Aquinas observed the universe and saw that everything in the universe was working towards a purpose for e.g. Tress growing leaves every spring and losing them every autumn. He noticed that they lacked intelligence, but there was regular pattern of leaves growing and dropping off at changes of seasons.
He stated that this order cannot happen by chance but designed, by an intelligent Being. For ex; a small baby learning to walk and the mother (intelligent being) directing the baby on how to walk.
Aquinas suggests that the universe is complex but works with regularity and in harmony. Just like the human body a complicated bit if machinery but all the complicated systems and organs work together to sustain life. So one can conclude that the universe was designed by an intelligent designer and that must be God who is omnipotence, omnipresent, omniscience.
William Paley suggests that if you were walking in the dessert and saw a stone you would think nothing of it but later if you see a watch and examine it, you would see the workings are very complicated and there must have been an intelligent designer (watchmaker) who designed and put it together. It hasn’t happened just by chance. Then he compered the universe to the watch. The universe is so complex but intricate in design for example the distance of the sun from the Earth no to close or not to far just perfect to sustain life.
Paley suggests that the universe itself is proof of an intelligent designer and could have not come by accident. He also suggests that everything had been designed to fulfill a purpose for example a Human Eye. And designed to order or regularity e.g. Newton’s Law.
“These phenomena are clearly too big for science to explain. Postulating to a God merely explains things that science has yet to explain.
Richard Swinburne
Richard Swinburne suggests that the probability that the world was created by chance is there but very low and remarks that the very existence of it and the human opportunities to do good, the pattern of history the evidence of miracles and religious experience. Only omnipotent, omnibenevolent God is able to produce a world orderly in these respects.
Atheistic argument suggests the world is beautiful, the water and the mountains, the animals for example all the beautiful colours of the peacock it is beauty that goes beyond that which is necessary to live. See order within the beauty i.e. the stars.
Humans like to look at beautiful things.
“God made man in his own image” – Genesis 1:27
Challenges against the Teleological arguments come from Scholar David Hume a scholar who argues that the universe is not orderly and harmonious e.g. earthquakes, pain, suffering and illness. And raises the question to why a God is omnipotent would allow this.
Hume argues that are knowledge of the world is based on our experiences for e.g. a carmaker makes cars as we have seen many of them on the roads, the same cannot be said about the universe. Which is unique. Hume looks at the complexity of a ship and notes the construction and how many people must have been employed to make the ship.in the same way he suggests how many gods or intelligent designers there were to make the universe or universes, as we don’t know.
As to the complexity of the universe, Hume states that we have nothing to compere it to and states it might not be complex. E.g. in the past people thought the desktop computer were complex but in comparison to I Pad’s they were simple.
John Mill also challenges the Teleological arguments by counteracting it with the dysteleological argument and argues that the universe is of poor design and the designer must be impotent, lacks power and cannot stop the evil and suffering and if he was all loving, caring he would of not created a world with evil and suffering.
Darwin proposes the theory of evolution. The survival of the fittest and the healthiest by natural selection.
Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection. Richard Dawkins
In Conclusion there are lot of challenges against the Teleological arguments for example
Hume and the carmaker, Mill and the poor designer. Darwin and Dawkins on natural selection. To challenge these I would argue who made the carmaker, the poor design (evil and good) is part of Gods creation to bring balance to the world and so evolution is part of his creation. We cannot be here by chance, there are more than 10 billion nerve cells in your brain. Each one sprouts between 10,00 and 100,00 fibers to contact other nerve cells, creating over one trillion connections that is the same as a forest covering 1 million square miles, with 10,000 tree per square mile and on each of these trees there are over 100,000 leaves That’s how many connections you have in your brain. Did this happen by chance?
My conclusion is that God is the designer of the universe.
by
hemupat (student)
