LECTURE XI 



PALEY, AND THE ARGUMENT FROM CONTRIVANCE 



PALEY sometimes argues that it is because watches are made 

 by men that they prove design ; while in other places, he holds 

 that it because they are so put together as to point out the 

 hours of the day. 



We must therefore ask what bearing natural selection has on 

 this statement of his argument : 



(1) Living things, and their works, such as watches, exhibit 

 peculiar evidence of usefulness. 



(2) Evidence of usefulness is evidence of design. 



(3) Living things and their works exhibit peculiar evidence of 

 design. 



If it is true that watches come about in order of nature, and 

 are so joined, by natural causation, to the movements of the earth 

 that no one who knows all the data would have the least reason 

 to expect that men should not make and sell and buy and use 

 them, this may well raise a doubt whether the contrivance of 

 man is any interruption to the order of nature; but a moment's 

 thought shows that it by no means does away with the teleologi- 

 cal problem, or makes it any easier to solve ; for it is still as true 

 as ever it was that watches do not come about without human 

 makers, and that they are useful to mankind and help to preserve 

 the human species from destruction. 



If the structure and orderly history of such things as eyes, 

 and cats, and spiders' webs, and watches were all we discover in 

 them, we might say these things are no harder to understand than 

 inorganic bodies and their movements ; for if living things are 

 continually bringing about rearrangements of inorganic matter 

 and physical energy, like watches, which never come about with- 



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