Who is Paley?

William Paley was an 18th century British philosopher and Anglican priest. A former student and professor at Cambridge University, his works on natural theology and utilitarianism made him well known within the scholarly community in Europe at the time. In his last book before his death in 1805, entitled Natural Theology: Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, Paley constructed the teleological argument for which he is most famous today. 

Preview to The Watchmaker Argument

As we will explore in depth later on, Paley’s argument for the existence of God uses analogies and inductive reasoning to support a primary claim that there is a divine designer who created all living things. According to Paley, contrivances of the world (such as the complex machinery of eyes and ears) were purposely developed in order to teach intelligence and complex reasoning to humanity. People, made in God’s image, could then carry on the process of design with which they were gifted. Influenced heavily by Paley’s work was the young Charles Darwin, whose studies on the Galapagos Islands ended up leading him to develop his theory of natural selection. This work– the keystone for our modern theory of evolution– tore big holes into Paley’s argument from Natural Theology; and yet the work remains remarkably relevant to scholars and theorists of today.

On Natural Theology 

In Making, Tim Ingold cites natural theologist William Paley’s work many times throughout chapter five, entitled The Sighted Watchmaker. Paley’s book, Natural Theology for short, is famous for its arguments which attempt to prove that, by design, living beings were created by a god to move and reproduce– and to the select few, to think and create. 

Paley begins his book, Natural Theology, with his state of the argument: 

“In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there: I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had 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 which I had before given, that, for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there […]. This mechanism being observed, the inference, we think, is inevitable; that the watch must have had a maker.” (Paley, 1-3). 

Paley explains that the watch has many parts (cogs, gears, springs), each arranged particularly for the purpose of keeping time. All these parts work together in coordination, therefore proving that the watch could not have just appeared as a rock had. From this concept Paley infers that just as a watch implies the existence of a watchmaker, the complex, orderly world implies the existence of a world maker– God.

Continuing the explanation of Paley’s argument, Ingold cites extensions made by Paley which ask the audience to imagine a watch that can self replicate. Upon first thought, one might think that this implies no need for a designer/watchmaker, as the watch can now make itself. Paley believes the opposite: “There cannot be a design without a designer; contrivance without a contriver; order without choice; arrangement without anything capable of arranging…” (Paley, 12). For Paley, each generation of watches is made by its predecessor, but the first watch, ‘Watch Zero’, must have been designed. The whole chain of replication ultimately depends on an original, intelligent design. 

Take special consideration too of things that can reproduce themselves; despite the continuity of living things, the capacity to reproduce must have been integrated into the original design, and the structure, order, and purpose of nature is therefore evidence of divine intelligence. The first watch was “made” in an entirely different way from that in which the first watch “makes” the second, third, etc. The former is intelligent design, and the latter is mechanical execution. Humans in the “image of God”, may only replicate that which God has ultimately designed first.

Ingold’s usage of Natural Theology 

The next natural question to ask now is “so what?”. Why should we care about a long-debunked paper on how God is real because our eyes are weird? And what is it doing in the book about weaving baskets? Ingold suggests that while the religious aspects of Natural Theology have been refuted, Paley’s assumptions about the nature of design and designer that underwrite these arguments have not. His arguments about function, design, and intent are still relevant, and we can apply them critically in our modern lives regardless of our faith. Whether the responsibility for the design is attributed to God or natural selection does not affect the logic of Paley’s “there is no design without a designer”, argues Ingold. 

Paley’s arguments also allow us to think about where design is. First, Ingold argues the answer will differ depending on whether the designed is an artifact (e.g. a watch) or a living being (e.g. a bat). If you happen to see a bat, you are not looking at a design for a bat, but the bat itself, right? An artifact’s design tends to be in the mind of the creator who, looking forward, thought thoroughly about said design. Working off what Paley argued and how other scholars like Dawkins responded, Ingold then suggests that our understanding of a bat’s design is dependent on the eyes of those observing it, and in the bat’s own behaviours:  

“Without design engineers, there would certainly be no missiles. Bats, on the other hand, would be around and would have evolved, without any scientists to observe them. Designs for bats, however, would not.” (Ingold, 67)

Ingold encourages us to re-invent our understanding of what a designer’s task is yet again; a designer is not only a trickster, but also an assembler. A watchmaker designing a clock to tell time, in a way, is the same as a bird designing a nest to lay their eggs, bringing pieces together to make them correspond to one another purposefully in a single creation. Next time you design a Canva website or an Insta photodump, you can relate yourself to a bird carefully assembling their nest– each decision is vitally different.

In conclusion, Ingold mainly uses Paley’s original arguments about design to tie back to his ideas of transduction and perdurance: designers, just like any makers, interact with the material flow with the use of a transducer, be it a pottery wheel or a set of watchmaker’s lenses and tweezers. These interactions shape us and our environments – a cycle of evolution, in a way. Whether Paley intended it or not, his paper on the naturalistic view of theology would be used to support Ingold’s argument almost two hundred years after it was written, and it won’t have to do anything with God, but everything to do with the act of Making. 

“It is precisely where the reach of the imagination meets the friction of materials, or where the forces of ambition rub up against the rough edges of the world, that human life is lived.” (Ingold, 73)

Works Cited

Ingold, Tim. Making. Routledge, 2013. 

Moore, Randy. “William Paley, 1743-1805.” NCSE (National Center for Science Education), 2009, ncse.ngo/william-paley-1743-1805. 

Paley, William. Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. Cambridge University Press, 2009. Digital scan of first-edition, published in 1805 by R. Faulder in London

Written by Allie, Bara, Celeste, and Naomi

Cover art by Celeste