God Is Not an Intelligent Designer

God Is Not an Intelligent Designer

Kent Dunnington

Greenville College, Illinois

February 2008

There is a story of a pastor who was walking home from church and saw a man hoeing his yard. “That’s a fine garden you have there, sir,” said the pastor. “I’ve put a lot of work into it,” responded the gardener. “It’s God you should be thanking,” said the sanctimonious pastor. The gardener replied, “You should have seen it when he had it to himself.”[1]

I hope that we have not grown too pious to appreciate the gardener’s response, for what I wish to contend in this short space is that we draw nearer to the truth of God by frankly admitting that this world is not the sort of world that we would have designed were we in charge, rather than by pretending that the world evinces an “intelligence” that resonates with our own. It should be plain that my target is the so-called Design Argument for the existence of God, and my contention is that such arguments are more likely to produce idolatry than knowledge of God. Such arguments fail to be theologically faithful to the extent that they incline us to think of God as a being like us, only bigger, rather than helping us to acknowledge the “infinite qualitative distinction”—to use Kierkegaard’s famous phrase—between ourselves and God.

The paper unfolds in four sections. First, I lay out what is widely considered the most persuasive form of the Intelligent Design argument, the so-called Fine Tuning argument. Second, I briefly raise what I take to be philosophical weaknesses in the argument. However, my central interest in the paper is theological, and so, third, I argue that even if the Fine Tuning argument were philosophically convincing, it would nevertheless be theologically disastrous. Finally, I offer some thoughts on the apologetic uses of the various arguments from design.

1. The Fine Tuning Design Argument

The “argument from design” is commonly attributed to William Paley, who in his book Natural Theology, published in 1802, suggested that God’s relationship to the world is analogous to that of a watchmaker to a watch.[2] Imagine, Paley asked, that you are walking along a beach and you spot a watch in the sand. Upon inspection, you are convinced that the watch could not have materialized on the beach by mere chance: it is far too complex for such an explanation to be plausible. You determine that the watch must have had a designer, even though the designer is nowhere to be seen. Similarly, Paley argued, when confronted with the exquisite order of the natural world, it is not plausible to infer that such order is the product of chance. The world must also have a designer, even though the designer can nowhere be seen.

The design argument, which fell on hard times with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859, has experienced a revival in recent years and has been reformulated in more sophisticated and substantive ways. The basic form of Paley’s argument remains, but a cadre of “theistic” scientists and philosophers have sought to substantiate Paley’s assertion that the world exhibits an ordered complexity that cries out for explanation in terms of a “designer.” Today, the most well-regarded formulation of the argument is known as the Fine Tuning Design Argument. Indeed, one of its leading proponents, Robin Collins, claims that the Fine Tuning Design argument is “widely regarded as offering by far the most persuasive current argument for the existence of God.”[3] Collins’s presentation of the argument displays a strong similarity to Paley’s. Imagine, Collins asks, that you went on a mission to Mars and found a domed structure in which everything was set up just right for life to exist. Would it be plausible to infer that the dome just happened to form by chance? Of course not! Instead, you would conclude that it was designed by some intelligent being. The universe in which we live, continues Collins, is analogous to such a domed structure, for recent findings in physics have shown that “almost everything about the basic structure of the universe—for example, the fundamental laws and parameters of physics and the initial distribution of matter and energy—is balanced on a razor’s edge for life to occur.”[4] Therefore, although it may not be necessary to postulate supernatural “intervention” in order to explain specific features of anything in the universe (e.g. the complexity of certain organisms), we must postulate some supernatural designer if we are to have a plausible explanation for why natural laws are so precisely-tuned as to permit the kinds of complexity that are essential to the development of life.

2. Philosophical flaws

What are we to make of the Fine Tuning Design Argument philosophically? A number of objections have been raised in the literature. Some of them are inane, such as the objection that if natural laws were not fine-tuned we wouldn’t be here to comment on the fact, or the simplistic objection, “If God designed the universe then who designed God?” A stronger and more frequent objection points out that, by the definition of a “universe,” we are prevented from knowing whether there are more universes than one. If there may be many, or even an infinite number of universes, then it would not be implausible to suppose that one or even several of those universes would have happened by chance to have natural laws conducive to the appearance of life.

Rather than focus on any of these objections, I wish instead to draw attention to a philosophical weakness in the Fine Tuning Design Argument (and indeed in all arguments from design) that will raise questions for a theological critique. Collins’s Fine Tuning argument is stated in premise/conclusion form as follows:

(1) The existence of fine tuning is not improbable under theism.

(2) The existence of fine tuning is very improbable under atheism.

(3) So, from (1) and (2) it follows that the fine tuning data provide strong

evidence to favor the design hypothesis over the atheistic hypothesis.[5]

The assumption implied by premise (1) is that we could be in a position to assess the probability of God acting one way rather than another. Collins seems to take such an assumption to be unproblematic, offering support for premise (1) as follows: “since God is an all good being, and it is good for intelligent, conscious beings to exist, it is not surprising or improbable that God would create a world that could support intelligent life.”[6] Such an assumption is necessary for the argument to succeed, for if we could not assess the odds of God acting one way rather than another, the existence of a fine-tuned universe would offer no more or no less justification for belief in God than would the existence of a non-fine-tuned universe. But is the assumption justified? It is hard to see how it could be.

On standard methods of assessing the odds of how some individual will act, at least one of two conditions must be met in order to get assessment off the ground. Either we must have data regarding the previous activity of the individual in question, or we must have data regarding the activity of other individuals of the same kind as the individual in question. For example, if we want to assess the odds of whether or not my dog Nina will dive into a five-foot deep pool of water to fetch a bone off the bottom, we must either possess data about Nina’s previous engagements with bones and deep water or we must possess data about other dogs’ previous engagements with bones and deep water. Of course, the former sort of data will produce greater accuracy than the latter, and in the latter class of data we should prefer data from dogs that are similar in important respects to Nina over data from dogs that are very different in terms of temperament and physical ability.[7]

Obviously, we lack the first sort of data with respect to the question of what kind of universe God would create because we lack access to any activity of God’s that could be considered activity other than God’s creation of this universe (God’s “sustaining” of the universe is but God’s continual creation thereof). Given the absence of this first sort of data, the viability of the argument from design depends upon whether we have access to the second sort of data. Do we have data about some other individual or set of individuals that are of the same kind as God? To employ the standard type/token distinction, is there some type of thing, of which God is one token among others, and about which we possess data that would allow us to predict the odds that any given token of that type of thing would create a fine-tuned universe rather than a non-fine-tuned universe? The intelligent design theorist must contend that there is such a class of individuals, namely the class of beings capable of intelligently designing things—i.e., capable of “thoughtful conceptualization and actualization”[8] of artifacts—and that God is a member of this class. In other words, Intelligent Design assumes that God is a member of our class.

It is a serious weakness of the design arguments generally that such an assumption is never defended. The design argument is rarely, if ever, accompanied by a defense of the assumption that the categories of “intelligence” or “goodness” can be straightforwardly applied to God. At the very least, we need some sense of how such predication is to be rightly controlled, perhaps by something like a “doctrine of analogy.” Moreover, even if Intelligent Design were to successfully demonstrate that the physical world evidences “intelligence,” it is not apparent why such intelligence should be thought to correlate with moral goodness. It may be, for example, that Intelligent Design provides a better argument for the existence of a Cartesian “evil genius” than for the existence of the God whom Christians worship. More on this shortly.

3. Theological Implications

This objection to the Fine Tuning Design Argument is by no means insurmountable. Indeed, it will hardly even seem an objection worth considering for those who find it unproblematic to assume that, if God exists, God would certainly be the preeminent member of the class of intelligent beings, the being than whom none smarter exists, a sort of honorary über-president of MENSA. Yet I want to insist that such an assumption, which is implicit in design arguments, is theologically questionable at best and idolatrous at worst.

We are dealing here with the formidable question of the analogy between God and the human person, and it is difficult to determine precisely a standard by which we might faithfully discipline the speech of analogy. Nevertheless, I think we can make some headway in understanding why notions such as those of intelligence and design are not felicitously predicated of God.

Let us return to Robin Collins’s thought experiment. Collins is certainly right that, were we to stumble onto a biosphere on the surface of Mars, we would conclude that it had been designed by some intelligent being or beings. Indeed, I think we would conclude something quite more specific than this: we would conclude that the structure was designed by some intelligent being or beings that are very much like us in a number of important respects. This is because of the tight connections between the notions of intelligence, design, and purpose. But imagine that, upon inspection, we find the biosphere to be filled with dangerous pollutants, or to be riddled with strains of infectious bacteria, or to frequently produce swirling sandstorms that destroy everything in their paths. What would we then infer? We might still infer that the biosphere had been designed by intelligent beings, but that it had long since been abandoned. Or we might infer that it has been designed by intelligent beings who have quite different lives than our own. Or we might even infer that the dome was designed by intelligent beings who quite intentionally intended the environs to be inhospitable to certain other creatures, including creatures like us. It does seem to me likely that we would still infer that the dome had been designed, but this probably has more to do with the picture in our minds of a symmetrically rounded shape showing up on Mars than it has to do with the suggestion of some kind of life-form. If we tinker further with the thought experiment and remove from our image of the scenario every hint of symmetrical shape and refined metal, I suspect that we would not know what to infer from the discovery. And, indeed, this is very much the situation that we find ourselves in when we try to infer the existence of a designer from the natural world as we encounter it.

We live in a world that is copiously conducive to the development of life and indiscriminately conducive to its destruction, a world in which human beings are daily born by the thousands and daily stricken by the thousands with horrendous afflictions and terminal diseases, a world in which millions upon millions of species of life spring up throughout the ages and in which billions upon billions of animals are stalked and killed or eaten alive by predators or are slowly decimated by famine or drought. It would be as valid to infer from the characteristics of our world that it was “designed” by an intelligent being whose interests were inthe torture and destruction of life as it would be to infer that our universe was designed by an intelligent being whose interests were in the cultivation and flourishing of life.

This suggests that the argument for the existence of God from the appearance of design and the argument against the existence of God from the presence of evil are really two sides of one coin. They stand and fall together. This insight is not new although it is mostly ignored among proponents of intelligent design. It is powerfully captured in Robert Frost’s poem, “Design.”

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth

Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—

Assorted characters of death and blight

Mixed ready to begin the morning right,

Like the ingredients of a witch’s broth—

A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,

And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,

The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?

What brought the kindred spider to that height,

Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

What but design of darkness to appall?—

If design govern in a thing so small.[9]

The Design Argument for the existence of a god and the Problem of Evil argument against the existence of a god are of a piece. Both arguments rely on the assumption that God belongs to that class of intelligent beings to which we also belong. Both locate the uniqueness of God primarily in God’s power to actualize whatever God may conceptualize. The plausibility of design arguments increases in proportion to our ability to convince ourselves that the workings of the universe align with how we might run things were we in charge. The plausibility of the arguments from evil increases in proportion to our frank recognition that even we could have done better than this if we possessed the omnipotence purported of the theistic God. What drives both arguments is the theologically dangerous assumption that God’s ways are our ways, that God’s purposes are our purposes, and that God ideates within the same horizons of possibility as ourselves.

The book of Job offers the most ruthless theological exposure of such an assumption. For we can understand the stand-off between Job and his pseudo-comforters as the conflict between differing attempts to maintain the principle that God’s activity must be intelligible to human persons on their own terms. The pseudo-comforters come with their own version of an argument from design: the world makes sense, it unfolds the way we would expect, indeed it unfolds exactly as it would unfold were we in charge: the good are rewarded and the evil are punished. Job is in fundamental agreement with the pseudo-comforters on their central contention, that there is a pattern the world ought to conform to and that we have access to this pattern by virtue of being intelligent, moral creatures. Job simply insists that the world is not conforming to the pattern. This is the argument from evil. When God finally speaks, out of the whirlwind, he does not provide a “solution” to Job’s complaint, nor does he suggest that the pseudo-comforters were fundamentally right to insist that God’s ways in the world are humanly intelligible. Rather, he confronts: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge” (38:2), and proceeds to present a God’s eye view of the world that plays havoc with Job’s sensible assessment of how the world should be run.

Who has cleft a channel for the torrents of rain,

and a way for the thunderbolt,

to bring rain on a land where no man is,

on the desert in which there is no man;

to satisfy the waste and desolate land,

and to make the ground put forth grass? (38:25-27)

“To bring rain on a land where no man is.” As Ellen Davis points out,

that one phrase says a lot about the way God runs things. And what it says is a calculated offense to ordinary human expectations. Remember that in ancient Israel, life depended directly on the precarious, never-too- abundant rainfall. No one wastes water in the arid climate of the Middle East—no one except God."[10]