What Are The Main Features Of The Cosmological Argument

Of the three main styles of arguments for the existence of God – the cosmological, the teleological, and the ontological – the teleological is probably the second strongest of these arguments. The teleological argument is also the only one of these arguments that reasons to its conclusion inductively. This means that, unlike the cosmological and ontological arguments, the acceptance of the premises of the teleological argument does not commit you to the acceptance of its conclusion. It only commits you to a judgement about the probability of the conclusion. The style of reasoning typically adopted by this method is one that starts from a posteriori observations about our reality, and then reasons a priori – typically through analogy – to the

When laid out, the teleological argument is this: there exists a phenomenon of certain regularities of succession in the universe – such as the natural laws. The best explanation for the existence of this regularities is that they were created by a free and intelligent agent (P.104). The sub-argument that is supporting this is that we observe other regularities of succession in which we know the cause to be human (P.104). The natural regularities are similar to those that we observe to be caused by humans; thus, the cause of these regularities is probably similar to human cause – in that it is caused by a free intelligent agent (P.104). There are many criteria used to determine the strength of these two types of inductive arguments, and I am going to analyze each of these criteria to try and show the weaknesses in the argument. The criteria we are going to be looking at for the analogical argument is relevant similarities, relevant dissimilarities, number of instances compared, and diversity among cases. While determining the strength of the inference to the best explanation I will be looking at consistency, testability, fruitfulness, scope and