Before Darwin published the Origin of Species, most people viewed the natural world as having been created directly by God. The Genesis accounts in the Bible laid out how this happened and there was no compelling reason to doubt the Bible on these, or any other, matters. Indeed, studying nature was thought to be a good way to gain evidence for the existence of God and, perhaps, what might be going on in His “mind”. The study of nature in this way is known as natural theology. The classic text of this genre is Natural Theology, written in 1803 by the Anglican minister, William Paley. In this book Paley introduced his famous “watchmaker analogy” which argued strongly that, since anyone who sees a watch would know that it had a maker, we must infer that living things have a maker (= God) too since they are so complex. This is the “argument from design” and it was compelling enough to make Paley required reading for budding divinity students at Cambridge University (like Charles Darwin!).
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