Page "Teleological argument" Paragraph 26

Himma considers Schlesinger ’ s argument to be subject to the same vulnerabilities he noted in other versions of the design argument: While Schlesinger is undoubtedly correct in thinking that we are justified in suspecting design in the case winning three consecutive lotteries, it is because — and only because — we know two related empirical facts about such events.

First, we already know that there exist intelligent agents who have the right motivations and causal abilities to deliberately bring about such events.

Second, we know from past experience with such events that they are usually explained by the deliberate agency of one or more of these agents.

Without at least one of these two pieces of information, we are not obviously justified in seeing design in such cases … he problem for the fine-tuning argument is that we lack both of the pieces that are needed to justify an inference of design.

First, the very point of the argument is to establish the fact that there exists an intelligent agency that has the right causal abilities and motivations to bring the existence of a universe capable of sustaining life.

Second, and more obviously, we do not have any past experience with the genesis of worlds and are hence not in a position to know whether the existence of fine-tuned universes are usually explained by the deliberate agency of some intelligent agency.

Because we lack this essential background information, we are not justified in inferring that there exists an intelligent Deity who deliberately created a universe capable of sustaining life.