Challenges to arguments from observation

📎 Necessary is the opposite form of contingent there must be something necessary, for Aquinas this is God.

General Criticism (Against the processes that have been used for both the teleological and cosmological arguments)

Leap of Logic (reduction ad absurdum) – Reduce the logic argument to be absurd. Each argument goes from there must be a designer, to that designer must be God, assuming that this is a logical step, yet no reasoning is given for why this may be the case. In each of these arguments observation are taken from the world and applied to the universe E.g a watch is compared to the universe this is not logical.

God of the Gaps - Each argument can said to have found a gap and then filled it with God E.g the need for a designer or creator and filled that Gap with God, without any reasoning of why this should be the case.

Burden of Proof – whoever makes the claim, as the burden to prove their point, neither teleological nor cosmological argument provides proof for their conclusions.

Details of Hume's criticisms of these arguments for the existence of God from natural religion

📎 Hume is an empiricist. This means that we will not accept any argument unless is it grounded in observable evidence. Hume wrote 24 years before Paley. Paley tries to answer Hume's criticism criticisms in his theological argument.

Argument against teleological argument (Hume)

1. Why is God the designer? Why does the argument assume that the God of Classical theism created the world, the teleological argument fails to explain this.
2. Why just one God? Watches have many designers, why does the analogy lead us to one God, the teleological argument fails to explain this.
3. Cannot guess that the universe has a designer just because things within the universe may show a design, the reasoning is unsound. It is too big a jump to go from something that we know it designed such as a watch to something that may appear to be designed, like the natural world and the universe.
4. Evidence of evil both natural and moral evil in the world contradicts the God of Classical Theism
5. "The world is not like a machine" The universe is more of an organic thing, if we use an analogy of an organic object like a carrot, this would change everything as we could not talk about the intricate details and complexity of a carrot.

The argument against the cosmological argument

1. The fallacy of Composition - we cannot move from saying that everything in the universe has a cause to say the universe itself has a cause. He uses the example of 20 partials – if we find the cause of each of the 20 particles, this does not mean that collectively the 20 particles have the same cause. Russell explains this with the idea that just because every human has a mother, it does not mean humankind has a mother.
2. The fallacy of the Affirmation of the Consequent – we often misunderstand the relationship between cause and effect, we have a habit of seeing effects and associating them with causes, as a matter of logic not all effects have causes. An example you can use (not Hume's) is If you were at a bus stop and then put your hand out to stop an on-coming bus you could not rightly say that you had caused the bus to stop. There is no way you can know that there is anything other than correlation between the two events. Any link made would be a link made by you in your mind.
3. We do not have any experience of the creation of the universe, therefore any attempt to discuss it goes beyond our capabilities. This means any argument put forward is nothing more than theory, and should be treated as such, so it cannot prove God's existence.
4. The universe might have always existed, if this is the case the cosmological argument falls short as it is dependent on the universe having a beginning caused by God. If the universe always existed it fits with Aristotle's PM and modern Science.
5. The cosmological argument does not lead convincingly to the Christian concept of one God. There could be many gods or a god who started things that no longer exist.

The challenge of evolution

• Evolution is the process by which different kinds of living organisms are believed to have developed from earlier forms during the history of the earth.
• Charles Darwin stated that the fittest and healthiest members of society survive and their characteristics are passed down – giving the appearance of design in the universe. Darwin argued that the cause of organic life on planet Earth was the result of a slow and mutated process of Evolution.
• He argued that the apparent purpose that Paley saw was just organisms fighting for survival
• Geneticist Steve Jones described the evolutionary process as 'a series of successful mistakes'. This means that even though people may look at the world and think that it was designed in reality, it is all by chance that the universe is what it is. 💡 Richard Dawkins a biological materialist and atheist supported Darwin by arguing that random mutations in DNA alone give rise to variation in the world and the illusion of design. For Dawkins, life amounts to nothing more that bytes of digital information contained in the quaternary code, DNA.