Theism Part Four: The Arguments from Design and Consciousness

This post continues the prior post concerning teleology.  Having established that science, on its own, cannot be expected to answer the teleological question (why is there order in the universe?) or cosmological question (why is there something rather than nothing?) we are, by deduction, left with only two possible answers to these questions:

1) Things simply are the way they are.  No explanation exists.

2) Something made things to be the way they are.

As established with the Kalam argument and argument from a finite past in an earlier post, we cannot accept an infinite chain of causes extending backwards into an infinite past.  Rather, there must be a first or initial cause.  In other words, the order we observe in the universe is either caused or it is an occurance of blind chance.

This is the essential starting point of the argument from design.

Theism Part Three: Teleological Arguments

This will be a brief post, mostly to present a framework for a series of small posts I intend to do defending and applying the argument from design.  Despite the broad dismissal of this argument in pop-culture, it is alive and well.  When people say that "science has disproven God" (it hasn't - how could it?) what they most often mean is "science can explain the order of the universe, so we don't need God."  Indeed, gods have long been used as cop-out explanations for hard-to-explain phenomena (like lightning, earthquakes, or the rise and fall of empires).

Yet there are two critical things to observe at the outset when analyzing arguments from design.  The first: what sort of question are we asking here?  The second: Is it proper to think that science could answer it?