During William Paley’s time (roughly the 17th and 18th centuries), the world came to be viewed as a clockwork mechanism. This viewpoint is referred to as deism.

The clockmaker God of deism is the world’s designer—remote and detached from his handiwork now that the clockwork has been designed and assembled. God started the world and then left it to run by itself. Perhaps God has moved on to less ambitious projects?

With the rise of modern science, the idea of supernatural intervention in nature seemed increasingly dubious. Hence, by the 18th century, God’s wisdom and power were understood primarily in the initial design of the universe, not in its continuing development and governance. So, deism acknowledges the lawfulness of nature (all kinds of scientific laws were being discovered during this Enlightenment period), but it also relegates God’s activity to the distance past.

Early deism was a logical outgrowth of the great advances in astronomy, physics, and chemistry that had been made by Bacon, Copernicus, Galileo, etc. It was a small leap from rational study of nature to the application of the same techniques in religion and theistic belief.

Deism is still a viewpoint that is current on some bumpers:

But in the mid-nineteenth century, a new theory was formulated that challenged the Design Argument and the need for even a distant designer God.

We will encounter this revolutionary theory on our next hike...a hike in the jungle.