The “Intelligent Design” argument was designed quite stupidly

By Pixel at August 3, 2005 at 7:17 pm. Filed in advocacy, history lesson, seriously now, thought experiment

So it turns out that the ‘function argument’ dates back to Aristotle.

Let’s give a quick overview of the function argument for those of you not lucky enough to be philosophy, history, or religious studies students:

A chair has a function: to sit.
A bad chair is that in which sitting is done poorly or not at all.
A cow has the function of being eaten.
A slave has the function of doing white people’s bidding.
Humans have the function of being rational..
A chair was created.
Humans must also have been created.

I purposefully ignored the rhetoric and the sense that the argument makes, so the true argument should be more intelligible.

Should be.

It isn’t.
It’s stupid. Aristotle thought that since humans are the only ones that are rational and that rationality controls everything else we do, then it was the be all and end all of our soul. Don’t ask me how that follows, Aristotle thought that the human body was the soul itself (not a house for the soul as most Cartesians would have it).

St. Thomas Aquinas butchered that argument (adding the creator sections) as a proof for God’s existence.

Hume debunked Aquinas’ argument by saying that the only thing his argument proves (if anything) is that there is a separate God of Chairs and God of Trees and God of Whistles and what-not. Making the jump to the Judeo-Christian OOO (Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnibenevolent) is ludicrous.

The argument was used to justify slavery, the oppression of women, and all sorts of other things throughout history. Now it’s being used to force courts to allow ‘Intelligent Design’ to be taught in public schools.

It’s a stupid line of reasoning (or lack thereof) and should not be tolerated in any civilized conversation.

First of all, it’s not an argument, it’s an analogy. And secondly, it’s a bad analogy.

In other words, in doing the function of an analogy, the Function Argument functions poorly.

| 3 Comments

---