In the recent Mind & Language workshop on cognitive science of religion, Frank Keil presented an intriguing paper entitled "Order, Order Everywhere and Not an Agent to Think: The Cognitive Compulsion to Make the Argument from Design." Keil does not believe the argument from design is inevitable – I've argued elsewhere that while teleological reasoning and creationism is common, arguing for the existence of God on the basis of perceived design is rare; it typically only happens when there are plausible non-theistic worldviews available.
Rather, Keil argues that from a very early age on, humans can recognize order, and that they prefer agents as causes for order. Taken together, this forms the cognitive basis for making the argument from design (AFD). (For similar proposals, see here and here). He proposes two very intriguing puzzles, and I'm wondering what NewApps readers think:
- Some forms of orderliness give us a sense of design, others do not. What kinds of order give rise to an inference to design, or a designer?
- Babies already seem to recognize ordered states from disordered states. How do they do it? What is it they recognize?
1. Which kinds of order give rise to a design inference? It's remarkable that complex orderliness does not automatically lead to a design inference. Andy Goldsworthy typically makes minimal alterations within the landscape (such as this row of pinned dandelions), but the sense it's designed is almost inescapable.
By contrast, snowflakes and rainbows don't automatically give the design inference. There seems at least some debate about whether snowflakes say anything about God's existence. Keil cites a Yahoo answers thread where the OP's question "Are snowflakes proof that God exists?", is answered by most respondents with "no". For example, "I think crystal formation and air resistance are really cool. No proof of God or gods here. Remember this maxim: God created gravity so He wouldn't have to hold things together manually.", "It is not a coincidence that snow flakes form the way they do. It is because of the molecular structure of H2O. H2O molecules are not linear, the H atoms are on either side of the O atom but not directly opposite.He angle is such that when liquid water freezes [etc] I hope this helps you understand a little more about science and I hope this does not jeopardize your faith."
More generally, is there something about biological complexity (as Keil speculates, most AFDs seem to draw primarily on biological complexity, although historically, orderly planetary orbits were also admired)? Or is it down to background information? This seems to me the more likely reason why snowflakes don't prompt the design inference. We know – or have some vague idea – about how snowflakes come about, through naturalistic processes. There's no need to invoke design. Likewise, we know the phenomenon of land art so that we would recognize a Goldsworthy alteration of the landscape, even if we didn't know it was a Goldsworthy. So there, the design inference seems warranted. What about things we don't have background information on, such as the emergence of the forces and constants that shaped our universe? Again, I think there's an important role of background beliefs, this time in the form of assumptions about whether a naturalistic or theistic cause would be likely.
2. How do babies recognize order? There are several looking experiments indicating that babies of 9 to 12 months expect ordered collections of items to be caused by a human agent (a hand), not by a claw. Apparently, even though the claw is operated by a hand (out of sight from the infant), they don't see it as animate. Infants look longer when ordered states are brought about by claws than by hands. Remarkably, the kinds of order that infants recognize is very diverse: recurring patterns of beads, for instance, as in the illustrated experiment by Xu & Ma - illustrated below - or neatly ordered blocks as in Newman, Keil, Kuhlmeier & Wynn, or items put into a one-to-one correspondence, as in some of Keil's yet to be published work. Keil seems to presuppose that infants have a concept of ORDER, and wonders how they compute it. What is it that infants recognize when they see ordered states?
I do not think babies have a higher-order concept of ORDER. It has been vexingly difficult for intelligent design creationists to make sense of the concept of ordered complexity without making, at some point, an analogy with the sorts of things humans do. So my sense is that infants might use experience of the sort of ordering behavior that their parents and older kids engage in, e.g., stacking and ranging items. At 9 to 12 months of age, they will have had some experience on the sorts of states human agents intentionally bring about (and infants can distinguish intentional actions from other kinds of actions). It is still a remarkable feat that infants do spot the difference between regular sequences of beads (as shown in the experiment above) and random sequences, among other things.
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