Ultimate Design

Abstract

AbstractHypothesis (iv) ‘uncaused universe’ has been refuted in Chap. 6. Moreover, it does not explain how it could be necessary that subjunctive facts (Lange) or physical entities have stable essences (Ellis) or dispositions (Mumford) that persist throughout time which enable them to behave in ways describable by mathematical laws. The Design hypothesis explains this. I reply to various arguments against the likelihood of Design, for example, Dawkins’ ‘who made God’ objection, Hume’s objection from ‘imperfections’, and Halvorsen’s objection that almost all physically possible universes are lifeless. I conclude that, while the alternatives to design are unlikely, there is no good reason to think that the Design hypothesis is unlikely. Since the list of hypotheses in Chap. 4 is logically exhaustive, the epistemic probabilities of those five categories must add up to 1. Even if one assigns to each alternative a probability of 0.1% (which is very generous given the arguments in previous chapters), that still leaves Design with a high probability of 99.6%. One can therefore argue for the Design hypothesis by exclusion without having to first assign a prior probability for Design, thus avoiding the objections by critics (e.g. Sober) on this point entirely.