Page "William Paley" Paragraph 10

Although Paley devotes a chapter of Natural Theology to astronomy, written by his old friend John Law and the Dublin Astronomer Royal John Brinkley, they did not consider astronomy to provide sound evidence of " designedness.

" Paley's argument is built mainly around anatomy and natural history.

" For my part ," he says, " I take my stand in human anatomy "; elsewhere he insists upon " the necessity, in each particular case, of an intelligent designing mind for the contriving and determining of the forms which organized bodies bear.

" In making his argument, Paley employed a wide variety of metaphors and analogies.

Perhaps the most famous is his analogy between a watch and the world.

Historians, philosophers and theologians often call this the Watchmaker analogy.

The germ of the idea is to be found in ancient writers who used sundials and Ptolemaic epicycles to illustrate the divine order of the world.

These types of examples can be seen in the work of the ancient philosopher Cicero, especially in his De natura deorum, ii.

87 and 97 ( see Hallam, Literature of Europe, ii.

385, note .).

The watch analogy was widely used in the Enlightenment, by deists and Christians alike.

Thus, Paley's use of the watch ( and other mechanical objects like it ) continued a long and fruitful tradition of analogical reasoning that was well received by those who read Natural Theology when it was published in 1802.