The Design Argument
The design argument has been argued by many philosophers over hundreds
of years. The design argument suggests that the world displays
elements of design, with things being adapted towards some overall end
or purpose and such design suggests that the world is the work of a
designer - God. Two of the main philosophers to argue this point were
Aquinas and Paley but many others since have tried to back these up
with there own approaches for example Swinburne with the argument from
probability. With all arguments there have been criticisms raised
against it with Hume being the main one but others include the
Epicurean Hypothesis, Darwin and Dawkins.
The main strengths are that it is a solid argument, based on
experience that people can relate to, there being a huge chance that
things were designed is a probable outcome, its logical, it makes
sense and it is believable.
Major criticisms were raised by Hume in one of his works - Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion. In this he made five points against the
idea of design qua regularity and design qua purpose.
Firstly he said humans don't have enough knowledge or experience of
the universe to draw the conclusion of a designer, we only have
experience of stuff we've made and that is not sufficient to draw this
conclusion. Even though this A posteriori view may have been true in
Hume's day we now have a lot more knowledge so we don't know if we
have enough experience, but we do have knowledge of designed things
made by other species, e.g. bird nests and beaver dams.
Secondly he said the design argument does not prove the God of
classical theism, the univers...
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... how intelligent life could evolve naturally.
The problem with his argument is that someone had to write the
programme and set the parameters which suggest a designer and
experience shows that we can breed features into species by selecting
the ones with the desired characteristics and then breeding them over
a few generations. It has also been argued that we choose our mate on
a genetic basis, which could mean programming.
I conclude that the design argument does not prove the God of
Classical Theism but then again the criticisms do not disprove it. If
both sides of the argument are examined then it is really down to the
person whether they believe that the universe was created by a
designer and that designer being God as there are strong points made
for and against the argument and neither can be logically false.
William Paley’s teleological argument (also known as the argument from design) is an attempt to prove the existence of god. This argument succeeds in proving that while existence was created by an aggregation of forces, to define these forces, as a conscious, rational, and ultimately godlike is dubious. Although the conclusions are valid, the argument makes several logical errors. The teleological argument relies on inductive reasoning, rendering the argument itself valid, but unsound. The argument fails to apply its own line of reasoning to itself, resulting in infinite regression. Beyond the scope of its logical flaws, the arguments content lacks accurate comparisons. The argument hinges on a watch metaphor, and as will be shown, this metaphor will prove inaccurate in explaining the creation of the universe.
Hume supports his claim with two arguments. Firstly, he states that when we reflect on our thoughts, they always become simple ideas that we copied from a first-hand experience of something, thus the idea has been copie...
To start, Hume makes the distinction that humans’ relationships with objects are either relations of ideas or matters of fact. “All the object of human reason or inquiry can naturally be divided into, relations of ideas and matters of fact.”(499) Lets discuss these one at a time.
David Hume is was a strong advocator and practitioner of a scientific and empirical way of thinking which is reflected in his philosophy. His skeptical philosophy was a 180 degree shift from the popular rational philosophy of the time period. Hume attempted to understand “human nature” through our psychological behaviors and patterns which, when analyzing Hume’s work, one can clearly see its relation to modern day psychology. Hume was a believer in that human behavior was influenced not by reason but by desire. He believed that “Ambition, avarice, self-love, vanity, friendship, generosity, public spirit—these passions, mixed in various proportions and distributed throughout society, are now (and from the beginning of the world always have been) the source of all the actions and projects that have ever...
In An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume demonstrates how there is no way to rationally make any claims about future occurrences. According to Hume knowledge of matters of fact come from previous experience. From building on this rationale, Hume goes on to prove how, as humans we can only make inferences on what will happen in the future, based on our experiences of the past. But he points out that we are incorrect to believe that we are justified in using our experience of the past as a means of evidence of what will happen in the future. Since we have only experience of the past, we can only offer propositions of the future. Hume classifies human into two categories; “Relations of Ideas,” and “Matters of Fact.” (240) “Relations of ideas” are either intuitively or demonstratively certain, such as in Mathematics (240). It can be affirmed that 2 + 2 equals 4, according to Hume’s “relations of ideas.” “Matters of fact” on the other hand are not ascertained in the same manner as “Relations of Ideas.” The ideas that are directly caused by impressions are called "matters of fact". With “matters of fact,” there is no certainty in establishing evidence of truth since every contradiction is possible. Hume uses the example of the sun rising in the future to demonstrate how as humans, we are unjustified in making predictions of the future based on past occurrences. As humans, we tend to use the principle of induction to predict what will occur in the future. Out of habit, we assume that sun will rise every day, like it has done in the past, but we have no basis of actual truth to make this justification. By claiming that the sun will rise tomorrow according to Hume is not false, nor is it true. Hume illustrates that “the contrary of every matter of fact is still possible, because it can never imply a contradiction and is conceived by the mind with the same facility and distinctness as if ever so conformable to reality” (240). Just because the sun has risen in the past does not serve as evidence for the future. Thus, according to Hume, we are only accurate in saying that there is a fifty- percent chance that the sun will rise tomorrow. Hume felt that all reasoning concerning matter of fact seemed to be founded on the relation between cause and effect.
The Design Argument For The Existence Of God This argument is also called the teleological argument, it argues that the universe did not come around by mere chance, but some one or something designed it. This thing was God. This argument is a prosteriori because the observation of the natural world is taken into the mind to conclude that there is a designer. The belief that the universe was designed by God was triggered by things like the four seasons; summer, spring, autumn and winter, that change through the year.
Hume is an empiricist and a skeptic. He develops a philosophy that is generally approached in a manner as that of a scientist and therefore he thinks that he can come up with a law for human understanding. Hume investigates the understanding as an empiricist to try and understand the origins of human ideas. Empiricism is the notion that all knowledge comes from experience. Skepticism is the practice of not believing things in nature a priori, but instead investigating things to discover what is really true. Hume does not believe that all a posteriori knowledge is useful, too. He believes “all experience is useless unless predictive knowledge is possible.” There are various types of skepticism that Hume differentiates, antecedent skepticism from consequent skepticism form his own skepticism that accounts for the limitations of the human kind while at the same time keeps our tendency to be excessive under check.
From the distinction of perceptions, Hume created his ‘microscope’ in order to trace all ideas back to impressions. He did this to search for the limits. If an idea could not be traced back to its impression, it was too abstruse. Hume separated the objects of human reason into two categories. First, the relation of ideas, which represented all that is ‘a priori’. Secondly, he created the category of matters of fact. Matters of fact made up the ‘a posteriori’ piece of the spectrum of reason. Matters of fact are contingent, meaning they could be otherwise.
that the same can be said for the universe as a whole. It seems to
In the selection, ‘Skeptical doubts concerning the operations of the understanding’, David Hume poses a problem for knowledge about the world. This question is related to the problem of induction. David Hume was one of the first who decided to analyze this problem. He starts the selection by providing his form of dividing the human knowledge, and later discusses reasoning and its dependence on experience. Hume states that people believe that the future will resemble the past, but we have no evidence to support this belief. In this paper, I will clarify the forms of knowledge and reasoning and examine Hume’s problem of induction, which is a challenge to Justified True Belief account because we lack a justification for our beliefs.
David Hume is a very famous philosopher for the methods that he takes to attack certain objects that he has a strong opinion on. He is the type of philosopher that will attack some of the simple things that we accept as humans and have grown to believe over time. He questions the validity of these arguments in regards to the methods that one took to arrive at their desired conclusions. He most notably takes a deeper look into induction and generalization. Induction is basically moving from some type of fact to formulate a specific conclusion about something. Generalization, on the other hand, is making broad assumptions on things usually with insufficient evidence. These two distinct points are the basis of David Hume’s argument expressed in, “An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding.” The main question that he poses is whether inductive reasoning overall can lead one to gain knowledge.
Descartes believes that the mind and body are separate of one another causing the problem to form in the transmission of information between the mind and the body. Hume does not conquer this task of mind and body one or separate. He is more concerned with the idea of self and how one is maintained over a period of time. He believes there is no such thing as self. That each moment we are a new being due to the fact that we are forever changing and nothing remains constant within ourselves. Yes, our DNA may be the same but that is not
Hume, David. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding: A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh: Hume's Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature. Indianapolis: Hackett Pub., 1993. Print.
Knowledge has a preliminary definition which is that it is justified true belief. Due to its dynamic nature, knowledge is subject to review and revision over time. Although, we may believe we have objective facts from various perceptions over time, such facts become re-interpreted in light of improved evidence, findings or technology and instigates new knowledge. This raises the questions, To what extent is knowledge provisional? and In what ways does the rise of new evidence give us a good reason to discard our old knowledge? This new knowledge can be gained in any of the different areas of knowledge, by considering the two areas of knowledge; History and Natural Sciences, I will be able to tackle these knowledge issues since they both offer more objective, yet regularly updated knowledge, which is crucial in order to explore this statement. I believe that rather than discarding knowledge we build upon it and in doing so access better knowledge, as well as getting closer to the truth.
Among many teaching styles and learning theories, there is one that is becoming more popular, the constructivist theory. The constructivist theory focuses on the way a person learns, a constructivist believes that the person will learn better when he/she is actively engaged. The person acts or views objects and events in their environment, in the process, this person then understands and learns from the object or events(P. Johnson, 2004). When we encounter a certain experience in our life, we think back to other things that have occurred in our life and use that to tackle this experience. In a lot of cases, we are creators of our own knowledge. In a classroom, the constructivist theory encourages more hands-on assignments or real-world situations, such as, experiments in science and math real-world problem solving. A constructivist teacher constantly checks up on the student, asking them to reflect what they are learning from this activity. The teacher should be keeping track on how they approached similar situations and help them build on that. The students can actually learning how to learn in a well-planned classroom. Many people look at this learning style as a spiral, the student is constantly learning from each new experience and their ideas become more complex and develop stronger abilities to integrate this information(P. Johnson, 2004). An example of a constructivist classroom would be, the student is in science class and everyone is asking questions, although the teacher knows the answer, instead of just giving it to them, she attempts to get the students to think through their knowledge and try to come up with a logical answer. A problem with this method of learning is that people believe that it is excusing the role of...