Meynell's Arguments for the Intelligibility of the Universe

Abstract

The main body of Meynell's book The Intelligible Universe divides into two parts of roughly equal length. It is argued in the first that the universe manifests the property of ‘intelligibility’, and in the second that this could not be so unless there were ‘something analogous to human intelligence in the constitution of the world’ (p. 68). The concern of this article is limited to the argument of the first part. It will be maintained that it consists of three intertwined arguments which, when disentangled, turn out not to be mutually supportive, as Meynell intends, but logically incompatible, and that neither singly nor in synthesis do they yield a notion of universal intelligibility which could provide the basis of an argument for the existence of God.