What place is there for the Design Argument in the 21st Century?

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What place is there for the Design Argument in the 21st Century?

The word teleological came from the Greek word telos, which means end or purpose. The nature of this is that something positive occurs. It is usually known as a design argument. All design arguments are inductive and a posteriori; there are numerous types of arguments with various philosophers giving them different names. The Teleological Argument is one of the famous design arguments and has been disputed by many philosophers but also design arguments in general. Teleology, in philosophy is about a term applied to any system attempting to explain events in terms ends, purposes and objectives that are trying to be achieved.

William Paley (1743-1805) developed the Teleological Argument further. He said that, one day you were walking in a forest and you saw a stone, it would be absurd to ask how did the stone get there in the first place. First of all, a person would not likely ask a question such as that about the stone but the stone could have been there all the time and so a conclusion will not be discovered. However, if you were walking in the forest one day, as you were walking you noticed a watch and then examined the watch to work out its function, you would come to the conclusion that the designer of the watch is intelligent and it is not product of random formation. The reason that the assumptions are not made for the stone is that the watch exhibits the appearance of a design due to the variety of different parts working together to produce a motion. Paley uses the watch analogy to direct it at the universe. He said that the universe is complex and that everything said about the watch could be said about the universe. The maker of the universe is referred to as God.

Paley mainly based his argument on Newtonian physics. Newton said that the universe obeys certain fixed laws, for example, gravity. According to Paley, an intelligent designer created these laws that have been discovered.

Palely used evidence from astronomy and Newton's law of gravity and motion to demonstrate that there is a designer for the universe. He pointed out that the rotation of the planets in the solar system and it also obeyed the same universal laws. Yet he concluded that this did not come by chance and that an external creator must be created the universe and that the creator must be God.
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Thomas Aquinas supported the Teleological Argument, as this is the fourth way of his Five Ways. He argued that the world established obvious traces of an intelligent designer. He said that the natural processes and objects seemed to adjust with certain aims in mind and to say that they have a purpose. The natural processes appear to have been designed and that objects do not design themselves and so this arrives at the conclusion that they are caused and designed by a supreme being, which is God. Aquinas uses this argument that it is rational to believe in ...

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