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God must be good, Paley argues, because in many cases the designs seen in nature are beneficial, and because animals perceive pleasure, beyond what would be strictly necessary. Pain is admitted to exist, but even such things as venomous bites of snakes exist to a good end, namely defence or the capture of prey.
The argument from beauty (also the aesthetic argument) is an argument for the existence of a realm of immaterial ideas or, most commonly, for the existence of God, that roughly states that the evident beauty in nature, art and music and even in more abstract areas like the elegance of the laws of physics or the elegant laws of mathematics is ...
Natural theology, once also termed physico-theology, [1] is a type of theology that seeks to provide arguments for theological topics (such as the existence of a deity) based on reason and the discoveries of science, the project of arguing for the existence of God on the basis of observed natural facts, and through natural phenomena viewed as ...
Ward defended the utility of the five ways (for instance, on the fourth argument he states that all possible smells must pre-exist in the mind of God, but that God, being by his nature non-physical, does not himself stink) whilst pointing out that they only constitute a proof of God if one first begins with a proposition that the universe can ...
Cleanthes is an "experimental theist"—"an exponent of orthodox empiricism" [6] —who bases his beliefs about God's existence and nature upon a version of the teleological argument, which uses evidence of design in the universe to argue for God's existence and resemblance to the human mind.
These natural philosophers saw God as the first cause, and sought secondary causes to explain design in nature: the leading figure Sir John Herschel wrote in 1836 that by analogy with other intermediate causes "the origination of fresh species, could it ever come under our cognizance, would be found to be a natural in contradistinction to a ...