What are the origins of intelligent design theory?
The argument from design, as it has been known for hundreds of years, was expounded most famously by William Paley, a 19th century British theologian. Using the analogy of the watchmaker, Paley argued that just as we infer a watchmaker from the complex workings of a pocket watch, we must infer a creator of the universe from the complex systems of the natural order. Today’s advocates of intelligent design maintain that while Paley’s perspective was rooted in the idea of a benevolent Christian God, theirs is the outgrowth of scientific discovery, which has left some profound and fundamental phenomena, such as cell structure, unexplained. But the overwhelming majority of intelligent design advocates are Christians, and virtually all are theists. Some critics equate intelligent design theory with the so-called “God of the gaps” fallacy—resorting to a divine intelligence to explain the existence of natural phenomena for which we have no scientific explanation. But proponents of intelligent
