Paley’s Mechanistic World
William Paley’s Natural Theology seems to be a reaction and response to find ‘rational’ arguments for religion in the face of the scientific revolution. Paley was a theist who wanted to provide empirical proofs of a ‘God’s’ intelligent design and order of the universe. Throughout his arguments runs the background model of a mechanistic universe: a machine designed by a ‘God’ within which humans live their lives. One can see this mechanistic paradigm that Carolyn Merchant proposes in The Death of Nature, and the impact it has on our world view.
Again, as with many of the texts we’ve been encountering, Paley ascribes the unknown or unknowable to a ‘God.’ He suggests that we shouldn’t allow what we don’t know to overshadow what we do. His rhetoric is strong and doesn’t allow any doubt to enter the reader’s mind. He posits the example of coming across a watch, and that that is evidence of a maker. He takes that, by analogy to extend to nature in general. He uses words and phrases like: “…the inference,…is inevitable…[and] raises no doubt in our minds of the existence and agency of such an artist… (P 8 Further on Paley insists that “there cannot be design without a designer…” (P 12). This statement can lead in two directions to my mind, although only one for Paley. While we may all agree that there can be no design without a designer, the extension to nature and a ‘God’ is odd. Perhaps it is our perceptual/cognitive apparatus, or modality of being in the world that projects the notion of design onto nature: that nature may not be ‘designed’ by anything other than our own experience of it. He doesn’t acknowledge the contingent and constitutive power of our experience in shaping our own objectivity.
He appropriates the term ‘contrivance’ to describe elements of nature, belying his mechanistic and instrumental model. In no uncertain terms Paley says:
the contrivances of nature surpass the contrivances of art, in the complexity, subtlety, and curiosity of the mechanism; and still more, if possible, do they go beyond them in number and variety; yet, in a multitude of cases, are not less evidently mechanical, not less evidently contrivances, not less evidently accommodated to their end, or suited to their office, than are the most perfect productions of human ingenuity. (P 16)
He continues to compare and contrast a telescope with the eye of a fish, and concludes that “the fact is, that they are both instruments.” (P 17). The fact is, seems completely unsubstantiated and very positively put forward. His rhetoric is relentless. Continuing with his description and ‘explanation’ of the eye, particularly focusing on the mechanical aspects and similarities to a telescope, Paley asks “can any thing be more decisive of contrivance than this is?” (P 20) He uses by analogy the concept of a contrivance applied to the natural world to make his argument. He assumes that we all happily accept this analogy and then builds an argument that is internally, logically coherent on insofar as we accept his initial premises: an acceptance that seems unfounded.
