that this designer is God. Argument from improbability Richard Dawkins is harshly critical of intelligent design in his book The God Delusion. In this book, he contends that an appeal to intelligent design can provide no explanation for biology because it not only begs the question of the designer's own origin but raises additional questions: an intelligent designer must itself be far more complex and difficult to explain than anything it is capable of designing. He believes the chances of life arising on a planet like the Earth are many orders of magnitude less probable than most people would think, but the anthropic principle effectively counters skepticism with regard to improbability. For example Astronomer Fred Hoyle suggested that potential for life on Earth was no more probable than a Boeing 747 being assembled by a hurricane from the scrapyard. Dawkins argues that a one-time event is indeed subject to improbability but once under way, natural selection itself is nothing like random chance. Furthermore, he refers to his counter argument to the argument from improbability by that same name: Dawkins considered the argument from improbability to be "much more powerful" than the teleological argument, or argument from design, although he sometimes implies the terms are used interchangeably. He paraphrases St. Thomas' teleological argument as follows: "Things in the world, especially living things, look as though they have been designed. Nothing that we know looks designed unless it is designed. Therefore there must have been a designer, and we call him God." Philosopher Edward Feser contends that Dawkins fundamentally misunderstands the teleological argument, particularly Aquinas' version, and refutes a straw man. Perception of purpose in biology The philosopher of biology Michael Ruse has argued that Darwin treated the structure of organisms as if they had a purpose: "the organism-as-if-it-were-designed-by God picture was absolutely central to Darwin's thinking in 1862, as it always had been". He refers to this as "the metaphor of design ... Organisms give the appearance of being designed, and thanks to Charles Darwin's discovery of natural selection we know why this is true." In his review of Ruse's book, R.J. Richards writes, "Biologists quite routinely refer to the design of organisms and their traits, but properly speaking it's apparent design to which they refer – an 'as if' design." Robert Foley refers to this as "the illusion of purpose, design, and progress". He adds, "there is no purpose in