One of the so-called "proofs of God," the teleological argument asserts that the beauty and purposiveness evident in nature points to the existence of God. It is also known as the "argument from design."
The more famous version of this argument is what is often called Paley's Watchmaker, who argued that if we found a watch along the road, it must of necessity require us to think of a watch-maker.
It is generally felt that the argument has been effectively countered by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. The evidences, he argued, are ambiguous and establishes, at best, nothing more than the existence of a designer or designers, not God.
The argument has received its most violent, but also desparate, attack from Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, who thinks that the design and purposiveness evident in nature is only apparent, and that evolutionary forces can account sufficiently for them. Dawkins is rather a contrarian; he argues that evolution that produces the appearance of design and purpose is actually purposeless yet he spends his entire life purposefully, and quite rudely, knocking down those who see purpose in nature.
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