Saturday, March 5, 2011

More Fuel for the Teleological Argument

The teleological argument for God's existence points to various features of the natural world and tries to make the case that God (or at any rate a cosmic designer) must be responsible for them and hence must exist. There are of course many versions of the teleological argument, but speaking generally, that's how they work.

The features that these arguments point to range from the intricate detail found in the fundamental constituents of physical reality, to the incomprehensible vastness of a universe which is somehow hospitable to us.

I recently came across a splendid website which gives an interactive "Scale of the Universe." It gives you a glimpse of the relative size of the constituents of the universe (from atoms to viruses to planets to stars), and of the universe itself. The site is both extremely informative and mind-blowing. What you see there raises the question: how can a universe that is at once so vast and yet composed of almost infinitesimally small building blocks have come to be purely as the result of chance?