The Teleological Argument

• "nearly all things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature's everyday performance" - Mill
• "either there is no god or there exists an incompetent and immoral god" - Mill
• "a single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season; a flight of locusts or a flood desolates a district; a trifling of chemical change in an edible root starves a million people" - Mill
• "we used to say that God was so wise that he could make all things. Now we know that he is much wiser than that, he can make all things make themselves" - Charles Kingsley
• "it is plain, that they achieve their end not fortuitously but designedly" - Aquinas
• "every indication of contrivance every manifestation of design which exist in the watch exists within nature" - Paley
• "from observing the growth of a hair, can we learn anything concerning the generation of a man?" - Hume
• "the world is very faulty and imperfect and may be only the first rude essay of some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it ashamed of his poor performance" - Hume
• "this would suggest that... many words have been botched and bungled" -Hume
• "the theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organised complexity" - Richard Dawkins
• "what plainer manifestation of design can there be?" - Paley
• "we have no reason to fear, therefore, our being forgotten, or overlooked, or neglected" - Paley
• "it is a happy world after all. The air, the earth, the water teem with delighted existence"
• "it is not necessary that a machine be perfect, in order to show with what design it was made;" - Paley
• "it is far more like an animal or a vegetable than a watch or a knitting loom... we have no reason to suppose that the universe is designed. Perhaps it simply grew!" - Paley
• "either there is no god or their exists an incompetent or immoral god" - Mill
• A god who "Wills misery" and a world that is "Red in tooth and claw"- Mill
• "nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, throws them to wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them to death, freezes them, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her vapors, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of the worst Roman emperor never surpassed" - Mill
• "if the law of all creation were Justice, and The creator were omnipotent, then each person's share of suffering and happiness be exactly proportioned to that person's good or evil deeds" - Mill
• "like confessing murder" - Charles Darwin
• "some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end and this being we call God" - Aquinas
• "evolution revealed a world more haphazard than the ordered world, without apparent order" - Don Cuppitt