The second level of criticism is “whether nature can be seen as the product of design in the first place” (65). Phillips calls into question whether it makes sense to even think of the universe in terms of a garden. He quotes Huxley, who states, “Man has recreated Europe in his own image. Its tamed and temperate nature confirmed Wordsworth in his philosophisings” (66). Huxley also said that an adoration of nature like that of Wordsworth “is only possible for those who are prepared to falsify their immediate intuitions of Nature. For Nature, even in the temperate zone is always alien and unknown, and occasionally diabolic…A voyage through the tropics would have cured [Wordsworth] of his too easy and comfortable pantheism” (65). With a little more realistic view of the natural world, Wordsworth “would have learned once more to treat Nature naturally, as he treated it in his youth, to react to it spontaneously, loving where love was the appropriate emotion, fearing, hating, fighting whenever Nature presented itself to his intuition as being not merely strange, but hostile, inhumanely evil” (66).
Phillips states that “once the analogy between gardens and nature collapses, it opens the way to the recognition that nature admits of natural explanations, and that the inference to a designer has no basis in nature itself” (66). Norman Kemp Smith argues, “The existence of an artificial product is only possible in and through the existence of an external artificer: the natural, on the other hand, is qua natural, self-evolving and self-maintaining; that is to say, its form is as native to it as the matter of which it is composed. Indeed the argument is at its weakest precisely in those fields in which it professes to find its chief evidence…The hinge of a door affords conclusive proof of an artificer: the hinge of the bivalve shell, though incomparably superior as a hinge, affords no such proof, it is as natural in its origin as anything in physical Nature can be known to be” (66). Phillips concludes that “it is not true that particular causal explanations are intellectually inadequate, forcing us to ask further questions until we arrive at an explanation of the universe as such” (66). He seems to think it silly to proceed down too many questions of “Why?” when it comes to explanations of the universe.
It seems that Phillips agrees with Hume’s criticism, and takes it even a step further – he seems to call into question certain lines of questioning about the origins of the universe. Both of these criticisms are clearly very severe – I am not sure what this leaves the believer. If a believer thinks that God is the creator of all that exists, these criticisms seem to paint her beliefs as both misguided and wrongheaded to even ask the question to begin with. Even the non-believer is so constricted by Phillips’ assessment that she cannot even proceed down certain lines of questions too long without being intellectually condemned. I think that Phillips could have provided more evidence for this more severe criticism that he adds to the end of this section. Is it silly to ask what the origin of the universe is? Perhaps he is right – I have been inclined to think that at a certain point, the questions cease to allow for verifiable answers, so perhaps it makes the most sense to be in wonder at this juncture and not seek answers, as if the world were a fill in the blank or multiple choice test, allowing for a simple resolution to ultimate questions of origin. I think that our minds naturally do not like “loose ends,” and to have to have this huge open-ended question is very uncomfortable for us as human beings. We like structure and boundaries within to operate – answers to our questions like where the universe came from, what it means to be human, what our purpose of living is, how life happens, and what happens to us when we die. We want an ultimate origin to what is right or wrong, so that there is not an “infinite regress” of moral authorities and reasoning. We seek permanence in a continually changing world. We must override our natural desire for security, structure, and answers in order to simply wonder at the unfathomable.
