Dr Greg Bahnsen - Philosophy of Christianity: The Cosmological Argument Pt 2 (Part 7)

Let's begin with a word of prayer. Lord, we pray that you might bless us with your presence, that you might give us wisdom during this hour. We pray especially that the wisdom we are granted would be the mind of Jesus Christ, that we might be submissive to his Word. We might be submissive to his authority in all things, especially in our reasoning and our thinking. We pray that every thought would be made captive to Jesus Christ, so that as we reflect upon your existence and our place before you as your servants, we would not be arrogant, we would not be mightier or think more of ourselves than we ought. We ask, Lord, that you might give us a due sense of humility, not only in what we think about you, but also in how we reason about you. We pray, Father, that these things might be done, that you would receive all the glory of our lives. For it's in Jesus name we pray. Amen. Okay, somebody please tell me what the thrust of the ontological argument is. Ontological arguments all have the same basic thrust, and that is. Okay, the existence of God is deduced from the conception of God. The nature of God, or the conception of God implies the existence of God. Okay, the cosmological argument. Now, what is the central thrust of it? This depends upon existence being implied by a conception of God. The cosmological argument deduces the existence from God from what central or basic platform? There is an appeal to some principle in every cosmological argument. That principle is the principle of causation. Causation. Okay, appeal to a causal principle to prove God's existence. So God is the first cause. God is the necessary being. Now we're going to come to the teleological argument. And in similar style, what would you say is the heart of the teleological argument? Because there's order.

There must be an orderer.

Okay, order proves an orderer. Or in order to make this a little easier to discuss, we'll say that order implies a designer. The teleological argument says that God's existence is probable. On a normal appeal to evidence, mainly the evidence of design or order. In our experience, most teleological arguments, I want you to note, appeal to probability. God's existence is probable. The ontological argument says God's existence is necessary. Necessary to the very conception of God. How about the cosmological argument? Is it an appeal to necessary existence or probable existence? To necessary truth or probable truth about the existence of God? Necessary. Necessary. Although there are some forms of it recently that appeal to probability, it's still along the lines of appeal to necessity. The Teleological argument, though this is what I want you to get at the beginning of class, is an appeal to probability. If you look at the world the way it is, very probably this world has a designer. Now, there's a great deal of variation in the various formulations of the teleological argument that you'll find in the history of philosophical literature. And these variations are due to three different factors. First of all, there's variation in the form of the teleological argument that arises from different conceptions of natural science from age to age. Different conceptions of natural science. Now, this is a very fertile field for discussion, and it's one that I wish we had more time to get into, but especially because there's such a reigning dogmatism about science in our society today. Science is not a uniform conception or ideology. There have been different and conflicting notions and conceptions of natural science from age to age. And I'm thinking here especially of the shift from Aristotelian concepts of nature with their teleological view of all natural items. A teleological view of nature is implied in Aristotelian physics, where all things seek their own end, their own appropriate end. That was replaced, especially around the time of the Renaissance, with a mechanical view, nature. And we see this come to fruition in Newtonian physics and so forth. And then we have in our own day a shift from Newtonian physics to field theory and Einsteinian physics. And so there are different conceptions of nature, different conceptions of physics, or phusis in Greek, nature, that you'll find from age to age. But there's a second factor that gives you a variation in the formulation of the teleological argument, and that's the different fields of relevant interest are appealed to. So some people will argue from adaptive purposes in, say, biology. Some might appeal to the realm of physics, some to the realm of zoology, or to human relations or whatever might be of interest to you. So you'll find different forms of the argument depending upon what the field of relevant interest is. And then, of course, within that field, there will be different features of the natural world that are picked out by different disputers who are using the teleological argument. So there are many, many forms and formulations of the teleological argument. You need to get that in mind so that when you read the literature, if you should read beyond this class, I hope you will, that when you come across this kind of argument, you'll see in terms of its basic structure, you'll say, that's a teleological argument. Okay, it may not be the one that Paley used, but it's an argument of that form. Now, if you get this down, you'll be able to distinguish then the structural features or the characteristic essence of every one of the arguments. An argument having to do with causality, an argument having to do with conception, argument having to do with design. It can all be distinguished in the history of theistic argumentation. Well, now let's ask what the thrust of the teleological argument is. The thrust of this argument, to put it very simply, is that without God's creative activity as an intelligent designer, these features of the natural world to which we have appealed could not be as they are. Without God's creative activity as an intelligent designer, these features of the natural world to which we have appealed could not be as they are the intricacy and the orderliness of what we're looking at, be it, say, a human eye or the geology of the world about us, the intricacy and orderliness of these things are not very probably the result of chance. Intricacy and orderliness are not very probably the result of chance. And then we add to this that the design of the whole natural order, the design of the whole natural order obviously cannot be the result of some human effort. And consequently the design of the whole is obviously suprahuman. And that is to say that it requires an intelligent creator or a God to have made the world the way it is. Another way to express it is only a wise creator can account for the purposive adaptiveness which we see in the universe. Only a wise creator can account for the purpose of adaptiveness that we see in the universe. Alright. The particular form of the teleological argument that you read for the for today was put forth by whom? Paley. Paley. Okay, what did Paley say? How does the argument run? It's very, you know, simply, naively, what did Paley appeal to? Analogy. To analogy. Okay. He said, imagine yourself walking along and you find what? A watch. Okay? And he says, now I want you to compare your feelings about the watch to your feelings about a. About a rock or a stone. Okay? It says now with respect to the watch, you see the intricacy of it. You see the way the parts relate to each other. You see that it has some kind of adaptive design in it. And you naturally think that this watch has a watchmaker. Then he says, if you look at the world as a whole, the very same reasoning that enabled you to move from the premise of the features of the watch, its purposiveness its order, its intricacy, its adaptiveness, those very same features can be seen in the world as a whole. And we are therefore justified to infer from the world as a whole that there is a designer, a grand world maker. Just like there is a watchmaker, there must be a world maker, a creator. Is that a pretty good argument? You don't necessarily get a watchmaker, though, out of looking at a watch, can make God into a watch, then a big giant watch in the sky that makes little watches. You don't get a personal God out of a watchman. You don't get a personal God. I think Paley would probably say, you're right, we can't prove that we get a personal God, but we do get an intelligent God. And then he would want to argue intelligence in some sense proves personality. And so he might want to do that in two steps. Well, now, who criticized this argument, by the way, your reading has selected the classic reputation of the argument. It was a very good choice, I think, on the editor's part. David Hume, in his dialogues about natural religion, he has this dialogue going on. And Hume really puts the screws to Paley's form of argumentation. Hume in essence is saying, does someone who is not predisposed to theism does someone who is not predisposed to theism come to a theistic explanation for the design of the world? Okay, Paley says, if you walk through this world and run across the watch, you think, what watchmaker? Now you look at the world as a whole. What do you think? There must be a world maker, there must be a creator? Hume says, is that true that when we run across, when we discover, when we encounter instances of design and order, intricacy and adaptiveness in our experience, is it true that we just naturally think there must be a God, a creator, or is that true only for those who are predisposed to believe that God is the creator of this world? Hume says the analogy between the artifacts appealed to by Paley and the natural objects of this world is not a very strong analogy. The analogy between artifacts and natural objects is not strong enough to be prove the Christian Creator. I'm going to give you five basic arguments against the analogy. And before we do that, though, you need to see there is a generalization implicit in Halley's argumentation. And then the generalizations of is applied to the world as a whole. It goes something like this. We can generalize from observed cases, so we have a generalization from observed cases to the world as a whole. There's going to be a generalization from observed cases that is then appealed. Excuse me. Applied to the world as a whole in the argumentation. And that generalization. I've left some room here on the board to fill it in for you. That generalization is, namely, that every. How have I written this down? Now, every case of order is the result of intelligent agency. Every case of order is the result or results from intelligent agency. And let's look at this just for a moment. Halley, implicitly is drawing a generalization from observed cases. He says, now let's just look at a few cases in our experience. Let's just observe what is true about our experience. Okay, you find the watch, you find a case of order. Here's his intricacy and purposiveness. And you know that that's the result of an intelligent agency, that there's some agent, some human creator for the watch, somebody who has manufactured this. So that will demonstrate the very feature of order that we're now observing. Okay? So he looks at observed cases and generalizes from them. He generalizes so that every case of order is the result of intelligent agency. Okay, we look at some cases and then we generalize, saying it is probably true for all cases. Now remember that we're saying it's probably true so we don't get into the difficulty of the logical error of reasoning from parts to whole. So from, if you will, a few observed instances to all observed instances. Anybody know what that informal fallacy is called? Learn it well. You'll run into it in your churches all the time. You'll run into the theological literature more times than you'd like to admit. It's called the fallacy of hasty generalization. From a few observed cases, we then generalize a principle. Now, if that's an argument, it's a fallacious argument. But now this is not an argument. This is just saying very probably we can generalize that if it's true in all these other cases, it must be true in the rest, probably. So it will allow for counter instances if there should be any. But nevertheless, the generalization has stated that every case of order is result of intelligent agency. And it's that generalization from observed cases that is then applied to the world as a whole. You see it in the case of the watch. You can apply the generalization from the watch to the world as a whole. Now, I'd like to give you five arguments against this procedure of generalizing from observed cases and applying it to the world as a whole. And the first form of argument that you'll find at Hume is very simply stated. What entitles us to say that the whole is sufficiently like some selected part of the whole? What warrants us in thinking that the whole will be like some particular part of the whole? Why should we think that the feature of the part is characteristic of the whole? Okay, what would you think if I argued that the human body is blue because the blood that flows in human veins is blue? Part of the body is blue, blood in the veins, therefore the whole of the body is blue? Anybody convinced of that? Well, obviously that argument from part to whole is a very bad one. We know it to be false. On the other hand, what if we say every brick in the wall is red and therefore the wall is red from the part, the brick which is red? We reason that the feature of the parts is the feature of the whole whole, therefore the wall as a whole is red. Is that right? You're all somehow not very trusting of me. I see you sitting here going, that's one of those obvious things, guys. That's right, the wall is red. I have nothing up my sleeve, no tricks. I'm not going to say the mortar's a different color. That's what I was thinking. If you get far enough back, you don't even see the mortar we want. My point here is that sometimes the features of the part are the features of the whole, and sometimes they aren't. Okay, you have red walls and red bodies, right? Or blue bodies is what I was arguing. Well, in one case it's true, in the other case it's not. Now, since you have to distinguish between some part, the whole reasoning which is good reasoning, and some which is not, Hume can legitimately ask, how do we know of the world as a whole that it partakes of the feature of some of its parts. How do we know that this selected part of the world is true of the whole? And there is no argument to be found in Paley for that. And consequently the applicability of the generalization has been undermined. How do we know the generalization applies? How do we know that what is true of the part? Obviously, we only see parts of the world. We don't see the whole world. Anybody here have an undifferentiated perception of the whole world for all of history? Anybody got it all in his mind right now? No. So when you reason, you're always reasoning about a part of the world, usually a very limited and somewhat trivial part of the world, human say, you really don't know very much at all what you do know, you make a lot of mistakes about. So what little bit we know the part if that shows us purposiveness, why should we think that the whole partakes of that little bit that we know? So the generalization is now undermined. Secondly, we can say this generalization not only is or a question about whether it applies, it's all a question about whether it's true. Is that generalization true? Is it true that every case of order is a result of intelligent agency? Do we know that to be true? Do we have grounds for saying that? Hume said that the actual evidence shows that only some forms of order are the result of intelligent agency. Only some forms of order. Some order shows us intelligent agency and some doesn't. Okay, give me an example of order that shows us intelligent agency. Human body. Nope. Have you ever watched a human body made computer or a watch, if you want to get back to Paley. So Hume says, that's right. Some order does show intelligent agency. Has anybody ever seen a tree manufactured? Has anybody ever seen a plant or an animal or a human body manufactured? Well, no. Well, do plants and trees and human bodies have order about them? Well, yes. Consequently, Hume said, we do have some forms of order that we don't know about any intelligent agency behind them at all. Do we? Now, at this point, if you're thinking along the inclination for apologists who like to shoot from the hip is to say, but that's just the point of the argument. He Hume, don't you see that if you see it in some cases, you should see it in others? There's order in the human body. There must be a maker for the human body. Remember where we began. Hume said, is it true that order shows us a creator? If you're not predisposed to believe so, Hume says, I understand why Christians jump from the order of the human body to the idea of an orderer or designer or creator of the human body. But is that what the natural evidence shows us? Hume said, the natural evidence shows us some cases of order have a designer and some don't. Trees don't have a designer that we can see anyway. There's no natural evidence for a creator of a tree. Consequently, the generalization is just not true. It's just not the case. The actual evidence shows some forms resulting from intelligent agency, but that natural objects like trees and stones, which also have order, intricacy, harmony, and yet without any human manufacturing. So unless you beg the question, Hume says some order need not be designed. There can be undesigned Order. Unless you beg the question. If you're predisposed to say order must have an orderer, a designer, then that's fine. But we're trying to argue on natural premises what can we see? And Hume says, I can take the very world you're appealing to and prove the opposite conclusion. I can show you that since we don't see a creator, obviously there are some forms of order that don't have a creator. You see, when Hume can do this, you better stop and think there's something really strange about this argument, because here I thought I had this really great club for, you know, apologetically beating down the opponents and turns out they can take the club and use it against me. Thirdly, Hume said there are alternative explanations available for the order that we do see. Alternative explanations to the explanation proposed by Christians that there is an intelligent creator. For instance, the harmony of the heavens can be explained on the basis of physical laws of motion, and the order that we see in the natural world about us can be explained on the basis of evolution. You say, wait a minute, Darwin hadn't written yet. That isn't quite right. The strange thing is, you will find in Hume's dialogues very early anticipation of what is called the survival of the fittest today. Hume said that there. It might well be that there have been a lot of accidents throughout history, a lot of cosmological accidents, if you will, and that the only worlds or world that survived are those accidents which have proven to be adaptively adequate. There may have been, may be a whole lot of creatures, a whole lot of realms of nature that have sprung from the womb of chance, but only those that had staying power are the ones that are around and they have adaptive purposiveness not because their creator made them that way, but they have survived so that we see their adaptiveness as just a result of chance. All the rest died out. There's been an awful lot of unadaptive, purposeless things that have flown from the womb of chance. And we only know the ones that show purpose because they're the only ones that survive. This is similar to an argument for the, for the natural truth rather than the logical truth of the laws of logic. There have been some philosophers who have said the reason we say A is not A is because you don't survive very well unless you say that. Okay, try living on the premise that there's a lion attacking me, but there's not a lion attacking me. And so you stand there and what happens is people who don't believe in the laws of logic get what, Eaten by lions? And therefore they don't survive. And since they don't survive, only those who. Only people who believe the laws of logic hang around long enough to teach future generations, of course, college freshmen, the laws of logic. Therefore the laws of logic are not necessary, they just happen to work best. That is similar to what Hume is saying here. He says it's not that we just look around us and find there's order everywhere. Just so happens that only those cases of order exist, that only those cases of order endured and survived. All the unorderly universes about us fell apart. They were accidents, just like this accidental world of order. It just turns out that it takes order to survive. And science can account for this intricacy in order. Moreover, we could say today, and philosophers have said, that as scientific knowledge advances, the realm of anomalous experience, the realm of anomalies is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. We know more and more and more, and we can give better and better accounts of the way things are and why they function the way they do. Now, what is the general answer of Swinburne, the third reading assignment for today? What does Swinburne answer to this claim that science, by its laws of nature, can account for the order in the world and so we don't have to appeal to God. I've either put you all asleep or we've come to the precipice of your reading. Has anybody read Swinburne for today can answer that question? It's one thing to have read him. It's another to answer the question. If I teach you to draw distinctions, I've done something in this class. I guess that's right. Okay. Somebody says, here is order. Okay? The Christian, Christian says, I see that order. There must be a God, a Creator who made things that way. The scientist says, no, we can account for this order by appealing not to God, but to natural law, the natural laws of evolution or planetary motion or what have you. And so natural law can explain the order. Now, Swinburne says, true, that there are certain kinds of regularities, regularities of co presence, he calls them. I won't get into why he uses that odd language, but if you'll read it, you'll see that he says, that's right. There are certain kinds of regularity, co presence regularities that science can explain. But there are other kinds of regularities, basic regularities, or as he calls them, regularities of succession. Regularities of succession that the scientists don't explain. Okay. There is a succession from this natural law to the order that is functioning according to the natural law. And what Swinburne says is, okay, you appeal from order to natural law. But why is this regularity of succession an enduring regularity of things? Why is it true over the long haul? Why is it in a long term sense true that the world operates the way that it does? Why are there natural laws at all? And this is, I think, a very good and obvious response to this third form of criticism. Christian wants to appeal from order to God. The scientist says, no, we don't need to appeal to God, we'll just appeal to natural law. But the next question is, well, why is natural law law? Like, why is there order in natural law? We have been looking at order, studying the human eyeball. So the doctor explains that according to natural laws of evolutionary development, we want to ask the question, well, why should there be any natural law likeness about development? That is another kind of order. Now we can look at and use that as the perfect for an orderer. It works somewhat like this. It's a sad thing to see in the theological world, I think. But there have been people who thought the theory of evolution did chase the Genesis literal reading of the Genesis account out of the realm of credibility and then have said, nevertheless, we are theistic evolutionists because we think God's in control of the evolutionary process. Process, okay, man didn't come as a mature creation from the hand of God. He came through the long history of evolutionary development. But nevertheless, God is the one who is running the evolutionary machine. And so we still believe in God. So youth, evolution. And I won't get into the theological reasons and the exegetical reasons why that is such a, really a bastard hypothesis, philosophically speaking. But this is what this argument is doing too. It's saying, okay, you want to explain the I according to natural law. Well, who makes natural law the way it is? And that is a spoon feeding approach to Swinburne. Swinburne's just saying, how is it that regularities of succession can be accounted for? Why is it that the law of gravity has been the law of gravity for so long? It may not be that we've had human eyes, you know, over the longest haul of natural history, but the law of gravity nobody challenges. How do you account for that orderliness when it comes to gravitational relations? Why is that regularity of succession a regularity? Mrs. Swinburne says that Hume's arguments don't really work. Hume's arguments against Haley can be defeated. Now I'm going to Take you beyond your reading here for a few moments, because I don't think Swinburne's right. I think Swinburne's done a good job of showing that Hume was a little sloppy in the formulation of his arguments, and I think that he advances our discussion admirably. But I still don't think that he gets us as far as we need to get to make this Heliog argument function. Okay? Somebody says the wider laws of nature can be appealed to to account for the order in our experience, the wider laws of nature. And then the Christian says, but those wider laws of nature were made laws by the lawgiver God, right? We still have to have a God to account for natural order. And to that I think the atheistic scientist would simply say the fundamental laws of nature have no explanation at all. The fundamental laws of nature have no explanation at all. You ask me why it is that gravity has been a law for so long. The answer is there's no explanation possible. It's just a basic given. Krishna says, you can't stop your argument there. You've got to give an explanation for that. Is this beginning to sound like our discussion from a couple days ago? The scientist says, oh, you have to. In other words, explanations can never end. Christian says, yeah, that's right, you can't stop your explanation there. So the scientist says, all right, how do you explain the law of gravity? Krishna says, God made it so. The scientist says, how do you explain God? And the Christian says, wait a minute. Explanations have to end somewhere. They end right here. The scientist says, oh, in other words, your explanation is going to stop somewhere, but you don't want my explanation to stop somewhere. But that's a little arbitrary, isn't it? Special pleading a little bit of predisposition maybe is causing you to argue the way you do. If your explanation can end, mine can end, and mine ends just short of God. That is, you can appeal from the order of the eyeball to certain natural laws. And then you might want to appeal to certain basic natural laws and get, you know, you can keep getting more and more general, but eventually you're going to get to the most basic laws of nature. And the scientists said, as soon as you get to the most basic laws of nature, and you've done your homework right, you don't go any further in your explanation. And so what we appeal to here is if you will just chance. Fundamental laws of nature have no explanation. They're just ultimate facts. They're just brute facts. It's just the way Things are. They could have been different. They just happen not to be. Moreover, the scientist can go on and add, if he is atomistic in his orientation toward reason, are we communicating that? Remember the first week of lectures, an atomistic approach to reason? He can go on to add that the ordinary analytical rules of evidence cease to apply just at the level of our most ultimate basic laws, because scientific explanation is to explain something in terms of the broader context of law. And then you explain that law in terms of the broadest context of the most basic laws. But how do you explain the most basic basic laws by even more basic laws? But if there are even more basic laws, and these aren't the basic laws, they're just intermediary laws. So once you get to basic law, there can be no further explanation. In the very nature of the case, the scientist is not committed to explaining everything. Forever and ever and ever he gets the basics, and then all explanation stops. He's atomistic. Because you finally get so far down here that you can't break things up any further. There can be no further appeal. Even the theist must be content with ultimate mysteries. The scientists will remind us. And in that sense, every school of thought has its most ultimate given. And for me, the ultimate given, the scientist says, are the basic laws of nature. For you, the ultimate given is God. But we can't prove who is right or wrong on the basis of order in the universe because I have my account for it and you have your account. But now he can add this little stinger. Perhaps he can say that my naturalistic hypothesis for the order of the human eye is more economical than your supernaturalistic hypothesis. Occam's razor. You all know Occam's razor. It's not a brand of razor. It's something from the history of philosophy. Occam said that superfluous explanatory devices should be shaven off of our way of speaking, and we should just talk about the most elegant and economic ways of accounting for things. Naturalistic hypothesis doesn't appeal to God. It just appeals to the way things are. And in that sense, it is less complicated than the supernaturalistic hypothesis. And since we prefer the less complicated hypothesis to the more complicated hypothesis, the scientist says maybe the supernaturalistic one is not acceptable to science at all. I'm going to go on to the fourth argument, but I want you to kind of hold that one in abeyance, because I think that's the way Swinburne has to be answered. I'm trying to play the part of the Devil's advocate here, very literally the devil's advocate, because I think there's an answer to that line of reasoning, too, but we haven't seen it in our literature. I'm going to come back to it when we try to reconstruct the teleological argument. Okay, now, as a fourth line, clear the register. Now we're going to move on to another way of arguing. There's a fourth line of argument against the teleological argument. It has been said that Paley's analogy between the world and the results of human design, that is Paley's analogy between the world and a machine, can be countered with an equally plausible analogy. Anybody guess what that might be? The world is likened to a machine, to a watch, if you will, in Halley. So you have the analogy between the world. And a watch or a machine, because we know that machines have ordered. But somebody suggests perhaps another analogy, a different analogy between the world and what else? What else do we see around us that has order? There's going to be another instance of taking the very evidence that Paley thought he was using and turn it against him. Now, in a very devastating way, more devastating than our second line of criticism. Where else do you see order? We see it in a factory. We see it in machines. We see it in watches. Where else do we see order? What biology in biology, okay, in the plant world and in the animal world, okay? So it may well be that the world is orderly in an analogous way to organisms, plant and animal organisms, okay? There is order in a machine. There's also order in organisms. Perhaps I can get across what is happening in this line of argument by doing this. The Christian apologist says, look at the watch. Spelled it right here. Look at the watch. It proves the watch proves that there must be a watchmaker. It says, now look at organisms or the world as a whole. They too must have a maker. Okay? First you look at the watch, then you look at organisms, and you find out there must be a creator. But now somebody turns this argument against itself and says, no, let's not move from a watch to organisms to a creator. Let's move from a watch to organisms because they both have order. It turns out it's the fact that both of these have order that has enabled the Christian to argue on to God. But what if somebody says the world is likened to a machine? In Paley, we can also liken the world to a plant. And so instead of having a watchmaker, God, what you have is the world is one giant organism. Sounds a little Bit like science fiction, you say. So the atheist is not all that convinced. Christianity doesn't sound like science fiction either. He says, the point is, you can argue from analogy. I can give you another analogy, equally plain plausible, and that is that the world is one large living creature, and that what we see here in the order of the world is just the. Is just the natural development of the plant, if you will, the natural development of the animal. The whole world is alive. And although you think that sounds a little strange, there have been numerous religions of the world that have held just that hypothesis, that the world is animistic in the broadest sense. Indeed, many ancient religions have said that the world came about not by creation, but by procreation. Okay, so that the sea in the sky had sexual relations of some sort that we can't explain, and the result was the earth. And so the point being here is not whether any of those are true, it's just that they are all alternatives to this analogy used by Paley. The world is not a great machine, therefore calling for a manufacturing God for the machine. The world is just one giant plant, one giant organism. It's alive, you see, in the order we see is just the same kind of order we see in plants and animals. If anything, this shows that God is not a separate creator for the world, but rather he is the life principle of the world. It proves an eminent God rather than a transcendent God. Now, Christians don't draw those conclusions, do they? But the atheist says it's not due to the evidence itself that they don't draw these conclusions, it's due to their predisposition. They could equally draw the conclusion that God as a life principle in the world itself as a giant organism, but instead they draw the conclusion that he's a transcendent creator, but it's just arbitrary, depending on which analogy you want. You want the analogy of a machine or analogy of a plant. It works either way. And then fifthly, very quickly, another argument against this use of the teleological proof for God is that when evil and imperfection in the world are taken into account, the argument does not suggest a creator that is both all powerful and perfectly good. Because if God is the source of order and adaptiveness in this world, then either he couldn't make the world, he couldn't adapt the world so there was no evil, or he could and chose not to, if he couldn't make the world so there'd be no evil in it, he's not all powerful. And if he could make the world without any evil, but chose not to. He's not all good. Therefore, the teleological argument which says all the functions and adaptive purpose that we see in the world must be attributed to the Creator proves argument which says all the functions and adaptive purpose that we see in the world must be attributed to the Creator proves too much because it proves that sin and evil and imperfection come from the Creator as well. And in that case, if the argument works at all, it does not work for Christians. It works for people who have less than a Christian God. In passing, note not on this particular point, on other points, I think you should know that Paley conceded that his argument does not prove prove necessarily the biblical God. It wasn't on the point of evil. But Paley said, I realize that, you know, the argument only goes so far and it doesn't get us to the Christian God necessarily. It only gets us to features which are consistent with the Christian God. Okay, these five lines of argument that I've given you, I think show the teleological argument to being very weak. Very weak indeed. It's only an argument that appeals to probability at best, and it doesn't even do a very good job of doing that. Turns out, however, I want to turn the corner here. I want to ask why it is that this notoriously weak form of argument has nevertheless seen such endurance in the history of human thought. Philosophers keep coming back to it. It's amazing, the stick to itness of this argument. Even Hume and Kant, after they criticized the argument, had to grant that it had an appeal and a certain power over them. Why does this argument have such appeal? Why do men keep coming back to it, even though it's notoriously a bad form of argument? We have an explanation because it's true, The conclusion is undoubtedly true. The line of argument is notoriously fallacious. Why do people keep getting drawn to a fallacious line of argument?

Yeah, in the dark. But he said this argument argues from probability. Well, the arguments against it are also arguments against it from probability as well. So there's a probability, a theoretical probability that it could be true.

No way.

They can definitely prove it's not true.

Yeah, but a scientist or a philosopher could say, oh, there's some probability that it's true, but the probability is so low that it's hardly worth taking more than 15 minutes class to deal with.

Probability still exists, though.

Yeah, but the fact that there's a probability, granted extremely low, cannot account for why philosophers have kept working with the argument and why they say there's a certain power in this argument, even though it's fallacious. So Hume and Kant tore it apart. They really did. And yet they said it had a certain appeal and power. How is that? Because of the borrowed capital even working on maybe. Hey, we're making progress. That makes my day. Thank you very much. Exactly right. Because it turns out that this argument from order and design is something that we're using all the time in our existence. Men are always using the capital, the Christian capital, the biblical capital. That God is providential and controls whatsoever comes of that. God has made this an orderly world. They are constantly using the order of the world that can only be accounted for on the hypothesis of God. They have to use it. And that's why the argument, you see, it gets a hook in them, if you will. And although the autonomous formulation of the argument is bad, there can be another formulation of the argument that gets the point across in a better form. And our first week in class, I encouraged you to be thinking in terms of worldviews and reasoning by presupposition. And it turns out that if you use a presuppositional form of this argument, I think you can make the appeal to order stick. Okay, let me go over this again. Why is the argument appealing, although it's notoriously false? The fallacy comes in the autonomous formulations of the argument. They are philosophically bad. They have to be recognized as such, I think. But we can reformulate the argument in a way that intuitively we can reformulate the argument in an explicit fashion that corresponds to the intuitive power of the argument. And the intuitive power of the argument comes just from the fact that all, all men are living on borrowed capital. They are assuming the very thing the argument is trying to prove. And we just have to show that in a more adequate way. And I suggested to you last time that if you wanted to pick up Dr. Van Til's booklet why I Believe in God, you will find a reformulation of the teleological argument. Just out of curiosity, anybody happen to pick that up and read it? Okay, let me read a little bit to you. From the conclusion of his pamphlet, the Unhappy Thing is because it's so well written and so subtly written that a number of students read this and they say there's no argument here at all. But of course there is an argument. It's an argument that is indirect in its nature. Now, what do I mean by an indirect form of argumentation? You should know this from the beginning of our course and from the reading of my syllabus. What is an indirect line of Argumentation, a direct line of argumentation takes some fact or some principle and reasons directly from it to the conclusion you're looking for. Okay? And we're finding that's not a very easy thing to do when you're arguing about ultimate issues. You can't argue directly from the fact of order to an orderer because there are alternative explanations that are appeal to and so forth. But an indirect line of reason reasoning says, now you look at this possibility and this possibility and we'll show you the impossibility of the contrary. Okay, look at a Christian world and life view. When you look at a Christian world and life view, you have some account for the order in your experience. Now look at the non Christian world and life view. And lo and behold, you can't appeal for order at all. And we're not talking about you can't appeal. You can't account for the order of the eyeball, you can't account for any order, you can't even reason. Ultimately, within the non Christian world and life view, order, you see, is not. It's not just that we look at certain observed cases of order and say from those observed cases we can get to God and orderer. The point is that order is always around us and we can't even reason, we can't even be orderly in our thought patterns without the Christian world and life view. That's an indirect form of argumentation. You compare alternative ultimate systems of thought and argue from the impossibility of the contrary. That's what we were talking about the first week of class and I'd like to read just the last few paragraphs of Van Till's booklet and, and see if you don't find this argument now coming out subtly but nevertheless clearly Van Til is carrying on a conversation with a college student who has all these problems with the existence of God. Or a college graduate, I should say. And I'm picking up on the 18th page, so there's an awful lot that's taken for granted. But he says, jumping here in the middle of this paragraph, it says deep down in your heart you know very well that what. What I have said to you is true. That's similar to my saying, you'll notice that philosophers keep coming back to this argument. Why is that? Mantilla says, deep down in your heart you know this argument is true. What I've been saying is true. You know that there is no unity in your life. You want no God, who by his counsel provides for the unity you need. Such a God, you say, would allow for Nothing new. So you provide your own unity. Let me say that another way. The unbeliever says, I don't want a God who determines the end from the beginning, providentially controls every event of history, because if that was true, there'd be no novelty, there'd be nothing new in history, there'd be no spontaneity, there'd be no freedom in history. Mantis says, I realize you don't want the Christian God because you think you have to provide for your own novelty. And so what does the unbeliever say? He says he lives in a random universe, a chance universe, and therefore a lot of things can be free and novel and uncontrolled. But if you live in a chance or random universe, how then do you provide unity to your experience? If everything happens by chance, you see you've lost it all. You can't keep these things together, Mantill says, so you must provide your own unity. By this unity, excuse me, by this unity, by your own definition must not kill that which is wholly new, therefore it must stand over against the wholly new and never touch it at all. And thus, by your logic, you talk about possibles and impossibles, but all this talk is in the air. By your own standards, it can never have anything to do with reality. Let me explain that. Mantill says unity comes from the human mind. On the non Christians world, unity comes from the standards of logic that the mind imposes upon the flux of experience. Okay, the world about us is just one giant flux of, you know, booming, buzzing confusion. It's just something that springs from the womb of chance. Everything happens randomly. But if that's true, we couldn't understand anything. It would just be a chaos. And so we give order to our experience. Mantilla is suggesting, and many non Christian philosophers have said just this thing, we give order to our experience. If you're an unbeliever by imposing mental categories on your experience, the order comes from your mind that organizes all this flux of experience out here. So you have the ordering categories of logic in your mind and you have the booming, buzzing confusion out here in the world. What's the problem? The unbeliever says, we don't want history to be such that there's no novelty, no freedom in it. So Mantill says, consequently, the laws of logic cannot arise from history. The laws of order and unity and interpretation cannot arise from the world as it is, because the world as it is has no order and interpretation set in advance. The world is random. Consequently, they must come from my mind and must not have any touch with the world of reality outside the mind. Your logic, he says, claims to deal with eternal and changeless matters, but your facts, your logic. Eternal and unchanging is one thing, but the facts out there in the world are wholly changing things, and ne' er the twain shall meet. So you've made nonsense of your own experience with the prodigal son. You are at the swine trough. But it may be that unlike the prodigal, you will refuse to return to your father's house. He says, on the other hand. On the other hand, he says, okay, now look at this worldview where you have to have this absolute split between random facts that have no order and then mental order which is unchanging. He shows how that just cannot account for things. He says, on the other hand, by my belief in God, I do have unity. In my experience. Not, of course, the sort of unity that you want. Not a unity that is the result of my own autonomous determination of what is possible, but a unity that is higher than mine and prior to mine. On the basis of God's counsel, I can look for facts and find them without destroying them in advance. On the basis of God's counsel, I can be a good physicist, a good biologist, a good psychologist, or a good philosopher. In all these fields, I use my powers of logical arrangement in order to see as much order in God's universe as it may be given a creature to see. The unities or systems that I make are true because genuine pointers toward the basic or original unity that is found in the counsel of God. He says, because I'm willing to think God's thoughts after him. The order that he is implanted in the world I can discover in my experience. But if you don't think God's thoughts after him, all the order you find in the world must be mentally imposed upon a random universe. And so Vantil says, looking about me, I see both order and disorder in every dimension of life. Or I think it would communicate to us better if I put it this way. Looking about me, I see both unity and particularity. I see the laws of nature. I see the way things relate. But I also see individual things. I see particulars. I see the freedom or, if you will, the individuality of things. I see both order and particularity in every dimension of life. But I look at both of them in the light of the great orderer who is back of them. That sounds like a teleological argument, doesn't it? The difference being that he doesn't say, look on autonomous grounds. Look at this instance of order and see if there mustn't be a God, he says. On autonomous grounds you can't have any order at all. And only if you renounce your autonomy and think God's thoughts after him can you find order. I need not deny either of them in the interest of optimism or in the interest of pessimism. I see the strong men of biology searching diligently through hill and dale to prove that the creation doctrine is not true with respect to the human body, only to return and admit that the missing link is missing. Still, I see the strong men of psychology search deep and far into the subconsciousness child and animal consciousness in order to prove that the creation and providence doctrines are not true with respect to the human soul, only to return and admit that the gulf between human and animal intelligence is as great as ever. I see the strong men of logic and scientific methodology search deep into the transcendental for a validity that will not be swept away by the ever changing tide of the holy new. Okay, that's. That's just very fancy language for saying I see them come back with their orderly explanations only to admit that it's all in a random universe and so just be swept away, only to return and say that they can find no bridge from logic to reality or from reality to logic. And yet I find all these, though standing on their heads reporting much that is true. How is it that biologists that have this ridiculous atheistic world and life view, psychologists, philosophers and scientists, can come up nevertheless with the truth? He says they're standing on their heads philosophically and yet they report much that is true. He says I need only to turn their reports right side up, making God instead of man the center of it all. And I have a marvelous display of the facts as God has intended men to see them. And if my unity is comprehensive enough to include the efforts of those who reject, is large enough even to include that which those who have been set upright by regeneration cannot see. My unity is that of a child who walks with its father through the woods. The child is not afraid because its father knows it all and is capable of handling every situation. So I readily grant that there are some difficulties with respect to belief in God and his revelation in nature and scripture that I cannot solve. In fact, there is mystery in every relationship with respect to every fact that faces me, for the reason that all facts have their final explanation in God, whose thoughts are higher than my thoughts and whose ways are higher than my ways. And it's exactly that sort of God that I need. Without such a God, without the God of the Bible, the God of authority, the God who is self contained and therefore incomprehensible to man, there would be no reason in anything, no human being can explain in the sense of seeing through all things. But only he who believes in God has the right to hold that there is any explanation at all. And this is the final paragraph. So you see, he's summarizing the whole thing now. So you see, when I was young, I was conditioned on every side. I could not help believing in God. He's referring to the fact that his parents brought him up to believe in God. He went to a Christian college. He believes God is the all conditioner. He says, I was conditioned on every side. I couldn't help believing in God. Now that I'm older, I still cannot help believing in God. I believe in God now because unless I have him as the all conditioner, life is chaos. Unless we have God as the all conditioner, life is chaos. He's reasoning from the impossible possibility of the contrary. Compare these worldviews. He says, without this worldview, the Christian worldview, all is chaos. He says, I shall not convert you at the end of my argument. I think the argument is sound. I hold that belief in God is not merely as reasonable as other belief, or even a little or infinitely more probably true than other belief. I hold rather that unless you believe in God, you can logically believe in nothing else. That's why Hume and Kant and all the rest can't get away from teleological argument. Because in their heart of hearts they know very well that unless you believe in God, you can logically believe in nothing else. That isn't to say people don't have other beliefs. It's just to say that all other beliefs are going to get washed away by this random view of the universe that they have. But since I believe in such a God, a God who is conditioned you as well as me, I know that you can, to your own satisfaction, by the help of the biologists, the psychologists, the logicians and the Bible critics, reduce everything I have said this afternoon and evening to the circular meanderings of a hopeless authoritarian. As I realize that rationalization is possible, well, my meanderings have, to be sure, been circular. They have made everything turn on God. And so now I shall leave you with him and with his mercy. What Mantilla is saying is you can't account for the order of your experience at all without God. Everything must turn on God. And so there's Something of a presuppositional reformulation of the heart of the teleological argument. Here he's arguing that you can't have both particularity and order in your experience. Now, early in the class I was speaking of these very same things, but using the language of rationalism and irrationalism. Okay, you can't account for everything rationalism and as well for the fact that the human mind is limited, if you will, finiteness, freedom and the rest. You can't bring these two together. Apart from a Christian world and life view. All other attempts to do so result in dialectical tension, a tension that pulls the worldview apart rather than gives harmony to it.

Okay, does Van Till's argument get the individual any closer to Christian theism? Is his purpose to just bring the individual to presuppose an orderly God?

Now, Van Til says it's not a question of proving that there is a God and then going on to prove that this God is the Christian God. He says we're comparing worldviews, so necessarily the only God he's talking about is the Christian God.

So the weakness of the argument is when you are, as you said before, on enemy territory, arguing under the other individual individual's presupposition.

Precisely.

Okay, Precisely, as you say. You know, it's almost. I'm thinking of Paul in Greece. He presupposes this very argument, you know, when he says God has not left the world alone, etc. And then he goes on to talk about Christ and it's within his own presupposition.

I do not believe that at the Areopagus Paul tried to make common cause philosophically with the Greeks. In fact, if you know anything of Stoic and Epicurean philosophy, he insulted them at every point. Every sentence in Luke's account of Paul's Areopagus address is a direct contradiction of Stoic and Epicurean belief and the only ground that anybody has for thinking he was misunderstood. Making common causes when he quotes them at one point. But of course he quotes them saying, even your own philosophers know this. What he's getting at is that which you have worshipped in ignorance. I can declare to you, God hasn't left men alone in your heart of hearts. You know this is true. He's not trying to say, but of course, everything you've been reasoning is fine as far as it goes. Now let me add to it that Jesus is the God you're looking for. He says, quite the contrary. You've been ignorant in what you've been doing and it's reduced to foolishness. In Romans 1, he says, of course, that men who suppress the truth are reduced to foolish error, and only submitting to the truth of God is going to supply a reasonable explanation for things. So you're right. Van Til's argument here is an attempt. Although he is sinful and imperfect like the rest of us, it's an attempt to try to use a teleological form of argumentation within the Christian world and life view. He says, compare my worldview to your own. The problem is the very process of comparing calls for what? Orderliness. You can't compare things if you don't have laws of comparison and laws of logic. But how can you account for the laws of logic? How can you account for the very fact we're talking this after? How can you give any account of order if you think this world is nothing but sound and fury, signifying nothing? I mean, if there is no account for anything. Okay, now I told you. Please hold in abeyance the end of criticism number three. Okay, now I'm going to come back and try to cash in on that in our remaining moments. Somebody says there are alternative accounts for the order of the world. We can give an evolutionary account for the purpose of this, of the eyeball. Okay, and then Swinburne says, oh, well, then how do you account for the laws of nature by which you give us the theory of evolution? How about these basic laws of nature? How come they are orderly? Why are they law like? And I said that the argument can be countered by the unbeliever saying, well, these are basic laws of nature, and just because they are basic, there is nothing more ultimate by which they are explained. They just are as they are because of their basicness. You Christians, you appeal to a basic, to an ultimate, to God. And so we have the right to appeal to an ultimate, to a basic and stop right there. And that being the basic laws of nature, I just need to add about 2. Two paragraphs to this and I think we can stop. What did I tell you early on in our class about activism? Activism explained things in terms of the parts. Right? Okay, we're looking at the eyeball. Okay, we're going to look. The part is the sense. It's part in the sense that a law of nature, in part, when it's brought into combination with another law of nature, will account for the development of the eye. Then there are more and more basic laws in nature. So you move from the eye to certain regularities in nature. We're breaking this down more and more. We're analyzing it more and more. And as we analyze further, we get to the basic laws of nature. Allegedly. Now, what did I say in the first week of class happens in atomism? However, if all excellent is in terms of more analytical and analytical and analytical parts, if you get down to the basic, there is nothing that can be analyzed, right? Is the atom of explanation is the uncuttable of explanation. It is the most basic. And since it cannot be explained by even more basic laws, in the very nature of the case, is it explained at all? No. That's the very point. The unbeliever moves from the I to the regularities of nature to the basic laws of nature. And you say, okay, now give me an account of the basic laws of nature. He says, I can't. No explanation for the most fundamental, presupposed ultimate regularities of life. There is no regularity about the most basic regularity, because there is. There is no law in terms of which the basic law can be accounted for. What I'm saying is this rational maneuver of atomizing things, that is analyzing things in terms of their most basic components or the most basic laws by which they operate, has to end somewhere for the unbeliever. And when it ends, his basic laws have no explanation at all. And so how do we know these basic laws? How do we explain them at all? Why are they the way they are? And what happens to all atomistic rationalists? They eventually appeal to what? Mysticism? And that's why in our last class period, when I was asked why is it that the unbelievers told he can't appeal to mystery and yet we want to appeal to mystery? Because when he appeals to my. The mystery, you notice how it ruins the whole system. Here is the rational system of scientific explanation ultimately resting on a foundation of mysticism. It's the very opposite of what it claims to be. Science and mysticism are supposed to be poles apart, but it turns out that scientists are mystics at base. I realize if you go out and say that to some biologist in one sentence without doing all the background work and showing him how it was this, he's going to repudiate it. But he cannot repudiate it. Once you push and push and push and push and you ask him to give an account of this and this and this, he gets down to his basics. And he'll have to say, the basics just are as they are. It's just some kind of mystical, positive reality. But the Christian is not reduced to a rationalism and a mysticism that are conflicting with each other. When we appeal to mystery, it's mystery because we say our minds can't account for it. And it's mystery because we only know this because we are depending on what the revelation of God, the sense of mystery or irrationalism in Christianity is that it appeals to that which goes beyond the human mind. We appeal to the revelation of God, but that isn't to give up our rationalism, is it? It turns out it's just the very foundation of our rationalism, that because God, God is the orderer, his mind is reflected in creation. He has given us that by which we can reason the laws of logic and all the rest. And so the atomistic scientist has to explain his basic laws in terms of just a mystical posit. It's just chance. But that's the very, you see, opposite of rationalism, very opposite of science. Whereas the Christian, by appealing to the mind of God, can account for all the regularities in order without giving up his rationalism. And so if you compare the worldviews, you see the dialectical tension of the one and you see the harmony of the other. And that, I think, is why it is that at base, unbelievers can't give up the teleological argument, because in their heart of hearts they know that without God, everything is chaos, everything is mysticism in the end. Now you can see the lack of realism in your professor's planning today. I also wanted to do a basic critique of natural theology, and I wanted to give you an argument for God's existence that shows how easy it is to prove God's existence and yet what the difficulty involved in it is, and then wanted to talk about the question of who the arguments could be directed to. And so we'll obviously have to do that in our next class period and have to hurry on to the question of religious language. I will not let us fall too far behind. I'll just kind of limp from class three to class.