INTELLIGENT DESIGN, a METAPHYSICAL PERSPECTIVE

Recently someone asked me the following question:

“What practical observation allows you to tell the difference between a universe that is ordered due to purposive design of an intelligent agent and one that is ordered through the workings of brute, undesigned necessity and chance?  What allows you to make that metaphysical distinction?”

It simply will not do for someone to ask “Why is it necessary for effects to regularly follow causes?” and answer by saying, “Because they do so by necessity” unless of course that someone has a don’t know/don’t care attitude. I do not mean to disparage anyone for stopping their inquiry at this point. I only wish to point out the following. Deciding not to pursue the fundamentals of the human condition that run deeper than naturalist assumptions comes at great cost. One must forego the hope of reaching satisfactory answers to those questions that matter most. People are left doubting the veracity of rational though, questioning the accuracy of sense data, and denying the defensibly of value judgments.

That is where reason leads most atheists. They defend determinism, conclude that consciousness as an illusion, and most recently shuck fundamental laws of thought like the Principle of Non-Contradiction and the Principle of Sufficient Reason.

Such stances bleak. That does not mean these stances are wrong, only that I think no inquiry into the role of intentionality will ever satisfy an eliminative materialist, for example. To me, these stances are self-refuting. When someone sees all subjective experiences, including rational reflection, personal identity, and as untrustworthy, he can only conclude that no answers can be derived. Personally, I think even atheists know deep down that their stances are fatalistic and nihilistic. Atheists make the personal existential choice in that direction by taking naturalistic assumptions about causality and concept formation as being beyond the extreme limits of human knowledge.

At a minimum, I have tried to show that the Schoolmen tackled these same problems hundreds of years prior to Descartes’s radical skepticism discounting the carefully crafted distinctions and conceptual nuances of Scholastic thought. I find great value in that tradition and see clearly how many intractable paradoxes of modern philosophy become irrelevant. That does not mean I am right, only that I believe the Principle of Sufficient Reason applies.

Two notions cover chance: 1) the notion that any given event can happen completely without rhyme or reason or 2) the infeasibility of fully knowing the conditions on which outcomes depend making the outcome uncertain, i.e. indeterminate.

Some people hold the notion that the rules applying to all known physical objects need not apply to one particular object, the entire physical universe which is the biggest of them all. Perhaps. However, many assure me that at the most fundamental level of reality subatomic particles pop in and out of existence randomly without cause. If this is truly the case, then the logic of the Thomas Aquinas’s Third Way applies. If it is possible that any given particle could cease to exist, then any object made of such particles would cease to exist if all the particles of which it is made ceased to exist all at once. If the object under consideration is the entire physical universe and if the physical universe is the sum total of all being, then...it would be possible at any given point in the history of reality it might not have existed. In that case it would not exist now since “from nothing, nothing comes.” Likewise it could at any time cease existing for no rhyme or reason. Since the physical universe continues to exist, a rational person can reasonably suppose that something sustains the physical universe, something whose existence is not subject to chance.

That leaves option 2, the existence of the physical universe depends on something necessary, but that whatever it is cannot be fully known. I reject this position by applying the Principle of Sufficient Reason. In an intelligible reality open to sound rational inquiry, we do know something about it: a necessary being must exist and it is absolutely requires to sustain all of existence every second of every day, regardless of how the whole ball of wax started in the first place.

Now as it relates to the Fifth Way of Aquinas either intentionality exists in nature or it does not. As stated earlier, I am not aware of any argument that an eliminative materialist would even consider. They have already ruled intentionality, including their own, as an illusion.

In short, while adopting theism is not neccesarily a rational, neither is atheism. Both rest on existential choices that cannot be rationally justified. The difference is that what logical follows from theism is a world of meaning and purpose in which scientific and moral knowledge can be gained. Meanwhile what follows from atheism is the exact opposite: a world in which people are slaves to blind impersonal forces in an absurd world, doubting of their own perceptions, and left bereft of purpose.