The Fallaciousness Of Paley's On The Origin Of Species

While many claim possession of religious knowledge, the religious are often not forced to justify their beliefs. This is due, firstly, to Western society’s gradual increasing tolerance of religious differences and secondly, to the fact that it is difficult to explain religious knowledge as a product of reason. Reason has earned its prestige as a logical way of knowing because it requires justification, and often this justification can take the form of physical evidence, which is tangible, adding to its credibility. However, in the case of religious knowledge, evidence presents itself in the form of emotional changes.
The fact that the evidence is emotional makes it less compelling, because advances in the field of psychology and psychiatry

The fallaciousness of Paley’s argument lies in the fact that it ignores the difference between animate and inanimate objects, the former being able to pass certain genetic information through reproduction and as such has the ability to change, which results in the aforementioned complexity [Dawkins 43-76]. The analogy is made on the premise that intelligent design is the legitimate explanation for the nature of living organisms on earth, which can be contested by centuries of evolutionary research and physical evidence in the form of fossil records. Of course, Paley was not aware of evolution when he wrote his book as Charles Darwin had yet to publish his 1859 work On the Origin of Species, which outlined the theory that organism evolve over time. It is also important to note that Darwin read Natural Theology before embarking on his pivotal voyage of the Beagle and at that point thought it rational. Using reason to pursue religious knowledge is unreliable in the case of theism because new scientific discoveries regarding biology and the nature of life are always being

It claims that the burden of proof lies upon a person making unverifiable claims, instead of on his opponent. Russell likens this situation to the existence of an unobservable teapot orbiting the sun, and supporters of the existence of the teapot expecting opponents to believe them since they are unable to invalidate the claim. These supporters would be seen as lunatics, and Russell goes on to draw a comparison between supporters of the existence of the teapot to religious believers: “If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity. It is customary to suppose that, if a belief is widespread, there must be something reasonable about it.” His argument is one that is still referenced to in discussions regarding the existence of god today, and was reinterpreted by biologist Richard Dawkins in a 2002 TED Talk on militant atheism; when talking about agnosticism in regards to supernatural beings like the tooth fairy, he made a similar claim as Russell’s: “The onus (burden of proof) is on you to say why, the onus is not on the rest of us to say why