Skip to contentWillowOne's Positions
TagsWhat’s newMediaStatistics
Search
Notes
WillowOne's Positions

Teleological Argument

Form

The classical version (William Paley, Natural Theology, 1802):

  1. Living things exhibit complexity and apparent purpose, like a watch found on a heath.
  2. Complexity and apparent purpose are the products of intelligent design.
  3. Therefore living things were designed, and the designer is God.

The modern "fine-tuning" version (William Lane Craig, Robin Collins):

  1. The constants of physics fall within the narrow range that permits life.
  2. This is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.
  3. It is not due to necessity or chance.
  4. Therefore it is due to design.

My Positions

  1. The classical argument was answered in 1859. Evolution by natural selection produces the appearance of design without a designer, and does so from observable, well-understood mechanisms. Paley's watch is an argument from Personal Incredulity: he could not imagine how complexity could arise without a mind, and so concluded that it could not.
  2. The "design" in living things is poor design. The recurrent laryngeal nerve, the inverted vertebrate retina, the human birth canal, and the appendix are what one expects from an unguided process constrained by its history, not from an engineer starting fresh. See Natural Selection.
  3. The fine-tuning version I answer in full under the Fine-Tuning Argument, which treats both the cosmic and the biological forms. In brief: it assumes the constants could have been otherwise, dismisses chance on a probability nobody can calculate, ignores the selection effect, and would apply with equal force to the designer it proposes.

Also see