freethoughtandmetaphor

The Bridge Outside William Paley’s Door

Today I submitted the corrections for the printer to the publisher for Made and Remade, my book responding to William Paley and his Natural Theology.  The cover is in process and I hope to have an image of that soon.

Paley wrote:  “suppose I had found a watch upon the ground . . . the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker . . . .”   His book presents his case for creation by design, based on the intricacies of eye, ear, and other parts of the body and of nature.

My poems respond in many ways, including these thoughts on Paley’s watch, from “Time Past, Time Present”:

What’s the time on Paley’s watch?
Without hands it would still be
a watch.  It’s mechanism matters
to him: springs and metal, not hours,
minutes.  His present so long
past, timeless in comparison
with ours, has he a gift for the now
in which we’re timebound?

The realization of how different Paley’s sense of time and the watch were from mine was one of the moments that made my dialogue with his writing so interesting to me.