I BELIEVE IN GOD

by William Barclay

...[S]ince I am a simple-minded person, the argument from design, even though it is nowadays discredited by the experts, still weighs strongly with me. Away back in 1748 Colin Maclaurin in his Account of Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophical Discoveries said succinctly: "A manifest contrivance suggests a contriver." And the world is a manifest contrivance. Kant, says M. L. Clarke in his book on Paley, did not regard the evidence from design as sufficient in itself to prove the existence of God, but he none the less called it "the oldest, the clearest argument, and that most in conformity with the common reason of humanity." Cicero in Concerning the Nature of the Gods speaks of the orrery, the model of the solar system that Posidonius made, a model "which at each revolution produces the same motions of the sun, the moon and the five planets that take place in the heavens every twenty-four hours," and then he goes on to ask, if some one took that orrery to Scythia or ritain, the ouposts of the world, "would any single native doubt that this orrery was the work of a rational being?" And if so with the model, how much more with the real thing?

[Quoted from William Barclay: A Spiritual Autobiography, pg 111, William B Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, 1977.]