PHL 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Intelligent Designer, Omnipotence, Omnibenevolence
14 Sep 2016
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Document Summary
Teleological arguments for the existence of god purport to show that god must exists because the universe (or some feature of it) could only have been brought about by the hand of a conscious being. Telos translated from greek as purpose, end, or goal. Usually their structure is to point to one or more structures in the universe that seem to be designed and argue that design implies a designer. Paley"s argument epitomizes two argument forms we haven"t yet discussed: One or more of the premises are false. The argument commits some fallacy or other (e. g. circular reasoning) Is a non-deductive of the following form: The two compared phenomena are not similar. They are similar in some ways, but different relevant to the feature under consideration. The similarity between the two kinds of things is superficial, and not supported by looking at a wider sample size. There are unintended consequences to the analogy.
