Show you have read and understood Paley and Hume 

In this essay you need to show you have read and understood Paley and Hume and understand the debate over teleology and its implications. You must include in your essay the following (in the order you think makes most sense) and you must answer the question “Does Paley’s teleological argument succeed in proving God’s existence?”

Show you have read and understood Paley and Hume

Paley and Hume
In this essay you need to show you have read and understood Paley and Hume and understand the debate over teleology and its implications.

You must include in your essay the following (in the order you think makes most sense) and you must answer the question “Does Paley’s teleological argument succeed in proving God’s existence?”

Do not limit your discussion to the following (e.g. evolution isn’t mention below) so always feel free to add relevant material you have learned, but you must cover these in your essay to pass.

(i)                Explain Paley’s teleological argument for God’s existence.

(ii)              Explain Paley’s first 3 replies to problems (begins p.10)

(iii)            Explain the point(s) being made when he writes:  “The watch is found, in the course of its movements, to produce another watch similar to itself…”

(iv)            Explain the point being mad in Paley’s discussion of the corn and the mill (have a short quote from the text).

(v)              From Hume: quote a short passage that makes a good criticism against the teleological argument and explain that point.

(vi)            Explain the point(s) being made in the following edited passage from David Hume (e.g. what are they arguing about and how it relates to Paley’s argument, is some of it supportive or critical etc.)

“Now if we survey the universe, so far as it falls under our knowledge, it bears a great resemblance to an animal or organized body, and seems actuated with a like principle of life and motion. ….each part and member, in performing its proper offices, operates both to its own preservation and to that of the whole….the world, therefore, I infer, is an animal, and the Deity is the soul of the world, actuating it, and actuated by it………(Philo) it seems to bear a stronger resemblance to a vegetable than to an animal, and your inference would be so far inconclusive in favour of the soul of the world”