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The watchmaker analogy is often used as a teleological argument (argument from design) in support of the view that the universe (or features of it) are the product of a conscious designer or designers.

The Analogy and Its Uses

The watchmaker analogy consists in the comparison of some natural phenomenon (a particular organ or organism, the structure of the solar system, life, the entire universe) to a watch. Typically, the analogy is presented as a prelude to an argument that can be called "the watchmaker argument" or (more generally) "the argument to an intelligent designer".

The watchmaker argument is this: just as a watch can have come into existence only by being created by an intellgent watchmaker who designed and built it, so too the natural phenomenon in question can have come into existence only by being created by an intelligent (and powerful) creator/designer. Sometimes the goal of the argument is to demonstrate the existence of such a powerful, intelligent creator; sometimes the existence of such a creator/designer being is assumed, and the goal of the argument is to demonstrate that the natural phenomenon in question must have been created by this being (rather than come into existence some other way).

The first (and unstated) premise of the argument to an intelligent designer is that a certain kind or level of complexity in a phenomenon reliably indicates that the phenomenon had an intelligent designer/creator. The watch analogy is a rhetorical device, used as a preamble to the argument, to establish the plausibility of this premise. The preamble, if explicitly stated, would go something like this:

  • A certain kind or level of complexity in any phenomenon reliably indicates that it had an intelligent designer/creator.
  • If we see a certain kind or level of complexity in some phenomenon X, we know that X must have been created by an intelligent designer/creator.
  • For example, consider the case of a watch. When we see a watch, which exhibits complex clockworks, we easily recognise that the watch must have been created by an intelligent designer/creator. (For a long time, clockworks were some of the most complex mechanical devices ever invented, so clockworks were a natural choice for an example of a complex, designed object.)

The use of the watch analogy also helps the argument by avoiding explicitly stating the kind of complexity that indicates design; it suggests that "like the complexity that we see in a watch" is a sufficient definition of that kind of complexity, and suggests that we can recognize that kind of complexity easily, simply by inspecting the phenonenon in question. (Recent versions of "intelligent design" arguments seek to overcome this limitation by offering more formal definitions of the kind of complexity that entails design.)

History

Cicero

The Roman Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC) used ideas which later developed into the subject of this article. For Romans Tellus was the Romanised version of the Greek goddess, Gaia. Gaia played an important part in the Creation mythology of Ancient Greece. Creation mythology of traditional religions frequently gives a prominent role to a Mother goddess who gives birth to other things in creation. Frequently also love-making is involved. Gaia in some versions of the story made love to her son, Ouranos. Other parts of creation arose from this union. Cicero by contrast claimed that Caelus, the Romanised form of Ouranos was the offspring of the ancient gods Aether and Hemera.

The Watchmaker analogy was anticipated by Cicero in De natura deorum, (About the nature of the gods), ii. 34 Cicero wrote in a polytheist context about what he thought was the design of the universe.

Robert Hooke

The great experimental scientist Robert Hooke (1635 – 1703) made several similar comparisons to watches in his revolutionary book Micrographia. He understood watches and had improved watch mechanisms The book Micrographia featured drawings of life as it had never been seen before — through the lens of a powerful microscope — and compared man-made artifacts to natural organisms, concluding that artifacts paled in comparison with the "Omnipotency and Infinite perfections of the great Creatour" [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15491/15491-h/15491-h.htm. Hooke compared the way watches were assembled with the workings of the organisms he was examining. Later biologists concluded that these apparent designs were the result of natural selection. The picture on the right is one of many which Hooke drew from a microscope. He saw these pictures as providing further proof that life was divinely designed.

Other Writers

Hooke's mentor was Robert Boyle who also developed the concept of divine design *

The English divine William Derham (26 November 1657 – 5 April 1735) published his Artificial Clockmaker in 1696, a teleological argument for the being and attributes of God. The watchmaker analogy was also made by Bernard Nieuwentyt (1730).

Voltaire

Voltaire (1694-1778) was fond of the argument from design, but also seemed aware of its limitations and treated it gingerly. In his unpublished A Treatise on Metaphysics (1736) Voltaire considered the watchmaker analogy and concluded that it probably indicated the existence of a powerful intelligent designer, but that it did not prove that the designer must be God.

William Paley

Perhaps most famously, William Paley (1743 – 1805) used the 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 a watchmaker and not by natural forces.

Paley went on to argue that complex structures, such as living things, must be the work of God. Later biologists concluded that these apparent designs were the result of natural selection. Paley believed the natural world was the creation of God and showed the nature of the creator. He believed the remarkable adaptations of plants and animals required an intelligent designer. Paley thought God had designed minute features carefully despite the large number, which had been designed. He believed the wings together with antennae of earwigs were examples. According to Paley God had designed "even the most humble and insignificant organisms" carefully. He believed therefore that God must care even more for humanity. Paley recognised that there is great suffering in nature and natural events appear indifferent to pain. He tried to reconcile this with belief in a benevolent God.(See Problem of Evil). His answer was to assume that life had more pleasure than pain.

Paley first assumes an obvious difference between a watch and a natural object, the rock, but then goes on to liken the evidence of design in the watch to that of nature. The design of the watch suggests a human designer, while the design of nature suggests a divine creator. Critics of the argument note that cultural knowledge allows most people to identify a human design, but there exists no analogous knowledge of the culture of an alleged designer of the universe, and thus similar conclusions about supposed design in nature cannot be drawn.*

As a sidenote, 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.

After Paley

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, he 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 led to gradual change in populations over many generations during very long periods. He wrote in The Origin of Species, "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".

20th Century and 21st Century thinkers from an agnostic viewpoint argue that if God exists he gave us curious and enquiring minds. That suggests he wants us to use our Critical faculties even if this use brings us to a skeptical conclusion.

Solar System Analogy

A parallel argument is that if a model of the solar system or orrery is found it is most reasonable to assume that it was made by human beings and not by natural forces. Typically, debaters then try to argue that the real Solar system is also designed. As before we have cultural knowledge that objects like a model of the solar system are likely to be manmade.

The laws of planetary motion were first discovered by Johannes Kepler. Later, Isaac Newton expanded on them in his Newtonian dynamics and Albert Einstein developed refinements of the theory in his General relativity. This science attempts to explain the movements of the solar system at least as effectively as natural selection explains the apparent design of life. In both instances, randomness is evident. Within the solar system, chaos is exhibited in the spin axes and orbits of many planets.* Within the Theory of Evolution, random mutations lead to new variants, only a few of which survive. In both instances, seemingly perfect regularity fades into less than perfectly directed change. The allegedly divinely designed "watch" is less than ideal when analyzed in a broader context and using long-term perspective.

Challenges to the Watchmaker Argument

Incoherence

George H. Smith, in his book Atheism: The Case Against God, points out what he considers to be a fatal flaw in the watchmaker argument. He states:

Thus, Smith concludes, the watchmaker "argument" is not valid for demonstrating the existence of God.

Circularity

When used (as Cicero and Paley used it, above) to explain all organizational complexity in the universe, the watchmaker argument commits the logical fallacy of circular reasoning, which leads to an infinite regress.

When the watchmaker argument is proposed as an explanation of natural organized complexity in the universe, it offers a supernatural organized complexity (i.e., a deity or some other supernatural force) outside of the universe as the cause of the organized complexity that we see around us. In other words, it says that natural organized complexity came to exist because it was created by supernatural organized complexity.

This does not, of course, prove that there are no deities or supernatural entites. But it shows that supernatural entities cannot be used to explain the origins of natural organized complexity unless one is prepared to deal with the question of the origin of supernatural organized complexity. And then the question of the origin of super-supernatural complexity. And so on.

Moreover, drawing a distinction between "supernatural" and "natural" organized complexity is itself an instance of circular reasoning, as the question at hand is the origin of organized complexity per se; since the only organized complexity empirically known to us is natural organized complexity, we have no logical grounds for assuming the existence of supernatural organized complexity as a premise.

The philosopher Daniel Dennett, in his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), summarizes these objections and describes them as "an unrebuttable refutation" (155) of the watchmaker analogy.

Parsimony

In scientific terms, the watchmaker analogy is flawed in the first instance because it violates Occam's Razor, the principle that unnecessary assumptions that cannot be supported by empirical facts should not be made. As natural selection is capable of explaining the origins of organized complexity without making any ungrounded assumptions--that is, without assuming anything that is not supported by empirical evidence--there is no compelling reason to adopt a theoretical model that, like the watchmaker analogy, assumes the existence of an unverifiable force that leaves no empirical evidence.

The Darwinian Challenge

Before Charles Darwin, the premise "A certain kind or level of complexity in any phenomenon reliably indicates that it had an intelligent designer/creator" could be used to argue from the complexity of certain kinds of biological phenomena to the existence of a designer/creator. Darwin's discovery of natural selection, however, challenged the applicability of the premise to biological phenomena: biological complexity, he argued, could best be explained by natural selection rather than by intelligent design. "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 had been discovered." In 1868 Darwin wrote, “I cannot possibly believe that a false theory would explain so many classes of facts.”

It can also be argued that the watchmaker analogy fails as an alternative to evolutionary biology because it explains single-step complexity rather than cumulative, gradual evolution of life in small steps from simplicity to complexity, as shown in the fossil record. The geneticist Richard Dawkins, in The Blind Watchmaker and other books, argues that systems that are complex today did not have to be so in the past in order to grant the organism an advantage, so there was no point at which an outside agent was needed to explain the origin of complexity. One example Dawkins gives is a light sensitive patch of skin which is enough to allow an animal to move into the warmth, or out of light which may reveal it to a predator, without the need for the lens, cornea, or iris, but this patch can be seen as the foundation of the retina of the much more evolved eye, which is then built up in small steps.

Starting in the 1980, the concepts of evolution and natural selection (usually referred to as "Darwinism") have become the subject of a concerted counter-attack by Christian creationists. This counter-attack has included a renewed defense of the Watchmaker Argument in the form of the "Intelligent Design" movement.

Argument from Poor Design

One counter-argument against the intelligent design of biological organisms is the existence poor designs in nature. Examples of poor design are:

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Watchmaker analogy".

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