Well, welcome back to another episode of five minutes in church history. On this episode, we're talking about the watchmaker.

This is attributed to an argument formed by William Paley.

William Paley was born in 1743.

He died in 1805.

William Paley's father, also William Paley,

was the headmaster at Giggleswick.

Great name, right? A boarding school in North Yorkshire, England.

And that's where young William Paley was a scholar.

Of course, with a father as a headmaster, he's probably got a career ahead of him in academics,

and after his training there at Giggleswick, he went off to Christ's College, Cambridge.

After he graduated, he was there for about 10 years serving as a lecturer and as a fellow at Christ college.

Then Paley would go on to hold various positions in the Anglican Church, and he was married once his wife passed away and he remarried

he had a number of children one of his sons would go on to be an architect of some repute.

William Pelly wrote three books and the most famous of those was the last book he wrote.

He published it in 1802 just a few years before he died, and it was entitled natural theology.

In there, William Paley makes the argument that the unity of nature that we see gives grounds for a single creator.

He then goes on to say that we also see a complexity within nature,

and that complexity that we observe gives grounds for us to see an intelligent creator, a designer.

This is a version of what we call the teleological argument.

That word teleological is based on the Greek word which

means end or design or purpose. It's a way of saying that the design that we see in

the universe points us to a designer.

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