Dr. Sahar Joakim, What is the Teleological Argument for God?

Here, Sahar Joakim briefly describes the Teleological Argument for God.

[myhopefullyworld-savingphi]

So, the idea of this argument is that things in the universe appear designed, and so seem more likely to have a designer because of that.

You could look at it that way. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. You could look at how humans can build complex objects and extend that reasoning to conclude that an intelligent being might have built the complex structures in the universe too. Now, of course, unintelligent animals produce things of great complexity all the time. Termite mounds can be extremely complex, for example. Your explanation for that would probably be that they were guided by some higher intelligence and that's how they built such complex designs.

However, there is the opposite way of looking at things too that I don't see as being any less rational. You could look at the universe and think, "Hmm...it looks like unintelligent sources can build extremely complex structures. I'll assume that's just the norm then, because that's what seems to be the case in the world around me. I guess the universe didn't need an intelligent source to be created.

So, if you want to show that an intelligent designer created our universe, you need more evidence than just complexity, because that could have been created by an unintelligent source too. What you'd ideally have would be both evidence of an intelligent designer, and some very unique examples of complexity that seem like they'd be quite unlikely if not designed by intelligence....such as, for example, the words "Islam is True" stitched in microscopic letters into all of our blood vessels.

Some people believe they've found those kinds of examples of design that seem eerily similar to the constructs engineered by human intelligence, such as how some people have compared mitochondria to human factories. I personally don't see that as enough evidence, because there are other unintelligent explanations...but I'll grant that it's a decent start to the search for intelligent design...maybe. Although, one thing to definitely keep in mind is that if we're seeing these organisms build these structures constantly through procreation, I don't know why any one-time modification of these organisms by an intelligent source would have lasted through all that. I would have thought that if they can retain these structures (like mitochondria) through all that time and evolution, they'd have evolved on their own at some point. Factories and intelligent-designed things tend to decay if not maintained, after all. If the Earth naturally replenishes something though (such as the materials to form cells) it looks to me like that would mean there's some property of the Earth that would have created them...if they're being reproduced all the time using Earth's materials.

Furthermore, if you're searching for signs of intelligent design, you've got the problem of not knowing the designer exists yet. Even if you found aliens powerful enough to build a universe, that doesn't mean they necessarily built ours. (I'm intentionally ignoring the prospect of God, rather than aliens, having created the universe for now because of how much less likely I consider that prospect. I'll explain why I have that view later).

So, with unintelligent possible explanations for how our universe came to be, and a lack of culprits, I'd heartily recommend being at most no closer to confident than agnostic to the prospect that aliens created our universe.

Now what about the prospect of a God having created our universe? Well, the way I see it a God would be best defined as a powerful alien with many traits not known to exist in reality, much less within one being, so I'd see God as being a less likely answer than powerful, flawed, aliens in every way.

God is often defined as being omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, having thoughts that exist outside a brain, being eternal and usually possessing the traits of some organized religion's description of it. I don't see examples of omniscience, omnipotence, thoughts existing outside a brain or eternal life forms in our universe. The idea of an omnibenevolent God seems countered by the state of our universe, if we look to the Problem of Evil argument. Most religious texts involve events that break the laws that seem to govern reality and I'd argue are therefore best defined as impossible until someone figures out how they could be possible. Aliens don't need any of those qualities. They just need to be organic or mechanical beings, or evolved from them at least, and I know at least organic beings can exist, because humans do, and I could see how mechanical beings could exist too.

Gods though...I hardly even know what a God is. I think the reason for that is, is because usually when people ponder that question much - really think about it, they ultimately find out its a hollow concept - God is basically undefined, and with that definition, the view of God most people have can't possibly exist.

So, I don't know why I'd believe in any of the traits gods are typically defined as having that seem to not exist in the universe, much less multiple of them contained within one being, and those problems are compounded the more of them there are within one being.

Regarding my personal views...I think our universe might very well have been designed by intelligence. The best reason for that which I can think of is that, if universes can be designed by intelligent beings, every universe not designed by an intelligent being could contain numerous beings who were. What makes be suspect it was no a God who created our universe is just the huge amount of competition that God would have in terms of other possible creators of our universe...such as flawed mortal aliens who have only traits known to exist in our universe and none of the physics-breaking powers Gods are defined as usually having that we typically think of as impossible when not describing them as traits of Gods.

[deviceinside]

God created Sahar, and Sahar created this Youtube channel

[OmAr_Kh.]

Great video
I am a Muslim but teleological argument is not good argument
because it contains begging the question fallacy in meaning of word design