Chaos And Wishful Thinking Maybe

"For Newton and his colleagues the ordered laws of motion themselves appear to be the end of Nature. God exists to uphold and perpetuate them, defending the world system from falling into chaos and irrationality."

-The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, p. 62.

The Biblical God had imposed order on pre-cosmic chaos represented by water.

"'In a reality forever liable to chaos, the Patrol is the stabilizing element, holding time to a single course... A cosmos of random changes must be senseless, ultimately self-destructive. In it could be no freedom.'"

-Poul Anderson, The Shield of Time (New York, New York, 1991), PART SIX, 1990, p. 435.

At the very end of The Shield of Time, a Danellian finally tells Everard and Wanda the meaning of the Patrol. It had been hinted at the very beginning of the series that the trainees were not yet being told the whole truth.

Barrow and Tipler summarize the history of Arguments from Design as a lead-in to introducing the Anthropic Principle. They also quote Stephen Jay Gould who characterizes the Principle as the latest manifestation of a comforting tradition of wishful thinking.