to do. Those who accept the Free Will Defence argue that, it is a necessary consequence of having free will that we should have the possibility of doing evil, otherwise it would not genuinely be free will. Because if we were pre-programmed to be automata, we could not even call our actions morally good since moral goodness depends on having a choice about what we do.

It Makes Two Basic Assumptions

Summary The main assumption the Free Will Defence makes is that a world with free will and the possibility of evil is preferable to a world of robot-like people who never perform evil actions. But is this obviously so? Many people, given the choice, would prefer everyone to have been pre-programmed only to do good, rather than to have the scale and scope of evil in the world. The second assumption the Free Will Defence makes is namely that we do actually have free will and not just an illusion of it. As brain scans show we make some decisions before we consciously have decided to make that decision and some psychologists believe that we can explain every decision or choice that an individual makes by referring to some earlier conditioning that the individual has undergone However, it should be pointed out in the Free Will Defence’s favour that most philosophers believe that human beings do have free will in some sense, and that free will is generally considered essential to being human.

Free will but No Evil

Summary If God is omnipotent, then presumably it is within his or her powers to have created a world in which there was both free will and yet no evil. It is logically possible that everyone could have had free will but decided always to shun the evil course of behaviour. Free Will Defenders would probably reply to this that such a state of affairs would not be genuine free will. This is open to debate.

God could Intervene

Summary Theists typically believe that God can and does intervene in the world, primarily by performing miracles. So why didn’t God intervene to prevent the Holocaust or the whole Second World War or the AIDS epidemic? Again, Theists might reply that if God ever intervened then we would not have genuine free will. But this would be to abandon an aspect of most Theists’ belief in God,

Doesn’t Explain Natural Evil

Summary Criticism of the Free Will Defence is that it can only justify the existence of moral evil, evil brought about directly by human beings. Unless one accepts some kind of doctrine of the Fall, whereby Adam and Eve’s betrayal of God’s trust is supposed to have brought all the different sorts of evil on the world. However, such a doctrine would only be acceptable to someone who already believed in the existence of the Judaeo-Christian God. There are other more plausible explanations of natural evil, one of which is that the regularity in the laws of nature has a great overall benefit which outweighs the occasional disasters that it gives rise to.

Beneficial Laws of Nature

Summary Without regularity in nature our world would be mere chaos, and we would have no way of predicting the results of any of our actions. Lack of regularity in other aspects of the world might make life itself impossible. Science, as well as everyday life, relies upon there being a great deal of regularity in nature, similar causes tending to produce similar effects. Theists argue that because this regularity is usually beneficial to us, natural evil is justified since it is just an unfortunate side-effect of the laws of nature continuing to operate in a regular way. The overall beneficial effects of this regularity are supposed to outweigh the detrimental ones. First, it does not explain why an omnipotent God couldn’t have created laws of nature which would never actually lead to any natural evil. A possible response to this is that even God is bound by the laws of nature; but this suggests that God is not really omnipotent. Second, it still fails to explain why God does not intervene to perform miracles more often. If god never intervenes, then, as we have seen, a major aspect of most Theists’ belief in God is taken away.

The Argument from Miracles

Summary In discussing the Problem of Evil and attempted solutions to it, I mentioned that Theists usually believe that God has performed occasional miracles. Here we shall consider whether the claim that miracles have occurred could ever provide sufficient evidence for believing in the existence of God. A miracle can be defined as some kind of divine intervention in the normal course of events which involves breaking an established law of nature. Most religions claim that God has performed miracles, and that the reports of these miracles should be treated as confirmation that God exists.

Hume on Miracles

Summary David Hume, in Section X of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, argued “A rational person should never believe a report that a miracle had actually taken place unless it would be a greater miracle that the person reporting the miracle was mistaken. We should, as a policy, always believe whatever would be the lesser miracle”. Hume is deliberately playing on the meaning of ‘miracle’. When Hume declares that we should believe whatever is the lesser miracle, he is using the word ‘miracle’ in the everyday sense, which can include something which is merely out of the ordinary. Hume thought that there had never been a reliable enough report of a miracle on which to base a belief in God. He used several powerful arguments to support this view.

Miracles Always Improbable

Summary Hume say to have a law of nature you need to have the maximum amount of evidence to support it with nothing that can disprove it, so in the case of any report of a miracle, like a man resurrecting from the dead, there will always be more evidence to suggest that it didn’t occur than that it did. This is just a consequence of miracles involving the breaking of well-established laws of nature. So, using this argument, a wise person should always be extremely reluctant to believe a report that a miracle has occurred. A wise person will always base what they believe, on the available evidence. although we cannot absolutely rule out the possibility that the Resurrection occurred, according to Hume, we should be extremely reluctant to believe that it did.

Psychological Factors

Summary Psychological factors can lead people to be self-deceived or even actually fraudulent about the occurrence of miracles. As people already entertain the notion that miracles have happened. When something strange occurs that they do not understand, they are more open to the possibility that it was a miracle which took place, add in embellishment from others and the feeling that a miracle happened, becomes their primary stance as this miracle reveals God’s presence confirming their beliefs

Religions Cancel Out

Summary When reading each religious texts you find that the same type of miracle has taken place in each texted, however this produces a problem as to which god produced the miracle. If a miracle where to of occurred only one god would have produced it cancelling out the others unless all the gods worked together but as each religious texts is based on different beliefs it would render them false as a team of gods would share the same beliefs The combination of these factors should always make rational people reluctant to believe reports that a miracle has happened. A natural explanation, even if improbable in itself, is always more likely to be appropriate Of course anyone who thinks they have witnessed a miracle would, rightly, take this experience very seriously. But, because it is so easy to be mistaken about these things, such an experience should never count as a conclusive proof of God’s existence.

The Gambler’s Argument: Pascal’s Wager

Summary Pascals wager, which is derived from the writings of the philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62), is not to provide proof of gods existence, but rather to show that a sensible gambler would ‘bet’ that God exists. The Gambler’s Argument proceeds as follows. Since we do not know whether or not God exists, we are in the same position as a gambler before a card is turned. We therefore must calculate the odds for the most likely scenario so we don’t lose out in life. There are four possible outcomes; If we bet on the existence of God and win, then we gain eternal life. If we bet on this option and lose, then we miss out on certain worldly pleasures, waste many hours praying, and live our lives under an illusion. However, if we choose to bet on the option that God doesn’t exist, and we win, then we live a life without illusion and are free to indulge in the pleasures of this life without fear of divine punishment. But if we bet on this option and lose, then we miss the chance of eternal life, and may even run the risk of eternal damnation. Pascal argued that, as gamblers faced with these options, the most rational course of action for us is to believe that God does exist.

Can’t Decide to Believe

Summary The Gambler’s Argument provides no evidence whatsoever to convince us that God exist. It merely tells us that as a gambler we would be well advised to bring ourselves to believe this to be so. But here we are faced with the problem that, in order to believe anything, we must have evidence to believe that it is true.

Inappropriate Argument

Summary To gamble on the belief that God does exist because we thereby gain the chance of everlasting life, seems an inappropriate attitude to take to the question of God’s existence. The philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910) went so far as to say that “if he were in God’s position, he would take great delight in preventing people who believed in him, on the basis of this procedure from going to heaven. The whole procedure seems insincere, and is entirely motivated by self-interest going against what God preached”.

Non-Realism about God