A View of the Evidences of Christianity
William Paley (1794)
William Paley — Archdeacon of Carlisle, better known for the watch in Natural Theology
- Catch rate
- 28 / 255
- Base research
- 246
- Stat total
- 348
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.
Distinct from his own Natural Theology, already in this library — that book argues from design, this one argues from testimony and its cost.
The historical case: witnesses who chose labour, danger and death rather than recant what they claimed to have seen.
Paley tests Hume’s own rule against a plain case, the way a mathematician tests a theorem against the simplest instance he can construct.
Assigned reading at Cambridge for a century after it was written.
Cited for this book
Not "his word for it" — many witnesses, hostile and friendly, choosing to be racked, burnt, or strangled rather than give up the truth of what they said they saw. Men do not, as an ordinary matter of human behaviour, die rather than unsay a story they know to be false. Against Hume specifically, Paley runs his own rule through a simple test case and finds that no working skeptic actually lives by it when it is put to them plainly — which is the whole of what a theorem failing its simplest case is supposed to show.
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 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 30 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 12 |
| 40 | Mr. Hume’s Rule | Rationality | Argument | 80 | 95% | 8 |
| 44 | Voluntarily Undergone | History | Argument | 96 | 95% | 10 |