The Teleological Argument

The teleological argument, which has also been called the argument from design, is one of my favorites. It was originally set forth by William Paley, a professor at Cambridge in the late eighteenth century. Rather than give the premises and conclusion of the argument, I will tell a short story that demonstrates this argument best.

If you are walking along the beach and find a beautiful golden watch that accurately tells time with an hour, minute, and second hand, where will you think the watch came from? Most likely, you will think that the watch had a maker or designer who put the watch together. Somehow, after making and potentially selling the watch, the watch was lost. Perhaps it fell out of a beach bag, or perhaps it was lost to sea in a ship wreck. Regardless of how the watch got there, it is very likely that the watch had a designer. As big as the ocean is, I doubt anyone would look out to the sea and think to themselves, "this watch must have been tossed around in the sea for years and molded into the perfectly working mechanism it is today." This watch we will call a teleological system. A teleological system is any mechanism that exhibits design.

We can apply the same story to the universe. It has many pieces that work together in incredible fashion. This can be seen on a large scale: The sun rising consistently, the stars rotating according to season, and the tides rising and falling. It can also be seen on a much more minute scale: DNA copying itself, cells joining together to create new life, and the brain sending signals to your foot to get it to move. The world is full of teleological systems, and many systems contain many smaller systems working together seamlessly. If one would assume a simple watch is made by a designer, why would one not think that all of the intricate "machines" in our universe do not also have a designer? Why would one think that a much more difficult system should have come about by random chance? It would seem, then, that there is some good reason to believe in God.

The Israelites out of Egypt

Thousands of years ago the Israelites were slaves in Egypt. They had been slaves for several generations, but they were eventually let go. I am not going to talk about the plagues or the parting of the red sea, but rather the beginning of the Jewish Religion.

The Jewish Law that was written by the Israelites while they were in the desert is one of the most complex religions in history. More importantly, it was one of the first monotheistic religions. It also became the most important and influential belief system in history.

How do those facts work as evidence for God? As I said before, the Israelites were slaves for generations. This means that they were uneducated and living in a very polytheistic country. When they left Egypt, it would have made sense if they began following a religion that was similar to Egypt’s, but they created an entire new one that was totally different from Egypt. The complexity of the religion, and the benefits of following many of the laws in that time, would have been impossible for a small and uneducated society to put together and then follow. But they did, and than their religion survived for thousands of years and changed the world.

The fact that such a small and uneducated society was responsible for the most influential and revolutionary religion in history, a religion that was completely different from that of the Egyptians, suggests that there was probably a divine influence guiding them. For this reason, I think it is rational to believe in God.