THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN

The most compelling argument for an intelligent creator of the universe is the argument from design and the most famous version of this argument in the English-speaking world was made by the Anglican theologian William Paley in 1802. In making his argument from design, Paley analogized the universe to a watch. He reasoned that just as the fact that a watch is a highly complex instrument leads to the inference that an intelligent being (in this case a human) designed and created it, so the universe demonstrates such a high degree of complexity that the only inference that can be drawn from this fact is that the universe was designed and created by an intelligent being.  

Paley did not make a convincing case for the proposition that there is actually an intelligent creator or designer outside of the universe who created it, only for the proposition that this is possibly the case. It is true that the universe is complex, even more than Paley or anyone else with a Newtonian mechanistic understanding of the universe realized. And this means it is possible that the universe was designed and created by an intelligent being. However, there is no positive evidence for the existence of such an intelligent creator. The belief that such a creator exists is purely speculative. As such, the belief that the universe has an intelligent creator is neither apparently justified nor apparently true. At most, such a belief is possibly justified and possibly true. But because another way of asserting this is that this belief is possibly unjustified and possibly false, it does not provide compelling grounds for believing in an intelligent creator.

Furthermore, as Richard Dawkins famously argued in The God Delusion (151-61), if one posits the existence of a creator/designer based on the universe’s complexity, then the posited creator/designer must necessarily be at least as complex as the universe itself. And to convincingly show that said creator/designer exists, one must provide a convincing explanation of how such a complex creator/designer came to be. This is not possible without positing the existence of an even more complex being. And that being would then need to be explained by positing the existence of a more complex being still, and so on ad infinitum. Thus, the argument from design leads to an infinite regression and is not logically sustainable.

One possible objection to Dawkins’ argument is that it is possible that the posited creator is self-existent. However, this objection does nothing more than add yet another layer of speculation and at most supports the proposition that belief in an intelligent creator is possibly justified and possibly true, which again does not provide compelling grounds for believing in an intelligent creator.

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

The ontological argument is less compelling than Paley’s argument from design. The ontological argument, which was most famously advocated by Anselm of Canterbury and Rene Descartes, starts with the premise that humans can conceptualize a “perfect being”—that is, a being than which no greater being can be imagined or thought. According to the argument, existence or being is better than nonexistence or nonbeing, and therefore any “perfect being” that people conceptualize or imagine must also exist outside people’s minds in order to actually be perfect. Put another way, for a “perfect being” we conceptualize or imagine to actually be perfect, that being must exist in an objective or empirical sense.

The biggest problem with the ontological argument is that no proposition within a purely analytical or logical system can be proven to be empirically valid from within that system but can only be proven such on the basis of external evidence. So, the proposition that the idea of a perfect being entails the actual existence of a perfect being, while it may be true within a logical system in which the idea of perfection necessarily includes the predicate of existence, does not necessarily mean that such a perfect being exists in fact. To conclude that such a being exists as an empirical or experiential matter, it is necessary to point to actual empirical or experiential evidence that establishes this. Since there is no such evidence, the argument fails.

The second major problem with the ontological argument is that existence is not necessarily better than nonexistence. There is no evidence for any objective or metaphysical basis for value judgments, no evidence for the existence of moral facts, and therefore no factual or metaphysical basis for the claim that existence is better than nonexistence. Even if there were evidence for an objective or metaphysical basis for value judgments, living humans would still be unable to judge whether existence or nonexistence is better because they don’t know what nonexistence is like and therefore have no basis for comparing the two. This argument, which conflicts with both the argument that nonexistence is better than existence and the argument that existence is better than nonexistence, is the most compelling of the three. The problem with the other two arguments is that they entail value judgments that would only be valid if they were universal and true in an objective, empirical, or metaphysical sense. But as there is no evidence that any value judgments are universal or true in an objective, empirical, or metaphysical sense, there is no evidence that it would be objectively or metaphysically better for a conceptualized or imagined “perfect being” to exist outside people’s minds than for it to only exist in people’s minds.

Finally, although there is no evidence for any objective or metaphysical basis for value judgments, it is inevitable that people will have certain values, usually based on their preferences. As nearly all people prefer that they and those they care maximize their overall well-being and suffer as little as possible, most people’s standard of values is well-being, the absence of suffering, happiness, or something similar. For those who have any of these standards of values, particularly the absence of suffering, there is a compelling argument that nonexistence is better than at least sentient existence on the grounds the latter includes a significant amount of suffering and grief. Even though sentient existence also includes happiness and pleasure, at least for most organisms, there is a compelling argument that, on balance, it features more suffering than happiness and that nonexistence is therefore better. For those who believe this, the argument that existence is better than nonexistence and that an imagined “perfect being” must actually exist to be perfect fails spectacularly. 

THE ARGUMENT FOR A FIRST CAUSE OR PRIME MOVER

Aristotle’s argument for a prime mover, which Thomas Aquinas repeated, is just as unpersuasive as the ontological argument. Essentially, Aristotle and Aquinas claimed that motion never occurs without a mover and that therefore there must have been some original mover that was not moved by anything prior to it and set the universe in motion in the beginning. This unmoved or prime mover, having purportedly set the universe in motion and caused the universe to come into existence, is therefore also known as the first cause. The argument that the prime mover must have been unmoved is based on the belief that there cannot be an infinite chain of causality, i.e., that there must have been a first cause that began the whole chain of causality that humans and all other organisms experience.

The biggest problem with the argument for a prime mover is that even if one arrives logically at what one thinks was the first cause or prime mover, one cannot prove by any convincing evidence that the posited first cause was itself uncaused or unmoved. A second problem is that it is doubtful whether the concept of causality and motion as understood by humans can even be applied to what occurred prior to the beginning of the universe’s expansion. For these reasons, the argument for a first cause or prime mover fails. Furthermore, even if there were evidence for a prime mover or first cause, this would not provide grounds for believing that the prime mover is intelligent or personal without additional evidence that supported this inference. In other words, it would not provide evidence for the existence of an intelligent creator.