Evidence · Case 08 · Science
Design
One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
Sources
Robin Collins, “The Teleological Argument: An Exploration of the Fine-Tuning of the Universe,” in “The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology” (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
Objections & responses
- Who designed the designer? A God capable of fine-tuning a universe is far more complex and improbable than the universe, so design explains the improbable by the more improbable.
This is Dawkins’s central argument and it has to be answered. The theistic reply, from Swinburne, Plantinga, and others, is that God is not a complex physical arrangement of parts and so is not improbable in the way a physical structure is; simplicity in explanation is about the number of independent postulates, and a single necessary mind is arguably simpler than a multiverse of unobservable universes. Dawkins’s critics also note that explanations do not need to explain their explainers: one can infer a designer from a watch without knowing the watchmaker’s origin. The debate is philosophical, and both sides are worth reading.
- Design is unscientific in a specific sense: it makes no testable predictions and can accommodate any observation. The multiverse, whatever its problems, is at least a research program with mathematical content.
This is the fairest form of the unscientific charge. Design proponents reply that the design hypothesis does predict something, namely that the universe will look fine-tuned, and that the multiverse, in the versions relevant here, is also untestable in principle since other universes are causally disconnected. The honest conclusion is that neither design nor the multiverse is science in the ordinary sense; both are metaphysical explanations of a scientific fact. Design should not be singled out as the unscientific option, and the accurate statement is that both are outside science, not that both are inside it.