Nonfiction | September 01, 1988
Looking For God's Footprints
James Gleick
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Sure, it’s easy to make fun. Our planet flies through space more smoothly than any airplane, covered with water yet never spilling a drop, so it must have had a Designer. Our eyes display too complex an architecture to be reached by random mutations, so they must have had a Biological Engineer. Our atmosphere contains just enough oxygen, just enough carbon to support life, so it must have had an Environmental Consultant. New York City offers a brilliantly conceived breeding ground for cockroaches; surely, therefore, we can deduce the existence of a cockroach diety. The so called argument from design–from design, that is, to the existence of God, had barely been thought up before it was being satirized, and you can’t always tell the serious versions from the parodies.
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