IV. Integration
1. Natural Theology
Here arguments for the existence of God are based entirely on human reason rather than on historical revelation or religious experience. The
"five ways" of Thomas Aquinas included several versions of the cosmological argument. One version asserted that every event must have a cause, so we must acknowledge a First Cause if we are to avoid infinite regress. Another version said that the whole chain of natural causes (finite or infinite) is contingent and might not have been; it is
dependent on a being which exists necessarily. These are what we have called boundary questions, since they refer only to the existence and very general features of the world. The teleological argument may similarly start from orderliness and intelligibility as general
characteristics of nature. But specific evidences of design in nature may also be cited. In this form the argument has often drawn from the
findings of science.
The founders of modern science frequently expressed admiration for the harmonious correlations of nature, which they saw as God’s handiwork.
Newton said that the eye could not have been contrived without skill in optics, and Boyle extolled the evidences of benevolent design
throughout the natural order. If the Newtonian world was the perfect clock, the deistic God was its designer. In the early nineteenth century, Paley said that if one finds a watch on a heath, one is justified in
concluding that it was designed by an intelligent being. In the human eye, many complex parts are coordinated to the one purpose of vision;
here, too, one can only conclude that there was an intelligent designer.
Paley cited many other examples of the coordination of structures fulfilling functions useful to living organisms.
Hume had already made several criticisms of the teleological argument.
He observed that the organizing principle responsible for patterns in nature might be within organisms, not external to them. At most the argument would point to the existence of a finite god or many gods, not the omnipotent Creator of monotheism. If there are evil and
dysfunctional phenomena in the world, does one ascribe them to a being with less benevolent intentions? It was Darwin, of course, who dealt the most serious blow to the argument, for he showed that adaptation can be explained by random variation and natural selection. An automatic and impersonal process could account for the apparent design in nature.
Many Protestants ignored the debate, asserting that their religious beliefs were based on revelation rather than natural theology. Others advocated a reformulation of the argument. Design is evident, they said, not in the particular structures of individual organisms, but in the
properties of matter and the laws of nature through which the
evolutionary process could produce such organisms. It is in the design of the total process that God’s wisdom is evident. In the 1930s, F. R.
Tennant argued that nature is a unified system of mutually supporting structures that have led to living organisms and have provided the conditions for human moral, aesthetic, and intellectual life.42
Reformulations of the teleological argument are common in Roman Catholic thought, where natural theology has traditionally held a respected place as a preparation for the truths of revealed theology.43 The British philosopher Richard Swinburne has given an extended defense of natural theology. He starts by discussing confirmation theory in the philosophy of science. In the development of science, new
evidence does not make a theory certain. Instead, a theory has an initial plausibility, and the probability that it is true increases or decreases with the additional evidence (Bayes’s Theorem). Swinburne suggests that the existence of God has an initial plausibility because of its simplicity and because it gives a personal explanation of the world in terms of the intentions of an agent. He then argues that the evidence of order in the world increases the probability of the theistic hypothesis. He also maintains that science cannot account for the presence of conscious beings in the world. "Something outside the web of physical laws" is needed to explain the rise of consciousness. Finally, religious
experience provides "additional crucial evidence." Swinburne
concludes, "On our total evidence, theism is more probable than not."44 The most recent rendition of the design argument is the Anthropic Principle in cosmology. Astrophysicists have found that life in the universe would have been impossible if some of the physical constants and other conditions in the early universe had differed even slightly from the values they had. The universe seems to be "fine-tuned" for the possibility of life. For example, Stephen Hawking writes, "If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it even reached its present size."45 Freeman Dyson draws the following conclusion from such findings:
I conclude from the existence of these accidents of physics and astronomy that the universe is an unexpectedly hospitable place for living creatures to make their home in. Being a scientist, trained in the habits of thought and language of the twentieth century rather than the eighteenth, I do not claim that the
architecture of the universe proves the existence of God. I claim only that the architecture of the universe is consistent with the hypothesis that mind plays an essential role in its functioning.46 John Barrow and Frank Tipler present many other cases in which there were extremely critical values of various forces in the early universe.47
The philosopher John Leslie defends the Anthropic Principle as a design argument. But he points out that an alternative explanation would be the assumption of many worlds (either in successive cycles of an oscillating universe or in separate domains existing simultaneously); These worlds might differ from each other, and we just happen to be in one that has the right variables for the emergence of life.48 Moreover, some of these apparently arbitrary conditions may be necessitated by a more basic unified theory, on which physicists are currently working. We will examine these alternatives in chapter 5.
The bishop of Birmingham, Hugh Montefiore, claims that there are many instances of design in the universe, including the Anthropic Principle and the directionality of evolution. Some of his other examples, such as James Lovelock’s "Gaia Hypothesis" and Rupert Sheldrake’s "morphogenetic fields," are much more controversial and have little support in the scientific community. Montefiore does not claim that these arguments prove the existence of God, but only that the latter is more probable than other explanations.49
Debates continue about the validity of each of these arguments, to which we will return in later chapters. But even if the arguments are accepted, they would not lead to the personal, active God of the Bible, as Hume pointed out, but only to an intelligent designer remote from the world. Moreover, few if any persons have actually acquired their
religious beliefs by such arguments. Natural theology can show that the existence of God is a plausible hypothesis, but this kind of reasoning is far removed from the actual life of a religious community.