Q&A: The Physico-Theological Argument
The Physico-Theological Argument
Question
Hello and blessings. I would like to understand something about the physico-theological argument.
The argument claims that because the world is complex / ordered (however you want to call it), it must have a designer. In order to stop the regress of a designer who would also require design, that designer must be outside the world—that is, not limited by our laws of physics—and he is the one who established them, so he himself does not need a designer. What is not clear to me is why a designer is inferred, when we know of things in the world that can be designed without a designer, certainly not an intelligent one—the perhaps best-known example being evolution in the biological world through natural selection and other secondary mechanisms.
In other words, just as in the past we did not know how the biological world, which appears designed because of each organism’s environmental adaptation, was designed, and later we discovered that there is a fully demonstrable designer that is not intelligent, so too we could explain complexity in other areas of life without any designer with intentions.
Answer
There is no connection whatsoever to the laws of physics. That Creator must be uncaused. Causality is not specifically connected to the laws of physics; rather, it is a philosophical principle. Naturally, if He created the world and the laws of physics, then He would also not be subject to them.
We have no knowledge of designed things without a designer. Where did you get that from?
Evolution is irrelevant to the issue, since it operates within very specific and complex laws of nature, and without them it would not occur. The question is not how creatures came into being. The answer to that is evolution. The question is how evolution came into being—that is, the laws of nature that dictate it and govern it.
I discussed this at length in the third talk in The First Being, and in many other places as well.
Discussion on Answer
And that is what I answered. Evolution creates order only because it operates within a framework of certain laws of nature. Therefore, the one who creates the order is whoever created the laws. Evolution teaches us nothing about the spontaneous creation of order.
I understand, but something in the terminology is still unclear to me. Is this the physico-theological argument—that the one who created the laws is actually the one who created the order? I was referring more to the issue of complexity, from which an intelligent designer is supposedly inferred. So what bothered me was that maybe there is no designer, but rather a mechanism within the laws of physics that created order. Who created the laws (and thereby the order) is a different question from the argument I referred to in the title of the question.
But if that is the main claim of the physico-theological argument, it leads me to the issue of the principle of causality and the Big Bang.
I got that precisely from evolution. Evolution is not an intelligent designer (it is a biological phenomenon that occurs because of certain laws of physics), but it did lead to a certain kind of “order.” More precisely, to each organism’s adaptation to its environment. That means that as long as there is some mechanism of order within the laws of physics—like evolution, which operates under certain conditions and creates order—we have an explanation for the physico-theological argument that does not involve an intelligent creator.
The question is this: why infer an intelligent creator, if we know of physical phenomena that create order and complexity without any intelligent designer (albeit under certain conditions)? In other words, just as a person looks at the world and it appears complex to him at the atomic level because of his limited cognitive abilities, so too a person looks at the natural world, which appears astonishingly ordered because of each organism’s adaptation to its environment. In the case of the person looking at the natural world, he has an explanation that does not involve intelligent design. The question is why an intelligent designer is inferred in the case of the person looking at the world at the “complex” atomic level according to the physico-theological argument, rather than a non-designed adaptation similar to what happened in the natural world. In other words, it may be that the order was created thanks to a mechanism of order within the laws of physics themselves, rather than an intelligent designer who created the laws so that order would come about.
I hope I’m being clear.