Describe the Key Features for the Design Argument for God

Describe the key features of the design argument for God’s existence

The teleological argument, or the argument from design, is an argument that leads to the conclusion that not only God exists, but that he designed the Universe. The world “telos” is Greek meaning ‘ends’ – referring to how we can discover God through his end results – everything that is in the Universe today.

The teleological argument is an argument that uses inductive logic to lead to the conclusion that God created the Universe, because the Universe shows elements of design, and therefore must have been designed by an intelligent being. Basically, the argument states that because the Universe is so complex, beautiful and functional (to fulfil a purpose), that it must have been designed by a deity. This is inductive as we’re inferring that the Universe was created due to our existing knowledge of how man-made products are designed – but instead of the Universe being created by a man, it is created by God as only he is powerful to do so. The argument is a posterior – meaning that the argument is based on something that we experience – due to the things we experience through the Universe now, this leads us to propose a designer. It’s also synthetic as it cannot be tested, but it is true regarding how it relates to the world.

The person who is most frequently associated with the Design Argument is Christian philosopher William Paley. In 1802, he wrote his influential book ‘Natural Theology; or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected by Nature.’ In this book he explains that God could be understood by his creation – nature.

Paley created the one of the most famous analogies to explain his argument – the watch analogy. An analogy is to compare two things with similarities in one (or several) respects, therefore the things are assumed to be similar in another respect. He says that if you were to walk across a field, and kick a stone, you wouldn’t wonder whether it had been designed it due to its simplicity. For example, it isn’t aesthetic, and it doesn’t have a purpose. Whereas if you were to find a watch, due to the complexity of the item you would immediately assume that somebody had designed it. From this he concludes that due to the complexity of the Universe, it, like the watch, must have been designed… The watch has multiple parts that work together to achieve a purpose of telling the time, hence why he likened it to the Universe as it’s often thought that everything in the Universe works together to support survival of various forms of animal life (which is complex as each life form requires different things). Paley was a Christian, so obviously he believed that the world was created by God.

To further support his analogy, Paley proposed the ideas “Design qua Purpose” and “Design qua Regularity”. He suggested that because (like the watch’s purpose of ticking) things in the Universe show design as they have a purpose, that this in turn means that the Universe was designed. To explain “design qua purpose” he used the example of a human eye, saying that because it’s so complex and serves the purpose of allowing us to see – the eye couldn’t have evolved by chance for this to happen.  He uses this example as Paley thinks that the eye (and hence the Universe) is so much more complex than the watch. If the watch was designed, but the eye and the world are even more complex, then it definitely must have been designed by a deity as anything else would be incapable. Also, he saw that there is regularity in the universe. For example, if gravity was any different, then we wouldn’t exist and the planets wouldn’t be in orbit! This implies that due to the regularity of things in the Universe, there must have been a designing force (God) to ensure that this happened.