Review of the 36 Arguments for the Existence of God # 3

[Pastor Jennifer v2]

3. The Argument from Design
( thx to R Goldstein - paraphrased as necessary)

A. The Classical Teleological Argument
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1. Whenever there are things that cohere only because of a purpose or
function (for example, all the complicated parts of a watch that allow
it to keep time), we know that they had a designer who designed them
with the function in mind; they are too improbable to have arisen by
random physical processes. (A hurricane blowing through a hardware
store could not assemble a watch.)
2. Organs of living things, such as the eye and the heart, cohere only
because they have a function (for example, the eye has a cornea, lens,
retina, iris, eyelids, and so on, which are found in the same organ
only because together they make it possible for the animal to see).
3. These organs must have a designer who designed them with their
function in mind: just as a watch implies a watchmaker, an eye implies
an eye-maker (from 1 and 2).
4. These things have not had a human designer.
5. Therefore, these things must have had a non-human designer (from 3
and 4).
6. God is the non-human designer (from 5).
7. God exists.

FLAW:
Darwin showed how the process of replication could give rise to the
illusion of design without the foresight of an actual designer.
Replicators make copies of themselves, which make copies of
themselves, and so on, giving rise to an exponential number of
descendants. In any finite environment, the replicators must compete
for the energy and materials necessary for replication. Since no
copying process is perfect, errors will eventually crop up, and any
error that causes a replicator to reproduce more efficiently than its
competitors will result in the predominance of that line of
replicators in the population. After many generations, the dominant
replicators will appear to have been designed for effective
replication, whereas all they have done is accumulate the copying
errors, which in the past did lead to effective replication. The
fallacy in the argument, then, is Premise 1 (and, as a consequence,
Premise 3, which depends on it): parts of a complex object serving a
complex function do not, in fact, require a designer. In the twenty-
first century, creationists have tried to revive the Teleological
Argument in three forms:

B. The Argument for Irreducible Complexity:
-----------------------------------------------------------

1. Evolution has no foresight, and every incremental step must be an
improvement over the preceding one, allowing the organism to survive
and reproduce better than its competitors.
2. In many complex organs, the removal or modification of any part
would destroy the functional whole. Examples are the lens and retina
of the eye, the molecular components of blood clotting, and the
molecular motor powering the cell’s flagellum. Call these organs
“irreducibly complex.”
3. These organs could not have been useful to the organisms that
possessed them in any simpler forms (from 2).
4. The theory of natural selection cannot explain these irreducibly
complex systems (from 1 and 3).
5. Natural selection is the only way out of the conclusions of The
Classical Teleological Argument.
6. God exists (from 4 and 5 and The Classical Teleological Argument).

This argument has been around since the time of Charles Darwin, and
his replies to it still hold.

FLAW 1:

For many organs, Premise 2 is false. An eye without a lens can still
see, just not as well as an eye with a lens.

FLAW 2:

For many other organs, removal of a part, or other alterations, may
render it useless for its current function, but the organ could have
been useful to the organism for some other function. Insect wings,
before they were large enough to be effective for flight, were used as
heat-exchange panels. This is also true for most of the molecular
mechanisms, such as
the flagellum motor, invoked in The New Argument from Irreducible
Complexity.

FLAW 3

the Fallacy of Arguing from Ignorance): There may be biological
systems for which we don’t yet know how they may have been useful in
simpler versions. But there are obviously many things we don’t yet
understand in molecular biology, and, given the huge success that
biologists have achieved in explaining so many examples of incremental
evolution in other biological systems, it is more reasonable to infer
that these gaps will eventually be filled by the day-to-day progress
of biology than to invoke a supernatural designer just to explain
these temporary puzzles.

COMMENT:

This last flaw can be seen as one particular instance of the more
general, fallacious Argument from Ignorance:
1. There are things that we cannot explain yet.
2.Those things must be attributed to God.

FLAW:

Premise 1 is obviously true. If there weren’t things that we could not
explain yet, then science would be complete, laboratories and
observatories would unplug their computers and convert to
condominiums, and all departments of science would be converted to
departments of the history of science. Science is only in business
because there are things we have not explained yet. So we cannot infer
from the existence of genuine, ongoing science that there must be a
God. In other words, Premise 2 does not follow from Premise 1.

C. The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

1. Evolution is powered by random mutations and natural selection.
2.Organisms are complex, improbable systems, and by the laws of
probability any change is astronomically more likely to be for the
worse than for the better.
3. The majority of mutations would be deadly for the organism (from
2).
4. The amount of time it would take for all the benign mutations
needed for the assembly of an organ to appear by chance is
preposterously long (from 3).
5. In order for evolution to work, something outside of evolution had
to bias the process of mutation, increasing the number of benign ones
(from 4).
6. Something outside of the mechanism of biological change—the Prime
Mutator—must bias the process of mutations for evolution to work (from
5).
7. The only entity that is both powerful enough and purposeful enough
to be the Prime Mutator is God.
8. God exists.

FLAW:

Evolution does not require infinitesimally improbable mutations, such
as a fully formed eye appearing out of the blue in a single
generation, because (a) mutations can have small effects (tissue that
is slightly more transparent, or cells that are slightly more
sensitive to light), and mutations contributing to these effects can
accumulate over time; (b) for any sexually reproducing organism, the
necessary mutations do not have to have occurred one after another in
a single line of descendants, but could have appeared independently in
thousands of separate organisms, each mutating at random, and the
necessary combinations could come together as the organisms have mated
and exchanged genes; (c) life on Earth has had a vast amount of time
to accumulate the necessary mutations (almost four billion years).

D. The Argument from the Original Replicator
-------------------------------------------------------------

1. Evolution is the process by which an organism evolves from simpler
ancestors.
2.  Evolution by itself cannot explain how the original ancestor—the
first living thing—came into existence (from 1).
3. The theory of natural selection can deal with this problem only by
saying that the first living thing evolved out of non-living matter
(from 2)
4. That original non-living matter (call it the Original Replicator)
must be capable of (a) self-replication, (b) generating a functioning
mechanism out of surrounding matter to protect itself against falling
apart, and (c) surviving slight mutations to itself that will then
result in slightly different replicators.
5. The Original Replicator is complex (from 4).
6. The Original Replicator is too complex to have arisen from purely
physical processes (from 5 and The Classical Teleological Argument).
For example, DNA, which currently carries the replicated design of
organisms, cannot be the Original Replicator, because DNA molecules
require a complex system of proteins to remain stable and to
replicate, and could not have arisen from natural processes before
complex life existed.
7. Natural selection cannot explain the complexity of the Original
Replicator (from 3 and 6).
8. The Original Replicator must have been created rather than have
evolved (from 7 and The Classical Teleological Argument).
9. Anything that was created requires a Creator.
10. God exists.

FLAW 1:

Premise 6 states that a replicator, because of its complexity, cannot
have arisen from natural processes, i.e., by way of natural selection.
But the mathematician John von Neumann proved in the 1950s that it is
theoretically possible for a simple physical system to make exact
copies of itself from surrounding materials. Since then, biologists
and chemists have identified a number of naturally occurring molecules
and crystals that can replicate in ways that could lead to natural
selection (in particular, that allow random variations to be preserved
in the copies). Once a molecule replicates, the process of natural
selection can kick in, and the replicator can accumulate matter and
become more complex, eventually leading to precursors of the
replication system used by living organisms today.

FLAW 2:

Even without von Neumann’s work (which not everyone accepts as
conclusive), to conclude the existence of God from our not yet knowing
how to explain the Original Replicator is to rely on The Argument from
Ignorance.

[Brock]

On Feb 23, 10:18 am, Pastor Jennifer v2

<jennifer.s.jo...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> 3. The Argument from Design
> ( thx to R Goldstein - paraphrased as necessary)

Again, as previously shown in the context of the ontological argument,
which is not merely one specific argument, but a general category of
arguments. So here, "The argument from design" represents another
oversimplification:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleological_argument

Another interesting note is "paraphrased as necessary". As evidenced
on this forum, one rebuts a "paraphrased" argument instead of an
actual argument at great peril. Some posters have shown a lack of
ability to adequately paraphrase their OP, while others have shown
great propensity for explicit misrepresentation.

Regards,

Brock

[Herbie]

Our only notions of design are of human design which is a process of
iterative improvement, arguably always inspired by existing materials
and processes (if anything mimicing the process of evolution). The
'design' of the argument is clearly not this but what it is remains
undefined.

A quality, such as design, may only be recognised in contrast to its
absence. The watch on the beach is recognised as designed (even by
those unfamiliar with watches) in contrast to the sand on which it
sits. However the design argument would imply that the sand is also
designed. If everything is designed then design has no recognisable
qualities to distinguish it from the non-designed.