Paley Fan’s Blog

While looking for resources in the library for a philosophy paper on David Hume, I ran across a very old looking book with a title that caught my eye. “Evidences for Christianity” “Wm Paley”. As a young believer who found myself in strong disagreement with Mr. Hume, I decided to take the time to pull this old book off the shelf. The inside cover page listed the publication year as 1802, and the recovered book looked like it might be about that old. Wondering what kind of evidence there might have been for Christianity so long ago, I checked the book out and took it home.

What I had found turned out to be one of the treasures of my life. William Paley presented to me the most thorough, logical, reasonable defense of the historicity of the resurrection that I have ever read. When I finished I was changed. As a Christian I believed that Jesus rose from the dead – but only with a somewhat quasi-connection to the real world I live in. When I finished his book I realized I had just followed the mind of a brilliant man who had asked – and answered with logic and evidence from history – the most important question of history – did a man really rise from the dead in Palestine 2000 years ago? The answer to that question was, “yes”, and the implications have affected me ever since.

I have followed William Paley down another road as well. His last book was Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature. It was in this book that Paley wrote about why nature revealed the reality of a Creator. He is perhaps most famous for his watchmaker argument, which, not surprisingly, is at the heart of the best arguments for a Designer today.

I am a Paley fan. William Paley was (and is) acknowledged by all to be a man of great integrity. He was a brilliant thinker. He was an objective truth seeker. And he was way ahead of his time.

My goal is to catch up to him.