The Argument from Design and the Missing Designer
Published by Hanno Kaiser January 2nd, 2007 in PhilosophyOf all proofs for the existence of god, the teleological argument or the argument from design is the most commonly invoked: The watch proves the existence of the watchmaker. Of course, the argument from design is a non-sequitur and fails as a result of some well-known flaws documented elsewhere. But there’s another noteworthy weakness of the argument from design: The more complex an object gets, the less likely it is that anyone truly designed it. Thus, the more complex the watch, the less likely that there is any identifiable watchmaker. Only very crude artifacts (e.g., stone tools) permit the “watch → watchmaker” inference. This is a result of the distribution of knowledge. Recall the story “I, Pencil” by Leonard Read.
I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write. Writing is both my vocation and my avocation; that’s all I do. … I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. … I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple. Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. This sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U.S.A. each year.
No single person knows how to make a pencil, because of the dispersion of knowledge resulting from the division of labor. Thus, even though someone might have thought of “designing” a pencil, the design incorporates thousands of previous “design” decisions by others. In other words, there is no single designer, and particularly the most obviously designed objects (e.g., airplanes) do not permit the inference of a single mind behind them. Interestingly, a very similar point was made by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations:
The woollen coat, for example, which covers the day-labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production. How many merchants and carriers, besides, must have been employed in transporting the materials from some of those workmen to others who often live in a very distant part of the country! how much commerce and navigation in particular, how many ship-builders, sailors, sail-makers, rope-makers, must have been employed in order to bring together the different drugs made use of by the dyer, which often come from the remotest corners of the world! What a variety of labour too is necessary in order to produce the tools of the meanest of those workmen!
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Um…. an argument from design doesn’t necessarily require that there is a single designer. Obviously, pencils are “designed,” even though any contemporary pencil reflects a cumulation of many previous design decisions. Pencils didn’t come to us through a series of random natural events.
And this statement: “No single person knows how to make a pencil, because of the dispersion of knowledge resulting from the division of labor” is clearly wrong. Anybody with some skill in product engineering can read the literature (including numerous patent documents) and quickly possess all the knowledge required to make a pencil. I once represented a pencil manufacturer in a patent dispute and interviewed an expert who clearly possessed such knowledge. It’s not a terribly complex art.
In any event, whether a single person knows the entire art is irrelevant to whether the cumulative art is a product of design. If we were to say that no single person can fully comprehend and describe all the art related to the design of a highly complex technology — say, the Space Shuttle — we aren’t saying anything about whether that technology developed as the product of conscious design. “Design” is a function of inputs, not a function of any individual’s post-hoc knowledge. The cumulation of many individual design inputs is “design” just as much as each of the individual inputs is “design.” Collectives can “design” just as individuals can design.
I suppose you are trying to use this fact about the collective nature of human innovation to suggest that there can’t be a designer-God. That is a category mistake. Human innovation must be cumulative because human knowledge is always limited by history, circumstances, etc., and thus human knowledge acquisition proceeds incrementally. A designer-God, however, would not necessarily be limited in this fashion; indeed, in clasical theology in the Abrahamic traditions, God is omniscient and by definition would not be so limited.
An argument against design based on the cumulative nature of human innovation therefore fails on its own terms and fails particularly as against a designer-God.
dopderbeck-
I don’t think the original post set out to dis-prove the existence of a designer-God by discrediting the watch:watchmaker teleological argument (although your “category mistake” riposte would be devastating if it did). Instead, I think it simply aimed to defeat a *particular* argument for the existence of a designer-God, on those grounds. Any final answer to the question of the designer-God’s existence is left for another day . . . although I have strong suspicions that the theist-atheist dialectic may ultimately amount to little more than this very routine: theist purports to “prove” the existence of a designer-God on particular grounds, and atheist purports to refute that particular basis. Ultimately though, the existence of a designer-God may be consistent with any conceivable human knowledge state, no matter how rigorously empirical or scientific. Because of this squirrelly and ineradicable “possibility”, atheists have trouble ‘proving the negative’ (except circumstantially on such negative grounds as parsimony-of-explanation, or Occam’s Razor), and can probably at best only play wrecking-ball by knocking over the theist’s particular supports for the proposition of existence, rather than erect separate support for their own proposition of non-existence.
What is striking, for me, is that the “watch of the beach” argument presupposes that the finder knows what a watch is, and most importantly, what its function is. If we knew the purpose of the universe in the same way that we know the purpose of a watch, then the argument from design would seem a whole lot more credible. But, Catch-22, any purpose presupposes an intention, and a designer, which would make the argument circular.
But Ben, of course we know the purpose of the universe. It’s 42. Haven’t you been paying attention?
Ben, great point. You raised the most revealing of all questions: where does this strange tendency to perceive “purpose” in the structure of the universe come from? Certainly not from watch:watchmaker teleological arguments. This kind of analogy is little more than a post-hoc rationalization, resting (as you point out) for its persuasiveness on the *prior* perception of purpose in the structure of the universe. So, again, where does this perception come from? I think it springs from (at least) one primary source: the perception that our own existence is purposive, that we exist for a reason. As the horizon of human knowledge presses farther back in time and away from our home planet (and indeed into the intimate spaces and cells of our bodies and even into our mothers’ wombs), this sense of purpose faces continual assault from the larger context, or “architecture”, of human knowledge, of the known universe, generating pressure on the purpose-narratives we construct to give macro-scopic meaning to our lives (and thereby avoid the despair of purposelessness). This narrative, in order to be plausible to ourselves, must anchor our sense of existential purpose in the very origins of the universe (as we understand and construct them in our minds, of course), and a handy construct (already employed to negate the sense of purposelessness generated by the idea of death by creating various fantasies of afterlife and salvation) is that of “God”. Humanistic purpose is the only kind we can imagine, so is it any surprise that it’s just this kind of purpose we seek to locate at the genesis of the universe and so validate our existence? Daniel Quinn described it best in his book “Ishmael”: Mother Culture whispers into our ears that we, humanity, are the purpose of the universe, the culmination of the cosmic drama. All that came before is mere prelude, and all that follows mere refuse. The alternative belief, given our limited cognitive resources, is that we are the products of a random, contingent, mindless process, with no real end or beginning, providing only the cold and alienating prospect of eternal flux.
Adolescent dabbling in astronomy catalyzed the loss of my faith: the vast, overwhelming, utterly unfathomable super-majority of raw material in the universe is “unused”, in a sense. Why does Jupiter exist? What are the “purposes” of Neptune’s moons? The Oort cloud? The uncountable galaxies revealed by the Hubble Ultra Deep Field photographs? Our sun will eventually expand into a bloated red giant and then explode into a supernova, incinerating the Earth. Where will humanity be? The universe may end in a reverse-crunch akin to the Big Bang in reverse or a heat death brought about by ineluctable entropic dissipation… again, what about human life? As our collective knowledge-base expands, the cognitive pressure to integrate our worldviews into coherent wholes destroys the plausibility of our perception of “purpose”, to those who are willing to listen. And with the loss of this belief likely goes belief in the kind of personally-involved god so common in religious lore. If a god exists, it is probably not the kind sympathetic to our needs or aims. The longer the (known) chain of causation that separates us from the imagined moment of “creation”, the less plausible humanity-as-the-purpose-of-the-universe narratives are (generating pressure to discredit evolution, for example, in the minds of those who cling to their traditional narratives). The vaster the (known) expanse of the universe, and the greater variety of (known) structures within it, the lesser role humans play in the cosmic drama, and the less plausible the humans-as-purpose-of-the-universe narrative becomes (vis a vis astronomy). And perhaps the greater grows the need to look to death for the proof of the sense-of-purpose that traditionalists cling so madly to. . . prophecies of Armaggedon, the End of Days, the Rapture, become all the more necessary to allay (and escape) the encircling notion that we simply don’t matter. And science is the enemy of that comforting illusion. As, it seems, is truth.
Hanno, don’t be froody.
Matt, you’re very much in line with my views on the matter. No doubt that existential dread is a factor. But it can’t be the only factor which explains the persistence of anthropomorphization.
The tendency of persons to attribute intentions to inert objects can be attributed to the workings of the so-called “mind-reading” faculty. There is a specific function of the brain that causes people to try to interpret intentions. (According to some researchers, this faculty is the thing that autistic persons lack.) Imagine an animation, where a triangle moves around the screen in a curved line, and the triangle is always next to a square which is moving along the same line. When shown the animation, most children will say something like, “The triangle is chasing the square!” — attributing intentions and actions to benign things.
Ben-
I don’t want to push the strong claim that existential dread is a complete explanation for people’s adoption of a designer-god belief, but I do think it can be given some teeth on a constructivist account of knowledge. Constructivist accounts of scientific progress describe a process of “splitting” and “inversion” that accompanies the cognitive hardening of hypotheses into “facts”. When consensus forms about the factual status of a scientific claim, the mental construct representing the claim (such as “curved space-time” or “sub-atomic particle”) “splits” and lodges a copy of itself in the individual’s perception of the “real-world”. Now two constructs (one acknowledged as such, the other not) are present in the mind. The relationship between the admitted construct and the “real” clone is then inverted, such that the clone construct is deemed to be a “real object in the world” which the admitted construct only reflects or describes. This type of world-creation is fairly obvious in hindsight, when we peer into history’s dustbin of discarded scientific concepts: the ether, the bodily humours, the celestial spheres, etc. In hindsight, we recognize the constructed nature of these ideas, but lose sight of the fact that their ontological existence “in the world” was a genuine felt-reality to their proponents at the time. The radical notion of constructivism is that our current scientific concepts occupy no more privileged or secure ontological status than those of the past (even if their pragmatic value has increased).
With this background in mind, one route to belief in a designer-god probably proceeds roughly as follows, undergirded by the basic processes of splitting/inversion. First, human beings are incessant planners. We envision desired results and contrive means of achieving these goals. Second, and most importantly, each of our choices has unintended consequences, both good and bad. A good example is my decision to attend a particular university. While I certainly had in mind a vague set of goals I hoped to achieve through that choice, one happy and completely unexpected consequence was the meeting of my wife. Third, there is a tendency to look backwards along the length of the chain of contingency that led to such happy results, recognize the inability of oneself to have foreseen and consciously planned for them, and, coupled with a feeling that the result is the “right” one, experience a feeling that some sort of invisible hand was at work the whole time, leading you blindfolded through a maze. My guess is that this perception of some larger “plan”, so common among American Christians at least, represents a splitting of a generalized construct of a “plan” drawn from our own experience as planning creatures, which is then inverted to become the “real” plan “out in the world”, which our own personal plans merely (and often vainly) attempt to track. As you mention, this may be an outgrowth of a “mind-reading” function in the brain, or perhaps the “intentional stance”, as Daniel Dennett calls it, by which we explain the behavior of objects through ascribing mental states to them. Because our experience with planning is limited to humans, this higher plan is comprehended in terms of an anthropomorphic intelligence which is cognitively located in the individual’s conception of the universe, or “real world”. By insuring (faith in) the ultimate contribution of all events to some greater good, this construct insulates the mind from existential angst, or feelings of purposelessness.
[[Aside: Interestingly, this notion of our lives having purpose — unfolding according to an unknown but progressively revealed design — can be attacked on the merits. The best argument I can think of is one from multi-finality: Because of the presence of both good and bad (unintended) consequences, and the overwhelming cognitive salience of actual events as opposed to hypothetical or “alternative” universes, every life-history will be full of intricate and seemingly improbable chains of contingency which result in some ultimate good. (“If I hadn’t sat with that ex-teacher at the elementary school banquet, I wouldn’t have taken that class in high school, and if I hadn’t taken that class, I wouldn’t have attended that college, and if I hadn’t attended that college, I wouldn’t have met person X, and if I hadn’t met person X, I wouldn’t have joined organization Y, and if…”) In hindsight, a sense of inevitability and design is seductive for the constructivist reasons I’ve outlined above. But the key point of multi-finality is that any such life-history, including those that are products of blind contingency, can generate this feeling, simply because of the mixed consequences that result from both single events and their aggregation. An inference of design faces the intractable problem that this sense-of-purpose is just as compatible with randomness (non-design and blind contingency) as it is with actual design. Occam’s razor therefore suggests, but does not require, a shave.]]
Now that I’ve sketched an explanation for the origins of belief in a higher-plan(ner), we can examine the effect of this one belief on an individual’s larger belief-architecture. Once accepted, this belief creates what I’ll call a “coherence-crisis” when combined, in a single brain, with other received knowledge about the world. (I assume that the impulse towards coherence of belief is a basic organizing principle of the mind, which seeks to eliminate overt contradiction of belief and perhaps even thorny doubts, by fashioning internally consistent narratives to explain events. Furthermore, a coherence-crisis, as I’ve called it, may never rise to the level of consciousness, but rather predispose an individual to credit certain factual claims consistent with more fervently held beliefs.) For example, there is a tension between the belief in a designer-god and standard scientific narratives describing our origins, which are at best agnostic. I.e., Big Bang – galaxy formation – solar system formation – planetary formation – chemical origins of life – biological evolution – humanity. Three constructivist strategies are available to preserve the belief in a designer-god in the face of conflicting narratives. First, the two stories can be dialectically fused to generate a single narrative. For example, the instance of design and creation may be located just prior to the Big Bang, and the scientific account understood as describing the means employed by the designer-god to achieve its purposive ends. Second, the scientific narrative can be discredited. Young-Earthers come to mind, as do arguments that dinosaur fossils were “planted” by a designer-god to create the appearance of antiquity, perhaps as a test of faith. Third, the scientific narrative can be systematically ignored. (Because our understandings of reality are constructions, the failure to transmit narratives from one generation to the next results in their disappearance.) I believe the American Amish have adopted a strategy similar to this one.
A fourth possibility, however, would be for coherence pressures to purge the designer-god belief itself. The less fervently this prior belief in a designer-god is held (underwritten by the perception of “purpose” in one’s own life), the more likely it is that the belief itself will be jettisoned in the teeth of alternative narratives. Furthermore, the greater the degree of exposure to agnostic scientific narratives, and the greater explanatory scope of those narratives themselves, the greater degree to which coherence pressures will push against belief in a designer-god as an implausible incoherence. That was my own personal experience: The universe simply seemed so vast, human lives so inconsequential and ephemeral when measured against light-years and cosmological time (perhaps even no more than a mere waystation in biological evolution), that I couldn’t believe it all existed “for us”. And if a putative designer-god had a multitude of other purposes, why should humanity rank so highly or deserve lavish attention like salvation or personal communion? Ultimately, my own personal coherence-crisis resulted in a rejection of the god meme. The more I learned, the more plausibly contingency and blind chance accounted for our existence, and the more contrived designer-god narratives, trying desperately to reach dialectically across the light-years and the epochs, grew.