Page 89 - The Signs Leading to Faith

The Signs Leading To Faith Refute
Atheism And Materialism
87

formed one of the fundamental con-
cepts of western science right up until
the time of Darwin (1809-82). Many great scientists, such as

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727),
Baron Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), and Carolus Linnaeus
(1707-78), studied the universe or living things with the
intention of “seeing the proofs of God.”
William Paley’s (1743-1805) book Natural

Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and
Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the
Appearances of Nature, includes a great many signs of faith de-

scribed from the perspective of design. In the introduction, he
mentioned a watch, saying that nobody could imagine that na-
ture could have created this by chance, thereby inferring that
every watch proved the existence of a watchmaker.
Following that, he examined the organs of living

things, saying that each of these had a far more
complex design than a watch and that this
proved God’s existence.

Darwin targeted this concept and at-
tempted to eliminate it by claiming that living things were not
“signs leading to faith” but the result of chance and that nature
had created them. His claims elicited a great response, because
at that time people did not know how complex living

things truly are. Moreover, sufficient experiments on
and observations of nature had not been
carried out, and people did not real-

ize that the effects described by
Darwin as “the evolutionary mecha-