teleological argument
Noun
Meaning
teleological argument (plural teleological arguments)
(philosophy, theology) A type of argument for the existence of God, stating that orderliness of nature is evidence of design, therefore also of a designer.
Synonyms
Examples
Galen's connection of the teleological argument to discussions about the complexity of living things, and his insistence that this is possible for a practical scientist, foreshadows some aspects of modern uses of the teleological argument.
Also starting already in classical Greece, two approaches to the teleological argument developed, distinguished by their understanding of whether the natural order was literally created or not.
He paraphrases St.Thomas' teleological argument as follows: “Things in the world, especially living things, look as though they have been designed.
In terms of a teleological argument, the intuition in relation to a fine-tuned universe would be that God must have been responsible, if achieving such perfect conditions is so improbable.
Later, the teleological argument was accepted by Saint Thomas Aquinas and included as the fifth of his " Five Ways " of proving the existence of God.
Leshem, A., Newton on Mathematics and Spiritual Purity, Springer, 2003, p. 20. The German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz disagreed with Newton's view of design in the teleological argument.