How Can the Religious View Be Defended As a Way of Seeing the World?

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“How Can the Religious View Be Defended As a Way of Seeing the World?” 

The philosopher John Wisdom suggested that the divergence between religious believers and non-believers exists as a disagreement between different perspectives of seeing the world. For the believer, the world is seen as God’s creation, while the atheist sees the world as one independent of God. Thus for Wisdom the disagreement isn’t on whether the world exits or not, but simply rather a difference in a way of perceiving the world. Anthony Flew takes Wisdom’s analogy of the invisible gardener and claims that the religious believer isn’t making a genuine hypothesis of the world at all, and that their claims are actually meaningless, because there is no evidence whatsoever that would falsify them. Wittgenstein, for very different reasons, argues that religion is not a hypothesis because he believes that religious claims should not be interpreted as scientific claims. Scientists make hypotheses; believers however, do not. Although, some religious believers might be uncomfortable with this argument because they believe that when the make religious statements, what they are saying are meaningful statements that are genuinely about the world

Paley’s design argument also offers support to the claim that the religious view can be defended as a way of seeing the world. In Paley’s argument he imagines himself walking across a field and coming across a stone and a watch. He ponders the same question about both objects; “how did that object come to be here?” In the case of the stone for all Paley knows, it could have simply been lying there forever. However in the case of the watch, Paley found that answer unsatisfactory because there are many differences between a watch and a stone. A watch for example, has many moving parts that are arranged intricately in a specific order so that they work together to tell the time correctly. If any of the parts had been arranged in a different way, such motion would not have been produced, and the watch wouldn’t be able to display the time correctly.

From having determined how to decide whether something has been designed, through examining the watch, Paley turns his attention to the natural world. He finds all the indicators of design, observed in the watch, in the natural world. This leads him to the conclusion, that like the watch, nature must also have a designer, who also designed the universe. His argument is essentially as follows: A watch has many complex features, which work together for a specific purpose (to tell the time). Anything which exhibits these features must design. Therefore the watch was has been designed by a designer. The universe is like the watch in that it possesses the same features, except on a far greater scale. Therefore the universe, like the watch, has also been designed, except by a ‘wondrous universe maker’ – God. Hence, in Paley’s view you can see the world from a religious viewpoint because there are so many indicators in the natural world that indicate to a greater being, and through a religious perspective, this being is God.

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However, philosopher David Hume critiques arguments from analogy, writing thirty years before Paley. One of the main criticisms he makes is that we have no experience of world making. We can only recognize that certain sort of objects, such as machines, have intelligent designers because we’ve had some form or experience, either direct or indirect, of such objects being designed or manufactured. So it is only through observation of the way in which an object like a watch, for example, is produced in our world, that we understand that they require a designer. But if we never had any experience ...

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