ipl-logo

Paley's Argument Analysis

846 Words4 Pages

William Paley’s argument from design starts off with a man seeing a watch on the side of the road. The argument is whether or not someone designed the watch, or if the watch randomly just showed up there itself by random chance. He makes an analogy of watches and humans. He says that since there is a designer that made the watch, there must be a designer that made us humans. The reason that he compares watches to humans is that is because they are both complex and have parts that work very well together. He says that the designer for humans is God. I think the analogy does a great job of showing that humans have a designer, but I disagree with the argument that it shows that God created us.
Paley asks you to imagine that you have never …show more content…

It basically just throws God in without even talking about him. The argument does a great job at showing that there is a creator, but does nothing to explain about God. Once you believe that there is a designer then it opens up many doors by diving into the topic of God and maybe doing research. What makes more sense to believe in God is actually trying to learn about God. If you learn about the Judeo-Christian God, you’ll find out that he wants to be known. You’ll find out that he created us in his image and we can bring him glory. You’ll find out that God wants to have a relationship with you and that he loves you. It’s from these types of situations that you actually will believe in God, not from analogies that Paley uses that says that God is the creator by because of a comparison that he uses between watches and humans. He gave no evidence about the characteristics of the Judeo-Christian God and just basically said he proved God is real. Analogies like this do a good job at making you believe that there is a designer, but you have to do more to actually believe that the designer is God. To say right off the bat that you believed in God because of this analogy would not make much sense. If you tried to convince somebody that God was real you’re going to have to dive deeper into the conversation than this watch analogy. One of the reasons that lead me to believing in God is how complex we are. To think that we as humans came about as a result of chance does not make sense one bit. That being said, I’ve always believed in a designer, but it wasn’t always that I believed that God was the designer. There was more that I had to do to come to that

Show More
Related

  • Summary Of Argument From Design By William Paley

    784 Words  | 4 Pages

    William Paley was a well known theologian in the 19th century responsible for surmising the existence of “an intelligent creator by design.” His argument, built up to and stated on page 29, Chapter III, paragraph 1 in sentence 1 is as follows: “for every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature”. Before diving into the meaning behind this, there are terms to be defined. By contrivance, Paley means artificiality, or to have been made. A watch, as easy as it is to grasp, is simply the mechanism on your wrist that tells you the time of day.

    Read More

  • Hambourger's Argument For The Existence Of God Essay

    829 Words  | 4 Pages

    Hambourger’s argument from design argues for the existence of god based on the perceived evidence of deliberate design in the world/universe. To further elaborate on the concepts he uses, Hambourger uses three main concepts; determinism, chance, and mere hap. Hambourger’s argument from design claims that though many things occur by chance, there are some things which we cannot simply accept to have happened by chance, and must therefore have some common explanation in the causal chain of events connecting the two events. For instance the universe is created by many states of affairs coming together. If some slight changes had occurred, the end result could have been vastly different than it currently is.

    Read More

  • George Zimmerman's Final Argument

    384 Words  | 2 Pages

    I have to admit that Zimmerman’s talk was hard at times for me to comprehend. I would love feedback if I understood his divine argument wrong, because I have had a few discussions about it with my peers and many took away different views from his final argument for a divine being, and in this paper I will explain how I understood his final argument. To come upon the divine being of God, he had to eliminate all the other contingent and necessary options believed by other philosophers and scientists through reasoning. He explained how it wasn’t possible for their to be no answer for the cosmos, nor were any of the contingent explanations of science, philosophy, or an infinite past made any sense.

    Read More

  • The Wager Rhetorical Analysis

    739 Words  | 3 Pages

    He introduces the idea with a game, a simple wager of " heads or tails". However, in his game, one side of the coin represents the belief that God exist, while the other means that God does not exist. What we bet on in Pascal's Wager is also more than your ordinary school yard gamble with higher stake. In this wager, betting our entire lives, as well as the infinite beyond which we live on this

    Read More

  • Reading R. Crumb: Chapter Analysis

    1153 Words  | 5 Pages

    Although I grew up in a religious household, I myself have not been religious since I became an adult. My memories of Genesis are of a rather boring book with lots of “begats” and stories that are so dry they lose all relatability. Reading R. Crumb’s illustrated book of Genesis brought the dry stories of the bible to life. The people became human with real emotions and I found it fascinating to see how their construct of a god was a reflection of themselves. The first chapter has God creating man in his own image, apparently emotionally as well as physically, as God seems to have all the same base feelings that humans do.

    Read More

  • Review Of The Article '3 Compelling Reasons I Am Pro-Life'

    1037 Words  | 5 Pages

    Within the argument that the author is fighting for he fails to provide a solid point by using the logical fallacies Ad Hominem. This fallacy is defined as Attacking your opponents' character or personal traits instead of engaging with their argument. The author implies that people who do not believe in God do not have a moral compass and therefore should not have a right to speak on the issue of abortion because god has created

    Read More

  • William Paley's The Teleological Argument

    802 Words  | 4 Pages

    Therefore, the world is not like a machine and because the analogy between a machine and the world collapses then there is no reason to believe that an intelligent designer created the world. Another alternative is that the world is actually more like a living organism than it is to a machine. This route would prove the second part of premise one ‘…parts adjusted to each other, with means to ends’. This would entail that the world was created in much the same way plants are produced. Therefore the world is an offspring of another world or worlds bigger and older and evolution gives us many credible justifications for how substances like plants and even animals came into existence.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Pascal's Argument For Belief In God

    639 Words  | 3 Pages

    If you grant this argument as valid, and are consequentially moved to choose to believe in God through reason, you are now meet with the obstacle of convincing yourself to believe. Pascal says that in this case you should not try to convince yourself by trying to further prove God’s existence, but instead you should observe those who have

    Read More

  • Summary Of Galileo's Letter To Grand-Duchess Christina '

    456 Words  | 2 Pages

    He points out that the Bible cannot be taken literally because sometimes it can be interpreted in different ways. The Bible was written for the common people and illiterate to understand, and to prove his point he mentions that the Bible gives God a body like ours while theologies believe God has no such features. He moves to his main point about who has the authority to determine what is true and untrue. He argues that what is scientifically proven will to understand the Bible true meaning.

    Read More

  • The Design Argument: Does God Exist

    965 Words  | 4 Pages

    The Design Argument The question of whether God truly exists has been debated between believers and non-believers for centuries. Also known as the Teleological Argument, the Design Argument argued by William Paley states that there are so many intricate details and designs in our world that there must be a creator. In addition, it also argues that this world could not have been created by chance alone due to the characteristics that make it the perfect condition for human life to exist (Pecorino). In this essay, I will be giving a brief overview of what the Design Argument is, then providing evidence and reasoning in favor of the argument, then addressing the criticisms of the argument, then comparing both sides of the argument, then finally

    Read More

  • Walter Sinnott-Armstrong's Argument Analysis

    2349 Words  | 10 Pages

    He also refers to the cosmological argument to show that God is an all-powerful being who created the universe out of nothing. Furthermore, he claims that suffering in the world is moral in the sense that suffering inflicted on innocents is genuinely evil. Without a God, there would be no objective morals, thus, evil proves God’s existence, as things would not be considered good or evil without a God (Craig, p. 126). In conclusion, evil proves God’s existence and thus the question as to why God permits evil does not work to disprove His existence.

    Read More

  • Descartes And Paley's Argument Analysis

    925 Words  | 4 Pages

    He further elaborates on this watch saying that even if you had never seen a watch made or known someone to make it you would still recognize that the watch had a creator. Also the watch at times may go wrong, even if this happens it still does not prove that the watch does not have a creator. Further that the watch has parts whose functions are unknown this still does not determine that the watch does not have a creator. Ultimately what this argument comes down to is that the watch is an analogy for the universe and or human beings. All of these things he attributed to the watch is in like fashion attributed to the universe.

    Read More

  • Thomas Aquinas Cosmological Argument

    1784 Words  | 8 Pages

    As he goes into depth on his opinion of the existence of God with each point he gives and their explanations, it is clear to see that his “five ways” argument is persuasive and valid. With his helpful and insightful thinkings, it is evident that God does very much exist and is the all powerful being that created the universe around us. I also agree that this first cause argument on the cosmological argument is a sound argument and that God is the “something” outside the universe that is responsible to explain the existence of the

    Read More

  • Frankenstein Complex And Asimov's Three Laws Essay

    1166 Words  | 5 Pages

    “Nor could I consider the magnitude and complexity of my plan as any argument of its impracticability. It was with these feelings that I began the creation of a human

    Read More

  • Existence Of God Analysis

    1027 Words  | 5 Pages

    In this argument we already assumed that there may be possibility that God exist and finally we reached where we started. So this argument does not give us the exact information about existence of God. There are many objections on this argument but still it is a powerful argument. In my opinion, this argument is not much satisfactory. It describes that existence is greater than imagination.

    Read More

More about Paley's Argument Analysis

Open Document