Natural Theology
William Paley, Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802)
William Paley, Archdeacon of Carlisle
Plain-spoken, patient, and convinced that the next specimen will make the case if the last one somehow didn’t.
- Catch rate
- 61 / 255
- Base research
- 242
- Stat total
- 336
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
Opens on a stone and a watch and never lets go of the comparison: a thing fitted to a purpose implies a fitter, whichever field it turns up in.
Plain, concrete, and aimed at a reader with no philosophical training at all — which is exactly why it stayed the standard textbook of natural theology for the better part of a century.
A young Charles Darwin read this book at Cambridge and, by his own account in his autobiography, found the reasoning genuinely compelling before he later argued his way out from under it.
Cited for this book
Paley published Natural Theology in 1802, late in a long run of English natural-theology apologetics answering a century of deism, and its opening chapter is the most famous single passage the genre ever produced: find a stone on a heath and shrug; find a watch there and you cannot. The book spends the rest of its length running the same test on living things — the eye chief among them — arguing that design, once recognised, points past itself to a Designer whichever direction it is examined from.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Watch Upon the Heath | Natural Theology | Argument | 95 | 100% | 15 |
| 1 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 34 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 12 |
| 44 | The Eye and the Telescope | Natural Theology | Argument | 88 | 100% | 15 |