REVISITING WILLIAM PALEY

Evaluations of William Paley's Natural Theology (1802) routinely refer to its philosophical and theological shortcomings, especially its vulnerability to Charles Darwin's scientific naturalism. Nevertheless, Paley still repays a visit as a subject who transcends common stereotypes, four of which invite correction: that Paley wrote in culpable neglect of David Hume; that he pretended to give a deductive demonstration of God's existence; that by making his Natural Theology a stand‐alone book, his apologetic framework was neglectful of revelation and therefore inconsequential for Christian theology; and that, preoccupied with the minutiae of anatomical specificity, he was blind to laws connecting natural phenomena. Nuances in Paley's thinking, particularly his allowance for the extension of scientific naturalism, help to explain the sympathetic recognition he still enjoyed among scientific figures until the end of the nineteenth century. For Thomas Huxley, he had even created a metaphysical space that allowed for a science of evolution.