264 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
Paley identifies God's work as incomparably superior to any human art. If the
existence of the watch implies a skilled craftsman, how can we even conceive the
more awesome skill of he who made all living things: "For every indication of
contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in
the work of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater and
more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation" (p. 19).
In succinct epitome of the entire argument, Paley writes (p. 473): "The marks
of design are too strong to be got over. Design must have a designer. That designer
must have been a person. That person is God."
Since we often misuse the past for ridicule, Paley has emerged as everybody's
favorite whipping boy from the bad old days of creationism. As a lively writer, he
is, to be sure, eminently quotable. And he does sometimes stray into the kind of
Panglossian perfectionism (or, rather, far-fetched rationalization for beneficence
within apparent evil) that Voltaire savaged with such glee in Candide.
Paley, for example, does engage in "just-so" storytelling to support
adaptationist explanation, though he presumably read this account of Babyrussa in
a fallacious traveler’s report, and can only be charged with insufficient skepticism,
not fabrication (Fig. 4-7):
I shall add one more example for the sake of its novelty. It is always an
agreeable discovery, when, having remarked in an animal an extraordinary
structure, we come at length to find out an unexpected use for it. The
following narrative furnishes an instance of this kind. The baby-rouessa, or
Indian hog, a species of wild boar found in the East Indies, has two bent
teeth, more than half a yard long, growing upwards, and (which is the
singularity) from the upper jaw. These instruments are not wanted for
defense, that service being provided for by two tusks issuing from the under
jaw, and resembling those of the common boar. Nor does the animal use
them for defense. They might seem therefore to be both