William Paley's "Watch and the Watchmaker"

Source of Photo

William Paley, an Anglican priest and tutor at Christ's College, Cambridge, wrote Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature in 1794. His argument in this book was that proof of God's existence is evident in His creation, the natural world.

The analogy he is most famous for is of The Watch and the Watchmaker. He initially shows how a watch cannot come into existence except through an intelligent designer. His reasoning for this is that it performs a function that is regarded as valuable, and it would not function if any of its parts were differently sized or moved slightly from their correct positions. He then says that the material world shows the same complexity as the watch and more. Therefore, because of the inference that functional complexity implies an intelligent designer, the material world had an intelligent designer as well.

I agree with the basic inference that there was a Creator, God, to our universe. I believe that there was something behind the creation of the universe, that it wasn't just random. However, I disagree with the notion of an "Intelligent Designer." If God is the "Intelligent Designer" of all life on the planet, why would He meticulously design the apparent pain, waste, and cruelty in the living world, such as a parasite that eats its host from the inside out, or cats that play with mice before eating them?

Sources

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/paley.html

http://www.wmcarey.edu/carey/paley/paley.htm

http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/design.htm#SH1c

Back to my Homepage