The Fifth Argument, or Fifth Way, was proposed by St. Thomas Aquinas, a philosopher who lived in eleventh century. He tried to prove the existence of God in the form of a deductively valid argument. His argument is as follows: (1) among objects which have goal …show more content…
He says that organisms were created by an intelligent designer by using, by inductive reasoning, the analogy of a watchmaker. A watch is a complex product and made by a designer, a watchmaker. Paley’s design argument can be summarized as follows: that the intricacy and adeptness of organism are best explained by suggesting the existence of an extremely intelligent designer. What is the reasoning involved in the Watchmaker Analogy? David Hume, who discussed different design arguments in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, says that Watchmaker argument is conducted by an inductive argument or an argument from analogy, while Elliott Sober, an author of Core Questions in Philosophy, says that this is abductive …show more content…
There is another criticism made by Hume that organisms are too complex to create, and it is impossible for any creature to make such complex things.
The problem for the design argument, that Sober mentioned in the text is we cannot use induction, because the number of sample for the design argument is zero. The only universe we have ever experienced is the one we inhabit, and we have not seen our universe being made by an intelligent designer nor have we seen an intelligent designer make the organisms that exist in our universe. This is the problem that all human being can tell with their experience.
To conclude, the design argument is for the existence of God, or an intelligent creator of everything. The major two version of the design argument are Aquinas’s Fifth Argument and Paley’s Watchmaker Argument. Aquinas’s Fifth Argument is mistaken because of the Birthday Fallacy, and Paley’s Watchmaker Analogy has a problem because there is a huge gap of complexity between a watch and organism. The objections to the design argument are the Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory by natural selection and the argument by David Hume, which says that organisms are too complex to create, and it is impossible for any