II. The Teleological Argument, or Argument from Order and Useful Collocation in Nature.
This is not properly an argument from design to a designer; for that design implies a designer is simply an identical proposition. It may be more correctly stated as follows: Order and useful collocation pervading a system respectively imply intelligence and purpose as the cause of that order and collocation. Since order and useful collocation pervade the universe, there must exist an intelligence adequate to the production of this order, and a will adequate to direct this collocation to useful ends.
Etymologically, "teleological argument" = argument to ends or final causes, that is, "causes which, beginning as a thought, work themselves out into a fact as an end or result" (Porter, Hum. Intellect, 592-618);--health, for example, is the final cause of exercise, while exercise is the efficient cause of health. This definition of the argument would be broad enough to cover the proof of a designing intelligence drawn from the constitution of man. This last, however, is treated as a part of the Anthropological Argument, which follows this, and the Teleological Argument covers only the proof of a designing intelligence drawn from nature. Hence Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Bohn's trans.), 381, calls it the physico-theological argument. On methods of stating the argument, see Bib. Sac., Oct. 1867:625. See also Hedge, Ways of the Spirit, 155-185; Mozley, Essays Hist. and Theol., 2:365-413.
Hicks, in his Critique of Design-Arguments, 347-389, makes two arguments instead of one: (1) the argument from _order_ to _intelligence_, to which he gives the name Eutaxiological; (2) the argument from _adaptation_ to _purpose_, to which he would restrict the name Teleological. He holds that teleology proper cannot prove _intelligence_, because in speaking of "ends" at all, it must assume the very intelligence which it seeks to prove; that it actually does prove simply the _intentional exercise_ of an intelligence whose existence has been previously established. "Circumstances, forces or agencies converging to a definite rational result imply volition--imply that this result is intended--is an end. This is the major premise of this new teleology." He objects to the term "final cause." The end is not a cause at all--it is a motive. The characteristic element of cause is power to produce an effect. Ends have no such power. The will may choose them or set them aside. As already assuming intelligence, ends cannot prove intelligence.