User talk:Edward Ockham/Argument from design
- 'design' means to work out or mark out something (from designare, to mark out or describe)
- 'telos' means purpose or end
- 'purpose' means a fixed intention or determination, from French porposer, to plan, ultimately from Latin proponere to propose.
- 'reason' is also a connected word
The IEP says 'Design arguments are empirical arguments for the existence of God'. Or could they be arguments for the existence of an intelligent or conscious principle? Doesn't have to be God.
SEP Random, unplanned, unexplained accident just couldn't produce the order, beauty, elegance, and seeming purpose that we experience in the natural world around us
Teleological arguments (or arguments from design) by contrast begin with a much more specialized catalogue of properties and end with a conclusion concerning the existence of a designer with the intellectual properties (knowledge, purpose, understanding, foresight, wisdom, intention) necessary to design the things exhibiting the special properties in question. In broad outline, then, teleological arguments focus upon finding and identifying various traces of the operation of a mind in nature's temporal and physical structures, behaviors and paths. Order of some significant type is usually the starting point of design arguments.
So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot. (Chesterton 1908, 106–7)
If we are confronted with something which nature unaided by an intelligence truly could not or would not produce (e.g., a DVD player), a design conclusion of some sort is very nearly inescapable.
Platonic and Aristotelian Roots of Teleological Arguments in Cosmology and Biology http://web.missouri.edu/~ariewa/Teleology.pdf
Aristotle’s naturalistic teleology must be distinguished from Plato’s anthropomorphic one
Teleological explanation in Aristotle pertains broadly to goal-directed actions or behavior. Aristotle invokes teleology when an event or action pertains to goals: “that for the sake of which” (e.g. Phys II 194b32).
In the Phaedo Plato recounts Socrates’ criticisms of the Pre-Socratics for missing the real cause of the orderly arrangements of natural phenomena. Anaxagoras explains the orderly arrangements of the cosmos by means of mechanistic principles of motion of matter such as air, water and ether. Simple material motions are what Anaxagoras take to be the Reason for the motion in the cosmos. Socrates is unsatisfied. He expected Anaxagoras to explain how the natural order was the best of possible world orders.
These patterns do not happen by accident. Rather they occur in every instance where the relevant organization is found, e.g., in the intentional production of artifacts (housebuilding) or the non-deliberate formation of natural objects (webmaking, nestmaking, roots descending, leaves shading fruit). It is in this respect that Aristotle famously remarks that “as in art, so in nature” (Phys. 199a9-10) and “as in nature, so in art” (199a15-16). The same pattern that explains certain organizations found in nature also explains the same organizations found in artifacts (Charles 1995, p. 115). This ‘certain organization’ is just goal-directed activity. Aristotle infers teleology from patterns of order and arrangement. We’ll call this the “argument from pattern”.
