Natural Theology Part Two
Natural theology was given its clearest modern expression with the 1802 publication of Natural Theology by William Paley. In this work, he provides us with an elegant version of the teleological argument for the existence of God; also known as the argument from design.
Suppose, says Paley, we were walking in the forest and happened upon a stone in the path. We probably wouldn't think twice about it and go on about our way. But, suppose that further on we were to happen upon a pocket watch. Our reaction to this would be different. It seems to be out of place. More than that, when we inspect it closely we recognize that it’s a mechanism designed to do a specific job. We note its intricate workings and speculate that such intricacy could not have naturally occurred. It must be the product of design and intelligence. The existence of the watch implies the existence of a watchmaker.
Now, "were there no examples in the world of contrivance except that of the eye, it would be alone sufficient to support the conclusion which we draw from it, as to the necessity of an intelligent Creator." In other words, if the watch requires a watchmaker so too the eye must require an intelligent designer. And given the immense complexity of the entire universe and all its intricate working parts, the Creator must be infinitely intelligent and powerful. This constitutes Paley's proof of the existence of God.
In the rest of Paley's work, he proceeds to show how each part of the universe, as a separate creation, can be seen as evidence for God. In parts, Natural Theology reads like a science textbook but this is simply Paley's attempt to offer as much detailed evidence as possible for his argument. Given the 18th century scientific revolution, it seems only natural to apply the reasoning of science to theology.
Still, not everyone was equally taken with his arguments. Interestingly enough one of his most vocal critics published his remarks a quarter of a century earlier. Of course, David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion was not written as a response to Paley himself but the growing popularity of natural theology (or natural religion in Hume's words). Paley's work can be seen as an attempt to respond to the criticisms offered by Hume and others. In particular, Hume offers six arguments against Paley's proof, most of which deal with the problem of causality and our understanding of it. Remember, Hume was very skeptical about our ability to know causality.
1. Problem of causality. As we know Hume was skeptical about our ability to gain knowledge of causality. But, he was certain that causality could not extend beyond objects of sense experience. How can we possibly understand the concept of causality applying to God? In this case, we have no sense of experience to go on for our knowledge of this cause. So we are greatly overstepping the limits of our knowledge.
2. Reasoning from effect to cause. Another problem with causal reasoning is using our knowledge of the effect, in this case, the universe) to gain knowledge of the cause (God). The fact is that knowledge of the effect cannot tell us anything about the cause (except perhaps that there must be a cause; for the response to that see point 1).
3. Evil effect implies evil cause. OK, so you still want to use this cause-and-effect reasoning? Well, says Hume, at least be consistent then. The effect has a great deal of pain and suffering in it; in short evil. So mustn't the cause also contain evil? It would seem so. This, in short, is the problem of evil which we will discuss in more detail later.
4. The nature of the cause. In response to some of the previous points, you might say that although we can't know the cause we must at least know that there is a cause. But, Hume asks, why would we infer that there is a cause? Why not several causes? The universe could be the result of a committee of Gods. Given point three this might make sense. Committees have a way of making things that don't turn out exactly perfect!
5. Weak analogy. The comparison of a watch and the universe is simply too far-fetched to make a plausible argument. Analogies only work if the things you're comparing are similar. But there are hardly any similarities between a watch and the universe.
6. Hasty generalization. On the subject of analogies let's consider the reasoning involved in Paley's argument. He's using the model of human intelligence to understand the cause of the universe. Sure, human intelligence created the watch but why do we assume that this (or something like it) was the driving force behind the cause of the universe. As Hume points out, there are many principles of nature in the universe. Why assume that the one that works for us here is responsible for the workings of the rest of the universe?
You might think these criticisms would be enough to spell the end of Paley's design argument. But there's one more criticism that, for some, pretty much spelled the end of the game for good. This criticism came, ironically enough, from a man whose only degree was in theology. I say ironically because many believed that it was this man, more than any other, who finally eliminated God from science entirely. Well, at least he tried right? Wrong. As we'll see, it was never Charles Darwin's intent to get rid of God but he did want to explain how things came to be the way they are and his explanation did do damage to natural theology. But don't worry, natural theology recovered and even made friends with Darwin's theory of evolution. To see how to let's look at the story from the beginning. Like evolution itself, the development of the theory of evolution was very gradual.
Some evolutionary thinking has been around since the ancient Greeks. But things began to develop in the 18th century. At the time the major best seller of the day was written by a Swiss botanist called Linnaeus. His Systema Natura classified all the plants and flowers rigidly for the first time and gave us the two-name system we still use today. He believed, as did many that each species was a separate creation and that things in the natural world don't change. Everything is where it’s been since the beginning which, according to an Anglican bishop called Ussher, was Monday 9:00 AM October 26, 4004 B.C. Every species was a special creation of God and so everything in the natural world was complete; no changes, no gaps.
The problem came when we started finding fossils of animals that didn't seem to be around anymore. It began to look as if there had been changes and now that these creatures seemed to be extinct there were gaps. The first attempt to explain this was given, in 1778, by the curator of the Paris Zoo named George Louis, Comte de Buffon. He had a look at the evidence, thought about it, and published a few thoughts on the question (44 volumes!). In his Natural History, he postulated that the age of the earth was more like 150,000 years. In this time, the varieties we see had to arise not by evolutionary means but by degenerating from the original creation. Each species was still thought to be a separate creation, which then degenerated into all the varieties we see today. OK this explained the variety but what about the gaps; what about all the fossil remains of animals (like the dinosaurs) that don't exist now?
The solution was to come from another Frenchman who was running the Paris Natural History Museum, named Georges Cuvier. He postulated that there must have been great catastrophes that occurred throughout history (like floods Cuvier postulated that there must have been two of them) that would have wiped out the species that are now extinct. This went over well with the Church, in particular an English clergyman named William Buckland. His view was that there had only been one flood that was mentioned in the Bible. While Buckland was a brilliant defender of the view it was not to survive the next development in the story.
The chief rival to the theory of catastrophism was offered by a geologist named James Hutton. He looked around and concluded that the changes throughout geological history could easily have been made by the same processes at work today. Given enough time wind and water erosion can account for a lot of change. The way things changed in the past is exactly like how they change now. Pretty darn slow! This view was called uniformitarianism and the key to the theory is time. Was there enough time in geological history for these processes to take effect?
The answer was to come from another geologist named Charles Lyell whose Principles of Geology published in 1830 made geology the science it is today. In essence, he confirmed Hutton's idea and because of his research concluded that the age of the earth must be millions of years. This was the only way to account for the observations he was making.
I'm leaving some details out of the story but the long and short of it was that Darwin was, in part, inspired by Lyell's work because he recognized that the process of natural selection required geologic scales of time. Given this, you can explain all the variety of animal species through the mechanism of adaptation to the environment.
OK given all of this, where does that leave Paley's argument? Well, if you can explain how things arise naturally, through the process of evolution, then you don't need to postulate a supernatural cause for each instance of creation. But as I mentioned earlier, this doesn't spell the end of natural theology entirely even if it does mean the end of Paley's version. The best way to think of this is to distinguish "narrow teleology" from "wider teleology." Paley's version (narrow) requires a special act of creation for each instance of design. The problem is that evidence suggests we can explain these particular instances of design without appealing to the supernatural. But what we can't explain is the whole system and in particular how the natural mechanisms (like evolution) arose. For this, we do seem to need a supernatural cause. This is the view offered by F.R. Tennant and may allow us to combine theology and science.
But, there are objections to this view as well. Now known as intelligent design theory, this view postulates that because certain elements in the natural world are irreducibly complex they require a supernatural explanation. Also, the probability of this occurring by chance alone is so small that there must be some supernatural cause at work. However, there are several important objections to this view. First, there simply have not been any examples found which are truly irreducibly complex such that they cannot be explained by appeal to gradual, natural processes. As Richard Dawkins puts it: "The creationists are right that, if genuinely irreducible complexity could be properly demonstrated, it would wreck Darwin's theory. Darwin himself said as much: 'If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would break down. But, I can find no such case.' Darwin could find no such case, and nor has anybody since Darwin's time, despite strenuous indeed desperate, efforts. Many candidates for this holy grail of creationism have been proposed. None has stood up to analysis."
But, a second problem arises from the search for the cause of any case of irreducible complexity in the supernatural realm. The problem here is that if you need a cause for something irreducibly complex, it makes no sense to appeal to something even more complex which is what God would be. How can a complex process in need of an explanation arise from a cause even more complex (and presumably even more improbable) than the original phenomena? If the probability of complex organisms arising from natural processes is vanishingly small, how much smaller is the probability that they arose as a result of a supernatural cause?
A third problem is with the claim that the probability of such intricate designed creatures such as are in the animal kingdom arising by chance is vanishingly small. The conclusion then is that they arose due to a supernatural cause. But, this ignores another possible option. In the first place, evolution does not postulate that the complex organisms we observe arose purely by chance but by a gradual, natural process. The best image of this is provided by Richard Dawkins in his book Climbing Mount Improbable. In this book he relates the parable of Mount Improbable: "Mount Improbable rears up from the plain, lofting its peaks dizzily to the rarefied sky. The towering, vertical cliffs of Mount Improbable can never, it seems, be climbed. Dwarfed like insects, thwarted mountaineers crawl and scrabble along the foot, gazing hopelessly at the sheer, unattainable heights. They shake their tiny, baffled heads and declare the brooding summit forever unscalable.
“Our mountaineers are too ambitious. So intent are they on the perpendicular drama of the cliffs, they do not think to look round the other side of the mountain. There they would find not vertical cliffs and echoing canyons but gently inclined grassy meadows graded steadily and easily towards distant uplands... The sheer height of the peak doesn't matter, so long as you don't try to scale it in a single bound. Locate the mildly sloping path and, if you have unlimited time, the ascent is only as formidable as the next step. The story of Mount Improbable is, of course, a parable." But, the parable illustrates quite nicely the theory of evolution and how designed creatures, can arise through a "non-random," natural process. Given the explanatory power of the theory of evolution, whether you agree or disagree with it, you should at least have a fairly sophisticated knowledge of what the theory is saying. I encourage you to learn as much as you can about the theory before dismissing it out of hand and the seriousness of its implications for philosophy and natural theology.
Some scholars, however, claim that theology does not always capture the entirety of the religious experience or, even, the most important parts. So we now turn to a consideration of the religious experience to see what elements we've been missing in our investigation of natural theology.
Suppose, says Paley, we were walking in the forest and happened upon a stone in the path. We probably wouldn't think twice about it and go on about our way. But, suppose that further on we were to happen upon a pocket watch. Our reaction to this would be different. It seems to be out of place. More than that, when we inspect it closely we recognize that it’s a mechanism designed to do a specific job. We note its intricate workings and speculate that such intricacy could not have naturally occurred. It must be the product of design and intelligence. The existence of the watch implies the existence of a watchmaker.
Now, "were there no examples in the world of contrivance except that of the eye, it would be alone sufficient to support the conclusion which we draw from it, as to the necessity of an intelligent Creator." In other words, if the watch requires a watchmaker so too the eye must require an intelligent designer. And given the immense complexity of the entire universe and all its intricate working parts, the Creator must be infinitely intelligent and powerful. This constitutes Paley's proof of the existence of God.
In the rest of Paley's work, he proceeds to show how each part of the universe, as a separate creation, can be seen as evidence for God. In parts, Natural Theology reads like a science textbook but this is simply Paley's attempt to offer as much detailed evidence as possible for his argument. Given the 18th century scientific revolution, it seems only natural to apply the reasoning of science to theology.
Still, not everyone was equally taken with his arguments. Interestingly enough one of his most vocal critics published his remarks a quarter of a century earlier. Of course, David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion was not written as a response to Paley himself but the growing popularity of natural theology (or natural religion in Hume's words). Paley's work can be seen as an attempt to respond to the criticisms offered by Hume and others. In particular, Hume offers six arguments against Paley's proof, most of which deal with the problem of causality and our understanding of it. Remember, Hume was very skeptical about our ability to know causality.
1. Problem of causality. As we know Hume was skeptical about our ability to gain knowledge of causality. But, he was certain that causality could not extend beyond objects of sense experience. How can we possibly understand the concept of causality applying to God? In this case, we have no sense of experience to go on for our knowledge of this cause. So we are greatly overstepping the limits of our knowledge.
2. Reasoning from effect to cause. Another problem with causal reasoning is using our knowledge of the effect, in this case, the universe) to gain knowledge of the cause (God). The fact is that knowledge of the effect cannot tell us anything about the cause (except perhaps that there must be a cause; for the response to that see point 1).
3. Evil effect implies evil cause. OK, so you still want to use this cause-and-effect reasoning? Well, says Hume, at least be consistent then. The effect has a great deal of pain and suffering in it; in short evil. So mustn't the cause also contain evil? It would seem so. This, in short, is the problem of evil which we will discuss in more detail later.
4. The nature of the cause. In response to some of the previous points, you might say that although we can't know the cause we must at least know that there is a cause. But, Hume asks, why would we infer that there is a cause? Why not several causes? The universe could be the result of a committee of Gods. Given point three this might make sense. Committees have a way of making things that don't turn out exactly perfect!
5. Weak analogy. The comparison of a watch and the universe is simply too far-fetched to make a plausible argument. Analogies only work if the things you're comparing are similar. But there are hardly any similarities between a watch and the universe.
6. Hasty generalization. On the subject of analogies let's consider the reasoning involved in Paley's argument. He's using the model of human intelligence to understand the cause of the universe. Sure, human intelligence created the watch but why do we assume that this (or something like it) was the driving force behind the cause of the universe. As Hume points out, there are many principles of nature in the universe. Why assume that the one that works for us here is responsible for the workings of the rest of the universe?
You might think these criticisms would be enough to spell the end of Paley's design argument. But there's one more criticism that, for some, pretty much spelled the end of the game for good. This criticism came, ironically enough, from a man whose only degree was in theology. I say ironically because many believed that it was this man, more than any other, who finally eliminated God from science entirely. Well, at least he tried right? Wrong. As we'll see, it was never Charles Darwin's intent to get rid of God but he did want to explain how things came to be the way they are and his explanation did do damage to natural theology. But don't worry, natural theology recovered and even made friends with Darwin's theory of evolution. To see how to let's look at the story from the beginning. Like evolution itself, the development of the theory of evolution was very gradual.
Some evolutionary thinking has been around since the ancient Greeks. But things began to develop in the 18th century. At the time the major best seller of the day was written by a Swiss botanist called Linnaeus. His Systema Natura classified all the plants and flowers rigidly for the first time and gave us the two-name system we still use today. He believed, as did many that each species was a separate creation and that things in the natural world don't change. Everything is where it’s been since the beginning which, according to an Anglican bishop called Ussher, was Monday 9:00 AM October 26, 4004 B.C. Every species was a special creation of God and so everything in the natural world was complete; no changes, no gaps.
The problem came when we started finding fossils of animals that didn't seem to be around anymore. It began to look as if there had been changes and now that these creatures seemed to be extinct there were gaps. The first attempt to explain this was given, in 1778, by the curator of the Paris Zoo named George Louis, Comte de Buffon. He had a look at the evidence, thought about it, and published a few thoughts on the question (44 volumes!). In his Natural History, he postulated that the age of the earth was more like 150,000 years. In this time, the varieties we see had to arise not by evolutionary means but by degenerating from the original creation. Each species was still thought to be a separate creation, which then degenerated into all the varieties we see today. OK this explained the variety but what about the gaps; what about all the fossil remains of animals (like the dinosaurs) that don't exist now?
The solution was to come from another Frenchman who was running the Paris Natural History Museum, named Georges Cuvier. He postulated that there must have been great catastrophes that occurred throughout history (like floods Cuvier postulated that there must have been two of them) that would have wiped out the species that are now extinct. This went over well with the Church, in particular an English clergyman named William Buckland. His view was that there had only been one flood that was mentioned in the Bible. While Buckland was a brilliant defender of the view it was not to survive the next development in the story.
The chief rival to the theory of catastrophism was offered by a geologist named James Hutton. He looked around and concluded that the changes throughout geological history could easily have been made by the same processes at work today. Given enough time wind and water erosion can account for a lot of change. The way things changed in the past is exactly like how they change now. Pretty darn slow! This view was called uniformitarianism and the key to the theory is time. Was there enough time in geological history for these processes to take effect?
The answer was to come from another geologist named Charles Lyell whose Principles of Geology published in 1830 made geology the science it is today. In essence, he confirmed Hutton's idea and because of his research concluded that the age of the earth must be millions of years. This was the only way to account for the observations he was making.
I'm leaving some details out of the story but the long and short of it was that Darwin was, in part, inspired by Lyell's work because he recognized that the process of natural selection required geologic scales of time. Given this, you can explain all the variety of animal species through the mechanism of adaptation to the environment.
OK given all of this, where does that leave Paley's argument? Well, if you can explain how things arise naturally, through the process of evolution, then you don't need to postulate a supernatural cause for each instance of creation. But as I mentioned earlier, this doesn't spell the end of natural theology entirely even if it does mean the end of Paley's version. The best way to think of this is to distinguish "narrow teleology" from "wider teleology." Paley's version (narrow) requires a special act of creation for each instance of design. The problem is that evidence suggests we can explain these particular instances of design without appealing to the supernatural. But what we can't explain is the whole system and in particular how the natural mechanisms (like evolution) arose. For this, we do seem to need a supernatural cause. This is the view offered by F.R. Tennant and may allow us to combine theology and science.
But, there are objections to this view as well. Now known as intelligent design theory, this view postulates that because certain elements in the natural world are irreducibly complex they require a supernatural explanation. Also, the probability of this occurring by chance alone is so small that there must be some supernatural cause at work. However, there are several important objections to this view. First, there simply have not been any examples found which are truly irreducibly complex such that they cannot be explained by appeal to gradual, natural processes. As Richard Dawkins puts it: "The creationists are right that, if genuinely irreducible complexity could be properly demonstrated, it would wreck Darwin's theory. Darwin himself said as much: 'If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would break down. But, I can find no such case.' Darwin could find no such case, and nor has anybody since Darwin's time, despite strenuous indeed desperate, efforts. Many candidates for this holy grail of creationism have been proposed. None has stood up to analysis."
But, a second problem arises from the search for the cause of any case of irreducible complexity in the supernatural realm. The problem here is that if you need a cause for something irreducibly complex, it makes no sense to appeal to something even more complex which is what God would be. How can a complex process in need of an explanation arise from a cause even more complex (and presumably even more improbable) than the original phenomena? If the probability of complex organisms arising from natural processes is vanishingly small, how much smaller is the probability that they arose as a result of a supernatural cause?
A third problem is with the claim that the probability of such intricate designed creatures such as are in the animal kingdom arising by chance is vanishingly small. The conclusion then is that they arose due to a supernatural cause. But, this ignores another possible option. In the first place, evolution does not postulate that the complex organisms we observe arose purely by chance but by a gradual, natural process. The best image of this is provided by Richard Dawkins in his book Climbing Mount Improbable. In this book he relates the parable of Mount Improbable: "Mount Improbable rears up from the plain, lofting its peaks dizzily to the rarefied sky. The towering, vertical cliffs of Mount Improbable can never, it seems, be climbed. Dwarfed like insects, thwarted mountaineers crawl and scrabble along the foot, gazing hopelessly at the sheer, unattainable heights. They shake their tiny, baffled heads and declare the brooding summit forever unscalable.
“Our mountaineers are too ambitious. So intent are they on the perpendicular drama of the cliffs, they do not think to look round the other side of the mountain. There they would find not vertical cliffs and echoing canyons but gently inclined grassy meadows graded steadily and easily towards distant uplands... The sheer height of the peak doesn't matter, so long as you don't try to scale it in a single bound. Locate the mildly sloping path and, if you have unlimited time, the ascent is only as formidable as the next step. The story of Mount Improbable is, of course, a parable." But, the parable illustrates quite nicely the theory of evolution and how designed creatures, can arise through a "non-random," natural process. Given the explanatory power of the theory of evolution, whether you agree or disagree with it, you should at least have a fairly sophisticated knowledge of what the theory is saying. I encourage you to learn as much as you can about the theory before dismissing it out of hand and the seriousness of its implications for philosophy and natural theology.
Some scholars, however, claim that theology does not always capture the entirety of the religious experience or, even, the most important parts. So we now turn to a consideration of the religious experience to see what elements we've been missing in our investigation of natural theology.