For more than two thousand years—many leading western thinkers, from Plato to Aquinas to Newton—argued that the natural world manifests the design of a preexistent mind or intelligence—a Creator. Yet during the late nineteenth century many scientists began to reject this idea. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, and other materialistic theories of the origin of life, the solar system, and the universe, portrayed nature as a self-creating and self-existent machine—one