William Paley 1743 – 1805

William Paley was an English Anglican clergyman, philosopher of religion, and moral philosopher and for half a century one of the most read writers in British religious thought. Long-time fellow and tutor of Christ's College, Cambridge, he held a succession of clerical livings and finally the archdeaconry of Carlisle. His Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, A View of the Evidences of Christianity, and Natural Theology became standard textbooks at Cambridge and Oxford and presented a celebrated argument from design centered on the analogy of finding a watch upon a heath. His combination of utilitarian ethics with natural theology shaped Anglo-American thought well into the nineteenth century.

William Paley was born at Peterborough in July 1743 and grew up at Giggleswick in Yorkshire, where his father was master of the grammar school. He went up to Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1759, took his bachelor's as senior wrangler in 1763, became a fellow and tutor of Christ's, and was ordained priest in 1767. He gave up Cambridge for the parish ministry, holding successively the livings of Musgrave, Dalston, Appleby, and Stanwix in the diocese of Carlisle, the archdeaconry of Carlisle, the subdeanery of Lincoln, and from 1795 the rich rectory of Bishopwearmouth.

His major books are the Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), Horae Paulinae (1790), A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794), and the celebrated Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802). The first three were used as undergraduate textbooks at Cambridge until well into the nineteenth century.

Paley defended a theological utilitarianism on which morality consists in doing the will of God, and God wills the happiness of his creatures, and an evidentialist Christian apologetics resting on the historical credibility of the apostles and the harmony of nature with design. His opening image of the watch found on a heath, from which a watchmaker is inferred, became the canonical version of the design argument and was carefully studied — and finally answered — by Charles Darwin. He died at Bishopwearmouth in May 1805.