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Paper #104927 :: The Limits of Mind: On the Fallacy of the Design Argument
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This paper critiques the design argument based on arguments from William Paley's "The Watch and the Watchmaker" and David Hume's "A Critique of the Design Argument".

Written in 2008; 2,040 words; 2 sources; MLA; $ 64.95

Paper Summary:

This essay critiques the design argument, as explained in both William Paley's "The Watch and the Watchmaker" and in David Hume's "A Critique of the Design Argument". This paper also explains the features of the design argument and evaluates the argument in order to critique it. The author follows Hume in suggesting that the design argument is ultimately a failure due to the massive egocentricity inherent in assuming that God can be understood through an analogy to the human mind.

From the Paper:

"The reason I have been rather pedantic in deconstructing Paley's analogy is twofold. Firstly, we have the problem of Darwin's theory of evolution. That is to say, the theory that explains that the mechanism or process that makes things fit is intrinsic to the system of nature itself. If you wish, Darwin's theory of evolution is akin to showing that the watch really does produce the watch and is the only creator thereof. Whether Darwin believed that God made it so or not is irrelevant--the point is that God can be taken out of evolution and the underlying principle of nature shown to be merely survival, and the survival of those traits which help us survive. Naturally, this system creates something which looks like it has been designed--because we have adapted to our environments, not because we have been created alongside our environments as a system always already in perfect harmony. Again, I am not concerned to argue that this is so--but this is merely an instance of the observer coming upon the watch and having no knowledge of the manufacturing processes involved in the production of mechanical objects, assumes that this watch is something which just exists, with no thought or evidence of processes that were involved in making it, because his lack of understanding of the need for those processes means he doesn't recognize them. Paley's argument is that we know something has been designed, because we recognize that the process by which it is constructed is one that requires thought--by I am suggesting that, when it comes to nature, we cannot know what the process is that is required to construct it, and therefore we cannot arrive at any certain deduction as to its having been designed by the method Paley describes. In fact, as I have shown, the only theory that describes the process (of evolution and survival) that creates, or recreates, nature is one that does not need to rely on design--at least not in any sense which we can understand, which brings me to my second criticism of Paley's analogy."

Tags: God, human mind, religion, egocentricity theology

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