ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to prove the existence of God from first principles, considers whether philosophers can derive from observation good evidence that philosophers’ world is a planned world. The evidence is drawn, in the main, from the structure and behaviour of living organisms, animal and plant. Life is a peculiar and complicated balance of chemical factors, a balance intricate, always precarious, subject to constant and unceasing jeopardy from the actions of neighbouring things, living and not-living. The eighteenth century loved to compare the living organism to a watch, the finest example of mechanical ingenuity then known. In the main the purpose served by the physical and mental organisation of a living creature is an individual purpose, the maintenance of its own life. The materialist philosophers were equally mistaken in supposing that, by giving a mechanical explanation of vital processes, they had disposed of the need for a teleological one.
