David Hume had already raised sustained objections to arguments of exactly this type in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779, more than two decades before Paley's book, questioning whether the analogy between a designed artifact and a natural organism is sound at all, and pointing out that apparent imperfections and suffering in the natural world sit awkwardly with an inference to a perfectly wise and benevolent designer specifically.
Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, offered the most consequential subsequent challenge, providing a mechanism, gradual variation and differential survival over long periods of time, by which complex, apparently purposeful biological structures could arise without an intending designer, which many scientists and philosophers took as removing the specific inferential force Paley's argument had relied on. The argument did not disappear from religious and philosophical discussion: twentieth and twenty first century Intelligent Design proponents, including the biochemist Michael Behe's concept of irreducible complexity, have proposed updated versions of design reasoning aimed specifically at features its proponents argue evolutionary mechanisms cannot adequately explain, versions mainstream evolutionary biology has in turn subjected to detailed scientific critique. This atlas records the argument's classical statement, its philosophical objections, and its ongoing revival as three connected but distinct chapters of one long running debate.