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Eighteen SCIENCE and NATURE WITHOUT Eighteen SCIENCE AND NATURE WITHOUT GOD Kevin S. Decker 1. Introduction The Fifth Way of St. Thomas Aquinas is an example of an argument toward the existence (and to a certain extent, the nature) of God from apparent design in nature. As an a posteriori argument, it begins with certain types of observations of the world, observations that can be distinguished by saying that “artifacts are objects made by intelligent agents; organisms—most of them, at least—owe their construction to no agent” (Lewens 2004). Natural theology’s approach to this distinction and design arguments, if successful, have the surprising result that the universe and everything in it are artifacts—and thus the artifact/organism distinction collapses. Naturalistic strategies, relying as they usually do upon the theory of natural selection by adaptation, have the equally interesting result that everything we know about artifacts and their intelligent designers can be explained in terms of complex functions of organisms. The Fifth Way argument hinges on an empirical generalization about things that “lack knowledge” (plants and animals) that nonetheless often act “so as to obtain the best result.” This generalization was first set down, so far as we know, by the fifth century BCE thinker Empedocles of Acragas, who claimed, in the observation of Aristotle, that: Wherever, then, everything turned out as it would have if it were happening for a purpose, there the creatures survived, being accidentally compounded in a suitable way; but where this did not happen, the creatures perished and are perishing still. (Kirk 1983) Tracing the history of such design arguments, Barrow and Tipler (1986) consider that the inclusion of the element of divine creation as the cause of teleological functioning should lead us to think that there must be a difference between older teleological and more recent “eutaxiological” arguments in explanations of nature. They write that teleological arguments (in Aristotle, Stoicism) “argue that because of the laws of causality order must have a consequent purpose,” while eutaxiological claims “argue that order must have a cause, which is planned. Whereas teleological arguments were based upon the notion that things were constructed for either our immediate benefit or some ultimate end, the eutaxiological arguments point just to their co-present, harmonious composition” (Barrow 1986, 29). Perhaps the most famous design 228 KEVIN S. DECKER or eutaxiological argument is that of William Paley in Natural Theology (1802). “Many find this evidential approach more persuasive than the ontological or cosmological arguments,” to quote one summary, “[since] it appeals to concrete instances of order common to our experience, so that few are inclined to dispute the premises” (Garcia 1997, 339). Both Aquinas’ Fifth Way and contemporary intelligent design arguments rest on the two premises that distinguish this type of argument from teleological appeals, namely: P1: Nature exhibits many striking examples of harmony, order, and/or complexity; P2: The precise purpose or function of this harmony, order, and/or complexity may not be immediately intelligible to us. Design arguments share with teleological arguments the conclusion that the most likely explanation for the existence of apparent purpose, harmony, order and/or complexity is the existence of a creative or designing intelligence. Current versions of the design argument reinforce the flexibility of applying P2, as Garcia points out, by avoiding the analogical reasoning favored by Paley and criticized by Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). Currently, eutaxiological arguments appeal “not only to the remarkable interrelationships between aspects of the environment and the functioning of living organisms, but to the wonderful simplicity and universality of the laws of Nature that governed the motions of the Earth and the planetary bodies” (Barrow 1995, 18). According to F. R. Tennant in his two-volume Philosophical Theology (1930), there are six distinct ways in which the apparent design of nature manifests itself. I will not argue for or against any of these, but instead arrange them into two useful groups: teleological and eutaxiological adaptations: Eutaxiological (adaptations display seemingly harmonious composition): 1. The intelligibility of the world to the human mind. 2. The adaptation of living organisms to their environment. 3. The beauty of nature. Teleological (adaptations seem to have a consequent purpose): 4. The ways in which the organic world is conducive to the emergence and maintenance of human and animal life. 5. The ways in which the world is conducive to the moral development of human beings. 6. The overall progressiveness of the evolutionary process. (Martin 1990) Tennant claims that adaptation types 1 through 5 can be treated naturalistically, but 6 is quite different, for “when [the first five] are taken as a whole they indicate a cosmic purpose that has used nature for the making and development .
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