----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Farmelant" <farmelantj at juno.com>
It would for at least some versions of the AD. Some of the most popular versions emphasize the necessity of a designer to account for the complexity of the universe or at least the complexity of say DNA, as apparently Flew does. But if that is the case then it would seem likely that a putative designer would be as least as complex as the things that he/she/it designed. But if we accept that, then by hypothesis it must follow that the designer in turn requires still another designer to account for its existence as a complex entity, and so on, ad infinitum. In other words, by Jove, we get ourselves into an infinite regress.
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And yet the deity a la Duns Scotus, TA, Leibniz and others is asserted to be metaphysically *simple* and Ockam's razor is used to eliminate the polytheist [divine outsourcing!] argument.