Flashcards
Design Arguments
Cards in this deck (36)
- 1What do design arguments seek to do?Move from facts about the world to God.
- 2What are Swinburne's three types of design argument?- Teleological arguments: arguments from a general pattern of order in the universe.
- Arguments from Providence: Arguments from the provision of need; conscious beings.
- Arguments from beauty. - 3What is the most famous design argument?William Paley's Watchmaker
- 4What posed a challenge to this argument?In the mid-nineteenth century Darwin’s work challenged the traditional idea of creation by God that Paley was suggesting due to his theory of evolution.
- 5What did Bishop Samuel Wilberforce say about this at a meeting of the British Association in 1860?“the principle of natural selection... is completely incompatible with the word of God."
- 6Who else rejected Paley's argument?David Hume, 22 years before Paley’s watchmaker argument.
- 7In which book did Hume deploy these criticisms?“Dialogues concerning Natural Religion”
- 8Who are the characters that he uses? What are they like?- Cleanthes: believes in Natural Theology and argues a posteriori to God.
- Demea: believes in God but their argument is a priori.
- Philo: a critic who puts forward Hume’s own views. - 9What is Hume's first argument?Cleanthes version of teleological: All design necessarily implies a designer, A great design necessarily implies greatness in the designer, there is clearly a great design in the world which is like a great machine; therefore: there must be a great designer of the world.
- 10How is Cleanthes' argument similar to Paley's?Cleanthes argument is similar to Paley’s and both are reliant on the idea that like effects cause like causes, but both are base on analogy which is a weak form of argument if you are comparing two things with a lot of differences (a watch and the world).
- 11What does Philo(/Hume) argue about the nature of our world and God in “Dialogues concerning Natural Religion”?Maybe our planet “was only the first rude effort of some infant deity.” Hume/Philo argues that a world like ours with so many natural disasters and evil could not have been created by the traditional omnibenevolent and omnipotent God.
- 12What is Hume's second argument?It is possible that the universe arose by chance, order does not necessarily have to imply design (this is indicated by the discovery of more and more natural scientific laws).
- 13Summarise Philo/Hume's argument about this.The world is ordered, this order is either resulted from design or from chance, it is entirely plausible that the world arose from chance.
- 14How does he strengthen his argument?With the following point: animal adaptations don’t prove a designer- they adapt in order to survive. Darwin’s arguments about natural selection strengthen this.
- 15What does Fred Hoyle say to support Swinburne?“a component has evidently been missing from cosmological studies. The origin of the Universe, like the solution of the rubik cube, requires an intelligence.” “properties seem to run through the fabric of the natural world like a thread of happy accidents. But there are so many of these odd coincidences essential to life that some explanation seems required to account for them."
- 16What is essentially Swinburne's idea?The conformity of nature to uniform natural laws is “too big” a phenomenon for science to explain.
- 17Why does he think that Hume is wrong about a group of deities?Because the uniformity of the universe points to the existence of one God.
- 18What does Swinburne conclude?1. A priori it is very improbably that a universe could just happen to exist and
2. By virtue of God’s postulated character, this is the sort of universe God would have reason to make.
Thus the teleological argument does not prove the existence of God but increases the probability. - 19Why does Dawkins criticise Swinburne?Richard Dawkins criticises Swinburne’s ideas as “arguments from personal incredulity” because he thinks that a Professor of the Philosophy of Religion should not make arguments based on the fact that they don’t understand biology.
- 20What does Dawkins argue about evolution?It has no longterm purpose.
- 21What does Dawkins argue in his book, "The Selfish Gene?"People don’t act for the good of their friends or their community, but instead they act because of a selfish gene that tells them to do anything to survive.
- 22Which scientists disagree with this and why?Some biologist (Stephen Rose, Richard Lewontin and Jay Gould) reject this idea because they think that species have clear priority over genes.
- 23How does Matt Ridley to some extent support Dawkins?By agreeing that human genes are selfish but we have learnt to overcome them and act virtuously.
- 24How does this idea relate to Christianity?This idea that human’s are ultimately flawed but learn to overcome it does not support traditional christian views of humanity.
- 25How did Arthur Peacock respond to Dawkins' view of humanity?By saying that the idea of the selfish gene does not necessarily rule out the existence of God because it doesn’t answer any questions about how the universe came into being or why there is only one set of physical laws.
- 26What did John Polkinghorne argue about God creating the universe?God chose to create a world that experiences the “fruitful interplay of chance and necessity, novelty and regularity.” (“Our World” 1986)
- 27What problem did John Stuart Mill raise with the teleological argument?To accept that a world full of evil and imperfection was designed, the designer can’t be both omnipotent and omnibenevolent.
- 28What is one reason for the idea that an intelligence is driving evolution?If the sole purpose is survival, then surely it would make more sense for us to be evolving towards single celled creatures that can survive easily than to be adapting towards more intelligent creatures.
- 29How does A.E Taylor's argument from providence work?Nature appears to plan for human and animal life and there has to be more than physical laws to account for the tremendous improbability of life. An intelligence is needed to explain this. Mind cannot be explained by evolution because evolution itself requires a mind that imposed it. Humans cannot be explained by evolution because they don’t just adapt to their environments, they also transform them. (Darwin, however, could say that human’s ability to transform their environment is an adaption we have gained to survive).
- 30What is Taylor trying to do?Restore the teleological argument whilst bearing the Darwin’s ideas in mind.
- 31What does Darwin day about the Devil's chaplain?“What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering law and horribly cruel works of nature. It can be worth considering how one might reply to the Devil’s chaplain.”
- 32What does Wittgenstein say about Darwin's ideas?Wittgenstein thought that we shouldn’t accept Darwin’s ideas as fact just because they seem obvious because we don’t know them to be true with absolute certainty (no one has watched evolution happen).
- 33What fact does the argument from beauty arise from?Beauty is held to have no survival value in nature.
- 34What does Tennant argue about the universe's beauty?Tennant argues that the universe is saturated with beauty from a microscopic to a macroscopic level.
- 35What did Franciscan theologians, such as Paul Rout, say about beauty?In being overwhelmed by something incredibly beautiful, such as a sunset, we are learning to connect with God’s language.
- 36What do some people argue to the contrary of this?Some people argue that beauty isn’t something that exists, rather that is a facet of human perception.
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- AS - Level Theology Flashcards on Design Arguments, created by dotty.h on 08/04/2016.
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