Watchmaker analogy

Part of a series of articles on
Intelligent design
see: Watchmaker analogy
Concepts
Irreducible complexity Specified complexity Fine-tuned universe Intelligent designer Theistic science Neo-creationism
Intelligent design movement
Timeline Wedge strategy Politics Kitzmiller v. Dover
Campaigns‎
Critical Analysis of Evolution Teach the Controversy
Organisations
Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture ISCID
Reactions
Jewish · Roman Catholic Scientific organizations
Creationism Book · Category · Portal
v · d · e

The watchmaker analogy, or watchmaker argument, is a teleological argument for the existence of God. By way of an analogy, the argument states that design implies a designer. The analogy has played a prominent role in natural theology and the "argument from design," where it was used to support arguments for the existence of God and for the intelligent design of the universe.

The most famous statement of the teleological argument using the watchmaker analogy was given by William Paley in 1802. In 1838, Charles Darwin's formulation of the theory of natural selection was seen as providing a counter-argument to the watchmaker analogy. In the United States, starting in the 1980s, the concepts of evolution and natural selection became the subject of national debate, including a renewed interest in the watchmaker argument by atheists.^[1]

The Watchmaker argument

The watchmaker analogy consists of the comparison of some natural phenomenon to a watch. Typically, the analogy is presented as a prelude to the teleological argument and is generally presented as:

1. The complex inner workings of a watch necessitate an intelligent designer.
2. As with a watch, the complexity of X (a particular organ or organism, the structure of the solar system, life, the universe, everything) necessitates a designer.

In this presentation, the watch analogy (step 1) does not function as a premise to an argument — rather it functions as a rhetorical device and a preamble. Its purpose is to establish the plausibility of the general premise: you can tell, simply by looking at something, whether or not it was the product of intelligent design.

In most formulations of the argument, the characteristic that indicates intelligent design is left implicit. In some formulations, the characteristic is orderliness or complexity (which is a form of order). In other cases it is clearly being designed for a purpose, where clearly is usually left undefined.

The argument conflates the difference between the complexity that arises from living organisms that are able to reproduce themselves (and as such may change to become more complex over time) with the complexity of inanimate objects, unable to pass on any reproductive changes (such as the multitude of parts manufactured in a watch), the comparison breaks down because of this important distinction.

William Paley

Main article: William Paley

William Paley.

Watches and timepieces have been used as examples of complicated technology in philosophical discussions throughout history. Cicero, Voltaire and René Descartes, for example, used timepieces in arguments regarding purpose. The watchmaker analogy, as described here, was used by Fontenelle in 1686,^[2] but was most famously formulated by Paley.

William Paley (1743–1805) used the watchmaker analogy in his book Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature, published in 1802. In it, Paley wrote that if a pocket watch is found on a heath, it is most reasonable to assume that someone dropped it and that it was made by one or more watchmakers, and not by natural forces.

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. (...) There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. (...) Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.

— William Paley, Natural Theology (1802)

Paley went on to argue that the complex structures of living things and the remarkable adaptations of plants and animals required an intelligent designer. He believed the natural world was the creation of God and showed the nature of the creator. According to Paley, God had carefully designed "even the most humble and insignificant organisms" and all of their minute features (such as the wings and antennae of earwigs). He believed therefore that God must care even more for humanity.

Paley recognised that there is great suffering in nature, and that nature appears to be indifferent to pain. His way of reconciling this with his belief in a benevolent God was to assume that life had more pleasure than pain. (See Problem of Evil).

As a side note, a charge of wholesale plagiarism from this book was brought against Paley in The Athenaeum for 1848, but the famous illustration of the watch was not peculiar to Nieuwentyt, and had been used by many others before either Paley or Nieuwentyt.

Criticism

There are three main arguments against the Watchmaker analogy. The first is that complex artifacts do not, in fact, require a designer, but can and do arise from "mindless" natural processes (as in the "Infinite Monkey Theorem"). The second argument is that the watch is a faulty analogy. The third argument is that the watchmaker is arguably a far more complex organism than the watch, and if complexity proves intelligent design, then the question arises: who designed such a complex designer?

David Hume

Hume gave the classic criticism of the design argument in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. He argued that for the design argument to be feasible, it must be true that order and purpose are observed only when they result from design. But order is observed regularly, resulting from presumably mindless processes like snowflake or crystal generation. Design accounts for only a tiny part of our experience with order and "purpose". Furthermore, the design argument is based on an incomplete analogy: because of our experience with objects, we can recognize human-designed ones, comparing for example a pile of stones and a brick wall. But to point to a designed Universe, we would need to have an experience of a range of different universes. As we only experience one, the analogy cannot be applied. We must ask therefore if it is right to compare the world to a machine—as in Paley's watchmaker argument—when perhaps it would be better described as a giant inert animal. Even if the design argument is completely successful, it could not (in and of itself) establish a robust theism; one could easily reach the conclusion that the universe's configuration is the result of some morally ambiguous, possibly unintelligent agent or agents whose method bears only a remote similarity to human design. In this way it could be asked if the designer was God, or further still, who designed the designer? Hume also reasoned that if a well-ordered natural world requires a special designer, then God's mind (being so well ordered) also requires a special designer. And then this designer would likewise need a designer, and so on ad infinitum. We could respond by resting content with an inexplicably self-ordered divine mind but then why not rest content with an inexplicably self-ordered natural world?

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin in 1880

Charles Darwin's theory provided another explanation for complex artifacts, one where a design is not necessary.

When Charles Darwin (1809–1882) completed his studies of theology at Christ's College, Cambridge in 1831, he read Paley's Natural Theology and believed that the work gave rational proof of the existence of God. This was because living beings showed complexity and were exquisitely fitted to their places in a happy world.

Subsequently, on the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin found that nature was not so beneficent, and the distribution of species did not support ideas of divine creation. In 1838, shortly after his return, Darwin conceived his theory that natural selection, rather than divine design, was the best explanation for gradual change in populations over many generations.

It can hardly be supposed that a false theory would explain, in so satisfactory a manner as does the theory of natural selection, the several large classes of facts above specified. It has recently been objected that this is an unsafe method of arguing; but it is a method used in judging of the common events of life, and has often been used by the greatest natural philosophers.... I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, "as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion." A celebrated author and divine has written to me that "he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws."

— The Origin of Species^[3]

Darwin reviewed the implications of this finding in his autobiography:

Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.^[4]

The idea that nature was governed by laws was already common, and in 1833 William Whewell as a proponent of the natural theology that Paley had inspired had written that "with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this—we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws."^[5] By the time Darwin published his theory, liberal theologians were already supporting such ideas, and by the late 19th century their modernist approach was predominant in theology. In science, evolution theory incorporating Darwin's natural selection became completely accepted.

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins

Main article: Richard Dawkins

Dawkins also gives an explanation for complex artifacts, one where a design is not necessary.

Dawkins demonstrates through computer simulation that "highly complex" systems can be produced by a series of very small randomly generated yet naturally selected steps, rather than an intelligent designer.

He further claims that the watchmaker analogy is a self-refuting argument: if complex things must have been intelligently designed by something more complex than themselves, then anything posited as this complex designer (i.e. God) must also have been designed by something yet more complex.

In a Horizon episode also entitled The Blind Watchmaker (Blind watchmaker), Dawkins described Paley's argument "as mistaken as it is elegant". In both contexts he saw Paley as having made an incorrect proposal as to a certain problem's solution, but did not disrespect him for this. In his essay The big bang, Steven Pinker discussed Dawkins' coverage of Paley's argument, adding: "Biologists today do not disagree with Paley's laying out of the problem. They disagree only with his solution."

In his book, The God Delusion, Dawkins argues that life was the result of complex biological processes. Dawkins makes the argument that the comparison to the lucky construction of a watch is fallacious because proponents of evolution do not consider evolution "lucky"; rather than luck, the evolution of human life is the result of billions of years of natural selection. He therefore concludes that evolution is a fair contestant to replace God in the role of watchmaker.

Mandelbrot analogy

A similar objection is coined as the Mandelbrot Analogy. It relies on the observation that some complex patterns and behaviours, such as those seen in fractals and chaotical systems, arise naturally from simple systems. Therefore, the complexity of something is not a valid argument for the necessity of a designer.

Faulty analogy

Criticisms have found fault in the watch, or the alternative 'eye', analogy. Anthropologists Richerson and Boyd argue that one human could not make a watch on their own and therefore a watch does not have a designer.^[6] The book Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar argues that there is no reason why the Universe resembles a watch any more than it does a baby kangaroo, and that the same question can be asked of any god. And a watch is manufactured out of other materials, while the case with the Universe is unclear.

Creationist revival

In the early 20th century the modernist theology of higher criticism was contested in the United States by Biblical literalists who campaigned successfully against the teaching of evolution and began calling themselves Creationists in the 1920s. When teaching of evolution was reintroduced into public schools in the 1960s they adopted what they called creation science which had a central concept of design in similar terms to Paley's argument. That idea was then relabelled intelligent design, which presents the same analogy as an argument against evolution by natural selection without explicitly stating that the "intelligent designer" was God. The argument from the complexity of biological organisms was now presented as the irreducible complexity argument,^[7] the most notable proponent of which was Michael Behe and, leveraging off the verbiage of information theory, the specified complexity argument, the most notable proponent of which was William Dembski.

The watchmaker analogy was referenced in the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial. Throughout the trial, the Reverend William Paley was mentioned several times, naming Paley the "posterboy" of Intelligent Design.^[8][9][10] The defense's expert witness John Haught noted that both Intelligent Design and the watchmaker analogy are both "reformulations" of the same theological argument.^[11] On day 21 of the trial, Mr. Harvey walked Dr. Minnich through a modernized version of Paley's argument, substituting a cell phone for the watch.^[12] In his ruling, the judge stated that the use of the argument from design by intelligent design proponents "is merely a restatement of the Reverend William Paley's argument applied at the cell level"^[13] and that the argument from design is subjective.^[14]

See also

• God of the Gaps
• Argument from poor design
• Hoyle's fallacy

References

1. ^ The Blind Watchmaker
2. ^ Durant, Will; Durant, Ariel (1935). Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Louis XIV (1963). Simon and Schuster. http://books.google.com/?id=jCFmAAAAMAAJ&q=%22the+situation+by+pointing+out%22+watch&dq=%22the+situation+by+pointing+out%22+watch. 
3. ^ Darwin, C. R. 1872. On the Origin of Species. London: John Murray. 6th edition. p. 421.
4. ^ Darwin, C. R. 1958. The autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882. With the original omissions restored. Edited and with appendix and notes by his grand-daughter Nora Barlow. London: Collins, p. 87
5. ^ Darwin, C. R. 1859. On the Origin of Species. London: John Murray, p. ii.
   Whewell, William, 1833. Astronomy and general physics considered with reference to natural theology. W. Pickering, London, 356
6. ^ Richerson & Boyd 2005, p. 50
7. ^ Scott EC, Matzke NJ (May 2007). "Biological design in science classrooms". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 104 Suppl 1 (suppl. 1): 8669–76. Bibcode 2007PNAS..104.8669S. doi:10.1073/pnas.0701505104. PMC 1876445. PMID 17494747. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/pmidlookup?view=long&pmid=17494747. 
8. ^ Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District Day 1 PM session
9. ^ Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District Day 10 PM session
10. ^ Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District Day 12 PM session
11. ^ Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District Day 5 PM session
12. ^ Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District Day 21 AM session
13. ^ Ruling, Whether ID Is Science, page 79 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District 2005
14. ^ "It is readily apparent to the Court that the only attribute of design that biological systems appear to share with human artifacts is their complex appearance, i.e. if it looks complex or designed, it must have been designed. (23:73 (Behe)). This inference to design based upon the appearance of a "purposeful arrangement of parts" is a completely subjective proposition, determined in the eye of each beholder and his/her viewpoint concerning the complexity of a system." Ruling, Whether ID Is Science, page 81

• Richerson, Peter J.; Boyd, Robert (2005). Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-71284-2 .

External links

• Refutation of the 'by design' argument for theism
• Full text of Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity
• Intelligent Design Deja Vu What would "intelligent design" science classes look like? All we have to do is look inside some 19th-century textbooks.
• Robert Hooke
• William Paley (1743–1805)
• The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, revised version published in 1958 by Darwin's granddaughter Nora Barlow.
• Recapitulation and Conclusion", By Charles Darwin.
• Natural History Magazine
• The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins
• Chaos in the Solar System, by J Laskar
• Index to Creationist Claims
• The Watchmaker Analogy Animated and Dramatically Read