.

.

The universe shows every sign of having been fine-tuned for life to exist

• The fine tuning of the universe provides prima facie evidence of deistic design. Edward Robert Harrison
• A life-giving factor lies at the centre of the whole machinery and design of the world. John Archibald Wheeler
• Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties. James Jeans
• Life as we know it would be impossible if any one of several physical quantities had slightly different values. Steven Weinberg
• The laws of nature seem to have been crafted so as to move the universe toward the emergence and sustenance of life. Antony Flew
• The Goldilocks Enigma is the idea that everything in the universe is just right for life, like the porridge in the fairy tale. Paul Davies
• It is easy to see that only a very restricted range of laws of nature are consistent with galaxies and stars, planets, life and intelligence. Carl Sagan
• This type of universe, however, seems to require a degree of fine tuning of the initial conditions that is in apparent conflict with ‘common wisdom’. Zehavi, and Dekel
• There would be no stars and no life anywhere, and no element other than hydrogen, if the strong force inside every atom were just slightly weaker than it is. Robert Lanza
• If gravity was a hair stronger or the Big Bang a sliver weaker, and therefore the universe’s lifespan significantly shorter, we couldn’t be here to think about it. Robert Lanza
• The precision [of the fine tuning] is as if one could throw a dart across the entire universe and hit a bullseye one millimeter in diameter on the other side. Michael Turner (astrophysicist)
• The really intriguing question may very well be not, ‘Is there other intelligent life in the universe?’ but rather, ‘Why is the universe so hospitable to life in the first place?’ Richard Morris
• Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule. Fred Hoyle
• If the universe had not been made with the most exacting precision we could never have come into existence. It is my view that these circumstances indicate the universe was created for man to live in. John O’Keefe
• If stars had been burning indefinitely in a static universe they’d have made the whole intolerably hot – certainly much too hot for the likes of us. An expanding universe resolved much of this at a stroke. Bill Bryson
• There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. . . It seems as though somebody has fine tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe. . . The impression of design is overwhelming. Paul Davies
• So if we open our mind and acknowledge that the hundreds or so conditions that allow life to exist must be implausible to happen by chance then we need to ask the most wondrous question of all. Why does it exist? Martin E Moore
• The notion of a random billiard-ball cosmos that could have had any forces that boast any range of values, but instead has the weirdly specific ones needed for life, looks impossible enough to seem downright silly. Robert Lanza
• As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming. Freeman Dyson
• When you realize that the laws of nature must be incredibly finely tuned to produce the universe we see, that conspires to plant the idea that the universe did not just happen, but that there must be a purpose behind it. John Polkinghorne

.

Constants create order in nature…

• Constants create order in nature. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
• Some numbers keep reappearing in nature at very small and very large scales. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
• Precise mathematical laws govern the four fundamental forces, gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
• If math exists beyond all created things, it stabilizes the constants and anchors reality in a place untouched by nature’s chaos, roughness, and irregularity. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos

.

…and these constants show every sign of being fine-tuned for life

• In our universe, it looks as though the formation of complex molecules of DNA, while a natural outcome of fundamental laws of physics, depends on the existence of many fortuitous conditions. That makes them seem improbable. Keith Ward
• There would be no stars and no life anywhere, and no element other than hydrogen, if the strong force inside every atom were just slightly weaker than it is. Robert Lanza
• Even more coincidentally, the universe’s four forces and all of its constants are just perfectly set up for atomic interactions, the existence of atoms and elements, planets, liquid water, and life. Tweak any of them and you never existed. Robert Lanza
• What’s known as the fine structure constant determines the properties of these atoms and molecules. It is a pure number, approximately 1/137. If the fine structure constant were different by as little as around 1 percent, no atoms or molecules as we know them would exist. These two effects didn’t mesh together perfectly, there would be no life as we know it. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
• This is a fine-tuned universe, which has a number of constants in play. If any of these constants had a different value, then life as we know it would not have been possible. Therefore, there must have been an intelligent designer. Alan H. Dawe
• It’s hard to get past the proposition that the constants of nature have their particular values because the universe is built to allow for life to develop. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
• The laws of physics accepted by modern science, including the particular values of its fundamental constants, are minutely fine-tuned to permit the evolution of life to go on. Bernard Haisch

.

God, if God exists, is a genius mathematician

• God built the universe on numbers. Pythagoras
• One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence and an intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers. Heinrich Hertz
• The language of mathematics exhibits every quality of design: balance, harmony, symmetry, and some would say beauty. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
• The creator of the universe works in mysterious ways; but he uses a base ten counting system and likes round numbers. Scott Adams
• One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Paul Dirac
• We know that nature is described by the best of all possible mathematics because God created it. Alexander Polyakov
• God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically. Albert Einstein
• God exists since mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exists since we cannot prove it. Andre Weil
• God is a mathematician of a very high order and He used advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Paul A. M. Dirac
• God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world. Paul Dirac
• In creating the world, God used arithmetic, geometry, and likewise astronomy. Nicholas of Cusa
• In the pure mathematics we contemplate absolute truths which existed in the divine mind before the morning stars sang together, and which will continue to exist there when the last of their radiant host shall have fallen from heaven. Edward Everett Hale
• Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe. Galileo Galilei
• Our external physical reality is a mathematical structure. Max Tegmark
• The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God. Euclid
• The laws of nature are written by the hand of God in the language of mathematics. Galileo Galilei
• When God produces the world, he produces a thoroughly mathematical structure that obeys the laws of number, geometrical figure and quantitative function. Nature is an embodied mathematical system. Galileo
• God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers. Paul Erdos

.

Some maintain that the fine-tuning indicates that there must be an infinite number of universes with different laws

• The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming. Freeman Dyson
• As we look out into the Universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the Universe must in some sense have known that we were coming. Freeman Dyson
• The evidence in this universe for design – or, if you will, the fine-tuning that cannot be explained by chance or by ‘enough time’ – is so compelling that the only way around it is to suggest that our universe is only one of an infinite number of universes. Dennis Prager
• A fourth multiverse hypothesis, is sometimes called the ‘inflationary’ hypothesis. Each universe is like a bubble; many bubbles are spread out in space and possibly in time; and all universes together form a bubbly multiverse, with different sets of laws in each universe. Keith Ward
• Why does such fine-tuning occur? And the answer many physicists now believe: the multiverse. A vast number of universes may exist, with many different values of the amount of dark energy. Our particular hat containing zillions of universes, we happened to draw a universe that allowed life. Alan Lightman
• This universe is one of a large number of variegated universes, produced by physical processes that randomly scan through (a subset of) the set of possible physics. Eventually (or somewhere), a life-permitting universe will be created. Only such universes can be observed, since only such universes contain observers. L. A. Barnes
• It is possible to explain these coincidences and fine-tunings as just a matter of statistics. This involves a concept called the multiverse. The concept of the multiverse is that our apparently special universe is just one of a vast number of universes all of which may be different from each other in unimaginable ways. Bernard Haisch
• Hawking explains that since all possible options of physical laws, universal constants, and environment are implicit in the 10^500 universes available, as well as in the many billions of solar systems available in just our universe, there is nothing extraordinary about our universe springing from nothing 14 billion years ago. Alan H. Dawe

.

However, there are strong arguments against the multiverse hypothesis…

• The super-laws governing the multiverse still need explaining. Keith Ward
• To postulate an infinity of unseen and unseeable universes just to explain the one we do see seems like a case of excess baggage carried to the extreme. It is simpler to postulate one unseen God. Paul Davies
• Do we really need to imagine that there exist an infinite number of messy universes that we have never seen and never will see in order to explain the one simple and remarkably smooth Universe we actually observe?” he asks. “I say no. We have to look for a better idea.” Paul Steinhardt
• To postulate a mechanism that produces every kind of universe would be to postulate a mechanism of enormous complexity in order to explain the existence of our universe, which would go far beyond the simplest explanation of the data of our universe as well as raise the question of why things are like that. Paul Davies

.

…including the fact that it still does not explain where the laws of physics or consciousness came from…

• The question not many ask is: why are the laws of physics like they are? Paul Davies
• The existence of a multiverse does not explain the origin of the laws of nature. Antony Flew
• Who created these laws? There is no question but that a God will always be needed. Barry Parker
• The multiverse hypothesis may increase the probability of this universe existing. But it does not remove the huge improbability of all possible universes existing! Keith Ward
• The multiverse theory falls short of a complete explanation of existence…. The problem has simply been shifted up a level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse. Paul Davies
• When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance. Paul Davies
• My feeling is that scientific method has the power to account for and interlink all phenomena in the universe, including its origin, using the laws of nature. But that still leaves the laws unexplained. Paul Davies
• Where do the laws of physics come from? Why is it that we have these laws instead of some other set? How is that we have a set of laws that drives featureless gases to life, consciousness and intelligence? Paul Davies
• Science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview. ..even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith the existence of a law-like order in nature that is at least in part comprehensible to us. Paul Davies

.

…and the fact that it violates Occam’s razor

• Occam’s razor: The principle (attributed to William of Occam) that in explaining a thing no more assumptions should be made than are necessary. Oxford Dictionary
• Occam’s razor is the principle that, of two explanations that account for all the facts, the simpler one is more likely to be correct. Encyclopaedia Britannica
• The hypothesis that every possible universe exists is the most extravagant hypothesis anyone could think of, and it breaks Occam’s rule of simplicity with a resounding smash. If the simple is good, then the fewer universes there are the better. Keith Ward

.

Others argue that the fine-tuning of the universe is proof of intelligent and deliberate design

• The universe is a put-up job. Fred Hoyle
• The universe in some sense must have known that we were coming. Freeman Dyson
• I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker. Voltaire
• Regularities in nature, however you describe them, can be best explained by a divine Mind. John Foster
• The fine tuning of the universe provides prima facie evidence of deistic design. Edward Robert Harrison
• It is either coincidence piled on top of coincidence,” said Hollus, “or it is deliberate design. Robert J. Sawyer
• The laws of physics … seem to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design… The universe must have a purpose. Paul Davies
• The idea of a universal mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory. Arthur Eddington
• We discover that the universe shows evidence of a designing or controlling power that has something in common with our own individual minds. James Jeans
• This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. Isaac Newton
• Scientists have no agreed theory of the origin of life – plenty of scenarios, conjectures and just-so stories, but nothing with solid experimental support. Paul Davies
• To me it is clear that we exist in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped by a universal intelligence and not by chance. Michio Kaku, string theorist
• One very good candidate for a final explanation is the existence of God, who could ensure that the laws of nature were just right for the evolution of intelligent life. Keith Ward
• There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all. It seems as though somebody has fine tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe. . . The impression of design is overwhelming. Paul Davies
• The world is too complicated in all its parts and interconnections to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together. Allan R. Sandage
• Every common biological organism is more intricately articulated, more astoundingly put together, than the most sublime literary composition… Despite all evasions, the ultimate agency of intelligence stares one in the face. Frederick Ferre
• To make sense of this view (design as opposed to accident), one must accept the idea of transcendence: that the Designer exists in a totally different order of reality or being, not restrained within the bounds of the Universe itself. George F. R. Ellis
• There exists a transcendent, personal creator of the universe. This entity desires to create a universe in which other minds will be able to form. Thus, the entity chooses from the set of possibilities a universe which is foreseen to evolve intelligent life. A. Barnes
• The temptation to believe that the Universe is the product of some sort of design, a manifestation of subtle aesthetic and mathematical judgment, is overwhelming. The belief that there is “something behind it all” is one that I personally share with, I suspect, a majority of physicists. Paul Davies
• I have concluded that we are in a world made by rules created by an intelligence. Believe me, everything that we call chance today won’t make sense anymore. To me, it is clear that we exist in a plan which is governed by rules that were created, shaped by a universal intelligence and not by chance. Michio Kaku, PhD
• The design argument still lives, as an argument that the precise structure of laws and constants that seem uniquely fitted to produce life by the process of evolution is hugely improbable. The existence of a designer or creator God would make it much less improbable. That is the New Design Argument, and it is very effective. Keith Ward
• There’s no obvious reason to assume that the very same rare properties that allow for our existence would also provide the best overall setting to make discoveries about the world around us. We don’t think this is merely coincidental. It cries out for another explanation, an explanation that… points to purpose and intelligent design in the cosmos. Guillermo Gonzalez
• For myself, faith begins with the realization that a supreme intelligence brought the universe into being and created man. It is not difficult for me to have this faith, for it is incontrovertible that where there is a plan, there is intelligence– an orderly, unfolding universe that testifies to the truth of the most majestic statement ever uttered–‘In the beginning God.’ Arthur Compton
• Here is the cosmological proof of the existence of God – the design argument of Paley – updated and refurbished. The fine tuning of the universe provides prima facie evidence of deistic design. Take your choice: blind chance that requires multitudes of universes or design that requires only one…. Many scientists, when they admit their views, incline toward the teleological or design argument. Edward Robert Harrison
• Proponents of Intelligent Design point out the difficulty, if not impossibility, of explaining complex structures like the vertebrate eye or the bacterial flagellum in terms of a series of random genetic mutations and natural selection. They suggest that complex structures and organs show a creative integration of many different components because they were intelligently designed. They leave open the question of the designer, but the obvious answer is God Rupert Sheldrake
• Rather than seeing ourselves as insignificant specks in the immensity of the cosmos, we can consider that immensity an indicator of our worth. It seems the Creator invested a great deal-a universe of 50 billion trillion stars, plus a hundred times more matter, all fine-tuned to mind-boggling precision-for us. If not for the strength and abundance of evidence in support of that notion, it would seem the height of arrogance. Humility demands that we take a deeper and wider look at that evidence. Hugh Ross
• Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly miniscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics on which life depends are in every respect deliberate. . . . It is therefore almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect . . . higher intelligences . . . even to the limit of God . . . such a theory is so obvious that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The reasons are psychological rather than scientific. Fred Hoyle
• The Canadian philosopher John Leslie proposed an intriguing explanation of the fine-tuning, which he called ‘axiarchism’. What strikes us as so incredible about the fine-tuning is that, of all the values the constants in our laws had, they ended up having exactly those values required for something of great value: life, and ultimately intelligent life. If the laws had not, against huge odds, been fine-tuned, the Universe would have had infinitely less value; some say it would have had no value at all. Leslie proposes that this proper understanding of the problem points us in the direction of the best solution: the laws are fine-tuned because their being so leads to something of great value. Philip Goff
• There are, generally speaking, two different viewpoints regarding the existence of life (discounting those who don’t care either way). The first is that it has occurred by chance and we are extremely fortunate to be here. The other is that we were somehow destined to be here and that we were brought into being for a particular reason. The latter notion is summed up in the Anthropic Principle (a term introduced by the cosmologist Carter in 1974) and it suggests that the universe is organized and constructed in such a way that people – conscious observers – are an inevitable by-product. As science gains greater understanding they find that the universe seems to be finely tuned to allow life to exist, and as this evidence mounts up the idea that it could have all happened by chance has become highly unlikely. Martin E Moore

.

…and that the apparent fine-tuning of the universe is proof of God

• As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency – or, rather, Agency – must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit? George Greenstein (astronomer)
• Here is the cosmological proof of the existence of God – the design argument of Paley – updated and refurbished. The fine tuning of the universe provides prima facie evidence of deistic design. Take your choice: blind chance that requires multitudes of universes or design that requires only one…. Many scientists, when they admit their views, incline toward the teleological or design argument. Edward Robert Harrison
• I believe in God. In fact, I believe in a personal God who acts in and interacts with the creation. I believe that the observations about the orderliness of the physical universe, and the apparently exceptional fine-tuning of the conditions of the universe for the development of life suggest that an intelligent Creator is responsible. William Daniel Phillips
• I belong to the group of scientists who do not subscribe to a conventional religion but nevertheless deny that the universe is a purposeless accident. Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact. There must, it seems to me, be a deeper level of explanation. Whether one wishes to call that deeper level ‘God’ is a matter of taste and definition. Paul Davies
• I hope the foregoing discussion will have convinced the reader that the natural world is not just any old concoction of entities and forces, but a marvelously ingenious and unified mathematical scheme. …these rules look as if they are the product of intelligent design. I do not see how that can be denied. Paul Davies
• A designing God would certainly raise the probability of the laws of nature being such as to lead to the existence of intelligent life. It would make the existence of such laws virtually certain. So the God hypothesis is not superfluous after all. It is a very good explanation. Keith Ward
• Rather than seeing ourselves as insignificant specks in the immensity of the cosmos, we can consider that immensity an indicator of our worth. It seems the Creator invested a great deal-a universe of 50 billion trillion stars, plus a hundred times more matter, all fine-tuned to mind-boggling precision-for us. If not for the strength and abundance of evidence in support of that notion, it would seem the height of arrogance. Humility demands that we take a deeper and wider look at that evidence. Hugh Ross
• The universe and the laws that guide it in all its intricate detail spring from a dimensionless foundation of intelligent consciousness. Joseph Selbie
• The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less we can believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially, the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer. Richard Dawkins

.

Through its discovery of fine-tuning, science points to God

• Four centuries after the scientific revolution apparently destroyed irretrievably man’s special place in the universe, banished Aristotle, and rendered teleological speculation obsolete, the relentless stream of discovery has turned dramatically in favor of teleology and design, and the doctrine of the microcosm is reborn. As I hope the evidence presented in this book has shown, science, which has been for centuries the great ally of atheism and skepticism, has become at last, in the final days of the second millennium, what Newton and many of its early advocates had so fervently wished – the “defender of the anthropocentric faith. Michael Denton
• God is a fundamental metaphysical hypothesis about the ultimate nature of reality, and God leaves the investigations of science fully intact. Keith Ward
• I now believe that the universe was brought into existence by an infinite Intelligence. I believe that this universe’s intricate laws manifest what scientists have called the Mind of God. I believe that life and reproduction originate in a divine Source. Why do I believe this, given that I expounded and defended atheism for more than a half century? The short answer is this: this is the world picture, as I see it, that has emerged from modern science. Antony Flew
• Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it as a brute fact….I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama. Paul Davies
• The conclusion of intelligent design flows naturally from the data itself – not from sacred books or sectarian beliefs. Inferring that biochemical systems were designed by an intelligent agent is a humdrum process that requires no new principles of logic or science. It comes simply from the hard work that biochemistry has done over the past forty years, combined with consideration of the way in which we reach conclusions of design every day. Michael Behe
• I find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science. Wernher von Braun (Pioneer rocket engineer)
• The physicists are getting down to the nitty-gritty, they’ve really just about pared things down to the ultimate details, and the last thing they ever expected to happen is happening. God is showing through. John Updike

.

The fine-tuning of the universe indicates that the universe has a purpose which includes the existence of life

• Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan. Arno Penzias
• I would say the universe has a purpose. It’s not there just somehow by chance. Roger Penrose
• It seems to me that when confronted with the marvels of life and the universe, one must ask why and not just how. The only possible answers are religious. . . . I find a need for God in the universe and in my own life. Arthur L. Schawlow
• Science may explain the world, but we still have to explain science. The laws which enable the universe to come into being spontaneously seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design. If physics is the product of design, the universe must have a purpose, and the evidence of modern physics suggests strongly to me that the purpose includes us. Paul Davies
• The laws of physics … seem to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design… The universe must have a purpose. Paul Davies
• The standard scientific view is that both cosmic and biological evolution are purposeless. The fact that the universe is just right for life, at least on earth, as in the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, does not mean that the universe as a whole has any purpose. Among countless universes, it just happens to be the one that has the right conditions for life. Rupert Sheldrake
• This contrived nature of physical existence is just too fantastic for me to take on board as simply ‘given.’ It points to a deeper underlying meaning to existence. Paul Davies
• When you realize that the laws of nature must be incredibly finely tuned to produce the universe we see, that conspires to plant the idea that the universe did not just happen, but that there must be a purpose behind it. John Polkinghorne
• To me, the contrived nature of physical existence is just too fantastic for me to take on board as simply “given.” It points forcefully to a deeper underlying meaning to existence. Some call it purpose, some design. These loaded words, which derive from human categories, capture only imperfectly what it is that the universe is about. But that it is about something, I have absolutely no doubt. Paul Davies

.

.

God, the creator, is a designer…

• I think God is the most fantastic designer. Roberto Cavalli
• We are here for God’s designs, not for our own. Oswald Chambers
• Everything is as it should be. God’s design is perfect. Yasmin Mogahed
• God doesn’t reveal his grand design. He reveals Himself. Frederick Buechner
• Fear is present when we forget that we are a part of God’s divine design. Wayne Dyer
• God is His own Design and End, and that there is no other Worthy of Him. Mary Astell
• Perhaps believing in good design is like believing in God, it makes you an optimist. Terence Conran
• Bottom line, your body is a temple, and you have to treat it that way. That’s how God designed it. Ray Lewis
• According to God’s perfect design, it is through selflessness that we can become truly fulfilled. Charles Stanley
• God’s designs may be frequent justification for our actions, but it is we, the “self-made men”, who take the credit. Arthur Erickson
• There are two gods in this universe: God and Imagination. Both of them can design and create infinite creations. Mehmet Murat Ildan
• God’s designs regarding you, and His methods of bringing about these designs, are infinitely wise. Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon
• I have a secret thought from some things I have observed, that God may perhaps design you for some singular service in the world. David Brainerd
• There is a grand designer behind everything. God’s plan for your life, all that happens to you, including your mistakes, your sins, and your hurts. Rick Warren
• Everything God does has purpose and intention behind that design. It is a master design, and every little thing has its proper place and function. Aiden Wilson Tozer
• Never believe that the so-called random events of life are anything less than God’s appointed order. Be ready to discover His divine designs anywhere and everywhere. Oswald Chambers
• God’s creative design was that your ravenous appetite for pleasure find fulfillment in Him, for nothing more wonderfully reveals His glory than the joy the creature has in its Creator. Sam Storms
• What we’re looking at is God’s design, nature’s template, and using that as a pattern to cut around and lay it down on a domestic model to duplicate that pattern that we see in nature. Joel Salatin
• God is weaving His tapestry according to his own grand design. All flesh is in His hands. We have no need to fear. We have no need to worry. Our imperative need is to be found doing our duty. Gordon B. Hinckley
• Can you not see the numerous designs made by God as signs, similitudes, or analogies of resurrection? He has placed them in every era, the alteration of day and night, even in the coming and going of clouds. Said Nursi
• In the heart of the God of the universe, each child of his is as necessary to him as the fingers are to the hand. In the marvelous design of the universe, not even a sparrow can fall to earth meaninglessly. Toyohiko Kagawa
• Everything in the world is part of a design. Everything has meaning and purpose and a place in the pattern of existence, only it’s not always possible to understand what that design is. Only God can understand the design, because he invented it. Susan Howatch
• God is a giant quiltmaker. With an infinite variety of designs. And the quilt is grown so big and confusing, the pattern is impossible to see, the squares and diamonds and triangles don’t fit well together anymore, it’s all become meaningless. So He has abandoned it. Rohinton Mistry
• Whether one sees the world as God’s creation or as a secular mystery that science is on the way to figuring out, there is no denying the beauty and majesty of everything from mountain ranges, deserts, and rain forests to the exquisite details in the design of an ordinary mosquito. Robert C. Solomon

.

…a designer of vast intelligence…

• Intelligent Design opens the whole possibility of us being created in the image of a benevolent God. William A. Dembski
• People who espouse Intelligent Design believe nature is so complex as to require an intelligent designer-God. Michael Shermer
• There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design. Michele Bachmann
• Intelligent design is consistent with any faith system I can think of, because most faith systems believe that there is a creator. Lee Strobel
• When we say there is a GOD, we mean that there is an intelligent designing cause of what we see in the world around us, and a being who was himself uncaused. Joseph Priestley
• For me, I’ve always believed that there was a God. I’ve always believed that God created the heavens and earth – so, for me it’s not a huge leap from there to intelligent design. Ben Stein
• The Book of Nature, with its astonishing details-the blade of grass, the Conus cedonulli, or the resonance levels of the carbon atom-also suggest a God of purpose and a God of design. And I think my belief makes me no less a scientist. Owen Gingerich
• Intelligent design is a modest position theologically and philosophically. It attributes the complexity and diversity of life to intelligence, but does not identify that intelligence with the God of any religious faith or philosophical system. William A. Dembski
• It’s high time to rescue “intelligent design” from the politics of religion. There are too many riddles not yet answered by either biology or the Bible, and by asking them honestly, without foregone conclusions, science could take a huge leap forward. Deepak Chopra
• While a case can be made for intelligent design, I can’t figure out why some Christians are so thrilled about that possibility. First of all, it doesn’t prove there’s a God. If anything, intelligent design lends support to some form of pantheism that defines God as immanent within nature. Tony Campolo
• The fundamental claim of intelligent design is straightforward and easily intelligible: namely, there are natural systems that cannot be adequately explained in terms of undirected natural forces and that exhibit features which in any other circumstance we would attribute to intelligence. William A. Dembski
• There’s no obvious reason to assume that the very same rare properties that allow for our existence would also provide the best overall setting to make discoveries about the world around us. We don’t think this is merely coincidental. It cries out for another explanation, an explanation that… points to purpose and intelligent design in the cosmos. Guillermo Gonzalez
• The result of [the] cumulative efforts to investigate the cell – to investigate life at the molecular level – is a loud, clear, piercing cry of ‘design!’ The result is so unambiguous and so significant that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science. The discovery rivals those of Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrödinger, Pasteur, and Darwin. The observation of the intelligent design of life is as momentous as the observation that the earth goes around the sun. Michael Behe

.

…a God revealed in the harmony and order of the universe

• God reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists. Albert Einstein
• The universe owes its existence to the emergence of order from chaos. Deepak Chopra
• Order is manifestly maintained in the universe… governed by the sovereign will of God. James Prescott Joule
• The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine. Vera Kistiakowsky
• This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. Isaac Newton
• The important point is not merely that there are regularities in nature, but that these regularities are mathematically precise, universal and tied together. Antony Flew
• I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings. Albert Einstein
• The harmony of natural law reveals an Intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. Albert Einstein
• The world is too complicated in all its parts and interconnections to be due to chance alone. I am convinced that the existence of life with all its order in each of its organisms is simply too well put together. Allan R. Sandage
• I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organizing principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something instead of nothing. Alan Sandage
• When confronted with the order and beauty of the universe and the strange coincidences of nature, it’s very tempting to take the leap of faith from science into religion. I am sure many physicists want to. I only wish they would admit it. Tony Rothman
• The universe exists under a reign of eternal law, surpassing the imperfect laws of human government. Such orderliness, such domination by law, imply intelligent planning and purpose. Nothing happens of itself. Nowhere, in the age-old experience of man, has continued order been found except as the product of intelligent direction. John Andreas Widtsoe
• I believe in God. In fact, I believe in a personal God who acts in and interacts with the creation. I believe that the observations about the orderliness of the physical universe, and the apparently exceptional fine-tuning of the conditions of the universe for the development of life suggest that an intelligent Creator is responsible. William Daniel Phillips
• Einstein regarded the universe with the same kind of feeling that religious people direct towards the Judeo-Christian God. He was just amazed and awe-struck by the fact that the universe exists, that it is so ordered, and how mysterious it is. He was also struck by how science and reason could give us access to the structure and order of the universe. Because the universe was so ordered and possible to understand Einstein gave it divine qualities and called the universe – or the laws of nature – God. Sam Woolfe
• All nature has come to expect from God a sense of orderliness. Whatever God does carries with it His fingerprint. And in the world around us His fingerprint of orderliness is evident to anybody who is honest with the facts. If you look at nature, you will discover a mathematical exactness. Without this precision, the entire world would be in utter confusion. One plus one always equals two no matter what part of the universe you happen to be in. And the laws of nature operate in beautiful harmony, a harmony that is ordered by God Himself. Aiden Wilson Tozer
• Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple limpid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely… have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all. Stuart Kauffman

.

God, the designer, has created the world to be as interesting as possible

• The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible. Freeman Dyson
• As a working hypothesis to explain the riddle of our existence, I propose that our universe is the most interesting of all possible universes, and our fate as human beings is to make it so. Freeman Dyson

.

God, the designer, has also been described as an engineer…

• God is the Great Engineer, creating circumstances to bring about moments in our lives of divine importance, leading us to divine appointments. Oswald Chambers
• A saint realizes that it is God who engineers his circumstances; consequently there are no complaints, only unrestrained surrender. Oswald Chambers
• The human body was designed by a civil engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area ? Robin Williams
• On the sixth day God saw He couldn’t do it all, so He created engineers. Lois McMaster Bujold

.

…and an architect

• God, that all-powerful Creator of nature and architect of the world… Quintilian
• Nature has provided us a spectacular toolbox. The toolbox exists. An architect far better and smarter than us has given us that toolbox, and we now have the ability to use it. Barry Schuler
• I look at the universe and I know there’s an architect. Jack Anderson
• We live in a world of creative beauty – the grand architect of the universe. God has planted something for us – a playground to play in if we choose to look at it that way and understand it. So, this time for me, is really a time to create. Giancarlo Esposito
• God, that all-powerful Creator of nature and architect of the world, has impressed man with no character so proper to distinguish him from other animals, as by the faculty of speech. Quintilian
• God the Father, the supreme Architect, had already built this cosmic home we behold, the most sacred temple of His godhead, by the laws of His mysterious wisdom. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

.

God designs not just the universe, but our lives too

• Not without design does God write the music of our lives. John Ruskin
• There’s a Grand Designer behind everything. Your life is not a result of random chance, fate, or luck. There is a master plan. History is His story. God is pulling the strings. Rick Warren
• When we invest in the things that matter most to us, that are within God’s unique design for each of us, I believe we will achieve a sense of balance in our lives. Candace Cameron
• Destiny is not designed by mere mortals like us. It is crafted by God. Rodrigo Duterte
• We look at life from the back side of the tapestry. And most of the time, what we see is loose threads, tangled knots and the like. But occasionally, God’s light shines through the tapestry, and we get a glimpse of the larger design with God weaving together the darks and lights of existence. John Piper
• It is only under this law of justice that mankind will achieve – slowly, no doubt, but certainly – God’s design for the orderly and peaceful progress of humanity. Frederic Bastiat
• If God causes you to suffer much it is a sign that He has great designs for you and that He certainly intends to make you a saint. Ignatius of Loyola
• God has hooked me up. He has the life by design.  Paula White
• Not without design does God write the music of our lives. John Ruskin

.

We are all part of God’s design

• As all human beings are, in my view, creatures of God’s design, we must respect all other human beings. That does not mean I have to agree with their choices or agree with their opinions, but indeed I respect them as human beings. Stockwell Day

.

.

Some argue that evolution and the notion of God as creator are not compatible

• Proponents of intelligent design don’t accept that some of the very complex nano-machines that we have inside ourselves could have come about solely on the basis of natural selection. Francis Collin
• Although God believers don’t need evolution to be false, atheists need evolution to be true. Ann Coulter
• The concept of God is generated by a brain designed by evolution to find design in nature (a very recursive idea). Michael Shermer
• I do not want to believe in God. Therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation leading to evolution. George Wald
• Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God? O. Wilson
• Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution – paths that a sensible God would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce. Stephen Jay Gould
• Not to take this web of dualities as a sign we are on the right track would be a bit like believing that God put fossils into the rocks in order to mislead Darwin about the evolution of life. Stephen Hawking
• If I were God wanting to make a human being, I would do it by a more direct way rather than by evolution. Why deliberately set it up in the one way which makes it look as though you don’t exist? Richard Dawkins
• The evidence for evolution is so compelling that the only way to save the creation theory is to assume that God deliberately planted enormous quantities of evidence to make it look as if evolution had happened. Richard Dawkins
• Intelligent design cannot explain Darwinian evolution. Darwin’s whole point is that variation and change are random and without higher purpose. We cannot imagine that God designed this disproof of His own existence. James K. Galbraith
• When the theory of evolution destroyed the picture of God as the supreme Creator, confidence in God as the all-powerful Father of man fell with it, although many were able to combine a belief in God with the acceptance of the Darwinian theory. Erich Fromm
• No matter what argument you make against evolution, the response is Well, you know, it’s possible to believe in evolution and believe in God. Yes, and it’s possible to believe in Spiderman and believe in God, but that doesn’t prove Spiderman is true. Ann Coulter
• The initial configuration of the universe may have been chosen by God, or it may itself have been determined by the laws of science. In either case, it would seem that everything in the universe would then be determined by evolution according to the laws of science, so it is difficult to see how we can be masters of our fate. Stephen Hawking
• Blake expressed some doubt as to whether God had made the tiger. But the tiger is in many ways an admirable animal. We have now to ask whether God made the tapeworm. And it is questionable whether an affirmative answer fits in either with what we know about the process of evolution or what many of us believe about the moral perfection of God. John B. S. Haldane
• The business of proving evolution has reached a stage when it is futile for biologists to work merely to discover more and more evidence of evolution. Those who choose to believe that God created every biological species separately in the state we observe them, but made them in a way calculated to lead us to the conclusion that they are the products of an evolutionary development are obviously not open to argument. All that can be said is that their belief is an implicit blasphemy, for it imputes to God an appalling deviousness. Theodosius Dobzhansky
• The concept of God is generated by a brain designed by evolution to find design in nature (a very recursive idea). Michael Shermer
• Evolution is the cornerstone of modern biology. Intelligent design is not a scientific concept. John Marburger
• The first point one has to get straight in discussions like this, is that intelligent design is not the opposite of evolution. Rather, it is the opposite of Darwinism, which says life evolved by an utterly unguided, undirected mechanism. If god directed the process of evolution, or rigged the universe to produce complex life, then that is not Darwinism – it is intelligent design. Michael Behe

.

Evolution, they argue, explains away God

• Substituting Nature as the architect of the universe, he suppresses the name of God. John Calvin
• The belief that the animals exist because God created them – and that he created them so we can better meet our needs – is contrary to our scientific understanding of evolution and, of course, to the fossil record, which shows the existence of non-human primates and other animals millions of years before there were any human beings at all. Peter Singer
• The Darwinian theory doesn’t say that God created slowly. It says that naturalistic evolution is the creator, and so God had nothing to do with it. Philip Johnson
• For centuries the most powerful argument for God’s existence from the physical world was the so-called argument from design: Living things are so beautiful and elegant and so apparently purposeful, they could only have been made by an intelligent designer. But [Charles] Darwin provided a simpler explanation. His way is a gradual, incremental improvement starting from very simple beginnings and working up step by tiny incremental step to more complexity, more elegance, more adaptive perfection. Richard Dawkins
• The theory of evolution destroyed the argument from mechanical design. A creator God could not have designed the machinery of animals and plants in the beginning if they evolved progressively through spontaneous variation and natural selection. Rupert Sheldrake
• Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.  Charles Darwin

.

Others argue that intelligent design is compatible with evolution

• God is a hacker, not an engineer. Francis Crick
• First understand infinity then you will understand God and how evolution is intelligent design. Lee Spence
• It will not be possible to rule out the supposition that the process of evolution may be guided by an intelligent design. F. C. S. Schiller
• Self-organization is embedded in the fabric of the cosmos, acting like an invisible, offstage choreographer to drive evolution. Deepak Chopra and Menas Kafatos
• Deism is logically compatible with evolutionary theory for the simple reason that the theory says nothing about the origin of the universe or of the laws of nature. Elliott Sober
• God decided to create a species with whom he could have fellowship. Who are we to say that evolution was a dumb way to do it? It was an incredibly elegant way to do it. Francis Collins
• I say the Intelligent Design-evolution debate misses the point. It trivializes God and it trivializes science. The universe is like the hand of God. The world is God’s body. Michael Dowd
• Following the creation concept that creation processes differed from preservation processes, it is suggested that God endowed each created kind, at the time of its creation, with potential for vast variety. Walter Lang
• If it suits [God] to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation? Richard Dawkins
• When the theory of evolution destroyed the picture of God as the supreme Creator, confidence in God as the all-powerful Father of man fell with it, although many were able to combine a belief in God with the acceptance of the Darwinian theory. Erich Fromm
• By understanding evolution as the expression of universal intelligence, now becoming conscious of itself within us, and as us, we overcome the dichotomy between current evolutionists who see no design in evolution, and creationists who often propose and anthropomorphic God as creator. Barbara Marx Hubbard
• Even if evolution were true, it wouldn’t disprove God. God has performed more spectacular feats than evolution. It’s not even a daunting challenge to a belief in God. If you want something that complicates a belief in God, try coming to terms with Michael Moore being one of God’s special creatures. Ann Coulter
• When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so. God is not a demiurge [demigod] or a magician, but the Creator who gives being to all entities. Evolution in nature is not opposed to the notion of Creation, because evolution presupposes the creation of beings that evolve. Pope Francis
• The first point one has to get straight in discussions like this, is that intelligent design is not the opposite of evolution. Rather, it is the opposite of Darwinism, which says life evolved by an utterly unguided, undirected mechanism. If god directed the process of evolution, or rigged the universe to produce complex life, then that is not Darwinism – it is intelligent design. Michael Behe
• I believe in the theory of evolution, but I believe as well in the allegorical truth of creation theory. In other words, I believe that evolution, including the principle of natural selection, is one of the tools used by God to create mankind. Mankind is then a participant in the creation of the universe itself, so that we have a closed loop. I believe that there is a level on which science and religious metaphor are mutually compatible. Christopher Langan

.

The belief in intelligent design is not a belief in creationism

• This story of “design” is repugnant to many scientists because of its association with creationism. Deepak Chopra
• Intelligent Design has been hijacked by a narrow group of creationist fundamentalists in America to mean something it didn’t originally mean at all. It’s another form of the God of the gaps. It’s bad theology in that it turns God once again into the pagan god of thunder and lightning. Guy Consolmagno

.

Evolution is just another name for God

• Some call it evolution, And others call it God. Charles Darwin
• Is evolution just another name for God? Frank Herbert
• I believe in evolution. But I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon and see it at sunset, that the hand of God is there also. John McCain
• God is the evolutionary impulse of the universe. God is infinite creativity, infinite love, infinite compassion, infinite caring. Deepak Chopra

.

Evolution is how God creates

• I am a creationist and an evolutionist. Evolution is God’s, or Nature’s method of creation. Creation is not an event that happened in 4004 BC; it is a process that began some 10 billion years ago and is still under way. Theodosius Dobzhansky
• The real question is, Did God use evolution as His plan? William Jennings Bryan
• First understand infinity then you will understand God and how evolution is intelligent design. Lee Spence
• God created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed – that is the meaning of evolution. Graham Greene

.

Evolution is the law of God

• All life is evolving, for evolution is God’s law; and man grows slowly and steadily along with the rest. Charles Webster Leadbeater

.

Of course, some creationists deny evolution

• Evolution is a myth. God creates the future the way he wants it. James Redfield
• We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Pope Benedict XVI
• Darwinian evolution is unscientific, unobservable, unbelievable, but understandable in a world that hates God. Ray Comfort
• If there’s a God, and we have all this evidence that there’s evolution, but He created the world only 6,000 years ago – what is the best and most logical explanation to reconcile those two things? I came up with – He came up with it, of course – that all things are fakeable. David Javerbaum

.

It’s true to say there is much about evolution we still don’t know

• We still do not know the mechanics of evolution in spite of the over-confident claims in some quarters, nor are we likely to make further progress in this by the classical methods of paleontology or biology; and we shall certainly not advance matters by jumping up and down shrilling, `Darwin is god and I, So-and-so, am his prophet’. Errol White

.

There are those who argue that the complexity of the universe’s design is not proof of God…

• I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn’t a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one. Richard Dawkins
• A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right. Richard Dawkins
• The belief in God is not therefore based on the perception of design in nature. Belief in design in nature is based upon the belief in God. Things are as they are whether there is a God or not. Logically, to believe in design one must start with God. He, or it, is not a conclusion but a datum. You may begin by assuming a creator, and then say he did this or that; but you cannot logically say that because certain things exist, therefore there is a God who made them. God is an assumption, not a conclusion. And it is an assumption that explains nothing. Chapman Cohen
• Give us detailed, testable, mechanistic accounts for the origin of life, the origin of the genetic code, the origin of ubiquitous bio macromolecules and assemblages like the ribosome, and the origin of molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum, and intelligent design will die a quick and painless death. William A. Dembski

.

…that any notion of intelligent design is a kind of ignorance…

• Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. Neil deGrasse Tyson
• I personally cannot discern a shred of evidence for intelligent design.’ If 97% of all creatures have gone extinct, some plan isn’t working very well! Irven DeVore
• There is absolutely no scientific basis or evidence for ‘intelligent design.’ It is simply a religious assertion, and it has no place in a science course. David Hillis
• Intelligent Design opens the whole possibility of us being created in the image of a benevolent God. William A. Dembski
• There is an immediate payoff to intelligent design: it destroys the atheistic legacy of Darwinian evolution. Intelligent design makes it impossible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. William A. Dembski
• Evolution as described by Charles Darwin is an scientific theory, abundantly reconfirmed, explaining physical phenomena by physical causes. Intelligent Design is a faith-based initiative in rhetorical argument. David Quammen
• Intelligent Design is a remarkably uncreative theory that abandons the search for understanding at the very point where it is most needed. If Intelligent Design is really a science, then the burden is on its scientists to discover the mechanisms used by the Intelligent Designer. Michael Shermer
• Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem. Neil deGrasse Tyson
• The problem with intelligent-design theory, is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis.  George Will

.

…that intelligent design is a form of “God of the gaps” that explains things away…

• In evolution, as in all areas of science, our knowledge is incomplete. But the entire success of the scientific enterprise has depended on an insistence that these gaps be filled by natural explanations, logically derived from confirmable evidence. Because “intelligent design” theories are based on supernatural explanations, they can have nothing to do with science. Bruce Alberts
• The argument for intelligent design basically depends on saying, ‘You haven’t answered every question with evolution,’… Well, guess what? Science can’t answer every question. Kenneth R. Miller
• Intelligent Design is a remarkably uncreative theory that abandons the search for understanding at the very point where it is most needed. If Intelligent Design is really a science, then the burden is on its scientists to discover the mechanisms used by the Intelligent Designer. Michael Shermer

.

…and that the design is not that intelligent to start off with

• I’ve always felt that the placement of a man’s testicles is an eloquent argument against intelligent design. Mark Lawrence
• Moreover, the eye contains a big flaw: the retina is inside out. Why would an almighty designer do such a thing? No intelligent designer, .. would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder, and this is just one of the hundreds of accidents frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process. Daniel Dennett

.

.

Traditionally, God was seen as the intelligent designer of a mechanical universe…

• Machines only make sense if they have designers. Robert Boyle, for example, saw the mechanical order of nature as evidence for God’s design.25 And Isaac Newton conceived of God in his own image as ‘very well skilled in mechanics and geometry’. Rupert Sheldrake
• God who gave Animals self motion beyond our understanding is without doubt able to implant other principles of motion in bodies [which] we may understand as little. Some would readily grant this may be a Spiritual one; yet a mechanical one might be shown, did not I think it better to pass it by. Isaac Newton
• God makes nothing without order, and everything that forms itself develops imperceptibly out of small parts. Gottfried Leibniz

.

…a kind of clockmaker or watchmaker…

• The most famous proponent of mechanistic theology was William Paley, an Anglican priest. In his book Natural Theology, published in 1802, he argued that if someone were to find an object like a watch, he would be bound to conclude on examining it and observing its intricate design and precision that ‘there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use’. So it was with ‘the works of nature’ such as the eye. God was the designer. Rupert Sheldrake
• My aim is to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to clockwork . . . Moreover I show how this physical conception is to be presented through calculation and geometry. Johannes Kepler
• In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. … There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. … Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.  William Paley
• The watchmaker analogy seems timeless—antiquated, yet always in fashion. The most famous version comes from the English clergyman William Paley’s 1802 book Natural Theology. Just as a watch is made up of several different pieces, “framed and put together for a purpose,” he reasoned, so too are natural objects—eyes, ears, wings, and bones—made up of parts that combine to serve a higher function. As the watch is the design of a watchmaker, nature is the product of a designing intelligence, or God. Adam R. Shapiro
• God is a meticulous clockmaker. So precise is His order that everything on earth happens in its own time. Neither a minute late nor a minute early. And for everyone without exception, the clock works accurately. For each there is a time to love and a time to die. Elif Safak
• . . . when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive. . . that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose,… the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker — that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use. William Paley
• This was the watchmaker-God who Paley proposed: an assembler, an overseer, a judge. One who has the power and knowledge to make every component personally, but actually delegates some work of creation to “the ministry of subordinate agents.” Paley argued, “it is as though one Being should have fixed certain rules; and, if we may so speak, provided certain materials,” and left the task of creating the complex parts of living things to the appointed agency of natural laws. The watchmaker is not alone in his workshop, meticulously filing each gear and chain link and polishing each crystal; nor is the watchmaker God personally crafting the eyes of each animal, nor shaping their wings or eardrums. It is a managerial God, with important business to run and with a reputation for good products. Adam R. Shapiro
• The Watch-Maker puts his Name upon the Plate, and is esteemed the Maker, though he has not made in his shop the smallest Wheel belonging to it. It is supposed, however, that he can make all the Movements… He must be a Judge of the Goodness of Work at first Sight, and put his Name to nothing but what will stand the severest Trial; for the Price of the Watch depends upon the Reputation of the Maker only. Robert Campbell
• I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker. Voltaire
• A split second is nothing compared to twenty-four hours. On God’s clock you’re in the middle of your millisecond. Compared to eternity, what is seventy, eighty, ninety years? Max Lucado

.

…an expert in mechanics and geometry…

• But by the end of the 17th century, instead of looking through the symbol to “the God beyond God,” Christians were transforming it into hard fact. Sir Isaac Newton had claimed that his cosmic system proved beyond doubt the existence of an intelligent, omniscient and omnipotent creator, who was obviously “very well skilled in Mechanicks and Geometry.” Enthralled by the prospect of such cast-iron certainty, churchmen started to develop a scientifically-based theology that eventually made Newton’s Mechanick, and later William Paley’s Intelligent Designer, essential to Western Christianity. But the Great Mechanick was little more than an idol, the kind of human projection that theology, at its best, was supposed to avoid. Thomas B. Sheridan

.

…an oversees of cosmic clocks and calendars…

• When we are unduly impatient with an omniscient God’s timing, we really are suggesting that we know what’s best. Strange isn’t it-we who wear wrist watches seek to counsel Him who oversees cosmic clocks and calendars. Neal A. Maxwell
• Disasters work like alarm clocks to the world, hence God allows them. They are shouting, ‘Wake up! Love! Pray! Criss Jami

.

…a God that winds up the universe and then allows to run on its own…

• According to their [Newton and his followers] doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Nay, the machine of God’s making, so imperfect, according to these gentlemen; that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as clockmaker mends his work. Gottfried Leibniz
• People tend to think about God more when the clock starts to wind down. Charles Roven
• The better the world-machine functioned, the less necessary was God’s ongoing activity. By the end of the eighteenth century, the celestial machinery was thought to work perfectly without any need for divine intervention. For many scientifically minded intellectuals, Christianity gave way to deism. A Supreme Being designed the world-machine, created it, set it in motion and left it to run automatically. This kind of God did not intervene in the world and there was no point in praying to him. In fact there was no point in any religious practice. Several Enlightenment philosophers, like Voltaire, combined deism with a rejection of the Christian religion. Rupert Sheldrake

.

…a God that was then later increasingly dispensed of altogether

• God had been essential to Newtonian physics but it was not long before other scientists were able to dispense with the God-hypothesis and, finally, Darwin showed that there could be no proof for God’s existence. This would not have been a disaster had not Christians become so dependent upon their scientific religion that they had lost the older habits of thought and were left without other resources. Thomas B. Sheridan

.

God as watchmaker no longer feels relevant…

• It’s hard to imagine what we could say today about a God who is like a watchmaker. If we own watches, we might realize that someone made them, but who that person is and what they do is largely an abstraction today. Adam R. Shapiro
• The mechanistic approach is essentially reductionist: it tries to explain wholes in terms of their parts. Rupert Sheldrake

.

…and is hard to conceive

• I see a pattern, but my imagination cannot picture the maker of that pattern. I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one? Albert Einstein

.

God as watchmaker implies that we too are no more than machines…

• Zoological physiology is the doctrine of the functions or actions of animals. It regards animal bodies as machines impelled by various forces, and performing a certain amount of work which can be expressed in terms of the ordinary forces of nature. The final object of physiology is to deduce the facts of morphology on the one hand, and those of ecology on the other, from the laws of the molecular forces of matter. T. H. Huxley

.

…and that our lives are mechanical…

• We live what we know. If we believe the universe and ourselves to be mechanical, we will live mechanically. On the other hand, if we know that we are part of an open universe, and that our minds are a matrix of reality, we will live more creatively and powerfully. Marilyn Ferguson

.

…devoid of meaning and destiny

• Destiny … a word which means more than we can find any definitions for. It is a word which can have no meaning in a mechanical universe: if that which is wound up must run down, what destiny is there in that? Destiny is not necessitarianism, and it is not caprice: it is something essentially meaningful. Each man has his destiny, though some men are undoubtedly “men of destiny” in a sense in which most men are not. S. Eliot

.

God as watchmaker does not explain the creativity and adaptability evident in nature

• The word ‘design’ nowhere occurs in Genesis, though the concept of creativity pervades the opening chapters. There is divine fiat, divine doing, but the mode is an empowering permission that places productive autonomy in the creation. It is not that there is no ‘watchmaker’; there is no ‘watch.’ Looking for one frames the problem the wrong way. There are species well adapted for problem solving, ever more informed in their self-actualizing. The watchmaker metaphor seems blind to the problem that here needs to be solved: that informationless matter-energy is a splendid information maker. Biologists cannot deny this creativity; indeed, better than anyone else biologists know that Earth has brought forth the natural kinds, prolifically, exuberantly over the millennia, and that enormous amounts of information are required to do this. Holmes Rolston

.

It feels more relevant to see the word as alive and organic rather than mechanical

• A central feature of Romanticism was the rejection of mechanical metaphors and their replacement with imagery of nature as alive, organic, and in a process of gestation or development. The first evolutionary theories arose in this context. Rupert Sheldrake
• The world plainly resembles more an animal or a vegetable, than it does a watch or a knitting-loom. David Hume
• Can you really think of yourself as a genetically programmed machine in a mechanical universe? Probably not. Probably even the most committed materialists cannot either. Most of us feel we are truly alive in a living world. Rupert Sheldrake
• The machine metaphor has long outlived its usefulness, and holds back scientific thinking in physics, biology and medicine. Our growing, evolving universe is much more like an organism, and so is the earth, and so are oak trees, and so are dogs, and so are you. Rupert Sheldrake
• The mechanistic theory is based on the metaphor of the machine. But it’s only a metaphor. Living organisms provide better metaphors for organised systems at all levels of complexity, including molecules, plants and societies of animals, all of which are organised in a series of inclusive levels, in which the whole at each level is more than the sum of the parts, which are themselves wholes at a lower level. Even the most ardent defenders of the mechanistic theory smuggle purposive organising principles into living organisms in the form of selfish genes or genetic programs. In the light of the Big Bang theory, the entire universe is more like a growing, developing organism than a machine slowly running out of steam. Rupert Sheldrake
• In relation to the living earth, we can see that the Gaia theory is not just an isolated poetic metaphor in an otherwise mechanical universe. The recognition of the earth as a living organism is a major step towards recognising the wider life of the cosmos. If the earth is a living organism, what about the sun and the solar system as a whole? If the solar system is a kind of organism, what about the galaxy? Cosmology already portrays the entire universe as a kind of growing super-organism, born through the hatching of the cosmic egg. Rupert Sheldrake
• No machine starts from small beginnings, grows, forms new structures within itself and then reproduces itself. Yet plants and animals do this all the time. They can also regenerate after damage. To see them as machines propelled only by ordinary physics and chemistry is an act of faith; to insist that they are machines despite all appearances is dogmatic. Rupert Sheldrake
• Living organisms, unlike machines, are themselves creative. Plants and animals vary spontaneously, respond to genetic changes and adapt to new challenges from the environment. Rupert Sheldrake
• There is no transcendent creator in animism, no god who set the clocks ticking and decides which ones to fix when they falter; nothing exists outside of nature. In other words, my philosophy does not require that I believe in something I cannot experience directly. Emma Restall Orr

.

It feels more relevant to see God, the designer, as a computer programmer, genetic engineer, or the environmental scientist

• Does “watchmaker” really say God to us in the digital age? If we want to understand God through a technological metaphor, wouldn’t the computer programmer, the genetic engineer, or the environmental scientist seem more apt? With accurate clocks built into our cellphones, computers, coffeemakers, and cars, a device whose main purpose is to tell the time seems quaint—an eccentric luxury, not the work of awe-inspiring genius. Adam R. Shapiro
• The metaphors that help people understand God are reflections of the kind of God they desire, whether it’s one who works mysteriously, one who cares about human welfare, or one who rewards some people and punishes others. Adam R. Shapiro
• God is a hacker, not an engineer. Francis Crick

.

Some even see God, the designer, as nature itself…

• What else is nature but God? Seneca the Younger
• I believe in nature instead of God. Matthew Sweet
• Study nature as the countenance of God. Charles Kingsley
• Nature is God’s. Art is man’s instrument. Thomas Overbury
• He who understands nature walks close with God. Edgar Cayce
• I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. Frank Lloyd Wright
• I’ve always regarded nature as the clothing of God. Alan Hovhaness
• If Nature is our mother, then God is our father. Henry David Thoreau
• Nature is the chart of God, mapping out all His attributes. Martin Farquhar Tupper
• We now use the word ‘nature’ very much as our fathers used the word ‘God.’ John Burroughs
• I believe in God and in nature and in the triumph of good over evil. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune all these are names of the one and self-same God. Lucius Annaeus Seneca

.

…or as life itself

• There is no God other than life itself. Rajneesh
• God is life. God is life in action. Miguel Angel Ruiz
• God is the Spiritual Presence that pervades life. Paul Tillich
• Life is God because everything is a part of God. Kevin R. Williams
• To know God and to live is the same thing. God is Life. Leo Tolstoy
• Life is everything. Life is God. Everything shifts and moves, and this movement is God. Leo Tolstoy
• The Father of the universals doth consist of Light and Life, and from Him Man was born. Hermes Trismegistus
• God is incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love. Mary Baker Eddy
• God is not the mere dead conception to which we have thus given utterance, but he is in himself pure Life. Johann Gottlieb Fichte
• God is life; and in that life which is God there are no years. … The human sense of life is not your real life. Joel S. Goldsmith
• God is not merely a name. God is the life that is surging within us; the Life by which we see and love one another. Paramahansa Yogananda
• The energy of life entering and leaving your body flows evenly throughout the universe. With that current, the mind of the cosmos communicates with all things. Ilchi Lee

.

Some argue the world appears more like a thought of God than a machine…

• The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter…we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. James Jeans

.

…and this implies that God, the designer, is a mind

• The metaphor of a designer presupposes an external mind. Rupert Sheldrake
• Mind is god and god is Mind. Anaxagoras
• The absolute is a single mind encompassing all streams of consciousness. Timothy Sprigge
• The Absolute consists of a single eternal mind, in which our minds are somehow included. T.H. Green
• God is incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, life, Truth, Love. Mary Baker Eddy
• As a handful of sand thrown into the ocean, so are the sins of all flesh as compared with the mind of God. Isaac of Nineveh
• The mind of God is all the mentality that is scattered over space and time, the diffused consciousness that animates the world. Baruch Spinoza
• I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. Freeman Dyson