Transcript Reading: Kant Part 5

We're continuing with our study of Kant, and it occurs to me that I'm not sure what you're reading. You may be coming across some strange terms that I probably should have explained earlier—my apologies. Let's pause for a moment to cover his foundational concepts and clarify some of these terms. In fact, I started to write one of them on the board the other day, and realized students probably didn't know what it meant. I used a different term, but let’s go ahead and clear these up now before we continue with Kant's "architecture of the mind," as he’s trying to sell us.

The first term I want to explain is transcendental. Kant uses this word frequently. He's offering a "transcendental critique." Transcendental means something that applies across the board, to everything. What he wants to address are the faculties or powers of the mind that work in all knowledge. Critique means an analysis and evaluation. So, it's not as mysterious as it sounds, but these are big, unfamiliar terms for most people.

This is different from transcendent. Transcendent doesn’t mean anything like transcendental. It means "across a boundary." When we say God is transcendent, we mean that He exists beyond the boundaries of all creation. God created space and time, and His existence is independent of space and time. He created matter and the laws that govern the universe. God's existence is outside these things, and He doesn't need them to exist, while they are dependent on Him. That's what transcendent means.

Another term I started to write the other day but backed off was heuristic. Disappointingly, this is just a fancy word for "of practical value." Kant says this about the idea of God. He doesn’t claim that we can know God in a definitive way. Instead, he suggests that believing in God gives more order to your life, as if God knows what you’re doing and cares about you. But in truth, Kant says we don’t know whether there is a God—we just live as though there were one. I’m not sure how he thinks he can sell that idea! Why would people live as though they’re accountable to God after reading that they can’t know for sure if God is real?

We’ll cover this in more detail in our final lectures, where we’ll look at an atheist’s perspective on life without the ability to know God. But that’s Kant’s stance on all "ideas of reason": they are of practical value. For example, the idea of the "totality of reality" is just that—an idea, not a concept. It doesn’t encompass every real thing because we can't form a concept that large. But the idea refers to everything that is real, including the self, and later Kant will add freedom to this category. We can’t prove or disprove freedom, but we act as though we are free, and that’s what we must continue to do.

There are more terms, like phenomena. This is a Greek word for "appearances," meaning what appears to us. Kant adopts the empiricist belief that what appears to our minds is just sensory data: colors, tastes, sounds, smells. He has a theory about how the mind unconsciously combines this sensory data into objects, imposing space, time, and categories like logic, math, and causality. But phenomena simply means appearances, which contrasts with another term, noumena, derived from Greek. Noumena refers to things "in themselves."

In other words, we speculate that there are things in themselves, though Kant doesn't explain why we should. If everything we know is inside our own minds, we don't know if anything exists outside of us. Kant acknowledges this but argues that the idea of things in themselves has practical usefulness, and we should live as if such things exist, as if we are being watched and cared for by God, and as if we have a self.

Kant makes a decent argument for the existence of the self. He suggests that all the intuitions we have—about our minds, our actions, whether we’re theorizing or cooking dinner—are not the real self. The self is what unifies all these things. It’s the self that imposes space, time, categories, and even beliefs in the usefulness of the ideas of reason. So there is a self behind everything we experience. I find this convincing, but Kant insists it's something we can't definitively know, which seems odd, given the strength of his argument.

One last thing: Kant was the first philosopher I know of to clearly distinguish between a concept and an idea, often called a "limiting idea." In a concept, we identify and unify a number of properties of something, focusing on the ones that interest us most. I used the example of my luggage coming down the conveyor belt at the airport as I try to pull it off, recognizing it based on the concept of its characteristics.

This should clear up some of the terms Kant uses, and now we can return to the larger framework of his ideas. So, we abstract some of the properties of things. If it's a single thing—an individual—we almost never have a complete concept of any individual thing, as that would involve combining countless properties. But we don’t need that to use things for their intended purposes. If it's an artifact, we use it for the purpose it was made, or if it's a natural thing—say, a plant we want to put in our garden—we might be mostly interested in its flower or foliage. We form a concept of that plant based on the major properties we care about. So, our concept of individuals is limited, and we all know that.

But when it comes to properties of a class of things, like plants, they can be defined. We can name the properties that a thing has to have to be a plant and make a definition that applies to all plants but only plants. That’s what a definition is. So, while our concept of a class of things can be complete if we define the class, we have many ideas where that’s not possible.

For example, take the color yellow. If I specify a particular shade of yellow, along with its intensity and saturation, then I have properties that can be combined into a concept. I now have a concept of that shade of yellow. But I also have an idea of yellow that covers every shade, intensity, and saturation, and I just use the term "yellow." Often, we don’t need to know the precise intensity or exact shade. For example, if you went through an intersection and the traffic light was yellow, you'd say, "It was yellow, Your Honor." That’s an idea rather than a concept. The court doesn’t need to know the specific shade or intensity of yellow—an artist might need to know those details to get it right, but the court just needs to know that the light wasn’t red.

The same goes for red. The court doesn’t need to know the exact shade, intensity, or saturation to make a judgment about whether you went through the intersection legally or illegally.

I hope this clears things up. Some of these terms may not be part of everyday English, but I’m sure you can handle them. You can look them up in a regular dictionary or even a philosophical dictionary—these are easily accessible on your phone or computer.

So, now we'll move ahead with our evaluation of Kant’s "floor plan of the mind." Remember that Locke had already used the analogy that the mind is like a box or a chamber with slits, and through those slits, sensations come. The mind itself, Locke said, is a blank slate, and sensations write on that blank slate, giving us something to think about—something we can know as they enter the otherwise empty room. Kant's hypothesis, however, is different. He argues that the room isn't empty. Instead, the mind makes very specific contributions to the raw colors, sounds, touches, smells, and other sensations.

Kant believes the mind contributes something, and he calls these contributions "forms of sensory intuition." That’s his fancy term for perceptions. The mind also has categories of understanding. For Kant, merely perceiving something isn’t enough to understand it. You need to think about it in terms of concepts. You can apply mathematics, logic, and reasoning to the perception to understand it. He says that the characteristics we perceive include quantity, quality, relation, and modality. Under relation, for example, is cause and effect, which helps us understand the laws that govern nature and ourselves.

However, there seem to be some significant flaws in Kant’s theory, which I started discussing but didn’t finish. One point I made was that, according to Kant, what comes to the mind must be chaotic because it lacks spatial and temporal order. It also lacks quantity, quality, relations, and modalities. If you take all those elements away, what's left is chaotic. He refers to this as chaotic sensory input—a mass or mess that enters the mind through the slot.

But my point was: if it's truly chaotic, you can’t even call it sensory, because sensory properties are understood by contrasting them with non-sensory properties. For example, sensory properties like colors, sounds, tastes, touches, and smells aren’t physical properties. Physical properties are things like weight, mass, density, salinity, and so on, and they are related to each other by physical laws. Sensory properties, on the other hand, are related by sensory laws. For example, nothing can be both blue and red all over at the same time for the same person.

Occasionally, some people have objected to that example and said to me, "That's just the law of non-contradiction," which says that nothing can both be and not be in the same sense at the same time. Excuse me, but it's not the same thing. That would require red and blue to be defined, and colors are notoriously indefinable.

So, we don't know this by the definition of terms—it’s not just logical. It’s a law that governs our sensory perception. We experience sensory qualities like colors, sounds, tastes, touches, and smells, but we also experience spatial, temporal, and mathematical qualities, among others. I made a long list of these not too long ago, consulting various sources, and you can see that many thinkers, both philosophers and scientists, have distinguished between these same kinds of properties and laws and have worked with them.

I didn't present any argument that my list is the definitive one and that all other lists are wrong. It seems to me that the criticisms I'm making apply to Kant and any other thinker, regardless of what list they come up with. As I mentioned before, in case you missed it, what we have in Kant’s floor plan is the claim that what enters the mind is chaotic, yet sensory. But for something to be sensory, it must have some form of organization. For instance, red and blue can’t be perceived on the same object, all over, at the same time, by the same person—that’s a form of order. So, it’s not really chaotic. Either it's chaotic and not sensory, or it's sensory and not chaotic.

Now, let’s move to cause and effect because that’s Kant's main point here. He believes that by this, he saves science—specifically physics. He’s the hero, riding in on a white horse, ready to save Newton’s physics from Hume, who showed us that no two things are causally connected, just observed in regular succession. We observe B following A again and again, and the next time we see A, we expect B. We call this expectation the law. But if that’s all there is to science, it would be pretty miserable, right? Science believes in real causes and effects. Kant says, "I've saved that." He claims that relations are a category of the logical understanding, and causality is one of the ways our sense perceptions are organized.

Now, let me interrupt for a moment to explain this further. Kant is giving us an account where the mind imposes cause, effect, and relations on our perceptions. That’s his claim—it’s part of his theory. He wanted a transcendental critique of all experiences, asking, “What conditions are required for us to have an experience?” Now, he offers a theory in answer to that question. The Christian philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd criticizes him sharply here. Dooyeweerd says Kant gave us a transcendental critique of the conditions required for experience and then blindly offered a theory. Why didn’t Kant ask for the transcendental conditions for making theories? That would be the next step.

What do we need for experience? Space, time, logic, mathematics—sure. We need to distinguish all kinds of properties and laws and look for the law order among them. That’s commendable, but that’s not what Kant did. Instead, he immediately offered a theory as though there could be no problems in making theories. But that’s not true. Dooyeweerd goes on to give a transcendental critique of theory-making and shows what theories can and can't do, and then constructs a Christian ontology.

But let’s return to Kant. His claim is that cause and effect relations are imposed upon our perceptions by our minds. When he explains this, he says that what is guaranteed by the mind is sequence. That is, we see B follow A repeatedly, and we call that causality. But you can call it causality if you want to—it's not really causality.

Here’s why: this doesn't save science at all. It saves the appearances in our perceptions—it saves the fact that B follows A. But causality is more than one thing following another. Causality means B follows A because A produces B. And Kant hasn't saved that idea at all. Percepts don’t produce anything.

In Kant's account, what produces the fact that B follows A is the mind itself. So, what Kant has given us is an account of causation that isn’t really an account of causation.

Think of it this way: in a cartoon, one character hits another on the head with a mallet, and a lump appears on the second character’s head. Every time you run the cartoon, the mallet will hit the character, and the lump will appear. Why? Because that’s how the artist drew it. But the mallet you see on screen isn’t producing the lump on the character’s head—the artist made it happen in the animation.

The artist did—and that's the kind of causation Kant gives us. The mind imposes regularity on things so that we see these sequences. And that’s what he calls causality. But sorry, Charlie, that’s not causality, because it’s not the percept that produces the next percept. There is no real causation in that sense, and that's the sense used by all the sciences.

In science, one thing under the right circumstances, given certain laws, produces the next thing. We can predict the next event because the first one causes the second. It’s not just that the second pops out of nowhere because our minds impose it on what we're perceiving.

So, I find this to be an utter and complete failure in this part of his "floor plan" for the mind. Kant does not save causality or rescue Newton from Hume.

Now, when it comes to the ideas of reason, I do find Kant's distinction between a concept and an idea to be helpful. For example, we only have a limiting idea of God. God is the self-existent reality that generates everything else. God is unconditionally non-dependent, and everything besides God has been produced, caused, or brought into existence by God.

But when it comes to God's being, we only have the idea of a self-existent being that produces everything else. We don’t have a detailed list of properties from that belief alone. We wouldn’t even know that God is all-powerful, just that He has enough power to produce the universe—whatever that requires, and it may not necessarily be infinite power.

We learn more about God through revelation. God tells us about His goodness, justice, mercy, and love, and those are all properties of His relationship with us. This distinction is recognized by theologians like Calvin, who said that every perfection ascribed to God in Scripture is found in creation, and thus reflects not God per se but how God relates to us.

So, God creates these relationships—relationships that are loving, merciful, just, forgiving, and so on. That’s why, when we summarize them, we come up with descriptions like “He is all-good, all-just, all-powerful, all-knowing.” These are summaries of the ideas set forth in Scripture, given to us by God’s revelation. Without God’s creation of these relations with us, we wouldn’t know anything more about the self-existent reality that everything depends on.

In the Eastern Church tradition, these relations are called God’s “energies”—His works, His efforts toward us and our salvation. God’s desire to rescue the human race from sin and death couldn’t be better news, and all of these things are known to us because God created those relationships with us. They’re truly real about Him, and He reveals them to us.

So, these relations aren’t anthropomorphisms—it's not that we imagine God to be like humans and come up with these ideas. Rather, God anthropomorphized Himself first and then revealed these things to us, creating us with the ability to have minds capable of knowing and at least occasionally acting mercifully and with goodness. We share these qualities, but in a small, non-infinite way.

I think that’s a significant contribution—the distinction between an idea and a concept. But for Kant, all ideas are to be treated as if they were true. He says we can’t know for sure if there is an unconditionally existing being that has brought everything into existence. And in Kant’s own theory—look at his "floor plan"—who is the lawgiver to creation? It’s not God—it’s the human mind.

It’s humans that impose space and time, quantity, quality, relation, and modality. We create these forces upon our perceptions, and thus the laws of nature, mathematics, and logic are imposed by us. We, ourselves, become the sources of creation and lawgivers to creation. We live with these ideas only as if they were true. That’s Kant’s recommendation: live as if there is a totality of reality, as if there is God and a self, and as if the self is free.

We can’t prove any of those things, Kant says, because proving is something reserved for our perceptions, the realm of science. Kant argues that all philosophical mistakes come from trying to apply mathematics or logic to ideas of reason—ideas that aren’t capable of being conceived of in that way. They’re beyond proof or disproof, so we must live as thoughthey are true.

And why should we do that? Kant says it has great heuristic value—it’s practically useful. It allows us to think about our lives as a coherent whole if we believe that God is watching and cares about us. It also allows us to think that we have free will in our choices and reasoning.

Many people in Kant’s time, and even more today, consider themselves materialists. They claim that everything is determined by physical properties and physical laws, which means freedom is an illusion. They argue that the way we believe what we believe was determined by the Big Bang, and every atom since then has bumped into another, forming stars, galaxies, planets, and eventually life that evolved into

What they're assuming is that the will is in the iron grip of physical causality, but somehow, their reasoning that led them to that conclusion is free, not forced on them. Sorry, Charles, I won't let you get away with that either.

Either the whole human being is determined, or the whole human being is free. Now, our bodies are not free; they're subject to laws, but what we choose to do is free under those laws. I'm not free to become a triangle by clapping my hands together. Lots of things are impossible for me, but I can choose among all the things that are possible, and there are many possibilities.

What I'm saying is, don't let anybody get away with saying that we have no freedom of the will, and for these reasons—no, those aren't the reasons. If there is no freedom for human beings, then those reasons aren't the reasons you believe that conclusion. You believe them for whatever you think determines the will. It determines the intellect, too. There aren't separate faculties or powers; they all stem from the self of a human being. That's our view of a human being—I mean, a Christian one.

It's hard to deny that the self is a unity. Some unity has to exist somewhere because all the experiences and operations, if this theory is correct, have to be done by one and the same self. It has to be the same self that has all these experiences because each set of experiences is unique to each self. According to Kant, of course, one of the things we can't know is whether there are other selves. I pointed that out too. If we're locked inside our own minds and all we know is what happens to take place inside them, and if we are actually the contributors of all the elements that make experience possible, then for all we know, we’re the only thing in the universe, see, because the self is just an idea of reason.

He tries to claim there's a real self behind all this, but that violates his own principle about what ideas of reason are. They're ideas of reason. They have great practical value in organizing our lives, but we can't know them to be true. As I said a little while ago, why can't we know that we have a self? We're intuitively aware of ourselves in these operations that are conscious—singling out something to pay attention to, abstracting properties from it, forming concepts, and forming ideas. Something's got to do that. Something does it. We're aware that we are the same person we were when we were six or twenty. In my case, more than that. We won’t go into that.

But he says it's only an idea of reason, then later treats it as a real thing. So why wouldn't a Christian then be justified in saying, "Well, God may be an idea of reason, but we think there's grounds to believe this one. This idea corresponds to reality, too."

And Kant has an answer to that. His answer is that all the arguments that try to prove God's existence fail. He distinguishes three types of them.

First of all, there's the proof—the rationalist proof—that's called in the history of philosophy by a very funny name. It's called the ontological proof of the existence of God, and it was created by St. Anselm, who was Archbishop of Canterbury in the early 1100s.

His proof goes like this: one, God is, by definition, the being with all and only perfections. Now, perfection means the highest possible degree of a certain property. So, the highest possible goodness is a perfection, as are the highest possible justice, mercy, and love. The highest possible power is also a perfection, as is the highest possible knowledge.

So God has all the perfections, whatever they are. It's not just all the ones we can think of. We can think of many of them, but maybe there's an infinite number. It doesn't matter. God has them all, whatever the list is, and He has only them. Only those things are true of being. In fact, in Anselm's view, God doesn't really, strictly speaking, have these perfections. He isthem.

God's being is the unity of all perfections.

Alright? That's what it means to be God. That's how he starts. Then premise two:

If I deny God's existence, I assert something that is self-contradictory, a self-contradictory claim.

Why is that?

Well, because I'm saying that the being with all the perfections doesn't have perfect existence. Now, to say that the being with all perfections doesn't have perfect existence is to say the being with all perfections lacks a perfection. I have to contradict myself to deny that God is real.

Therefore, God is real. God has perfect existence. Anselm is trying to show that to deny the existence of God, you have to contradict yourself. If something is self-contradictory, it has to be false.

So, the denial of God has to be false. It follows that God exists. What's true is the denial of the denial that God exists.

And Kant's reply to that, I think, is quite legitimate. Kant says there's no contradiction if I deny both God and what I’ll call perfect existence. Kant says, "I'm not prepared to admit that there is a being with all and only perfections. You haven't given me a reason for that." So, it is self-contradictory if I admit to this defined being having all the perfections and then deny its self-existence, which is perfect existence, but I deny both God and perfect existence, and then there's no contradiction.

Take a parallel case—the belief that all crows are black. If I define crows as black and admit that this definition corresponds to something, and then deny that black is true of crows, I contradict myself. But if I reject both the definition and the blackness, there's no contradiction at all. I deny both. I deny that there's a being with all perfections and that one of them is perfect existence. Then there's no contradiction at all.

Kant also raised objections in another way. Let's put it this way: he raised the objection that existence is a property of things. What he means here is we can describe something by listing properties that it has. For example, the properties of my briefcase: my briefcase has certain dimensions, it holds so much, it's black, it has brass fittings for locks, and things like that.

But we never say "and it exists," because existence is just whether there's a briefcase. It's not one property among many. In other words, it could still be a briefcase if we changed its color, size, or made the fittings out of something else. We could replace all the properties of the briefcase and still have a briefcase. But if we take away its existence, we can't replace it with something else and still have a briefcase. It's just the whole object.

So whether it exists isn't one property of a thing alongside the other properties that could or could not be true of it.

There's another way to put it as well. This point has been debated a lot in philosophy. One of the ways is to say that a real property has a complement, meaning its opposite is also true for any real property.

A real property has its denial. So, if I say something is red, then it can also be non-red. There are things that are non-red. If I say it's square, there are things that are not square. You get the idea—the denial of it is also a real property.

Now, if that's true, and that's one of the conditions for a property—that its opposite is also a real property or could be in the world—then existence isn't a property. Because the denial of existence is non-existence, or nothingness, and nothing can have the property of non-being. If it doesn't exist, there's no thing there. It doesn't have a denial that can have real instances in the world.

You can't say "there exists a thing X that has the property of not existing." That's self-contradictory, and it makes it look as though existence is not a property.

Now, whether or not you think that argument's the final word on this subject, that's the position I would take about this. I agree with Kant that existence isn't a property, and that means, again, it's not something that you can say has a perfect degree, as opposed to non-existence and so on. It's just whether there is such a thing. So, trying to prove the existence of God isn't a matter of finding that He has the property of perfect existence, because that's the whole thing, not just whether something is an instance of this one property. So, Kant dismisses this proof as a failure. He says, "No, the ontological proof doesn't work."

Of course, that's not the only kind of proof that's been tried. There's also a kind called the cosmological proof. And the person most famous for these is the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, and he gave five such proofs.

Before I give you Kant's criticism and tell you that I agree with it, it's only fair to Thomas to say that he didn't give these as proofs to be presented to non-believers to convince them that God exists. He wrote them for people who already believe in God, to strengthen their faith, not to produce faith in them.

Maybe they can do that. I don't find them convincing, but maybe others will.

All five of these proofs end up claiming that if something—each proof gives a different example of a something—exists contingently (meaning it depends on certain conditions), then something else has to exist necessarily.

I exist contingently. Therefore, God—or something—exists necessarily, where necessarily means it's required by logic. Then Thomas adds to each of these five proofs, "Et hoc dicimus Deum," meaning, "And this we call God."

Now, before we even evaluate this argument, let me point out something that Kant points out, and I agree with: even if you show that something exists necessarily, which means the laws of logic require it to exist, that doesn't show you any other property true of this supposed amazing thing. It doesn't show you that it's a person or conscious. It doesn't show you that it has love for you. That's the big one, right? If God didn't care about human beings at all, why should we care whether God exists?

Scripture says something like that: "We love Him because He first loved us." By not loving Him and being grateful for all He does, there's something to lose.

Kant points out that doesn't mean that it has any other property, particularly. So, it's not God. You can say it's God, but you haven't shown that. You've shown that something exists necessarily, and we say that the necessarily existing being is God, but you haven't proven that.

There's something else that troubles me about this, and I've mentioned it before, and I know most philosophers disagree with it. But, along with the Eastern Orthodox and many Reformed thinkers (where Reformed means Calvinists), many have held that God created the laws of logic and math, the laws of proof, along with everything else. Those are not eternal and uncreated; they are created too.

Colossians 1 says God has created everything, visible or invisible—that includes the laws of logic and mathematics. At face value, it does. So, in that case, whatever can be proven would not be God.

Why do we have laws of logic and mathematics? Because God built them into the world of His creation. But God created them. Everything but God depends on God.

Now, of course, those who think of God as the unity of all perfections think that includes the laws of logic and mathematics. But that seems at least a weird thing to say. Why are those perfections? If you're talking about geometry, you could say the perfect triangle and circle and square are part of God's being, but isn't that at least a little strange? Those don't seem to be the same sorts of things as perfect justice, perfect love, perfect power, and perfect knowledge—oh, and all of logic and mathematics. Oops.

But it's an attempt just to affirm that the law of non-contradiction and the laws of math are validly applied to things we experience. Consensus says they are—they're applied to things we experience, but not to God. God is an idea of reason, and you can't apply those laws to Him. I'm saying Kant is actually right about that, but he's giving the wrong reasons. His reasons are that categories of understanding don't apply to ideas of reason, and why not? He just says so. He doesn't give any proof of that. He tries to show that if you do apply them, they don't work, and I'll give him that.

He tries to say that if you try to apply them to the forms of sensory intuition, you can construct a proof that space is infinite—and it's not. You can construct a proof that time is infinite—and it's not. See, it's not working. You can't apply the proofs.

You can't use the categories of understanding either to the forms of sensory intuition or to the ideas of reason. You can't do both. And he tries this, thinking that by showing the traditional proofs of God's existence don't work, he's shown that too about God.

But I think if the laws of logic and math must have some account of their origin in a philosophy, the only alternative is to declare them self-existent too. And that's what these other theologians do. They make that part of the being of God, and therefore it's eternal and uncreated.

Because, isn't everything true of God uncreated and eternal? It has to be a perfection, doesn't it? And the answer to that is no.

No, not everything true of God is an uncreated perfection. There are things true of God that are not uncreated perfections, such as His relationship to you and me. That’s not a perfection. But God tells us that He loves us, each one of us, and He wants to see us rescued from sin and death. That’s not a perfection.

It’s not the highest possible degree of some positive property that makes a thing better to have than to lack. God doesn’t benefit by being my Redeemer.

Look, when God created the world, He simultaneously created the relationship of being the Creator of the world, and He really stands in that relationship. That’s not a perfection, either.

It’s not true that God has only perfections true of Him. If I pray to God, God really has the property of being prayed to by me, and that’s not a perfection.

So, God has billions of properties true of Him that are not perfections.

And that’s where I’m going to end the discussion of this type of proof. It doesn’t work either. In my opinion, it may do for some people what Thomas hoped it would do—strengthen their faith, give them some idea of good reasons to continue believing in God. I don’t think he’s come up with good ones. I don’t think the argument works. And I think what he should have told people is that this doesn’t need to be proven. But he didn’t say that.

Well, what other kind of proof is there? Traditionally, there has been another kind, and this type of proof is a very old idea. It was given its best form just a couple of years before Kant died. He died in 1804, and this proof was published by a man named Paley, who published it in 1802.

It’s called the Watch and the Watchmaker.

So, here’s what Paley says: If you were walking in a wilderness somewhere, maybe hiking with a group on safari, and you had never heard of or seen a watch, and you stumbled upon one, if you picked it up and examined it, what would you think?

Would you think that this was just one more part of the natural landscape? Would you think that perhaps lightning had come down and struck that rock over there, melted some metal, and the little rivulets of molten metal just happened to congeal into a watch? Is that the conclusion you’d come to? Or does it look to you as though this thing’s been intelligently designed?

You open it up, and you see how all the parts fit together. Wouldn’t that convince you that the watch had an intelligent designer?

Then look around the world. It’s a lot more complicated than a watch.

Look at the stars and the galaxies, how things work. Look at chemistry, how things fit together, how the human body is knit together so that it does what it does and thinks intelligently.

There’s a lot more evidence of design in the world than in a watch. If you’d make that conclusion about a watch, surely you’d make it about the world.