A Body of Divinity, Vol. 1 (of 4): Wherein the doctrines of the Christian religion are explained and defended, being the substance of several lectures on the Assembly's Larger CatechismRidgley, Thomas
Religion
A Body of Divinity, Vol. 1 (of 4): Wherein the doctrines of the Christian religion are explained and defended, being the substance of several lectures on the Assembly's Larger Catechism
“III. Though it be now no longer probable, that the individual watch
which our observer had found, was made immediately by the hand of an
artificer, yet doth not this alteration in any wise affect the
inference that an artificer had been originally employed and concerned
in the production. The argument from design remains as it was. Marks
of design and contrivance are no more accounted for now, than they
were before. In the same thing, we may ask for the cause of different
properties. We may ask for the cause of the colour of a body, of its
hardness, of its heat; and these causes may be all different. We are
now asking for the cause of that subserviency to an use, that relation
to an end, which we have remarked in the watch before us. No answer is
given to this question by telling us that a preceding watch produced
it. There cannot be design without a designer; contrivance without a
contriver; order without choice; arrangement, without any thing
capable of arranging; subserviency and relation to a purpose, without
that which could intend a purpose; means suitable to an end, and
executing their office in accomplishing that end, without the end ever
having been contemplated, or the means accommodated to it.
Arrangement, disposition of parts, subserviency of means to an end,
relation of instruments to an use, imply the presence of intelligence
and mind. No one, therefore, can rationally believe, that the
insensible, inanimate watch, from which the watch before us issued,
was the proper cause of the mechanism we so much admire in it; could
be truly said to have constructed the instrument, disposed its parts,
assigned their office, determined their order, action, and mutual
dependency, combined their several motions into one result, and that
also a result connected with the utilities of other beings. All these
properties therefore, are as much unaccounted for as they were before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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