8. The Argument from the World as an Interacting Whole

This argument is from The One and the Many by Norris Clarke who taught metaphysics and philosophy of religion at Fordham.  It is an intriguing version of the design argument. 

Starting Point.  This world is given to us as a dynamic, ordered system of many active component elements. Their natures (natural properties) are ordered to interact with each other in stable, reciprocal relationships that we call physical laws.  For example, every hydrogen atom in our universe is ordered to combine with every oxygen atom in the proportion of 2:1 (which implies that every oxygen atom is reciprocally ordered to combine with every hydrogen atom in the proportion of 1:2).  So it is with the chemical valences of all the basic elements.  So to all particles with mass are ordered to move toward every other according to the fixed proportions of the law of gravity.  (Handbook of Catholic Apologetics, pps. 67-68)

The world is complex and interdependent.  Many parts which seem independent are found to have relationships with seeming unrelated other parts.  These many separate but related parts make up a whole so that the parts cannot be understood apart from the whole.

In such a system as described, no one part is self-sufficient or self-explanatory.  Each part presupposes the other parts and needs them to act and interact reciprocally with it.  There could only be such a self-sufficient part if it were the cause of the whole system, and this is impossible.  "Nor can the system as a whole explain its own existence, since it is made up of the component parts and is not a separate being,on its own, independent of them."  (Handbook, pg. 68)

Three Conclusions

1. "Since the parts make sense only within the whole, and neither the whole nor the parts can explain their own existence, than such a system as our world requires a unifying efficient cause to posit it in existence as a unified whole."  (Handbook, pg. 68)
2. This cause must be intelligent and cause this system to be by a unifying idea.  Why an idea?  The various parts are unified through reciprocal relationships and organized.  Yet that organizing factor, though working within, cannot be a part of the whole.  This wholeness and unity can only be a part of an organizing unifying idea.  "For only an idea can hold together many different elements at once without destroying or fusing their distinctness" (Handbook, pg. 69).  An idea must exist and work within a mind who has the power to create.  Therefore our universe must have an Orderer which can only be a Mind.
3. This Mind must be independent of the system itself- or transcendent.  If it were dependent on the system it would have to presuppose the system in order to exist. 

"Thus our material universe necessarily requires, as the sufficient reason for its actual existence as an operating whole, a Transcendent Creative Mind"  (Handbook of Catholic Apologetics, pg. 69).