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2.7: Criticisms of the Argument from Design (Noah Levin)

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    14 Criticisms of the Argument from Design
    Noah Levin24

    In discussing and defending particular actions during the invasion of Iraq, on February 12, 2002, Donald Rumsfeld, the United States Secretary of Defense at the time, famously said,

    Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

    He was mostly criticized at the time for saying this primarily because of the political climate and the implication that he was trying to avoid admitting a mistake, but there are a lot of important truths contained within this quote. Rumsfeld did not originate these concepts and they have been widely used, and respected, in many areas. Time has brought support to Rumsfeld for pointing out these distinctions, and understanding the idea of “known unknowns” will elucidate my belief that Arguments from Design are currently impotent.

    When the Argument from Design is properly understood and phrased, I do not maintain that it is incorrect, wrong, false, etc., but rather that its soundness is indeterminate due its reliance on gaps in our current knowledge, our “known unknowns.” It is, however, definitely a philosophical argument that contains traits that allow it to be assessed scientifically as well. Understood as such, we are currently at a state in our knowledge that leaves it with very little force, and therefore should not be held as proving anything of any importance.

    First, it is important to get clear on where the Argument from Design comes into play and what it’s supposed to do. Generally speaking, they argue that some facet of the universe (planets, animals, or even the universe itself) could have only come into existence through being designed and created by some entity. The primary reason supporting this belief is that these things are so intricate and amazing they could not have just appeared by themselves or developed from other natural elements following rules of nature. Indeed, most religions posit that there was some creator (or creators) that designed and created everything that exists in the “natural” world. Creation stories abound in all cultures, and the most familiar to Western thinkers is the story told in Genesis: God created everything in a specific order in six days. There are numerous labels that can apply to this belief that a divine entity created the universe or components of it (they fall broadly under the name “creationism”), some that take religious stories more literally than others. These beliefs were widespread for a long time, and justifiably so, as they faced few challenges and have a particular intuitive (as well as religious) appeal.

    While the religious viewpoint has always had strong support, the scientific revolution resulted in new methodologies that evolved existing sciences, namely astronomy and biology. These new understandings caused contradictions to emerge between the observations and theories pulled from science and the creation stories told by religions. There is a long and storied history of this conflict and its resolutions that I won’t recount here, but here is the important element from this conflict: science began to give a story about the creation and design of parts of the universe that did not require the existence of a God. In fact, these arguments started becoming so complete that there did not appear to be any necessary divine element in the creation of the universe and life on Earth at all. This created a problem for the belief that we can know God exists because we can see evidence of God in everything that exists since only God could have created everything we see. And if we want to prove God exists, we just have to show that we can only be here because God exists. Eventually, the debate about the necessity of God in describing how the universe came about reached a point of clarification on how to settle the conflict: if theories that explain the development of parts of the universe (like how evolution explain the development of humans) are unable to give a full accounting of how those elements came about, then the best explanation would be that God did, in fact, have a part in the design of those things. Thus, perhaps science can be used not to show God is unnecessary when illustrating how the universe came about, but that God is necessary in order to fully explain how it came about.

    Arguments from design are therefore generally aimed at proving (or illustrating that it is more likely than not) that God exists because there is evidence of design in all facets of existence, primarily life, and especially human life. There are two versions of the argument from design that attempt to do this and that I will focus on here:

    Biological Design Argument (BDA): There are theories that explain many natural processes, most notably the development of life, the earth, and the universe. To focus on evolution, there appear to be things that cannot be explained by the theory. There are aspects in the evolutionary processes of specific structures or organisms that can’t be explained. Evolutionary theory can fail to explain these things in at least two ways: by failing to explain how some structures could have developed in the relatively short time frame they developed in when the theory itself predicts it should have taken much longer; and the inability to explain how current structures could have evolved gradually from prior structures (that these structures are “irreducibly complex”). These “gaps” in our knowledge are there because the theory is incapable of explaining them. There is an alternate explanation for how these structures came about: they were created by an intelligent designer. Because there are serious problems with evolutionary theory, and there is a long history of religious belief and arguments to make existence and belief in a higher power not implausible, the best explanation for “evolutionary gaps” is that an intelligent designer bridged those gaps, and evolution is not an entirely “natural” scientifically explicable process. Therefore, the best explanation for how life evolved is that an intelligent designer facilitated it, and that intelligent designer is likely to be God.

    Fine-Tuning Argument: The perfectly balanced laws of physics, the elegance in the evolutionary processes at all levels, and the general beauty in the universe provide strong evidence that some grand architect designed the whole thing. The more we learn about these theories, the more we understand this designer. The level of complexity and the delicate, precise balance we observe is best explained by the presence of a designer, as the likelihood of any of this happening without a designer is much, much lower. This designer would be God, thus God exists as the most rational explanation for the finely tuned universe, especially given the other evidence and reasons for God’s existence.

    The fine-tuning argument has the serious problem that I am unsure how we will assign any appropriate probabilities to the likelihood that any of the finely tuned parts of our universe could be different than they are. As a result, I have no way of comparing the probability that universe came to exist as it does absent God with how the universe came to exist in the presence of God. As our knowledge is collectively limited in this regard, I do not want to spend further time on this fine-tuning argument. The BDA, however, presents an argument that is similar in structure to the fine-tuning argument but utilizes evidence that we can more directly examine. While we might not be able to travel back in time and observe the origins of the universe or observe a universe that contains different physical constants and laws of physics than our own, we can examine ourselves directly to understand the nature of our complexity. In a way, the BDA is a more focused version of the fine-tuning argument and one that we have more observations and knowledge about.

    To begin with analyzing the BDA, we should ask the following question: Are there natural occurrences that cannot, and will not, be explained by theories such as evolution? It is true that right now, we do not have a full and complete evolutionary picture of how humans came about. We don’t know every step along the way or even the order in which certain traits first appeared in Homo sapiens or our ancestors. We barely understand our very own cell development, and understand even less about how our brains create consciousness (if consciousness does, in fact, exist). There are gaps in our knowledge, both known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Specifically, there are gaps in the evolutionary record. With our current state of knowledge, can we say that these gaps will not be filled in and that we should adopt the BDA? To put it in a word: no. These gaps are known unknowns that don’t have an answer...yet.

    Our knowledge of evolution is in its infancy (it is a science less than 200-years-old, after all), so that claiming we have finished our analysis and have learned everything there is to know about evolution would be grossly incorrect. Thus if someone were to ask, “There are gaps in the evolutionary picture of how Homo sapiens evolved, correct? Will you ever be able to fill in these gaps?” The answer would have to be, “I don’t know,” and an evolutionary biologist would add, “But I believe eventually we will be able to.” There two famous examples where proponents of arguments from design have presented structures that are “irreducibly complex” because there was no complete evolutionary explanation for how they came about…at the time. After some time (arguably even at the time these examples were presented), evolutionary biologists offered explanations for them. These two mysterious structures are the eye and the bacterial flagellum (little hair-like structures on the outer wall of a bacterium).

    It turns out that eyes are extremely complex organic entities. They have over a hundred structural components that must work in perfect harmony in order to function as they do, and if any single component fails, the whole eye stops performing as we’d expect it to. If evolution says that things must evolve by slow steps, each one that is biologically more advantageous than the last one, then how could there have been something prior to the eye as we know it?

    There was, it was just hard to uncover exactly what came just before eyes as we know them. There is, right now, a reasonable picture of how an eye can evolve from simple photosensitive cells into the complex structure that it is today, including all the fun and complex molecules that are involved in registering different wavelengths of light. The eye, it now appears, is reducibly complex. There are intermediaries, and while we can never know if the eye took the path that has been described, it is at least possible for it to have reasonably evolved through the processes of natural selection as described by evolutionary theory.

    The bacterial flagellum, championed by biologist Michael Behe as evidence of intelligent design, is a bizarre little structure. It sits on the outer membrane of some bacteria and performs some oddly specific functions, mostly transporting certain molecules or elements into and out of the bacterial cell, which can aid in motility (the name for the type of chemical movement bacteria use). It was believed that the flagellum, like the eye, exhibited such complexity that there was no single aspect of it that could be removed and leave the bacteria with a structure that had any useful functions. It was irreducibly complex in a way that was more direct than the eye. However, prokaryotic (bacterial) experts were able to illustrate a reasonable path from basic structures to the final type of flagellum people like Behe were focusing on. Every step along the way performed some useful function for the bacteria, thus the flagellum was shown to be reducibly complex just like the eye. Blood clotting mechanisms (which have fascinating and complex molecular interactions) have also been offered as irreducibly complex but they have also been shown to be reducibly complex. These structures aren’t the only ones that have been offered as irreducibly complex and they won’t be the last ones. I suspect that any structure believed to be irreducibly complex at first will eventually be shown to be reducibly complex as well.

    Now, one might want to accuse me of presenting an unfalsifiable argument through my claim that there will always be an evolutionary explanation for any biological structure that has evolved, even if we haven’t found it yet. That all biological “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns,” every one of those gaps, will be filled in. While I do believe this is true, my belief could be misplaced. For example, if there comes a time when expert scientists all agree and say, “We’ve been at this for a while, and we don’t think there will be an answer for how the uvula (that dangling thing in the back of your throat) evolved to its precise shape. We’re stumped,” then some form of the BDA can swoop in and say, “I know why! Because it was designed!” When this might occur (if it ever does) is many years down the road. We have to learn a lot more and understand a lot more before we can reach this point. Thus, it is premature to present the BDA right now based on the assumption that scientists are done investigating evolution and have yielded all the results they will ever yield.

    The “known unknowns” with regard to evolution are not certain to remain this way and may merely be “unknowns we don’t currently know (or might not be able to know)” and not “unknowns that have no explanation.” Even if is shown to be likely that there are gaps in our knowledge that can’t be filled in, there are still further steps to the argument to arrive at conclusions that some would like to draw from it. If the BDA is correct, then all it can show is that parts of the universe were designed, but we would not then be allowed to conclude that the designer of such things is intelligent, rather than merely an accidental designer, without having other evidence to confirm it. We’d need even more evidence to show that such a designer is still in existence and yet more evidence to show that such a designer is worthy of any other traits often ascribed to it (or that this designer is God). These issues are quite separate from any arguments from design.

    Even if all arguments from design fail, there is still something important that can come from the universe being fully explicable. Science, logic, evidence, etc., can never disprove God’s existence; they can just show the evidence for God’s existence is lacking. Fully describing how the universe and life developed might potentially illustrate just how amazing God actually is. Uncovering every biochemical path, every law of quantum physics, does not explain the need for a God in any way, but rather could be used as evidence to show the elegance of God’s design. Albert Einstein famously believed something similar to this. This type of argument is not falsifiable and we cannot prove anything for or against God with this line of reasoning. I make no claims as to the veracity of these forms of argument and associated beliefs, and spending more time on these will not help us in understanding what a general argument from design is intended to do: use observational evidence and scientific theories to prove that God exists (not merely show how cool existence is). But, it is important to recognize that nothing is lost if arguments from design fail.

    At its absolute best, arguments from design can provide some evidence that can be used to further an argument that at some point an intelligent designer existed, but they cannot, on their own, prove that an intelligent God currently exists, nor can they provide any evidence toward any specific conceptions of such a being or religion based upon its existence. For the arguments to succeed, evolutionary theories will need to advance to the point they give as complete of a picture as they can give. When they reach this point, if there are still “known unknowns” that lack explanation, then arguments from design will have a lot more force behind their claims. Until scientists arrive at that conclusion, arguments from design are premature and thus not worthy of further consideration.

    For Review and Discussion

    1. What are the different types of arguments from design. Are some more powerful than others?

    2. Is there anything that you can think of that lacks a clear naturalistic explanation? What does your view on this say about the existence of God?

    3. The author argues that arguments from design are not worth pursuing further at the current time. Do you think he is correct?


    This page titled 2.7: Criticisms of the Argument from Design (Noah Levin) is shared under a CC BY 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Noah Levin (NGE Far Press) .

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