The teleological argument

Overview

Recall questions on a posteriori reasoning, Aquinas' Fifth Way and the archer and the arrow, Paley's watch and his natural examples, design as purpose and as order, Hume's objections from analogy, the Epicurean hypothesis and the character of a designer, the challenge of evolution, and whether chance defeats the argument.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What makes an argument a posteriori?

   Model answer

   Its premises depend on experience of the world: you have to look before you can run it. Arguments from design, from causation and from religious experience all begin with something observed, such as order, motion or a reported vision. Because they rest on observation, their conclusions can be revised if what we observe changes, which is both their strength and their weakness.

2. 2

   Explain the teleological argument in outline.

   Model answer

   It begins from features of the world that look purposeful or ordered, such as the regular behaviour of nature or the fitness of organs for their tasks. It argues that such arrangement is not the sort of thing that arises without direction. It concludes that there is an intelligent designer responsible for it, whom believers identify with God.

3. 3

   Set out Aquinas' Fifth Way.

   Model answer

   Aquinas observes that natural bodies which lack intelligence nevertheless act consistently towards an outcome that benefits them, and do so regularly rather than by fluke. Something without knowledge cannot aim at a goal unless it is directed by something that has knowledge. Therefore there exists an intelligent being by whom natural things are directed to their ends, and this Aquinas identifies as God.

4. 4

   Why is Aquinas' Fifth Way an argument from regularity rather than from complexity?

   Model answer

   Aquinas is not pointing at intricate machinery and inferring a maker. His starting point is that unthinking things behave in a lawlike way and reliably reach what is good for them, which he thinks unintelligible unless a mind is directing them. The evidence is the consistency of nature's behaviour, not the sophistication of any particular structure, so evidence of intricate biological engineering is not what his argument stands or falls on.

5. 5

   Set out Paley's watch argument.

   Model answer

   Paley asks us to imagine finding a stone on a heath, where we would think nothing of it, and then finding a watch. The watch has parts made of particular materials, shaped and assembled so that they work together to produce motion that measures time, and remove or alter any part and the purpose fails. Such adaptation of means to an end forces the conclusion that it had a maker who designed it. Paley argues that the natural world shows the same marks of contrivance to a far higher degree, so it too must have a designer.

6. 6

   How does Paley answer the obvious objections to his watch analogy?

   Model answer

   He replies that the inference holds even if we have never seen a watch being made, even if we cannot understand how some parts work, even if the watch sometimes goes wrong, and even if some parts appear to serve no function. He adds that if the watch also contained machinery for producing further watches, that would increase our admiration for its maker rather than remove the need for one, since a mechanism that reproduces itself is still a mechanism requiring explanation.

Other ways to work this

The same content, four other ways.

What is inside Levo

Six ways to work the same material.