Re: paleonet Living Pterosaurs soon on display

The Rev'd. William Paley, author of the "Natural Theology," which was the inspiration for the Bridgewater Treatises, which took the Biblical view of evolution. Any good history of geology or biology should mention him. I'm sure that a "google" search for Paley & Bridgewater Treatise will give you plenty to review!

For example, http://www.victorianweb.org/religion/paley1.html has this:

Paley begins his theology by postulating that if he is walking in country and stumbles against a stone that there is no objection to supposing that the stone had been there ever since the beginning of time. Paley then changes the object to a watch:

But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given,--that, for anything I knoew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone?...For this reason, and for no other, viz,. that, when we come to inspect the watch we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are famed put together for a purpose....[Description of watch omitted.] This mechanism being observed... the inference, we think, is inevitalbe, that the watch must have had a maker....who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.

Paley gives numerous instances of the design of the various animal species, which will be passed over, but he then goes on to a discussion of the attributes of the deity. He asserts that "No animal, for instance, can have contrived its own limbs and senses; can have been the author to itself of the design with which they were constructed."

[There's lots else on the Internet about this...]

Alan Kabat

-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Holterhoff <frank@matricus.com>
To: paleonet@nhm.ac.uk
Sent: Fri, 02 Dec 2005 12:18:46 -0600
Subject: Re: paleonet Living Pterosaurs soon on display

Sorry, I think my lack of culture is showing! To whom is this a reference?

F

P. David Polly wrote:

> Note that the author is > Dr Richard Paley (remind you of anyone?).

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