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A grade essay on Paley’s teleological argument successfully defends the existence of God
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- Design argument
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Paley’s teleological argument successfully defends the existence of God
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‘Paley’s teleological argument successfully defends the existence of God’This question is related to the arguments in support of and against the teleological argument of
Paley’s Watch, which were presented first by Aquinas and later developed and portrayed by Paley
himself. The idea of a teleological argument means an ‘Idea of Purpose’, otherwise known as the
Design argument.
Main challenges to this question include the idea that if God truly is the designer, then he is a flawed
designer, as challenged by Mills by using the existence of evil and immorality. Furthermore, another
challenge to this question is the argument from Hume, who states that the world is formed by a series
of random events; not design. Occam’s razor can also be used to challenge this question due to the
fact that it would be much simpler to agree that God does not exist, as well as the ideas of evolution
and natural selection presented by Darwin who, similar to Mills, believers that if there is a designer of
the world, then they are in fact a wasteful designer.
However, we can also take into consideration the strengths behind this question, including the use of
a posteriori arguments in comparison to a priori arguments, which rely purely on empirical evidence or
reasoning.
Therefore, I will be rejecting the view that Paley’s (and other’s) teleological argument successfully
defends God’s existence in this essay by making clear the strengths as well as the weaknesses
behind Aquinas’ and Paley’s arguments.
Paley’s teleological argument is seen to successfully defend the existence of God through the idea of
Paley’s design argument, which relates to a watch and its complexity, and that the complexity of the
watch must act as evidence that the watch must have a watch-maker. The idea behind a teleological
argument is that everything in the universe must have a purpose, regardless of whether or not it
physically exists. For example, Santa Claus could be seen to exist to influence young children to be
good instead of bad, therefore the idea of the question ‘does Santa exist?’ in comparison to ‘does God
exist?’ cannot be compared, as God is not believed to be a physical being in the universe, whereas
(to children) Santa is. In relation to this, Paley’s design argument (first developed by Aquinas) uses
the watch to illustrate how all things with complexity must have a designer, so, as the universe and
most things in it are complex, God must have designed it, as influenced by the works of Aquinas, who
taught Paley his works before he passed, in which Paley carried on. However, the problem regarding
this argument is that it is a huge step from the idea of a designer, to believing that God is the designer.
Another objection is that of Hume’s, who presented the belief that all things - including the universe -
come by chance, or a series of random events. In addition to this, there is also Hume’s idea of
epicurean thesis, which includes the hypothesis that if you were to place a billion monkeys in a room
for a billion years, then eventually - by random chance - they would end up typing the works of
Shakespeare or the Bible, although they have little intellectual ability to be able to read and
understand these works. Despite this, one could argue that if this hypothesis was correct, why have
we seen no evidence of it in history? We would only associate monkeys with bananas, swinging
around trees, or - at most - mild intelligence, and we have not thought about or tested their intellectual
ability to the point where Hume’s argument could be labelled as true or false.
Furthermore, Paley’s teleological argument is understood to rightfully defend God’s existence through
Paley’s idea that a watches internal workings is so sophisticated and complex, that its process of
being made cannot have been through chance, and instead must have been thought through by a
designer, which is used as a metaphor for the universe, and its designer being God. In objection to
this argument, Mills, a British philosopher, suggests that the universe and the world itself is so flawed
and carries many imperfections (such as natural evil), to the point where he believes that God cannot
be the designer of the universe, nor can God exist as he claims ‘Why would a designer make
something that is flawed?’ Mills further explains this analogy by claiming that a shipmaker would not
make a ship that leaks, as it would make little to no sense, and would be flawed to the point where the
ship would be incapable of sailing. As God is commonly known to be ‘good’ and ‘loving’, Mills
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