The argument from design is also referred to as the teleological argument, which comes from the word telos, meaning purpose in the Greek language, in other words teleology is the study of purpose. The argument from design is Thomas Aquinas’s final way of proving the existence of God. Aquinas is an Italian philosopher who was ranked as the most powerful thinker; he was highly influenced by Aristotle.
According to Aquinas’s argument, all things have a disposition or an order, in a way that when you look at the world, every object, every human and basically everything that exists had to be designed by someone, and that someone is God. Aquinas also believes that everything in this world has an aim, even the unintelligent beings, such as trees. For example, apple trees have a purpose of producing apples not bananas. There must be some intelligent being controlling and directing all the unintelligent to their end, and that being is in the name of God.
William Paley, an English philosopher who was the first to analyze the argument from design. He published a book called natural theology, where he demonstrated that by studying nature, we can show the existence of God. Paley uses the analogy of the watch to prove the existence of God. He concluded that the watch didn’t just appear out of nowhere, but was designed by an intelligent being. A watch implies a watchmaker, yet everything that exists in this world implies an even greater designer, which we believe is God.
The argument from design is A posteriori since they are not based on empirical evidence but from our own experiences. Aquinas explains that in this world there is order of causes, in the sense that a cause cannot be the cause of itself. Based on my perspectives and criticism, I believe that there is no clear evidence into why the universe needs a designer; it could have all existed naturally. The world maybe in its own nature that it is the way it is, it may have a predisposition to order. However, the teleological argument has received criticism from several famous philosophers as well, such as David Hume, Charles Darwin and so on. According to Hume, he criticized ‘Aquinas’s argument from design’ in his book named as “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion”, published in the year of 1779. Hume argues that us human beings have a limited level of knowledge towards the origin of the world and that we cannot simply conclude that there is only one designer behind the existence of this world. It is neither necessary nor apparent that there is even a designer in the first place. The world might have existed by random chance.
Thomas Aquinas and David Hume are two well known philosophers who came from different backgrounds. These two intellects have been the most influenced thinkers consisting of intelligence, although they both come to a different conclusion. The major difference in their theories would be on religious matters. Hume was atheist while Aquinas very much believed in God, and that’s why is wrote the five ways to prove the existence of God.