The Indisputable Appearance of Design

This is post seventeen in the series “The Case Against Physicalism.”

Evan Sanchez on unsplash. The remarkable beauty that is evident in the universe and the wonders of life and all creation have led virtually all humans to intuitively see in it the hand of a designer. The rejection of this most basic human intuition is an anomaly and a unique feature of our intellectual milieu. While physicalists and their proselytizers have preached against this intuition for many years, the vast majority of people persistently reject their denial of the obvious.

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck… you get the idea. (After writing this I read Graham Pemberton’s excellent article on Darwinism and found that I inadvertently copied him. Great minds….) Does anyone seriously dispute the appearance of design in the universe as revealed through science? The argument today is not about appearance but whether or not the appearances reveal design or whether they are fooling at least some of us into thinking they are designed. That’s a basic question I’ve been dealing with in Top Down or Bottom Up and in the Case Against Physicalism series.

Simplifying things we can see the discussion coming down to, in this corner William Paley or Francis Collins, and in that corner David Hume or Richard Dawkins. Does nature reveal a watchmaker with a mind, intention, creativity and the requisite technical skills? Or, does what we have learned about nature tell us that the watchmaker is blind: there is no design, no intention, no purpose. It’s all accidental and meaningless. If we think we see design it is an artifact of evolution and proof of how we can be easily deceived by a brain evolved for the purpose of surviving in the desert or jungle.

Throughout most of human history it was understood by all thinking apes that the world where we lived didn’t just pop into being without a cause. Someone or something was behind it all. Maybe still involved, maybe not.

Even the most well-known New Atheist, Richard Dawkins admitted the primary premise here which is that the appearance of design is indisputable. As Graham Pemberton pointed on in a recent Medium post, in the 1982 book Current Problems in Sociobiology published by Cambridge, Dawkins wrote:

“So overwhelming is the appearance of purposeful design that, even in this Darwinian era when we know ‘better’, we still find it difficult, indeed boringly pedantic, to refrain from teleological language when discussing adaptation.”

One of the most remarkable developments in intellectual history is that almost all major cultural drivers — education…