MYTH 8

THAT WILLIAM PALEY RAISED SCIENTIFIC QUESTIONS ABOUT BIOLOGICAL ORIGINS THAT WERE EVENTUALLY ANSWERED BY CHARLES DARWIN

Adam R. Shapiro

[William Paley’s] … Natural Theology—or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature, published in 1802, is the best known exposition of the “Argument from Design,” always the most influential of the arguments for the existence of a God. It is a book I greatly admire, for in its own time the author succeeded in doing what I am struggling to do now.… The only thing he got wrong—admittedly quite a big thing!—was the explanation itself. He gave the traditional religious answer to the riddle, but he articulated it more clearly and convincingly than anybody had before. The true explanation is utterly different, and it had to wait for one of the most revolutionary thinkers of all time, Charles Darwin.

—Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1986)

Up until the time of Darwin, in fact, the argument that the world was designed was commonplace in both philosophy and science. But the intellectual soundness of the argument was poor, probably due to lack of competition from other ideas. The pre-Darwinian strength of the design argument reached its zenith in the writings of nineteenth-century Anglican clergyman William Paley. An enthusiastic servant of his God, Paley brought a wide scientific scholarship to bear on his writings but, ironically, set himself up for refutation by overreaching.

—Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box (1996)

Richard Dawkins and “intelligent design” advocate Michael Behe don’t agree on much, certainly not when it comes to evolution. They can’t even agree on whether William Paley (1743–1805) should be seen as a man of the eighteenth century or the nineteenth. But the one point of consensus that they’ve reached is historical, claiming that Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) On the Origin of Species (1859) refuted Paley’s Natural Theology (1802). They agree that Paley was trying to explain the origin of complex structures that we see in the natural world—things such as eyes, ears, lungs, wings, and other organs—which seem to serve purposes like that of a watch telling time. It was this need to explain biological origins that led Paley to conclude that a deity—an intelligent designer—must exist; and it was not until Darwin published his theory of evolution by natural selection that Paley’s argument was seriously challenged.

This myth—that Darwin refuted Paley’s scientific explanation for the origins of complex life—is mistaken on several levels. Paley’s argument wasn’t about biological origins, and it wasn’t a scientific argument but a theological one. While Darwin eventually found Paley’s arguments to be unconvincing, his goal wasn’t to refute them. In fact, some of Darwin’s contemporaries found natural selection to be compatible with natural-theology arguments similar to Paley’s. It was not until the twentieth century, when a new synthesis of evolutionary thought was held against a caricature of Paley’s original ideas, that people began to claim that a scientific argument for design had been refuted.

The Natural Theology begins with Paley stating that if he were to come across a stone in a field, “I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary it had lain there for ever.” By “for ever,” he didn’t mean since the beginning; he meant eternally, without beginning or end. At the time that Paley wrote the Natural Theology, the idea of an eternal universe, one that had no beginning or end in time, was given serious consideration by astronomers and geologists; it had also been a source of Christian theological debate for centuries. An infinite eternal universe is not ruled out when Paley then suggests how we might react were we to come across a watch instead of a stone. It doesn’t matter how the watch first came to be there; what matters is that the watch shows evidence of having a purpose at the moment he’s looking at it. Even though it operates by springs and not by gravity (the way hourglasses, pendulum clocks, or descending-weight clocks do), its parts are arranged in such a way that it coincides with the way that gravity makes the planets move—in other words, it measures the time. It’s as if, Paley writes, one being was responsible for the laws of nature, and another for putting together material objects in the world. Lo and behold, those material objects (eyes, ears, lungs) seem ready to take advantage of—are adapted to—the laws of nature (optics, acoustics, pressure). It’s the fact that material objects are adapted to this world, with its specific natural laws, that leads Paley to conclude that there’s a designing intelligence behind it all.1

This argument doesn’t depend on how those material objects were formed in the first place. Paley invites the reader to imagine a watch that, as part of its mechanical function, assembles another watch just like itself. We might then expect that the watch in front of us now was formed by a previous watch, and that one by another (again imagining a world that has existed forever). His argument doesn’t change; he examines the watch for its evidence of purpose, not to ask how it was initially formed.²

Paley did believe that the world had a beginning, but he didn’t want to take that for granted. Thus, he restricted his argument for a designer, so that it would be true even for an eternal world. This mattered because his intention was never simply to show that some designer merely existed. His aim was to do theology: to answer religious questions about the kind of being that could create a world filled with purpose. Because natural laws apply everywhere and act in the same ways, he inferred that there is only one designer and that that designer is everywhere: it is God. Because (as he saw it) the universe contains no unnecessary suffering, and the experience of pleasure often seems to be an end in itself, he inferred that the designer is good. And because the world gives evidence of God that we can explore through studying nature and using our rational minds, he inferred that God wants all people to be able to understand him, even before they accept revelation, scripture, or some other private way of knowing.3

One could try to prove that a god exists by saying that there are things that nature can’t explain, that there are phenomena that couldn’t have occurred through natural processes alone. But Paley feared that such a proof could lead to appeals to private knowledge and would justify religious conflict between different interpretations of revelation or scripture. Paley invoked nature as the starting point for theology because he thought that public knowledge based on observation of nature was the best hope for consensus.⁴

For Paley, the natural world testified that the best society was a conservative one, in which people followed their natural God-given inclinations, and that society as a whole had an optimal balance of intellectuals, laborers, governors, craftsmen, and soldiers. When people disregarded those natural inclinations (Paley thought that these were mostly hereditary), this divine utilitarian system—one that brought the most benefit to the society as a whole—broke down. In Paley’s view, that was precisely what happened in the French Revolution.⁵

For Paley, nature is God’s way of illustrating morality. Not just the parts of organs but whole ecosystems are balanced to bring about the least amount of suffering. Paley used nature—the structures and organs of people and animals and the relationship among different species—to make claims about God and God’s moral law. Paley wasn’t engaged in science, and not just because it would be somewhat anachronistic to use the word “science” for these descriptions of nature. Paley used natural history and natural philosophy instead, not in order to reach conclusions that we would today call scientific but in order to make religious claims. Paley didn’t invoke God to explain nature; he invoked nature to explain God. The Natural Theology was, truly, a work of theology.6

By the 1830s, the presentation of Paley’s argument had already changed. In an annotated edition of the text published in 1836, editors Henry Brougham and Charles Bell added a footnote to the first paragraph, stating that with recent discoveries in geology, it was no longer true that we should infer that the rock had lain there forever—it, too, had been formed at some distinct time. While this footnote added some updated geological knowledge, it undermined Paley’s theological point: that a designer was not dependent on origins. With new theories about the development of the solar system and geological formation, an eternal universe was of less concern to readers in the 1830s. For them, the real question was not whether the world had a beginning but whether (or how) things had changed since that beginning.⁷

This is where the question of the origin of species comes in. Charles Darwin was not the first to suggest that life on earth had changed over time. When Paley wrote in 1802, he considered two primary theories for the introduction of new species. First was the theory of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), whereby the world is suffused with creative particles called organic molecules that have an inherent tendency to organize matter and give rise to new life. Buffon’s theory wasn’t truly evolutionary because it didn’t call for gradual emergence, but it did claim that new species came about at some time after the initial creation of the world. The other theory Paley addressed was that of appetencies, put forward by Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), Charles’s grandfather, in which life was seen as the process of willful striving for new growth and new complexity. This was a truly evolutionary theory, which Paley described as new forms emerging “by continual endeavors, carried on through a long series of generations.”⁸

Paley firmly rejected Buffon. Calling his theory both incorrect and atheistic, Paley stated that there was no evidence that new species had ever spontaneously emerged, nor was there any backing for the hypothesis that nature has the inherent power to create new species this way. But he treated Erasmus Darwin’s theory of appetencies differently. According to Paley, there was very little evidence (in 1802) to support the claim that evolution happened in the past, but it was not impossible that such change could have occurred. “I am unwilling to give to it the name of an atheistic scheme,” he wrote, because “the original propensities and the numberless varieties of them … are, in the plan itself, attributed to the ordination and appointment of an intelligent and designing Creator.” Unlike Buffon, Erasmus Darwin didn’t posit any additional creative force in the world. The natural life processes of growth and inheritance, gradually accumulating over the course of many generations, could give rise to new variation. But Paley still objected that Erasmus Darwin’s particular version of gradual evolution “does away with final causes.” Paley wasn’t an evolutionist, but his argument didn’t rely on species being specially created. Because his argument for a designer came from indications of purpose, not origin, Paley did not insist that an evolutionary scheme was incompatible with his argument (as long as there was still a role for purposes).9

Charles Darwin posited a system whereby species evolve over time, not because they have some innate creative power but because those more adapted to the demands of their environment tend to be better at surviving and reproducing. Natural selection does not eliminate purposes; it serves a purpose of increased (but never complete) adaptation. Darwin argued that natural selection brought about an overall good for creatures in a way similar to Paley’s utilitarianism. Indeed, the only time Paley is mentioned in the Origin of Species, it’s not in refutation but in approval:¹⁰

Natural selection will never produce in a being any structure more injurious than beneficial to that being, for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each. No organ will be formed, as Paley has remarked, for the purpose of causing pain or for doing an injury to its possessor. If a fair balance be struck between the good and evil caused by each part, each will be found on the whole advantageous.11

Even though Darwin said that he eventually found Paley’s religious conclusions unconvincing, he never saw them as scientific arguments about the origin of life that had to be refuted in order to make the case for evolution. It wasn’t until the twentieth century, after the advent of a neo-Darwinian synthesis that explicitly tried to eliminate any talk of purpose or progress from biology, that Paley was resurrected as a caricature of pre-Darwinian biological thought. Paley was virtually ignored at the time of the 1925 Scopes antievolution trial, when religious opposition to evolution was presented as a conflict with the Bible, not with natural theology. Historians and other commentators at the time of the 1959 centenary of the Origin mentioned Paley in contrast to Darwin and in ways that earlier texts had not. By the 1980s, accounts of the Paley-Darwin relationship (like that given by Dawkins) made the Natural Theology out to be a work of science rather than religion.¹²