↑ Francisco J. Ayala (2006), Review article of "The Blasphemy of Intelligent Design: Creationism's Trojan Horse. The Wedge of Intelligent Design" by Barbara Forrest; Paul R. Gross History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 409–421, JSTOR23334140.: "The argument from design to demonstrate God's existence, now called the 'Intelligent Design' argument (ID) is a two-tined argument. The first prong asserts that the universe, humans, as well as all sorts of organisms, in their wholes, in their parts, and in their relations to one another and to their environment, appear to have been designed for serving certain functions and for certain ways of life. The second prong of the argument is that only an omnipotent Creator could account for the perfection and purposeful design of the universe and everything in it."
↑ Ahbel-Rappe, S. and Kamtekar, R., A Companion to Socrates, John Wiley & Sons, 2009, p. 45. "Xenophon attributes to Socrates what is probably the earliest known natural theology, an argument for the existence of the gods from observations of design in the physical world."
↑ Sedley (2007) agrees (p. 86), and cites other recent commentators who agree, and argues in detail that the argument reported by Xenophon and Plato is "at any rate the antecedent" of the argument from design (p. 213). He shows that the Stoics frequently paraphrased the account given by Xenophon.
↑ Oxford English Dictionary under "Design", substantive number 4.
↑ The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology, p. 3, for example: "Between them, so the story goes, Hume, Darwin and Barth pulled the rug out from underneath the pretensions of natural theology to any philosophical, scientific, or theological legitimacy".
