William Paley

Luke wouldn't let me look at this ahead, by the way.

Maybe William Paley.

Exactly.

Yeah, okay.

You'd know that that was a human creation and not just a rock or a...

Okay, and so let me put you to the test again, Scott.

For the first 100 or 150 years after William Paley, right up to the middle of the 20th century, what analogy did every creationist apologist refer to in making their argument for intelligent design?

On the biological level, yeah, the eye.

Um, the argument that, uh, the world is so beautifully designed, so intricately manufactured and, and engineered that that implies the existence of a designer.

Um, famously, William Paley, the theologian philosopher, wrote a treatise on the attributes of God as revealed in the design of nature.

Um, Richard Dawkins has called this the thesis of the blind watchmaker.

Um, so you don't...

This is the classic philosophical defense of intelligent design.

It was articulated most famously by an 18th century English philosopher named William Paley.

OK, what was his argument?

Paley used a very elegant analogy.

He said, imagine you were walking across a wild, uncultivated heath and you stub your toe on a stone.

You might assume the stone had been there forever, shaped by random weather.

Tiny brass gears, a coiled spring, an escapement mechanism, all perfectly calibrated to move the hands at a precise speed to tell time.

Exactly.

They answered questions that people were asking at the time they were written, but a generation or two later, people found that the evidence they were using or even the questions they were asking didn't really resonate with a lot of people.

So I would say that of the great works of apologetics originally published in English, the only ones that, that really had enduring power, uh, were two from the 18th century, Joseph Butler's Analogy of Religion and William Paley's, uh, Evidences of Christianity or his work, uh, Natural Theology.

But even those books are not widely read today.

They were widely read throughout the, the 19th century, uh, but then their popularity really dropped off.

Certainly at, in American colleges, those historical evidences were taught for a long time, well into the 19th century, even into the late 19th century in many places.

However, there were new books that also appeared that were designed to deal with deistic arguments in particular, and, and the most well-known of those was Joseph Butler's "The Analogy of Religion," which was a British work that came out in the early 17th century.

And so in the American context, a lot of the books that people assigned in their classes on Christian apologetics in the, in the early 19th century were those classic British books, uh, "The Analogy of Religion" by Joseph Butler, and then a work of historical evidences from the late 18th century that had synthesized some of this earlier work, William Paley's "Evidences of Christianity." And, and so whether you were going to Harvard or Yale or, or, uh, Princeton or Brown or, or, uh, Williams or Amherst or other places, uh, that were leading centers of education in the early 19th century, you would be required to take courses in Christian Evidences, as they were called, and as well as natural theology, and you would be exposed to these arguments.

Now, in the late 19th century, as people became influenced by German, uh, criticism of the Bible, German higher criticism, they, they started to have to deal with that more directly.

Teleological arguments for God say that there is design in the universe that points to God's existence.

Or as Psalm 19.1 puts it, "...the heavens declare the glory of God, the sky proclaims its builder's craft." The 18th century theologian William Paley argued that if we walk through a field and found a rock, we would not assume the rock was designed by anyone.

But if we found a watch in the same field, even if we didn't know what watches were, we would know that someone designed it.

And since living things are much more complex than watches, we can conclude they were designed as well.

Now many atheists say this argument doesn't work anymore because the theory of evolution shows how living things can naturally become complex over time as the species evolves and so God isn't needed.

But Paley's argument wasn't restricted just to living things.

He said of the strength of gravity itself that it, "...falls within the limits which utility requires, even though they fall within so small a proportion to the range of possibilities." In the past few decades, non-religious scientists have discovered that the range of possible values for the constants and the laws of nature is huge, but the life-permitting value within that range is incredibly small, and we are really lucky that it falls within that tiny range.

Oh, and don't be cute and say this doesn't need to be explained because if it wasn't fine-tuned, we wouldn't be here to notice.

And, um, all that to say as far as the, the telea- teleios goes, um, or design, um, it's such a strong argument.

And of course, Charles Darwin was obsessed with, uh, William Paley, who wrote a book about design, and, um, and that's such a strong argument.

Um, but it was just so interesting how he, uh, you know, he, he really, uh, he really, uh, went 180 degrees a- against that argument.

But-

This work is called The Young Woman's Guide to Excellence because it is believed that excellence rather than happiness should be the leading aim of every human being.

I am not ignorant that happiness, present and future, is proposed as our being's end and aim, not only as a distinguished a poet as Alexander Pope, but also by as distinguished a philosopher as William Paley.

But these men did not learn in the school of Christ that our being's end and aim is happiness, present or future.

The Christian religion, no less than Christian philosophy and sound common sense, teaches that holiness or excellence should be the leading aim of mankind.

...

William Paley, who argue-- who had the watch to watchmaker argument.

And as a young man at Cambridge University, Darwin encountered that idea that the, uh, intricate complexity of life pointed to a designing intelligence, and he was very taken with that, but then later attempted to explain that appearance, what he-- what was later viewed as an appearance of design by re- reference to the undirected, unguided power of natural selection acting on random mutations.

So he was very much in that, um, natural theological tradition in the sense that he was trying to make sense of the obvious appearance of design in living organisms, an appearance that biologists today still recognize.