According to Paley, God had carefully designed "even the most humble and insignificant organisms" and all of their minute features (such as the wings and antennae of earwigs). He believed therefore that God must care even more for humanity. Paley recognised that there is great suffering in nature, and that nature appears to be indifferent to pain. His way of reconciling this with his belief in a benevolent God was to assume that life had more pleasure than pain. The watch analogy is a teleological argument, meaning it is an a posteriori (after experience) argument for the existence of God based on apparent design and purpose in the universe.
Swinburne counted this by claiming that the order in the universe does require an explanation. As some is not even necessary for human survival. Just because we are there to observe it does not make it less unlikely. However Charles Darwin formulated the theory of natural selection which provided an alternative explanation for the design of the world, without reference to creation by God. ‘Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for this existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind’ Richard Dawkins supports Darwinian evolution and rejects God.
You would not assume that it was made due to random changes in nature; you would think that the watch had a designer. Because it has a purpose (to tell the time) it must have a designer. As the universe also has signs of complexity and intelligence, it too must have a designer? The watch is an unintelligent being in the case, with the designer being the intelligence. If we use analogy to compare the watch to the universe then there must be some intelligent being which directs all unintelligent beings towards their end.
William Paley, "The Teleological Argument" (Natural Theology) William Paley in his Natural Theology argues for the existence of God based on the complex design of the universe. A question that has betroubled all philosophers. First this being a teleological argument one must explore the meaning of such an argument. A teleological argument is the argument for the existence of God from the evidence of order, and hence designs, in nature . As Paley explains, just as the function and complexity of a watch implies a watchmaker, so likewise the function and complexity of the universe implies the existence of a universe-maker.
Hence why, natural laws such as gravity and motion assist in forming the basis for the cause and effect that fills the discussion of hard determinism. However, James Lovelock argued that according to GAIA theory the world changes, adapts and amends itself in order to survive and the human race is of little significance. Humans do not control nature, nature is in control. Philosophical determinism, like all forms of hard determinism, is based on the theory of Universal Causation. This is the belief that everything in the universe including all human actions and choices has a cause.
'Telos' is Greek for purpose or end. The teleological arguments are based off the fact that we observe that objects in the world, even if they lack conscious and intelligence, act or behave in purposeful ways (they act towards and end), for example the purpose of a heart is to pump blood around the body and the purpose of a toaster is to toast things. Aquinas had his own form of the teleological argument shown in the fifth of his five ways, also known as the argument from design. He identified that that the way in which 'Natural Bodies' act in a regular fashion to accomplish their end, directed to a goal, following natural laws provides the evidence for the existence of an externally and higher intelligent being, or to Aquinas, God. Aquinas' argument is an a posteriori argument as it is based on human observation or experience.
AO1: Give an account of the fundamental ideas of the Design Argument for the existence of God. Target: To improve my AO1 essay I should link two or more scholar through each paragraph and make the conclusion a short summary. The Argument of Design aims to prove God’s existence through a posteriori premise, that the universe is too complex to just came into existence by chance and therefore it has to be designed by God. All of its scholars using inductive reasoning, Aquinas and Paley aim to prove the existence of God through Analogy and Swinburne, Tennant and Stannard using Probabilities. Theist Stannard and Paley both start their arguments with the premise, that the universe has complex features, but Stannard proceed further the idea, that the universe is too complex to just happen by coincidence.
Paley would suggest that to argue that the camera happened by accident is nonsense. The camera shows obvious signs of having been designed. If you compare the camera to an eye, the eye is even more complex, for example it automatically focuses. This must show that the must be intelligent design in the world. It can not have happened by chance.
In this paper I will examine and evaluate Cleanthes’s argument from design to the existence of God. I argue that although I begin by examine Cleathes’s argument from design to the existence of God. Cleanthes, a character introduced by David Hume in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, tries to argue that the Universe was created by a designer, presumably God. According to Dan’s analysis at discussion, Cleanthes’s argument takes the following form: “ Premise 1 – The Universe resembles an artifact because: i) It shows a high level of complexity and ii) It has degree of apparently purposive organization Premise 2 – Artifacts are created by designers. Therefore, the Universe was created by a designer.
For this, Aquinas uses the example of an arrow being directed by an archer. The second part of the argument is design qua regularity and focuses on the order of the universe. The argument says that there is evidence in the universe itself that there is a designer at work, and without them, the world would become chaos. Like a garden, it shows evidence of a gardener because of the order of the flowers or lack of weeds. However, people against this say that the world is not ordered or designed, it is made by chance henceforth the argument that the world is made by the result of mere chance or is made by design – God.