William Paley

(1743 - 1805)

After graduating first in his class from the University of Cambridge in 1763, William Paley was ordained and spent the remainder of his career teaching at Christ’s College and rising through the ranks of the Anglican Church. Natural Theology, his final work, is an attempt to prove the existence of God through observation of the natural world. The book begins with the famous analogy of God as a watchmaker. “It is not necessary that a machine be perfect,” he writes, “in order to show with what design it was made.”