Paley, Revd William (1743-1805)

Anglican priest and philosopher. Natural Theology and its most popular vehicle, the argument from design, can be traced back to the Anglican Divine, William Paley. His 1807 work, The Argument from Design, is the starting point for his theology of nature, which would later become a standard text for students reading for the divinity degree at Cambridge University.

Paley’s argument is one from analogy. It relies on the principle that if two things are similar in some known respect they are likely to be similar in other respects. These arguments enable us to draw conclusions as to likely similarities, where these are not already known. The problem is that they presuppose a sense of where the analogy holds and will help us to new truths and where it does not it will let us down. He argues that we would still think something was a watch, so long as it had the observable properties of a watch, even if we did not about its origins. Whatever we suppose about its origins, the fact that the various parts of a watch work together so as to tell the time would be evidence that it had a designer.

Related Topics:

	Philosophy
	Genetics
	Evolution
	Design

Contributed by: Richard P Whaite