Quick questions on The teleological argument: Paley, Tennant, Hume and Darwin - WJEC A-Level Religious Studies

If you found a watch on a heath, its intricate parts adapted to a purpose ("contrivance") would force you to conclude it had a maker, even if you never saw one. The natural world (Paley's example is the human eye) shows the same marks of design, parts adapted to ends, so it too must have a designer, and only God is adequate to the task. Paley's argument combines design qua purpose (parts working towards an end) and design qua regularity (the order of the cosmos, such as planetary motion).

The decisive question for the design argument today is whether Darwin disposes of it entirely or only of one version. Paley's biological examples, the eye above all, were the strongest cases for design in 1802, and natural selection has indeed supplied an undirected mechanism that explains exactly such adaptation, so that part of the argument is genuinely undermined. But Tennant's anthropic argument operates at a level Darwin does not touch: evolution by natural selection can only occur in a universe whose fundamental constants permit stable matter, chemistry and life, and the apparent fine-tuning of those constants is not itself a product of evolution.

What does Paley's watch analogy aim to show? [2 marks]

State Tennant's anthropic argument. [2 marks]

Evaluate the view that the design argument no longer works after Darwin. [20 marks]