Ed L Miller stated how “the Cosmological and Teleological argument are closely related” (Miller 84). I would have to disagree. I believe that they have more differences than they have similarities. They do have some similarities, however I don’t necessarily believe they are closely related. The first Cosmological Argument was discovered by Thomas Aquinas where he argued his understanding of God’s existence through science and what he thought was physical evidence. However, the Teleological Argument can be described through a theory called the watchmaker analogy.
The Teleological argument can be described through William Paley’s watchmaker analogy. In that specific analogy, he states how there could be a random watch on the ground. Would we imagine that it just appeared on the ground? Or would we notice the complexity of it and how everything comes together in a certain way to accomplish a goal. Therefore we can assume the watch would have had to be made by someone on purpose to accomplish a certain goal. This particular idea relates to teleology because the watch demonstrated how there had to be a creator, therefore, we could conclude that Earth was designed by an intelligent creator with a certain end in mind. The word teleology itself means “goal oriented” or “purposeful”.
Man-made objects of teleology exist everywhere, such as a water bottle. A water bottle is created with a particular teleology in mind, it’s designed to hold liquid without leaking. Therefore, someone created it that way on purpose. Using those instances, a cup would equal cup maker, and a watch would equal a watchmaker, therefore a world would have to equal a world maker, which proves God’s existence. If one were to compare a watch to organism, the complexities of both become apparent. An organism such as a human body is complex because the heart and lungs work together, the body produces sweat to keep us from overheating, and there’s also the process where our bodies transform food into energy. There’s even occurrences in the natural world that follow complex designs, such as the golden ratio. There is absolutely no way all of this could have just miraculously happened, there must have been a designer to all t this complexity.
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There are also counterarguments that go against the Teleological Argument as well. I think that it’s hard to compare everything in society to a watch analogy. That is due to the fact that the world is simply way more complex than a watch. Also, why were humans made with flaws? Why did God make some humans color blind, and why did God make humans have blind spots in their eyes? Paley then started how it doesn’t matter how something was created, all that matters is that it was created. In that sense, things still don’t seem to add up. Why would God create something if it doesn’t have purpose? Such as blind spots in the human eye or nipples on man. There’s absolutely no purpose for those things. Just because there isn’t an apparent purpose doesn’t mean there isn’t one I suppose. All of which is a problem because the whole argument for believing in god is that you should look at the world and see purpose. If some things look great and have and a complex and complete design and there’s other things that don’t, that means there’s a flaw in the argument. Paley states that bodies are purposeful and from there concludes that the purpose had to have been put there by a powerful creator. However, that may not always be the case.
Humans always need to find a purpose for things even if its not necessarily the correct purpose. A 20th century British philosopher Bertrand Russell made fun of purpose finding tendency by stating that you could look at a bunny and form the belief that god gave it a white tail so that hunters could shoot at it. Therefore, if we are the ones inventing purposes rather than recognizing the purposes that are already there, then we would be the real creators of purpose in the earth. Not god. If we believe God made eyes for seeing, then we also have to believe that he made rabbit tails for target practice. Humans don’t get to pick and choose and say God designed the stuff we want him to have designed and not the other stuff. David Hume even stated if that we were to take the watch analogy seriously, we would need to conclude that the creator that Paley credits seems to make many mistakes. Mistakes such as illnesses that can cause death such as cancer, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc. Therefore a flawed world equivalates to a flawed creator. Eve
References
- Cosmological argument – Wikipedia
- Teleological argument – Wikipedia
- Cosmology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Teleological Arguments (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Watchmaker analogy – Wikipedia
- Teleology – Britannica
