Discovering God’s Will: Paley’s Problem With Special Reference To ‘The Christian Sabbath’ -- By: Graham A. Cole

Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 39:1 (NA 1988)
Article: Discovering God’s Will: Paley’s Problem With Special Reference To ‘The Christian Sabbath’
Author: Graham A. Cole


Discovering God’s Will:
Paley’s Problem With Special Reference To
‘The Christian Sabbath’

Graham Cole

William Paley (1743–1805), Archdeacon of Carlisle and sometime Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, is usually remembered these days for his classic formulation of one of the design arguments for the existence of God: namely, the argument from watch to watchmaker and then, on analogy, from world to world-maker.1 However, in his own day and for much of the nineteenth century he was considered a noted Christian apologist - of the evidence writing kind - and not just a natural theologian.2 He was also considered to be an important Christian ethicist.3

It is with the last mentioned area of Paley’s many- sided labours that the present article is concerned. As an ethicist Paley exercised immense influence over several generations of young English minds (especially at Cambridge, but also in British institutions for the training of missionaries).4 His first major published work, for example, The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy of 1785 was a required text for the ordinary B.A. at Cambridge from 1786 to 1857, when the works of J. S. Mill replaced it.5 The Paley

scholar, D. L. Le Mahieu is right, therefore, to remark that ‘The Principles . . . exercised a powerful intellectual hegemony over a substantial portion of England’s educated elite.’6 But the concern of this article is not merely antiquarian. The theological utilitarianism that Paley expounded raises certain fundamental questions about the relationship between religion and ethics which are of continuing philosophical and theological importance.

1. Problematic Elucidation

But given this climate of interest, it is a question of more than passing interest as to the best way to approach a figure of the past like Paley, who was both a philosophical and religious thinker. Philosopher and historian of philosophy John Passmore has suggested five possibilities: polemical, cultural, doxographical, retrospective, and problematic elucidation.7

The polemical approach examines a past thinker in terms of some currently held philosophical ‘orthodoxy’, and usually finds him or her wanting. Thus Hegel, for argument’s sake, might be judged as n...

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