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Atheistic Teleological Arguments


The Anthropic Coincidences, Evil and the Disconfirmation of Theism (1995) by Quentin Smith
“The anthropic principle or the associated anthropic coincidences have been used by philosophers such as John Leslie (1989), William Lane Craig (1988) and Richard Swinburne (1990) to support the thesis that God exists. In this paper I shall examine Swinburne’s argument from the anthropic coincidences. I will show that Swinburne’s premises, coupled with his principle of credulity and the failure of his theodicy in The Existence of God, dis-confirms theism and confirms instead the hypothesis that there exists a malevolent creator of the universe.”

Causation and the Logical Impossibility of a Divine Cause (1996) by Quentin Smith
“Virtually all contemporary theists, agnostics and atheists … [have] assumed that the sentence, ‘God is the originating cause of the universe’, does not express a logical contradiction . . . . I believe the prevalence of this assumption is due to the fact that philosophers have not undertaken the requisite sort of metaphysical investigation into the nature of causation. This investigation is the purpose of this paper; specifically, I shall argue that the thesis that the universe has an originating divine cause is logically inconsistent with all extant definitions of causality and with a logical requirement upon these and all possible valid definitions or theories of causality. I will conclude that the cosmological and teleological arguments for a cause of the universe may have some force but that these arguments, traditionally understood as arguments for the existence of God, are in fact arguments for the nonexistence of God.”