Topics Religion

Question Did teleological arguments give us reasonable grounds to believe in a Creator before Darwin?

Accepted:
March 1, 2007

Comments

The issue of what's to count as 'reaonsable' is a fascinating one, indeed. Part of the answer depends upon whether what one thinks is reasonable is in some sense transhistorical or whether it changes over time as people develop different norms of rationality. There's a larger than many realize contingent number of philosophers even today who think telelogical arguments reasonable.

But your question is about how things stood before Darwin. In my own view, whether you think norms or rationality transhistorical or not, David Hume's argument's against the teleological argument in Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779; first composed in the 1750s) were decisive nearly a century before Darwin. Since, Hume I don't think one really can regard the telelogical argument as reasonable.

I'd certainly agree that the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion ought to be the starting point. I sha'n't try to summarise Hume's arguments here, for he could surely express them far better than I could myself: the full text is freely available online, with only the most elementary of searches. In my opinion, this book constitutes one of the most powerful philosophical polemics ever written on any issue at all, and it really does need to be read by everyone who has any interest in the issue of intelligent design, both those who support it and those who oppose it. And yet my impression is that pitifully few on either side have ever really looked at it at all. The proponents of intelligent design so often portray Darwin as the great enemy, to be refuted at all costs; but, equally, its opponents portray Darwin as the prime source of salvation against what they regard as creationist mumbo-jumbo. But Darwin's work only ever touched on a tiny aspect of the universe, namely the living organisms contained therein -- there's a lot more to the universe than that! If one looks back at the earlier versions of the teleological argument, those that were presented before both Darwin and Hume, one finds that they would often allude to things like, for instance, the apparent organisation of the celestial bodies, just as much as they would root themselves in biological adaptation. (Several examples of this kind of approach are to be found in the texts of the 'Boyle Lectures' that were delivered annually -- by high-brow scientists, no less -- in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries). Some modern supporters of the teleological argument do indeed still adopt this course: and wisely so, because, no matter how much support can be provided for Darwinianism, it's going to have no effect whatsoever in countering this version of the argument. But Hume's arguments were not only presented earlier than Darwin's: they approach the issue from an entirely different direction, striking directly at the logical structure of the argument itself, and not merely at the evidence upon which it is based.

Now, I do not mean to suggest that Hume was necessarily successful in conclusively refuting the teleological argument beyond all repair. There are (as always, with these things) places where one can pick holes in his arguments, and there are counter-objections that can be raised against his own objections to the teleological argument itself. So the debate can certainly still continue. But Darwin is just a distraction from the real debate, the one that gets properly to the heart of the matter. The debate ought to be between the intelligent design theorists and the Humeans, not between the former and the Darwinians.

I agree with the posts above on the decisiveness of Hume's criticisms of the teleological argument in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, but thought I'd add one point on the other side. In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins suggests that he "could not imagine being an atheist" before Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859. Dawkins suggests that "although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." Dawkins argues that "what Hume did was criticize the logic of using apparent design in nature as positive evidence for the existence of a God. He did not offer an alternative explanation for apparent design, but left the question open." It was only with Darwin that a plausible alternative explanation was provided.

Question Did teleological arguments give us reasonable grounds to believe in a Creator before Darwin? Accepted:March 1, 2007

Question Did teleological arguments give us reasonable grounds to believe in a Creator before Darwin?

Accepted:
March 1, 2007