On this blog, I tend to take somewhat different tacks to classical arguments. It's not so much because I think the old counterarguments are invalid, but simply because I think there is so much more that could be said that simply isn't being explored. Reddit's atheism channel had quite a time with my earlier approaches to WLC's favorite -- the Kalam Cosmological Argument -- for a little while because I put forth points and thought experiments that nobody else had apparently considered up until then; in particular, in part two. The thought experiment I mentioned has been brought to WLC's attention, but he has not responded in these years since -- either he has nothing to offer without straw-manning it (which he can't afford to after I spent so much time pointing out how often he does that), or he simply didn't care enough to pay it any mind. Given how long ago this was and how new I was to blogging at the time, I'm inclined to believe that it's the latter. To be honest, though, I don't think it was a particularly esoteric or brilliant counterargument, but it's merely one that never really gets explored because people don't typically have to go to that extent.
In that sense, I'm going to try in this one to get at some of the hardly -- if at all -- covered issues with the teleological argument, aka the argument from design. We all know this one : a watch implies a watchmaker, a building implies a builder, therefore life, which appears designed, implies a designer. Well, the obvious counterargument here is that the analogy falls apart when you compare to living things that can reproduce. Buildings don't have sex with other buildings to make little baby buildings that grow up to become skyscrapers and what not... that would be terrifying when you think about it. Living things have that option and the imperfections of the process coupled with natural selection can yield changes in the average probabilities of alleles throughout a population over generations. That's the obvious counterargument, and most would stop right there; but you could go further and really start to tear down the concept of teleological thinking to begin with.
In that sense, I'm going to try in this one to get at some of the hardly -- if at all -- covered issues with the teleological argument, aka the argument from design. We all know this one : a watch implies a watchmaker, a building implies a builder, therefore life, which appears designed, implies a designer. Well, the obvious counterargument here is that the analogy falls apart when you compare to living things that can reproduce. Buildings don't have sex with other buildings to make little baby buildings that grow up to become skyscrapers and what not... that would be terrifying when you think about it. Living things have that option and the imperfections of the process coupled with natural selection can yield changes in the average probabilities of alleles throughout a population over generations. That's the obvious counterargument, and most would stop right there; but you could go further and really start to tear down the concept of teleological thinking to begin with.