More than 200 years ago William Paley wrote a book entitled Natural Theology. Paley drew the reader’s attention to the fact that organisms have many properties that appear to us as if they had been designed. He used this insight to underpin thoughts about the existence of a divine designer. These thoughts were nicely illustrated by a watchmaker analogy. Modern biologists have no problem to understand why Paley’s design argument seemed appealing to him and many of his contemporaries. The reason is that all living beings – ranging from bacteria to plants and animals – possess numerous features that reveal a high degree of organisation and functionality. Who would deny that this raises a deep question about the origin of natural design? In emphasizing this question, natural theology created a great deal of enthusiasm for exploring fossils and collecting specimens. Ironically, these activities – originally meant to explore the traces of God’s design – laid much of the foundation of Darwin’s theory. Evolutionary biology achieves a powerful explanation of organismic design by solely relying on the creative action of a ‘blind’ process that has neither a goal nor foresight, nor any supernatural power. Not astonishingly, the term evolutionary design is frequently used among theoreticians in evolutionary biology. Mathematical models of genetic evolution help us understand why evolutionary design often appears to an observer as if an intelligent creator had been at work. In contrast, the political movement named ‘intelligent design’, has not produced any scientific insight. Rather than studying this movement in relation to its biological relevance, we should ask the question: Why do many people develop and aversion to the scientific picture of life?