Teleological argument

===Roman era===
It was the [[Stoicism|Stoics]] who "developed the battery of creationist arguments broadly known under the label 'The Argument from Design'".<ref name="sed" />{{Rp|xviii}} Cicero (c. 106 – c. 43 BC) reported the teleological argument of the Stoics in ''[[De Natura Deorum]]'' (''On the Nature of the Gods'') Book II, which includes an early version of the watchmaker analogy, which was later developed by William Paley. He has one of the characters in the dialogue say:
{{Blockquote|text=When you see a sundial or a water-clock, you see that it tells the time by design and not by chance. How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is devoid of purpose and intelligence, when it embraces everything, including these artifacts themselves and their artificers?|author=Cicero|source=''De Natura Deorum'', II.34}}

Another very important classical supporter of the teleological argument was [[Galen]], whose compendious works were one of the major sources of medical knowledge until modern times, both in Europe and the medieval Islamic world. He was not a Stoic, but like them he looked back to the Socratics and was constantly engaged in arguing against atomists such as the Epicureans. Unlike Aristotle (who was however a major influence upon him), and unlike the Neoplatonists, he believed there was really evidence for something literally like the "demiurge" found in Plato's ''Timaeus'', which worked physical upon nature. In works such as his ''On the Usefulness of Parts'' he explained evidence for it in the complexity of animal construction. His work shows "early signs of contact and contrast between the pagan and the Judaeo-Christian tradition of creation", criticizing the account found in the Bible. "Moses, he suggests, would have contented himself with saying that God ordered the eyelashes not to grow and that they obeyed. In contrast to this, the Platonic tradition's Demiurge is above all else a technician." Surprisingly, neither Aristotle nor Plato, but Xenophon are considered by Galen, as the best writer on this subject. Galen shared with Xenophon a scepticism of the value of books about most speculative philosophy, except for inquiries such as whether there is "something in the world superior in power and wisdom to man". This he saw as having an everyday importance, a usefulness for living well. He also asserted that Xenophon was the author who reported the real position of Socrates, including his aloofness from many types of speculative science and philosophy.<ref>Sedley (2007) ''Epilogue''.</ref>

Galen's connection of the teleological argument to discussions about the complexity of living things, and his insistence that this is possible for a practical scientist, foreshadows some aspects of modern uses of the teleological argument.