Video Transcript: Lesson 12

We're back, and I hope you've given a real, long, hard and deep thought to  reviewing these proofs that we've seen in your mind, seeing what the issues are  with them, and understanding that these were attempts by people who believed  in and loved God to try to show to others who didn't that God really exists. They  didn't succeed, but they were very well intentioned and pretty brilliantly thought  out, clever, even if they had contained mistakes. Around the end of the 18th  century, the beginning of the 19th the idea of proving God shifted from this sort  of proof, where you get premise, premise, premise, Therefore the conclusion  has to follow that kind of thing. It shifted in the hands of a skillful writer named  William Paley, who said, Let's not try to prove God. Let's talk about belief in God  and ask whether belief in God is more probably true than believing God doesn't  exist. So the argument is going to be not premise, premise certainty, but for  these reasons, more probability lies with the existence of God than the  nonexistence and it's there. It's not an attempt to show that has to be true, but  it's more likely the truth. So it's weaker in many ways. It attempts less, but a lot  of people still think it succeeds. Here's the way Paley's argument goes. It goes  not with premises, but with a story. Suppose he said that you were out in the  wilds, hiking, where there were was uninhabited by humans, and you had never  seen a watch, and suddenly you stumbled across a watch. Now he would mean  a pocket watch. There were no wristwatches in 1800 you pick it up and you  examine it. You see how all the the interior wheels and balance spring are  arranged so as to turn the hands on the face around once and every 12 hours  and so on. You look at all that. What would you conclude about the watch?  Would you conclude that it was a natural object that, say, a bolt of lightning  struck these rocks, and there was metal ore in the rocks, and the ore melted and ran down and just happened to congeal into a watch? Is that what you'd think, or would you think, oh, somebody designed this very, very cleverly assembled all  the pieces and did so so that the goal of having a way to tell the time is is  fulfilled by this mechanism. He thinks every reasonable person would say, No,  no, I'd think it was designed this area is supposed to be uninhabited, but it's not.  There have been people here before, at least, at least one of them lost his  watch. That's what Paley says we ought to do when we look at the universe. He  says, If you think the watch just because of those balance springs and the  wheels and the other, the winding stem and all that the way they're put together,  and achieve a goal, achieve a purpose that that shows it was designed. How  much more does the universe look designed? Look at the whole of the universe. Look at the all the way life forms are arranged so that they they support one  another. Look at the design in the heavens. Look at the way the Earth itself is a  planet is just right for human habitation. Why would you think that those things  are just accidents? If you wouldn't think a watch was just an accident of nature,  the design is more apparent in the universe as a whole. That argument is still  held by a lot of people. They still argue that there are things about this world as 

we observe it that couldn't possibly have been accidents of nature and must  have been designed by intelligence. So this argument is still very controversial.  Let me review again. First, what the argument doesn't try to do. It doesn't try to  show God exists for certain. It doesn't try to show that God necessarily exists  whether it's certain or not. It yields only probability about our belief, not certainty  about the object of our belief, which is God. It draws a conclusion about one of  our beliefs rather than about God himself, and it implies nothing else about God  other than that God is intelligent, and that intelligence is displayed. In the design of the universe, it doesn't show that God's all good, all powerful, all wise, nothing of those, of the rest of the nature of God only there is some kind of supreme  intelligence that designed the universe as we know it, and which was powerful  enough to put its design into effect in the universe. That doesn't mean it has  would be all powerful. Wouldn't have to be omnipotent. Have to be very  powerful. However, to do this for the entire universe, it doesn't show that that  designer cares about humans the present day, defenders of this argument admit all that. Yes, it tries to do less. Yes, it's about our belief rather than the designer  itself. But still, it leads us to say that any reasonable person should conclude  that we're not the only intelligent beings in the universe, and that some being or  other not only is vastly more intelligent, but vastly more powerful and has put his design into effect in the universe. So having attempted much less, does it at  least succeed in the things that it attempts? That's our question. Take Paley's  story, think about that, and then compare that to the entire universe. Would you  draw the same conclusion when you look at the universe? And of course, the  answer is that a lot of people look at the universe and don't draw that conclusion at all. They would probably draw it about a watch. But as David Hume said  about this argument, but we all know that watches are designed to begin with.  So if you compare the universe to a watch, you've already begged the question,  of course, the watch was designed. Paley says, imagine you had never seen  one, but we all have seen them, and we all know where they come from. So  Hume says, Why don't you give a different example, and say, suppose you  stumbled on a carrot and you had never seen one before, and you pulled it up  and examined it, all its parts worked together to produce this vegetable. And  would you then say, look at the universe as a whole. It shows even more design. Does the carrot look designed? And the answer he's trying to urge is, if you  already believe in God, it'll look designed, of course, it'll look as though God put  it here, because that's what believing God means. God the Creator God who  brought everything into existence other than himself. But then to compare it to  something that we know is designed begs the question, compare it to something it isn't like a carrot or a clam, and the argument seems to fall apart. There's  another problem with the argument, and that is that when we're asked to look at  the design in the watch, and then look for that same sort of design in the  universe. We are thinking about human intelligence. We're thinking about what 

we would do, how we would design things if we were going to do it. So it's  human intelligence we're talking about here. We have no reason to think that  God's intelligence, if it's proper to speak that way of God at all, of God at all  would be exactly like ours. Would God do it the same way we would? And there  are a number of places in Scripture that seem to suggest strongly that we can't  make that inference. We can't assume that God would do things as we would  have. My ways are not your ways, says the Lord, nor my thoughts, your  thoughts. High as the heavens are above the earth, so are My ways above your  ways, and my thoughts above your thoughts. That's one place, but there are  others, and that's a real problem, because in the Proverbs in the 16th chapter of  Proverbs, there's this comment, we throw the dice, but God determines how  they turn out. That means God works in things that look chaotic and random and to have happened by chance. From our point of view, it's random, it's chance.  That's the point of the gamble. But not from God's point of view, he knows how  that's going to turn out. It's going to turn out the way he intends. So that  encourages us to think of God as the author of and the creator of everything  about the universe, not just the things that look orderly and design, but the  things that don't look orderly and don't look designed, things that look chaotic,  from our point of view, are still under God's control. Have been created by God.  So that's another point that I think weakens the appeal of this argument. I don't  know if there's much point in going on and on with this about this particular  argument we've covered, the essentials of it, and I tried to suggest to you that it  isn't as scriptural an argument or consistent with Scripture as its advocates  would like to make out.