Please read UCGC before this page
The Catholic Church does not recognize the ordinations of Gnostic churches as valid. This means that a Gnostic priest would not be considered a validly ordained priest within the Catholic Church.
The name was chosen because of the word “gnostic,” meaning “knowledge,” and for no other reason. I learned about the Gnostic Church and its rituals only after 2020, when I discovered more about them on YouTube.And I ordered the Gospel of Thomas from Amazon in 2023.
As previously stated, we study only the imprimatur authorization books of St. John or those related to St. John.
I will not hide that in my teenage time, I did purchase the Esoteric Gospel of Saint John, a book that I never read, and it is lost today The book name was L’évangile ésotérique de Saint Jean interprété par Paul Le Cour, who is still available on the net, but for me it as no interest.
The RTT Ministry’s mission was to conduct research and compile information. The twelve members spend days in documentation, in libraries and writing. Today we find the same passion in R.T.T Ministry: The Did you know?, Classes and the Mediatech.
Our worship was a crossbreed between Catholic, Anglican and Methodist
If you ask me which one is which, I couldn’t tell you, but we didn’t have the Catholic Mass.
In the Anglican Church of Canada, everyone who is baptized is welcome to take Communion, whether you were baptized in an Anglican Church or another Christian tradition.
Methodists say in our Invitation to the Table, “Christ our Lord invites to his table all who love him, who earnestly repent of their sin, and seek to be at peace with one another.” If you have done or are doing these three things, you are welcome to receive them. All baptized Christians of any age (including infants) and any Christian denomination are welcome to the Lord’s Table. It is Christ’s Table. He welcomes all who are baptized in his name, and so do we.
People of all faiths are welcome to attend Mass in a Catholic Church. Non-Catholics are welcome to attend the celebration, but only Catholics in a state of grace are permitted to receive Holy Communion during Mass.
For these reasons, we adhere to an open Communion policy. Nevertheless, we still believe that Christ is present in the host after it has been consecrated.
I did a thesis according to our study:” And God created the Big Bang.”:
Other Thesis:
- Convergence: How heaven works in the spiritual world.
- The Historical Jesus
- And God created the Big Bang.
As I explained previously, I lost all my documents in 2006, so I will not be able to print the documents that I wrote. However, it was based on a lecture I gave in one of my RTTM classes.
The text from Wikipedia, compiled from the works of many authors, presents my state of mind during those years.
And God Created the Big Bang http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design.
That was my second thesis title, «A God Created the Big Bang,» which built upon a Deist affirmation that God exists and, in their belief, He sparked the Creation, and the rest belongs to the theory of evolution.
As in native religions and some of the pagans who worship Mother Earth and Father Sun, or mythical oriental dragons that represent elements like water, wind or fire, that we call today «Nature,» which Christians call the «Hand of God,» can we see God’s implications?
God created Nature, and from that, Nature formed our Universe through time and space. That affirmation cannot be proved, but it also cannot be disproved. For a believer, God exists, and what is good about a God if He did not do anything? So, we attributed the Creation.
If you judge those lines with your reason, it makes good sense. Now, creationists want to go further by trying to prove it, and they came up with the«Intelligent Design Theory.» Let us see the point of view on it via
Wikipedia Writers:
We all know the Bible passage that says: «In the beginning, God created Heaven and Earth. And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved over the waters.
And God said: Let there be light made. And light was made. And God saw the light, that it was good, and he divided the light from the darkness. And he called the light Day, and the darkness Night; and there was evening and morning, one day.
And God said: Let there be a firmament made amidst the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made a firmament, and divided the waters that were under the firmament from those that were above the firmament, and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven; and the evening and morning were the second day.»
From this, we got our Cosmos. Now let us see a scientific view: «Darwinism originally included broad concepts of transmutation of species or evolution which gained general scientific acceptance when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, including concepts which predated Darwin’s theories, but subsequently referred to specific concepts of natural selection, the Weismann barrier or in genetics the central dogma of molecular biology. Though it usually refers strictly to biological evolution, the term has been misused by creationists to refer to the origin of life. It has even been applied to concepts of cosmic evolution, which have no connection to Darwin’s work.
The modern evolutionary synthesis is a union of ideas from several biological specialties which provides a widely accepted account of evolution. It is also referred to as the new synthesis, the modern synthesis, the evolutionary synthesis, the millennium synthesis and the Neo-Darwinian synthesis.
The synthesis, produced between 1936 and 1947, reflects the consensus about how evolution proceeds. The previous development of population genetics, between 1918 and 1932, served as a stimulus, as it demonstrated that Mendelian genetics was consistent with natural selection and gradual evolution. The synthesis is still, to a large extent, the current paradigm in evolutionary biology.
The modern synthesis addressed the difficulties and confusion caused by the specialization and poor communication among biologists in the early 20th Century. At its heart was the question of whether Mendelian genetics could be reconciled with gradual evolution through natural selection. A second issue was whether the broad-scale changes (macroevolution) seen by paleontologists could be explained by changes observed in local populations (microevolution).
The synthesis incorporated evidence from biologists trained in genetics, who studied populations both in the field and in the laboratory. These studies were crucial to the development of evolutionary theory. The synthesis drew together ideas from several branches of biology which had become separated, particularly genetics, cytology, systematics, botany, morphology, ecology and paleontology.
Intelligent Design (ID) is a form of creationism promulgated by the Discovery Institute, a politically conservative think tank. The Institute defines it as the proposition that “certain features of the universe and living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.” It is a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for the existence of God, presented by its advocates as “an evidence-based scientific theory about life’s origins” rather than “a religion-based idea.”All the leading proponents of Intelligent Design are associated with the Discovery Institute and believe the designer to be the Christian deity.
Scientific acceptance of Intelligent Design would require redefining science to allow supernatural explanations of observed phenomena, an approach its proponents describe as theistic realism or theistic science. It presents several arguments in support of the existence of a designer, the most prominent of which are irreducible complexity and specified complexity. The scientific community rejects the extension of science to include supernatural explanations, instead favouring the continued acceptance of methodological naturalism. It has also rejected both irreducible complexity and specified complexity due to a wide range of conceptual and factual flaws. Intelligent Design is viewed as a pseudoscience by the scientific community because it lacks empirical support, offers no tenable hypotheses, and aims to describe natural history in terms of scientifically untestable supernatural causes.
Intelligent Design was developed by a group of American creationists who revised their argument in the Creation–evolution controversy to circumvent court rulings, such as the United States Supreme Court’s Edwards v. Aguilar decision, which barred the teaching of “Creation Science” in public schools on the grounds of breaching the separation of Church and state. The first publication of the phrase “intelligent design” in its present use as an alternative term for creationism was in Of Pandas and People, a 1989 textbook intended for high-school biology classes. From the mid-1990s, intelligent design proponents were supported by the Discovery Institute, which, along with its Center for Science and Culture, planned and funded the “intelligent design movement.” They advocated the inclusion of Intelligent Design in public school biology curricula, leading to the 2005 Kitzmiller v. DoverArea School District trial, where U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent Design is not science, that it “cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents,” and that the school district’s promotion of it, therefore, violated the establishment ClauseoftheFirst Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The intelligent design movement is a direct outgrowth of the creationism of the 1980s. The scientific and academic communities, along with a U.S. federal court, view intelligent Design as either a form of creationism or as a direct descendant closely intertwined with traditional creationism; several authors explicitly refer to it as “intelligent design creationism.”
The movement is headquartered at the Centre for Science and Culture (CSC), established in 1996 as the creationist wing of the Discovery Institute, to promote a religious agenda calling for broad social, academic, and political changes. The Discovery Institute’s intelligent design campaigns have been staged primarily in the United States, although efforts have been made in other countries to promote intelligent Design. Leaders of the movement say Intelligent Design exposes the limitations of scientific orthodoxy and the secular philosophy of naturalism. Intelligent design proponents allege that science should not be limited to naturalism and should not demand the
Adoption of a naturalistic philosophy that dismisses out of hand any explanation that includes a supernatural cause. The overall goal of the movement is to “defeat the materialist worldview,” as represented by the theory of evolution, in favour of “a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.”
Phillip E. Johnson stated that the goal of Intelligent Design is to cast creationism as a scientific concept. All leading proponents of Intelligent Design are fellows or staff members of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Nearly all intelligent design concepts and the associated movement are the products of the Discovery Institute, which guides the movement and follows its “wedge strategy” while conducting its “Teach the Controversy” campaign and other related programs.
Leading intelligent design proponents have made conflicting statements regarding intelligent Design. In statements directed at the general public, they say intelligent Design is not religious; when addressing conservative Christian supporters, they state that intelligent Design has its foundation in the Bible. Recognizing the need for support, the Institute affirms its Christian, evangelistic orientation: “Alongside a focus on influential opinion-makers, we also seek to build up a popular base of support among our natural constituency, namely, Christians. We will do this primarily through apologetic seminars. We intend these to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidence that supports the faith, as well as to ‘popularize’ our ideas in the broader culture.”
Barbara Forrest, an expert who has written extensively on the movement, describes this as being due to the Discovery Institute’s policy of obfuscating its agenda. She has written that the movement’s “activities betray an aggressive, systematic agenda for promoting not only intelligent design creationism but the religious worldview that undergirds it.”
Although arguments for Intelligent Design are formulated in secular terms and intentionally avoid positing the identity of the designer, the majority of principal Intelligent Design advocates are publicly religious Christians who have stated that, in their view, the designer proposed in Intelligent Design is the Christian conception of God. Stuart Burgess, Phillip E. Johnson, William Dembski, and Stephen C. Meyer are evangelical Protestants; Michael Behe is a Roman Catholic, and Jonathan Wells is a member of the Unification Church. Non-Christian proponents include David Klinghoffer, who is Jewish, Michael Denton, who is agnostic, and Muzaffar Iqbal, a Pakistani Muslim. Phillip E. Johnson has stated that cultivating ambiguity by employing secular language in carefully crafted arguments is a necessary first step for ultimately reintroducing the Christian concept of God as the designer. Johnson explicitly calls for intelligent design proponents to obfuscate their religious motivations to avoid having intelligent Design identified “as just another way of packaging the Christian evangelical message.” Johnson
Emphasizes that “the first thing that has to be done is to get the Bible out of the discussion”; “after we have separated materialist prejudice from scientific fact. Only then can ‘biblical issues’ be discussed”.
William Dembski has described the strategy of deliberately disguising the religious intent of Intelligent Design in The Design Inference. In this work, Dembski lists a god or an “alien life force” as two possible options for the identity of the designer; however, in his book Intelligent Design: The Bridge Between Science and Theology, Dembski states that “Christ is indispensable to any scientific theory, even if its practitioners do not have a clue about him. The pragmatics of a scientific theory can, to be sure, be pursued without recourse to Christ. However, the conceptual soundness of the theory can, in the end, only be located in Christ.” Dembski also stated, “ID is part of God’s general revelation. Not only does Intelligent Design rid us of this ideology (materialism), which suffocates the human spirit, but, in my personal experience, I’ve found that it opens the path for people to come to Christ”. Both Johnson and Dembski cite the Gospel of John in the Bible as the foundation of Intelligent Design.
Barbara Forrest contends such statements reveal that leading proponents see intelligent Design as essentially religious in Nature, not merely a scientific concept that has implications with which their personal religious beliefs happen to coincide. She writes that the leading proponents of Intelligent Design are closely allied with the ultra-conservative Christian Reconstructionism movement. She lists connections of (current and former) Discovery Institute Fellows Phillip Johnson, Charles Thaxton, Michael Behe, Richard Weikart, Jonathan Wells, and Francis Beckwith to leading Christian Reconstructionist organizations, as well as the extent of the funding provided to the Institute by Howard Ahmanson Jr., a leading figure in the Reconstructionist movement.
Not all creationist organizations have embraced the intelligent design movement. According to Thomas Dixon, “Religious leaders have come out against ID, too. An open letter affirming the compatibility of the Christian faith and the theory of evolution, first produced in response to controversies in Wisconsin in 2004, has now been signed by over 10,000 clergy from various Christian denominations across the United States. In 2006, the director of the Vatican Observatory, the Jesuit astronomer George Coyne, condemned ID as a kind of ‘crude creationism’ which reduced God to a mere engineer.” Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe, a proponent of Old Earth creationism, believes that the efforts of intelligent design proponents to divorce the concept from Biblical Christianity make its hypothesis too vague. In 2002, he wrote: “Winning the argument for Design without identifying the designer yields, at best, a sketchy origins model. Such a model makes little to no positive impact on the community of scientists and other scholars… The time is right for a direct approach, a single leap into the origins fray. Introducing a Bible-based, scientifically verifiable creation model represents such a leap.”
Likewise, two of the most prominent Young Earth creationism organizations in the world have attempted to distinguish their views from Intelligent Design. Henry M. Morris of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) wrote in 1999 that ID, “even if well-meaning and effectively articulated, will not work! It has often been tried in the
past and has failed, and it will fail today. The reason it will not work is because it is not the Biblical method.” According to Morris: “The evidence of intelligent design… must be either followed by or accompanied by a sound presentation of true Biblical creationism if it is to be meaningful and lasting.” In 2002, Carl Wieland, then of answers in Genesis (AiG), criticized design advocates who, though well-intentioned, “left the Bible out of it” and thereby unwittingly aided and abetted the modern rejection of the Bible. Wieland explained that “AiG’s major ‘strategy’ is to boldly, but humbly, call the Church back to its Biblical foundations… [so] we neither count ourselves a part of this movement nor campaign against it.
TeleologicalAgument http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleological_argument
A teleological or Design argument is an a posteriori argument for the existence of God based on apparent Design and purpose in the Universe. The argument is based on an interpretation of teleology wherein purpose and Design appear to exist in Nature beyond the scope of any such human activities. The teleological argument suggests that, given this premise, the existence of a designer can be assumed, typically presented as God. Various concepts of teleology originated in ancient philosophy and theology. Some philosophers, such as Plato, proposed a divine Artificer as the designer; others, including Aristotle, rejected that conclusion in favour of a more naturalistic teleology.
In the Middle Ages, the Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd, also known as Averroes, introduced a teleological argument. Later, a teleological argument is the fifth of Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways, his rational proof for the existence of God. The teleological argument was continued by empiricists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who believed that the order in the world suggested the existence of God. William Paley developed these ideas with his version of the watchmaker analogy. He argued that in the same way, a
Watch’s complexity implies the existence of its maker, so too, one may infer the Creator of the Universe exists, given the evident complexity of Nature. This argument resonates with a notion of the fine-tuned Universe, understood as an alternative to the anthropic principle.
There have been numerous criticisms of the different versions of the teleological argument. Commonly, critics argue that any implied designer need not have the qualities commonly attributed to the God of classical theism. Moreover, there is a great diversity of spiritual and religious beliefs concerning the identity and attributes of such a Creator, which vary from one society to another and across different periods of human history. Biologists have presented alternative explanations for biological complexity, notably the theory of evolution through natural selection, which, however, does not explain the origins of life. Since the 1990s, the concept of “no-creationism” and Intelligent Design have presented the teleological argument while avoiding naming the designer, aiming to present this as science and have it taught in public school science classes. In 2005, a U.S. Federal Court ruled that Intelligent Design is a religious argument and is not science and was being used to give pseudo-scientific support for creationism, the religious belief in a designer.
Plato and Aristotle, depicted here in The School of Athens, both developed philosophical arguments addressing the Universe’s apparent order (logos)
According to Xenophon, Socrates (c. 469-399 B.C.) argued that the adaptation of human parts to one another, such as the eyelids protecting the eyeballs, could not have been due to chance and was a sign of wise planning in the Universe.
Plato (C. 427–C 347 B.C.) posited a “demiurge” of supreme wisdom and intelligence as the Creator of the cosmos in his work Timaeus. Plato’s teleological perspective is also built upon the analysis of a priori order and structure in the world that he had already presented in The Republic. Plato does not propose creation ex nihilo; instead, the demiurge made an order from the chaos of the cosmos, imitating the eternal Forms.
Plato’s world of eternal and unchanging Forms, imperfectly represented in matter by a divine Artisan, contrasts sharply with the various mechanistic Weltanschauungen, of which atomism was, by the fourth Century at least, the most prominent… This debate persisted throughout the ancient world. The atomistic mechanism received a boost from Epicurus, while the Stoics adopted a divine teleology. The choice seems simple: either shows how a structured, regular world could arise out of undirected processes or inject intelligence into the system. This was how Aristotle (384–322 BC), when still a young acolyte of Plato, viewed matters. Cicero (On the Nature of the Gods 2.95 = Fr. 12) preserves Aristotle’s cave image: if troglodytes were brought suddenly into the upper world, they would immediately suppose it to have been intelligently arranged. However, Aristotle eventually abandoned this view; although he believed in a divine being, he referred to it as the Prime.
Mover is not the efficient cause of action in the Universe, and plays no part in constructing or arranging it… However, although he rejects the divine Artificer, Aristotle does not resort to a purely mechanistic explanation of random forces. Instead, he seeks to find a middle way between the two positions, one which relies heavily on the notion of Nature or physics. — R. J. Hankinson, Cause and Explanation in Ancient Greek Thought
Aristotle (c. 384–322 B.C.) argued that the most complete explanation regarding the natural, as well as the artificial, is, for the most part, teleological. Based solely on the study of immature specimens, for example, one would not feel confident in one’s knowledge of the species. Similarly, knowledge of what an animal uses a feature for is crucial to understanding it (for example, that birds use wings for flight). Aristotle did not believe that Nature is endowed with the same rational purpose and direction as human activity and artifacts. However, he did believe that the adult form is present in the offspring, having been copied from the parent and that the parts of the organism are suitable for their purpose. He maintained that, by an imperfect but compelling analogy, one could almost say they are purpose-built to suit their essential function. Furthermore, knowledge of that function or end purpose is essential because any other explanations one could offer for the organ would be tremendously informed, given the telos.
In his Metaphysics, Aristotle addressed the existence of gods. Rather than envisioning an Artificer as Plato did, he believed that the eternal Cosmos required no creation. Aristotle argued for the existence of one or more unmoved movers to serve as Nature’s role models and constant inspiration (see Prime Mover and Daimon). Aristotle described the movers as immaterial “active intellects,” incapable of perceiving or interacting with the Cosmos, thus assuredly “unmoved.” To the extent permitted by the vagrancy of matter, he believed the natural pleroma is exerting its full potential because it has had an eternity in which to do so. This is not to imply naïve, Panglossian idealism, but rather a logically valid argument from a natural scientist who took a great deal of interest in efficient causal analysis. As a more unsettled account of the species, he briefly recounted the concept of the survival of the fittest, a notion well-known even in Aristotle’s time. It would have been infinitely long ago, he argued and thus would have remained effectively unchanged for an infinitely long duration. Conceding that monstrosities come about by chance, he disagrees with those who, like Democritus, ascribe all Nature purely to chance because he believes science can only provide a general account of that which is normal, “always, or for the most part.”
Cicero (c. 106–c. 43 B.C.) presented an early teleological argument in De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), arguing that divine power can be found in reason, which exists throughout Nature. He developed an early version of the watchmaker analogy, which William Paley later developed.
“When you see a sundial or a water clock, you see that it tells the time by Design and not by chance. How, then, can you imagine that the Universe as a whole is devoid of purpose?
And intelligence, when it embraces everything, including these artifacts themselves and their artificers?” —Cicero, De Natura Deorum, ii. 34
As an appeal to general revelation, Paul the Apostle (A.D. 5-67) argues in Romans 1:18-20 that because it has been made plain to all from what has been created in the world, it is obvious that there is a God.
Marcus Minucius Felix (late 2nd-3rd c.), an Early Christian writer, argued for the existence of God based on the analogy of an ordered house in his The Orders of Minucius Felix.
Augustine of Hippo (A.D. 354–430) presented a classic teleological perspective in his work City of God. He describes the “city of man” and essentially posits that God plans to replace the city of man with the city of God (at some as-yet-unknown point in the future). Whether this is to happen gradually or suddenly is not made clear in Augustine’s work. He did not, however, present a formal argument for the existence of God; instead, God’s existence is already presumed, and Augustine presented a proposed view of God’s teleology. Augustine’s perspective is built upon the Neo-Platonic views of his era, which in turn have their original roots in Plato’s cosmogony.
Averroes
Averroes (Ibn Rushd) introduced teleological arguments into his interpretations of Aristotle from an Islamic perspective in Moorish Spain in the latter half of the 12th Century. His work was highly controversial and officially banned in both Christendom and Islamic Spain. Averroes’ teleological arguments can be characterized as assuming the existence of one God. He proposes that God’s intellect is responsible for causing order and continual motion in the world. In knowing all forms and patterns, God provides order to the Lesser Intelligences.
Aquinas
The fifth of Thomas Aquinas’ proofs of God’s existence was based on teleology. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) presented a form of the teleological argument in his Summa Theologica. In his work, Aquinas presented five ways to prove the existence of God, known as the quinque viae. These arguments feature only a posteriori arguments rather than traditional dogma. He sums up his teleological argument as follows.
The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack knowledge, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, to obtain the best result. Hence, it is plain that they achieve their end, not fortuitously, but designedly. Now, whatever lacks knowledge cannot reach its end unless it is directed by someone endowed.
With knowledge and intelligence, the archer directs the arrow. Therefore, some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end, and this being we call God.
—St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica: Article 3, Question 2
Aquinas notes that the existence of final causes, by which a cause is directed toward an effect, can only be explained by an appeal to intelligence. However, as natural bodies aside from humans do not possess intelligence, there must, he reasons, exist a being that directs final causes at every moment. That being is what we call God.
British empiricists
The 17th-century Dutch writers Lessius and Grotius argued that the intricate structure of the world, like that of a house, was unlikely to have arisen by chance. The empiricist John Locke, writing in the late 17th Century, developed the Aristotelian idea that, excluding geometry, all science must attain its knowledge a posteriori —through sensory experience. In response to Locke, the Anglican Irish Bishop George Berkeley advanced a form of idealism in which things only continue to exist as long as they are perceived. When humans do not perceive objects, they continue to exist because God is perceiving them. Therefore, for objects to remain in existence, God must be omnipresent.
David Hume, in the mid-18th Century, presented arguments both for and against the teleological argument in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. The character Cleanthes, summarizing the teleological argument, likens the Universe to an artificial machine and concludes, based on the principle of similar effects and similar causes, that it must have a designing intelligence. Philo is not satisfied with the teleological argument, however. He attempts several refutations, including one that arguably foreshadows Darwin’s theory, and argues that if God is likened to a human designer, then assuming divine characteristics such as omnipotence and omniscience is not justified. He goes on to joke that far from being the perfect Creation of a perfect designer, this Universe may be “only the first rude essay of some infant deity… the object of derision to his superiors”.
Look round the world: contemplate the whole and every part of it. You will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all Nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance, of human Design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence. Since, therefore, effects resemble each other, we are led to infer, by all the rules of analogy, that the causes also resemble and that the Author of Nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man, though possessed of much larger faculties, proportioned to the grandeur of the
Work which he has executed. By this argument a posteriori, and by this argument alone, do we prove at once the existence of a Deity and his similarity to the human mind and intelligence?
— David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
Watchmaker analogy
William Paley’s “watchmaker analogy” is one of the most famous teleological arguments in philosophy. The watchmaker analogy, framing the argument concerning a timepiece, dates back to Cicero, who used the example of a sundial or water clock in his reasoning that the presence of order and purpose signifies the existence of a designer. It was also used by Robert Hooke and Voltaire, the latter of whom remarked: “L’univers m’embarrasse, etje ne puis songer Quecette horlogeexiste, et n’ait point d’horloger”; “I’m puzzled by the world; I cannot dream The timepiece real, its maker but a dream”.
William Paley presented the watchmaker analogy in his Natural Theology (1802). Suppose I found a watch on the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think … that, for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for a stone that happened to lie on the ground?… For this reason, and no other, namely that, if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, if a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it. —William Paley, Natural Theology
Paley wrote in response to Hume’s objection to the analogy between artifacts and worlds, choosing to use the example of a watch as a reliable indicator of divine Design. He identifies two features of a watch that demonstrate its Design. First, a watch serves a valuable purpose, timekeeping, which a designer would find helpful; secondly, the watch would be unable to perform this purpose if its parts were any different or arranged in any other way. Paley argued that the world of Nature displays more functional complexity than that found in the watch. As the adaptation found in natural organisms seems to be both complex and achieve a purpose, Paley reasons that this must be evidence of divine Design.
Natural theology had a profound influence on British science, with the expectation, as expressed by Adam Sedgwick in 1831, that the truths revealed by science could not conflict with the moral truths of religion. These natural philosophers saw God as the first cause and sought secondary causes to explain Design in Nature: The leading figure, John Herschel, wrote in 1836 that by analogy with other intermediate causes, “the origination of fresh species, could it ever come under our cognizance, would be found to be a natural in contradistinction to a miraculous process.”
As a theology student, Charles Darwin found Paley’s arguments compelling. However, he later developed his theory of evolution in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, which offers an alternate explanation of biological order. In his autobiography, Darwin wrote, “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.” Darwin struggled with the problem of evil and suffering in Nature but remained inclined to believe that Nature depended upon “designed laws” and commended Asa Gray for pointing out that Darwin’s work supported teleology.
Fine-tuned Universe
A modern variation of the teleological argument is based on the concept of a fine-tuned Universe. The fine-tuning of the Universe is the apparent delicate balance of conditions necessary for human life. In this view, speculation about a vast range of possible conditions in which life cannot exist is used to explore the probability of conditions in which life can and does exist. In terms of a teleological argument, the intuition about a fine-tuned universe would be that God must have been responsible if achieving such perfect conditions is so improbable. Regarding fine-tuning, Kenneth Himma writes: “The mere fact that it is enormously improbable that an event occurred… by itself, gives us no reason to think that it occurred by Design… As intuitively tempting as it may be…” Himma attributes the “Argument from Suspicious Improbabilities,” a formalization of “the fine-tuning intuition,” to George N. Schlesinger:
To understand the argument, consider your reaction to two different events. If John wins a 1-in-1,000,000,000 lottery game, you would not immediately be tempted to think that John (or someone acting on his behalf) cheated. If, however, John won three consecutive 1-in-1,000 lotteries, you would immediately be tempted to think that John (or someone acting on his behalf) cheated. Schlesinger believes that the intuitive reaction to these two scenarios is justified. The structure of the latter event is such that it… justifies a belief that Intelligent Design is the cause… Even though the probability of winning three consecutive 1-in-1,000 games is the same as the probability of winning one 1-in-1,000,000,000 game, the former event… warrants an inference of intelligent Design.
Himma considers Schlesinger’s argument to be subject to the same vulnerabilities he noted in other versions of the design argument: While Schlesinger is undoubtedly correct in thinking that we are justified in suspecting Design in the case [of winning] three consecutive lotteries, it is because—and only because—we know two related empirical facts about such events. First, we already know that intelligent agents exist that possess the right motivations and causal abilities to bring about such events deliberately. Second, we know from experience with such events that they are typically attributed to the deliberate agency of one or more of these agents. Without at least one of these two pieces of information, we are not justified in seeing.
design in such cases… The problem with the fine-tuning argument is that we lack both the pieces needed to justify an inference of Design. First, the very point of the argument is to establish the fact that there exists an intelligent agency that has the right causal abilities and motivations to bring the existence of a universe capable of sustaining life. Second, and more obviously, we do not have any experience with the genesis of worlds and are, hence, not in a position to know whether the deliberate agency of some intelligent agency usually explains the existence of fine-tuned universes. Because we lack this essential background information, we are not justified in inferring that an intelligent Deity exists who deliberately created a universe capable of sustaining life.
Antony Flew, who spent most of his life as an atheist, converted to deism late in life because of the anthropic principle. He concluded that the fine-tuning of the Universe was too precise to be the result of chance, so they accepted the existence of God. He said that his commitment to “go where the evidence leads meant that he ended up accepting the existence of God. Flew proposed the view, held earlier by Fred Hoyle, that the Universe is too young for life to have developed purely by chance and that, therefore, an intelligent being must exist that was involved in designing the conditions required for life to evolve.
Would you not say to yourself, “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.” Of course, you would… A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in Nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question. — Fred Hoyle, Engineering and Science, The Universe: Past and Present Reflections
In the state, a group of creationists rebranded Creation Science as “intelligent design,” which was presented as a scientific theory rather than a religious argument.
The teaching of evolution was effectively barred from United States public school curricula by the outcome of the 1925 Scopes Trial. However, in the 1960s, the National Defence Education Act led to the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study reintroducing the teaching of evolution. In response, there was a resurgence of creationism, which was presented as “Creation Science,” based on biblical literalism but with Bible quotes optional. A 1989 survey found that virtually all literature promoting creation science presented the design argument, with John D. Morris saying, “Any living thing gives such strong evidence for design by an intelligent designer that only a willful ignorance of the data(II Peter 3:5) could lead one to assign such intricacy to chance.” Such publications introduced concepts central to intelligent Design, including irreducible complexity (a variant of the watchmaker analogy) and specified complexity (closely resembling a fine-tuning argument). The United States Supreme Court’s Edwards v. Aguillard ruling barred the teaching of “Creation Science” in public schools, as it was deemed to breach the separation of Church and State.
Scientists disagreed with the assertion that Intelligent Design is scientific, and its introduction into the science curriculum of a Pennsylvania school district led to the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial, which ruled that the “Intelligent Design” arguments are essentially religious in Nature and not science. The court took evidence from theologian John F. Haught and ruled that “ID is not a new scientific argument, but is rather an old religious argument for the existence of God. He traced this argument back to at least Thomas Aquinas in the 13th Century, who framed the argument as a syllogism: Wherever complex Design exists, there must have been a designer; Nature is complex; therefore, Nature must have had an intelligent designer.” “This argument for the existence of God was advanced early in the 19th century by Reverend Paley.” “The only apparent difference between the argument made by Paley and the argument for ID, as expressed by defence expert witnesses Behe and Minnich, is that ID’s’ official position’ does not acknowledge that the designer is God.”
Proponents of the intelligent design movement, such as Cornelius G. Hunter, have asserted that the methodological naturalism upon which science is based is inherently religious in Nature. They commonly refer to it as ‘scientific materialism’ or’ methodological materialism’ and conflate it with ‘metaphysical naturalism.’ They use this assertion to support their claim that modern science is atheistic and contrast it with their preferred approach of a revived natural philosophy, which welcomes supernatural explanations for natural phenomena and supports theistic science. This ignores the distinction between science and religion established in Ancient Greece. In medieval European Scholasticism, science as taught at universities was obliged to restrict its attention to the natural world. From the standpoint of modern science, Stephen Jay Gould’s concept of non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) posits that science and religion should be viewed as two compatible, complementary fields, or “magisteria,” whose authority does not overlap.
Intelligent design advocate Michael Behe proposed the development of Paley’s watch analogy, in which he argued in favour of Intelligent Design. Unlike Paley, Behe only attempts to prove the existence of an intelligent designer rather than the God of classical theism. Behe uses the analogy of a mousetrap to propose irreducible complexity: if a mousetrap loses just one of its parts, it can no longer function as a mousetrap. He argues that irreducible complexity in an object guarantees the presence of intelligent Design. Behe claims that there are instances of irreducible complexity in the natural world and that parts of the world must have been designed.
At the University of Chicago, geneticist James A. Shapiro, writing in the Boston Review, states that advancements in microbiology, molecular biology and genetics, insofar as
They overlap with information science and introduce hard science with implications for the teleological argument. Genome reorganization is a biological process discovered by Nobel Laureate Barbara McClintock. Shapiro states that these natural genetic engineering systems can produce radical reorganizations of the ‘genetic apparatus within a single cell generation.’ One protozoan, called Oxytricha, responds to stress by splitting its chromosomes into thousands of pieces, which are then reassembled into a ‘distinct kind of functional genome.’ Shapiro suggests what he calls a ‘Third Way’; a non-creationist, non-Darwinian type of evolution:
What significance does an emerging interface between biology and information science hold for thinking about evolution? It opens up the possibility of addressing scientifically, rather than ideologically, the central issues so hotly contested by fundamentalists on both sides of the Creationist-Darwinist debate: Is there any guiding intelligence at work in the origin of species, displaying exquisite adaptations…
For science, their goal in that story is to prove the existence of GOD.
As it is for members of a Christian Congregation, it is a fact that comes with our beliefs. At EMMI, in collaboration with the RTT Ministry, created by Rev. Eric Michel, our goal was not to prove or disprove science and the Holy Scriptures but to pose questions that can be answered by reason. Using modern tools and discovery to dig the theo-philosophical thoughts to set plausible scientific explanations for an observable reality concerning the Universe, the Cosmos, etc., I was listening to a CBC Television show with the astrophysicist Hubert Reeves, who said about God, «I want to know if there is an intention in Nature if the conduct of the Universe is a project? In terms of atoms, molecules, stars, galaxies, and biochemistry, the idea of a project seems acceptable. It is wonderful to see, for example, the functioning of the human body. The problems arise in terms of human behaviour. He added that he noticed in his travels around the world, “there are no people, culture, civilization, small groups of people, tribes that have their sacred history. This need for meaning is present everywhere in the world. “God, according to Reeves, refers to this basic need that we all understand in us. It is this quest to find the universal meaning of our lives.
The Research, Theology, and Teaching Ministry is Rev. Eric Michel’s passion, the oldest ministry within the Church, established in 1987 as a result of his research and studies, which began in 1966. The ministry of learning, the ministry of sharing knowledge.Ministry that you find sponsoring many projects on this website or our network, like the Forum, Classes or Videos. Additionally, to serve you better with the proper tools and information, RTT has a Multimedia Library containing hundreds of Books, Videos, CDs, and Magazines. Member of many Christian Organizations and a layperson as well. Our goal is not to tell you what to believe but to lead you on the right path.
In conclusion, the Rev Eric Michel said:
I am a convinced believer that God created our Universe, to the extent no one can tell. Intelligent Design makes sense if you consider that Nature is, in a figurative sense, “The Hand of God.” As Christians, we do not need any science to validate it or not. This is a faith-related issue and has nothing to do with science when talking about Creation. Science is there to teach us how it works. I have no problem supporting both theories. Nature took over when God left. Did He create our world as mentioned in the Bible? Of course not; the Jewish writers of the Torah did not have the knowledge we have today. Many ancient theories that the Church had taught for years were revealed to be false.
Can we teach Intelligent Design in School? Not as a science, it is a faith matter; if you do, in my opinion, it has to be included in a religious program that teaches all faiths, including the Agnostic and atheist points of view on the same topic. Furthermore, it must be taught at a level that the student understands and can analyze and argue the exposure.