Mackie on the Argument From Design

Extract

Reviewing J. L. Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism (Oxford, 1982), Galen Strawson says that ‘philosophical resistance to the theologians’ argument has dropped to a low ebb in recent years’ because ‘most philosophers think the topic is simply not worth discussing any more’ (The Sunday Times, 16 January 1983). This is fair comment, though its truth entails no conclusion to the credit of ‘most philosophers’. But Mackie, at any rate did think theology worth discussing. Hence The Miracle of Theism (written shortly before Mackie’s death in 1981), which is a sustained discussion of arguments for and against God’s existence. The book is a rich one deserving of serious study. Here I am concerned only with a small part of it: its critique of the design argument offered by Richard Swinburne in The Existence of God (Oxford, 1979). Swinburne thinks well of an argument which belongs to the family of arguments commonly lumped together under the (dubious) title ‘the argument from design’. Mackie thinks otherwise of the argument. Here I wish to defend Swinburne, though I shall also be disagreeing with him at one point.

Swinburne offers what he calls a ‘teleological argument from the temporal order of the world’. That there is temporal order in the universe is, says, Swinburne, very evident. This is explained as follows:

Regularities of succession are all-pervasive. For simple laws govern almost all successions of events. In books of physics, chemistry and biology we can learn how almost everything in the world behaves. The laws of their behaviour can be set out by relatively simple formulae which men can understand and by means of which they can successfully predict the future. The orderliness of nature to which I draw attention here is its conformity to formula, to simple, formulable, scientific laws. The orderliness of the universe in this respect is a very striking fact about it. The universe might so naturally have been chaotic, but it is not - it is very orderly. (P 136)