CMENZEL@TAMLSR.BITNET (09/03/88)
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 88 12:54 EDT From: CMENZEL%TAMLSR.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU Subject: theistic arguments To: ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu X-Original-To: ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu, CMENZEL In a recent AIList number, T. William Wells writes of the argument from design: > This argument goes: "the universe appears to have been > designed, therefore there was a designer. I shall call it god." > How silly! In its refined form, this argument posits god as a > "primary cause": this makes god "beyond" natural law, as an > explanation for natural law. It is trivially refuted by pointing > out that it begs the question. (If the universe requires a > cause, why shouldn't god require a cause? And if not, why > presume god anyway?) Wells is confusing two traditional theistic arguments here. The first is the argument from design, or teleological argument, which traces its origins primarily to Paley in (if I recall) the early 18th century. The second is the the cosmological argument, which goes back in its best known forms to Aquinas. The teleological argument is more or less as Wells reports, though he doesn't sufficiently emphasize the role of *explanation* in the argument; the idea is that the amazing precision, detail, and apparent *purpose* (hence the name "teleological argument") exhibited in the natural order can only reasonably be explained by a rational designer, just as (Paley argues) it would be unreasonable to suppose an intricate watch found in the desert had no designer. Wells does less justice to the cosmological argument, which in its strongest form argues not from the idea that anything that exists requires a cause, which would then be open to Wells' trivial refutation, but from the *contingency* of the universe. The idea is that since everything in the physical universe is contingent, i.e., might not have existed, the universe itself is contingent (possible fallacy of composition here, but never mind). A contingently existing thing requires some sort of explanation for its existence, some reason for why it exists rather than not. The only possible explanation (so the argument goes) is that its existence must be rooted in a *necessary* being, a being whose nature it is to exist and hence which doesn't require a cause. It is a further step of course to say that this being has to be God as usually understood. I'm not saying it's a *good* argument, just a lot better than Wells would have it. --Chris