Continuing this series on the philosophical questions around God's existence, Jamie now turns to the teleological family of arguments.
Jamie Dew: Hey everybody. This is Jamie Dew.
Joe Fontenot: And this is Joe Fontenot.
Jamie Dew: Welcome back again to The Towel and the Basin. We're talking about fun stuff here.
Joe Fontenot: Fun stuff, indeed. So we've been looking at this question, how can we know God exists? It's a pretty important question, given that we are Christians and believers and followers of God. So you had outlined a few different categories of arguments in the previous. Last episode we looked at cosmological arguments, such as the kalam and William Lane Craig's version of that and so forth.
Jamie Dew: Right.
Joe Fontenot: And so you had outlined these different arguments or categories rather, and so this week, tell me about the teleological argument.
Jamie Dew: Yeah. So teleological arguments. First of all, to circle back on a point I made in the last one, teleological arguments, there's not one argument here. There's a family of arguments. And if arguments do these two things we would call them teleological arguments. If number one, they argue from something in nature to God, and number two specifically some detail, a detail that seems to have purpose or design to it. When we find that kind of stuff and make arguments from it to God's existence, those are typically we're in the ballpark at least of what we call teleological arguments. There's a bit of debate amongst some philosophers and theologians as to whether or not teleological arguments and design arguments are the same thing or even fine tuning arguments are the same thing, and I guess technically there are some differences in each of those, but I would say those differences are a little too narrow for our concerns right here.
We're roughly talking about the same kind of stuff. Really you can think about all three of those as just a continued evolution of a particular kind of argument here. I would say this. So I said in the last podcast that today maybe it's the cosmological argument that is the most, or the arguments that are most popular today with the exception of maybe moral arguments. Maybe we can do that in another one.
During the Enlightenment, it would be teleological arguments that were the rage. I mean, this was the kind of arguments that people would make in defense of God. And we're in this historical moment in the modern period/Enlightenment when, in short, there were lots of questions about scripture. I mean this is the age where source criticism and all that stuff is coming in to critique the Old Testament and all of that stuff.
We're on the heels of a Protestant reformation where Protestants and Catholics have just had this bloodbath with each other and there's all sorts of questions about religious belief during this time. People want to hang onto their religious beliefs for moral reasons, but the basis for doing that was in question. And so people would make arguments for God's existence. And generally speaking, they were teleological arguments.
Now one good example of that is William Paley, 1802 writes a book called Natural Theology. And again, that just sort of suggests to you this is the way people thought about natural theology. It was argument with nature, right? Paley was a pastor and yet he was highly esteemed and respected in Europe and in the United States because Paley made arguments for God's existence from nature and particular details of nature that seem to necessitate God. He looked at particular aspects of nature like the skeletal system, the eyeball, and a wide variety of other things like that and essentially argued that the only way we could ever really explain this is God.
He gives this classic illustration, well, there's debate here, is this just an illustration for Paley or is this an analogy he uses to make the case here? So at the beginning of Natural Theology, he gives this scenario. He says, "Imagine that you're going through the woods and you kick your foot against a rock. You'd never wonder where that rock came from. That rock for all you know has been there forever and ever and ever, and you'd give it no thought."
He says, "But imagine you're going through the woods and you kick your foot upon a watch. You find a watch." He said, "You would immediately wonder who put the watch there." He said, "Now, why would you wonder that in the case of the watch but not the case of the stone? Simple," he says. "It's because the watch has certain details about it that seem to be perfectly designed and situated. It has contrivance to it, such that it can perform certain kinds of purposes, like telling time. And because of that, you would say this watch has a designer. What is it that causes you to say it has a designer? It has design."
And so arguments of this nature would say something like, well, if there's design, there is a designer. In the universe we find lots of design, therefore there is a designer to it all. And those are really powerful arguments. Despite the fact that 25 years before that David Hume had already leveled some pretty major philosophical arguments against that. He argued that essentially these arguments depended on a very weak analogy between physical things in the universe in nature and human made things and stuff like that. And there were some theological concerns with these arguments at one point.
But despite those philosophical and those theological concerns, these kinds of arguments were incredibly popular in the Enlightenment. What changed it, Paley writes in 1802, in 1859 Charles Darwin writes one of the most influential works in the history of the world, it's The Origin of Species, where essentially he argues that horses and cows and cats and dogs all come from some basic common ancestry and it's the whole idea of not just evolution, but specifically survival of the fittest and natural selection. There had been plenty of other evolutionists prior to Darwin. That's not what made Darwin Darwin. What made Darwin Darwin is that he had a mechanism that he could put forward that would explain how such complexities could come about, and pretty much almost within a decade, teleological style arguments had gone from being wildly popular to dead as a doornail because of Darwin's theory of evolution.
He had given naturalists a way of explaining the contrivance and the complexity of the biological world without God, and that is the only reason arguments for God's existence had continued to go forward during this period is because scientists couldn't explain it otherwise, but now they could. And so just almost overnight, I mean, these arguments and natural theology with it, go the way of the dodo and they are no more.
And I think I said this in one of the previous podcasts, but Alister McGrath does a phenomenal job of just sort of cataloging this history. He says that after Darwin and by the beginning of the 20th century, natural theology was like a beached whale on the shores because it was just rotting and stinking in the hot sun and nobody wanted to get near it. But that's kind of what happened when these arguments.
Now today these arguments have come back in a major, major way because of what we've... It's interesting. These arguments died because of developments in scientific thought, and these arguments have now come back again with full force because of development in scientific thought. It's our new understanding of the magnitude of the universe and it's also our new understanding of the complexity of the universe that has brought these arguments back very much into consideration today.
And specifically the arguments that are most popular today are what we would call fine-tuning arguments. And fine-tuning references a very, very, very, very large number of details about our universe at the biggest level all the way down to the smallest level. So you're talking about the way galaxies are structured all the way down to the way atoms are structured. We find a lot of things that are just exactly the way they need to be. With even just the slightest variations whatsoever would take things in such a way that life could not exist and compounds could not form and there would literally be nothing but little random bits and parts floating around through space if this very large number of factors were not exactly tuned, finely-tuned exactly the way they are.
Let me give you one example of that, and then we'll go wherever you want to go after that. Here's one example of that. Now, again, if you're interested in examples of this, I can point you to a number of resources, Alister McGrath's Fine-Tune Universe is a really good example of this. Anything that Hugh Ross does, he has cataloged this stuff very, very well and is just a great source for any Christian interested in these things. But here's one example, consider the forces at play in keeping an atom together, a simple little atom, the most basic building blocks of our universe, an atom. You have on the one hand an external force, that is to say a force that's thrusting the electrons that are orbiting around those nucleuses. There's a force thrusting those electrons outwardly with incredible force. It's called centrifugal force.
Take a bucket of water, and if you take the bucket of water and you hold it in your hand, the water stays in the bucket. If you turn the bucket upside down, the bucket of the water will dump on your head. If however you rock the bucket back and forth slowly and get faster and faster and faster such that you begin to spin the bucket around in one big circle very quickly, notice that the water when it's upside down in the bucket will not dump out on your head. Why? It's centrifugal force. There's an outward thrust on that water that's literally greater than the gravitational force. It's thrusting that water to the bottom of the bucket, even though it's at the top over your head at that moment. So that's one force when those electrons are zipping around that nucleus, it's just going fast. Joe, there's a lot of force there on that little electron thrusting in that way.
So what keeps the electron from just shearing off and the atom therefore from just dissolving into nothing? Well, there's an equal and opposite force, a nuclear force. I don't know what physicists call this, but there's an internal force that's pulling that electron back down and holding it in. And here's what's interesting about it. The external centrifugal force and the internal nuclear force that's pulling it back in are balanced perfectly. If either one of them were just slightly more than the other one, say the centrifugal force is stronger just even slightly, the electron shears off and goes into nothing. If the internal force is stronger, it sucks it down into the nucleus and the atom doesn't form.
The other interesting thing about that force that's pulling that electron back in is it's short ranged. It's clearly got to be really, really, really, really strong but its force can't extend very far or else all the other atoms around it will suck in too. So when you look at little details like that, and man, there are literally dozens and dozens and dozens of things that we know about today the more we discover about our world, the more mind boggling it is. There are just so many features from the biggest level down to the smallest level that seem to be finely-tuned. They have to be exactly the way they are. And that greatly suggests that there's something that preset everything. And so, because of stuff like this, these kinds of arguments are back and they're back with incredible force.
Joe Fontenot: Okay. So I see what you're saying, but devil's advocate. Is it possible, extremely unlikely-
Jamie Dew: Sure.
Joe Fontenot: But isn't it possible that these things could all just be chance? Given an infinite set of chances, this is bound to happen once and here we sit.
Jamie Dew: The short answer is yes, it's possible. But as you say, incredibly unlikely. Let me just say this, this is a good point to make a comment about these arguments for God's existence here. In any of these arguments for God's existence, in many cases, there are some that deal with certainty. We call those deductive arguments. When an argument is put forward for God's existence and there are examples of deductive arguments in cosmological, teleological, moral, and such. Every [inaudible 00:13:01] arguments has deductive ones. Deductive arguments are designed to give you an absolute certainty. Most arguments that we deal with though are not deductive arguments, they're inductive arguments. That is, we consider all the data and the evidence, and we just go where it points us. When we deal with induction, we are by its very nature dealing with probabilities, not with certainties.
So for example, do I know that the sun is going to rise tomorrow? Yes, absolutely. But that's a certainty I guess you could say that I have that's based off of probability, not logical necessity. There's nothing logical in the idea of the concept of a sun that requires it to come up tomorrow. But we know from a really long track record that the probabilities are astronomically in our favor that the sun's going to rise up. So we're dealing with probabilities here.
Could these fine-tuning data that I've mentioned here in this podcast, could they be the result of chance? I guess, yeah, it's possible. There's two ways to argue against this though. Number one is just to simply say, "Hey, if you want to say it's possible and you want to do it on such a narrow, thin probability, go for it, buddy." But who's the one that seems irrational at that point. It's not the Christian. The probabilities are wildly in our favor. Our, who is the our? Those who think that there is a God. So probability or probabilistically, you are talking about a scenario that's mind bogglingly small that this could not be the case. So that's one way we can respond.
Another way we could respond is say, "Hey look, but we have actually ways that scientists use today for determining whether or not some data that we get from the universe is just simply random result of chance or if it's the result of actual design." And here I draw on the work of William Dembski and Michael Denton in particular, where they've really given us a way of thinking through how to determine when fine-tuning data is the result of chance or some kind of intention. The way they illustrate this is with the SETI Research Project.
The SETI Research Project is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, where we have our telescopes listening to sounds from the universe, and what we're listening for is any signs of intelligence. And what we hear is a bunch of static, just shhh, this staticky sound. What they want to know is in the midst of all that static if we heard a sound here and there that we thought could be intelligent, how would we know that it's intelligence? And the criteria that SETI uses to determine whether or not it's intelligence versus something else are there's three criteria that we use. They call it contingency, specificity, and complexity.
So let's start with complexity. If the information comes in has any kind of pattern to it at all, then there's a complexity there and all three of the criteria have to be met. So for example, if the sound you got in was simply one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, you wouldn't think much about it. But if the sound you got in sounded like this one, one, one, one, one, two, one, one three, one, one, four, one, one, five. Wait a minute. There's a complexity in there. So that in and of itself is not going to do it, but that's interesting.
Second of all, is there any specificity to it? In other words, does it yield some kind of information? It'd be one thing if says one, one, one, one, one, two, one, one, three, one, one, four, but what if it starts hammering it out with a specificity such that we can start to piece together a possible message? Well, that's interesting.
Then the last criteria is the criteria of contingency. Does it have to be there given the laws of nature? And if the answer to the question is no, then we would be inclined to take that as intelligence. So here's an illustration of that. I'm going through the woods, or imagine you and your girlfriend are going through the woods and you look at all the bark on all the trees as you're walking by and you don't think anything of it. But when you see on one tree etched with a knife, a big heart, and in that heart Bill heart Tina, I don't know why I picked Tina.
Joe Fontenot: I'm sure she's very lovely.
Jamie Dew: Yeah. She's a great girl. Bill heart Tina forever, well then you know that there's some dude named Bill and that he hearts Tina forever.
Joe Fontenot: Forever.
Jamie Dew: So why do we do that? None of the other shapes or patterns on the bark of the tree did we draw any inferences for. But when we saw that pattern, why did we draw the inference that there's a Bill who hearts Tina forever? Simple. Because there's a complexity to it, there's a contingency to it, and there's a specificity to it. And when we see that we go, no that's intelligence. So as we're listening to the sounds coming from the universe, those are the criteria that we're using to determine if there's any intelligence there.
So take that to the fine-tuning data. What these guys are going to argue is that, look, when you look at all this fine-tuning data, that fine-tuning data meets these criteria very well. And so therefore, look, this is intelligence. And look, I said at the end of the last podcast, ah, cosmological arguments, I find them... Yeah, they seem plausible rationally, but they don't do a whole lot for me. I still don't know that they do a whole lot, but these seem to do a little bit more for me.
There's something about, and maybe in some of the other arguments we could look at rationality, for example, meaning for example, there's something... It's not just that we have a universe, it's that the universe is the way that it is. It's a particular way and it didn't have to be that way. In fact, it seems to me quite unlikely that the universe would be as it is if there weren't some kind of intelligent mind behind it.
And so that's what these newer versions of these arguments are doing now. So it's just interesting. Teleological arguments have had their day in the sun and then they died and they died because of advanced new theories in science and they're back today because of new theories in science. They've opened the door for it again, and that's really interesting.
Joe Fontenot: It is really interesting. One of the things that I think about when you talk through this is as helpful as these are, and they are or they can be, they are not the end all. You know what I mean? There could be right around the corner something else that's going to... Who knows? I don't know.
Jamie Dew: That's right.
Joe Fontenot: But clearly it's happened.
Jamie Dew: Right.
Joe Fontenot: But at the same time, they also, when they help, they help.
Jamie Dew: Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Look, I remember that we're dealing as I said earlier with probabilities here, not with [crosstalk 00:19:55], at least in this kind of argument that we're looking at. There are some arguments that do seek to yield absolute certainty. These kinds of arguments right here are not designed to do that.
I also remember, I mean while I don't adopt all of what he says, I am as a big fan and proponent of natural theology, I'm also very sympathetic with some of the critiques of natural theology that Paul Moser has made who's a huge critic of this. Where essentially he just simply argues that natural theology done the way natural theologians try to do it will never actually generate belief in God because we try to do it autonomously wherein we try to come to God on our own terms, and if you don't start off this search for God with a posture already willing to submit and follow if you find Him, then God might just keep Himself veiled from you forever. And I think that's right. So therefore as we have this pursuit, it's not really an honest pursuit of God unless our heart is open to God in that process.
Joe Fontenot: Yeah.
Jamie Dew: I think that's a word worth hearing.
Joe Fontenot: Well, I think it's really encouraging. I am looking forward to getting into the rest of these in future episodes.
Jamie Dew: All right, man. Thanks dude.
Joe Fontenot: All right, thanks.
Jamie Dew: See ya.
Hey everybody. This is Jamie and Joe again.
Joe Fontenot: If you like this podcast, would you leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to podcasts? That helps other people find it.
Jamie Dew: And if you have any questions, we'd love to hear about them. Just go to jamiedew.com/questions and send them in that way and we'll take a look at the most frequently asked questions and give them a shot.