Internalism and Laws of Form 263
to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use (Paley,
1803, p. 203—I am using my personal copy of the widely read 1803 edition
for all quotes).Two features of the watch compel this conclusion. First, and less important,
its complexity—for chance could not make anything so intricate: "What does
chance ever do for us? In the human body, for instance, chance, i.e. the operation
of causes without design, may produce a wen, or a wart, a mole, a pimple, but
never an eye" (1803, pp. 67-68). Second, and far more important, the watch's
design, its adaptation to a clearly perceived end. A high degree of order might
arise from laws of nature with no reference to final cause, but complexity for a
clear purpose implies a designer. "There cannot be design without a designer;
contrivance without a contriver; arrangement, without anything capable of
arranging" (p. 12). Thus does Paley attack his hypothetical opponent and partial
straw man throughout his work? "Nor would any man in his senses think the
existence of the watch, with its various machinery, accounted for, by being told
that it was one out of several possible combinations of material forms; that
whatever he had found in the place where he found the watch, must have contained
some internal configuration or other; and that this configuration might be the
structure now exhibited" (p. 6).
The watch implies, by its utility, a mind capable of forethought, design and
construction: "In the watch which we are examining, are seen contrivance, design;
an end, a purpose; means for the end, adaptation to the purpose. And the question,
which irresistibly presses upon our thoughts, is, whence this contrivance and
design. The thing required is the intending mind, the adapting hand, the
intelligence by which that hand was directed" (p. 16).
But organisms surely display more complexity and more purposeful design
than any watch. Just as Darwin would exalt natural selection as vastly more
powerful than artificial human selection in breeding or agriculture, so does
*The word adaptation did not enter biology with the advent of evolutionary theory. The
Oxford English Dictionary traces it to the early 17th century in a variety of meanings, all
referring to the designing or suitability of an object for a particular function, or the fit of one
thing to another. The British school of natural theology used "adaptation" as its standard word
for illustrating God's wisdom by the exquisite fit of form to immediate function. Darwin, in
borrowing this term, simply followed an established definition while completely revising the
cause of the phenomenon.
Paley frames his hypothetical opponent as a somewhat caricatured workbench materialist
who believes that all natural order arises from physical laws. For Paley, this opponent exists in
two versions, one more dangerous—the true atheist who denies God outright; and the theist who
has abandoned a directly caring and providential God for a deity who set up the laws of nature at
the beginning and then bowed out (or the deist who sees spirit in everything, but calls this
directing force physical law, and owns no caring, personal God). Apparently, Paley never
conceptualized, as another potential opponent worthy of explicit refutation, the possibility of a
principle of selection, in Darwin's version or otherwise. That is, his caricature depicts order as
arising from laws of nature, but he never imagines that good order could also emerge as a residue
of trying many things out and rejecting most. Such selectionism represents, to us today, an
obvious potential alternative to Paley's only conceptual model for order without apparent
purpose: direct construction by the action of physical laws.