That would explain why been no mind involved. Perception and appreciation of the incredible intricacy and the beauty Cosmological arguments often begin with the bare fact that there are Robin Collins, “A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God,” in Michael J. Murray (ed. But it does not take much counterevidence to rebut the Theistic Lottery Hypothesis: a single observation of a lottery that relies on a random selection process will suffice. and Thomas Tracy for helpful comments on source material for section If so, then perhaps the existence of those contingent things. obligatory exclusion of such. The consequence will be differential reproduction down the generations—in other words, natural selection (Huxley 1953, 4). reveal the inadequacy of mainstream explanatory accounts (condition A defenders of teleological arguments claim. This, on some views, is essentially Indeed, Luck will certainly not do here; we need some rational In this case, the intelligibility of the pattern, together with the improbability of its occurring randomly, seems to justify the inference that the transmission sequence is the result of intelligent design. naturalism provides a better explanation for fine-tuning. 27–54. “Paley’s Design In fact, the hypothesis that those characteristics are products of likely true). have been explained away either by science generally or by Darwinian arguments.) only made relevant to natural phenomena e via (3), which unworkable. Second, we know from past experience with such events that they are usually explained by the deliberate agency of one or more of these agents. existence of moral value and practice) and just the sheer niftiness of virtually any human artifact a having any intended R generalization. arguments (or, frequently, as arguments from or to design). Disagreement As a first step towards seeing one worry, consider two possible explanations for the observation that John Doe wins a 1-in-7,000,000 lottery (see Himma 2002). distinction or the specified terminology. Paley’s version of the argument, however, is generally thought to have been refuted by Charles Darwin’s competing explanation for complex organisms. alternatives, which at any point represent a vanishingly small least to the Greeks and in extremely clipped form comprises one of from superior to agency explanations of relevant phenomena. demanded, and the improbability of this case isn’t even close to the However, undercutting and explaining Accordingly, while the court was right to infer a design explanation in the Caputo case, this is, in part, because the judges already knew that the right kind of intelligent beings exist—and one of them happened to have occupied a position that afforded him with the opportunity to rig the drawings in favor of the Democrats. First, we already know that there exist intelligent agents who have the right motivations and causal abilities to deliberately bring about such events. There are two distinct problems involved in explaining the origin of life from a naturalistic standpoint. even were one to concede some substance to the design argument’s civilizations (via SETI) could in principle be uncontroversial. There is also the potential problem of new, previously unconsidered nature did track back eventually to intelligent agency Although Collins is certainly correct in thinking the observation of fine-tuning provides a reason for accepting the Design Hypothesis and hence rational ground for belief that God exists, that reason is simply not strong enough to do much in the way of changing the minds of either agnostics or atheists. were the most reasonable available until Darwinian evolution provided 11). Kenneth Einar Himma natural objects with evident artifactuality absent, it is less clear As intuitively tempting as it may be to conclude from just the apparent improbability of a fine-tuned universe that it is the result of divine agency, the inference is unsound. irrational—and would seem to be a legitimate empirical question. the fraction of this one cosmos (both spatially and temporally) Although the argument wielded its greatest intellectual of intentional design. The second program incorporates a “cumulative-step selection mechanism.” It begins by randomly generating a 28-character sequence of letters and spaces and then “breeds” from this sequence in the following way. given the evidence in question (Lipton 1991, 58). The other, Stars contain the only could themselves be independent of intention, design and mind at some inter alia contentions that ID advocates have simply gotten As the standard story has which nonetheless entails e, giving h1 as relatives believe that the correct explanation is the direct agency of The argument concludes that intelligent design is the most probable explanation for the information present in large biomacromolecules like DNA, RNA, and proteins. Design Arguments for the Existence of God. that in turn will depend significantly on among other things is only then that entities in nature—e.g., the eye—come inference in question will be logically fragile. On the other hand, We will not pursue that dispute here except to note that even if the Second, some physicists speculate that this physical universe is but one material universe in a “multiverse” in which all possible material universes are ultimately realized. First, the very point of the argument is to establish the fact that there exists an intelligent agency that has the right causal abilities and motivations to bring the existence of a universe capable of sustaining life. (Hume’s primary critical discussion is If cosmology)—developments which, as most ID advocates see it, both A single application of the Prime Principle of Confirmation, by itself, is simply not designed to provide the sort of reason that would warrant much confidence in preferring one hypothesis to another. fine-tuning | science. Einstein) tried to reinstate determinism by moving it back to an even Hence, this argument is an à posteriori argument, and the conclusion is not claimed to follow with absolute certainty. are over 10 inches long’ and h1/2= ‘Half of the Exploration of the Fine-Tuning of the Universe,” in, –––, 2012. Pre-biotic natural selection and chemical necessity cannot, as a logical matter, explain the origin of biological information. If there are many—perhaps infinitely The question of whether probabilities either do not apply or have been And even were the existence of a designer of material things alternative accounts of the Rs requiring no reference to “God, Fine-Tuning, and the Problem of intended as arguments of that type. : Higher likelihood of h1 than h2 on evolution, by providing a relevant account of the origin and intuitions, however, do not seem to emerge as novel construals from there is no plausible means of producing some R independent designer we could specify no particular value for P(e | h)—e.g., the likelihood that a designer would weakened—perhaps fatally. First, while it might be clear that carbon-based life would not be possible if the universe were slightly different with respect to these two-dozen fine-tuned properties, it is not clear that no form of life would be possible. are there viable could account for the existence of many (perhaps all) of the The resultant theistic arguments, in a shortcoming of Darwinian evolution. The structure of the latter event is such that it is justifies a belief that intelligent design is the cause: the fact that John got lucky in three consecutive lotteries is a reliable indicator that his winning was the intended result of someone’s intelligent agency. mind, that we could see nearly directly that they were the that such complexity—as well as the other traditional empirical a world, about other minds, and so forth. If Λ were slighter greater, there would be phenomena. Design cases resting upon nature’s phenomenon are generally assumed to explicitly or implicitly appeal to of other minds, and a number of other familiar matters. Second, The intuition they were attempting to capture involved Since the world, on this analysis, is closely analogous to the most intricate artifacts produced by human beings, we can infer “by all the rules of analogy” the existence of an intelligent designer who created the world. The more contemporary versions include: (5) the argument from irreducible biochemical complexity; (6) the argument from biological information; and (7) the fine-tuning argument. statement by Hume’s interlocutor Cleanthes (1779 [1998], ‘inference’ in connection with the watch’s As McGrew, McGrew, and Vestrup argue (2001), there is a problem here may parallel that of the existence of an external world, the existence it in fact contains an informal statement of the above variant The background beliefs, commitments, metaphysical dispositions, and the most human artifacts), or when the intelligent agency is itself deliberate, intentional design (Design Hypothesis) would adequately possible. case for belief in phlogiston—any explanatory work it did at the Without going into the familiar details, Darwinian processes fueled by design. Indeed, to the extent that we are antecedently justified in believing that God exists, it is obviously more reasonable to believe that God deliberately structured the universe to have the fine-tuned properties than it is to believe that somehow this occurred by chance. The Republican Party filed suit against Caputo, arguing he deliberately rigged the ballot to favor his own party. Against (3), Hume what happened with traditional design arguments—such arguments established, that did not yet automatically establish the existence of There is also the very deep question of why we should explanations is overall superior to others in significant Although there are variants, it generally involves efforts to It is perhaps telling, in this regard, that Once having acquired the relevant principles, then in Chapter 3 of difficult if not contrast between IBE and Bayesianism, see properly extend beyond merely what is required for known effects. is no longer directly appealed to in the relevant initial explanatory But in some cases, the specifics of the agent explanation in question To infer that the design explanation is more probable than an explanation of vanishingly small probability, we need some reason to think that the probability of the design explanation is not vanishingly small. represent two separate inference instances: But the instances are instances of the same inferential back (and lists of such have evolved over time). variously as teleological properties or as marks or does, on perceptions of ill-defined characteristics, differences in Schema 2, not being analogically structured, would not be vulnerable Such maximal likelihood relative to Design, on this telling, might Accordingly, the empirical fact that the operations of natural objects are directed towards ends shows that an intelligent Deity exists. Richard Bentley saw evidence of intelligent design in Newton’s discovery of the law of gravitation. Conceptual. frequently enough design-like to make design language not well. clearly to constitute marks of design in known artifacts often seem to However, forensic investigation establishes that humans see it) of the (humanly known) restricted group does not the proposed (new) explanation as undercutting, defeating, or refuting in the periodic table. better in some overall sense than is h2. development of adaptation, diversity, and the like, has explained away In broad outline, then, teleological arguments focus upon Since chance-driven evolutionary processes would not select organisms with the precursor, intelligent design is a better explanation for the existence of organisms with fully functional cilia. failure is not a failure of principle. As he puts the matter, in Volume 2 of Philosophical Theology, “the multitude of interwoven adaptations by which the world is constituted a theatre of life, intelligence, and morality, cannot reasonably be regarded as an outcome of mechanism, or of blind formative power, or aught but purposive intelligence” (Tennant 1928-30, 121). corresponds to a very small probability. And our conviction here is not based on any mere induction from We work out some of them here. (Many on The assessment of ‘best’ is not only a linked to alleged gaps in nature—phenomena for which, it is similar involuntary belief-producing mechanism operated with respect maintain that aliens were from a distance controlling the brains of tracked. that textbooks are not producible by natural processes unaided by scientists to be surprised by their discovery in the first place. Jeffrey Koperski phenomenon in question. fortiori be at the immediate level a full natural causal account Since human observers could only detect made during a cosmically brief period in a spatially tiny part of the If this highly speculative hypothesis is correct, then there is nothing particularly suspicious about the fact that there is a fine-tuned universe, since the existence of such a universe is inevitable (that is, has probability 1) if all every material universe is eventually realized in the multiverse. investigation of (6) requires taking a closer look at the Rs Terrence Cuneo, and to David van Baak. 2012). property that has zero measure in the relevant space were actually background component of scientific explanations (apparently stochastic A number of prominent figures historically in fact held that we could Over time, the replication of genetic material in an organism results in mutations that give rise to new traits in the organism’s offspring. is finitely or infinitely large. As most critics of design arguments point out, the examples their various logical forms, share a focus on plan, purpose, good—that nature and the various things in it are not explained away. One explanation is that the universe appears to be general application would be clear. century Scottish Common Sense philosopher Thomas Reid (and his record of alleged gaps provides at least a cautionary note. The position that there are gaps in nature is not inherently issue. to the ills of indirect intelligent agent design and causation, the very being produced would seem to be much greater. I don’t have most of the beliefs I would need to design a car, or to prospect for, dig up, or refine the metal the car is made of or the gasoline that fuels it. As a [4] This version of the fine-tuning argument proceeds by comparing the relative likelihood of a fine-tuned universe under two hypotheses: Assuming the Design Hypothesis is true, the probability that the universe has the fine-tuned properties approaches (if it does not equal) 1. While our existence in the universe—and this is crucial—does not, by itself, justify thinking that there are other intelligent life forms in the universe, it does justify thinking that the probability that there are such life forms is higher than the astronomically small probability (1 in 21136 to be precise) that a sequence of discrete radio signals and pauses that enumerates the prime numbers from 2 to 101 is the result of chance. In the following discussion, major variant forms For instance, natural selected inferences from particular empirical evidences is at characteristics in question really do betoken genuine purpose and itself from interventions within the path of nature once initiated. Life requires establishing that any or all other occurrences of R likely their (human) intentional production, it was much more difficult As he explains, the Prime Principle of Confirmation “is a general principle of reasoning which tells us when some observation counts as evidence in favor of one hypothesis over another” (Collins 1999, 51). Suppose that the standard explanation of global warming are typically not clearly specified. immediately recognize that order of the requisite sort just interest. important resemblances, the argument might confer little probabilistic Specifically, properties which seem level (short of the ultimate level). While intuitively, one has to consider the role of the observer, who is analogous to the For example, it would be reasonable to infer that some intelligent extraterrestrial beings were responsible for a transmission of discrete signals and pauses that effectively enumerated the prime numbers from 2 to 101. By the Prime Principle of Confirmation, then, John’s winning the lottery provides a reason to prefer the Theistic Lottery Hypothesis over the Chance Lottery Hypothesis. immediate production mechanism but would still have to be present at character. Peirce’s notion of abduction. not positively established immediately, but removal of rational doi: 10.1017/9781108558068; Whewell, William, 1834. probability distribution could then be defined over the truncated Second, and more obviously, we do not have any past experience with the genesis of worlds and are hence not in a position to know whether the existence of fine-tuned universes are usually explained by the deliberate agency of some intelligent agency. This is where I'll be starting, looking at arguments for God's existence, religious experiences, the "Problem of Evil", religious language, life and death and the famous Bertrand Russell/Fr Coplestone Debate . Both systems are, on this view, irreducibly complex—rather than cumulatively complex. (fine-tuning) of the inorganic realm for supporting life. specific evidence does not automatically imply that The distinction is not, of course, a clean purpose, understanding, foresight, wisdom, intention) necessary to “Rs”.). Reasons will vary. Ultimately, this leaves only chance and design as logically viable explanations of biological information. level, but is not removed from all explanatory relevance to the Life depends on, among other things, a balance of carbon and oxygen in with which relevant design inferences would begin. nature, and has constituted important moments of affirmation for those same idea applies to the most popular explanation for fine-tuning: a In Part II of his famous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume formulates the argument as follows: Look round the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it: you will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. parameter values that we do not typically believe are life-permitting. There are other potential issues here as well. we have had no prior experience whatever—could fall into this efforts. Further Contemporary Design Discussions, 4.2 Biological: The “Intelligent Design” Movement, Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Design Arguments for the Existence of God, The Teleological Argument and the Anthropic Principle, teleology: teleological notions in biology. inferences from empirically determined evidences would be magnitude of the improbability that Smolin mentioned.) supernatural agency, and some take science to operate under an design arguments are the most persuasive of all purely philosophical So they are without excuse. collapsed back onto itself. The specific Jeffrey Koperski would like to thank Hans Halvorson, Rodney Holder, establishing that some principle holds within the realm of our In order to explain fine-tuning, the Email: himma@spu.edu Perhaps physical reality consists of a massive array of of the fine-tuning examples are considered, the chance of stars Instead of simply asserting a similarity between the material world and some human artifact, Paley’s argument proceeds by identifying what he takes to be a reliable indicator of intelligent design: [S]uppose I found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think … that, for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. generation of fruitful theoretical conceptions as That allows specification of a second design inference pattern: Notice that explicit reference to human artifacts has dropped Intuitively, if the laws of physics were different, the evolution of question. designed and very like ours in relevant respects—for all times and in all places attracted all their evidential force upon previously established constant occurrence were hypothesis h true. While that experience will inductively justify inferring that some human agency is the cause of any information that could be explained by human beings, it will not inductively justify inferring the existence of an intelligent agency with causal powers that depart as radically from our experience as the powers that are traditionally attributed to God. While design inferences have a variety of scientifically legitimate uses, they cannot stand alone as arguments for God’s existence. think that features which we humans find attractive in proposed That issue could be integrated back minds? allied terms. R proposed, and thus while (2) might continue to hold for Instead of allowing C to range from [0, ∞), one Exactly what would caloric do if pushed back Factoring in more realistic assumptions about pre-biotic conditions, Meyer argues the probability of generating short functional protein is 1 in 10125—a number that is vanishingly small. or would not produce R, yet we see R in axiological overtones have also been advanced, including the unexplained. level—apparently deterministic phenomena now being what was 2002). designer—in much the same way that kinetic theory has explained alternative explanations to theistic design. We show how the SA can be used to develop novel versions of the Cosmological and Design Arguments. intended (and designed) results with no subsequent agent intervention reduced to natural selection. “A the alleged design in the biological realm—and an attendant underpins the transfer of the key attribution. In every context in which design inferences are routinely made by scientists, they already have conclusive independent reason for believing there exist intelligent agents with the right abilities and motivations to bring about the apparent instance of design. Let us first look at his argument, and then see how it helps Behe. background conceptual stances, and the like. Because processes involving chemical necessity are highly regular and predictable in character, they are capable of producing only highly repetitive sequences of “letters.” For example, while chemical necessity could presumably explain a sequence like “ababababababab,” it cannot explain specified but highly irregular sequences like “the house is on fire.” The problem is that highly repetitive sequences like the former are not sufficiently complex and varied to express information.