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    The Nyāya argument from design fails to establish that th... — Carmelics
    Home/Natural Theology
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    The Nyāya argument from design fails to establish that the world requires a single intelligent creator.

    Natural Theology
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    2 reasons for
    1 reason against

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.The Nyāya argument requires a single omniscient coordinating intelligence because multiple partial designers would each require coordination by a further designer, generating a regress.
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    • 2.Collective agency (as in ant-hills) presupposes instinctual programs or prior causal structures that themselves demand explanation by a unified intelligent source.
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    • 3.Udayana's Nyāyakusumāñjali explicitly addresses distributed causation by arguing that unity of design-plan is a necessary condition for coherent causal integration of parts into wholes.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.The Mīmāṃsaka and Buddhist critics who invoke collective agency cannot account for the lawlike regularity of adṛṣṭa (unseen potentials) without a single superintending intelligence to organize their activation.
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    • 2.Mere aggregation of partial agents produces only additive complexity, not the hierarchically integrated teleological order that Nyāya identifies as the mark of intelligent design.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.An ant-hill is a complex and intricate construction made of clay, yet it is produced by collective agency rather than a single intelligent agent.
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    • 2.If complex structures made of material ingredients can arise from collective agency, then the world could similarly be the product of collective agency.
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    • 3.There is no principled reason to prefer the hypothesis of a single creator over collective agency as the explanation for the world's complexity.
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    Natural Theology

    Related

    An ant-hill is a complex and intricate construction made of clay, yet it is prod...Collective agency (as in ant-hills) presupposes instinctual programs or prior ca...If complex structures made of material ingredients can arise from collective age...Mere aggregation of partial agents produces only additive complexity, not the hi...
    +4 moreShow less
    The Mīmāṃsaka and Buddhist critics who invoke collective agency cannot account f...The Nyāya argument requires a single omniscient coordinating intelligence becaus...There is no principled reason to prefer the hypothesis of a single creator over ...Udayana's Nyāyakusumāñjali explicitly addresses distributed causation by arguing...

    Similar

    The design argument is based on an analogy between the world and human...81%The design argument falls well short of what it claims to prove78%The universe must be the product of an intelligent designer78%The universe must have been designed by an intelligent creator77%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: early-modern-india
    View source passageHide passage
    (2) The argument takes the picture of causation used in the “potter-pot” example and extends it to cover all natural phenomena. God’s function is to make things out of the given and uncreated ingredients (the atoms, cf. the clay), which are the products’ material cause. Matilal accordingly describes the Nyāya as having a “potter model” of God, in contrast with a “spider model”, in which God spins the world out of his own essence, or a “magician” model, in which the world is an illusion conjured
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (2 for, 1 against)
    Edits
    1 edit