The Will to Imagine: A Justification of Skeptical Religion

8. Paley’s Wonder

138 c h a p t e r 8 Paley’s Wonder In this chapter we descend from the heady heights of unsurpassable ideas and unsurpassed intellectual ambition to consider the contributions of William Paley, whose gaze was focused squarely on the details of the concrete natural world. Paley’s characteristic response to these details was a kind of admiring wonder at their order and exquisite beauty. Of course they also inspired him to a certain lofty intellectual ambition of his own: Paley is the best-known and most often cited representative of the teleological or design argument for theism, itself perhaps the best-known and most often cited of the so-called theistic proofs. What I want to show here is that this proof and the related attitudes of its most famous defender lend themselves to the support of skeptical religion in much the same way as do the ontological and cosmological proofs and provers already discussed. 1. The Vicissitudes of Teleological Argumentation Paley’s argument is that the high degree of apparently goal-directed order in nature requires (or at least makes highly probable) the existence of an intelligent orderer or designer—a designer with a grandeur commensurate with the awe induced by its effects. Commonly, as at the very beginning of his Natural Theology,1 in which these matters are most fully discussed, the argument is developed by analogy with goal-directed order as we find it 1 See William Paley, Natural Theology (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1851). Page references in the text are to this work. Paley’s Wonder 139 in human artifacts like the watch. Wouldn’t we accept the watch as having a designer because of the complex mechanism that neatly produces the result of telling time? Well, then, says Paley, we should also accept that nature has a designer when we note the complex mechanisms to be found in it and the results they neatly produce. “There cannot be design without a designer; contrivance, without a contriver; order, without choice; arrangement, without anything capable of arranging; subserviency and relation to a purpose, without that which could intend a purpose; means suitable to an end, and executing their office in accomplishing that end, without the end ever having been contemplated, or the means accommodated to it” (10). That theism might be defended by reference to the order in nature had occurred to numerous writers before Paley: there are clear antecedents for many of his points even in Cicero’s The Nature of the Gods, not to mention Plato’s Timaeus. But Paley developed the claim about natural order with unprecedented thoroughness. He saw design and contrivance everywhere and wrote it all down with lavish and loving attention to detail. (The result is, among other things, a clear outline of late-eighteenth-century anatomy.) His most characteristic tone in all of this is one of wonderment. As a biographer puts it, “he approached his subject with a childlike awe and bubbling exuberance...he was continually stunned by the beauty and efficiency of nature.”2 To give the flavor of his Natural Theology (what he says about the eye is perhaps overfamiliar, so I focus on some of the multitude of other examples ): “The spine, or back bone, is a chain of joints of very wonderful construction. Various, difficult, and almost inconsistent offices were to be executed by the same instrument. It was to be firm, yet flexible, (now I know no chain made by art, which is both these...)” (55). “The reciprocal enlargement and contraction of the chest to allow for the play of the lungs, depends upon a simple yet beautiful mechanical contrivance, referrible [sic] to the structure of the bones which enclose it” (62). “The works of nature want only to be contemplated. When contemplated, they have everything in them which can astonish by their greatness....At one end we see an intelligent Power arranging planetary systems...and, at the other, bending a hooked tooth, concerting and providing an appropriate mechanism , for the clasping and reclasping of the filaments of the feather of the humming bird....The hinges in the wings of an earwig, and the joints of its antennae, are as highly wrought, as if the Creator had nothing else to finish” (294–295). 2 D. L. LeMahieu, The Mind of William Paley (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), p. 79. 140 The Will to Imagine...