Paley, William
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
William (1743-1805), an English clergyman. He was born at Peterborough and was educated at Cambridge. After graduation he remained at his college for a number of years, holding a fellowship and acting as a tutor. After marriage he retired to Westmoreland in charge of a parish. Later he held a position in the cathedral of St. Paul's. In 1795 he was made subdean of Lincoln. He is remembered chiefly for a work entitled Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature. It is an argument in wonderfully clear and simple English for the divine creation of man. The author begins with the simple proposition that if one, wandering across a heath, were to pitch his foot against a stone, and were asked where the stone came from, he might reply that it had been there for all time for aught he knew. If one, however, were to find a watch with its wonderful mechanism of wheels, springs, and dials, and were asked the same question, he would reply at once that the watch had been made by an intelligent person and that it had found its way to the middle of the heath by some human agency. Paley then proceeds to point out the wonderful mechanism of the eye, likening it to an optical instrument, and the mechanism of the ear, with its delicate apparatus for receiving and conveying sound. He then proceeds to argue that if a watch must have a maker, man must also owe his origin to a Creator of supreme intelligence and wisdom.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Aiton's wrote this in 1910 it presented the watch-on-the-heath argument straight, as "an argument in wonderfully clear and simple English for the divine creation of man" — with no mention that Darwin's Origin of Species had appeared half a century earlier and offered natural selection as an alternative account of the eye and the ear. Darwin himself had read Paley's Evidences as an undergraduate at Cambridge and admired it before concluding that adaptation needed no designer; Richard Dawkins named his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker in direct answer to the heath passage. Paley's Natural Theology of 1802 is now read mainly as the classic statement of the design argument rather than as a living proof, though its descendant, "intelligent design," was argued in an American federal court in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover case and ruled not to be science. What Aiton's leaves out is that Paley's Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy was for decades a required Cambridge text, and his utilitarian ethics still get discussed by philosophers today.
Written for this edition, 2026.