The Teleological Argument is failed, and should NEVER BE USED EVER AGAIN.

The TAG is a particularly useless argument for Gods (or even against Gods) as I shall outline below. It is a trivial statement that arguments which cannot support any conclusion are particularly useless, and that their use is misguided at best and in many situations their use would be outright dishonest. I see it as uncontroversial to identify that such arguments should not ever be used. The crux of my argument rests on the inability of form to inform history absent without external context. As there can never be external context to the universe, however, it seems to be an open and shut case against the TAG. Further, it is quite apparent that any proposed designer is necessarily complex, and if the complexiy and agency of human life in the universe implies a designer, the designer itself would imply an even more complex designer, into infinte regress.So, the charges I level against the TAG is that complexity neither implies agency, nor does agency imply complexity, and secondly that it is trivial to identify that the TAG engages in special pleading. For these reasons, the TAG fails and should not be used. Complexity does not imply agency, and agency does not imply complexity. Many things are made complex WITHOUT an intelligent agency. First, all things visible on a macro scale are incredibly complex on the scale of visible matter. A simple unassuming rock composed primarily of quartz contains roughly 90 elementary particles per molecule. In only 1 gram of rock there are roughly 10^22 molecules. That’s roughly 9*10^23 molecules in a specific arrangement. If such an arrangement of that many objects is not “complex” I do not know what is, and we have seen “dumb” forces create such complex arrangements of matter; in fact the likelihood of some thing having happened is nearly 100%, even if the chances of any particular outcome was low. Large systems of things display complexity and lack intelligent agency. Good examples of such things include crystals and simple self-replicating organic chemicals, natural bridges, and weather systems. Many things involving agency are not complex, and appear lacking in agency, or are also produced without agency. It is not a difficult thing to imagine an object which appears as one of the above objects, both lacking in agency yet owing its existence to that agency. A man with intent may make a computer program that spits out compatible orientations of 10^22 molecules of Silicon Dioxide and random impurities and structural defects and then to build that object, and then afterward putting the resultant pebble into a rock tumbler so that it would have the appearance of an unassuming river-tumbled pebble. It could be placed in any stream with similar looking pebbles, and if observed by a person would be assumed to be entirely lacking in agency. Function does not imply purpose; many functions are clearly incidental. Natural bridges have a function for an agent in allowing them to cross an obstacle, but that function is entirely incidental. In observed instances of evolution, many neutral mutations occur which are only selected for after the fact. A structure which functions as an ion pump in a stationary organism may be entirely neutral or even detrimental to its survival; but a second incidental change which causes the cement which affixes it to its position, itself normally detrimental, might cause both to become highly beneficial to the organism’s survival. Evolution and life in fact relies upon the lack of purpose, and upon incidentally functional mutation. Many such incidentally useful mutations have been observed, and until the evolution of intelligent agents, there was no other form of adaptation. The problem of induction invalidates the TAG in every way. Judgements and assumptions of design are made through inductive reasoning: we look at things involving agency and things not involving agency, and we make a Bayesian determination as to which category a thing is in. It is only obvious that a thing is designed when we have context of how people have done things before. With only one point of information for universal design and no external context no induction is possible; any statement of probability is further impossible to make. The universe, being the sum total of observable stuff, does not allow any placement into context. Without being able to observe an undesigned universe, it is utterly impossible to make an inductive determination that this is not just such an undesigned universe, nor is it possible to make any such judgement that it is; the teleological argument is particularly useless to either conclusion. There is no data to inform the assertion that other values of the constants of our universe are even possible in the first place. The universe itself is neither entirely hostile nor particularly nurturing to life, nor are the specific qualities of the universe necessary for complex arrangements of stuff (such as life) to exist. There is a lot of “wiggle room” in the constants of the universe which would allow for life: in fact the universe would not be all that different even absent a fundamental force of nature, the weak force. There is no basis for the assertion that some other form of complex intelligent agency existing as a subunit of the universe (such as ourselves) would be impossible even outside of those bounds. Certainly many universes prohibit life in the form of our own, made of carbon, however it is entirely plausible that some other form of self-replicating adapters might exist in many other universes. The vast majority of the universe is extremely hostile to life. Between black holes, poisonous hydrogen nebulae, stars hostile to any possibility of life, pulsars which fry all of everything near them, even our own planet which is subject to meteor hits, caldera-forming eruptions, gamma ray bursts and solar flares, it is obvious that life is fragile. Why would a creator make a universe so hostile to life, if life was the intent? Only in universes where agency is possible does life occur which may question if the universe had agency. Our agency is indistinguishable from that which would be incidental. We're here as this is the world we can be here in, and that does not imply that it is here purely because we can be in it. Life could not exist as we know it even in our own solar system for ~9 billion years. The TAG is essentially an argument from ignorance: I don't know how it happened, therefore GODDIDIT. The TAG engages forces special pleading Design implies intent Intent implies agency Agency implies complexity The TAG assumes complexity implies design Therefore the TAG must answer why the designer does not itself require a designer of its own. Conclusions The TAG fails for multiple factual reasons. The TAG fails because it is fallacious. Therefore the teleological argument for god fails. Failed arguments should not be used to support a premise, because they do not support any premise; predictiveness gives models value and the TAG has no predictive strength. Therefore the Teleological argument is a failed argument and should not be used.