The argument from design sucks. I’ll be the first to admit this, and it will probably be the last thing I shout as they haul me off to jail. The interesting thing about it, though, is the way it gives us an index of what a given culture considers “designed” – information which, for eras before the existence of tech journalism, is otherwise hard to get. The classic enlightenment examples, for instance, mostly feature clocks, presumably because clockwork struck people back then as a product of intelligence that couldn’t occur by chance. Nowadays, instead, the argument from design (or that we’re living in a simulation, but it amounts to the same thing) gets made from the apparently granular, bitwise and pixelated character of small-scale physics, presumably because these are traits of a digital computer which we don’t think could have otherwise arisen than at the hand of a programmer.
As it turns out, there’s no real limit to the range of objects that a person can use as grounds for a design argument. Consider this version, from Cicero’s De natura deorum:
An vero, si domum magnam pulchramque videris, non possis adduci ut, etiam si dominum non videas, muribus illam et mustelis aedificatam putes: tantum ergo ornatum mundi, tantam varietatem pulchritudinemque rerum caelestium, tantam vim et magnitudinem maris atque terrarum si tuum ac non deorum inmortalium domicilium putes, nonne plane desipere videare?
“If you should see a big beautiful house, even you didn’t see its owner, could you really be led to believe that it had been built by mice and weasels? Well then, if you don’t think that this so great adornment of the world, this such wide variety and beauty of the heavens, this so strong force and breadth of the sea and land is the domicile of the immortal gods, don’t you seem plainly to be mad?” (DND 2.27)
It’s Balbus the Stoic who puts this argument. In a dialogue where Cicero is a speaker, this means we maybe shouldn’t take it totally seriously. Even so, the argument needs to have at least a specious probability. That means a house – just the basic stuff, columns, rooms and roof – must be able to do in a Roman context the kind of intellectual work that a watch would do for Hume 1800 years later. Given that some Romans (e.g. Vitruvius) were still super-consciousness of the way that architecture began as an imitation of nature, this is a bit hard to swallow.
What actually makes the argument from design work for Cicero, I think, is an element of ownership not explicitly present in its more modern iterations, which is the property relation. Houses in Rome are non only manmade, but man-owned. That adds a degree of urgency to Balbus’ hypothetical which later versions of the argument lack. The question Balbus asks, after all, is not only who built the house but also to whom it belongs – and the latter question seems to be more salient when Balbus extends his analogy to the position of the gods vis a vis the world. If you come to an empty house, who built it is a matter for idle speculation. On the other hand, whether you think someone owns it determines whether you’ll go inside or not, and who you think owns it might make the difference between leaving flowers on the doorstep and putting a rock through the window.
The upshot is that, while most arguments from design hector you into answering a question that you otherwise might not think about and certainly wouldn’t act on, Balbus’ version appeals to a form of social knowledge that already interests people and motivates action. In that respect – rhetorically, at least – it’s an advance over other versions of the argument from design that would come later.