Justified True Belief

(●) The country archdeacon who put a watch on a heath, and taught the English-speaking world how to argue that the world was made. + Almost nobody who uses the phrase "the watchmaker argument" has read the man who made it famous. William Paley was a Yorkshire schoolmaster’s son who became a Cambridge lecturer, then a country parson in Cumberland, then archdeacon of Carlisle, and who wrote four books so clear that for well over a century an English undergraduate could hardly take a degree without knowing at least one of them by heart. He was not an original thinker and never claimed to be. He said as much in his own prefaces. What he had instead was a gift that is rarer than originality: he could take an argument that had been made clumsily by a dozen learned men and set it out so plainly that a reader of ordinary education could follow every step and see exactly where it might break. Nor were the four books four separate ventures. Three of them were built to stand together as one case, running from the evidence for a God in nature, through the evidence for the Christian revelation in history, to the duties that follow from both. Here is the fact worth remembering. Half a century after Paley’s death, the argument he had made famous met its hardest answer from a man who had studied it at Paley’s own college, sat the same examination on the same books, and loved them. Charles Darwin wrote that the logic of the Evidences and the Natural Theology gave him as much delight as Euclid. He also wrote, decades later, that the old argument of design as given by Paley fails. Both sentences are his, and a fair account of Paley has to carry both.

(●) 1743 AD: Born at Peterborough and raised in a Yorkshire schoolroom, a clumsy boy who loved machines. + Paley was born at Peterborough in July 1743 and baptised in the cathedral there on 30 August. His father, also William, was a minor canon of the cathedral, which is to say one of the junior clergy on its staff, and vicar of the nearby village of Helpston besides; his mother, Elizabeth Clapham, was a thrifty and quick-witted woman from a Yorkshire family. Two years after the boy’s birth the father was made headmaster of Giggleswick grammar school in the Yorkshire dales, a post he held for fifty-four years, and the family moved north. The son grew up in his father’s schoolroom. He was a fair classical scholar and an unusually keen one at mechanics, which matters more to his later life than it sounds: the man who would one day take a watch apart on paper, wheel by wheel, had spent his boyhood interested in how things were put together. He was too clumsy for the boys’ games, and fished instead, a habit he kept until he died. He was also the sort of boy who came home and staged whatever he had just watched. After a visit to the assizes at Lancaster, the court that came round the county to try the serious cases, he played at trying his schoolfellows. After seeing a travelling quack he tried to pull out one of his sisters’ teeth. His biographers preserve the ride to Cambridge in November 1758, when he was entered at Christ’s College as a sizar, the poorest rank of undergraduate, who paid reduced fees. Father and son rode down together, and the boy fell off his pony seven times on the road. Each time, his father is said to have turned his head and said only, "Take care of thy money, lad."

(●) 1763 AD: He came out senior wrangler at Cambridge, and stayed on to lecture on morals and the Greek Testament. + Paley began residence at Christ’s in October 1759 and collected scholarships almost at once. Then, by the usual account, he wasted two years. His early biographer George Meadley reports that he idled until a companion woke him one morning after a jovial evening to tell him he was a fool for wasting abilities that other men in the room did not have. Whatever was actually said that morning, something took. Paley began rising early, worked systematically, and in 1763 came out senior wrangler. The wranglers at Cambridge were the men who took the top class in the mathematics examination, and the senior wrangler was the first of them, ranked ahead of everyone else in the university that year. His son later doubted the story, or at least its date; either way the result is on the record. He was elected a fellow of his college on 24 June 1766, ordained priest in London on 21 December 1767, and taught alongside his friend John Law, son of Edmund Law, who was made bishop of Carlisle in 1768. Law took the mathematics. Paley lectured on metaphysics, morals, and the Greek Testament, and his students copied out his notes and passed them around the university. Those lectures were the seed of everything he later published, which is worth holding on to when the plainness of the books comes up: they began as things he had to say out loud to undergraduates who needed to be able to follow him. He was also, in these years, part of a circle pressing for reform. In 1772 a group of clergy and laymen met at the Feathers Tavern in London and petitioned Parliament to relax the requirement that clergy and graduates subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles, the Church of England’s doctrinal standards. To subscribe meant to declare, formally and in public, that you held them. Paley was close to John Jebb, one of the leaders, and he later wrote anonymously in defence of a pamphlet by Edmund Law, by then bishop of Carlisle, arguing the same case. But he would not sign the petition himself. The reason Meadley records has followed him ever since: he could not, he said, afford to keep a conscience. Leslie Stephen, writing Paley up for the Dictionary of National Biography, the great Victorian catalogue of British lives, repeats the remark and reads it as a humourist claiming a lower motive than the true one, which may be right. It was still a strange thing to say, and Paley’s critics have never let it go.

(●) 1776 AD: He married, left Cambridge for country parishes, and failed at farming. + In May 1775 the bishop of Carlisle presented him to the rectory of Musgrave in Westmorland, worth about eighty pounds a year. To be presented to a rectory was to be handed a living: a parish, a house to live in, and an income attached to both, in the gift of whoever held the right to appoint. Eighty pounds a year was a modest living. It was, however, enough to marry on. That autumn he became engaged to Jane Hewitt, the daughter of a Carlisle spirit merchant; they were married at Carlisle on 6 June 1776, and he left Cambridge for good. The next years were the ordinary life of a northern country clergyman. He took the vicarage of Dalston at the end of 1776 and Appleby in 1777, divided the year between two parishes, welcomed the barristers riding the northern circuit, and tried farming a little for recreation. The farming was a failure. He could not make it pay its own expenses and gave it up, which is worth knowing about a man whose most famous book is a long argument about how well things are made. Preferment, which is the church’s own word for promotion into better posts, came steadily after that. He was installed a prebendary of Carlisle in 1780, meaning one of the cathedral clergy with an endowed place in its governing body, and in August 1782 became archdeacon of Carlisle in succession to his friend John Law, who had been made a bishop in Ireland. An archdeacon is in principle the bishop’s deputy over the parishes, the man who inspects the churches and keeps an eye on the clergy. In practice the archdeaconry was largely a sinecure, an office whose duties were done by somebody else. At the end of 1785 he added the chancellorship of the diocese, the post that ran its courts. He sat as a magistrate too, judging the county’s smaller cases, and is said to have been sharp-tempered on the bench. Not everything he tried there worked either: an attempt of his to cut the number of alehouse licences failed when his fellow magistrates would not back him.

(●) 1785 AD: His book on morals became the Cambridge textbook, and one page in it probably cost him a bishopric. + Bishop Law urged him to turn the old Cambridge lectures into a book. Paley offered the manuscript to a London publisher for three hundred pounds and was offered two hundred and fifty; while the haggling went on, a Carlisle bookseller offered him a thousand. The London publisher heard of it and paid the thousand on the spot. That was more than twelve years’ income from the little Westmorland rectory he had started with, handed over for a set of lecture notes. The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy appeared in 1785, was adopted as a Cambridge textbook almost at once, and went through fifteen editions in his lifetime. The book opens the chapter on property with a picture nobody who reads it forgets. Imagine, Paley says, a flock of pigeons in a cornfield, where ninety-nine of them gather everything they find into one heap and keep it for a single pigeon, "and that the weakest, perhaps worst, pigeon of the flock," sitting round and watching all winter while that one devours and wastes it; and if a hungrier bird touches a grain of the hoard, the rest fly on it and tear it to pieces. If you saw that, he writes, you would see nothing more than what is every day practised among men, where the ninety and nine toil to heap up superfluities for one, "and if one of the number take or touch a particle of the hoard, the others joining against him, and hanging him for the theft." The passage earned him the nickname "Pigeon Paley" and a warning from Law that it might shut him out of a bishopric. His answer, as his son records it: "Bishop or no bishop, it shall go in." He never was made a bishop.

(●) 1790 AD: He published his most original book, buried his wife, and took the chair at a public meeting against the slave trade. + The Horae Paulinae came out in 1790, and it is the most original thing Paley ever did. The title means "Pauline hours," the hours he spent laying Paul’s letters beside the book of Acts and noticing where they touch. It sold worse than his other three books and outlived most of what he wrote (T5). Then the hard years. Jane died in May 1791, leaving him with four sons and four daughters, eight children and no wife. He kept working. The campaign against the slave trade had his hands before her death and kept them afterwards. In 1789 he drew up a paper for it, and on 9 February 1792 he took the chair at a public meeting at Carlisle called for the same purpose and drafted the resolutions it printed. None of that was a late conversion, because his position was already in print. The Principles defines slavery, allows in principle that a debt or a crime might oblige a man to labour, and then says flatly that the trade on the African coast is not excused by any of it. He describes men "torn away from parents, wives, children, from their friends and companions, their fields and flocks, their home and country," carried over with no better accommodation than is provided for animals, and delivered into plantation law. Then he turns on the standard defence of the trade in a sentence worth the whole chapter: "But necessity is pretended; the name under which every enormity is attempted to be justified." Not everything he wrote in these years wears as well. In 1792, with revolutionary France in everyone’s mind, he published Reasons for Contentment, addressed to the Labouring Part of the British Public, a short piece telling the poor how much they had to be thankful for. He thought it his best performance. It was the least successful thing he published, and it sits awkwardly beside the pigeons in the cornfield.

(●) 1794 AD: The Evidences of Christianity made his name, and the preferments arrived within a year. + A View of the Evidences of Christianity appeared in 1794 and succeeded immediately. It is a lawyer’s book, and Paley had spent enough time in courtrooms to write one. It sets out two propositions about the first Christian witnesses, argues them for a volume, then turns to the objections, with David Hume’s argument against miracles taken first because, as Paley says, it stands in the very threshold of the argument and if admitted is a bar to every proof. The rewards followed fast, and they came from bishops who had read him. Bishop Porteus of London, an old fellow of Christ’s, gave him a stall at St Paul’s in August 1794, a stall being a place among a cathedral’s endowed clergy and the income that goes with the seat. In January 1795 Bishop Pretyman gave him the subdeanery of Lincoln, a senior post in that cathedral’s chapter, worth seven hundred pounds a year. Before he had left Cambridge after taking his doctorate, Bishop Barrington of Durham offered him the rectory of Bishopwearmouth, worth twelve hundred, and he was inducted there on 14 March 1795. That last living was fifteen times the value of the Westmorland rectory he had begun on twenty years earlier. On 14 December that year he married again, a Miss Dobinson of Carlisle. He was comfortable at last, a good host, a bad horseman, and a byword for common sense. At Bishopwearmouth he avoided the endless quarrels over tithes, the tenth of produce owed to the parish clergyman, by simply leasing the right to the landowners for life at a fixed sum, accepting less money for the sake of peace.

(●) 1802 AD: In constant pain, and forbidden to preach, he wrote Natural Theology, the book about the watch. + In 1800 Paley was struck for the first time by the illness that killed him, a recurring internal complaint that brought long spells of severe pain. His doctors ordered him to give up public speaking altogether. Think what that meant. A preacher and lecturer of forty years, a man whose whole working life had been spent explaining things out loud to a room, was told he could no longer do the thing he was best at. So he sat down and wrote the most widely read of all his books. Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, collected from the Appearances of Nature was published in 1802. His physician, John Clark of Newcastle, spoke of the courage he showed, and noted that while he was suffering he was at work on the twenty-sixth chapter, the one on the goodness of God, in which he writes about the relief that comes in the intervals between attacks of pain. The cheerfulness of that chapter (T3) was not written from a comfortable chair. He went to Lincoln in 1805 for his usual months of residence, was quickly laid low by a violent return of the complaint, and died there on 25 May 1805, at sixty-one. He was buried in Carlisle Cathedral on 4 June, beside his first wife. Within a generation three of his books were fixed in the English syllabus, and it was said of the Evidences that a man could not take his degree without it.

What He Taught

(T1) A thing whose parts are shaped and fitted for a purpose must have had a maker who intended that purpose. + Paley opens with a walk. Crossing a heath, you kick a stone and someone asks how it came to be there. For all you know, you answer, it had lain there for ever, and it would not be easy to show that the answer is absurd. Now suppose instead you found a watch lying in the grass, and were asked the same question. You would not give the same answer, and the interesting thing is why not. So he opens the watch. There is a coiled spring in a box; a chain carrying the force of the spring to the wheels; a train of toothed wheels that pass the motion along and, by their sizes, regulate it, so that a pointer crosses a measured space in a measured time. The wheels are brass, to keep them from rusting. The springs are steel, because no other metal is so elastic. Over the face there is glass, a material used nowhere else in the instrument, because if it were anything but transparent you could not read the hour without opening the case. The word Paley uses for all this is contrivance: parts chosen and arranged so as to bring about a result, where a different choice would have failed. His claim is not that the watch is complicated, nor that it is beautiful. It is that the parts are suited to an end, and suited in ways that would not work if they were otherwise, and that this is a signature. Reading a signature like that off the world has a name. Natural theology is the attempt to learn something true about God from the world itself, from what any person can see and handle, without appealing to Scripture or to any revelation at all. A heath, a stone, and a watch lying in the grass are as much equipment as it needs to begin. He then takes the objections a reader will raise, one after another in numbered points in the same chapter, and gives them their full weight. Suppose you had never seen a watch made, and knew no craftsman who could make one. Suppose the watch sometimes went wrong, or ran a little fast. Suppose there were parts inside whose use you could not make out at all. None of that, he argues, touches the conclusion. You are not being asked to explain the workmanship, only to say whether there was any.

(Q) "the inference, we think, is inevitable; that the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use." + Source: William Paley, Natural Theology, chapter I, "State of the Argument" (1802). The sentence comes at the end of the description of the watch’s works, and Paley is careful about the order: first look at the mechanism and understand it, and only then draw the inference. An artificer is simply a maker, a skilled workman. Paley did not invent the comparison. Cicero had reached for a similar one, and it was a commonplace among the English natural philosophers Paley had been reading. What he did was take it slowly enough that a reader could see what the argument actually rests on.

(T2) Every mark of contrivance found in the watch is found in living bodies, and more of it. + The watch is only the doorway. The rest of the book is anatomy, and Paley’s favourite example is the eye. Take the two instruments side by side, he says: an eye and a telescope. Both are made on the same optical principles. Light passing from air into a denser medium is bent, and to bring it to a point on a screen you need surfaces of the right curvature, in the right order, with the right distances between them. The telescope maker solves that problem with ground glass. The eye solves it with a curved cornea, a lens, and fluids of different densities, one behind the other, and adds a curtain that opens wide in dim light and closes in bright. Then he presses the point that is easy to miss. The eye of a fish has a nearly spherical lens, much rounder than ours, because a fish’s eye works in water, where the outer surface can do far less of the bending. The difference between the two eyes is precisely the difference an instrument maker would have to introduce if he were building for the two media. Change the medium and the design changes with it, in the direction the optics require. Paley knew the standard replies and answered them at length, taking them one at a time. Perhaps everything is simply the working out of some law? A law, he says, presupposes an agent. Say that a machine runs by the law of the lever and you have described how it works, not who put it together; a law with nobody acting through it is a rule written on a page in an empty room, and it moves nothing at all. Perhaps the forms we see are the few that happened to survive out of endless useless ones? He states that suggestion, an old one going back to the Greek atomists, and rejects it as a story with no evidence behind it. Perhaps living things simply have an inbuilt tendency to grow the organs they need? That is the doctrine Erasmus Darwin had set out in his Zoonomia a few years earlier, and appetency is the word Paley borrows for it: a built-in craving in the creature for the part it lacks, the animal’s own wants working, over long stretches of time, to produce the organ it needs. He answers that not one example of such a tendency producing anything has ever been offered, and that giving the thing a name does not explain the fitting of the parts. That is the honest place to say what happened next, and it is better said plainly than managed. Paley’s argument turned on there being no known natural process that produces contrivance. In 1859 a natural process was proposed that does, and the eye was one of the first things Charles Darwin used it to explain. Christian thinkers divided at once over what that costs, and they still do. What the objection does not touch is Paley’s starting question, which is why anything should be fitted to anything at all. The argument from design has largely moved house since then, from the parts of animals to the constants of physics and the origin of life, and that is where the debate is now had.

(Q) "This is atheism: for every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater and more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation." + Source: William Paley, Natural Theology, chapter III, "Application of the Argument" (1802). Paley has just imagined a man who admits the watch had a maker and refuses to say the same about an eye. That refusal, he says, is what atheism amounts to in practice: not a different reading of the evidence, but the same reading applied to one case and withheld from another that is stronger.

(T3) The Maker is good, because so much of what is contrived runs past usefulness into enjoyment. + Having argued that the world has a maker, Paley asks what sort of maker, and answers with two propositions. First, in the great majority of cases where a contrivance can be identified, the purpose it serves is a good one. Second, God has added pleasure to animal sensations beyond what any purpose required, when the same work could have been got out of a creature by bare need, or by pain, instead. The second proposition is the striking one, and it is where he goes looking on a spring afternoon. A creature could have been kept eating by hunger and nothing else, so that feeding was a bare need with no delight in it. It was not arranged that way. Motion could have been drudgery. Watch newly hatched flies trying their wings, he says, going nowhere for no reason, and a bee working over the flowers, and tell him that is not enjoyment. He does not pretend the ledger is all on one side. He faces pain squarely, notes that it is usually brief and its intervals are ease rather than mere absence of ache, and writes about that with the authority of a man who was learning it from the inside. He faces death, disease, and the fact that animals live by eating each other, and he does not always have a satisfying answer. What he insists on is the proportion: a world running on contrivances that mostly work, mostly for good, and quite often for pleasure. Christian readers have found both a strength and a gap here. The strength is that Scripture makes the same appeal, and older than Paley: God "did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness" (Acts 14:17). The gap is that a good Maker inferred from spring afternoons is not yet the God who suffers. Paley’s natural theology reaches an author of a mostly happy world. The cross is not in the argument, and he did not claim it was; that is what the other books were for.

(Q) "It is a happy world after all. The air, the earth, the water, teem with delighted existence. In a spring noon, or a summer evening, on whichever side I turn my eyes, myriads of happy beings crowd upon my view." + Source: William Paley, Natural Theology, chapter XXVI, "The Goodness of the Deity" (1802). The sentence just before it is "Nor is the design abortive," and the design he means is the one he has spent the chapter arguing for, that God added pleasure to animal sensation beyond what any other purpose required. The crowded spring afternoon is his evidence that the addition took. This is the chapter his physician recorded him writing between attacks of the illness that would kill him three years later.

(T4) Once there is a God, a miracle is no longer incredible, and the only question left is whether the witnesses are good. + David Hume had argued a generation earlier that no testimony can establish a miracle, because it will always be more likely that the witnesses are lying or mistaken than that the course of nature was broken. Paley takes the objection first, before any evidence, because if it holds nothing that comes after it matters. His reply has two moves, and the first is a piece of careful reading. "Contrary to experience" can mean two quite different things, and everything turns on which of them is meant. Take the strict sense first. Suppose a neighbour tells you a horse was led through your kitchen on Tuesday morning, and you spent Tuesday morning in that kitchen and saw nothing of the sort. His report is contrary to your experience in the full sense of the words: you were there, you were watching, and it did not happen. Against that, Paley grants, no testimony can stand. But that is plainly not what anybody means by saying that miracles are contrary to experience. What is meant is that we have not ourselves met anything like it, and that such things are not generally met with. That is a want of experience, Paley says, not a contradiction of it. And a want of experience counts against a report only so far as we had some reason to expect that the event, if it were real, would be the kind of thing that happens often. The second move sets the question where it belongs. Call the course of nature the ordinary working of an intelligent Being, and ask what that Being might be expected to do. Not to break the order constantly, which would wreck the very thing the order is for. But on rare occasions of real importance, perhaps. And if the occasions are rare, the events are rare, which puts them within the experience of only a few people, which is precisely where the reports of them are found. Hume, Paley argues, has weighed the improbability of a miracle without ever putting on the scale what we know or may reasonably think about God, the reason for the miracle, or the end it served, so that on his account a miracle worked for the most important purpose imaginable is exactly as incredible as one worked for no purpose at all. What follows is not proof that the gospel miracles happened. It is the removal of a blanket refusal to look, and the whole book after it is about the witnesses (T5 gives the method he used on Paul).

(Q) "In a word, once believe that there is a God, and miracles are not incredible." + Source: William Paley, A View of the Evidences of Christianity, Preparatory Considerations (1794). The whole case Paley then builds rests on two propositions he states at the head of Part I. The first: "That there is satisfactory evidence that many, professing to be original witnesses of the Christian miracles, passed their lives in labours, dangers, and sufferings, voluntarily undergone in attestation of the accounts which they delivered, and solely in consequence of their belief of those accounts; and that they also submitted, from the same motives, to new rules of conduct." The second is that no comparable claim can be made out for the witnesses to any other miracle story. Modern arguments from the willingness of the apostles to suffer are Paley’s first proposition, restated.

(T5) Paul’s letters and the book of Acts cross each other in small, awkward details that no forger would have arranged. + Others before him had compared the letters with the history, Nathaniel Lardner most thoroughly, but the test itself is Paley’s, and it is the part of his work that has aged best. Set two documents side by side: the letters that carry Paul’s name, and the history in Acts that covers the same years. Neither shows any sign of having been written with the other open. Then look for the places where they touch. Start with something ordinary. Suppose two friends write you letters about the same weekend without comparing notes. One mentions in passing that she had to drive because her car was in the shop, which makes no sense until you notice the other has said, three paragraphs later and for a different reason, that she had lent hers to her brother. Neither is explaining anything to you. The fit is a by-product of both accounts being true, and it is exactly the kind of thing a person inventing a story does not think to put in. Paley calls the property undesignedness, and he is precise about what makes an agreement worth anything. A broad, obvious agreement proves little, because that is what a forger would supply on purpose. The valuable coincidences are the ones that are small, indirect, and slightly buried: a detail dropped in one text for one reason which quietly explains something dropped in the other for a different reason. He assembles them letter by letter, eight of them from Romans alone, and the accumulation is the argument. The book landed with a thud and sold badly. It was the most original thing he wrote, and the judgement has largely been vindicated: the method outlived the natural theology, was extended to the Gospels in the nineteenth century, and is in active use today.

(Q) "if some of the coincidences alledged appear to be minute, circuitous, or oblique, let him reflect that this very indirectness and subtility is that which gives force and propriety to the example. Broad, obvious, and explicit agreements prove little; because it may be suggested that the insertion of such is the ordinary expedient of every forgery." + Source: William Paley, Horae Paulinae, chapter I, "Exposition of the Argument" (1790). The old spellings "alledged" and "subtility" are Paley’s own. He has just told the reader to keep hold of the word undesignedness as the thing the whole argument depends on, and adds that he would rather the reader be convinced by the examples themselves than by any formula about them.

(Q) "The world thenceforth becomes a temple, and life itself one continued act of adoration." + Source: William Paley, Natural Theology, chapter XXVII, "Conclusion" (1802). The last chapter turns from argument to what the argument is for. Of all the habits of mind a person might form, Paley says, the one worth having is the habit of looking at anything in nature with a steady reference to a supreme intelligent Author; and to make that the settled temper of the mind is to have laid the foundation of everything religious. The change, he adds, is simply that whereas God was formerly seldom in our thoughts, we can now hardly look at anything without seeing its relation to him. It is the nearest his cool prose comes to devotion, and it is where a good many of his readers stopped reading and started praying.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He gave the English-speaking church a system it could teach, and it taught it for well over a century. + Paley said in the preface to Natural Theology that his books formed a system: the evidence for God in nature, the evidence for the Christian revelation in history, and the duties that follow from both. That system was adopted almost immediately as a course of study. The Principles went into the Cambridge examinations at once; the Evidences followed and then simply stayed. It was not dropped from the examinations until 1920, a hundred and twenty-six years after it was published, and a run that long means something concrete. Generation after generation of English clergy, lawyers and schoolmasters shared one vocabulary for defending the faith, and the vocabulary was his. Behind the argument stands a claim the church has always made, that the created order tells the truth about its maker to anyone with eyes. "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork" (Psalm 19:1). Paul makes it an argument: God’s "invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse" (Romans 1:20). Theologians call this general revelation, the knowledge of God available to anyone through creation and conscience, as against the special revelation given in Scripture. Paley’s achievement was to take that claim and make it examinable: not a mood about sunsets but a chain of inferences a student could be tested on and an opponent could attack. His influence outlasted his own century in odd places. The Bridgewater Treatises, eight works commissioned under the will of the Earl of Bridgewater and published through the 1830s to display the power, wisdom and goodness of God in creation, are Paley’s programme carried out by professional scientists. Annotated editions of his books were still being produced in the 1870s. Even critics who thought the whole enterprise misconceived assumed their readers knew it.

(†) Darwin learned him at his own college, loved him, and then broke the argument he loved. + There is no stranger fact in this history than that Charles Darwin read for his degree at Christ’s College, Cambridge, the college where Paley had been a fellow, and had to master Paley’s books to graduate. The same college, the same examination, the same set books. He was not resentful about it, either. In his autobiography he wrote that in order to pass the examination it was also necessary to get up the Evidences of Christianity and the Moral Philosophy, that he was convinced he could have written out the whole of the Evidences correctly, and that "The logic of this book and as I may add of his Natural Theology gave me as much delight as did Euclid." The careful study of those works, he added, was the only part of the whole course that he then felt, and still believed, had been of any use to the education of his mind. He was honest, too, about why it had gone down so easily: "I did not at that time trouble myself about Paley’s premises; and taking these on trust I was charmed and convinced by the long line of argumentation." Decades later, writing about how his religious belief had gone, he was exact about which part had failed. "The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man." Christians have answered that in more than one way, and the disagreement is real and still live. Some hold that natural selection removes the inference altogether and that Christian confidence must rest elsewhere, on revelation and history. Others hold that it relocates the inference rather than destroying it, since a process that reliably produces such results is itself a contrivance of a high order. They add that the design argument has shifted its ground since 1859. Its modern home is the fine-tuning of physical constants and the origin of the first living cell, and in neither place is an equivalent mechanism on offer. Fine-tuning here means that the fixed numbers built into the laws of physics, the strength of gravity among them, fall inside the narrow ranges that permit any life at all. What is not in dispute is that Paley asked a question that had to be answered, and that the answer, when it came, came from a man who had learned to reason by reading him.

(†) The book the public would not buy is the one still in use, and its method is now applied to the Gospels. + The Horae Paulinae sold worst of the four books and lasted longest. In the nineteenth century James Tate, T. R. Birks and J. S. Howson all produced editions extending or illustrating it, and Birks added a companion treatise, the Horae Apostolicae, which gathers coincidences Paley had passed over and carries the same test into the Gospels. J. J. Blunt, a Cambridge professor, carried the method through both Testaments in his Undesigned Coincidences in the Writings both of the Old and New Testament. The argument then went quiet for most of the twentieth century and has come back in this one. Lydia McGrew’s Hidden in Plain View gathers undesigned coincidences in the Gospels and Acts, and her Testimonies to the Truth makes the wider case for the Gospels as the reports of witnesses. The vocabulary is Paley’s, the caution about broad and obvious agreements is Paley’s, and the reason the argument keeps returning is the reason he gave for it in the first place: it is very hard to fake, because the thing it detects is precisely what nobody put there on purpose. It also fits how the New Testament writers speak about themselves. John ends his Gospel by saying his book was written so that readers "may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name" (John 20:31), and Luke opens Acts by saying that Jesus "presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs" (Acts 1:3). Paley’s contribution was to notice that a document written by a witness leaves fingerprints its author never intended to leave.

(†) Where his own work invites the criticism: virtue defined by reward, and subscription treated as a treaty. + Two things in Paley’s own writing have troubled Christians ever since, and neither is a matter of what later readers did with him. - Virtue reduced to prudence. The Principles defines virtue as "the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness," and Paley then names the parts: the good of mankind is the subject, the will of God is the rule, and everlasting happiness is the motive. That last word is the trouble. Scripture does hold out reward, and holds it out as something faith must reckon with: "whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him" (Hebrews 11:6). But when reward becomes the motive of virtue, obedience turns into prudence in the old sense of that word, a long-range calculation of one’s own advantage, and that is not what Jesus asked for when he named the first and great commandment as loving God with the whole heart, soul and mind, and the second as loving one’s neighbour as oneself (Matthew 22:37-40). Paley’s contemporaries noticed. Some of his warmest admirers thought he had given away the heart of Christian ethics in a definition. - Articles of peace. Paley taught, and then published, the view that the Thirty-nine Articles were merely "articles of peace": a treaty to keep order in the church rather than a list of things a subscriber must actually believe. Parliament, he argued, could never have expected the consent of ten thousand men, and that in perpetual succession, not to one controverted proposition but to many hundreds, so nobody could seriously be held to each and every separate proposition in them. That reasoning let him take an oath he did not believe in every particular, and it goes with the remark Meadley records about not affording to keep a conscience. He seems to have thought his position defensible in principle, and defended it in print rather than quietly; men who thought subscription meant what it said found it a piece of ingenuity used to make a hard thing easy. Neither charge touches the arguments in Natural Theology, the Evidences or the Horae Paulinae, which stand or fall on their own evidence. But a life is a whole, and Paley’s has an odd shape: the man who taught two generations how to prove that Christianity is true was not equally exercised about what it costs to say so.