In the eighteenth century, William Paley offered one of the most famous illustrations of the argument from design: the watchmaker analogy.211 Paley argued that if we walked through a field and found a rock, we would not assume the rock was designed by anyone. We would just think that it was a result of natural causes. But if we found a watch in the same field, even if we did not know what watches were, we would know that someone designed it, for we recognize design when a thing has a complicated set of parts that function in order to accomplish a specific end or purpose. According to Paley,
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