Get to grips with Religious Studies and Philosophy in five minutes in this blog series! If you’re an A Level Religious Studies or Philosophy student, each of these blog posts is a five-minute summary of some of the main topics you will need for your exams. For university-level scholars or independent researchers, we’ve included clickable links to useful literature, primary sources and canonical scholarship you’ll need to know.
In this post, discover the teleological argument for the existence of God!
Design arguments are empirical arguments (arguments based on the observation of data, rather than on ideas) for the existence of God. Some design arguments are also known as teleological arguments, with “telos” being the Greek word for “end” or “purpose.”
The idea that the universe exhibits evidence of God’s design has scriptural roots in the world’s Abrahamic religions. Psalms 19:1 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.” Romans 1:19-21 says, “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made...” The Koran 31:20 asks, “Have you not seen that Allah has subjected for you whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth, and has lavished His favours upon you, both seen and unseen?”
In European Christianity, St. Thomas Aquinas’s Fifth Way is one of the most famous iterations of the argument. Aquinas was a huge fan of the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who explained everything in terms of its telos – the end towards which it is moving. In his Summa Theologica Aquinas describes “Five Ways” to prove the existence of God.
Aquinas’s “fifth way” is a teleological argument. He says, “Whatever lacks knowledge cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence…Therefore, some intelligent being exists…and this being we call God.” That is, because it seems that things in the universe seem to have a purpose, the only explanation is the existence of an intelligent creator.
Hume’s Critique of Arguments from Analogy
Common design arguments for the existence of God in European history relied on a simple analogy: the idea that the universe resembles human-made objects in that it exhibits design. As design in human-made objects is the result of having been made by an intelligent being, the material universe was made by an intelligent creator. For instance, William Derham saw evidence of intelligent design in the vision of birds, the drum of the ear, the eye-socket, and the digestive system. Richard Bentley saw evidence of intelligent design in Newton's discovery of the law of gravitation.
Scottish philosopher David Hume was unhappy with these kinds of arguments. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume points out a number of problems.
Firstly, the use of analogy is not a good strategy in argument. As Hume says, “Wherever you depart in the least, from the similarity of the cases, you diminish proportionably the evidence; and may at last bring it to a very weak analogy, which is confessedly liable to error and uncertainty.”
Secondly, Hume puts forward his Epicurean thesis: even in a random world, apparent order can be found. If your Alphabite cereal spells your name one morning, you would notice it – and this would stick in your mind more than every other morning in which the letters did not fall into a comprehensive order.
Thirdly, Hume highlighted the argument from cause to effect. Consider sales a set of scales where we can only see one pan. We do not know what is weighing down the other pan: it could be a weight, or a finger, or anything else. Likewise, we cannot know that there is an intelligent designer from looking at the world, because we can only see the world, not its cause.
Paley’s Watchmaker Argument
English clergyman William Paley came up with a teleological argument that is more complex than simple analogy and that attempts to avoid Hume’s objection. He asks us to imagine a watch found on a heath. We would see immediately that, unlike an object such as a stone, this is an object designed by an intelligent creator.
There are two features of a watch that reliably indicate that it is the result of an intelligent design: (i) it performs a function that an intelligent agent would value and (ii) it could not perform this function if it were differently structured. Paley’s point is that the material universe exhibits the same kind of functional complexity as a watch.
Paley’s argument is challenged by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution via natural selection, which he sets out in his On the Origin of Species. Not only does this give us a mechanism for complexity, we also see evidence of bad design in the universe. Darwin admitted that he questioned his faith in God when thinking about the Ichneumon wasp, which must inject their eggs into another creature while it is still living, so its offspring feed on, and eventually kill, the host.
Richard Dawkins gives the example of the laryngeal nerve of the giraffe, which takes a fourteen foot detour due to the forces of evolution. There is also the Australian giant jewel beetle, which is unable to tell the difference between female beetles and beer bottles left in the wilderness by partying Australians.
English theologian Frederick Robert Tennant uses the aesthetic argument to object that Darwin’s natural selection does not explain our appreciation of beauty in nature. The fact that the universe possesses a natural beauty beyond that which is necessary to live cannot be explained by evolution. In addition, Tennant proposes the anthropic principle: the world is exactly the right environment for man to evolve; thus, it must have been designed.
Finally, Richard Swinburne uses Ockham’s Razor to argue for the design of the universe. He also distinguishes between spatial order (for instance, the human eye; Paley’s watch) and temporal order (regularities of succession like a billiard ball being hit or a stone falling). Swinburne argues that it is regularities of succession that can only be explained by God; he uses the analogy of regularities of succession in the human world, which can only be explained by a disembodied, free agent.
In our next post, explore the cosmological argument for the existence of God!
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