Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents

Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, at Amazon

“The ancient covenant is in pieces. Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance.” —Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity

IN HIS BOOK NATURAL THEOLOGY, published in 1802, Anglican theologian William Paley made what was regarded for more than a century as an irrefutable argument for the existence of God. “In crossing a heath,” Paley wrote, “suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever.” But suppose, Paley continued,

“I found a watch upon the ground, I should hardly think of the answer I had given before.”2

Paley’s point was that you don’t have to be a horologist to see right away that the watch was intentionally designed. You may not know who designed it, but you know that someone did. Paley proceeded to show, with an intricate tapestry of informed detail, how the earth and its life forms, including human beings, display in their constitution the unquestion- able marks of design. Such design, he concluded, demonstrates the presence of a designer who may be considered the divine “watchmaker” of creation.

About two decades ago, biologist Richard Dawkins published his book The Blind Watchmaker, in which he asserts that Paley was “gloriously and utterly wrong:’ Dawkins argued that Charles Darwin had discovered a way for nature to produce the appearance of design—yes, even minute and complex design—without the intervention of a creator. Dawkins declared the “blind, unconscious, automatic process” of natural selection “the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life…. It is the blind watchmaker.”