Design Argument Strengths

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1. (a) Explain the main strengths and weaknesses of the design argument for the existence of God. (21 marks)

Our universe seems to adopt a sort of “Goldilocks effect” where every last detail is exactly right regarding the laws and forces of science so as to create life. The extent of this ‘fine-tuning’ means it seems inconceivable that, in the chaos of the Big Bang, the universe could have happened entirely by chance, and therefore there must have been some sort of divine designer which caused the universe to form in this way.
Fred Hoyle agrees with Swinburne’s ideas. He suggests that the string of coincidences that led to the creation of life are “happy accidents” yet there is such a large number of these that it appears strange and much …show more content…
Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher of the 18th century, served what was described as a “death blow” to the design argument: if his theory was seen as true, it would deconstruct everything that the argument is based on. His idea was that there was, in fact, no order in the universe. There is only order insofar as humans impose it on what we can see. Humans seem to have a natural drive to seek out patterns in every aspect of our lives, which is why we ‘see’ repeated structures throughout the natural world. There is no intrinsic order, but we expect patterns in things, and so we define the world as “ordered” because that is how we want to see it. In the same way that the ancient Greeks developed the images in the constellations, we pick out shapes in nature - Dawkins adds to this argument, pointing out that the brain can spot illusions (like a woman’s face or the Buddha) in Mars’ surface, or in the clouds, because we are “drawn towards seeing patterns as a natural instinct”. If we are capable of such ‘pareidolia’ (seeing faces where there are none) then the brain would also, then, be capable of connecting this to apparent design, and suggesting that there must have been an intelligent designer - where there may again be, in fact, nothing there. Kant’s argument states that the argument of design qua regularity is entirely void, because its foundations don’t
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