Teleological argument for the existence of God

Just for clarity Jude, I wasn't arguing against the existence of God, just pointing out a problem for me with using teleology in theology.

I agree Mr Shirt... I am in line with pre-Aquinas views that some areas of philosophy such as logic and teleology are not useful tools in theology. Only taking the "Philosophy of Religion" course because its a core compulsory one. Yuckky!

So ultimately we arrive at the position that some people say that there must be a god or gods and other people say that they don't feel the same urge. I read something very interesting once about a study that looked at spirituality and psychiatric illness. In this case spirituality can be understood to mean the religious urge, the sense of significance of events, of something greater than oneself, of a connectedness to the universe etc What the study found was that something like seventy percent of people who had been through a period of psychiatric illness serious enough to require hospitalisation reported increased feelings of spirituality after their serious episode of illness. This does not draw any conclusions about mental health and religious urges but does reveal a link between extraordinary experience and religion. What something happens that is so out of the ordinary we can't make it fit in with the rest of our lives, such as a death, an illness, a situation of extreme risk etc we have a problem in achieving equilibrium afterwards. We want everything to fit in to a harmonious whole, but extraordinary events don't do this, they stick out like sore thumbs. Religion provides a perfect way of intergrating the odd, the extraordinary and the illogical into everyday life. In the case of mental illness, someone ends up in a weird place where odd things happen, then arrives back in the world of everyone else with a memory of the strange places they have been. These leaves a lot of stuff that needs to be understood and intergrated, which is where religion can play a very valuable role. The daddy of the discussion of the difference between spirituality and religion is probably William James' 'The Varieties of Religious Experience' which is brilliant. Check it out at amazon.co.uk here: [%sig%]

An 'Original' view? - "I agree and diss agree with 'all' of the above arguments. (Is that an original view)??? OK. Hears a question for Jude. I think we get to stuck up on the 'image' of a God as Creator. We have this image of an Man, woman or person as some omnipresent, all seeing, all hearing and all knowing entity. Well, there is such an omnipresence all around us. The Universes, the planets and Nature her self. What if it was eventually decided that all living things are the product of Biological specified? That Nature is the sole 'Creator', responsible for all life and with no out side influences by some God. Would Nature as Creator, Be considered God? This is just part of my question, will get round to the question of the 'beginning' a bit later. The Universe can hold on until i have me cup a tea.

If we accept the big bang theory...we have to accept there is something beyond this universe and therefore nature. This could be some ultimate reality - a mathematical conundrum of both existence and non existence. whatever this ultimate reality is is "God". I accept that the absolute reality...whatever it is, by reason does not have to be "God" in the traditional sense of the word (image of man with beard all knowing) and there may be no providence...this ultimate reality has no knowledge of or inteference in our world. I BELIEVE by faith not reason that this ultimate reality is a loving creator who does have a presence in the world, who is beyond my understanding, who singled Jude out for His service in a way she don't quite get yet! But I cannot demonstrate, prove this to you, nor am I trying to evangelise you....just wanted some nicely constructed sentences for me essay!!! Thanks all

and yes John... Paley in his argument talked of God creating the Unverse in analogy to a watchmaker who created a watch Dawkins, speaking of mutation and random selection to be the forces of life creation ( and these are just the laws of physics albeit deployed in a special way) said that nature is indeed the Watchmaker (god) but a "Blind Watchmaker" - hence h title of the book you must read if you haven't already

Jude. How do i manage to do it! I really was not trying to offend or question your believe. I was just trying to work through the obvious arguments first, and then try to come at it from an 'original' point of view. As you requested. I have no interest in trying to prove or dis prove some thing that will never be falsifiable. My apologies if my post upset you. I will keep out of such debates from now on.

I am not offended at all John rarely am) sorry if I sounded offended !!! - I'm not...in fact your post was most insightful...please do keep joining in debates...it's nice to have a fellow scientist on board.

" Religion provides a perfect way of intergrating the odd, the extraordinary and the illogical into everyday life. " from Mark Brown And the longer you live, the more you will come acrosss the extraordinary and realise how little you can know of the things that there are to know, not least because the things that there are to know grow day by day... Faith however you define it falls into the realm of things that are outside of the box of things that you know... and however much you think you know through reason and experience, you would have to concede that the space outside your particular box is far greater if not infinite in comparison. It is to encapsulate all that mystery outside that one can perceive yet not understand, that faith comes into its own and in fact is fundamental to the way brains work. At a basic level, as you can not possibly work out all the permutations of a tommorrow (so that you can negotiate your way confidently through it), the workings of the brain entrusts all unknowns to faith just so that you can forge your way through it anyway... However much you may think you know about buses and planes, stepping onto one still requires an act of faith. Faith is fundamental to the brain, to being human, whether you concede it or not. It is clear to me in the business of faith, no two Christian's for example would be the same. Jude's from what I perceive would be a complex affair whereas some others I am sure would be more simplistic affairs. The point is to deride faith and religion as 'pointless', 'backward' or unnecessary or whatever is to miss the boat completely on the propelling forces that have driven humanity from the caves to where we are today... from our great cities that grew up around towering, maginificent cathedrals, temples and monuments to faith (when all else around was mud huts) to all that we hold dear in art, culture and civilisation today.... What is at stake here is tremendous energy that needs to be chanelled and directed for the greater good... not to laughingly (and ignorantly) be ignored as irrelevant to modern living...

'What is at stake here is tremendous energy that needs to be chanelled and directed for the greater good... not to laughingly (and ignorantly) be ignored as irrelevant to modern living...' But the problem is that each 'faith' has differing ideas of what constitutes 'the greater good', and the 'tremendous energy' is just as likely to drive people to do things that are less than friendly. I don't thing the power of a person's faith is ignored in the 21st century - I think it's central to many people's fears, as most people now have seen the negative side of how far a person will go if their faith is strong enough. Thus the American Christian Right goes into overdrive to demonstrate just how divine and selfless their liberation forces are. PS. What's with all the unnecessary elipsis? (...) Most people punctuate using one full stop, not three. Your keyboard keep getting stuck or something? Or do you just like adding extra drama to your posts... Oooh! What next?...

I've never gone with the arguement that because things fit together so nicely, that means that someone must have purposely put them together. There is also the counter arguement that if they didn't, we wouldn't be here. Yes, the possibility of the conditions that we see occurring and developing by chance is tiny, but this does not mean that it is impossible. And we know that it's happened, because we see it all around us. I've never seen the need to introduce another factor into the equation. Improbable things aren't the same as impossible things.

Plus, the assigning of purpose can be a byproduct of observation. You watch a gust of wind lift a crisp packet off the ground, whirl it around then deposit it into a nearby skip. You can say that the wind 'meant' to put the crisp bag in the skip. Or, you can see it as an improbable occurrance that nevertheless you have just observed.

I'm not familiar with Kant, Hume, Platinga, or Dawkins, so apologies if I repeat anything. I've never really understood this argument for two reasons. 1. It does not seem to follow that because the universe is complex and fits together nicely it requires intelligent design. Enourmously complex systems can emerge from the simplest of rules, this is demonstrated by any number of mathematical puzzles or anyone who's ever tried to debug a computer program. Plus Mark's point, we have no statistical sample of universes and so no idea how unlikely it was to occur by fluke. Or to put it another way, 100% of universes observed work like this one, therefore I conclude it is 100% likely that any universe will work like this one. 2. The supostion of an Intelligent Creator does not solve the problem. A complex universe with a creator is more extraordinary that a complex universe without a creator. This does not answer the questions, but merely shift them over to one side where you can't see them as clearly.

Argument against…. Sigmund Freud once wrote in his book, Totem and Taboo, of the “omnipotence of thought” Humans conjured up the supreme entity out of fear of death and the dead, worshiping him (most usually a father image) in one form or another since the dawn of consciousness, a GOD. Today’s religion is no different from the primordial savage beliefs that were first preached in tribes and honed to a sharp point over the thousands and thousands of years that have since elapsed. The basic theory is that, by believing something for so long, it takes on a life of its own, thus becoming truth. The omnipotence of thought. We want to believe in a GOD so much, we insist he exists. The hallmarks characteristics of all religions have at their roots, our fear of death, fear of the dead, our fear of our fathers and a belief in things we can not see, touch or feel, but dearly want to exist. A means of controlling behavior in group settings, for the future benefit of the groups’ existence. Belief in GOD is not in and of itself harmful and most likely has beneficial to mankind as it has been the driving force behind modern civilizations laws and societal structures. GOD is a figment of our imagination.

thanks...about 200 words into the 4000 word essay with an additional 500 in reserve for use later...keep them coming!

well done jude.. i cant help you i am afraid, as a) i dont do God, and b) am 700 words into the conflict between individual and society in american literature. I dont know which essay is worse... I might have a change of heart and start praying soon if i dont get inspired shortly)

Liana, Let me know if you need any help, I can loan you a ton of bad essay material under the guise of bad American literature. I generate it daily.

Help? Do I ever need help! Ive done conflict within puritanical society in hawthornes scarlet letter, and am now into chopins 'awakenings' and gilman perkins 'yellow wallpaper'. The subject is kind of easy enough... the problem i have with it really, is separating into an american thing... i mean, at the base of almost ALL literature, a conflict with society pokes out somewhere? (sorry to shove conflict into your thread jude)

Intelligent Design is pseudo-science. Creationism and ID fall down because they lack falsifiability - a crucial element of any scientific theory. You need to discuss falsifiability if you're going to broach the subject.

nice one Rokkit...just googled "falsifiability" and "teleological" and got loads of reading references.

"Enourmously complex systems can emerge from the simplest of rules, this is demonstrated by any number of mathematical puzzles or anyone who's ever tried to debug a computer program.." by Dan This is the basis of Stephen Wolfram's (and others) work where he takes a static starting condition and evolves it using some of the simplest rules known (cellular automata) and finds unpredictable complexity after a number of states (a surprising result). His postulates after analysing tens of thousands similar routines is that complexity tends to arise from simple rules more often than we would think and that the complexity we find in nature eg snowflakes, sea shell types, patterns on animal skins, etc are demonstrably as a result of permutations of these rules running their course rather than a pure product of evolution (in the case of life).... So these rules encapsulate something more fundamental than 'evolution' in their description of life and the universe... The only reliable thing one can say about 'design' and the universe based on determinable evidence is that it tends to greater complexity over time...

that sounds sooo good!!!

The nice Mr Rokkit is correct - Karl Popper demonstrated rather nicely that it is a fault of anything which claims to be a 'proof' that it cannot be falsified. I.e if you cannot conjecture a circumstance that could arise where the theory must be said to be wrong. The theory of gravity can be falsified if we drop something on earth and it does not eventually fall to the floor, or more to the point if we drop an object which is a straightforward solid and it does not accelerate towards the ground at ten metres per second. Darwin's theory of evolution is falsifiable if an adaptation is discovered which would have caused no benefits to the generations which produced it which would have tended to cause that genetic mutation/adaptation to prosper in the gene pool - i.e a creature with a part of an eye must be shown to have a genetic advantage over the same creature who did not have part of an eye - each step in the chain must have a tendency to make the creature more likely to reproduce and pass on its genes. Creationism is not falsifiable - fossils which have been dated millions of years before the world exists (45 % of Americans surveyed believed that God created the earth at some stage in the last 10,000 years) were simply placed there by God to test our faith, and so forth. There is no set of circumstances which a creationist would accept could ever falsify the theory of creationism, because you have a God acting who works in mysterious ways. That's not an argument against the existence of God - as Kierkeegaard rightly said, it is a question of faith, and either you believe in it and it is the most important thing ever and should dominate your every waking moment, or you do not - it is an argument against proofs of something which is a faith and not science. I'd drag in Kurt Godel too (but he works splendidly in almost any argument) Godel proved with his Theory of Incompleteness that even in the most formal, logical, tidy field of mathematics that there are things that are true that cannot be proved. Or, more neatly - there is always a difference between Truth and Proof. Paley's argument is a nice one, and it did cause Darwin some problems, particularly over the eye, but at the end, it is a fallacious argument. Just because animals are superbly adapted to their world, doesn't mean that they are perfectly designed - there are many possible adaptations that don't exist because they are too difficult or just didn't offer genetically advantageous interim steps - a perfect designer would have made perfect animals. And here's the kicker - panda bears and their thumbs (read the Stephen Jay Gould article in book of same name). Panda bears use thumbs to strip bamboo leaves, but being descended from bears they don't have proper thumbs (the bear blueprint has no thumbs). What instead happened was that over generations, pandas with mutated distorted wristbones tended to thrive and prosper in the gene pool, producing modern pandas who have a juryrigged wrist-bone thumb. Now, no designer would have taken that approach, particularly when there are other blue-prints (apes for example) that had thumbs - the only answer is that nature works with what it has and refines and improves it over generations through the process of natural selection. Ta-da!

Neat one Emily. Now add in a little Marx. Dialectics made simple states that once something has been through a process it can never be the same because the process inevitabley changes it. For example if you have a blue house and paint it yellow and then paint it blue again it is not the same as it was before - because there is a perception of it as not blue. It isn't only genetic change, it's perceptive change that constantly shifts. In relation to the existence of God this means that our perception of God is constantly in flux because of our experiences. No individual's perception of god is the same - and it constantly changes. Theefore we cannot begin to even discuss the existence of God until we have sorted out the linguistical analysis of what we mean by God. And that's pretty much where philosophy is - stuck in a side alley with a linguistics butt-plug duly inserted. The argument is flawed before it's begun.

I'm completing a diploma in theology first...but I'm joining the Dominicans, an order devoted to study and preaching so no ...I don't just turn up and make vows! I turn up, get to study and continue to discern then take first vows after 2 years! Yep...thanks for that Emily, and thanks for the Marx Mr Cook!

well the "stupid" or less academically inclined are more likely to seek an order with a different mission/ministry. Dominicans are offficially called the "Order of Preachers" so historically it has always attracted scholars...great ones including St Thomas Aquinas. No there are no entry exams but their are three interviews to assess your suitability for religious life, including psychological profiling. In addition you require four referees. Before you even reach this stage you have one to three years of candidacy where you get to know the sisters and discern if it is the right thing. They are not looking for perfect people, just people who can grow in and contribute to the congregation community

Four referees? That's more than Arsenal need. Do you get red and yellow cards? Are you sent off frequently? Or just go to the sin bin?

I think getting caught smoking, barking in the corridors (I know a Friar who used to do this in his novitiate) and over eating Krispy Kreme donuts are yellow card offences. Illicit sex, drugs and tackling other Sisters from behind are probably red card and you get sent off. wearing shorts in the refectory is a penalty.

Jude, it's all bollocks.

The main scientific evidence against the existence of God comes from British archaeological findings. Dubbed "The Essex Man", this creature, proved by carbon dating to be millions of years old yet still with a large shock of hair, was dug out of an Essex bog, placed in front of a computer and continues to this day to contradict the finest theological minds of the age, as above.

But presumably you can't do the essay *too* well, because clearly if you follow the aformentioned arguments to their logical conclusions, you'll demonstrate the complete untenability of the faith you're claiming to be a subscriber to. I recommend getting involved with and blasting a few choice terms into the 'search' box: Carl Sagan Intelligent Design Creationism Evolution Darwinism Thomas Aquinas Blind Watchmaker Postmodernism Relativism It's pretty tough being a Christian and sustaining any claim to rationality, but the least you can do is make sure you're well-versed in all the facts you have to ignore in order to keep your beliefs intact.

Dubbed "The Essex Man", this creature, proved by carbon dating to be millions of years old yet still with a large shock of hair, was dug out of an Essex bog, placed in front of a computer and continues to this day to contradict the finest theological minds of the age, as above. Haha! Neil, do you know him personally? I'd like an intro...

"Proving" the existence of an almighty being in this way is easy for us Earthlings. We have a world that has developed into a rich and intricate tapestry of things as technologically, culturally and physiologically evolved as the Dyson vacuum cleaner, reality television, Anna Friel, the nuclear bomb and mississippi. It's not surprising then that some of us might think there was a hidden hand at work. But what about the other planets in our solar system, let alone beyond? I bet the last surviving denizen of Saturn or Jupiter, as it breathed its final breath many trillions of years ago in the icy, mineral-less inhospitable wasteland that was its ultimate nemesis, wasn't ruminating on the teleological argument for the existence of God. If God exists on Earth, he didn't do much for the poor Plutonians or Neptunians. So God exists but he's not omnipresent or ominscient? Hmmm. That's driven a coach and horses through the Christian and a number of other conceptions of the ultimate power.

I find this argument doesn't hold logically....next term we are doing "Belief without Reason" ...that's where I stand...I have faith not reason. Still Aquinas said what could be deduced logically by reason could not be in contradiction to the truth of the Christian Faith....poor fat bugger!