文档介绍：The Design Argument 117 Chapter 6 The Design Argument Elliott Sober The design argument is one of three main arguments for the existence of God; the others are the ontological argument and the cosmological argument. Unlike the ontological argument, the design argument and the cosmological argument are a posteriori. And whereas the cosmological argument can focus on any present event to get the ball rolling (arguing that it must trace back to a ?rst cause, namely God), design theorists are usually more selective. Design arguments have typically been of two types – organismic and cosmic . Organismic design arguments start with the observation that organisms have features that adapt them to the environments in which they live and that exhibit a kind of delicacy . Consider, for example, the vertebrate eye. This organ anisms survive by permitting them to perceive objects in their environment. And were the parts of the eye even slightly different in their shape and assembly, the an would not allow us to see. Cosmic design arguments begin with an observation concerning features of the entire cosmos – the universe obeys simple laws, it has a kind of stability, its physical features permit life and intelli- gent life to exist. However, not all design arguments ?t into these two partments. Kepler, for example, thought that the face we see when we look at the moon requires explanation in terms of intelligent design. Still, mon thread is that design theorists describe some empirical feature of the world and argue that this feature points towards an explanation in terms of God’s intentional planning and away from an explanation in terms of mindless natural processes. The design argument raises epistemological questions that go beyond its tradi- tional theological context. As William Paley (1802) observed, when we ?nd a watch while walking across a heath, we unhesitatingly infer that it was prod