William Paley

English theologian and philosopher

• Born: July 1, 1743
• Birthplace: Peterborough, England
• Died: May 25, 1805
• Place of death: Lincoln, England

Paley was the most cogent eighteenth century proponent for the argument that the universe resulted from the intelligent design of a purposeful creator. Several of his books remained standard university texts some fifty years after his death, and his works were a formative influence on the religious faith of early Victorians. The disturbing intellectual challenge later posed by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was strong evidence of how deeply most of the English had accepted Paley’s argument.

Early Life

William Paley was born in Peterborough and baptized August 30, 1743, in the cathedral there, where his father was a minor canon. He attended Giggleswick grammar school (of which his father was also headmaster) and excelled at his studies. He entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1759, and two years later he won the prestigious Bunting Prize in mathematics. He graduated in 1763, having also distinguished himself in debating. After teaching school for several years, he was elected a fellow of Christ’s College in 1766. He began work on his master of arts degree and spent a decade of successful teaching there.

After his ordination to the Anglican priesthood in 1767, he occupied a series of increasingly remunerative church posts, including chaplain to the bishop of Carlisle (1769) and preacher at the Royal Chapel (1771). In 1776 he married Jane Hewitt. The couple had four sons and four daughters. Hewitt died in 1791, and Paley remarried four years later. In 1782, Paley became archdeacon of Carlisle and then chancellor of the diocese, a well-paid position that established him financially. He also became a justice of the peace in Lincoln and a vocal opponent of slavery. His social views were otherwise generally conservative, as in his printed sermon on Reasons for Contentment, Addressed to the Labouring Part of the British Public (1790), which argued that common laborers were happier than their wealthier landowners.

Life’s Work

William Paley’s success as a theological writer resulted more from the clarity and persuasive power of his writing than from his sheer originality of thought. Paley published his lectures, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, in 1785, and it quickly became a Cambridge textbook. The volume, which codified the thinking on natural law then available from a variety of contemporary thinkers, such as John Locke and David Hartley, presented a moral utilitarianism rooted in theological principles. The book caught the interest of Jeremy Bentham, who four years later issued his famous treatise on utilitarianism (An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation) while avoiding Paley’s Christian framework. Paley roots moral behavior in each person’s awareness of those actions that will most “promote or diminish the general happiness.” In doing so, humans fulfill God’s will that all persons be happy.

Paley’s first religious work was Horae Paulinae: Or, The Truth of the Scripture History of St. Paul… (1790), a defense of the reliability of Saint Paul’s New Testament letters and of the Acts of the Apostles. Like it, his next major publication, A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794), was a work of apologetics (a defense of the faith). Paley defended the truthfulness of the earliest Christian documents, especially regarding miracles, by arguing for the integrity of the Christian authors themselves. Challenging David Hume’s skeptical view of miracles, Paley argued that early Christians would not have been willing to suffer and die for their faith if the miracles had been false. The volume was so popular that it contributed to Paley receiving the doctor of divinity degree in 1795 as well as the post of rector at Bishop-Wearmouth, a position worth œ1,200 per year.

The work for which Paley is best known is Natural Theology: Or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802). With textbook clarity, Paley presents a case for the existence of God based upon the argument from design. His most famous illustration of this principle is that of a watch supposedly found on a heath (the use of the watch as a metaphor for the precision of creation was not original with Paley, but he became its greatest popularizer). Unlike a mere stone, the intricate parts of the watch signify that it was created for a purpose. Thus, “the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker… 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.”

Paley presented numerous examples of human and animal organs and bone structures to support his claim. Prominent among them was the human eye, whose intricacy he believed demonstrated “the intending mind, the adapting hand, the intelligence by which that hand was directed.” Probably influenced by his interest in legal proceedings, Paley listed and answered numerous objections to this governing principle, including the assumption that such design resulted solely from a natural law: “It is a perversion of language to assign any law as the efficient, operative cause of any thing. A law presupposes an agent, for it is only the mode according to which an agent proceeds.…” This was to be the very issue Charles Darwin later challenged by suggesting that evolution operated according to a biological principle (the survival of the fittest through the process of natural selection) that was sufficient to produce the intricacy of creation Paley admired but without benefit of a directing intelligence.

Paley had been afflicted for many years with a painful intestinal illness that began to worsen in 1800, probably as a result of a kidney stone. He died a comfortably wealthy man on May 25, 1805, and was buried next to his first wife in Carlisle Cathedral.

Significance

For at least the first half of the nineteenth century, until Darwin’s ideas began to influence mid-Victorian England, William Paley’s defense of the intelligent design of the universe was a foundation stone of English religious belief. His textbook on moral philosophy was used at Cambridge University until 1857, and A View of the Evidences of Christianity was not removed from the university’s reading list until 1920. In his autobiography, Darwin recorded that his reading of Paley at Cambridge gave him

as much delight as did Euclid. The careful study of these works… was the only part of the Academical Course which, as I have felt and still believe, was of the least use to me in the education of my mind.… I was charmed and convinced by the long line of argumentation.

Challenges to Paley’s views, however, had begun well before the spread of the theory of evolution. Romantic authors such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Hazlitt, and Thomas de Quincey criticized Paley’s political conservatism, assertive optimism, and exclusively rational approach to the divine, as opposed to their own more intuitive and imaginative inclinations. While his position against slavery would have earned him their respect, they rejected his defense of the social status quo. However, Paley’s clarity of argument and consistent faith in a rationally apprehended God make him one of the most influential voices of eighteenth century English philosophical theology.

Bibliography

Clarke, M. L. Paley: Evidences for the Man. Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press, 1974. A concise, readable introduction to Paley’s life and work. Contains appendices with his portraits and a list of descendants, and includes notes and an index.

Fyfe, Aileen. “Publishing and the Classics: Paley’s Natural Theology and the Nineteenth-Century Scientific Canon.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 33 (December, 2002): 729-751. The long publication history of Paley’s Natural Theology (at least fifty-seven editions over the course of a century) offers a test case for understanding what makes a text classic. In Paley’s case, Natural Theology became classic because it appealed to scientific and religious as well as “gentlemen” and middle-class readers.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “The Reception of William Paley’s Natural Theology in the University of Cambridge.” British Journal for the History of Science 30, no. 3 (1997): 215-223. Paley’s Natural Theology (unlike many of his other works) was not a common text at Cambridge in the early nineteenth century, where natural theology was given less emphasis than revealed theology.

Gardner-Thorpe, Christopher. “William Paley (1743-1805): Neuroanatomist?” Journal of Medical Biography 10, no. 4 (2002): 215-223. Argues that Paley “wrote about neuroanatomy although he was not what we could call a neuroanatomist.” Includes comments on modern critiques of Paley by Daniel C. Dennett and Richard Dawkins.

Gillespie, Neal C. “Divine Design and the Industrial Revolution: William Paley’s Abortive Reform of Natural Theology.” Isis 81, no. 2 (June, 1990): 214-219. Rather than merely comparing living beings by analogy to machines, Paley strengthened his natural theology by asserting that living beings were in fact mechanical creations. In this way he hoped to appeal to the “emerging industrial population of England.”

Gould, Stephen Jay. “Darwin and Paley Meet the Invisible Hand.” Natural History 11 (1990): 8-16. Contrasts Paley’s and Darwin’s explanations for the origin of biological diversity.

Lightman, Bernard. “The Visual Theology of Victorian Popularizers of Science: From Reverent Eye to Chemical Retina.” Isis 91, no. 4 (December, 2000): 651-680. Paley’s use of the human eye as evidence of a designing creator was adapted by Victorian popularizers of science, who employed inventions such as the camera and spectroscope to reveal God’s handiwork.

Nuovo, Victor. “Rethinking Paley.” Synthese 91 (April/May, 1992): 29-51. Defends Paley against the charge that he was advocating a theological argument already disproved by Immanuel Kant and David Hume. Paley’s argument from design is “one of the great theistic arguments comparable in its sophistication and scope to Anselm’s so-called ontological argument.”