"......in 1988, Reagan delivered remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC.
He told attendees that he had “long been unable to understand the atheist in this world of so much beauty.” With a touch of mischief in his voice, he added: “I’ve had an unholy desire to invite some atheists to a dinner and then serve the most fabulous gourmet dinner that has ever been concocted, and — after dinner — ask them if they believe there was a cook.”
It was Reagan’s riff on the age-old argument for intelligent design, the idea that the order and purposefulness of nature point to a designer.
Just as a sculpture implies a sculptor — or, in Reagan’s telling, a gourmet meal implies a master cook — the elegant and functional features of nature imply a creator."
EN&V