Friday, December 27, 2019

Transcendent Designer and Immanent Designer

As has been previously discussed, implicit in Spinoza's attribution of Thought to Nature is an exposure of the fallacy of the various versions of the standard Theological Argument From Design.  According to that argument: 1. Nature evinces Design; 2. Evidence of Design indicates the existence of a Designer; 3. Therefore, a Designer exists; 4. Therefore, the transcendent Abrahamic deity exists.  Usually, counter-arguments have targeted 1 or 2, e. g. Hume and Kant, respectively.  But, the counter that is possible only on the basis of an intelligent Monist Naturalism targets 4, by implicitly exposing the inference to a Designer that transcends Nature--an inference that is the essence of the argument--as begging the question.  Furthermore, Spinoza's doctrine does not merely neutralize the argument by presenting an alternative inference at 4--its alternative is better grounded.  For, there is ample evidence of Designing that is immanent in Nature--that of humans, who routinely make plans and execute them, with e. g. products of their manufacturing as evidence of Design, which advocates of Theological argument freely acknowledge.  So, there is unarguable evidence of the existence of immanent Self-Designing in Nature.  In contrast, there is no such evidence of the existence of a transcendent Designer that is independent of the argument devised to prove that existence.  Nevertheless, Spinoza's doctrine has remained an untapped resource as the Argument From Design persists in its recent Creationist guise, e. g. Darwinists who seem satisfied with the thesis that Evolution is a random process.

No comments:

Post a Comment