Paley's Design Argument
For the exam, you would need to know at least this much about William Paley’s ‘Design Argument’.
A Design Argument is an argument from analogy which says that the world probably has a designer (God) because it shares qualities with human-designed things.
Design Arguments are a posteriori because they depend on observations of the world.
For this reason, they are inductive — leading to probability rather than certainty.
Paley claims if a person came across a pocket watch they would recognise immediately that:
it has a purpose, i.e. telling time,
its purpose relies on many small parts working perfectly together.
He claims that once this has been understood ‘the inference seems inevitable that the watch must have had a maker’ (1802: 1).
He means that the watch cannot have a purpose without someone to give it purpose, and its complex parts cannot have come together as they did without the help of a watchmaker.
Paley goes on to argue that things in the natural world also have purposes.
He points out that ‘every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design that existed in the watch exists in the works of nature’ (1802: 5).
He points to the eye as an example of this: it is a complex organ for seeing which has many working parts, just like a pocket watch.
He argues that just as a wach cannot be purposeful and complex without a ‘maker’, so the the things of the world need a ‘maker’ — and this ‘maker’ is GOD.
References:
Paley, William. 1802. 'Natural Theology', ed. Jonathan Bennett <https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/paley1802.pdf> [accessed 21 May 2026]
