The teleological argument begins by stating a special kind of argument, an a posteriori argument. An a posteriori argument is an argument based on the knowledge of experiences encountered in the world. For Paley, the a posteriori argument is established as he imagines himself nature walking, only to stumble upon a watch: a pocket watch, whose function is made visible through a transparent glass and made possible through gears and springs. Paley retrieves the watch and questions how such an object came to be in the middle of vegetation and is easily intrigued to reflect about the nature of the watch. Let us reflect about the physical attributes of the watch. Imagine for a second that the body of the watch was covered in highly polished gold metal and in the middle of its body laid a transparent glass. The glass lets us see two disproportionate metallic rods whose ends are encrusted with small diamonds. Apart from ...
...erfect goodness and is morally good all the time. Paley's supreme being is never attributed with being a good or bad, loving or hateful, individual. A second important characteristic of God is that he is omniscient; he knows everything about anything there is to know; although Paley's supreme being is intelligent enough to engender the first creation, it does not imply that he knows about all the subsequent creations which rose from that first creation. Thirdly, God is considered to be all-powerful or omnipotent while the supreme being possesses the power to create the first creation. Lastly, God is an eternal being whose existence defies space and time. At the start of Paley's a posteriori argument, it was concluded that while anything that shows evidence of creation has a creator, such creator exists or has existed at one point in time but is by no means eternal.
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- William Paley’s, The Argument from Design, talks a great deal about a being coming across a watch and questioning why the watch was there and how the watch was created there. He stated that there must have been a creator to the watch. Everything that has a design has a creator and that how nobody had ever seen the creator at work as he crafts this piece of art altogether to the point of where everything is put in place and has a purpose, that if even one thing was out of place that the watch would not tick, or for that matter, never work at all.... [tags: teleological arguments]
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