[note: the author formatted this is a way that did not leave space for a page break. So I am inserting the break at the top — NR]
- Paley’s teleological argument is: just as the function and complexity of a watch implies a watch-maker, so likewise the function and complexity of the universe implies the existence of a universe-maker. Paley also addressed a number of possible counterarguments:
- Objection: We don’t know who the watchmaker is. Paley: Just because we don’t know who the artist might be, it doesn’t follow that we cannot know that there is one.
- Objection: The watch (universe) is not perfect. Paley: Perfection is not required.
- Objection: Some parts of the watch (universe) seem to have no function. Paley: We just don’t know those functions yet.
- Objection: The watch (re universe) is only one possible form of many possible combinations and so is a chance event. Paley: Life is too complex and organized to be a product of chance.
- Objection: There is a law or principle that disposed the watch (re universe) to be in that form. Also, the watch (re the universe) came about as a result of the laws of metallic nature. Paley: The existence of a law presupposes a lawgiver with the power to enforce the law.
- Objection: One knows nothing at all about the matter. Paley: Certainly, by seeing the parts of the watch (re the universe), one can know the design.
- Hume’s arguments against design:
- Objection: “We have no experience of world-making”. Counter-objection: We have no direct experience of many things, yet that never stops us from reasoning our way through problems.
- Objection: “The analogy is not good enough. The universe could be argued to be more analogous to something more organic such as a vegetable. But both watch and vegetable are ridiculous analogies”. Counter-objection: By definition, no analogy is perfect. The analogy needs only be good enough to prove the point. And Paley’s analogy is great for that limited scope. Hume’s followers are free to pursue the vegetable analogy if they think it is good enough. And some [unconvincingly] do imagine the universe as “organic”.
- Objection: “Even if the argument did give evidence for a designer; it’s not the God of traditional Christian theism”. Counter-objection: Once we establish that the universe is designed, only then we can [optionally] discuss other aspects of this finding.
- Objection: “The universe could have been created by random chance but still show evidence of design as the universe is eternal and would have an infinite amount of time to be able to form a universe so complex and ordered as our own”. Counter-objection: Not possible. There is nothing random in the universe that looks indubitably designed. That is why we use non-randomness to search for extraterrestrial life and ancient artefacts.
- Other arguments against design:
- Darwin: “Evolution (natural selection) is a better explanation”. “There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.” — The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882. Counter-objection: “Natural selection” would be an alternative hypothesis to Paley’s if it worked. But it demonstrably doesn’t, so there is not even a point in comparing the two.
- Dawkins: “Who designed the designer?” Counter-objection: Once we establish that the universe is designed, only then we can [optionally] discuss other aspects of this finding (see counter-objection to Hume).
- Dawkins: “The watch analogy conflates the complexity that arises from living organisms that are able to reproduce themselves with the complexity of inanimate objects, unable to pass on any reproductive changes”. Counter-objection: Paley is aware of the differences between the living and the inert and is not trying to cast life into a watch. Instead he is only demonstrating that they both share the property of being designed. In addition, nothing even “arises”. Instead everything is caused by something else. That’s why we always look for a cause in science.
- Objection: “Watches were not created by single inventors, but by people building up their skills in a cumulative fashion over time, each contributing to a watch-making tradition from which any individual watchmaker draws their designs”. Counter-objection: Once we establish that the universe is designed, only then we can [optionally] discuss other aspects of this finding (see counter-objection to Hume).
- Objection: In Dover case, the judge ruled that such an inductive argument is not accepted as science because it is unfalsifiable. Counter-objection: Both inductive and deductive reasoning are used in science. Paley’s argument is not inductive as he had his hypothesis formulated well before his argumentation. Finally, Paley’s hypothesis can absolutely be falsified if a random draw can be found to look designed. This is exactly what the “infinite monkey” theorem has tried and failed to do (see counter-objection to Hume).
- Objection: Paley confuses descriptive law with prescriptive law (i.e., the fallacy of equivocation). Prescriptive law does imply a lawgiver, and prescriptive laws can be broken (e.g., speed limits, rules of behavior). Descriptive laws do not imply a law-giver, and descriptive laws cannot be broken (one exception disproves the law, e.g., gravity, f = ma.). Counter-objection: Of all the laws with known origin, all (100%) have a lawgiver at the origin. The distinction between descriptive and prescriptive laws is thus arbitrary and unwarranted.
- Objection: It is the nature of mind to see relationship. Where one person sees design, another sees randomness. Counter-objection: This ambiguity is present only for very simple cases. But all humans agree that organisms’ structures are clearly not random.
- Dawkins: “Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.” Counter-objection: Just a corollary: since organisms indeed appear designed, then they are most likely designed according to Occam’s razor.
- In conclusion, Paley is right and his opponents continue to be wrong with not even a plausible alternative hypothesis.
Links:
This counter-objection fails to constitute a response to the objection. It is not arbitrary at all. Man-made laws really are prescriptive, (yet non-binding, we can and do violate them), while the laws of physics really are descriptive.
The objection is absolutely correct, the argument commits the fallacy of equivocation. The only commonality is in the name. We call them both laws. That’s it.
It doesn’t actually follow that things that “give an appearance of design” are most likely to be designed(by Occam’s razor or otherwise). Apparently you don’t know that Occam’s razor is about the preference for simpler explanations. It doesn’t say that some explanations are more likely true than others.
Indeed!
Of all the laws with known origin, all (100%) have a lawgiver at the origin.
I wonder where this assertion was extracted from.
So much nonsense packed into a small space!
Once we establish that the universe is designed, only then we can [optionally] discuss other aspects of this finding (see counter-objection to Hume).
How are you going to do that? With Dembski’s filter? I challenge you, be the first to make it work.
Wait a sec!
Have you listed all of the laws with known origin? I think not. So you cannot say that they add up to 100%.
I’ll get me coat.
I suspect a different sort of bait-and-switch. He’s talking about all the laws of KNOWN origin. It might make sense then to distinguish between laws of known and unknown origin, whereby prescriptive laws have known origin, and descriptive laws have unknown origin. And here, I think he is rejecting laws of unknown origin, and simply DECREEING that f=ma has a lawgiver because he SAYS so.
Paley does not compare a watch to the universe. He compares it to an eye.
Also, whoever wrote this does not understand Hume’s skeptical arguments.
Wtf? Who has ever made this objection?
So Paley’s purported response to the above meaningless twaddle is to basically just re-state his conclusion, as if that makes it true (or constitutes a meaningful rebuttal to twaddle)?
Seriously, I have never seen anyone raise most of the objections to Paley’s watchmaker argument listed in the OP. It seems like deliberately designed strawmen, or deep misunderstandings of possible objections made by others.
It’s remarkable that the responses Nonlin imagines Paley would make, are even worse than the inept nonsense Nolin has fantasized to be objections to Paley.
The actual William Paley has an argument here — not that one would know it from the OP. It depends on two premises:
1. living things display an intricate contrivance similar to that of advanced tools;
2. intricate contrivance cannot arise through self-organization
The argument for (2) depends on this idea that “matter”, left to itself, is passive or inert; it can’t do anything unless acted upon. So the passive mechanisms of mere matter can’t do anything that would give rise to anything with the intricacy and precision of, say, a vertebrate eye. Anything like that would require that passive matter be acted upon by some intentional agent.
For the curious, I’m reading The Restless Clock by Jessica Riskin. Riskin’s history of the debate about the nature of life, from the Renaissance to the present day, has lots of fascinating details taken from different stages of this history.
Her guiding theme is a long-simmering debate between “active mechanism” and “passive mechanism”. For the active mechanists, to be a machine is to be active, responsive, sensitive to the environment — whereas for the passive mechanists, to be a machine is to be passive, inert, ‘dead’. She traces active mechanism from Renaissance gardens, through a compelling but subversive reading of Descartes, through Leibniz to Kant, Goethe, the Romantics, and holistic ecology: nature as full of life, awareness, sensitivity. Passive mechanism also begins in Descartes and goes through Spinoza (though I think she is wrong about this), Enlightenment rationalism, natural theology and the argument from design, cybernetics (I think she is wrong about cybernetics, too) and molecular biology.
Two main things I’ve learned so far:
1. The debate between “organization” and “design” has a much longer and more complicated history than I realized;
2. The “argument from design” requires passive mechanism when it comes to matter — if matter could self-organize into life and mind, then we wouldn’t need God to play the role of crossing the matter/life divide.
For many years the main argument for Design was — well, what alternative is there? Then natural selection was discovered (by Darwin, also by Wallace and by Patrick Matthew). Now there was an alternative. nonlin.org of course waves that away as a non-starter, and if you try to argue about it, nonlin refuses to acknowledge that natural selection could even exist, and does not listen to what you say. One could continue to try to impress upon nonlin that there is such a process, but basically life is too short to bother doing that — nonlin is convinced that there is no way to refute nonlin’s position.
Joe Felsenstein,
How is a filter an alternative to intentional design?
By basically doing what designers do, test many different things, keep those that work.
Exactly, which is why I wrote purported response. Ironically I actually think more highly of Paley’s argument than the inane facsimile in the OP, and I’m pretty sure he’d have more to say back to the objections he received than to just blindly declare the truth of the conclusion to his argument.
You are seeing that removal of less-fit individuals occurs, but you fail to connect that with increase of the number of more-fit individuals. But populations produce more offspring than can survive to the next generation. So with the less-fit individuals not producing offspring, that leads to greater reproduction of the more-fit. So, given this excess reproduction and population density regulation, natural selection is not just a negative phenomenon.
Well, it’s possible that this myopia arises from our tendency to be human-centric. Around 1800, the human population was about 1 billion. Since then, it has risen to nearly 8 billion, an explosive rate of growth largely attributable to various technologies from medical to agricultural to distributional.
And THIS in turn means that the removal from the human population is (in many nations, anyway) limited to extremely less fit individuals. Humans have, recently anyway, NOT been producing more offspring than can survive in the short run (a few centuries). The currently-occurring mass extinction implies that humans are using technology to borrow from the future and exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet.
About as many humans are alive today as have ever lived. Populations that do this, in nature, tend to implode. The human genius is that we can postpone the implosion until too few resources remain for any post-implosion recovery. We have engineered a boundary condition for weeding out the less fit – nobody is weeded until suddenly everyone is weeded.
The idea of natural selection, without the requisite modification part is so trivial that it doesn’t it make sense to say anyone discovered it. It’s like saying that someone discovered that things float. Did anyone before not realize that when the Europeans invaded North America and started killing Indians, that white north Americans started out reproducing Indians, until eventually there were more whites than Indians? What a discovery . The doubters must have really felt stupid!
Do you know the first guy who threw a stick into a pond and noticed it didn’t sink was also named Charles? Charles Unga Vonwinklefloat.
I have no idea what you are referring to. There is genetic variation in almost any trait in almost any population.
Yes, there are people all the way back to Ancient Greece who noticed natural selection and commented on it, but Matthew, Darwin, and Wallace were the ones who stated it as a central mechanism of a general theory.
My point was that populations with a reproductive excess (basically all of them except ones that are going extinct) as well as density-dependent population size regulation will have the property that, as some genotypes are reduced in frequency, the others must increase in numbers and in frequency. Thus natural selection is not a purely eliminative mechanism, but at the same time acts to increase the frequencies of the better-adapted genotypes.
Modification part? Is that where your designer lives?
What was the mechanism that caused an increase in western Europeans genes and a decrease in native American genes in North America? Small pox blankets? The musket? Is that a mechanism? Is that natural selection?
I don’t think Darwin was the first to notice. So what was his contribution exactly?
Yeah and you all still do, and should.
Have fun convincing Nonlin about it, now that you’ve suddenly become convinced it’s trivial and obvious and everyone always knew it all along(instead of an impossible tautology obscured by overwhelming random deaths).
But hey, glad we’re one the same page. Now that you’re suddenly fine with natural selection, notice how those who deny it are basically impossible to communicate with, and will say the dumbest crap imaginable and deny the simplest and most obvious things. Consider why that is.
Yes, reprehensible historical genocides, and deaths due to disease are also examples of natural selection.
Rumraket,
So what makes you think no one noticed before Darwin? Because it was so trivially and pointlessly obvious that they didn’t bother writing a book explaining that when some things die there are less of them?
I don’t think people didn’t know this before Darwin, and I don’t think Darwin’s contribution is merely that. I recommend you read The Origin of Species. It’s a very well written book, and you can read the original 1859 version free online here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species_(1859)
Phoodoo should already know this. I keep telling him about the niche!
Rumraket,
Why, when my point is that talking about natural selection is meaningless, if natural selection just means some things die, and there are less of them.
I think you should read up on Charles Unga Vonwinklefloat’s amazing discovery. I think its in audiobook form. It might only be available in Cushitic Oromo though, so you might have to learn that first.
So the Rev. Paley found a watch on the heath and goes on to state that a watch needs a watchmaker.
However, the funny thing is that the ID-ers actually are talking about the heath, not about the watch!
Moreover, the fact that Paley thought there was something remarkable about the watch as compared to the heath implies that watches and heath are fundamentally not the same.
A perceptive man, this Rev. Paley.
How are the ‘some things that die’ chosen?
Have you ever actually read Origin?
Also discovered since ducks float, things that weigh the same as ducks float
newton,
Well, Unga VonWinklefloat claims he also discovered that, but there is some dispute. Alfred W.B. Clugel Fleaglebrook has always maintained that it was he who first realized this, but that VonWinklefloat stole his notes.
Sounds like the makings of the ID Hall of Fame.
Counter-counter-objection: This statement is false. We can easily discuss the required properties of a hypothetical designer before we have established whether the universe is designed or not. I would go as far as stating that there are a number of very stringent requirements for any candidate for the role of creator of the universe.
It’s a reification / equivocation. We could have called natural “laws” “patterns,” or “equations,” or “chilaquiles.” That people decided to call them laws doesn’t make them akin to human laws, doesn’t make them things that the universe “obeys.” It’s just descriptions of observed phenomena that happen to be consistent as far as we have observed.
I’d like to raise a minor quibble here. When the idea of “laws of nature” was first developed in the early days of the Scientific Revolution, it was emphatically in a theistic context: for people like Descartes, Kepler, and Newton, the universe obeyed God’s laws in exactly the same sense that perfectly obedient subjects obeyed the laws of a perfectly wise and benevolent king.
It took a lot of subsequent work for philosophers and scientists to arrive at the idea that laws of nature are just descriptions of consistent regularities. In fact I’m not sure if anyone had that idea before Hume or if that was one of Hume’s innovations.
As it is, Nancy Cartwright (one of the best living philosophers of science) has an unpublished paper (but free for download) called “No Gods, No Laws” in which she argues that we should abandon the very idea of “laws of physics” to be good consistent naturalists. It’s an excellent historical supplement to her book How the Laws of Physics Lie.
His contribution was to recognize that it could account for all of the biodiversity that we see.
I’d like to make a slight quibble here.
As I understand, Darwin’s point is that selection acting on heritable variation can explain why it is the case that multiple sources of evidence (embryology, biogeography, paleontology, comparative anatomy) generate similar patterns.
In this respect Darwin’s contribution could be thought of as what Peirce called “an abductive leap”: he took a whole bunch of widely accepted facts that were intuited to be related, but people were puzzled as to exactly how.
His abductive leap consisted of the idea that if selection acted on heritable variation for sufficient time, and if species were populations and not kinds, then eventually speciation would inevitably occur — and that allowed us to understand why embryology, biogeography, comparative anatomy, and paleontology gave rise to similar patterns over and over again.
But while this does seem to be a ‘win’ for the triumph of ‘organization’ over ‘design,’ it is not decisive — most importantly, because it does not show that matter can self-organize into life. As long as there’s an explanatory gap between “matter” and “life,” there’s conceptual room for the argument from design.
Then the conclusion should be that natural selection causes a decrease in genetic diversity, not an increase.
Paley compares the watch to the eye, which seems far more “watch-like” (intricate contrivance) with dissection and microscopy. I suppose the ID line here is that Paley would have been seen a comparison between the watch and the heath if he had observed the intricate contrivance of the molecular components of the heath’s cells.
But you’re right that Paley is not just giving us an argument, but also working through a psychology of belief: we are struck by the intricate assembly of parts in the watch, it seems surprising to us, and thus we are impressed by the assembly of the parts of the eye as well. The marvel and surprise we feel when considering a watch is explained by considering the intelligence of the watch-maker; likewise we turn our attention from the eye to whole body to the the intelligent agent that invented and then implemented the human body.
Thanks. I googled the title, found it and downloaded.
I have sometimes commented here, that I see people making theistic assumptions. And Cartwright is making a similar point.
In a little known historical anecdote, VonWinklefloat was later accused of witchcraft, and died when an angry mob built a bridge out of him.
False. There are human laws that have never been violated. Ever! And you don’t know enough about the “descriptive laws” to discuss their trespass. Distinction is arbitrary.
Occam’s razor is the problem-solving principle that states that “Entities should not be multiplied without necessity.”
This description of Occam’s razor is pretty clear. And obviously, “evolution” is a huge complication, separately proved impossible.
Can you give ONE counterexample? Of course not. QED.
You cannot ascribe different origin to laws of unknown origin. Best bet is that they are similar to known-origin laws. Meaning “all designed”. If you claim otherwise, the burden is on you to demonstrate the different origin.
Who are you who are so wise in the ways of science?
Always check the links provided first. You’ll be surprised those objections come from someone disputing Paley.
There’s nothing known to “self-organize self-organize”.
Completely wrong. Notice Paley came before Darwin. And his argument is NOT “what alternative is there?”
Unfair comment. I do listen. Not my fault your arguments are failing. Meanwhile, are YOU listening?
No such thing as “fit”. Remember?
No “better-adapted” either. Remember?
Wrong. Paley only focused on the watch. Let’s not put lies in his mouth.
Did he give no thought at all to “the heath”? Who designed the heath?
https://biodiversity.europa.eu/topics/ecosystems-and-habitats/heath-and-scrubs
My apologies, nonlin. My “Have you listed all of the laws with known origin?” quip was making fun of your argument on the Lockdown! thread, to which I linked. If I had written “False and stupid. Learn math”, would you have gotten the point then?
Wooosh.
Not that it matters one bit, but there’s a case to be made that the origin of the Book of Mormon is known, but the identity of the lawgiver is in dispute…
😉
What’s the point? Aside from trying to circumvent the issue at hand? Your whataboutism fails.
Of course matter CANNOT self-organize into life. Where is that stupid idea even coming from? I know, the religion of atheism. That’s where.
How can you be so certain? I mean, I’m skeptical but I’m not certain.
And your point is?
And that has what to do with what?
I wonder if we need to define “listen”. Maybe “I flat deny all you say, and reject all evidence as irrelevant” is the nonlin definition.