The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal

by James Franklin

Of all arguments for the existence of God, the most durable is the design argument. It comes in two flavors, deductive and nondeductive. The deductive type, of which the most famous example is Thomas Aquinas’s Fifth Way, argues that teleology, or directedness, in nature necessarily implies an Orderer, in much the same way as a street sign’s having a meaning implies that someone wrote it to have that meaning. This is offered as a philosophical intuition into the nature of things. Take it or leave it. The other, more popular, kind of design argument is quite different. Exemplified by such modern versions as “What is the chance of a tornado blowing through a junkyard and leaving a 747?” it is a nondeductive argument and hence subject to infinite discussions of its plausibility. Is there an alternative explanation of apparent order? Can nature self-organize? Can order come to be by chance? Can the analogy between the world and an artifact be defeated by some parallel argument, like an argument from disorder?