Somewhere, it may be that William Paley is smiling

Last updated on: June 8, 2019 at 3:07 pm by Dan Peterson

Somewhere, it may be that William Paley is smiling 2019-06-08T15:07:19-06:00 Dan Peterson

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The center of our galaxy as seen above part of the European Southern Observatory at La Silla, Chile
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)

I published this column in Salt Lake City’s Deseret News on 17 January 2018:

No version of the “design argument” for God’s existence is more famous than a passage from the Rev. William Paley’s 1802 book “Natural Theology”:

“In crossing a heath suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone comes to be there: I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place. I should hardly think of the answer I had given before — that, for anything I knew, the watch might always have been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone?”

The universe, to Paley, was more like a watch than a mere stone. But he was scarcely the first to argue that nature suggests a designer.

The philosopher Plato (d. ca. 347 B.C.) proposed in his “Timaeus” that the cosmos was formed by an incomprehensibly intelligent “Demiurge.” In “On the Nature of the Gods,” Cicero (d. ca. 43 B.C.) contended that divine reason “pervades the whole of nature.” “When you see a sundial or a water-clock,” he wrote, sounding curiously Paley-like, “you see that it tells the time by design and not by chance. How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is devoid of purpose and intelligence?”

While a theology student at Cambridge University (1828-1831), Charles Darwin (d. 1882) was fascinated by William Paley’s work. “I hardly ever admired a book more than Paley’s ‘Natural Theology,’” he recalled in an 1859 letter to John Lubbock. “I could almost formerly have said it by heart.”

But then Darwin’s own theory of evolution hit western thought like a freight train, seeming to eliminate any need for a designer — and Darwin himself apparently died a sometimes rather tortured and despondent agnostic.

As its title suggests, “The Blind Watchmaker,” a 1986 book written by the Oxford evolutionary biologist and “New Atheist” polemicist Richard Dawkins, is at least in part a response to Paley-style design arguments. “Biology,” Dawkins declared, “is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.”

That appearance, in Dawkins’ view, is mere illusion.

But the idea of divine design never quite died. Indeed, the unjustly lesser known co-discoverer of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace (d. 1913), seems to have broken with Darwin over precisely this issue, insisting that certain features of the natural world could be explained only by invoking what he called an “Overruling Intelligence.”

Strikingly, suggestions of design or intention in nature have reappeared over the past few decades — and not only or even chiefly in explicitly religious circles or as part of the “Intelligent Design” movement, which focuses mostly on terrestrial biology. Many cosmologists and others have noted what James Gardner, in his 2003 book “Biocosm,” terms “the anthropic, or life-friendly, qualities of our cosmos — a spectacularly unlikely congeries of physical laws and constants that seem altogether too perfectly suited to the emergence and evolution of carbon-based life and intelligence to be the product of any conceivable random process.” “These clues,” he says, “indicate that the impression of design in nature is no mere illusion.”

“What (scientists) find,” wrote the late physicist Heinz Pagels, apparently an atheist, in his 1988 book “The Dreams of Reason,” “is that the architecture of the universe is indeed built according to invisible universal rules, what I call the cosmic code — the building code of the Demiurge. … Scientists in discovering this code are deciphering the Demiurge’s hidden message, the tricks he used in creating the universe. No human mind could have arranged for any message so flawlessly coherent, so strangely imaginative, and sometimes downright bizarre. It must be the work of an Alien Intelligence!”

Famously, the great astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle (d. 2001) discovered a mysterious quirk in the process by which stars produce the carbon that makes life possible. It seemed, to him, to have been designed. “Nothing,” he is reported to have said, “has shaken my atheism as much as this discovery.”

The English physicist Paul Davies — scarcely a Christian apologist — writes in his 1984 book “God and the New Physics” that “It may seem bizarre, but in my opinion science offers a surer path to God than religion.”

Posted from Jerusalem, Israel

Uncategorized

Previous Post

June 8, 2019

Shalom!

Next Post

June 8, 2019 Paris again, very briefly again

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 March 2014 August 2013 February 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who is credited with writing much of Proverbs?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Agur David Hezekiah Solomon