![]() And given the complexity of the design, only God could have been the designer. Such order could not have come about simply by chance. In the early 1950s, in celebration of the 700th birthday of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri, the Italian government commissioned the Surrealist master Salvador Dalí to create 100 illustrations for a commemorative edition of The Divine Comedy.Dalí’s hyperrealistic, bizarre, and nightmarish imagery seemed like the perfect pairing to Dante’s visions of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. If youre making a clock where the numerals are cut from metal and affixed to the face, using IIII means youll need. Given the apparent design in the world (how everything seems to fit together, like an intricate machine), it would seem that the world was in fact designed. Using IIII may have also made work a little easier for certain clock makers. This proof argues from the design or order of the universe to the need for a rational creator. So it was the rise of modern science that eclipsed earlier arguments for God’s existence, and moved to center stage a new proof: the argument from design. Time is an inescapable reality of human life and one of the fundamental building blocks of human society. Just as the human mind is the source of the rational ordering found in a clock, the divine mind must be the source of the rational ordering found in nature, whether it be the foot of a dog, the motion of the planets, or human beings themselves and their powerful minds. John Locke wrote that “the works of Nature everywhere sufficiently evidence a Deity,” and his chemist friend at Oxford, Robert Boyle, claimed that “there is incomparably more art expressed in the structure of a dog’s foot than in that of the famous clock at Strasbourg.”īoyle’s point is clear: the clock in the Strasbourg Cathedral was the most complicated piece of machinery of its day, with people traveling from all over Europe just to wonder at it - and yet this greatest of human inventions paled in comparison with the meanest of natural structures, such as a dog’s foot. The very fact that nature was understandable was strong evidence that it came from God, the very source of reason. Nor did this unlocking of nature’s mysteries lead scientists away from religion rather, most scientists viewed it as lending support to the notion that God must have created this world - for how better could we explain the rational ordering found in nature? Only a rational mind could bring about such a rational world. What before had struck humans as unfathomable mystery or confusion was slowly yielding to scientific explanation. Important scientific advances impressed upon that age just how rational - that is, how understandable - nature really was. Only then could we design and create the machines to forge and produce each individual part needed to assemble a watch. Reason and Nature were inseparable concepts during the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. ![]()
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