God's Bonsai
The concepts of the “watchmaker-God” and the “best of all possible worlds” have been around for a long time, but I was recently considering ways of talking about God as creator, and stumbled on an interesting concept that sits fairly nicely with me so far, and I thought I would post it so that I could get some feedback on it. Briefly, the watchmaker-God (put forward by William Paley in 1802) is the idea that orderliness and complexity are evidence of intelligent design in the universe that imply the existence of an intelligent designer, but is often criticised by Christians because the analogy suggests that God (who scripture reveals as both intimately interested and continuously involved in his creation) created the universe to function without further attention (a watchmaker doesn’t follow you around constantly tinkering with your watch to make sure it runs as it was supposed to). The “best of all possible worlds” idea (which came from Gottfried Leibniz in 1710) was...