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Chapter 7 The Argument from Design 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 for ever: 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 any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone? Why is it not as admissible in the second case, as in the first? [Because], when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, e.g. that they are so formed and adjusted as to produce motion, and that motion so regulated as to point out the hour of the day; that, if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any other order, than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it. —William Paley, clergyman and naturalist These words by William Paley were written in 1800.They are the classic statement of the argument from design. In Paley’s time, most people believed in fixed species; that is, they thought that the species were set at the creation and remained unchanged thereafter. Many scientific creationists hold that view today, arguing that kinds (see chapter 3) were created at once, and that, while there can be variation within kinds, there can be no crossing from one kind to another.Thus, the dog kind may originally have had only one or two members but now displays a number of breeds. In short, some scientific creationists accept microevolution, or slight 59 CH007.qxd 3/26/09 5:28 AM Page 59 changes within kinds, but reject macroevolution, or evolution from one species to another. Others may admit that wolves, foxes, and dogs, for example, have descended from the canine kind but would deny that the reptile kind has descended from the amphibian kind. Theories of evolution before Darwin were rudimentary at best; Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, proposed that animals descended from a single ancestral species and continually improved themselves in some unspecified way as a result of their own activities and experiences. After Paley published his book, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck in 1809 developed a theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics and postulated that organisms improved themselves by passing to their descendants characteristics that they acquired during their lifetimes. Lamarck assumed that only characteristics that the animal acquired as a result of willing them were passed on, so, for example, bulldogs were not born with their tails cut off, even though their ancestors’ tails had been cut off for generations. Lamarck’s theory is completely consistent with the then-accepted view that some kind of life force propelled living organisms and was not as unreasonable at the time as it is sometimes portrayed today. Thus, until 1858, when Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace published a comprehensive theory of natural selection, it would have been hard not to accept Paley’s argument, because Paley was an excellent naturalist, and his argument was very carefully thought out. Darwin and Wallace, however, made the need for a designer wholly unnecessary by providing a naturalistic theory that accounted for the observed facts without a designer and accounted for some of those facts better than a designer. Paley’s argument, which was good in its time, has all the concepts we will see in modern creationism:The watch has a purpose, it is intricately designed, all the parts are well matched, and if one part is out of place, the watch ceases to function. Paley assumes that the universe has a purpose; maybe it does, maybe it does not. If it does not, then Paley’s argument fails. His argument fails on other accounts as well.For instance,a watch is obviously artificial. It is made...

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