AS Religious Studies The Design Argument

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AS Religious Studies – The Design Argument

Explain the Design Argument for the Existence of God.  

The design argument or the teleological argument suggests that the universe is created by a designer. It states that the complexity of the order and patterns of the operation of the world could not have been created out of chance or by random; instead it is made by a creator.

William Daley is a well known advocate of the theory; his arguments consist of two parts – design qua purpose and design qua regularity. The design qua purpose argument states that the complex involved in assembling and designing human, animals the nature could have only been accomplished by a “designing creator”. He gives examples such as the operation of the human eye which allows us to see things stating that God has created it for the purpose of allowing us to see. Indeed, one slight rearrangement of the structure of our eyes would have caused us to be blind thus the likelihood for the formation of a human eye to be accomplished randomly is very low.

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Daley’s argument of design qua regularity points out that there are simply too much universal laws stating that the world could not have been created out of random. He believes there is an “external agent” who has imposed such orders to the world; the external agent has to be God.

The Anthropic Principle is a recent development supporting the design argument. The developer of the principle F.R. Tennant uses natural/ scientific arguments to show that the world has been designed. First, he states that the world has been designed as it can be analysed in a rational manner. ...

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