Is there design? Let’s plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
One of the problems atheists have with design arguments is they think all of them are meant to be scientific arguments. If anything, the classical teleological arguments are more arguments of order. There is science in the sense that if you do A, B will follow, That does not require any of our complex science today.
It could be that Paulos gets closer to the idea when he starts out chapter 2 this way.
The trees swaying in the breeze, the gentle hills and valleys, the lakes teeming with fish, are all beautifully exquisite. How could there not be a God?
Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up (p. 10). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
Actually, this is a good argument I think. Beauty is a powerful pointer to God. These are all material objects but there is something that transcends the matter somehow. It is interesting that normally atheists deny objective beauty.
Unfortunately, Paulos throws out any serious study of the argument by saying its best proponent is probably Paley. The problem is while Paley’s argument has a point to it, it is not at all something someone like Aquinas or Aristotle would have in mind by teleology. For those two, you could just have something like an iceberg floating in water and you could have the argument.
To make matters worse, Paulos then just goes on to argue Richard Dawkins’s Boeing 747 argument about how the creator has to be more complex. Why? Paulos I am sure holds to evolutionary theory which says the complexity we have today arose from simpler lifeforms. Why does he change it when it comes to God?
Not only that, but classically, Christianity has held that God is absolutely simple. (Of course, that would require that Paulos actually studied what he talked about.) I look at the argument and think that Paulos doesn’t know what he’s talking about immediately. Even if he did disagree with that approach, as even some Christians do, he should at least mention some Christians hold to divine simplicity.
But let’s look at how this goes for Paulos.
Suppose he claims complex things need a designer.
If so, then we have to ask how we have anything here since evolution is not a designer. If the reply is that not all complex things need a designer, then one could hypothetically say that God is also one of those things. I find that weak, but if Paulos can beg a question, why not the rest of us?
Paulos also tries to use the free market as an example of something without an intelligent designer, but as my friend David Marshall said in his Amazon review of the book:
Really bizarre is his illustration of how the Free Market accomplishes all kinds of complex planning without a Planner. Paulos goes on and on about this, citing Adam Smith and thinking he has scored a great point by cleverly citing an icon of conservatism. This is a “stunningly obvious” example of evolution working by itself, without need for a designer.
But of course, the free market involves millions of intelligent designers. Maybe that doesn’t matter to Paulos’ illustration, but that, too, ought to be “stunningly obvious,” and again, he ought not to just ignore this stunningly obvious fact.
So far, Paulos’s book is just awful.
But oh dear reader, it’s going to get much worse.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
(And I affirm the virgin birth)
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