Reconsidering the Place of Teleological Arguments for the Existence of God in the Light of the ID/Evolution Controversy
Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 83:227 - 240 (2009)
| Abstract | Prompted by questions raised in the public arena concerning the validity of arguments for the existence of God based on "design" in the universe, I explore traditional teleological argument for the existence of God. Using the arguments offered by Thomas Aquinas as fairly representative of this classical line of argumentation going back to Aristotle, I attempt to uncover the hidden premises and construct arguments for the existence of God which are deductive in nature. To justify the premises of Aquinas’s argument, I begin by presenting an argument to justify the existence of "final causes," with a focus on answering questions about the biological implications of these causes for evolutionary theory. Then, I attempt to construct two teleological proofs for the existence of God. Finally, I offer some implications of this reasoning for the contemporary disputes over ID/evolution in education | |||||||||
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