Essay practice

Good morning,
This easter I am trying to improve my grades for A-level OCR Philosophy,ethics and theology,
As such I have wrote an essay and I was hoping that it could be marked if anyone had the time and experience.
Thankyou!

Assess Paley’s design argument.
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The design argument by Paley is a teleological argument that attempt to prove the existence of God just by looking at the world around us. He believes that the world is so intricately complex it cannot have just occurred by chance, an intelligent designer must have made it. To elaborate on this Paley provides the example of a fine watch, which must have been made by a skilled watchmaker and the world is the same having been made by the intelligent designer that is God. This essay shall argue that Paley is incredibly convincing as whilst there are counters to his work, he is able to defend them and prove the existence of God.

To help explain his argument he uses the analogy of a fine watch he says that the pieces fit together so perfectly with such complexity as to complete the excellent function of incredibly accurate time-telling that it is not possible that it could have ever happened by chance. This argument and an analogy is largely convincing as it is logically intuitive and thus is hard to prove wrong. However scholar Hume does disagree as he says that analogies (such as a watch analogy) can be misleading, Paley’s argument works particularly well when applied to a watch, but if applied to other items (such as a pineapple) is it really fair to say that a pineapple needs a clever designer and couldn’t have just been made by chance, thus Hume would argue that the watch analogy is misleading and thus cannot be trusted. However, Paley can defend this as his argument does not rely on the analogy of the watch, the analogy is only there to assist people with understanding the argument. Therefore, it would still seem that Paley’s argument is credible in proving the existence of God.

Another way in which Paley’s designer argument is incredibly effective is that we can see examples of how complex and intricately designed the world is all around us from the orbits of the planets, to the muscles of animals to the complexities of the human eye, it is clear that there must have been something intelligent designing all of them. On the other hand Charles Darwin, who proposed the theory of evolution in his book, ‘the origin of species’ disagrees with Paley as he says the reason why the muscles of animals and the human eye work so well is through millions of years of evolution with only the very best individuals in a community being able to survive, reproduce and pass on their genes to the next generation. Additionally, the theory of evolution has been proven with plenty of scientific evidence and experiments thus is very likely to be correct and Paley’s argument appears to be incorrect. However this criticism is actually fine as Paley would just say that evolution is such a complicated and intricate process that it must have had an intelligent designer and thus it is God that designed and permitted evolution to occur thus Paley’s designer argument is still correct and does still prove the existence of God.

To conclude, Paley’s design argument is incredibly convincing as it is logically sound with a useful analogy to assist us in the understanding of the argument and there is so much intricate and complex stuff in the world that logically there must have been an intelligent designer to design all of it, and this intelligent designer must be God. Therefore, Paley’s design argument is incredibly persuasive in the argument that God exists and is able to effectively combat counters from other scholars, thus Paley’s designer argument is incredibly convincing.