Posted on 12/04/2005 12:42:42 PM PST by Tribune7
Didn't David Hume demolish not just the design argument for the existence of God but any sort of inference to design based on features of the natural world?
David Hume's critique of intelligent design is vastly overrated. Nevertheless, his critique, especially at the hands of his contemporary disciples, has been highly effective at shutting down discussion about design. I want here to review Hume's critique, indicate how modern disciples have updated it, and then describe the response to Hume by his contemporary Thomas Reid. That response in my view is decisive. Would that more philosophers studied it. Hume did not demolish design. Reid demolished Hume.
(Excerpt) Read more at denistn.mine.nu ...
Even so, there is a way to strengthen the argument from analogy, and that is by arguing that the features shared by the items in question have never in our experience been divorced from the feature in question. Suppose the items in question are watches and organisms and that the feature in question is design. If it could be shown that features shared by watches and organisms like functional interdependence of parts, adaptation of means to ends, and self-propulsion have in our experience always resulted from the work of a designing intelligence, then it would be reasonable, as an inductive generalization, to conclude that organisms, like watches, are designed. Schematically the argument would look as follows (P1-P3 are the premises, C is the conclusion):
P1 Watches are designed.
P2 Watches and organisms exhibit functional interdependence of parts, adaptation of means to ends, etc.
P3 There is no known instance where something exhibits functional interdependence of parts, adaptation of means to ends, etc. without being designed.
C Therefore, organisms are designed as well.
Although reframing the design argument as an inductive generalization turns it into a valid argument from analogy, reframing it this way runs smack into Hume's second objection. Hume and the Humean tradition reject such inductive generalizations. The problem is that inductive generalizations are supposed to be based on past experience. And while we have past experience of watches being designed, Hume would claim that we have no experience of organisms, or for that matter a universe, being designed. Hume's modern disciples agree. Robert Pennock, for instance, will remark that design inferences must be "based upon known types of causal processes"
(snip)
And for Pennock, as for fellow Humeans generally, if it can't be known scientifically, then it can't be known at all (Hume, after all, consigned metaphysics to the flames).
(snip)
All of these restrictions on inferring design are, of course, very convenient for keeping designers unacceptable to naturalism at bay. Indeed, there's no way for a transcendent designer to get a foot in the door once one accepts this Humean inductive framework for design reasoning. But why should one accept this framework in the first place? It seems on its face an exercise in special pleading.
(snip)
Consider a more extreme example still. Imagine a device that outputs 0s and 1s for which our best science tells us that the bits are independent and identically distributed with uniform probability. (The device is therefore an idealized coin tossing machine; note that quantum mechanics offers such a device in the form of photons shot at a polaroid filter whose angle of polarization is 45 degrees in relation to the polarization of the photons--half the photons will go through the filter, counting as a "1"; the others will not, counting as a "0.") Now, what happens if we control for all possible physical interference with this device, and nevertheless the bit string that this device outputs yields an English text-file in ASCII code that resolves outstanding mathematical problems, explains the cure for cancer, and delineates undreamt of technologies? The output of this device is therefore not only designed (and obviously so) but also exceeds all current human design. Yet our best science has no way of prescribing a causal account for how this design was imparted. By Hume's logic, we would have to shrug our shoulders and say, "Golly, isn't nature amazing!"
(snip)
Our ability to recognize design must therefore arise independently of induction and therefore independently of a Humean inductive framework.
That was precisely Thomas Reid's point, and in making it he demolished once and for all Humean induction as applied to design. In 1780, only a year following the publication of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Selection, Reid delivered a set of lectures on natural theology in Glasgow. In those lectures he remarked: No man ever saw wisdom [read "design" or "intelligence"], and if he does not [infer wisdom] from the marks of it, he can form no conclusions respecting anything of his fellow creature. How should I know that any of this audience have understanding? It is only by the effects of it on their conduct and behavior, and this leads me to suppose that such behavior proceeds only from understanding. But says Hume, unless you know it by experience, you know nothing of it. If this is the case, I never could know it at all. Hence it appears that whoever maintains that there is no force in the argument from final causes [design], denies the existence of any intelligent being but himself. He has the same evidence for wisdom and intelligence in God as in a father or brother or a friend. He infers it in both from its effects and these effects he discovers in the one as well as the other.... From marks of wisdom and intelligence in effects, a wise and intelligent cause may be inferred. (Reprinted in Lectures on Natural Theology, University Press of America, 1981.)
Neither of Hume's two main criticisms against design therefore holds up. Induction is entirely the wrong analytic framework for how we infer design. And Hume's concern about design inferences involving faulty analogies is misconceived. The signs of intelligence that occur in human artifacts and biological systems are not merely analogous. They are isomorphic, for we find the exact same form of specified complexity in each.
Read Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason".
He made the same argument that a few of us on FR have been making. There's never been much of a satisfactory response to it, just a lot of semantic dancing.
...in addition to shouting, ridiculing and labeling.
Archival ping.
YEC/ID SPOTREP
Thanks for the ping!
Archived.
I thought this was going to be a post about Fox News Sunday, Brit Hume, and Harry Reid...
LOL :-)
If the complexity of the universe or of phenomenon therein requires recourse, explanitorily, to an intelligent designer, i.e., to God, then so does the complexity of an entity complex enough to design the universe. So I guess Super-God designed God. And Super-Super-God designed Super-God. Etc. So we have really explained nothing.
But now ID proponents will come up with an argument that God is somehow a self-creating and/or self-sustaining entity that always existed. God, in this view, doesn't require a causal explanation. But if that's the case, then it leaves one to wonder why the natural universe as a whole requires a causal explanation.
The universe is the sum total of everything that exists; it requires no causal explanation, nor can it have a causal explanation, because there's nothing else around out of which the universe can emerge. That's because, again, the universe is everything. (That's why we call it the universe, as opposed to particular things, like cars or Philadelphia or instances of plant and animal life.) It is the universe, and only the universe, that does not require a causal explanation. It's just there, and it always was there and always will be there.
Explanation has to end somewhere, and our only choice is whether to end it with the natural facts that lie before us, or whether to build an vicious infinate regress of endless supernatural worlds purporting to support the natural world, which later does not need any support, because the rock-bottom fact is that the universe is just there, period, end of story.
And that's all I have to say about that.
Flame on.
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Just so you're aware, you're making a philosophical argument, not a scientific one.
Just so you're aware, you're making a philosophical argument, not a scientific one.
And, the argument that "an intelligent designer" exists is...?
Me,too!!
Oh, but we have, namely the limit of human understanding. You can either admit to it, truthfully, or pretend it doesn't exist.
bump
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