There was mind and purpose behind it. As the
anti-Bradlaugh member would have put it, there must be somebody behind
the something: no atheist could get over that.
PALEY'S WATCH
Paley had put the argument in an apparently unanswerable form. If you
found a watch, full of mechanism exquisitely adapted to produce a series
of operations all leading to the fulfilment of one central purpose of
measuring for mankind the march of the day and night, could you believe
that it was not the work of a cunning artificer who had designed and
contrived it all to that end? And here was a far more wonderful thing
than a watch, a man with all his organs ingeniously contrived, cords and
levers, girders and kingposts, circulating systems of pipes and valves,
dialysing membranes, chemical retorts, carburettors, ventilators, inlets
and outlets, telephone transmitters in his ears, light recorders and
lenses in his eye: was it conceivable that this was the work of chance?
that no artificer had wrought here? that there was no purpose in this,
no design, no guiding intelligence? The thing was incredible.
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