William Paley's Design Argument Analysis

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William Paley’s argument William Paley’s design argument is the idea of purpose or chance. Paley argues for purpose. He believes that the order, beauty and complexity of this world could not be blind chance and therefore must have a purpose. Paley believes that for everything to work so intricately together there must be a divine intelligence ordering it; A creator. He believed this creator to be God. Paley uses an analogy of someone finding a watch in a remote place to illustrate his argument. 1. The watch is found on the ground 2. The watch works perfectly and has a purpose. The parts are ordered and put together in way to make the watch work. 3. If it is ordered and has a purpose it couldn’t have been by chance that a random ordering…show more content…
He does not see why order means there has to be a designer. However, he is open to the idea of a designer or creator but doesn’t see why this has to be a God. He believes that there are many different possibilities such as a “team of Gods” or even a totally different entity. Hume believes the world is far too complex to be compared to something as simple as the mechanism of a watch. He believes there truly is no comparison. In fact, he believes that there is nothing we can compare this world to because, as far as we know, there is not another world even similar to us. We have no standard in which we can judge our world because our world is all we know. According to Hume, we cannot assume a Christian God as the creator. He was not sure we could even assume a creator, let alone choose one religions God to be the true one. Hume uses his own analogy of a pair of scales. If one end is hidden from view and the end we can see is clearly outweighed by the other one. We know how much weight is in the end of the one we can see, a kilogram for example, but all we know about the other side is that it is heavier than a kilogram. We cannot claim or infer with any confidence that we know the weight on the hidden side. This is the same with our world. We can see the effect but not the cause. Therefore, we cannot assume the cause with certainty if we cannot see
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