The Argument from Design - A Brief History

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The Argument from Design
A Brief History
Michael Ruse
The argument from design for the existence of God – sometimes known as
the teleological argument – claims that there are aspects of the world that
cannot be explained except by reference to a Creator. It is not a Christian ar-
gument as such, but it has been appropriated by Christians. Indeed, it forms
one of the major pillars of the natural-theological approach to belief – that
is, the approach that stresses reason, as opposed to the revealed-theological
approach that stresses faith and (in the case of Catholics) authority. This
chapter is a very brief history of the argument from design, paying particu-
lar attention to the impact of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through
natural selection, as presented in his Origin of Species, published in 1859.
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from the greeks to christianity
According to Xenophon (Memorabilia, I, 4.2–18), it was Socrates who first
introduced the argument to Western thought, but it is Plato who gives the
earliest full discussion, in his great dialogue about the death of Socrates
(the Phaedo) and then in later dialogues (the Timaeus, especially). Drawing
a distinction between causes that simply function and those that seem to
reveal some sort of plan, Plato wrote about the growth of a human being:
I had formerly thought that it was clear to everyone that he grew through eating
and drinking; that when, through food, new flesh and bones came into being to
supplement the old, and thus in the same way each kind of thing was supplemented
by new substances proper to it, only then did the mass which was small become large,
and in the same way the small man big. (Phaedo, 96 d, quoted in Cooper 1997, 83–4)
But then, Plato argued that this kind of explanation will not do. It is not
wrong, but it is incomplete. One must address the question of why someone

would grow. Here one must (said Plato) bring in a thinking mind, for without
this, one has no way of relating the growth to the end result, the reason for
the growth:
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Michael Ruse
The ordering Mind ordered everything and place each thing severally as it was best
that it should be; so that if anyone wanted to discover the cause of anything, how
it came into being or perished or existed, he simply needed to discover what kind
of existence was best for it, or what it was best that it should do or have done to it.
(97 b–c)
Note that here there is a two-stage argument. First, there is the claim that
there is something special about the world that needs explaining – the fact
of growth and development, in Plato’s example. To use modern language,
there is the claim that things exist for certain desired ends, that there is
something “teleological” about the world. Then, second, there is the claim
that this special nature of the world needs a special kind of cause, namely,
one dependent on intelligence or thinking. Sometimes the first stage of the
argument is known as the argument to design, and the second stage as the
argument from design, but this seems to me to suppose what is to be proven,
namely, that the world demands a designer. Although not unaware of the
anthropomorphic undertones, I shall refer to the first stage of the argument
as the “argument to (seemingly) organized complexity.” Here I am using the
language of a notorious atheist, the English biologist Richard Dawkins, who
speaks in terms of “organized complexity” or “adaptive complexity,” follow-
ing his fellow English evolutionist John Maynard Smith (1969) in thinking
that this is “the same set of facts” that the religious “have used as evidence of
a Creator” (Dawkins 1983, 404). Then for the second stage of the argument,

I shall speak of the “argument to design.” Obviously, for Socrates and Plato
this did not prove the Christian God, but it did prove a being whose mag-
nificence is reflected in the results – namely, the wonderful world about us.
For the two stages taken together, I shall continue to speak of the argument
from design.
For Plato, it was the second stage of the argument – the argument to de-
sign – that really mattered. He was not that interested in the world as such,
and clearly thought that design could be inferred from the inorganic and
the organic indifferently. His student Aristotle, who for part of his life was a
working biologist, emphasized things rather differently. Although, in a clas-
sic discussion of causation, he argued that all things require understanding
in terms of ends or plans – in terms of “final causes,” to use his language – in
fact it was in the organic world exclusively that he found what I am calling
organic complexity. Aristotle asked: “What are the forces by which the hand
or the body was fashioned into its shape?” A woodcarver (speaking of a
model) might say that it was made as it is by tools such as an axe or an auger.
But note that simply referring to the tools and their effects is not enough.
One must bring in desired ends. The woodcarver “must state the reasons
why he struck his blow in such a way as to effect this, and for the sake of what
he did so; namely, that the piece of wood should develop eventually into
this or that shape.” Likewise, against the physiologists he argued that “the
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true method is to state what the characters are that distinguish the animal –
to explain what it is and what are its qualities – and to deal after the same
fashion with its several parts; in fact, to proceed in exactly the same way as
we should do, were we dealing with the form of a couch” (Parts of Animals,
641a 7–17, quoted in Barnes 1984, 997).

Aristotle certainly believed in a god or gods, but these “unmoved movers”
spend their time contemplating their own perfection, indifferent to human
fate. For this reason, whereas Plato’s teleology is sometimes spoken of as
“external,” meaning that the emphasis is on the designer, Aristotle’s teleol-
ogy is sometimes spoken of as “internal,” meaning that the emphasis is on
the way that the world – the organic world, particularly – seems to have an
end-directed nature. Stones fall. Rivers run. Volcanoes erupt. But hands are
for grasping. Eyes are for seeing. Teeth are for biting and chewing. Aristotle
emphasizes the first part of the argument from design. Plato emphasizes
the second part. And these different emphases show in the uses made of
the argument from design in the two millennia following the great Greek
philosophers. Someone like the physician Galen was interested in the argu-
ment to organized complexity. The hand, for instance, has fingers because
“if the hand remained undivided, it would lay hold only on the things in con-
tact with it that were of the same size that it happened to be itself, whereas,
being subdivided into many members, it could easily grasp masses much
larger than itself, and fasten accurately upon the smallest objects” (Galen
1968, 1, 72). Someone like the great Christian thinker Augustine was inter-
ested in the argument to design.
The world itself, by the perfect order of its changes and motions, and by the great
beauty of all things visible, proclaims by a kind of silent testimony of its own both that
it has been created, and also that it could not have been made other than by a God
ineffable and invisible in greatness, and ineffable and invisible in beauty. (Augustine
1998, 452–3)
As every student of philosophy and religion knows well, it was Saint
Thomas Aquinas who put the official seal of approval on the argument
from design, integrating it firmly within the Christian Weltanschauung, high-
lighting it as one of the five valid proofs for the existence of God.
The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things that lack
intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their

acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence
it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly do they [things of this world] achieve
their end.
Then from this premise (equivalent of the argument to organization) –
more claimed than defended – we move to the Creator behind things (ar-
gument to design). “Now whatever lacks knowledge cannot move towards
an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and
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Michael Ruse
intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some
intelligent being exists by which all natural things are directed to their end;
and this being we call God” (Aquinas 1952, 26–7).
after the reformation
Famous though this “Thomistic” argument has become, one should never-
theless note that for Aquinas (as for Augustine before him) natural theology
could never take the primary place of revealed theology. Faith first, and then
reason. It is not until the Reformation that one starts to see natural theology
being promoted to the status of revealed theology. In a way, this is some-
what paradoxical. The great reformers – Luther and Calvin, particularly –
had in some respects less time for natural theology than the Catholics from
which they were breaking. One finds God by faith alone (sola fide), and one is
guided to Him by scripture alone (sola scriptura). They were putting pressure
on the second part of the argument from design. At the same time, scien-
tists were putting pressure on the first part of the argument. Francis Bacon
(1561–1626), the English philosopher of scientific theory and methodol-
ogy, led the attack on Greek thinking, wittily likening final causes to vestal
virgins: dedicated to God but barren! He did not want to deny that God
stands behind His design, but Bacon did want to keep this kind of thinking

out of his science. The argument to complexity is not very useful in science;
certainly the argument to complexity in the nonliving context is not useful
in science. And whatever one might want to say about the argument to com-
plexity for the living world, inferences from this to or for design (a Mind,
that is) have no place in science. Harshly, Bacon judged: “For the handling
of final causes mixed with the rest in physical inquiries, hath intercepted the
severe and diligent inquiry of all real and physical causes, and given men
the occasion to stay upon these satisfactory and specious causes, to the great
arrest and prejudice of further discovery” (Bacon 1605, 119).
But there was another side, in England particularly. Caught in the six-
teenth century between the Scylla of Catholicism on the continent and the
Charybdis of Calvinism at home, the central Protestants – the members of
the Church of England, or the Anglicans – turned with some relief to nat-
ural theology as a middle way between the authority of the Pope and the
Catholic tradition and the authority of the Bible read in a Puritan fashion.
This was especially the strategy of the Oxford-trained cleric Richard Hooker,
in his The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. If one turned to reason and evidence,
one did not need to rely on Catholic authority and tradition. The truth was
there for all to see, given good will and reason and observation. Nor, against
the other extreme, did one need to rely on the unaided word of scripture.
Indeed, it is an error to think that “the only law which God has appointed
unto men” is the word of the Bible (Hooker, Works, I, 224, quoted in Olson
1987, 8). In fact, natural theology is not just a prop but an essential part of
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the Christian’s argument. “Nature and Scripture do serve in such full sort
that they both jointly and not severally either of them be so complete that
unto everlasting felicity we need not the knowledge of anything more than

these two may easily furnish. ...“(Hooker, Works, I, 216, quoted in Olson
1987, 8)
With the argument to design given firm backing by the authorities, the
way was now open to exploit the argument to organized complexity – if not
in the inorganic world, then in the world of plants and animals. William
Harvey’s whole approach to the problem of circulation – valves in the veins,
the functions of the parts of the heart, and so forth – was teleological through
and through, with a total stress on what was best for, or of most value for,
an organism and its parts. And then, at the end of the seventeenth century,
there was the clergyman-naturalist John Ray (1628–1705) and his Wisdom
of God, Manifested in the Words of Creation (1691, 5th ed. 1709). First, the
argument to adaptive complexity:
Whatever is natural, beheld through [the microscope] appears exquisitely formed,
and adorned with all imaginable Elegancy and Beauty. There are such inimitable
gildings in the smallest Seeds of Plants, but especially in the parts of Animals, in the
Lead or Eye of a small Fry; Such accuracy, Order and Symmetry in the frame of the
most minute Creatures, a Louse, for example, or a Mite, as no man were able to
conceive without seeming of them.
Everything that we humans do and produce is just crude and amateurish
compared to what we find in nature. Then, the argument to design: “There
is no greater, at least no more palpable and convincing argument of the
Existence of a Deity, than the admirable Art and Wisdom that discovers
itself in the Make and Constitution, the Order and Disposition, the Ends
and uses of all the parts and members of this stately fabric of Heaven and
Earth” (Ray 1709, 32–3).
At the end of the eighteenth century, this happy harmony between sci-
ence and religion was drowned out by the cymbals clashed together by he
who has been described wittily as “God’s greatest gift to the infidel.” In his Di-
alogues Concerning Natural Religion, David Hume tore into the argument from
design.

If we survey a ship, what an exalted idea must we form of the ingenuity of the carpen-
ter, who framed so complicated, useful, and beautiful a machine? And what surprise
must we feel, when we find him a stupid mechanic, who imitated others, and copied
an art, which, through a long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes,
corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving?
More generally:
Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this
system was struck out: much labour lost: many fruitless trials made: and a slow, but
continued improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world-making.
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Michael Ruse
In such subjects, who can determine, where the truth; nay, who can conjecture where
the probability, lies; amidst a great number of hypotheses which may be proposed,
and a still greater number which may be imagined? (Hume 1779, 140)
This is a counter to the second phase of the argument – against the ar-
gument from complexity to a Creator that we might want to take seriously.
Hume also went after the argument to complexity itself, that which sug-
gests that there is something special or in need of explanation. In Hume’s
opinion, we should be careful about making any such inference. We might
question whether the world really does have marks of organized, adaptive
complexity. For instance, is it like a machine, or is it more like an animal or
a vegetable, in which case the whole argument collapses into some kind of
circularity or regression? It is certainly true that we seem to have a balance of
nature, with change in one part affecting and being compensated by change
in another part, just as we have in organisms. But this seems to imply a kind
of non-Christian pantheism. “The world, therefore, I infer, is an animal,
and the Deity is the SOUL of the world, actuating it, and actuated by it”
(pp. 143–4). And if this is not enough – going back again to the argument

for a Designer – there is the problem of evil. This is something that appar-
ently belies the optimistic conclusions – drawn by enthusiasts for the design
argument from Socrates on – about the Designer. As Hume asked, if God
did design and create the world, how do you account for all that is wrong
within it? If God is all-powerful, He could prevent evil. If God is all-loving,
He would prevent evil. Why then does it exist? Speaking with some feeling
of life in the eighteenth century, Hume asked meaningfully, “what racking
pains, on the other hand, arise from gouts, gravels, megrims, tooth-aches,
rheumatisms; where the injury to the animal-machinery is either small or
incurable?” (p. 172) Not much “divine benevolence” displaying itself here,
I am afraid.
For students in philosophy classes today, this tends to be the end of mat-
ters. The argument from design is finished, and it is time to move on. For
people at the end of the eighteenth century, this was anything but the end
of matters. Indeed, even Hume himself, at the end of his Dialogues, rather
admitted that he had proven too much. The argument still has some force. If
the proposition before us is that “the cause or causes of order in the universe prob-
ably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence,” then “what can the most
inquisitive, contemplative, and religious man do more than give a plain,
philosophical assent to the proposition, as often as it occurs; and believe
that the arguments, on which it is established, exceed the objections, which
lie against it?” (Hume 1779, 203–4, his italics) The official counterblast came
from a Christian apologist, Archdeacon William Paley of Carlisle. Warming
up for the argument to complexity:
In crossing a heath suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how
the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that for any thing I knew to the
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contrary it had lain there for ever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the
absurdity of this answer. But supposing I had found a watch upon the ground, and
it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly
think of the answer which I had before given, that for any thing I knew the watch
might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as
well as for the stone; why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first? For
this reason, and for no other, namely, that when we come to inspect the watch, we
perceive – what we could not discover in the stone – that its several parts are framed
and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to
produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day;
that if the different parts had been shaped different from what they are, or placed
after any other manner or in any other order than that in which they are placed,
either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which
would have answered the use that is now served by it. (Paley 1819, 1)
A watch implies a watchmaker. Likewise, the adaptations of the living world
imply an adaptation maker, a Deity. The argument to design. You cannot
argue otherwise without falling into absurdity. “This is atheism; for every
indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design which existed in
the watch, exists in the works of nature, with the difference on the side of
nature of being greater and more, and that in a degree which exceeds all
computation” (p. 14).
After Hume, how was Paley able to get away with it? More pertinently, after
Hume, how did Paley manage to influence so many of his readers? Do logic
and philosophy have so little effect? The philosopher Elliott Sober (2000)
points to the answer. Prima facie, Paley is offering an analogical argument.
The world is like a machine. Machines have designers/makers. Hence, the
world has a designer/maker. Hume had roughed this up by suggesting that
the world is not much like a machine, and that even if it is, one cannot then
argue to the kind of machine-maker/designer usually identified with the
Christian God. But this is not really Paley’s argument. He is offering what

is known as an “inference to the best explanation.” There has to be some
causal explanation of the world. All explanations other than one supposing
a designing mind – or rather a Designing Mind – are clearly inadequate.
Hence, whatever the problems, the causal explanation of the world has to
be a Designing Mind. If design remains the only explanation that can do the
job, then at one level all of the counterarguments put forth by Hume fall
away. As Sherlock Holmes, speaking to his friend Dr. Watson, put it so well:
“How often have I told you that when you have eliminated the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” This is not to say
that Hume’s critical work was wasted. The believer who was prepared to
face up to what Hume had argued would now know (or should now know)
that the Designer is a lot less humanlike than most confidently suppose. But
for the critical work to be fatal to the existence of the Designer, it would
be necessary to wait until another viable hypothesis presented itself. Then,