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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Groundwork in Islamic Philosophy Teleological Arguments The version of the argument from design is best known in contemporary philosophy as presented by William Paley (1805) in his Natural Theology. He presents us with an analogy of a watch. Suppose that while walking in a deserted remote location one comes across a watch. Upon examining this device one may ask themselves how did this object come into existence.

Surely it could not be by pure chance, it is composed of intricate and complex internal design. We are likely to think that it was a product of an intelligent designer, i.e. there must be a watchmaker. In the same way Paley argues that the universe is much more complex and manifestly designed. The extraordinary design is evident from planets and galaxies at the cosmic level to human cells and atoms at the quantum level. Therefore this world must have an intelligent creator.

This form of the argument can be seen as an inference to the best explanation. That is given the remarkable phenomena of the universe, the best possible explanation for this, must be the existence of God. Elliot Sober explains this in terms of the Likelihood Principle, which he defines as: "O" strongly favors "H1" over "H2" if and only if "H1" assigns to "O" a probability that is much bigger than the probability that "H2" assigns to "O" [Sober, pp. 31-33].

Here "O" is an observation, and "H" is a hypothesis. The likelihood may be mathematically written as [P (O/H)]: the probability of the observation given the hypothesis. The principle in probability theory form would state that "O" strongly favors "H1" over "H2" if and only if "P(O/H1) >> P(O/H2)." This Sober makes clear is not to be confused with the Probability Principle which states can be written as "[P (H/O)]." These are two important distinct principles.

Sober gives an example of the observation (O) that while sitting in a cabin one hears rumblings in the attic. On the basis of this one forms the hypothesis (H) that there are gremlins in the attic and they are bowling. Now it is clear that the P (O/H) is very high, that is, if there were gremlin's bowling (H) the likelihood of the rumbling noise (O) would be quite high. But P (H/O) in this case is very low.

Since given the rumbling noise (O), the probability of the explanation being bowling gremlins (H) is small. "The gremlin hypothesis has a high likelihood but a low probability given the noises we hear" [Sober, p. 32].