RESUMEN
Natural Theology is constructed around the analogy of a watchmaker, a metaphor borrowed from previous advocates of the design doctrine. Imagine, Paley suggests, that you are walking across a heath and suddenly encounter a watch lying on the ground. After close inspection of the watch, you would be compelled to conclude that such an intricate device could not have been constructed otherwise in order for it to work. It is only reasonable to assume “that the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artifi cer or artifi cers who formed it for the purpose which we fi nd it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use” (1802:3–4). In the case of living organisms Paley continued, the evidence for design is even stronger “in a degree which exceeds all computation” (1802:19), and he concluded: “The marks of design are too strong to be got over. Design must have had a designer. That designer must have been a person. That person is GOD” (1802:473). The efforts by Ray, Paley, and others to unite natural history with theology were among the inducements that inclined Darwin, at the age of eighteen, to look favourably on a career in the church. Sent by his father two years earlier to study medicine at Edinburgh University, Darwin had found himself uninspired by this profession and revolted by the sight of operations, which at that time were conducted without the benefi t of anesthesia. Worried that his son might turn into “an idle sporting man,” Darwin’s.