A History of Ideas: William Paley and the Divine Watchmaker

BBC

A History of Ideas: William Paley and the Divine Watchmaker

Cognitive and TED collaboration

Gillian Anderson on William Paley and the Divine Watchmaker

Ray Laurence

Theologian William Paley propounded the theory that if you found a watch on a heath, you would assume that an intelligent being designed and made it. The human eye is just as complex, so surely it also had a designer. Discover why this argument for the existence of God was seen as being fraught with difficulty even before Charles Darwin gave an alternative explanation for the complexities of the natural world.

Want to hear more on this topic?

Here’s the whole episode from A History of Ideas – Historian Justin Champion on Whiston’s Comet Theory

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