DESIGN ARGUMENT FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD (OCR A LEVEL RELIGIOUS STUDIES - PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION)

[@Anon93836]

You know what ..fair play to you Ben 👏. You have been working so hard for years committing to teaching others on KZbin and you have helped so many people and are still helping individuals studying philosophy including myself. Thanks a lot 😊

[@BenWardle]

Thank you very much for your kind words !! And very best of luck with all your studies! Thanks again

[@alishafong2243]

Ben u are such a legend, thank u so much for taking the time out of your day to save my life❤

[@meegmoog]

Thank you so so much for these videos!! Watching a few days before my mocks and feeling a lot more confident :)

[@AlessiaEnoghama]

this is video and the previous one are so helpful🤍 can you also do OCR ancient philosophy, soul mind and body, attributes of God, death and the afterlife, knowledge of God, conscience, sexual ethics, euthanasia, business ethics Christian moral principles and actions

[@lyithmeresh1087]

Hello Ben. Your informative video on the design arguments has helped me so much. However I think you should point out the difference between design qua purpose and design qua regularity. Paley's design argument consists of the following: design qua purpose (known as Paley's watchmaker argument) , which looks at how the complex and specific arrangement of parts in a thing (ie, its design) shows that it must have a purpose, which is therefore best explained by a designer design qua regularity, which looks at how order in the universe and its physical laws shows that it must tend to a designer who keeps it in order (e.g. a gardener looking after a garden) I just want to clarify to others that when talking about Paley's watch argument, you must only talk about design qua purpose and not go on a tangent about regularity, which is Paley's other design argument.

[@intelligentdesign2295]

To the objection "who created the Creator? " you can answer as follows: "Ah, the "Who designed God?" objection! That objection would be fair if the design argument contained a premise along these lines: "Every complex event or entity has an explanation." But no such premise (or presupposition) is involved in the argument we've been considering. Or again, the "Who designed God?" objection might have some force if Theism were proposed for no other reason than to explain the life-supporting universe. (We would at least need assurance that there was some explanatory advantage in postulating one complex entity to explain another complex entity. But keep in mind that scientists routinely hypothesize one complex entity to explain another; e.g., think of subatomic physics. So there's nothing wrong with doing this as long as there's a clear explanatory advantage to be gained.) But as we've seen, Theism is partly grounded in religious experience. It isn't just cooked up to explain our life-supporting universe. Theism also does a good job of explaining the presence of contingent beings. It purportedly explains additional phenomena as well-though we've not yet discussed these. To sum up, Theism gets some support from religious experience, and Theism is a metaphysical hypothesis that promises to explain a wide range of phenomena. Finally, I thought we agreed long ago that no theory can explain everything. When theorizing, you have to start somewhere. There has to be an initial hypothesis, a claim that something or other has so-and-so features. And if this hypothesis is genuinely one's initial move in the "explanation game," then one will have no explanation for the state of affairs it postulates. And Theism is offered as an initial metaphysical hypothesis. For all these reasons, the "Who designed God?" objection misses the mark, in my estimation. " (Stephen Layman "Letters To Doubting Thomas") "There is still another difficulty with Dawkins’s argument. Part of the force of his objection lies in its implicit accusation of inconsistency in the case for intelligent design. If specified complexity always points to intelligent design, then the existence of a designing mind in the past would, by Dawkins’s understanding of the logic of the design inference, necessarily point to a still prior designing mind, ad infinitum. In asserting this, Dawkins assumes that designing minds are necessarily complex (and, presumably, specified) entities (itself a questionable proposition). He then argues that advocates of intelligent design can escape the need for an infinite regress only by violating the rule that specified (or irreducible) complexity always points to a prior intelligent cause. Inferring an uncaused designer, he seems to be arguing, would represent an unjustified exception to the principle of cause and effect upon which the inference to design is based. But positing an uncaused designer would not constitute an unjustified exception to this principle, if it constitutes an exception at all. In every worldview or metaphysical system of thought something stands as the ultimate or prime reality, the thing from which everything else comes. All causal explanations either involve an infinitive regress of prior causes, or they must ultimately terminate with explanatory entities that do not themselves require explication by reference to anything more fundamental or primary. If the latter, then something has to stand as the ultimate or primary causal principle at the beginning of each causal chain. If the former-if all explanations inevitably generate regresses-then all explanations fail to meet Dawkins’s implicit criterion of explanatory adequacy, including his own. Since, however, most cosmological theories now imply that time itself had a beginning, and further imply that life itself first arose sometime in the finite past, it seems likely that every chain of effect back to cause must terminate at some starting point. Either way, materialistic explanations as well as those involving mind are subject to these same constraints. If so, why couldn’t an immaterial mind function as the ultimate starting point for causal explanation just as well as matter and energy? In Dawkins’s worldview, matter and energy must stand as the prime reality from which everything else comes. Thus, Dawkins simply assumes that a material process must function as the fundamental explanatory principle or first cause of biological complexity and information. His “who designed the designer” objection shows this. Why? Dawkins assumes that explanations invoking intelligent design must either generate a regress of designing minds or that such explanations must eventually account for mind by reference to an undirected material process. Either way, Dawkins simply presupposes that mind cannot function as the ultimate explanation of biological complexity and information. For Dawkins and other philosophical materialists, matter alone can play this role. But that begs that fundamental question at issue in the debate about the origin of life. A more philosophically neutral way to frame the issue would be to simply ask: What is a better candidate to be that fundamental explanatory principle, the thing from which specified complexity or information ultimately comes? What is a better candidate to be the first cause of this phenomenon: mind or matter? Based upon what we know from our own experience, as opposed to deductions from materialistic philosophical doctrine, the answer to that question would seem to be mind. We have first-person awareness of our own minds. We know from direct introspection what attributes our minds possess and what they can do. Our uniform experience shows that minds have the capacity to produce specified information. Conversely, experience has shown that material processes do not have this capacity. This suggests-with respect to the origin of specified information, at least-that mind is the better candidate to be the fundamental explanatory entity, the thing from which such information comes in the first place. " (Stephen Meyer "Signature In The Cell")

[@intelligentdesign2295]

Hume's objection about many gods has been refuted: "Of the ‘unity of the Deity’ the proof is, the uniformity of plan observable in the universe. The universe itself is a system; each part either depending upon other parts, or being connected with other parts by some common law of motion, or by the presence of some common substance. One principle of gravitation causes a stone to drop towards the earth, and the moon to wheel round it. One law of attraction carries all the different planets about the sun. This philosophers demonstrate. There are also other points of agreement amongst them, which may be considered as marks of the identity of their origin, and of their intelligent author. In all are found the conveniency and stability derived from gravitation. They all experience vicissitudes of days and nights, and changes of season. They all, at least Jupiter, Mars, and Venus, have the same advantages from their atmospheres as we have. In all the planets the axes of rotation are permanent. Nothing is more probable, than that the same attracting influence, acting according to the same rule, reaches to the fixed stars: but, if this be only probable, another thing is certain, viz. that the same element of light does.* The light from a fixed star affects our eyes in the same manner, is refracted and reflected according to the same laws, as the light of a candle. The velocity of the light of the fixed stars, is also the same as the velocity of the light of the sun, reflected from the satellites of Jupiter. The heat of the sun, in kind, differs nothing from the heat of a coal fire. In our own globe the case is clearer. New countries are continually discovered, but the old laws of nature are always found in them: new plants perhaps or animals, but always in company with plants and animals, which we already know; and always possessing many of the same general properties. We never get amongst such original, or totally different, modes of existence, as to indicate, that we are come into the province of a different Creator, or under the direction of a different will. In truth, the same order of things attends us, wherever we go. The elements act upon one another, electricity operates, the tides rise and fall, the magnetic needle elects its position, in one region of the earth and sea, as well as in another. One atmosphere invests all parts of the globe, and connects all: one sun illuminates; one moon exerts its specific attraction upon all parts. If there be a variety in natural effects, as, e. g. in the tides of different seas, that very variety is the result of the same cause, acting under different circumstances. In many cases this is proved; in all is probable. The inspection and comparison of living forms, add to this argument examples without number. Of all large terrestrial animals the structure is very much alike. Their senses nearly the same. Their natural functions and passions nearly the same. Their viscera nearly the same, both in substance, shape, and office. Digestion, nutrition, circulation, secretion, go on, in a similar manner, in all. The great circulating fluid is the same: for, I think, no difference has been discovered in the properties of blood, from whatever animal it be drawn. The experiment of transfusion proves, that the blood of one animal will serve for another. The skeletons also of the larger terrestrial animals, shew particular varieties, but still under a great general affinity. The resemblance is somewhat less, yet sufficiently evident, between quadrupeds and birds. They are alike in five respects, for one in which they differ. In fish, which belong to another department, as it were, of nature, the points of comparison become fewer. But we never lose sight of our analogy, e. g. we still meet with a stomach, a liver, a spine; with bile and blood; with teeth; with eyes, which eyes are only slightly varied from our own, and which variation, in truth, demonstrates, not an interruption, but a continuance, of the same exquisite plan; for it is the adaptation of the organ to the element, viz. to the different refraction of light passing into the eye out of a denser medium. The provinces, also, themselves of water and earth, are connected by the species of animals which inhabit both; and also by a large tribe of aquatic animals, which closely resemble the terrestrial in their internal structure: I mean the cetaceous tribe,* which have hot blood, respiring lungs, bowels, and other essential parts, like those of land animals. This similitude, surely, bespeaks the same creation and the same Creator." (William Paley "Natural Theology") "And, to jump ahead a bit, there are two further problems with polytheism as an explanation of the existence of not merely a universe but a universe governed throughout space and time by the same natural laws . If this order in the world is to be explained by many gods, then some explanation is required for how and why they cooperate in producing the same patterns of order throughout the universe. This becomes a new datum requiring explanation for the same reason as the fact of order itself. The need for further explanation ends when we postulate one being who is the cause of the existence of all others, and the simplest conceivable such-I urge-is God. And, further, the power of polytheism to explain this order in the world is perhaps not as great as that of theism. If there were more than one deity responsible for the order of the universe, we would expect to see characteristic marks of the handiwork of different deities in different parts of the universe, just as we see different kinds of workmanship in the different houses of a city. We would expect to find an inverse square of law of gravitation obeyed in one part of the universe, and in another part a law that was just short of being an inverse square law-without the difference being explicable in terms of a more general law." (Richard Swinburne "The Existence Of God") "If the physical universe is the product of intelligent design, rather than being a pure accident, it is more likely to be the handiwork of only one rather than more than one intelligence. This is so for two broad reasons. The first reason is the need for theoretical parsimony. In the absence of any evidence for supposing the universe to be the handiwork of more than one intelligence rather than only one, then, faced with a choice between supposing it the handiwork of one or of more than one intelligent designer, we should choose to suppose it to be the creation of only one. For it is not necessary to postulate more than one to account for the phenomena in question. The second reason for preferring the hypothesis of there being only one designer of the universe to supposing more than one is that the general harmony and uniformity of everything in the universe suggest that, should it be the product of design, it is more likely to be the handiwork of a single designer, rather than a plurality of designers who might have been expected to have left in their joint product some trace of their plural individualities. " (David Conway "Rediscovery Of Wisdom")

[@user-fizz-r6y]

I really like your explanations ❤ Can you make for edexcel as well please

[@JamesJaffa-zb7xh]

i accidentally described paleys watchmaker argument in my rs exam but said it was aquinas' 5th way, am i cooked?

[@intelligentdesign2295]

The chance hypothesis and its derivative, the multiverse hypothesis, have serious problems: "The multiverse hypothesis has some more general problems, however. Such proposals “over-explain,” especially if the number of proposed universes is infinite. Having an infinite set of random universes means that any possibility will occur an infinite number of times. There is, then, no need to explain anything in the physics of our own universe, because whatever we find could have just occurred by chance. So those who are seeking explanations for the values of parameters such as the masses of elementary particles, or the strengths of physical forces, could be wasting their time. If even our own universe is infinitely large, then there will be an infinite number of planets closely like our own planet Earth, containing populations that include people closely resembling you and me, who made choices in their lives the same as yours and mine, or differing in arbitrary ways. Anything with a small probability to happen will occur somewhere, indeed an infinite number of times. “Impossible” events might occur with nominally zero probability but still a finite number of times. It becomes hard to determine whether anything is truly impossible. Suggestions such as these stretch our notion of what is reasonable far beyond normal limits. They are not forced upon us by observation, needless to say, but by theoretical ideas that are considered by their proposers to be attractive! The quantum theorist Max Born once wrote, “Intellect distinguishes between the possible and the impossible, but reason distinguishes between the sensible and the senseless. Even the possible can be senseless.” We need to think very hard about the criteria for judging concepts that are logically consistent but which seem to destroy understanding rather than extend it, or even destroy the need for understanding." (Peter Bussey "Signposts To God") "Reaction (c): Low-Probability Events Happen All the Time The comment: Forget about life in general; let’s consider the probability of you. Think of all the coincidences involved in your parents being in the same place and meeting and hitting it off and getting together. Think of the miniscule probability of a particular sperm outracing a billion others to find the egg. Multiply similarly tiny probabilities for all your ancestors stretching back in time, and you get an extraordinarily small probability. Yet, here you are. You’re just going to have to get used to it. The short answer: Small probabilities sometimes mean that something unlikely has happened. Enough said. But sometimes they mean that we’ve made an incorrect assumption. Given that almost no one believes that the laws of nature as we know them are the ultimate laws of the Universe, the low probability of a life-permitting universe could be a clue to a better explanation, a deeper theory. The long answer: Sure, the lawyer says, the DNA evidence makes it extraordinary unlikely that my client is innocent. But, your honour, unlikely events happen all the time! Eggs and sperm and such! The defence rests. Something must have gone wrong with this response to finetuning, since the same reply could be made to any appeal to low probabilities. We’d never be able to reason probabilistically at all. Think about some seemingly improbable events: a poker player deals himself another royal flush, a large blip appears on our detector, a safe with a trillion possible combinations is opened. In these cases, a small probability is generated not just by the event but also by our assumptions. We’ve assumed that the dealer is fair, that the instrument reading is just noise, or that the burglar guessed the combination to the safe. What separates these from the ‘just unlikely’ cases is the availability (or even just a glimpse) of a better explanation: a trick shuffle, a signal, or an inside job. This is precisely what we don’t have in the case of ‘egg + sperm = you’. So before we dismiss a low-probability event as just a fluke, we should consider alternative explanations. " (Luke Barnes "A Fortunate Universe")