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utiliratianism
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Utilitarianism Oliver Baker The design argument In this essay I am going to examine the design argument and its many variations and forms. Mainly I will be looking at the argument expressed by Paley, by Hume through Cleanthes, and the Anthropic Principle. Then I am going to go through the argument and examine more closely the critiques and strengths of the arguments. The design argument is one of the most popular arguments for the existence of god; it has been in existence for thousands of years. The design argument is split into to main parts: qua regularity and qua purpose. The basic argument for design states that: the universe has order and regularity. The complexity of the universe shows evidence of design. Such design implies a designer. The designer of the universe is god. In this paragraph I am going to look more closely at the design argument as expressed by William Paley. The first part of Paley’s argument is called ‘purpose’ it is the most famous form of the design argument and was written in his book Natural Theology (1802): If you were walking through a wood and you happened to come across a watch and if you picked up the watch and looked inside you would see that the watch was made up of lots of cogs and springs. You would see that the watch worked and that the watch was made for a purpose by someone: a watchmaker. In the same way by analogy we can say that the universe is complicated and works for a purpose so must have a maker. This universe maker is what we call god. Therefore there is a god. In the rest of the book Paley gives more examples. The best known of these is the eye compared to a telescope. The second part of Paley’s argument ‘regularity’ used evidence from astronomy and Newton’s laws of motion and gravity to prove that there is design to the universe. Paley pointed to the rotation of the planets in the solar system, and how they obey the same universal laws, and hold their orbits because of gravity. This could have not come about by chance. He concluded that an external agent must have imposed order on the universe as a whole, and on its many parts, and that agent must be god. Paley’s argument is a posteriori because it uses many almost infinite amounts of examples from our experiences e.g. the watch or the eye. The main technique Paley uses in this argument is analogy. The analogy is pretty obvious and is that of the watch and the universe. The universe and the watch in this argument are not different in kind but only in degree.
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