Science of Discworld III

must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at sometime, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.
    There then follows a long series of numbered paragraphs, in which Paley qualifies his argument more carefully, extends it to cases where, for instance, some parts of the watch are missing, and dismisses several objections to his reasoning. The second chapter takes up the story by describing a hypothetical ‘watch’ that can produce copies of itself – a remarkable anticipation of the twentieth-century concept of a Von Neumann machine. There would still be good reason, Paley states, to infer the existence of a ‘contriver’; in fact, if anything, the effect would be to enhance one’s admiration for the contriver’s skill. Moreover, the intelligent observer
    would reflect, that though the watch before him were, in some sense, the maker of the watch which was fabricated in the course of itsmovements, yet it was in a very different sense from that in which a carpenter, for instance, is the maker of a chair.
    He continues to develop this thought, and disposes of one possible suggestion: that, just as a stone might always have existed, for all he knew, so a watch might have always existed. That is, there might have been a chain of watches, each made by its predecessor, going back infinitely far into the past, so that there never was any first watch. However, he tells us, a watch is very different from a stone: it is contrived. Perhaps stones could always have existed: who knows? But not watches. Otherwise we would have ‘contrivance, but no contriver; proofs of design, but no designer’. Rejecting this suggestion on various metaphysical grounds, Paley states:
    The conclusion which the first examination of the watch, of its works, construction, and movement, suggested, was, that it must have had, for the cause and author of that construction, an artificer, who understood its mechanism, and designed its use. This conclusion is invincible. A second examination presents us with a new discovery. The watch is found, in the course of its movement, to produce another watch, similar to itself: and not only so, but we perceive in it a system or organisation, separately calculated for that purpose. What effect would this discovery have, or ought it to have, upon our former inference? What, as hath already been said, but to increase, beyond measure, our admiration of the skill which had been employed in the formation of such a machine!
    Well, we can all see where the good reverend is leading, and he homes in on his target in his third chapter. Instead of a watch, consider an eye. Not lying on a heath, but in an animal, which perhaps does lie on a heath. What he does say is: compare the eye to a telescope. There are so many similarities that we are forced to deduce that the eye was ‘made for vision’, just as the telescope was. Somethirty pages of anatomical description reinforce the contention that the eye must have been designed for the purpose of seeing. And the eye is just one example: consider a bird, a fish, a silkworm, or a spider. Now, finally, Paley states explicitly what all his readers knew was coming from page one:
    Were there no example in the world of contrivance except that of the eye, it would be alone sufficient to support the conclusion which we draw from it, as to the necessity of an intelligent Creator.
    There we have it, in a nutshell. Living creatures are so intricate, and function so effectively, and fit together so perfectly, that they can have arisen only by design. But design implies a designer. Ergo: God exists, and it was He who created Earth’s magnificent panoply of life. What more is there to say? The proof is complete.
    1 So called because it starts from the phenomenon of design and deduces the existence of a cosmic designer.
    2 According to Isaac Asimov, the most practical and dramatic victory of science over religion occurred in the seventeenth century, when churches began to put up lightning conductors.
    3 It is old enough to use the elongated s’s parodied in Di ſ cworld as ſ s. We have re ſ i ſ ted temptation except in this footnote. Though ‘manife ſ tation of de ſ ign’ does have a bit of a cachet.

THREE
THEOLOGY OF SPECIES
    I T WAS THREE HOURS LATER …
    The senior wizards trod carefully in the High Energy Magic Building, partly