I'm trying to get caught up with a lot of good posts around the various blogs this last week. One interesting one was by Johnny over at Fides Quaerens Intellectum. (Who, due to blog overload disabled comments so he didn't feel so obliged to answer everyone with a critique. Hopefully he'll not mind me taking a few pot shots here because I think it an excellent issue, even if I disagree with his particular take.) John's post was basically an argument from design from a regress argument. It is interesting, I think, for different reasons for Mormons.
The argument comes from Angus Menuge's book Agents Under Fire. (I've modified it somewhat from John's presentation for clarity.
(1) If something has purpose, then it is designed.
(2) Entities with intentions entail a purpose.
(3) Entities with intentions are designed (from 1 and 2)
(4) To be designed entails purpose
(5) Any entity that designs is designed ( from 3 and 4)
Now here Menuge (and Johnny) introduce God. John's argument initially is that God has essential properties a se. That is God holds his essential properties without dependence. Since only God does this, he ends what appears to be an infinite regress in the argument. (Since for any designer there is designer from (5))
This, to me, is highly unsatisfactory since it basically argues that the argument is true for everyone but God. And it doesn't apply to God since if God depended on something else for his existence then he wouldn't be God. As I mentioned in the comments to John's post, this seems like one is simply assuming ones conclusions in a subtle way. After all for this to work as an argument for design premise (1) really is "if something has a purpose then it is designed or is God." But the argument isn't much of an argument for God then.
The obvious argument against the above is that evolution has entities with intentions that don't arise out of intentional creatures. That is of course the matter under debate however. So someone arguing for design simply isn't going to accept that evolution provides entities with intention out of non-intentionality. Having said that though I posted the other day on computer evolution. It does seem we can make entities that appear to develop intentionality without having a designer. However do they really?
An objection would be that things can appear to have intentions when they really don't. For instance we frequently speak about inanimate entities as if they had intentionality. We might say our car wants to pull right. Yet we recognize that despite this talk that the car doesn't really have intentionality. So how do we know if something has intentionality?
The other complaint is that any computer program is designed and offers elements of design. So one has to be quite careful is appealing to computer programs to argue against design. Quite frequently to have a computer program that can evolve in a reasonable fashion one actually has quite significant design elements. At best we can say something moves from limited purpose to greater purpose, but not that purpose came out of no-purpose. The blog Prosthesis makes this argument against the Zimmer article I mentioned before.
So the two main approaches to the problem simply either modify (1) to exclude God or else deny (1). Unfortunately in the dialogs that go on, this tends to be as far as it goes. However an other approach is simply to take the argument seriously and allow an infinite regress. That is, have existence inherently purposeful and changing. For any entity expressing design there will be some prior entity helping it reach this state of purpose. Yet this prior entity would itself be both purposeful and "designed." An obvious movement that does this is Process Theology. However most panpsychic positions in philosophy would accept this. Consider, for example, Peirce, in which there is always final causation. That is purpose is simply a fact of the universe and of existence itself.
Johnny has up an other post defending his view of premise (1). It is mainly Menuge himself responding to some of John's questions from the earlier post. I don't think it really helps things that much though. It simply recognizes the difference between having a purpose in itself and having a purpose in a secondary sense. That is, a boat might be made for sailing, but I can sail on a log that floats by. One is designed for sailing while the other isn't. This, however, simply raises the issue I came at earlier. If use is ambiguous in this sense, how can we tell when something is designed? It can't be in terms of utility.
Put an other way, conceived of like this, the whole problem of purpose and intentionality become greater, not less.
I have some thoughts on John's and Menuge's further comments. I think they take us towards Heidegger and the issue of appropriateness and for-the-sake-of. However I'll leave that for an other day.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
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