God's Gravediggers: Why no Deity Exists by Raymond Bradley

Author:Raymond Bradley [Bradley, Raymond]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Ockham Publishing
Published: 2016-02-12T05:00:00+00:00

A Devastating Dilemma for Design Devotees

Every type of design argument for the existence of a creator/designer God confronts a devastating dilemma:

Either it is possible that something should function well without its being probable that it was designed by an intelligent designer, or it is impossible that anything can function well without its having been thus designed. If it is possible, then--given the scientific evidence--it is highly probable that it is nature itself that does the designing. But if it is impossible, then since any intelligent designer would have to function well enough to design a universe that functions well, it follows that that intelligent designer was designed by a second intelligent designer, the second by a third, and so on ad infinitum.

For any advocate of intelligent design, both alternatives are unacceptable. Unless they say that there is an infinity of intelligent designers (an absurd consequence, and one that contradicts their idea that there is just one intelligent designer), they will have to concede that the presence of design in the universe does not make it more probable than not that it was designed by an intelligent designer.

In any case, the hypothesis of an intelligent designer can't really explain what it is supposed to explain. Recall that the whole argument gets its appeal from seeming to offer a plausible explanation of apparent design. The problem is that as an explanation it offers to explain too much. An "explanation" that purports to be the explanation of everything that occurs isn't a genuine explanation of why anything occurs. A genuine explanation of why something occurs must be an explanation of why that occurred and not something else. By way of explaining why the universe contains order, structural complexity, and functionality, the intelligent design hypothesis offers us nothing better than "Because God designed it that way." Since this hypothesis could still be invoked even for the case where the universe was utterly chaotic, the intelligent design hypothesis doesn't explain why the universe is ordered rather than chaotic. It is about as helpful as saying "Because that's the way it is." We are offered words but no explanation.

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