Paley, Darwin, the interconnection of ideas, Truth…

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William Paley is a 19th-century theologian best known today for his argument supporting intelligent design: Something as complex as a mechanical watch clearly would not exist without a creator. Thus we can infer that the intricacy of our bodies — and those of all creatures — is the work of God.

One might be surprised to find how close Paley came to anticipating Darwin. Here again is the passage from Paley’s “Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity”: As he contemplated the miracle of life, Paley proposed and then rejected the possibility that living organisms “are only so many out of the possible varieties and combinations of being, which the lapse of infinite ages has brought into existence; that the present world is the relict of that variety: millions of other bodily forms and other species having perished, being by the defect of their constitution incapable of preservation, or of continuance by generation”.

Darwin, as a student at Cambridge, was required to read Paley and expressed his own admiration for the man’s clear thinking. It seems that Paley was the inspiration for Darwin’s ideas about evolution. (1)

All ideas are interconnected.
What you think as illogical, is what someone else finds logical.
What you think as foolish, is what someone else finds clever.
Never be too judgmental with the ideas of.
You never know how they will turn back on you and hit you.

Defend your logic by leaving it defenseless.
Nothing true needs a defense.
It simply… Is.

And no. I have no “argument” about that. 😉

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