Faces in the Sky: The Anthropic Principle Design Argument

Of all of the arguments for the existence of God, perhaps the best known and best understood is the Argument from Design, or Teleological Argument. This venerable line of reasoning claims we can know there is a God because the natural world-and, in particular, the living world-is too complex to have come about by pure chance. Rather, so the argument claims, it must be the product of a designing intelligence, meaning, of course, God. The argument's area and era of greatest influence was Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Hick 1). The most commonly quoted expositor of the argument is the clergyman-naturalist William Paley, whose analogy between a watch and a living organism is among the best-known examples in the history of philosophy. To paraphrase Paley, if we find a rock in the wilderness, no explanation involving purpose is required. The rock could be of any size, shape, or composition. It can be explained entirely in terms of the natural laws of science. But if we find a watch, the matter is very different: only an explanation in terms of the intentions of a conscious entity will serve. The difference is in what Paley says we observe about the watch: that the various parts and structures of the watch are all designed and constructed so as to achieve the objective of keeping time. Now, adaptation of form to function is even more conspicuous in living organisms than in artifacts. So, the argument concludes, a Supreme Author of Nature must have designed living organisms with the intention of promoting their survival. This argument in its traditional form has lost much of its popularity because the discoveries of science have so often explained naturalistically what was formerly thought to require divine providence. Nor has the design argument fared well at the hands of philosophy in recent centuries. As is well known, the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) criticized it keenly even before the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who complimented it while refuting it. It is therefore interesting to notice that the design argument in a new and revitalized form is alive and well in the intellectual life of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The Anthropic Principle Design Argument (APDA) has emerged in recent years as a new variation on this theme. This time, the supposedly unexplainable phenomena are a large number of very general natural laws and constants, from the boiling point of water to the mass of the neutrino, which are said to be "fine-tuned" for the needs of living organisms. Natural laws and constants are claimed to be so precisely adapted for life that organisms could not exist if they were even very slightly different. For example, the physicist Paul Davies says, "[There is] impressive evidence that life as we know it depends very sensitively on the form of the laws of physics, and on some seemingly fortuitous accidents in the actual values that nature has chosen for various particle masses, force strengths, and so on" (199). Davies, however, does not make so confident claims as some others do about establishing a Designer. These values, in other words, appear to be "accidents" in that they are not logically necessary consequences of more fundamental laws, and therefore are not derivable from them. In other words, these laws and constants could just as easily have been other than as they are. Therefore, the fact that they have precisely the values needed for life indicates that they were deliberately chosen-by God. I have previously criticized the APDA on the grounds that it presupposes that the laws of the universe could have been different, while simultaneously assuming that they must remain the same (Fulmer, "Fatal Flaw"). Here, however, I argue that this new design argument is logically incoherent because its proponents repeatedly commit the logical fallacy of circularity. That is, they assume the desired conclusion of the argument as a premise to establish that very same conclusion. …