From: exukjb@exu.ericsson.se (ken bell)
Newsgroups: alt.atheism
Subject: Re: The Teleological argument
Date: 15 Oct 92 15:15:00 GMT
Organization: Ericsson Network Systems, Inc.
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In article <Bw5FJv.15G@umassd.edu> rolls@cis.umassd.edu (Frank Pinto) writes:
>From: rolls@cis.umassd.edu (Frank Pinto)
>Subject: The Teleological argument
>Date: 15 Oct 92 06:04:40 GMT

>Ay one have any comment on this argument?

>Frank

Most versions of it, while they continue to be made to order for
popular preachers and even some serious theologians, can easily
be shown to lack cogency. Hume and Kant demolished them; and with
the rise of evolutionary theory in the 19th century, alternative
ways of accounting for teleological systems in nature have
greatly reduced the argument's plausibility.

Main objections to it are:

1. Teleological explanations cannot exclude the possibility of
   alternative scientific explanations of the world's order and
   design.

2. Just because something has a marvelous and complex pattern,
   and thus seems the product of intelligent design, is no
   proof--even inductively--that it is. Consider: 

   (a)  The incredibly complex and wonderous patterns in the
	snowflake or the crystal appear to be designed, yet 
	we know that the snowflake's pattern is the result of 
	the action of temperature on water vapor; those of the 
	crystal, to the supersaturation of certain salts.

    (b) The complexity of living organisms appear to be the
	result of intelligent design, yet there are theories
	which, at least in the opinion of many biologists,
	are capable of explaining these structures without
	introducing the concepts of design, purpose, or intel-
	ligence at all [e.g., natural selection, mutuation, etc]

3.  The intellectual problem which teleological explanations of the
    world's order and design are intended to solve is How do we
    account for the order--and in later refinements of teleological
    reasoning, such as those by R.F Tennant--and the intelligibility
    of that order by the human mind? But the difficulty here is that
    we don't know how to decide whether order must be present in the
    world in order for it to be intelligible to human minds, or whether 
    any world in which minds like our own could emerge would impose
    significance upon it. [Does the world's order make it intelligible
    to mind or does mind make order and hence intelligibility out of
    the world? Very difficult question.] 

4.  Dave Hume pointed out that any world capable of supporting life
    would have to have some order to it. There couldn't, e.g., be
    birds that grew wings but, like fish, were unable to fly. So
    any environment in which life could emerge and persist would of
    necessity have to be organised [i.e., ordered] a bit. 

5.  The Design Argument also doesn't rule out the possibility--and it
    cannot do so without beginning the question--that the world has
    no temporal beginning. As Hume suggested, the DA gives us no reason 
    to think the something like Epicurus' theory is untrue: the world
    has existed from eternity in one form or another as a collection
    of swirling atoms in the void. Given an infinite time these atoms
    would go through every arrangement possible to them. If one of these
    arrangement happens to constitute a stable world order that can support
    life, that may well be the universe we live in.

[Note: Objection 5 here is, I think, quite sufficient to rule out one
very popular version of the DA.  According to it, the intrinsic probability  
of a world like ours happening by pure accident or chance, "a fortuitious
collocation of atoms" in Russell's words, is very close to 0. The 
improbability is variously calculated--10 to the 257th power I think is the
last figure I saw in a recent article.  The trouble is, all such 
calculations of probability rest on the assumption that the world's 
existence is finite in time.]

There, that should hold you for a while. I have not tried to do justice
to Hume or Kant here, nor is completeness claimed for the list of objections,
but these are among the most serious and damaging ones, to my mind.
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