The Design Argument

‘With such signs of forethought in the design of living creatures, can you doubt they are the work of choice or design?’

The name teleological is derived from the Greek word ‘telos’ meaning ‘end’ or ‘purpose’. Thus nature is viewed as directed in order that something beneficial may result. More popularly it is referred to as the ‘argument from design’, but this wording assumes the very thing that has to be proved. A better description would be the ‘argument for design’.

This argument is by far the most popular and most often expressed by people. This is mainly due to the fact that people would like to re-affirm their belief in their God. As, if everyone around them were trying to prove that God didn’t existed, then them believing in a God would probably seem quite bizarre.

The argument over the existence of God has been around for centuries. One of the most popular arguments used to prove the existence of god is the evidence of order and precision in the universe. We just have to look at our solar system and we will see that there just has to be a creator to this piece of perfection. No man can create this. Can you confidently say that this all just fell into place by accident?

For those people that believe that this all happened by accident, consider this: a tornado swept through a huge junkyard, but before the tornado left, it created a brand new Boeing 747, in working order, including all the seats and the other little accessories that we would usually find in a Boeing nowadays. Now would you actually believe this?

Let’s pretend that this actually did happen in real life, and only 1 person witnessed this. Do you actually think that anyone would believe him, or even, would you believe him? This person would be considered mad and would be immediately sent away to a mental home. Something as precise as this universe just cannot be here by accident!                      

Over the centuries there have been many people attempting to answer this question. One of these was Thomas Aquinas. Thomas was born near Naples, in Italy in the year 1225-1274. He later entered the Dominican Order. So we can see that he was quite a religious figure. Over the years he has greatly influenced teleological thinking, he has written a book called ‘The Five Ways’ which is arguing for the existence of God. Basically his main argument is that non-intelligent material things produce beneficial order. For this to happen there must be an intelligent being maneuvering these actions. And this being is God. As in his book he says,

Join now!

        ‘We see that things that lack knowledge such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result.’

What Aquinas means by this is that objects like trees, stars and other non-intelligent bodies do the same thing day in day out. But if we look at their functions in great depth we can see that without them doing their own concise job it would be hard for man and animals to exist. Let’s look at the acorn ...

This is a preview of the whole essay