ry conclusion of the Christian God’s existence. Added to this, in special response to Sober, we could easily dispute the alleged coherence of God being the intelligent designer, by appealing to something like the problem of evil. Does the intrinsic concept of God hold a somewhat contradictory note if He was to be the designer of an obviously flawed world?We may next consider the actual feasibility of the premises. An interesting point of discussion may be to wonder about the proposed analogy between watches and biological organisms. This is to say, we might wonder at the plausibility of Premise 4, from our first formulation of the argument in inference to the best explanation terms. It does seem reasonable to accept that watches are distinctly recognisable as the work of intelligent design. However, this may very well be due to the fact watches are made up of non-living parts and that it is almost ridiculous to think that as such they could come together into a semblance of functionality of their volition. It is not altogether clear that the intuitive explanation for watches should extend to biological entities, for the reason that the two things are very distinct from one another. The most telling blow to Paley’s premises – sociologically speaking – came from Darwin, when he proposed another explanation for the evidence of design in nature, in the form of evolutionary theory. This posed a serious problem for perhaps the most important premise in Paley’s argument, represented as Premise 6 in our first formulation. Finally, the esoteric members of Paley’s sceptics were provided with a seemingly more credible explanation. This, though, did not by any means spell the final demise of teleological arguments, as Dawkins and Sober would have us believe. Paley’s seemingly dead thesis has been recently exhumed due to developments in cosmology; to hopefully have physics breathe some lif...
