Teleological Arguments for the existence of God

William Paley’s teleological argument is but one example of the formulation of an argument from design, but nevertheless one that deserves some attention. Although the origins of the thesis can be reasonably traced back as far as ancient Greek philosophy, in the form of Lucilius Bablos, Paley’s version was the true precursor for later deliberations on the subject, as it was the first to truly attempt to affirm God’s existence by ap

. . .

If one were to take Paley’s argument from the deductive perspective, it is clearly invalid: there exists a possible world in which the premises are true, yet God, in the guise required by theists, does not exist. Added to this, in special response to Sober, we could easily dispute the alleged coherence of God being the intelligent designer, by appealing to something like the problem of evil. Here the obviously weak link between the premises and the conclusion has been exploited; a problem that many theological arguments suffer from - in arriving at the necessary conclusion of the Christian God’s existence. An interesting point of discussion may be to wonder about the proposed analogy between watches and biological organisms. Sober agrees in part with Dawkins in that “the problem is that Hume has no serious alternate explanation for the phenomena he discusses. ” Above all, what is being claimed by such responses is that the conclusion of an intelligent designer is strongly supported by the argument’s preceding premises, thus leading us to conclude that Paley’s argument should have been successful in its time. A watch would not, and could not, have arisen from a random distribution or chance configuration of its constituent parts. This is to say, we might wonder at the plausibility of Premise 4, from our first formulation of the argument in inference to the best explanation terms. He makes the claim that by the watch’s very intrinsic make-up it could clearly be concluded the intentional construction of an intelligent designer: the various parts and their composition, together with a recognisable function, would inevitably lead us to believe that it was not merely a randomly formed entity. So, Paley concludes, if it is the case that intelligent design can be seen in watches, then it should also be recognised immediately in nature. These systems are often the cause of pain and suffering in the creatures they pertain to; eg: childbirth. In fact, the existence of a watchmaking watch would only stren!

gthen the hypothesis of a designer, for it would make the watch an even more complex system.

Common topics in this essay:
Tennant Swinburne, C1 Hence, Christian Gods, God Firstly, Dialogues Alternatively, Conversely Sober, Dawkins Sober, Bablos Paleys, Fine Tuning, P4 Nature, intelligent designer, paleys argument, intelligent design, teleological argument, biological systems, inference explanation, complex biological, product intelligent, product intelligent design, apparent design, world product, world product intelligent, complex biological systems, recognisable intelligent designer, apparent design nature,

Approximate Word count = 2542
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)

Already a member? Click here