Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

Natural Theology

Natural theology blossomed in the age of science as the first wave of the modern scientific quest for God in William Paley's 1802 book, Natural Theology.  Paley, by way of analogy, compared the complexity of living things to the lesser complexity of a watch. Upon finding a watch, he argued, we would immediately realize that it had a maker. Living things being even more complex, he reasoned, certainly were the products of an intelligent designer. But Darwin, just a few years later, demonstrated how very complex living forms could evolve from much simpler forms. Darwin’s ideas demolished Paley’s argument. Dawkins explained it best. Theologian McGrath agrees. In his book, The Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine, he writes:

Dawkins holds that the existence or nonexistence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. In The Blind Watchmaker, he provided a sustained and effective critique of the arguments of the nineteenth-century writer William Paley for the existence of God on biological grounds. It is Dawkins's home territory, and he knows what he is talking about. This book remains the finest criticism of this argument in print. The only criticism I would direct against this aspect of The Blind Watchmaker is that Paley's ideas were typical of his age, not of Christianity as a whole, and that many Christian writers of the age were alarmed at his approach, seeing it as a surefire recipe for the triumph of atheism. There is no doubt in my mind that Paley saw himself as in some way "proving" the existence of God, and Dawkins's extended critique of Paley in that book is fair, gracious and accurate.