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The Greek atomists and the god of Paley

In recent posts, I have been defending classical theism and criticizing Paley-style “design arguments” as time wasters at best and theologically dangerous at worst because of their implicit anthropomorphic conception of God. Here’s another way to look at the problem.

As is well known, the ancient Greek atomists were forerunners of modern naturalism. They pioneered the mechanistic approach to the study of nature. They were critical of traditional religion. They denied that there is any Uncaused Cause sustaining the world in being. But they were not atheists as that term is understood today. They generally acknowledged that the gods existed. They just regarded them as one part of the natural order among others. Were they writing today, they might have expressed their position by comparing the gods to extraterrestrials or beings from another dimension.

If you are a Christian, suppose it turned out that there really was such a being as Yahweh, but he was an alien from Alpha Centauri who had decided for a few centuries to have a little fun with the ancient Israelites. In particular, suppose it turned out that something like the events recounted in the Old Testament really did happen, but only as interpreted by Erich von Däniken in Chariots of the Gods. Would you feel vindicated? Would you expect Richard Dawkins to repent and race over to the nearest revival meeting? No, because even Dawkins is not that foolish, and neither are you.

Certainly the atomists would have responded with a gigantic yawn. And rightly so, because if God were really a space alien, then He wouldn’t be God. He certainly wouldn’t be worthy of worship. Scary, maybe. Perhaps for that reason someone you might not want to tick off. But still merely a cosmic despot, or (if we’re lucky) a cosmic kindly old grandfather. It really doesn’t matter for religious purposes, because, again, he would not in that case be any more worthy of worship than Superman.

Thus, if contemporary naturalists were wise, they would stop getting so upset over the arguments of ID theorists, given that those theorists themselves keep insisting, quite rightly, that their arguments don’t (and, I’ve been arguing, can’t) strictly get you anything more grand than E.T. If the ancient atomists could happily accept that, why couldn’t the American Atheists? Perhaps someday they’ll wise up and realize they can. For with respect to the anthropomorphic god of Paley, you might as well say: “There probably is such a god, but stop worrying and enjoy your life anyway.”

You see, there is a reason why Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and all the others among the very greatest thinkers of the Christian tradition insisted on classical theism. There is a reason why it is reflected in the creeds and councils, and why it is the infallible, irreformable doctrine of Holy Mother Church. Nothing less gets you beyond the naturalism of the ancient atomists. Which, if ID theory ever gained wide acceptance, would simply become the naturalism of the modern naturalists. Darwinism will have been defeated, but a redefined naturalism will bop along unscathed. The last laugh will belong to Democritus rather than Dembski. Then many will say bitterly, in the wake of their Pyrrhic victory: “Even the naturalists believe, and tremble not at all.”

(cross-posted)

Comments (80)

Ed,

Some comments.

* I absolutely understand the importance of stressing the difference between classical theism and what ID is capable of pointing at. And personally (amateur that I am) I'm very inclined to believe that the arguments you give in TLS are powerful and persuasive. So I entirely understand stressing why someone subscribing to A-T metaphysics cannot accept the mechanistic worldview. As you may say, it sacrifices far too much (proving the God of reason) for too little (finding design in a 'mechanistic' world that, while powerful, is not necessarily God.)

* At the same time, I think it's flat-out false that - if it were proven (or even strongly inferred) that our world, even our universe, was in fact designed (even if it, conceivably, could have been some being lesser than or distinct from the God of classical theism), that the American Atheists would happily accept this. In fact, I think it's clear it would be devastating to them. Deism is simply not atheism - and atheists are atheists (or so they insist) with respect to all gods, not simply the God of classical theism (who, frankly, most of them seem to not even be aware of). If you have a powerful argument for a designer of our world, of our universe, etc, you have a powerful argument against atheism - regardless of the particulars of this 'designer'.

* But you should be aware of this yourself. After all, you realize that the arguments in TLS, even if they work, do not get one to Christianity. They get us to the God of classical theism - a God, if I'm correct, embraced even by Anthony Flew. Now, this God -can- be the Christian God. And I believe this God -is- the Christian God. But I don't think it's fair to criticize ID on the grounds that, whatever their successes, their inferences are compatible with mere deism or some mere "very powerful being" rather than the Christian God - while at the same time the argument in TLS alone cannot do that same job either.

Basically, I think you underestimate the value of ID arguments (or at least the broader ID perspective) and underestimate the effect these arguments/views, if a powerful inference to design were on the table and popularized, would necessarily have on atheism/naturalism (To hear you put it, Dan Dennett converting to deism would mean little for atheism/naturalism, and with that I disagree). At the same time, I can certainly understand why you, given A-T metaphysics, have strong criticisms of ID based on what they implicitly accept to make their arguments.

But more than that - even ID proponents admit that their inferences, at their best, do not get one to the God of Christianity, or of any specific faith, all on their own. But I ask you: If, even given the mechanistic worldview, "design" (whether of our biology, of our planet, or of our universe) is the most reasonable, or even a very reasonable conclusion... isn't this important to establish? Just as it's important to point out what sort of inanities naturally follow from a more specifically atheistic/materialist naturalism (Which, again, you yourself even stress in TLS - for example, regarding the Churchlands) if one takes such seriously?


The Zeitgeist demands that one has to provide mechanical explanations for natural phenomena. We are no longer in the Middle Ages where arguments based on final causes can settle the matter. Gregor Mandel, the Catholic monk and founder of genetics certainly thought in terms of 'atoms of heredity'. Dembski, Behe and others have the intention of showing that the intricacy and multi-layered interactions of the artifacts in the natural world cannot be the product of Darwinian selection, as that mechanism is mindless and purposeless. In doing so they clear a space for Mind in the Universe. And where you have Mind you have Purpose. They have not claimed that such knowledge would lead one inevitably to Jesus Christ. In practice they challenge the right of the Darwinians and their line intellectuals to determine for the rest us of morals, laws and temper of society based on their bogus framework and inferences. If Darwinism is some kind of entertainment, hardly anyone would bother but the authority of science, and the totalitarian claim of Darwinism is such that it must be challenged on its own terms or one has to leave the fields of ethics, morals, politics in fact anything that concerns us as moral beings to the materialists.

The obvious objection I have here is to the inference from, "X argument cannot by itself get you to the Christian God" to "X argument by itself gets you to some being who _cannot in principle_ be the Christian God."

Obviously, the former does not entail the latter. Ed's position vis a vis ID is the latter--that if the ID arguments work, the designer inferred _cannot_ be the Christian God understood only partially but _must be_ some totally other being.

This position evidently is supposed to follow from the use in (some) ID arguments of the underlying, detailed structure of the biological objects. Using such an underlying, detailed structure to argue for the existence of a designer _apparently_, if I understand Ed's position rightly, means that the designer one infers from such a structure _must not be_ the Christian God. See my questions in my last comment below for further attempts to see if this is a correct understanding.

Again, I'm happy to be corrected if this is an incorrect summary.

"Below" meaning "in the thread below."

Btw, I would second a comment by Joseph A here about the God of Aristotle: Why couldn't an agnostic say, "Okay, so maybe the God of Aristotle exists. At least that doesn't mean I have to be a Christian"? After all, the god of Aristotle hasn't intervened in history, hasn't become man. And he certainly doesn't personally judge each individual human being at the last judgment, which sounds _way_ too much like what those darned Religious Right types believe. Now, _I_ (being a generous fellow) am not going to say like a commentator in a famous fight here recently that the god of Aristotle _cannot_ be the Christian God. I'm willing to grant at least for the sake of the argument that he could be the Christian God partially understood. But he's a heck of a lot less threatening to the atheist mind without the Christian aspects than with them, and you're going to need something else to get to those aspects anyway.

So if it's _just_ a matter of "what the atheist could say," then it seems like there's a perfectly good tu quoque hanging around here.

No, it seems that the whole thing must turn not on "what the atheist could say" but on this idea that the designer inferred via an ID argument *must not be* the Christian God, even partially understood.

Yes, I have been a bit puzzled as well. If I recall correctly, in terms of agent cause Aristotle thought that the unmoved mover a First moved mover, who moved the heavenly spheres, and these then moved all the lesser beings below the heavens. We don't view that chain of causality as an accurate description. But whether it is accurate or inaccurate, it leaves room for there to be a moved mover whose intentional design is being carried out in the physical plane, without being God. If ID arguments point in the direction of a designer whose form of causing CANNOT be the thing that is the God of Aristotle, that doesn't mean the God of Aristotle is thereby excluded from the ID world view and description of reality. It just means that their arguments don't point deeply enough to be a full account of reality, because they don't go all the way to God.

If ID arguments point in the direction of a designer whose form of causing CANNOT be the thing that is the God of Aristotle

Well, I'm not convinced myself that the Christian God has all these Aristotelian properties. But even if he does, I have never been able to see that the designer inferred from ID arguments _cannot_ be the Christian God, even given a Thomistic understanding of the Christian God. That, I take it, is Ed's position. I just don't see it. Ed has admitted below that the Christian God could make a machine. It just seems that on his understanding, it is a metaphysical and even theological necessity that bacteria or anything else we call "biological" not be thought of in machine-like terms or even as strongly analogous to machines for purposes of argument, and _somehow_ any being who designed strongly machine-like entities and made them to be such that we now call them "biological," would *have to be* some non-theistic being. I do not think this is correct at all.

I can't help adding that what really threatens atheists is intervention.

Now, someone like Mike Behe is very careful and actually goes on at some length to say that the designer he envisages need not have worked by intervention. For example, the designer could have "front-loaded" everything so that things arose in a certain way later.

So far, this insistence hasn't gotten Mike any credit at all with the anti-interventionist crowd, and I think the reason is not far to seek: IMO, such extreme front-loading is even more implausible than creation by intervention--at least _some_ interventions--once one grants that a being is making this stuff happen _at all_. Hence, ID arguments are not implausibly taken to point to intervention by the designer, though this is not _logically entailed_ by them. But intervention is absolutely anathema to the atheist mind.

So if we're going to talk about offending vs. accommodating naturalism, I'm here to tell you not only _that_ ID offends naturalism but also _why_ it offends naturalism. And I'm sorry, but heavy metaphysical arguments for a being that *maybe doesn't* (for all the argument says) perform miracles isn't nearly as offensive.

You wanna offend atheists? Embrace ID.

Just so, Ivan. You have to speak in the words they'll listen to.

It seems probable to me that this objection to Paley-style arguments arises not only from Ed’s own metaphysical commitments, which I find puzzling, but also from a misunderstanding of what Paley was attempting to do. His point in the Natural Theology is not that the design argument gives us all the classical properties of God, which obviously it does not, but rather that it provides evidence for the existence of such a being.

From the technical side, the key point is that one may offer some evidence E for the claim G even if there are alternative hypotheses H, I, J ... that would also account for E. The mere existence of these alternatives does not entail either that E is not evidence for G or that the probability of G, given E and the rest of our background information, is subject to any significant upper bound.

This is one of the things Hume misses in his critique of the design argument. It is a little dismaying to think that contemporary Thomists may be falling into the same error.

Guys, here and in the earlier thread, it seems to me you all keep missing the point. So let me emphasize it again. The problem is not that the arguments I object to get you only part way to classical theism. The problem is that they do not get you a single inch toward classical theism, but only (if they work at all) to some being who is no more God than an elf or Superman or E.T. is God. That's why I say the arguments are a waste of time at best and theologically dangerous at worst. Suppose a Christian friend of yours devoted his hours to trying to prove that the Loch Ness monster existed and thought that doing so would strike a major blow against naturalism. Well, it might strike a blow against some particular anti-Nessie version of naturalism, but not a single blow against naturalism per se, and you'd be doing him a favor if you tried to dissuade him from this fool's errand. Same thing with "design arguments" and the like which of their nature can only ever get you to something that cannot be the God of classical theism.

Why? Because, as I've said over and over (a) if you are committed to a view of the world on which it could even in theory have existed apart from God -- as mechanism, when worked out, entails -- then you have, not knowingly but certainly implicitly, abandoned classical theism already and thus (I would say) abandoned Christianity; and (b) if you are committed to the sort of anthropomorphic God you get via Paleyan methodology, you have for that additional reason implicitly abandoned classcial theism and thus Christianity. Any conception of God on which He is less than Being Itself, Pure Act, etc. (or pick your preferred terminology to the same effect if you don't like those ones) is not the God of Christianity. And the point, to repeat one more time, is not that the arguments I object to merely don't get you all the way to that; the point is that they positively get you away from it.

Instead of addressing these issues, everyone wants to keep going on about (say) how machine-like the bacterial flagellum is, or how attractive Paley-style arguments are to the man on the street, or how ID really ticks off atheists, or some other irrelevancy. (And some anonymous oddball on my own blog has even just got ticked off at me for ruling out the possibility that a Christian could regard the God of the Bible as an extraterrestrial.)

Re: mechanism being the standard approach these days, sure, of course it is. That's the problem. But as I argue in TLS, the mechanistic approach to nature is not merely erroneous or incomplete. It is an absolute, unmitigated cultural, moral, philosophical, and theological disaster. I'm not going to cut and paste all of TLS here, though, so if you want to know why I say this, give it a read. If you don't want to buy into A-T, fine -- go for some other classical philosophy instead (Platonism would be my #2 choice), or eschew philosophy altogether a la Michael Bauman (well, as long as you stick to the creeds). But don't accept mechanism, because it is, I would say -- at least when it's implications are worked out -- simply incompatible with Christianity. It is no accident that the rise of the mechanistic view of nature has coincided with the gradual decline of orthodoxy, the rise of atheism, the destruction of traditional morality, and all the rest. Plato and Aristotle knew its predecessor atomism was a menace when they encountered it, and so did the later Scholastics when they were faced with its revival. Part of the point of writing TLS was to do my small part in restoring awareness of how central and calamitous this move in intellectual history was. Dawkins and Co. are only riding the wave started by Descartes, Hobbes, Boyle, Locke and Co. (No, these folks weren't all atheists, but they were all rabid anti-Scholastics who were more intent on dethroning Aristotle than on thinking through the implications of what they wanted to replace him with. And they often also partially preserved some Aristotelian-Scholastic concepts. But the history of modern philosophy is largely a history of the ever-more thorough purging of these concepts, and that this long development corresponded, as historically it did, with the steady decline of theism and traditional morality within philosophy, was inevitable.)

Same thing with deism. Yes, deism is not atheism. But deism was the key stop on the way to atheism, because it replaced the God of Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, the councils, creeds, and (I, like they, hold, the Bible) with what Christopher Martin calls a Masonic imposter -- a clockmaking tinkerer god who is no more God than I am. He's just a lot more powerful than I am. Once you grant that that's pretty much the best you can get, you've implicitly conceded that Christianity lacks rational foundations. You might at first decide "Well, let's replace it with some made-up Enlightened religion, then" but when it becomes obvious that this is a farce -- as it did, historically -- then Ockham's razor kicks in and agnosticism and finally atheism are bound to follow -- as they did historically.

Note that Hume himself, by the end of the Dialogues, is willing to concede that something vaguely like a "designer" might exist, but that this is irrelevant to religion. And he was right. The fact that many contemporary atheists foolishly suppose otherwise is a historically contingent accident and misses the deeper point that "gods" with a small g are, philosophically speaking, really not a problem for naturalism more broadly conceived, as the example of the Greek atomists shows. It's that broader naturalism that must be the taarget, and mechanistically-oriented theological arguments only strengthen it by endorsing its underlying metaphysical assumptions.

Hi Ed,

Suppose we should that it is extremely unlikely that animals could have arisen if we accept standard evolutionary theory. And suppose that that it seems like animals must have been designed. This raises the probability that a superbeing designed animals. But doesn't it also raise the probability that the God of classical theism exists? Or does it lower it?

Hey Bobcat,

It depends on how the argument is stated. For example, suppose it goes as follows: "This animal, like any material object, might in principle just exist without a divine cause, due to chance, say. But now let's consider how very improbable that is given the complexity of the arrangement of its parts..."

That argument will never raise the probability of classical theism one iota. It forces you into a situation where the best you can possibly get is the Ralph Richardson of Time Bandits. Why? Because the first sentence already implicitly concedes the falsity of classical theism. Because if you concede that the material world is not something which of metaphysical necessity requires the sustaining activity of an Uncaused Cause which is Being Itself etc., then you've already conceded that there is no such God as the God of classical theism, since God is necessarily the cause of everything other than Himself. But a mechanistic view of nature implies that first sentence, because, by denying final causality, it dissolves the (efficient) causal glue that in the classical (Platonic-Aristotelian-Thomistic-Scholastic) tradition ties the world as a matter of metaphysical necessity to an Uncaused Cause. (I said all this in my recent Paley post, and of course it's spelled out in detail in TLS.)

Maybe some other kind of argument, though, would be OK. Frankly, though, I tend to doubt it. Not because there aren't discontinuities in the biological realm that cannot be explained in Darwinian terms -- there definitely are (e.g. the human intellect, I would say, cannot in principle have evolved). But the clearest cases of such discontinuities (e.g., again, the human intellect) also tend (for A-T metaphysical reasons) to point necessarily to God, rather than merely making it "probable" that there is a God.

Still, what I'm opposing here is not probabilistic arguments as such, but rather arguments that make metaphysical presuppositions which, however implicitly and inadvertantly, give away the store.

Ed,

The problem is not that the arguments I object to get you only part way to classical theism. The problem is that they do not get you a single inch toward classical theism, but only (if they work at all) to some being who is no more God than an elf or Superman or E.T. is God.

I think this is the point you have to address very clearly for us non-hylomorphists, since what you have said here seems to me to be obviously false. It may be that the only way you can do that is to convince us to become hylomorphists, in which case I have to say that I am not sanguine about the prospects of consensus emerging here. Your argument appears to have this general structure:

1. If hylomorphism is true, then Paley-style arguments are incapable, in principle, of providing evidence that God exists.

2. Hylomorphism is true.

Therefore,

3. Paley-style arguments are incapable, in principle, of providing evidence that God exists.

I should like to believe, notwithstanding all that you have said, that premise 1 is false. But if premise 1 is true, then it seems to me that the argument can with much greater plausibility be inverted:

1. If hylomorphism is true, then Paley-style arguments are incapable, in principle, of providing evidence that God exists.

2*. Paley-style arguments are capable, in principle, of providing evidence that God exists.

Therefore,

3*. Hylomorphism is false.

I realize that you don't see it this way; that's part of what makes philosophy difficult. From where I'm sitting, 2* is so obviously true, and 2 is so tangled in obscurities and difficulties, that if they are really in conflict (per 1), then there is just no contest: hylomorphism has got to go.

You suggest that a shift to Platonism would have the same consequences. Alas! I don't see this, either.

It is no accident that the rise of the mechanistic view of nature has coincided with the gradual decline of orthodoxy, the rise of atheism, the destruction of traditional morality, and all the rest.

I have a hard time seeing this conclusion. I don't think it's just ignorance or stupidity on my part: I had a Jesuit undergraduate education (with what seemed like lots of Aristotle and Aquinas in the reading), and I have a more-than-average interest in the history of science and the history of modern philosophy and its interconnections with theology in the 16th through the 19th centuries. Is a direct argument for 2 (or perhaps against the mechanistic conception of nature) laid out in TLS? If so, maybe I'll just have to wait until I have time to read TLS and see for myself how your argument runs. But in that case, for blogospheric discussion in the meanwhile, we seem to be at an impasse.

Note that Hume himself, by the end of the Dialogues, is willing to concede that something vaguely like a "designer" might exist, but that this is irrelevant to religion. And he was right.

This is another locus of disagreement: I think Hume was quite wrong. The realization that Hume was mistaken on this point was one of several epiphanies that brought Joseph Barker, the Victorian secularist lecturer, back to Christianity.

Not because there aren't discontinuities in the biological realm that cannot be explained in Darwinian terms -- there definitely are (e.g. the human intellect, I would say, cannot in principle have evolved). But the clearest cases of such discontinuities (e.g., again, the human intellect) also tend (for A-T metaphysical reasons) to point necessarily to God, rather than merely making it "probable" that there is a God.

What if there were discontinuities that seemed to you _unlikely to be explained_ in such terms, Ed? How much of a difference would that make? Is it _impossible_, in your view, that such discontinuities could have _probabilistic_ consequences regarding the existence of God as you conceive of God? Surely you aren't going to say, "On the A-T view, we must believe that all Darwinian apparent discontinuities can ultimately be resolved in Darwinian terms unless it is metaphysically impossible for them to be so resolved." I flatly refuse to believe that Thomism entails any such thing!

This is related to my comment at 11:37 on the other thread. Why could not the complexity of biological organisms raise the probability of special creation of particular types of biological organisms as a means or method of creation, which you claim the A-T view *does not rule out*? That would of course be in and of itself probabilistically relevant to the existence of God.

Any conception of God on which He is less than Being Itself, Pure Act, etc. (or pick your preferred terminology to the same effect if you don't like those ones) is not the God of Christianity.

Hmmm ... methinks the Apostle Paul, not to mention Moses and the prophets, may be in trouble on this definition. Obviously you cannot be claiming that the Biblical authors were explicitly invoking such categories. But the suggestion that they were presupposing these categories in some more subtle sense is also going to require a great deal of argumentation. (Which perhaps you have attempted to provide in TLS.)

Hi Tim,

To take your last point first, well, for one thing, Gilson famously takes the view that the notion of God as Being Itself is at least implicit in Moses (he calls it the "metaphysics of Exodus"). He is of course not saying that Moses, Paul, et al. were philosophers, only that the Bible is gesturing in the direction of what would later be spelled out more precisely and explicitly by thinkers like Aquinas. Anyway, as I keep saying, my problem is not with arguments that do not get you to all the details of classical theism, but rather with arguments that positively get you away from them, as I claim arguments which presuppose mechanism do.

Re: your earlier point, no one has to accept hylemorphism specifically in order to accept what I've been saying here. Take, for instance, a Neoplatonic conception of the world as emanating from God. On that view too, it is metaphyscially impossible for there to be a material world without God; there is no logical space whatever in which we might have a world and no God. What I have a problem with is any view that allows for such a gap, as I claim mechanism necessarily does, though yes, establishing that for a devout mechanist would require more than I'm going to try to do in the combox since I've elaborated on it at book-length elsewhere. It is hardly a novel thesis, though, and neither is the idea that it is mechanism that has led to the moral, religious, and cultural upheavals of the last few centuries. I've provided many quotes, both in TLS and in earlier posts from time to time, from people who've taken similar views. And it's implicit in the thinking of people who think that the scientific worldview necessitates the abandonment of religion, traditional morality, etc. They are wrong to think any actual scientific discovery entails this, but not wrong to think that the denial of final causes, etc. entails it. Certainly, at the very least, if one denies final causes, and thus any inherent purposes or meanings in nature, it becomes very hard ground traditional morality, or any morality, in human nature; hard to make efficient causlaity intelligible; and so forth. (Impossible, actully, I would say. But at least very hard.)

Anyway, as I say, I've developed these themes at length in TLS. The point for now is that it is hardly some novel idea of my own. Perhaps -- just a suggestion -- the reason this is not so evident to you and Lydia is that you're thinking primarily in terms of the intentions of mechanistic philosophers like Descartes, Locke, Boyle, et al., who were in fact sincere Christians. But what is more important is what a mechanical view of nature actually entails, and what it actually did lead to historically, regardless of the intentions of its founders.

Oh, I wanted to add: It is, then, not a "hylemorphism vs. the world" position I am advocating here. But it would not be unfair to say that it is a "classical philosophy vs. modern philosophy" position, where "classical" includes Platonism and Neoplatonism, Aristotelianism, Thomism and other forms of Scholasticism (e.g. Scotism, Suarezianism), and "modern" includes most of what's new since Hobbes and Descartes. I think modern philosophy is a gigantic disaster. Color me bold. But again, it's all in TLS, and is the standard line among Neo-Scholastics, Neoplatonists, and other philosophical reactionaries (which for me is a complimentary term). That is not to say that some moderns are not right about this or that. But I do think to defend even what they get right (e.g. Leibnizian cosmological arguments) leads you back to classical categories. So, you might as well cut to the chase and go back to the classical writers. For me, the real debate is not between the ancients/medievals and the moderns, but within the ancient/medieval camp, between Thomists, Scotists, Neoplatonists, non-Thomistic Aristotelians, etc.

Lydia, no, as I keep saying, I have no problem with probabilities as such. My problem is only with the specific kind of probabilistic argument which begins with a mechanistic analysis of life. And you can be sure that every Thomist agrees with me about that.

Tim,

I like the syllogisms.

Hylomorphism and Paley-style arguments are not in conflict per se (as I‘ve tried to convince Ed); but they are in conflict per accidens, i.e., insofar as people who employ Paley-style arguments tend to take a reductionist view of substantial being. But that view is not necessary to make the argument from design. In fact, I make Paley-style arguments all the time -- and I’m a fanatical hylomorphist.

Dr. Feser,
Your main objection appears to be that Paley and other mechanist views presuppose a God-of-the-gaps which is incompatible with classic theism. Is that right?

Lydia,
Intervention would indeed be devastating for atheism, but I agree with Dr. Feser that intervention of the bacterial flagellum, the blood clotting cascade, etc. doesn't get you the first step towards the Christian God, nor does it even show much of any grand design, since it has all the appearance of being a "fix" of a faulty design.

Heya Ed,

First, I still fail to understand why ID does not have value even as an internal critique of naturalism (as well as, perhaps, scientism). Now, I do understand you when you say that committing to a mechanistic view of the world is inherently incompatible with the A-T metaphysic, incompatible with classical theism, and therefore incompatible with Christianity (or at least Christianity by the measure of some tremendously important thinkers in Christianity). But you seem to be saying that to think ID arguments have any value is to embrace not only mechanist philosophy (questionable) but also naturalism of at least a very broad form (!!!). So again I ask, isn't it possible (and worthwhile) to use ID arguments to show that mechanism/'naturalism' does not at all imply or lead to what so many naturalists apparently think it does? I know you mention that deism historically was the stopping point on the way to atheism in the west. My reply is that deism or a broad theism can also function as the stopping point on the way from atheism to classical theism (since, if mechanism, even a "broad naturalism" does not do what so many think it does, then one barrier to taking classical theism seriously comes down.)

Second, while I doubt this changes things for you, I think it's important to point out that ID is not only concerned with biological developments. Admittedly, the bulk of the ID arguments we hear about are related to "Darwinism", etc. But, there are ID arguments about the mind. Then ID arguments about broad cosmology (rare earth, etc.) And then there are ID arguments about the origin of our universe. Maybe you're aware of these different ID approaches, and I certainly realize that people are capable of accepting all this ID without getting one to the God of classical theism or Christianity (Indeed, John Gribbin just wrote a book stating as much, David Chalmers has accepted this possibility, etc.) But it seems important to realize the ID scope in conjunction with my point about ID at least having utility, even for someone subscribing to A-T metaphysics, as an internal critique.

So I'd be willing to accept that, if one accepts mechanistic philosophy, that this would mean that the God of classical theism cannot be moved to "one iota" no matter what evidence or perspective is brought to bear. But it also seems to me that one could hold to classical theism and A-T metaphysics while making use of ID arguments in the way I've outlined here, that there is absolutely value in demonstrating the likelihood, reasonable possibility, or even inevitability of deism or non-classical theism being true given naturalism. Again, one thing I took away from TLS was the fact that mechanistic philosophy entailed quite a lot of things that 'naturalists' seemed desperate to not admit to (the death of morality, the death of justice, the death of reason, etc.) So even you seem to find value in exposing what can or necessarily does follow, given mechanistic philosophy.

(By the way, an off-topic question if you're willing. Would you say Bertrand Russell subscribed to mechanistic philosophy? After all, he certainly didn't embrace classical theism, but I recall you regarding him as rejecting naturalism - and he apparently didn't think universals were unreal, or material. Also, what about panpsychism? Mechanistic as well? Thank you, by the way, for enduring all these rough questions about ID.)

Hokay, so what if there were probabilistic problems with Darwinian accounts of the origin of species. Would that, on your view, Ed, be capable of raising the probability of the Christian God?

It's worth emphasizing the fact that I use the phrase "Christian God." I gather that on your view the existence of the God of "classical theism" has probability 1. Hence it cannot be raised by any probabilistic arguments.

But if it's true (as I suspect it is, though I would not foist this view on any other ID sympathizer) that the design of biological entities is most plausibly a result of _intervention_--that is, of some form of special creation at some point in past time--then this point would go _beyond_ "the God of classical theism" to a God who intervenes in the world--that is, a God with some additional properties like those of the Christian God. And as far as I know, it isn't your view, Ed, that the existence of the Christian God has probability 1.

Ed,

Yes, I’ve read Gilson’s Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, but I must say that the attempt to read Thomistic metaphysics back into the “I AM” of Exodus 3:14 has always seemed to me to be one of the most regrettable pieces of eisegesis in which that talented historian and philosopher ever engaged.

it is metaphyscially impossible for there to be a material world without God

I have no problem with this claim. But I do not see how you can get from this to the impossibility of mechanism, much less to the impossibility of Paley-style arguments for the existence of God, capital ‘G.’ Of course, that could be a result of lack of metaphsical insight on my part.

I think modern philosophy is a gigantic disaster. Color me bold. But again, it's all in TLS, and is the standard line among Neo-Scholastics, Neoplatonists, and other philosophical reactionaries (which for me is a complimentary term).

That’s a pretty wide divide. I’m inclined to say that the moderns, though by no means perfect, got some things crucially right, including a mechanistic conception of nature, and that 20th century neo-Thomists like Maritain (with deeply unsympathetic handling of most of the moderns) and Gilson (with vastly more finesse) were engaged in a brave but futile attempt to revive a metaphysical position that had run its course and should have been reverently laid to rest.

Obviously, you disagree with all possible vigor. I guess I’ll have to pick up a copy of TLS and find out why. ;)


I don't get why mechanism implies that objects can exist on their own anymore than hylomorphism does. I've read TLS, so I know the arguments for why hylomorphism commits one to classical theism (though I'm not entirely convinced by those arguments); but one could easily do the same thing for mechanism, no? Just use the Kalam or Leibniz-Clarke cosmological argument. Then, as long as you suppose that something exists, you're committed to the existence of a timeless, non-spatial, necessarily existent, immaterial being with a will, power enough to create the universe, and knowledge enough to know how to create the universe. That doesn't get you all-good, but I never quite got how one got to an all-good God without Jesus anyway.

Sure, both versions of the CA are deniable if one doesn't accept some of the premises; but the same is surely true of any thomistic cosmological argument as well.

George,

If you thought hylemorphism is compatible with analyzing living things mechanistically, then you would be, not a fanatical hylemorphist, but rather a very confused hylemorphist. But presumably you would agree with that much. Yet Paley-style arguments proceed from a mechanistic analysis of life. And you say you use them all the time. So, you seem to me to be confused after all. Maybe what you mean is that you give Fifth Way style arguments all the time. But the Fifth Way is not a Paley-style "design argument."

Step2,

Well I don't like god-of-the-gaps arguments, but no, that's not my main objection. As I keep saying, my main objection is (a) the presupposition of a mechanistic conception of nature, primarily because it entails that it is at least possible in principle that the world might exist without God (classical theism does NOT allow that this is possible even in principle), and (b) an anthropomorphic conception of God that derives from applying concepts like power, knowledge, etc. in a univocal rather than analogous sense (to allude to a Thomistic distinction explained in an earlier post).

Joseph,

Like I've already said, ID might well force naturalists to expand their conception of what is "natural," but as the Greek atomist parallel shows, that does nothing at all to refute naturalism per se, because it does absolutely nothing -- not even as a matter of probability -- to get you outside the natural order altogether (i.e. to that which isn't a being among others but Being Itself). And it cannot do so given the methodological straightjacket it puts itself into. You'll forgive me for not repeating all the reasons why yet again!

Look, people have to get out of this box of thinking in terms of trying to prove something that this or that loud naturalist wouldn't like. They have to think things down to first principles. Annoying Richard Dawkins is not the point. Forcing naturalists to admit super space aliens or ectoplasm is not the point. None of that requires anything but recognizing that the natural world contains some weird stuff. If you're a sci-fi hobbyist that might be important, but it has zero relevance to defending Christianity. Zero.

Also, people need to study the history of philosophy and of religion more, and they would realize this. They would see that there are lots of ways to accept very weird phenomena without getting an inch closer to the God of Christianity. They'd also see that the categories we moderns tend lazily to fall into are very far from the only possible ones, and very far from the best ones.

Re: Russell, he was a mechanist broadly construed, but he was unusually perceptive vis-a-vis its limitations, which is why he ended up endorsing a view about mind which later writers have taken in a panpsychist direction.

Lydia,

Well, it depends on what you mean. Yes, the existence of the God of classical theism has probability 1. But I maintain that the Christian God just is that God. So, given that, the existence of the Christian God has probability 1 as well. But what you mean is probably something more like "What is the probability that the descriptions 'the God of classical theism' and 'the God of Christianity' really do refer to the same thing?"

Well, I don't know, pretty darn high, but I don't see how it's relevant here. As far as I know, no one claims that Paley-style arguments or ID arguments show that Christian theism, as opposed to generic theism, is the only way to explain the bacterial flagellum (or whatever). No one says "This biological fact requires a Trinitarian explanation" as opposed to "This requires a theistic explanation."

In general, I dont see how the issue of Darwinism is relevant to Christianity per se, as opposed to generic theism. The defense of Christianity, specifically, proceeds instead once classical theism and the other truths of natural theology have already been established, and we then move on to things like the Resurrection. Now that's where I really want you and Tim to come in swinging right alongside me! ;-)

Ed,

I won't press you on ID anymore. I find myself squarely in the middle here, since I value ID, but I also value A-T. But clearly you find even talking as if mechanistic philosophy were true (even just for the sake of argument) as dangerous or undesirable, so I'll respect that.

Still, one thing I'm still wondering - you said Russell was 'broadly mechanistic', but I'm surprised at that. There are gradations of 'mechanistic philosophy'? And you mentioned that Russell's view is defended by modern writers as a kind of panpsychism. That's good, but I also was curious if panpsychism is itself falling under mechanistic philosophy?

Ah well. So much more to learn.

Tim and Bobcat,

Suppose we come across a dead body in classroom 307 and we want to discover who did it. And suppose we define "Fred" as "the man who given his nature must necessarily be responsible for any dead bodies in room 307." Now suppose we move on to considering various suspects. "Was it Bob? Steve? Sally? Hmmm. Hey, how about Fred? Let's weigh the probabilities..."

Well, if it's a matter of weighting the probabilities, you can rule Fred out. Because if it's at least possible that Fred didn't do it, that just means Fred doesn't exist. Because if Fred does exist, then he simply had necessarily to be the cause of the dead body.

Same with any argument that starts out "Let's weigh the probabilities that the universe was caused by God." If it's a matter of probability whether God caused the world, then there is no God, not in the classcial theistic sense. (As I've said before, I'm not denying that we can ever reason probabilistically about whether God caused this or that specific event. I'm talking about the world as a whole. God's creating that cannot be a matter of probability.)

That's one point. Paley-style arguments are probabilistic arguments about whether God created the world; therefore they are incompatible with classical theism. It doesn't matter whether the arguments proceed by allowing that the world might exist without God only "for the sake of argument." That's like saying "OK, let's allow for the sake of argument that it is metaphysically possible that the guy in 307 was not killed by Fred. Now let's consider the probability that Fred did it..." You've just ruled out Fred absolutely, given what Fred is supposed to be, so the argument is an incoherent waste of time.

Second point: Suppose, then, that classical theism is right that the world could not exist even in principle without God. Why would that be? Well, classical philosophy has an answer to that question, and it has to do with things like the act/potency distinction, the essence/existence distinction, etc. It tells us that any mixture of act and potency necessarily must be caused by that which is pure act, that any essence/existence compound necessarily must be created by that in which essence and existence are identical, etc. But these distinction turn out on analysis to presuppose formal and final cause. E.g. a potency is neccessarily ordered to a certain kind of actuality as a final cause. When you deny final causality -- and that is the essence of a mechanistic philosophy of nature, the one theme that has survived all the variations in the mechanistic idea over the centuries -- then these other concepts go with it. That's why they did in fact eventually disappear from modern philosophy despite having a temporary echo in writers like Descartes and Leibniz.

So, my claim is that mechanism inherently leads to a conception of nature on which there is no longer any reason to see it as necessarily sustained in being by an Uncaused Cause. An ontological gap in principle opens up between God and the world, and once that happens, we're no longer in a philosophical position in which classical theism is possible, and are left instead at most with the Ralph Richardson substitute.

Joseph,

"Mechanism" has meant many things historically. Sometimes it included the idea that all causation in the material world was of a push/pull sort, though that didn't last long. Some writers (e.g. Descartes) allowed that there was a realm outside the material world that didn't operate according to purely mechanistic principles; others (e.g. Hobbes) did not allow this. Some were atomists, others plenum theorists, others corpuscularians.

What they all had in common -- and what has survived all the transformations of the idea -- is a firm rejection of Aristotelian final causes as having no role to play in our understanding of the material world. It's in that sense that Russell -- like almost all modern philosophers, almost by definition -- was a mechanist.

His neutral monism also committed him to regarding something analogous to sensory qualities or qualia to be the intrinsic properties of material things, and while this seems to make matter inherently mental, he resisted this implication. But others influenced by him (e.g. David Chalmers, Galen Strawson) have been happy to accept it.

"Generic theism?"

God is not a prescription drug. He has no generic equivalent. Nor is He reducible. You cannot suppress, or avoid, or ignore, or leave aside, the Trinity, the way Aristotle does, and still be talking about the only God who is -- as if Trinity were merely optional when thinking properly about God -- as if Trinity were something peripheral, as if you could take it or leave it. Generic theism leads to a non-Trinitarian god -- and there is no non-Trinitarian God. Generic theism might be compatible with Arius's god, but not with God. To think that an impersonal cause is a suitable generic equivalent for the supra-personal Trinity is as serious a theological error as one can make. God is Trinity, nothing less.

Further, the God who is, the only God, the God of the Bible, is articulate. Indeed, He speaks worlds into existence. He also communicates with his people. Please tell me anything Aristotle's cause or mover ever said. If Aristotle's metaphysical concoction is actually articulate, I'd like evidence. I'd like a few quotations. Two or three would be enough. I'd settle even for one. But if it hasn't spoken, whether before, during, or after creation, if we have no indication it actually can speak, it isn't God. He is there, and He is not silent.

The God who is, is irreducible and articulate Trinity, known to us only by means of the grace of his articulate revelation in creation and in history, and not by the arrogant, unaided, inventions of pagan speculation, which labors under all the burdens and noetic effects of sin, including the unacknowledged inclination of fallen persons, Aristotle included, to suppress the truth -- an inclination never to be escaped without the Trinity's gracious, direct address to a fallen world in history, in Scripture, and, most fully, in Christ -- things absent in Aristotle.

Ed,

The example is helpful, so I’ll frame my questions in terms of it. But stop me if I push on some part of it harder than you intended.

Suppose we have no idea whether there is someone who, given his nature, must necessarily be responsible for any dead bodies in room 307. Maybe the idea has never occurred to us. We do find, however, one of Fred’s business cards on the carpet, some of Fred’s blood beneath the fingernails of the deceased, scratch marks on Fred’s face, blood on Fred’s clothes, etc.

Questions:

1. Should we have to take the heavy metaphysical claim into account before suggesting that it looks rather as though Fred had done it?

2. If so, why?

3. If not, what precludes us from discovering, later, on independent grounds, that Fred was after all a being of whom the modal claim holds?

4. If nothing precludes us, then why doesn’t this example show that a probabilistic argument regarding Fred’s responsibility and a metaphysical argument guaranteeing it are compatible?

In other words, referential opacity enables us to keep open options regarding Fred. Under one description, he’s the guy (whoever that may be, if there is one) who has to be responsible; under another, he’s the guy down the hall with a bloodstained shirt, scratches on his face, and an incomplete stack of business cards.

Paley-style arguments are probabilistic arguments about whether God created the world; therefore they are incompatible with classical theism.

I’d prefer to say that Paley-style arguments are probabilistic arguments in favor of the existence of a designer whose full panoply of attributes is neither guaranteed nor ruled out by the evidence presented. But either way, it seems to me that the possibility of opacity resolves any tension there might seem to be between these approaches.

Second point: Suppose, then, that classical theism is right that the world could not exist even in principle without God. Why would that be? Well, classical philosophy has an answer to that question, and it has to do with things like the act/potency distinction, the essence/existence distinction, etc.

[... snip ...]

So, my claim is that mechanism inherently leads to a conception of nature on which there is no longer any reason to see it as necessarily sustained in being by an Uncaused Cause. An ontological gap in principle opens up between God and the world, and once that happens, we're no longer in a philosophical position in which classical theism is possible, and are left instead at most with the Ralph Richardson substitute.

Whoa. All that you just gave was an argument that the particular sort of reason given by "classical theism" and "classical philosophy" of an Aristotelian variety disappears on a mechanistic conception of nature. Other sorts of reasons have not necessarily been eliminated, though — say, a Kalam argument for the beginning of the physical universe combined with a suitably sophisticated version of the PSR.

If you thought hylemorphism is compatible with analyzing living things mechanistically, then you would be, not a fanatical hylemorphist, but rather a very confused hylemorphist.

Ed,
Because living things are, in their activities and structures, very similar to mechanisms, there is nothing wrong with analyzing them as such -- as long as one keeps in mind that this “mechanical” structure is not an accidental form like in human artifacts composed of already existing things, but proceeds from and depends on a substantial being, which is a composite of form and primary matter. This substance is, in itself, imperceptible, but is being in an unqualified sense, whereas that which is perceived is accidental being inhering in the substance.

Therefore, to the extent that living things are like mechanical things, they may be analyzed as such. But it must also be understood that they are profoundly different from mechanical things.

Hi Tim,

The example is only parallel if we don't already have independent knowledge of Fred. For the point of giving an argument for God's existence is to find ot if there is a God, not to find out if the God we already know about did this or that.

So, in the Fred example, while we might sensibly ask "Is there really such a thing as Fred?" and go on to look for reasons, what we can't do is ask "Let's check Fred's clothes" etc., because we don't yet know whether there is a Fred. Also, we can't say "Well, given the nature of the dead body, there's nothing about it that requires a Fred. It may have got here without someone like Fred. But now let's consider how probable that is..." Because the moment you've conceded that much, you've elminated Fred as a possibility. And it's worse than just "Gee, this won't get us all the way to Fred.". Because there just can't be a Fred if you've already admitted that the dead body might have gotten there without him. The argument becomes, in effect, a disproof of Fred, not just a non-proof of Fred.

Re: PSR and the like, this is one of those cases where I would say that what the moderns got right can ultimately itself only be defended by recourse to classical ideas. PSR is notoriously controversial, and to show what's wrong with the objections I would say we need to go back to a classical conception of causality (which, in my view, is worked out most satisfactorily by A-T).

George,

"Similar to" mechanisms, sure; they're similar to lots of things. But they're not mechanisms.

Look, if A-T is right then the truth is that God did not create the world the way a machinist makes machines, and could not have, since from a hylemorphist POV machines presuppose natural objects. The idea of the world as a machine through-and-through is incoherent, a metaphysical impossibility. So what's the point of an A-T advocate saying "Well, let's see where we get when we treat the world as if it were this incoherent, metaphysically impossible thing"? You don't get anywhere, except (as I have been arguing) to a conception of God which is incompatible with classical theism.

For example, George, living things are similar to angels, because both living things and angels have forms. Does that mean we should say "OK, let's analyze living things as if they were forms-without-matter, as angels are, and see what kind of argument for God we get"? They're not forms-without-matter. So again, what's the point?

At a minimum, finding the blood on Fred's clothes, etc., might show you that Fred murdered the guy in person rather than by, say, thought waves. If we also define Fred as somehow "underlying all murders" or something in a very heavy metaphysical sense, it then becomes interesting to discuss whether there are some murders that Fred not only "underlies" but also carries out in more familiar ways, whether he "does" the murders by just letting the "natural properties of matter" develop in such a way that some people die of a heart attack when they get old in room 307, or whether he does some murders in more direct ways, etc.

Ed,

[T]he point of giving an argument for God's existence is to find ot if there is a God, not to find out if the God we already know about did this or that.

Surely there are many other reasons for giving an argument for God’s existence; to persuade the skeptical, to fortify the faith of the believing, to work out the implications of a cluster of metaphysical commitments, etc. All of these activities may be undertaken by someone already fully persuaded of the existence of God.

So, in the Fred example, while we might sensibly ask "Is there really such a thing as Fred?" and go on to look for reasons, what we can't do is ask "Let's check Fred's clothes" etc., because we don't yet know whether there is a Fred. Also, we can't say "Well, given the nature of the dead body, there's nothing about it that requires a Fred. It may have got here without someone like Fred. But now let's consider how probable that is..." Because the moment you've conceded that much, you've eliminated Fred as a possibility. And it's worse than just "Gee, this won't get us all the way to Fred." Because there just can't be a Fred if you've already admitted that the dead body might have gotten there without him. The argument becomes, in effect, a disproof of Fred, not just a non-proof of Fred.

Still not seeing it. Let’s give some stipulative definitions:

THE FRED: the being (if there is one) who must be responsible for all dead bodies in room 307.

Fred: the guy whose office is three doors down the hall from room 307.

Given these definitions, we can imagine various things someone could ask or say:

1. “Is there really such a thing as THE FRED?”

2. “Since we don’t know whether there is such a thing as THE FRED, let’s check Fred’s clothes, etc.”

3. “Granting that there is such a thing as THE FRED, did He do it?”

4. “Granting that there is such a thing as THE FRED, how did He do it?”

5. “It sure looks like Fred did it.”

6. “Fred must be THE FRED.”

We can all agree (I hope!) that question 3 is misguided: it reflects a failure on the part of the questioner to absorb what is really meant by THE FRED. Assuming arguendo that there is a cogent metaphysical argument a priori for the existence of THE FRED, question 1 reflects, and statement 2 discloses, metaphysical naivete. But on this assumption, question 4 seems to be a legitimate question, and 5 could be the conclusion of exactly the same line of reasoning both for the naive and for the sophisticated metaphysician. But only the latter will draw 6 as a further conclusion.

And the legitimacy of reasoning to 5 -- which anybody can do -- is the only thing a Paley-style reasoner needs.

Am I missing something here?

A common error is to mistakenly link the arguments of contemporary ID advocates with St. Thomas Aquinas’s argument from final causes in nature. Martha Nussbauma, for example, makes this mistake in her book, Liberty of Conscience: In Defense of America’s Tradition of Religious Equality (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 322. Although it is true that final causes imply design, the ID movement is a project in which the irreducible or degree of specified complexity of the parts in natural objects are offered as evidence that these entities are designed. But that is not the same as a final or formal cause, which is something intrinsic to the entity and not detectable by mere empirical observation. For example, if I were to claim that the human intellect’s final cause is to know because the human being’s formal cause is his nature of “rational animal,” I would not be making that claim based on the irreducible or degree of specified complexity of the brain’s parts. Rather, I would be making a claim about the proper end of a power possessed by the human person. That end cannot be strictly observed, since in-principle one can exhaustively describe the efficient and material causes of a person’s brain-function without recourse to its proper end or purpose. Yet, the end or purpose of the human intellect seems in fact to be knowable.

For St. Thomas (following Aristotle), the formal and final causes of artifcats, like desks, computers, and iPods, are imposed from outside the collection of parts by an intelligent agent. On the other hand, the formal and final causes of natural objects are intrinsic to those objects. This is why, as Aristotle points out, if you own a bed made out of wood and then plant a piece of the bed in the ground, “it would not be a bed that would come up, but wood.” This “shows that the arrangement in accordance with the rules of the art is merely an incidental attribute, whereas the real nature is the other, which, further, persists continuously through the process of making.” In other words, the form and finality of the bed is imposed from without (an “arrangement in accordance with the rules of art”) while the form and finality of the wood is intrinsic to the nature of the tree from which it was taken (“the real nature” that “persists continuously through the process of making”). In the words of Etienne Gilson, “The artist is external to his work; the work of art is consequently external to the art which produces it. The end of living nature is, on the contrary, cosubstantial with it. The embryo is the law of its own development. It is already of its nature to be what will be later on an adult capable of reproducing itself.”

Consequently, for example, a medical scientist may provide an exhaustive account of the mechanics of respiration without any reference to final and formal causes. But it does not follow that final and formal causes play no part in our rational deliberations about the world. In fact, some critics of ID simply cannot resist helping themselves to those causes in their assessments of ID and its advocates, even though many of these critics believe that Darwinian evolution has forever banished these causes from our study of nature. And there is a reason for this: formal and final causes are so much the woof and warp of our lives that we, like the water-skeptic fish submerged in H2O, are blissfully unaware of the role they play in our ontological and normative pronouncements.

As Stephen M. Barr, a physicist at the University of Delaware (and a critic of ID), puts it:

Contrary to what is often claimed, even by some scientists, modern science has not eliminated final and formal causes. It uses them all the time, even if unaware that it is doing so. For example, a liver and a muscle are made up of the same material constituents—hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and so on—acting on each other by the same basic forces. It is precisely their forms, their organic structures, that differ and enable them to play different roles in the body. 


The same is true in physics. The very same carbon atoms can form a diamond (transparent, hard, and electrically insulating) or a piece of graphite (opaque, soft, and electrically conducting). What explains their different properties is the difference in form, in intelligible structure. Indeed, as one goes deeper into fundamental physics, one finds that matter itself seems almost to dissolve into the pure forms of advanced mathematics. 



Some people think that the Darwinian mechanism eliminates final causes in biology. It doesn't; the finality comes in but in a different way. Why does natural selection favor this mutation but not that one? Because this one makes the eye see better in some way, which serves the purpose of helping the creature find food or mates or avoid predators, which in turn serves the purpose of helping the animal to live and reproduce. Why do species that take up residence in caves gradually lose the ability to see? Because seeing serves no purpose for them, and so mutations that harm the faculty of sight are not selected against. (Even a Dawkins would not deny purpose in this sense; he would deny only that these purposes were in the mind of God.) Darwinian explanations can account for very little indeed without bringing intrinsic finality into the explanation.

So, the problem with Darwinism in relation to belief in God is not the Darwinian claim that natural processes, including scientific laws, are sufficient to account for the variety of life forms that now populate the world. After all, for the Thomist, Darwinian mechanisms and algorithms, as well as scientific laws and other natural processes, no more count against the existence and necessity of God (or even final or formal causality) than does the account of my conception by the natural processes of human reproduction count againt the claim that God is Creator of the universe.

For ID advocates Behe and Dembski no design inference about nature is warranted short of achieving that threshold of irreducible or specified complexity. But that means that the person who believes he has good grounds for final and formal causes—while rejecting Behe’s and Dembski’s criteria—has no warrant for believing that the final and formal causes he claims to “see” in living organisms. In other words, Behe and Dembski are implicitly accepting the assumption of the materialists—the opponents of final and formal causes--that God’s role in nature may only be exhibited in properly arranged bits of matter so as to signify an agent cause of the arrangement. But this means that design in nature is more like Aristotle’s bed than the tree from which the bed was made.

Suppose that in the next few years biologists discover another force in nature, similar to natural selection, that has the power to produce in living organisms organs and systems that appear to be irreducibly or specifically complex. According to the ID advocate, the rational person would have to abandon the idea that these organs and systems are intelligently designed, since his criterion would no longer be a reliable detector of “design.” Consequently, the rational person would have to conclude that these organs and systems are probably the product of necessity and/or chance (to employ Dembski’s categories). TD, on the other hand, is not threatened by such discoveries, since the Thomistic design (TD) advocate actually expects to find such laws in nature, since she believes that God created ex nihilo a universe teeming with ends or purposes that depend on laws and principles that cry out for explanation. By rejecting the mechanistic assumptions of both the Darwinian materialists and the ID advocates, TD does not have the burden of waiting with bated breath for the latest scientific argument or discovery in order to remain confident that the universe, or at least a small sliver of it, is designed. It has something better: rigorous philosophical arguments that challenge the philosophical assumptions of both the Darwinian materialists and the ID advocates who unconsciously (though sometimes purposely) offer their assumptions as undisputed premises under the guise of “science.”

It would be one thing if the ID advocates were only offering their point of view as a mere hypothesis subjected to the usual give and take in scientific and philosophical discourse. (In fact, my earlier work on ID assumed as much). But that in fact is not the case. It has over the years morphed into a movement that treats the soundness of its arguments as virtually essential to sustaining the rationality of theism itself. Steve Meyer, for example, suggests that before the 20th century’s advances in biochemistry and microbiology, immaterialism and teleology were down for the count. But now ID stands ready, Meyer contends, to triumphantly procure these advances to help restore “some of the intellectual underpinning of traditional Western metaphysics and theistic belief.” Who knew?

This embellished sense of ID’s importance in the march of history is not a virture. It is an unattractive enthusiasm that clouds rather than showcases ID’s important, though modest, publishing successes and the legitimate questions these writings bring to bear on many issues that overlap science, theology, and philosophy. Combine this lack of academic modesty with the ubiquitous propagation of ID within Evangelical Protestantism and its churches, seminaries, and parachurch groups (and even among some Catholics) as a new and improved way to topple the materialist critics of Christianity, and you have a recipe for widespread disappointment (and perhaps disillusionment with Christianity) if the ID ship takes on too much water in the sea of philosophical and scientific criticism. For this reason, other non-materialist Christian academics, such as Thomists and some Cosmic Fine Tuning supporters, who would ordinarily find ID’s project intriguing and worth interacting with (as I do), are hesitant to cooperate with a movement that implies to church goers and popular audiences that the very foundations of theism and Western civilization rise or fall on the soundness of Behe’s and Dembski’s inferences.

Surely there are many other reasons for giving an argument for God’s existence;

Yes, but I'm talking about what the argument qua argument (rather than qua attempt at edifying someone, elocution exercise, etc.) is supposed to show. If the conclusion is "God exists," then if it is to avoid circularity, there must be nothing in the premises that presupposes God's existence. Same with the parallel argument about Fred. If the argument is going to succeed in proving that Fred exists, its premises can't presuppose that Fred exists and owns a bloody shirt, etc.

Now, recall my original characterization of Fred: "the man who given his nature must necessarily be responsible for any dead bodies in room 307." This entails that if Fred exists, it is metaphysically impossible -- and thus not even slightly probable -- that any dead bodies in room 307 were caused apart from him. Therefore, if you say "Well, it's at least metaphysically possible that this dead body in room 307 wasn't caused by Fred," you are already, by virtue of saying so, implying that Fred doesn't exist. In which case, going on to say "But let's consider whether it's at least probable that Fred exists" is muddled. What you've said already entails that Fred does not exist. Therefore, anyone you end up concluding did do it -- the guy down the hall or whomever else -- simply cannot be Fred, even if in some respects he seems similar to Fred.

By the same token, if you start out a theistic argument saying "It is at least metaphysically possible that the world was not caused by God, but let's weigh the probabilities," you have already in the first conjunct ruled out the existence of God, at least as conceived of in classical theism. For the God of classical theism is such that it is metaphysically impossible for anything to exist apart from Him. Therefore, whoever it is whose existence you go on to argue for, it isn't the God of classical theism, even if he seems in some respects similar to Him.

Frank! Hooray, the cavalry has arrived!

Combine this lack of academic modesty with the ubiquitous propagation of ID within Evangelical Protestantism and its churches, seminaries, and parachurch groups (and even among some Catholics) as a new and improved way to topple the materialist critics of Christianity, and you have a recipe for widespread disappointment (and perhaps disillusionment with Christianity) if the ID ship takes on too much water in the sea of philosophical and scientific criticism. For this reason, other non-materialist Christian academics, such as Thomists and some Cosmic Fine Tuning supporters, who would ordinarily find ID’s project intriguing and worth interacting with (as I do), are hesitant to cooperate with a movement that implies to church goers and popular audiences that the very foundations of theism and Western civilization rise or fall on the soundness of Behe’s and Dembski’s inferences.

Bingo!

Frank,

For St. Thomas (following Aristotle), the formal and final causes of artifcats, like desks, computers, and iPods, are imposed from outside the collection of parts by an intelligent agent. On the other hand, the formal and final causes of natural objects are intrinsic to those objects.

Yes -- but why think that he is right to draw the line just there? The bury-it-and-see-what-grows argument will not, I think, bear heavy weight. Bury a possum and perhaps grass will grow on the spot, but certainly not more possums.

For ID advocates Behe and Dembski no design inference about nature is warranted short of achieving that threshold of irreducible or specified complexity.

But this is an artifact of the eliminative nature of Dembski's reconstruction of the design inference. There are other reconstructions.

Ed,

Your response to the first bit seems to me to hinge on an arbitrary aspect of your example. Let the question be whether there is a murderer of Jones, whose lifeless body was found in room 307, and we're back on track. I would still find it enlightening if you could sort out your classification of the questions and statements I gave, particularly highlighting any where we disagree. I suspect you think 5 is loaded. But I disagree.

The "mights" here should be understood as epistemic, not as metaphysical. "It is possible for all I know," says the metaphysically naive detective, "that there is no FRED. But the evidence strongly points to homicide, and there are lots of pieces of evidence pointing to Fred as the criminal." He does not start out by saying, "It is at least metaphyscially possible that there is no FRED" -- that's a proposition off his pay scale. But he knows a homicide when he sees one.

Beyond the fact that he is (ex hypothesi) metaphysically naive -- and at some level, who among us is not -- what is wrong with his reasoning?

Your response to the first bit seems to me to hinge on an arbitrary aspect of your example.

?? What aspect is "arbitrary"? Please don't answer: "The bit about how Fred is characterized as the man who given his nature must necessarily be responsible for any dead bodies in room 307." The stuff about "given his nature must necessarily" etc. is not an "arbitrary" aspect of the example; it's the whole point of the example.

And that you might be missing the point also seems evident from the "epistemic, not metaphyscial" stuff. No, it's metaphysical, not epistemic. That's the whole point.

And the reason I didn't say anything about the numbered questions you gave is that they have nothing to do with my example. The Fred vs. THE FRED stuff only confuses things, because when we cash out the example in terms of God it makes it sound, quite falsely, like we already have a known candidate for creator and we want to know whether that guy is God. (Or something. Frankly, I'm not sure I do see the point of the Fred vs. THE FRED stuff.)

Look, let's try again. The context is one where we're considering how to argue for God's existence, from scratch. What do we mean by God? Classical theism (and thus, I maintain, Christianity) says: A cause apart from whom nothing could even possibly exist even in principle (and thus an absolutely necessary being, or Being Itself, or Pure Act, or whatever). Now, we then go on to ask: Can we get to knowledge of the world to knowledge that such a God exists?

And my point is that if you start out by assuming that the world could in principle possibly exist apart from God, you've already conceded that there is no God, in that sense of "God." You've done this even if you're only conceding it "for the sake of argument" (unless what you're trying to give is a strict reductio ad absurdum proof, but that's not how Paley-style arguments work). That is to say, if you say "Look, metaphysically speaking it is indeed possible in principle that the world could have got here other than divine creation, but let's now consider whether that's really probable even if possible," then you've already given away the game. "Weighing the probabilities" isn't to the point.

The parallel with the Fred example was supposed to be something like this: Was this guy in 307 killed by someone -- call him Fred -- whose very nature requires that nothing other than Fred could have been the killer? Is there such a thing as a "Fred" -- a killer who by his nature has to be the killer of anyone found dead in 307, so that bodies in 307, when properly understood, lead us to Fred as a matter of metaphysical necessity? If we go on to say "Well, actually the body in 307 could in fact in principle have been produced by someone other than Fred. But let's see if that's probable.." we've just talked nonsense. If we've already granted that Fred didn't metaphysically have to be the killer, we've already determined thereby that Fred wasn't the killer, that there is no Fred.

Now when you start out an argument for God by saying: "Well, the world is like a big machine, see, and its parts are so intricate that it's very improbable that they could come together by chance. Oh I'll admit that it's in theory possible that that's what happened, because it could have been a giant cosmic wind, or just some big object that has always been laying around like that, or whatever. Still, come on guys, how likely is that! I mean what if you found a watch out on the heath etc. Heh heh, now come on fellows, let's be reasonable and weigh the probabilities" -- if you reason this way, then the last laugh is actually on you, at least if you're trying to defend classical theism. Because all the "It might have been a wind, or a machine that's just always been laying around" stuff -- which is a claim about metaphysical possibilities, not epistemic ones -- already entails that the God of classical theism doesn't exist, because it already entails that the world might have existed without Him. And all the probability weighing in the world is just whistling in the dark after you've conceded that.

BTW, you're also missing the point of Frank's bed example. No one's making the ridiculous claim that everything by its nature will grow into something of the same type if you plant it. The bed example involves planting only because trees, from which wood is made, do grow when planted. For the possum example to be parallel, you'd have to ask something like this: what would a piece of possum meat you've put into a sandwich give rise to if you could keep the tissue alive and nourish it? And the answer, of course, is that it would grow back into at least a living possum muscle, or even a whole possum if you clone it, rather than into a sandwich. It's natural tendency would be to be "possum-like" and not "sandwich-like." And that means that, properly understood, the possum parallel only provides further support for Frank's point.

Ed,

If you care to - and if now is not the appropriate time, then please do so at some point in the future - I would love to hear a Thomist/Aristotilean explanation of and approach to DNA, contrasted with the ID approach. Since it seems that at least in the case of DNA in particular, both A-Ts and ID proponents have a lot to say.

I truly think that everyone here should really examine Dr. Beckwith's well written comment above. It is concise and remarkably clear. It also speaks to many of the comments and confusions here about Thomism and ID.

Joseph A., the teleological argument rests upon the principle that "every agent acts for an end." An acorn growing into a tree, for example, is not incidental to the acorn, the acorn naturally develops into a tree because of what it essentially is. In this sense, the acorn points beyond its own existence toward something else, that for which it exists. It exists for the sake of whatever its final cause is.

Final causality permeates the natural order, but, it seems, nowhere is this more apparent than in DNA. The whole concept of DNA is essentially a blueprint for the development of a living organism. Functioning as a genetic code that determines the developmental process for biological organisms, it is as if DNA simply cannot be understood apart from the principle of finality, namely, "every agent acts for an end." A simple understanding of DNA requires one to understand that DNA exists for the sake of the organism of which it is a part.

Notice, though, that the particular complexity of DNA serves no other purpose than to exemplify a principle that is found in all of nature. It seems to be as clear an example of final causality as one can have, yet the argument is not saying that an explanation is needed to explain only DNA. The ancients and medievals did not know about DNA, yet final causality was more apparent to them than it is to us.

Yes -- but why think that he is right to draw the line just there? The bury-it-and-see-what-grows argument will not, I think, bear heavy weight. Bury a possum and perhaps grass will grow on the spot, but certainly not more possums.

Depends on the thing. Not all natural organisms develop and reproduce the same way. For instance, given enough time, two possums--one male, the other female--will spawn little possums. But if you leave my two possum-hair jackets alone in my closet--even though they were made from male and female possums--no third jacket will arise.

As for reconstructions of the design inference, it doesn't really matter if its Dembski's or McGrew's. If you're going to hitch your wagon to that "external arrangement of matter" star, you're still looking for design when there are apparent gaps in natural processes.

what would a piece of possum meat you've put into a sandwich give rise to if you could keep the tissue alive and nourish it? And the answer, of course, is that it would grow back into at least a living possum muscle, or even a whole possum if you clone it, rather than into a sandwich.

Hold on just a minute. This is just empirically wrong. If you culture tissue and "keep it going," it doesn't "grow into living muscle." You just have, at most, some cells. Moreover, as far as I know, most non-cancerous tissue will not keep going like this. One of the reasons tumor tissue is so useful to scientists is because it can be "kept going" indefinitely, in the sense that you can create further cell lines and so forth from it. But ordinary, mature tissue, as far as I know, is not like this. I'll be happy to be correct if I'm wrong. And cloning is certainly _not_ a matter of "keeping something alive." You have to do all sorts of technological things to clone, including replacing the nucleus of one cell with the DNA of another and tricking the cell by chemical or electrical means into beginning to divide like an embryo.

In any event, of course the reason that wood grows into trees, etc., is because of its underlying structure. We are presumably all agreed on that. What seems unfortunate to me is that getting into the nitty gritty of that underlying structure should be regarded with any suspicion.

Also, if the bed-tree example is supposed to show that manmade machines take things away from their "natural functions," it's pretty easy to see that plenty of man-made machines are made from substances that don't have some special tendency to do something radically different. If you bury a car, nothing else happens. The metal doesn't have some _other_ function you were "frustrating" by making it into a car.

And looking at it from the other side, the components of any living thing _down at the bottom_--at the level of elements, for example, and even some molecular substances--do _not_ have natural tendencies to produce living things. As I said on the other thread, we have to compare apples and apples. We should be comparing molecules of metal to molecules of water or carbon, not comparing "bits of metal" to, say, whole organs or even cells.

Combine this lack of academic modesty with the ubiquitous propagation of ID within Evangelical Protestantism and its churches, seminaries, and parachurch groups (and even among some Catholics) as a new and improved way to topple the materialist critics of Christianity, and you have a recipe for widespread disappointment (and perhaps disillusionment with Christianity) if the ID ship takes on too much water in the sea of philosophical and scientific criticism.

Lack of academic modesty is a problem but needs to be alleged on a case-by-case basis. _Who_ is academically immodest? _Who_ is not listening to _scientific_ (as opposed to a priori) criticism? And so forth. Mike Behe does answer his critics, though the journals will not give him space to do so and he has to publish the answers elsewhere. So allegations of academic immodesty are too diffuse and vague to be a big deal until they are brought down to brass tacks and it is shown that the criticisms in question are intelligent and deserving of answer, as well. (There are plenty of ridiculous ones and _tons_ of rehashing forever and ever of ones that have been answered already, in detail.)

As for the rest, I'm sorry, but frankly, I think it's plain ignoble to say, "Oh, let's not make an _empirical_ argument and have anything _turn_ on it, because (oh no!) people are getting _enthusiastic_ about it and if it turns out to be wrong, they are going to lose their faith." I'm sorry, Frank, but I've seen you say this kind of thing before. You even got a little hot under the collar to this effect ("What about the poor guy in the pew who might lose his faith if ID turned out to be wrong?") on a different thread, and I'm having none of it. Truth is truth, and _no one_ should hide his light under a bushel as far as some argument and evidence because it _might_ turn out that he's wrong and people _might_ lose their faith if so. By that construal, we shouldn't be publishing historical evidence for Jesus' resurrection either, on exactly the same argument. ("But someone _might_ turn up some historical evidence to the contrary, and then what?") This is not a good reason to criticize some area of research and argument. It is anti-intellectual, anti-academic, anti-scientific, anti-evidential, and quite frankly, contrary to a good deal of Scripture regarding God's not leaving himself without witness. It smacks of a desire to isolate and shelter our Christianity by putting all our eggs into a metaphysical argument basket that shall be forever immune from empirical criticism. No, no, no.

I'm sorry to be so vehement, but nothing Ed has said thus far in these two threads has been along those lines, and I have therefore not had occasion to be vehement about this. In fact, I have recently come to believe that I had previously misunderstood Ed as believing that probabilistic and hypothetical arguments should never be made regarding the existence and action of the Christian God, and I have been glad to be corrected on that score.

Frank, I just disagree with you on that point.

Ed,

Sorry that what I wrote seemed obscure to you. I wrote, too tersely, as I see now:

Your response to the first bit seems to me to hinge on an arbitrary aspect of your example.

To which you responded

?? What aspect is "arbitrary"? Please don't answer: "The bit about how Fred is characterized as the man who given his nature must necessarily be responsible for any dead bodies in room 307." The stuff about "given his nature must necessarily" etc. is not an "arbitrary" aspect of the example; it's the whole point of the example.

No, no, that’s not the arbitrary stuff. The arbitrary bit (which I am responsible for elaborating – I said “your example” only because you started the room 307 idea) is that we already know Fred, “a known candidate for creator.” You wrote:

If the argument is going to succeed in proving that Fred exists, its premises can't presuppose that Fred exists and owns a bloody shirt, etc.

Fair enough: that’s the arbitrary bit. So take Fred, the guy you already know, out of the example and just ask whether the death in room 307 was a homicide. We can still refer by definite description to the person (whoever it may be, if there is one) who is in point of fact responsible for the death in room 307. That’s all I’m saying.

And that you might be missing the point also seems evident from the "epistemic, not metaphyscial" stuff. No, it's metaphysical, not epistemic. That's the whole point.

Something is being lost in communication here. As I understand it (and feel free to correct me if I have a misimpression), our exchange on this point has run something like this:

Ed: Paley-style design arguments presuppose that the God of classical theism doesn’t exist!

Tim: Why? They seem to work just fine without any assumptions either way on that point.

Ed: Because Paley-style arguments are probabilistic, and probabilistic arguments start out by defining the existence of the designer as a contingent matter. But if classical theism is true, then the existence of the designer is not a contingent matter. Therefore, Paley-style arguments presuppose something that is incompatible with classical theism.

Tim: I grant that the arguments in question are probabilistic, but I don’t understand why you think it follows that they are defining the existence of the designer as a contingent matter.

Ed: If you think it is only probable that a given natural object was created by God, then you are committed to saying that it might not have been. But to say that it might not have been created by God is to claim that it is metaphysically possible for it to have existed without God. The claim is metaphysical, not epistemic. That's the whole point.

Tim: Your claim may be, but Paley’s is not, and you have no right to foist it upon him. There is, certainly, something one could mean by the statement “Probably this object was designed by God” that would entail the metaphysical claim in question. But what I have been arguing is that there is another thing one could mean by that statement that does not have that consequence, and that it is this other meaning that is intended by those who marshal Paley-style arguments.

After all, consider Paley’s own words in the opening sentences of the Natural Theology:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there: I might possibly answer, that for any thing I know to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer.

The phrase “for any thing I knew to the contrary” is the key; he’s making a statement of what is epistemically possible, possible for all he knows to the contrary, not a statement of what is metaphysically possible. And the epistemic possibility claim does not entail the metaphysical possibility claim. Indeed, Paley leaves the door open for a proof of metaphysical impossibility with his last phrase, simply indicating that it may not “be very easy” to show the absurdity of the claim that the stone has lain there forever. In this example, Paley is not assuming that the world could in principle possibly exist apart from God; he is envisaging, at most, a state of mind in which one is uncertain of the claim of metaphysical necessity. But to be uncertain about a modal claim is not to assert or to presuppose its negation.

We use probabilistic reasoning all the time in matters that are a priori. I ask my friend Mike, who is a much better mathematician than I am, what the derivative of tan x is; he confidently replies that it is sec^2 x. In taking his word for it, I am making a probabilistic argument. But I am not thereby assuming that it is a logically contingent matter whether d/dx tan x = sec^2 x. Yet it seems that, by reasoning parallel to that which you have here deployed, something must be wrong with my taking Mike’s word for it. Yet clearly, I should say, what I have done here is absolutely innocuous.

BTW, you're also missing the point of Frank's bed example. No one's making the ridiculous claim that everything by its nature will grow into something of the same type if you plant it. The bed example involves planting only because trees, from which wood is made, do grow when planted. For the possum example to be parallel, you'd have to ask something like this: what would a piece of possum meat you've put into a sandwich give rise to if you could keep the tissue alive and nourish it? And the answer, of course, is that it would grow back into at least a living possum muscle, or even a whole possum if you clone it, rather than into a sandwich. It's natural tendency would be to be "possum-like" and not "sandwich-like." And that means that, properly understood, the possum parallel only provides further support for Frank's point.

Of course I don’t think Frank believes planted possums will give rise to possum plants; he’s a sensible fellow. The problem here is that, in giving more detailed conditions like you have done, and bracketing the point Lydia has just made about culturing possum-meat, we’re moving in the direction of saying simply that trees and possums are self-replicating entities given the appropriate environment. But this does not provide a rigorous criterion for distinguishing them from machines. If I were to build a self-replicating machine (hideously complicated job, but I see absolutely no argument in principle that it cannot be done) then, in an appropriate environment, it would replicate itself. It takes us nowhere to say that the parts of my machine are steel, copper, etc., and that these are themselves sorts of things that have their own natural tendencies. Of course they are; so are the atoms of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, etc. in a tree or a possum. When my machine breaks down, as all machines eventually will, those elements will gradually separate from each other – just like the possum’s body decays and the atoms of which it is made go back into the environment.

It is anti-intellectual, anti-academic, anti-scientific, anti-evidential, and quite frankly, contrary to a good deal of Scripture regarding God's not leaving himself without witness. It smacks of a desire to isolate and shelter our Christianity by putting all our eggs into a metaphysical argument basket that shall be forever immune from empirical criticism. No, no, no.

Don't hold back. Tell me what you really think. :-)

First, I'm not talking about Christianity per se. I am talking about naturalism v. theism. I do not disagree with you, Lydia, on the merits of evidentialism in terms of the historical questions. In those cases, one is talking about specific instances of divine agency in the natural order. But not in order to amend or change the trajectory of the natural order. So, the Resurrection, for example, is a singular act indicating our Savior's defeat of death. The natural order did not change. No bacterial flagella were inserted by God in order to change the future development of organisms.

Second, up until the Enlightenment, nobody thought of the natural order as something that God tinkered with like a Watchmaker adjusts his watch in order to refine its ends or purposes. God as ground of creation had always been the Christian view until certain thinkers suggested that final or formal causes are gratuitous to knowledge. But instead of challenging this rule-change, thinkers like Paley said, "Look, we don't need final causes or formal causes; we can get all of this through mere efficient causes." Bad move. For when Darwin offered his account that efficient causes in nature do not not require divine intervention in order to acquire the appearance of design, Paley was finished. But instead of going back to the older understanding of design--something not dependent on efficient causes externally directed by a mind--the ID guys said, "We can resurrect Paley based on this new stuff that Darwin can't account for." But we've all seen this movie before. And it does not end well for theism.

Third, this has nothing to do with evidentialism. In fact, I would argue that evidentialism requires minds with final and formal causes that have intellects capable of acquiring knowledge of the external world and drawing inferences. Ironically, Darwinian mind-body theorists have a real tough time with this, as Al Plantinga has argued in several places. But this takes us back to final and formal causes, where the real action is, IMHO.

Fourth, you are correct that Behe et al have been treated shabbily by the academic establishment. I, in fact, make that point in my forthcoming article in the University of St. Thomas Journal of Law and Public Policy, "How to Be An Anti-Intelligent Design Advocate." Believe me, I am much harder on Dawkins, Forrest, etc. than I am on the ID guys. But I could not let pass on the "brand new way to defeat naturalism" enthusiasm that is ubiquitous in the circles in which the ID guys run. Again, we've seen this movie before. And it too does not end well.

Does that mean that the ID guys don't have something to say? Of course, they do. And they should say it and not have to suffer under the secular fascism propagated by the new no-nothings of naturalism. The ID guys have important things to contribute to the conversation. But the impression a lot of us get is that they think they have the Holy Grail while the rest of us are stuck with Stork Club shot glasses left over from a Sinatra party gone terribly wrong.

Frank,

You write:

As for reconstructions of the design inference, it doesn't really matter if its Dembski's or McGrew's.

But with regard to the specific criticism you originally raised, I think this is mistaken. In the note to which I was responding, you wrote:

For ID advocates Behe and Dembski no design inference about nature is warranted short of achieving that threshold of irreducible or specified complexity. But that means that the person who believes he has good grounds for final and formal causes—while rejecting Behe’s and Dembski’s criteria—has no warrant for believing that the final and formal causes he claims to “see” in living organisms.

But it is precisely that “no inference is warranted ...” part that is not present in Bayesian reconstructions. So even if Behe and Dembski were to dig in their heels and say that you have no right to say anything about the evidence short of its hitting the trigger value for specified complexity, your criticism there would not be relevant to a Bayesian reconstruction.

In your subsequent comment, you shift the criticism, writing:

If you're going to hitch your wagon to that "external arrangement of matter" star, you're still looking for design when there are apparent gaps in natural processes.

I don’t think Henry Drummond’s fuzzy language of “gaps” is particularly helpful here. But I do think that it makes sense to ask whether there are things in the natural world that appear to have been designed. And if there are, then that is evidence for the existence of a designer.

As for the fear that the argument might be empirically undermined, welcome to the world of empirical reasoning. The claim that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated might, in principle, be undermined by further historical information — and wouldn’t the American History teachers be surprised! But that should not keep us from studying the evidence for the assassination of Lincoln.

Mutatis mutandis, this applies to arguments regarding the existence of God. The right response, for my money, is not to give people fewer arguments, but to give them more — not to withhold an empirical line of argument from hoi polloi because it might not be airtight, but rather to give them lots of reasons, a cumulative case that weaves a tough safety net beneath their beliefs. If one strand of argument turns out to be weak or fuddled or downright wrong, a thousand others will take up the slack.

I disagree that questions of origins should be off-limits for inferences regarding Divine action, Frank. I think your distinction between historical and scientific evidentialism is artificial and a prioristic in precisely the wrong way. For example, all that about "amend[ing] or chang[ing] the trajectory of the natural order" smacks far too much of a deistical a priori limitation on Divine creation, as though God is _allowed_ to perform miracles or intervene for "salvation history" but is not _allowed_ to engage in, say, special creation, for purposes of origins. God doesn't have a bunch of bureaucratic rules like that, and I don't think we should limit his action. We should, rather, look to the evidence to speak for itself.

I would add here, by way of continuing to stir up the pot and put the cat among the pigeons (I'm running out of metaphors), that in case you didn't notice it, in the earlier thread, Ed said that he believes the origin of life constitutes an argument for special creation, because of the implausibility on the A-T view of the development of life from non-life. Or at least, so I understood him.

It would seem to me that artificial strictures on what is supposedly "gaps" reasoning or on God's "changing the trajectory of the natural order" should apply just as much to such an A-T view on special creation in the origin of life as to ID. And they would be wrong in both cases.

Ed also reminded us that he holds no brief for Darwinism, so your statement, Frank, that "when Darwin offered his account that efficient causes in nature do not not require divine intervention in order to acquire the appearance of design, Paley was finished," which seems to my ears to imply that Darwin was scientifically _right_ and that his account is the _correct_ one, might not sit well with all Thomists in the room.

Frank,

You write:

[W]hen Darwin offered his account that efficient causes in nature do not not require divine intervention in order to acquire the appearance of design, Paley was finished.

I think this is far too quick. Darwin updated the naturalists' tools, and he was thereby enabled to cope with some of Paley's examples. What will happen if we allow Paley's intellectual heirs to update their examples to include, say, the question of the origin of life, which is by definition outside the scope of Darwinian explanations?

Lydia writes:

... by way of continuing to stir up the pot and put the cat among the pigeons ...

I doubt that I am the only one here whose first thought on reading this is, "but, Lydia, you are the cat among the pigeons." Or as Ed might say, you are the being whose nature it is necessarily always to be the cat among the pigeons. ;)

Hi Tim,

Yes, I realize that Paley and those who give Paley-style arguments are not necessarily explicitly committed to the claim that it is metaphysically possible that the world might exist without God. I realize that they might assume all that is in question are epistemic probabilities. Nevertheless, they way they proceed to argue makes sense only on the assumption that it is metaphysically possible that the world might exist without God.

Compare: Suppose I say “Let’s consider the probability that Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem is true.” Once I’ve done that, it’s obvious I don’t know what I’m talking about. It is not, and cannot be, a matter of probability. Truths of logic and mathematics are not like that, and to insist in this case that we argue about them in that way would, if it has any sense at all, really entail arguing about something other than Gödel’s theorem, some strange empirical analogue of it perhaps (whatever that could mean).

Of course, if you didn’t know anything about Gödel’s theorem, and just accept it on your friend Mike’s authority, you might sensibly say “The probability that Mike is right is such-and-such.” But that’s because the probabilities here concern Mike’s reliability, not the theorem. You aren’t saying “Gödel’s theorem in itself has such-and-such a probability of being true”; you are saying “There is such-and-such a probability that Mike knows what he is talking about.”

Now when we ask questions like “How probable is it that such-and-such material parts could get together without a designer” or “How probable is it that the world could always have been here without a designer,” we might be saying something consistent with classical theism if all we meant was “Epistemically speaking, I don’t know how good the arguments are that show that the world was necessarily created by God, because I haven’t studied them.” But that’s not what Paley and Co. are saying. They aren’t giving arguments for the conclusion that it is very likely that Aquinas’s First Way (or whatever) is sound. They aren’t giving arguments to the effect that our metaphysician friend Mike is probably right when he tells us that the world could not exist without God. They aren’t talking about our epistemic states or Mike’s or anyone else’s. They are talking about the world itself, and the probability of its being as it is apart from God. That’s why they go on about things like how likely it is that watch parts could get together by wind and soil erosion, etc. The reasoning concerns the things themselves, not merely our epistemic situation with respect to them. And thus, whether they realize it or not, people who argue this way are talking about metaphysical possibilities. And what they are implying is that there is at least some probability – not merely ”for all we know” but “in the nature of the case” – that the world might have gotten here without God. And that entails in turn that classical theism is false, for the reasons noted earlier.

if you leave my two possum-hair jackets alone in my closet--

Frank. We need to talk, buddy.

the rest of us are stuck with Stork Club shot glasses left over from a Sinatra party gone terribly wrong

Hmmm, actually, those would be pretty cool...

I don't know about possum-hair jackets, but freshman essays left overnight multiply into more and worse freshman essays.

Beth,
who cannot follow this discussion with her limited ability in philosophy, but who knows perfectly well that the inanimate can give rise to more of itself, since she is staring at the proof right now and trying to figure out how to get away with doing nothing about it. :)

Beth, I feel your pain, believe me... ;-)

Thanks, Ed. The only days I regret my professional life are the days freshman essays sit on the desk . . . They give me a worse headache than trying to follow this thread with no philosophy background whatsoever! :)

What do we mean by God? Classical theism (and thus, I maintain, Christianity) says: A cause apart from whom nothing could even possibly exist even in principle (and thus an absolutely necessary being, or Being Itself, or Pure Act, or whatever). Now, we then go on to ask: Can we get to knowledge of the world to knowledge that such a God exists?

If you start out with that as the definition of God, then you do get into some logical problems when you say "Let's see if we can use the existence of X to prove God exists."

But virtually nobody starts out with that definition of God. Certainly the Romans, Greeks, and the rest of the ancient pagan world did not view the notion of "god" to mean that. Most agnostics don't start out thinking that when they use the term "god" that they are using it to refer to a cause apart from whom nothing could even possibly exist." Certainly atheists would reject that definition as representing what they mean by the term "god".

One might propose that even St. Thomas doesn't start out that way when he sets out to prove that God exists. If I understand the thrust of his argument, he proves that there must be an unmoved mover, and an uncaused cause, and a necessary being, etc. And then says, this being is what we mean by the term God. Now, UNTIL you had proven that there is an unmoved mover, a Roman pagan would never have agreed that that's what he meant by the term "god." So, I would take St. Thomas's ending comment to mean something more like this: NOW that we know that there is an unmoved mover, and a necessary being, etc., thereby we NOW know that no lesser being rightly qualifies for the term "God". Properly, then, one would suppose that the term "God" means, for its primary referent, the highest of beings. It is NOT a given that the highest of beings is the cause of all the universe, and is necessary being. It is not even certain, to start out with (viewing through the pagans' eyes), that the "highest of beings" is singular rather than plural.

Epistemologically, then, you cannot use the later conclusions of Thomas's argument, that God is indeed the one without whom all the rest would not be, in deciding whether or not to ask (with IDers) whether complexity in living organisms constitutes evidence that there is a God.

By the way, I am not claiming that the ID argument, and especially the now more usual form of the ID presentation, is actually correct.

Now, if Paley were arguing for the proposition "in all possible worlds contingent being requires a necessary being," then he would be on to something. But by the time Paley's writing, the idea that the mind has the power to know things like "being" is not even on the philosophical radar. So, he's stuck in a Humean universe with Humean premises. This is why in moral philosophy, Hutchenson and Paley are talking "sentiments," not natures or intrinsic purposes. This is the beginning of the end. This is why Lockean "natural law" eventually gets you Rawls or Rorty.

The ID advocate tries to detect instances of design in nature by eliminating chance and necessity (or scientific law). This implies that one has no warrant to say that the latter two are the result of an intelligence that brought into being a whole universe whose parts, including its laws and those events that are apparently random, seem to work in concert to achieve a variety of ends. But this is precisely the position advanced by the Thomist. In response, someone could say that an ID advocate who accepts a Cosmic Fine Tuning argument does in fact have warrant to believe that change and necessity are the result of intelligence as well, since both function as parts of the Creator’s plan for the universe’s fine-tuning. But then, what happens to irreducible and specified complexity as criteria by which to eliminate non-agent causes of apparently designed effects in nature? Perhaps this is why some ID advocates are reticent to call their “designer” God, since it would mean that God creates everything ex nihilo and then returns now and again to tidy things up a bit when they seem to be going awry.

But, as Brad S. Gregory writes (in the recent issue of Logos), this puts the ID advocates in the ironic position of sharing a philosophical assumption with the New Atheists, the latest apologists for Darwinian evolution who claim that it entails unbelief: “Advocates of intelligent design posit that ordinary biological processes of natural selection and genetic mutation can account for much but not everything in the evolution of species, the remainder requiring recourse to God’s intervention. Insofar as proponents of intelligent design posit normally autonomous natural processes usually devoid of God’s influence, they share important assumptions with the New Atheists….” Gregory points out the fallacy in this understanding of God’s relationship to nature: “[P]erhaps in the past Darwinism wasn’t explanatorily powerful enough to drive God out, but recent, further scientific findings no longer leave room for God.” The result is a strange parallel of ferocious posturing between ID advocates and the New Atheists: “The intelligent design proponents scramble to find remaining places for supernatural intervention; the New Atheists claim there are none left. Both assume that God, conceived in spatial and quasi-spatial terms, needs `room’ to be God—which is precisely what traditional Christian theology says God does not need.”

Now, if Paley were arguing for the proposition "in all possible worlds contingent being requires a necessary being," then he would be on to something. But by the time Paley's writing, the idea that the mind has the power to know things like "being" is not even on the philosophical radar. So, he's stuck in a Humean universe with Humean premises. This is why in moral philosophy, Hutchenson and Paley are talking "sentiments," not natures or intrinsic purposes. This is the beginning of the end. This is why Lockean "natural law" eventually gets you Rawls or Rorty.

The ID advocate tries to detect instances of design in nature by eliminating chance and necessity (or scientific law). This implies that one has no warrant to say that the latter two are the result of an intelligence that brought into being a whole universe whose parts, including its laws and those events that are apparently random, seem to work in concert to achieve a variety of ends. But this is precisely the position advanced by the Thomist. In response, someone could say that an ID advocate who accepts a Cosmic Fine Tuning argument does in fact have warrant to believe that change and necessity are the result of intelligence as well, since both function as parts of the Creator’s plan for the universe’s fine-tuning. But then, what happens to irreducible and specified complexity as criteria by which to eliminate non-agent causes of apparently designed effects in nature? Perhaps this is why some ID advocates are reticent to call their “designer” God, since it would mean that God creates everything ex nihilo and then returns now and again to tidy things up a bit when they seem to be going awry.

But, as Brad S. Gregory writes (in the recent issue of Logos), this puts the ID advocates in the ironic position of sharing a philosophical assumption with the New Atheists, the latest apologists for Darwinian evolution who claim that it entails unbelief: “Advocates of intelligent design posit that ordinary biological processes of natural selection and genetic mutation can account for much but not everything in the evolution of species, the remainder requiring recourse to God’s intervention. Insofar as proponents of intelligent design posit normally autonomous natural processes usually devoid of God’s influence, they share important assumptions with the New Atheists….” Gregory points out the fallacy in this understanding of God’s relationship to nature: “[P]erhaps in the past Darwinism wasn’t explanatorily powerful enough to drive God out, but recent, further scientific findings no longer leave room for God.” The result is a strange parallel of ferocious posturing between ID advocates and the New Atheists: “The intelligent design proponents scramble to find remaining places for supernatural intervention; the New Atheists claim there are none left. Both assume that God, conceived in spatial and quasi-spatial terms, needs `room’ to be God—which is precisely what traditional Christian theology says God does not need.”

“How probable is it that such-and-such material parts could get together without a designer”

At the risk of opening a can of worms, I want to ask, why could one not take the phrase "without a designer" to mean or be shorthand for, "By means of such-and-such physical causes"? Now, from an A-T perspective, I suppose that this would be asking whether the _nature_ of some particular type of other material entities is such as naturally to produce _this_ type of material entity. For example, when considering descent-with-modification and its relation to some organism, organ, or system, one would be asking whether the nature of one type of creature is such that it is to be expected to mutate by natural causes within such-and-such a time in such a way as to result in a different type of creature that has such-and-such an organ that the earlier organism did not have. Stating that it is improbable that such-and-such material parts should get together in these ways would then be a statement about probabilities grounded in what one concluded about the nature of the material objects and processes which are the only causally relevant factors posited by some alternative theory--say, neo-Darwinism, etc.

I do not see that it could be wrong for a Thomist to argue that it is likely that God designed the flagellum, the blood-clotting cascade, etc., at the time of their first appearance, in some sense of "designed" that is different from "allowed the natural properties intrinsic to matter and to previously existing organisms to develop and act according to their propensities." And such an argument would seem to involve talking about the probabilities that such things would develop in the first place merely by the action of the natural properties and propensities of the matter and organisms that existed before those things existed.

Ed,

I think we're narrowing our disagreement regarding your critique of Paley-style arguments to a point. That's good: it represents progress. But it may not (alas!) lead us to agreement on the substantive issue.

You write:

Nevertheless, [the] way they proceed to argue makes sense only on the assumption that it is metaphysically possible that the world might exist without God.

This is what I deny. It still seems to me that it makes perfectly good sense to me for someone to say, "I don't know whether the world had to have a creator; for all I know, perhaps the world is eternal. But regardless of all that, this bit appears to have been designed." You seem to think that, in saying this (or perhaps, in elaborating on the final clause using the language of probability), one is committed to denying that the world had to have a creator. But that just doesn't follow.

In regard to the Gödel example, people all the time form judgments regarding the probability that a certain mathematical or logical claim is true, even while realizing that if it is true at all, it is true necessarily, and if it is false, it is false necessarily. From "Mike is probably right about what he just said" and "What Mike just said is that Fermat's last theorem is true," it follows that, probably, Fermat's last theorem is true. But it does not follow from this latter claim that Fermat's last theorem is merely probable. The argument renders the conclusion probable relative to what the reasoner knows. But this statement of relative probability does not stamp the conclusion as contingent, logically or metaphyscially. There is a significant literature on this subject, with contributions by Dick Jeffrey and Daniel Garber.

Mutatis mutandis, the same holds for an intelligent advocate of a Paley-style design argument. Sure, someone could add a further (and ex hypothesi false) claim to Paley's premises that denies the metaphysical necessity claim. If sheer hard thinking hasn't yet ruled out that denial for him, nothing in Paley's argument as such is likely to bring him metaphysical enlightenment. But it is not a serious fault in an argument that it does not bring on enlightenment regarding an issue that the argument as such is not designed to address.

Lydia,

"I do not see that it could be wrong for a Thomist to argue that it is likely that God designed the flagellum, the blood-clotting cascade, etc., at the time of their first appearance, in some sense of "designed" that is different from "allowed the natural properties intrinsic to matter and to previously existing organisms to develop and act according to their propensities." And such an argument would seem to involve talking about the probabilities that such things would develop in the first place merely by the action of the natural properties and propensities of the matter and organisms that existed before those things existed."

I suspect that a Thomist could make that argument, but at the same time it just wouldn't be terribly interesting to them. It would end up being a purely historical argument, where the question wasn't whether the flagellum was or was not "designed", but what was the course of development for the design in question. Worse, they wouldn't want to give the impression that the truth or falsity of 'design' rested on the historical argument.

But that actually leads me to ask a similar question in the opposite direction: Would taking the position that evolution and (all?) other natural processes were/are part of a design, make one an ID proponent? Now I know it makes no sense to say 'Darwinian evolution is designed' since 'Darwinian evolution' is committed to there being no design in evolution - but that view also goes beyond science and into metaphysics, and isn't integral to research or the science itself anyway.

I know there are some associated with ID (Michael Denton, though he left the DI) that take views similar to this. Simon Conway Morris also argues that evolution is very constrained, and is bound to find certain "solutions" that make intelligence and something akin to humanity inevitable. So I'm wondering if what makes one an ID proponent, in the views of those here at least, is explicitly denying that "nature" could develop certain things (OoL, bacterial flagellum, etc) -- or would the broader view of regarding nature and natural processes/outcomes as the results of design (due to A-T or similar commitments) also suffice to put one in the ID camp?

Hey Tim,

But it may not (alas!) lead us to agreement on the substantive issue.

Yep, they don't make comboxes in a way that ever seems to lead to that. Design flaw. ;-)

It still seems to me that it makes perfectly good sense to me for someone to say, "I don't know whether the world had to have a creator; for all I know, perhaps the world is eternal. But regardless of all that, this bit appears to have been designed."

Ah, well, "This bit" is different. What I've been on about in our exchange here is the specific question about whether arguing for the God of classical theism as designer of the world as a whole could proceed on the assumption that the world might as a matter of metaphysical possibility have existed without Him. IF we're starting instead from only one aspect of the world teh argument would have to proceed in a somewhat different (though related direction). And some of what I'd say I've already said in my exchange with Lydia in the other thread.

Re: the stuff about probability in your penultimate paragraph, I agree, but it doesn't conflict with what I'm saying. Change the example a little as follows: Suppose someone proposed to consider how probable Gödel's second incompleteness theorem is, relative, not to what the reasoner knows, but relative instead to the premises Gödel appeals to in his proof of the theorem. That, of course, would be absurd. The theorem either follows necessarily from those premises or it doesn't, and questions of probability cannot arise.

Similarly, if classical theism is true, then the existence of the world as a whole necessarily entails the existence of God, and a good argument for God's existence will try to show why this is so, i.e. will start from a description of the world that will lead necessarily to the conclusion that God exists. But then, an argument that starts instead from a characterization of the world on which God's existence is only probable given those facts about the world -- not given what the reasoner knows but given the world as characterized in the argument -- is as misguided as an argument that characterizes Gödel's theorem as following with probability from the sort of premises Gödel appeals to. In the latter case, whatever someone who argues this way shows or thinks he's shwoing, it ain't Gödel's theorem, and can't be. And in former case, whatever someone who reasons that way shows or thinks he's showing, it ain't the existence of the God of classical theism, and cannot be.

The ID leaders themselves long ago decided that the only criterion for membership in the ID big tent is this: Do you agree that design is detectable in nature?

That's it.

So if someone really believes that God "guides" the process of evolution, for example, and that this is detectable, that counts. If someone accepts the fine-tuning argument, that counts. If someone holds that the "process of evolution" was designed, and that we can tell that, that counts. (As to this last one, I insert here my own purely personal statement that I have no idea what the claim means and that I think it's weaseling, but then, I probably wouldn't be very good at building big tents.)

I think that certainly the most clear and straightforward way to detect design in nature is to decide that _this_ part of nature (which was the only part around before _that_ part appeared) does not have a natural telos/ability to produce _that_ part and that God and/or an intelligent being _would_ wish/be likely to/be able to produce _that_ part, therefore...etc.

Ed,

You may be closer to Paley than you think. For he does not set out to argue from the premise that "The world is like a big machine" but rather takes you from piece to piece. He dwells on the eye, its socket, brow, lid, tears, and nictitating membrane; on the ear, with its spiraling canal, its drum, and the minute bones of the inner ear; on the succession of plants and animals; on the aorta of a whale's heart; on the extraordinary strength and lightness of a bird's quill and the extraordinary latching mechanism whereby the laminae of the feather hook into one another. On and on he takes the reader through the details of natural phenomena as they are disclosed to the naked eye or viewed through a modest powered microscope.

Some of the specific phenomena from which he is working seem quaint now, in the sense that today their origins are understood at a deeper level and can be explained through the agency of secondary causes of which Paley was unaware. But there is nothing wrong with the method of his argumentation; and, suitably updated by means of modern molecular biology, such reasoning still presents a very powerful argument for the existence of a designer. I would love to see it used, not instead of, but in conjunction with the best metaphysical arguments in the armory of natural theology.

Alright. But where does that criterion (Design is detectable in nature) leave A-T types such as Ed? He may be disagreeing strongly about inferring God through probability-based reasoning, but it certainly seems like he agrees design is detectable in nature in the broader sense - there's teleology, goal-directedness, and 'design' even in the most simple and basic operations of nature. The main difference there seems to be that A-T proponents don't argue (in fact, they emphatically deny) they're arriving at their conclusions via science. So does the detection have to be "scientific"?

One thing I mentioned in another thread is that I see a whole lot of value in ID, because it encourages approaching nature and natural history with design in mind. So nature as a whole - from the most complicated (the Cambrian explosion, for example) to the most simple (Ed's example of an electron circling a nucleus) - isn't treated as some kind of stuff/events utterly disconnected from God, but all falling properly under God's design and even interaction (even if via secondary causes). I'm not sure if stressing that compatibility / complementary approach to nature and God falls under ID, even if analogical arguments are employed (regarding God relating to the world as a thinker relates to His thoughts, etc). But it does involve looking at nature and declaring 'design is present here'.

You missed in the other thread where I told Ed he's now a member of the ID big tent? :-) Tim added that his DI membership card is in the mail. :-)

I think that probably Ed would be the first to join the ID folks in questioning the demarcationist nonsense according to which no talk of design is scientific. In fact, if I'm right in that conjecture, that would distinguish Ed from a number of other theistic evolutionists, some of whom are absolutely rabid demarcationists, adopting the standard NOMA account according to which God is supposed to stay tamely on His side of an invisible line between "science" and "religion." Pshaw on all of that. You know what definition of science I've seen Mike Behe propose? This is from memory, but I have a pretty good memory: "The vigorous attempt to make important and true statements about the physical world." Sounds good to me.

The truth is that ID's critics are usually more interested in saying that they are not part of ID than ID's advocates are in excluding people. And that's just a sociological fact, for what it's worth.

By the way, Joseph, in response to what you said above about an historical claim, a bit of autobiography might be in order: I was raised a YEC, went to a YEC Bible college, then became, temporarily, a theistic evolutionist, though not a very intellectually satisfied one, then came as a somewhat older layman to conclude that the ID arguments are mostly correct (though I disagree with Dembski's construal), and hence to go to being something like a progressive creationist with an old earth. During this entire time, I believed that _somehow_ God created the heavens and the earth and all things. I've been a Christian since I was four years old! And when it came to questions of evidence, I was immediately steered not to origins issues but to the historical evidence for Christianity. So my Christianity has _never_ turned on these questions. Yet I find them _extremely_ interesting. As an empirical matter, I think it's _very_ interesting to see what the evidence says about Darwinism, about God's methods of working, about secondary causes vs. other means of creating, and so on and so forth. So speaking just for myself, I can't imagine why anyone would find such questions _uninteresting_ because he already believed "God created all things." So I would think such issues could be just as interesting to a Thomist, even though characterized as "historical questions about how God did things."

I've been a Christian since I was four years old!
I know what you mean.

But, on the narrower question of "Darwinism," I've been a DarwinDenier since I was five (or six) years old -- I understood, even in Kindergarten (unless it was first grade) that I was being told, "God didn't do it, and "science" proves that he didn't"

Now, of course, until I was older, I couldn't articulate what is wrong with "Darwinism," but I *always* understood that there is something deeply and profoundly wrong about it. And I think that's what the "Darwinists" rely upon to "convince" the children in the public indoctrination centers that "Darwinism" is correct -- until one is quite a bit older, one can't even begin to rationally explain to oneself the error that one sees; meanwhile, the authority figures are constantly drumming aray: "This is The Truth!" It takes an uncommon degree of ... stubbornness ... to stand up against that.

If someone holds that the "process of evolution" was designed, and that we can tell that, that counts. (As to this last one, I insert here my own purely personal statement that I have no idea what the claim means and that I think it's weaseling, but then, I probably wouldn't be very good at building big tents.)
An amusing thing is that even to speak of a "process of evolution" is to speak of teleology and design.

The word 'process,' rationally used, *always* implies a goal and decided-upon method for acheiving the goal.

I think that probably Ed would be the first to join the ID folks in questioning the demarcationist nonsense according to which no talk of design is scientific.

Yes indeed. I may not agree with the ID folks on metaphysics, but I agree even less with the dogmatic naturalistic metaphysics that is doing an enormous amount of the work in Darwinian polemics, and tarted up as "science."

Ed,

I got here late, but I think it would help if you would follow up with a post addressing the specific scriptural claims about the origins of creation since that is revelation from God. Genesis does not support any form of evolutionary theory, but rather claims that the entire universe, including mankind, was created through direct acts of intentional creation by God.

It would be more helpful to compare the various methodologies in their compatibility with the specific claims of Genesis rather than each other because Genesis is the explanation given to us by the Holy Spirit.

***That is not to say that I am accusing you of supporting evolutionary theory, but rather I am pointing out that it is not possible to coherently tie the specific scriptural claims and evolutionary theory together in a coherent way.

I trust that there are people reading this comments thread. They may benefit from (in my opinion) Tim's good summary (from the Nov 8, 12:49pm comment) of the Ed Feser-Tim McGrew discussion:

Something is being lost in communication here. As I understand it (and feel free to correct me if I have a misimpression), our exchange on this point has run something like this:

Ed: Paley-style design arguments presuppose that the God of classical theism doesn’t exist!

Tim: Why? They seem to work just fine without any assumptions either way on that point.

Ed: Because Paley-style arguments are probabilistic, and probabilistic arguments start out by defining the existence of the designer as a contingent matter. But if classical theism is true, then the existence of the designer is not a contingent matter. Therefore, Paley-style arguments presuppose something that is incompatible with classical theism.

Tim: I grant that the arguments in question are probabilistic, but I don’t understand why you think it follows that they are defining the existence of the designer as a contingent matter.

Ed: If you think it is only probable that a given natural object was created by God, then you are committed to saying that it might not have been. But to say that it might not have been created by God is to claim that it is metaphysically possible for it to have existed without God. The claim is metaphysical, not epistemic. That's the whole point.

Tim: Your claim may be, but Paley’s is not, and you have no right to foist it upon him. There is, certainly, something one could mean by the statement “Probably this object was designed by God” that would entail the metaphysical claim in question. But what I have been arguing is that there is another thing one could mean by that statement that does not have that consequence, and that it is this other meaning that is intended by those who marshal Paley-style arguments.

I found the comments following that discussion really interesting and revealing; the discussion leads to helpful examples of whether and/or how arguments that begin with "it is probable that [insert mathematical/logical truth claim, e.g. 3+3=6] is true because..." are legitimate arguments.

The legitimacy in question, I think, rests on what one believes about the nature and limits of knowledge, which are epistemological claims resting on theological anthropologies, a part of which concerns what man is capable of knowing. Is it possible for absolute certainty to reside in a finite human? Or is such certainty held only by God, Whom man has been seeking to displace in the West for centuries? If the latter, the pursuit of knowledge must always have been a pursuit of probabilistic, proper confidence, a trust which is man's only possible means of apprehending the truth.

The illusion of certainty in our knowledge is easy to maintain today because of modern culture's belief in the absolute certainty of scientific knowledge, empirical claims, and certain logical claims; it is an illusion which is plausible and believed so deeply as to be unquestionable because it is a part of a Western tradition that has succeeded, in many ways, so well that we forget it is a tradition of epistemology that is maintained in the context of a hierarchical community which cultivates the epistemology through practices, catechisms, and social institutions.

This issue really has come up a number of times in philosophy discussions here.

Albert, that's rather provocative. It seems to me that on one level, the basic, proper meaning of "certain" shouldn't admit of degree, really. If you really are certain, then "absolutely certain" doesn't properly add anything to the meaning. But we all use "certain" in a looser sense, meaning something like closer to certain much of the time, and of course this admits of degree.

Man can be certain - of the sorts of propositions that admit of certainty to the human mind - without claiming that his sort of certainty is identical to God's sort of certainty. When we say that "the whole is greater than the proper part" we are saying something we are certain of. The fact that God knows it in a way more perfect than we do doesn't change the fact that our knowledge ought to be called certain .

Speaking with respect to the mode of arguing, when we say "it is probably true that 3+3=6", although the proposition 3+3=6 is true AND is itself capable of being held certainly in the human mind, in this instance we are holding it on grounds that do not present it as certain. Such grounds are not proper demonstrations of the subject matter, but still amount to (sometimes) worthwhile advance in understanding - if nothing else, at least to give us a basis for looking for a proper, rigorous demonstration. This probable ground for the proposition inherently capable of certainty does not undermine the legitimacy of the proposition held with certainty when the ground for that certainty is elicited.

There is no more an "illusion" of certainty in apprehending self-evident principles than there is an "illusion" of red in seeing a red ball.

Ed,
It seems to me, and correct me if I’m wrong, that the A-T position is in no way contradicted by simply regarding the bodies of living things as mechanisms of some sort; for according to the A-T position the bodies of living things are not the things themselves anyway; so whether they’re mechanisms or not in no way determines the underlying substances to be mechanisms.

For example, to say that the body of a horse is mechanism is not to say that a horse is a mechanism; because the body is not what the horse is, but what the horse has.

Therefore, to regard bodies as mechanisms and to infer from them things inferred from human mechanisms, i.e., design and intelligence, in no way involves necessarily the assumption of reductionist principles--not even for the sake of argument.

And the same holds true if one assumes that the body is entirely composed of atoms, which, of course, it is.

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