Teleological Argument

The Teleological Argument moves from the apparent design or order of the universe to a designer. The classical eighteenth-century form, attributed to William Paley among others, argued by analogy with human artifacts: just as a watch found on a heath implies a watchmaker, so the intricacy of the natural world implies a designer.

The classical form was substantially demolished by David Hume in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Hume’s central move was to attack the analogy: the universe is not relevantly similar to a watch; even if the analogy held, it would license at most a finite, fallible, and possibly evil designer rather than the omnipotent and omnibenevolent God of theism.

The contemporary form is the fine-tuning argument: the observation that the physical constants of the universe lie in a narrow range that permits the existence of complex life, and the inference that this fine-tuning is more probable on theism than on atheism. Richard Swinburne develops a probabilistic version in his cumulative case argument. J. L. Mackie in The Miracle of Theism addresses the contemporary version and argues that the multiverse hypothesis, or the rejection of strong principles of explanation, undermines the probabilistic case.

Margaret Halloran spent a few weeks in a seminar on fine-tuning in her first year of graduate study and came away unconvinced. The argument is not central to her year.