The problem with this view is that it destroys what made the Design Argument so persuasive in the first place: that the world is clearly the product of a good and wise designer. Therefore beneficial order is a remnant of how the world was supposed to be, but dysteleological order (like parasites and bone cancer) has been added in later. Religious believers who reject the implications of dysteleology need to show that the Designer God is not incompetent or wicked and there are several theodicies which try to do this.Ī common response from Christians is that the world was once a paradise where none of this dysteleology existed, but it is now a fallen world, thanks to the sin of Adam and Eve. This is known as the Doctrine of Divine Simplicity (DDS) or " aseity".Īs well as undermining one of the premises of the Design Argument, dysteleology links to the problem of evil & suffering. This is summed up in the expression that God is "ontologically simple"- he has a simple sort of existence because he only has one characteristic: "being God". You can't consider one of God's attributes separately from the others or imagine what God would be like without one of them, the way you can imagine a blue tomato. God is Omnipotence and Omniscience and Goodness. God doesn't just possess lovingness, God is Love. His essence (what he's really like) is identical with his characteristics. God isn't composed of different things or parts. Because the essence of tomatoes (what tomatoes have to be like) is separate from the characteristics of tomatoes, you can imagine a blue tomato or a square tomato. Tomatoes are red and round and they're fruits but you don't put them in fruit salads. You can break creatures and objects down into the characteristics they possess, which is why they are complex. For example, I possess the characteristic of "being a human" and tomatoes possess the characteristic of "being red" and "being round". As such, any assumptions you add to your theory introduce further possibilities for error, and if an assumption isn’t improving the accuracy of a theory, it just increases the probability the theory is wrong.What Aquinas means is that most creatures and objects possess characteristics. All things can be ascribed a probability of happening. You can think of it in terms of basic probability theory. Or as the US Navy KISS design principle states, “Keep it simple, stupid”. As medical students are sometimes told, “When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras”. Or if you are a doctor and a patient turns up complaining of a blocked nose, it is more likely they have a common cold than a rare immune-system disorder. If two computer programs do the same job, for example, the shorter one, in which less code can go wrong, is probably preferable. The principle can be applied in many fields of science and logic. Many other people before and after the friar, including Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton, have come up with similar rules, but it is generally attributed (via an alternative spelling of the name of the village in which he grew up) to Ockham because he used the principle with such razor-like logic to state, along with other things, that “God’s existence cannot be deduced by reason alone”. Occam’s razor is a principle often attributed to 14th –century friar William of Ockham that says that if you have two competing ideas to explain the same phenomenon, you should prefer the simpler one.
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