ABSTRACT
In the case of biology, most people experience an intuitive feeling of designedness. Because of this, it comes as no surprise that people are hesitant when they are told by thinkers like Dawkins that this experience is actually an illusion. Thought experiments are usually thought to be essential to philosophy, but they have also played a surprising role in natural science. Galileo Galilei used a thought experiment to argue that Aristotelian physics is contradictory, and modern physicists also use thought experiments in discovering the implications of theories. Like their predecessors from the time of the English Enlightenment, proponents of Intelligent Design (ID) present both fanciful and realistic thought experiments. In recent decades, the idea that humans intuitively see nature as designed has received support from research in the cognitive science of religion. Teleological explanations are argued to be natural to us humans in the sense that they accord with our natural cognitive tendencies.
