"The same rejoinder is easily applicable to the argument from beauty, which
indeed is only a particular aspect of the argument from utility. It is
certainly improbable that a random daubing of colors on a canvas will
produce a tolerable painting, even should the experiment be continued for
thousands of years. Our conception of beauty being given, it is utterly
improbable that chance should select, out of the infinity of combinations
which form and color may afford, the precise combination which that
conception will approve. But the universe is not posterior to our sense of
beauty, but antecedent to it: our sense of beauty grows out of what we see;
and hence the conformance of our world to our aesthetical conceptions is
evidence, not of the world's origin, but of our own."
We are accustomed to hear design doubted on account of certain failures of
provision, waste of resources, or functionless condition of organs; but it
is refreshingly new to have the very harmony itself of man with his
surroundings, and the completeness of provision for his wants and desires,
brought up as a refutation of the validity of the argument for design. It
is hard, indeed, if man must be out of harmony with Nature in order to
judge anything respecting it, or his relations with it; if he must have
experience of chaos before he can predicate anything of order.
But is it true that man has all that he conceives of, or thinks would be
useful, and has no "negative evidence of design afforded by the absence of
a faculty" to set against the positive evidence afforded by its presence?
He notes that he lacks the faculty of flight, sometimes wants it, and in
dreams imagines that he has it, yet as thoroughly believes that he was
designed not to have it as that he was designed to have the faculties and
organs which he possesses. He notes that some animals lack sight, and so,
with this negative side of the testimony to the value of vision, he is "apt
to infer creative wisdom" both in what he enjoys and in what the lower
animal neither needs nor wants. That man does not miss that which he has no
conception of, and is by this limitation disqualified from judging rightly
of what he can conceive and know, is what the Westminster Reviewer comes
to, as follows:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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