Examining arguments from design › What the house comparison can establish

In Part II Philo grants that seeing a house gives us strong grounds for inferring a builder. We have experience connecting that kind of effect with that kind of cause. His objection is that the universe does not resemble a house closely enough to justify transferring the same confidence to its origin.

The issue is not that reasoning about something unobserved is automatically illegitimate. Inferring a builder is itself reasoning about a cause that may be absent from view. The issue is the experience supporting the inference. We know something about housebuilding. We lack a comparable history of observing worlds produced by divine minds.

Philo also questions the movement from parts to a whole. Within the world, human thought is one activity among others. Why should that activity explain the origin of the entire system? Familiarity with thinking makes it an intelligible candidate to us, but familiarity alone does not establish its explanatory priority over every other natural process.

Cleanthes can answer that the inference needs a relevant resemblance rather than a sample of created universes. A person might recognize meaningful speech or an organized artifact without having observed that exact kind of thing being made. The force of this answer depends on how the claimed signs of intelligence can be identified independently of the theological conclusion. The argument cannot simply define natural order as designed and then infer a designer from it.

This is a dispute about the strength and reach of evidence. Showing that an inference is not demonstratively certain leaves open whether it is probable. Conversely, showing that it has some plausibility leaves open whether it can support the much richer religious conclusion Cleanthes wants.