The Design Argument Elliott Sober

Religion ) The Design Argument

The design argument is one of three main arguments for the existence of God; the others are the ontological argument and the cosmological argument. Unlike the ontological argument, the design argument and the cosmological argument are a posteriori. And whereas the cosmological argument could focus on any present event to get the ball rolling (arguing that it must trace back to a first cause, na...

Why explanatoriness is evidentially relevant

William Roche and Elliott Sober argue that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant. This conclusion is surprising since it conflicts with a plausible assumption—the fact that a hypothesis best explains a given set of data is evidence that the hypothesis is true. We argue that Roche and Sober?s screening-off argument fails to account for a key aspect of evidential strength: the weight of a bo...

Is Drift a Serious Alternative to Natural Selection as an Explanation of Complex Adaptive Traits?

Sex Ratio Theory, Ancient and Modern — An 18 Century Debate about Intelligent Design and the Development of Models in Evolutionary Biology

The design argument for the existence of God took a probabilistic turn in the 17 and 18 centuries. Earlier versions, such as Thomas Aquinas’ 5 way, usually embraced the premise that goaldirected systems (things that “act for an end” or have a function) must have been created by an intelligent designer. This idea – which we might express by the slogan “no design without a designer” – survived in...

Empiricism and Intelligent Design I: Three Empiricist Challenges

Due to the logical relations between theism and intelligent design (ID), there are two challenges to theism that also apply to ID. In the falsifiability challenge, it is charged that theism is compatible with every observation statement and thus asserts nothing. I argue that the contentious assumptions of this challenge can be avoided without loss of precision by charging theism (and thus ID) d...