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Paley's Argument Analysis

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Recommended: Outline of the design argument

William Paley’s argument from design starts off with a man seeing a watch on the side of the road. The argument is whether or not someone designed the watch, or if the watch randomly just showed up there itself by random chance. He makes an analogy of watches and humans. He says that since there is a designer that made the watch, there must be a designer that made us humans. The reason that he compares watches to humans is that is because they are both complex and have parts that work very well together. He says that the designer for humans is God. I think the analogy does a great job of showing that humans have a designer, but I disagree with the argument that it shows that God created us.
Paley asks you to imagine that you have never …show more content…

It basically just throws God in without even talking about him. The argument does a great job at showing that there is a creator, but does nothing to explain about God. Once you believe that there is a designer then it opens up many doors by diving into the topic of God and maybe doing research. What makes more sense to believe in God is actually trying to learn about God. If you learn about the Judeo-Christian God, you’ll find out that he wants to be known. You’ll find out that he created us in his image and we can bring him glory. You’ll find out that God wants to have a relationship with you and that he loves you. It’s from these types of situations that you actually will believe in God, not from analogies that Paley uses that says that God is the creator by because of a comparison that he uses between watches and humans. He gave no evidence about the characteristics of the Judeo-Christian God and just basically said he proved God is real. Analogies like this do a good job at making you believe that there is a designer, but you have to do more to actually believe that the designer is God. To say right off the bat that you believed in God because of this analogy would not make much sense. If you tried to convince somebody that God was real you’re going to have to dive deeper into the conversation than this watch analogy. One of the reasons that lead me to believing in God is how complex we are. To think that we as humans came about as a result of chance does not make sense one bit. That being said, I’ve always believed in a designer, but it wasn’t always that I believed that God was the designer. There was more that I had to do to come to that

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