David Stewart and Arguments for God's Existence

David Stewart and Arguments for God's Existence

1. William Paley uses the complexity of a watch and its parts along with order and motion to suggest an intelligent designer.

2. The world and its order are being compared to artifacts that exemplify design, intelligence and mechanical skill.

3. A watch or another artifact might be imperfect; for example, a watch might seldom tell the correct time or sometime fail to work properly. Nevertheless, one might still arrive at the conclusion that watches have designers, albeit imperfect ones. (p. 145)

4. Most people would not be inclined to believe that a watch just came to be organized in the form of a watch by an impersonal "principle of order" (p. 146); watches do not assume their respective forms by chance or random events (p. 146). Compare Heb. 3:4.

5. Another way to confront secular views of God is by emphasizing problematic features of things that infinitely regress (p. 148). See the first and second "way" of Aquinas' cosmological argument. If the universe has always existed and did not have a beginning, it would be an example of infinite regression. However, what are the chances that the cosmos infinitely regresses?

6. Immanuel Kant possibly makes a case for God or a supreme being by appealing to the existence of morality and ethics (p. 154). Is it possible for morality to exist without God? See Romans 2:14-15.

See David Stewart, Exploring the Philosophy of Religion, Seventh Edition (London and Toronto: Prentice Hall, 2010), ISBN: 978-0-205-64519-0.