A plausible plausibility structure (1)

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed.”

These lines from ‘God’s Grandeur’ reveal the poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, to be a late Victorian confident of the argument from design placing him very much in the mainstream of the Christian tradition. This argument, that the beauty and intricacy of the natural world (including that of humanity) must derive from an Intelligent Designer, can be found in both the Old and New Testaments and in Christian thought from Augustine to William Paley (an Anglican priest and older contemporary of Hopkins). Additionally, the same argument can also be found in the Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle who were both significant influences on the development of Christian theology.

Thomas Aquinas, who drew heavily on Aristotle’s thought, developed, in the Five Ways, a series of natural arguments for the existence of God. The Five Ways began to be questioned in the seventeenth century following the development of the science of mechanics. This did not destroy the argument from design but did lead to its development being primarily by scientists rather than theologians (and thereby entwined with the belief that science provided objective knowledge of the world) and to differences in where its supporters chose to look for evidence of design.

Hopkins was, however, unusual in the late Victorian era in the confidence with which he held to the argument from design. More typical of late Victorian opinion was Alfred Tennyson when he wrote of “life as futile, then, as frail” because Man, who had “… trusted God was love indeed/And love Creation’s final law”, had now discovered that “Nature, red in tooth and claw/With ravine, shriek’d against his creed” and left him to “Be blown about the desert dust,/Or seal’d within the iron hills”.

As the archeological references in Tennyson’s poem show, the most significant threat to the argument from design came from the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859. Darwin’s hypothesis was that organisms and creatures evolved through a process by which random mutations that improved the chances of survival for an organism/creature were naturally selected as they enabled survival in preference to other weaker organisms/creatures.

For many, Darwin’s hypothesis was taken, over time and with developments, as objective proof that purposefulness in nature could be explained without there being a need to invoke a creator. This belief was also supported by David Hume’s earlier philosophical critique of the design argument in Dialogues concerning Natural Religion.

Dialogues had been posthumously published in 1779 but its arguments were not taken up on a significant scale until the following century. Hume argued that the design argument was based on an analogy between the world and the mind of God that had no rational basis. It was just as easy, perhaps easier, Hume argued to suggest from the way in which the world was formed that there were many gods or no gods and, therefore, he concluded that there was no reasonable basis on which we could “draw any conclusion about the origin of the world from the way we find it”. The combination of Darwin and Hume appeared to sound the death knell to the argument from design.

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Bob Dylan - Watching The River Flow.