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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. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the analogy was used (by Descartes and Boyle, for instance) as a device for explaining the structure of the universe and God's relationship to it. Later, the analogy 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. Paley's argument was seriously challenged by Charles Darwin's discovery of natural selection. In the United States, starting in the 1980s, the concepts of evolution and natural selection (usually referred to as "Darwinism") become the subject of a concerted attack by Christian creationists. This attack included a renewed interest in, and defense of, the watchmaker argument by the intelligent design movement. 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: 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. Arguments that emphasize the appearance of purpose (as in Voltaire, see below), often appeal to biological phenomena. It seems natural to say that the purpose of an eye is to enable an organism to gather information about its environment, the purpose of legs is to enable an organism to move about in its environment, and so on. Even for non-biological phenomena, scientific explanations in terms of purpose were accepted well into the 19th century. Natural phenomena were explained in terms of how they were designed for the benefit of humanity. It was held for instance, that the highest mountains on earth are located in the hottest climates by design -- so that the mountains might condense the rain and provide cool breezes where mankind needed them the most. (Ref.) In arguments that emphasize on orderliness or complexity, the argument is often supplemented by a second argument that proceeds this way: This argument is basically a process of elimination: three possible explanations are offered. When the first two (random chance, natural causes) are ruled out, intelligent design is left standing as the only plausible explanation. The Achilles heel of the argument is that it fails if there exists a plausible explanation of phenomenon X in terms of natural processes. And this makes it vulnerable to advances in science, which has progressively found more and more naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena, and progressively abandoned explanations in terms of teleology. The location of mountains, for instance, is now explained in terms of plate tectonics. The structure of biological organisms is explained in terms of natural selection. The structure of the solar system is explained in terms of the nebular hypothesis and its refinements. And so on. Cicero Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC) anticipated the watchmaker analogy in De natura deorum, (About the nature of the gods), ii. 34 Invention of Clocks Historically speaking, it was necessary for watches to be invented before there could be watchmaker analogies. But before there were watches (small portable clocks), there were clocks... and the possibility of clock analogies. The first reasonably accurate mechanical clocks were developed early in the 14th century. They used falling weights to supply power and were not portable. Rene Descartes
Invention of the Watch
Invention of the Orrery What makes a watch a suitable component in an argument from design is that a watch is composed of clockworks -- that is, a watch has many moving parts which interact with each other in complex ways. An orrery or armillary sphere -- a machine that models the solar system and the motion of the planets, using a complex set of clockworks -- has a similar appeal. Since the construction of an orrery clearly requires intelligence and design, so (it can be argued) the construction of the actual solar system, whose parts and motions are similar to those of the orrery, must have required intelligence and design. The first modern orrery was built circa 1704 by George Graham, an English clockmaker and member of the Royal Society. Graham gave the first model (or its design) to the celebrated instrument maker John Rowley of London, who made a copy for Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery, thus the name. Joseph Wright's picture "The Orrery" (c. 1766) is an excellent portrayal of both an orrery and the wonder and awe that conveyed. Robert Boyle During the 17th century, a new vision of the universe, and of natural law, emerged. God was no longer seen as constantly active in the world, but as a relatively distant creator being who created the universe, set it in motion, and left it to run under the control of natural laws. Robert Boyle (1627-1691), for instance, argued that the universe In this conception, the universe manifests the wisdom and power of a God who could create a universe so skillfully that, once it had been set in motion, would run properly without any further intervention by its creator. It was felt that a universe that required constant divine tinkering in order to run properly would have reflected badly on its creator's skills, the way that a watch that keeps time poorly would reflect badly on the watchmaker's skills. This increased regard for the laws of nature was one of the reasons for the growing skepticism regarding reports of miracles (that is, reports of events that defied natural law). Robert Hooke
Other Writers 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. Laplace The watchmaker analogy has been used to support the argument that the complexity of the structure of the solar system can be explained only by an intelligent designer. Today, that explanations has been replaced by the nebular hypothesis. As the story (Ref.) goes, Laplace explained his theory of celestial mechanics to Napoleon. Napoleon, who had not heard God mentioned in the exposition, asked what role God played in Laplace's system. Laplace famously replied, "I have no need of that hypothesis". Thomas Paine William Paley
Darwin 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. Natural selection, Darwin argued, provides a plausible alternative to intelligent design as the explanation of biological complexity. "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." Because natural selection is capable of explaining the origins of biological complexity, there is no reason to resort to the hypothesis of an invisible supernatural agency. To do so violates Occam's Razor. Evolutionary biology also offers a more plausible explanation of the cumulative, gradual evolution of life from simplicity to complexity as shown in the fossil record. Starting in the 1980s, 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. Richard Dawkins Richard Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker (1986) is a reply to the watch argument. Dawkins argues that highly complex systems can be produced by a series of very small randomly-generated steps, rather than an intelligent designer. He further points out the self-refuting nature of the argument: that if complex things must have been intellegently 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, according to the argument. Challenges to the Watchmaker Analogy Cultural anthropologists challenge the watchmaker argument both as a 1) faulty analogy and also as a 2) mistaken idea about the matching of people, animals, and plants to their natural settings. That is, a man's mother makes the man, not a God. And people, animals, and plants have many biological mistakes in their design. Furthermore, the anthropologists Richerson and Boyd note that, though one woman may make a watch, the know-how that the watchmaker uses consists of the accumulated learning of many generations of technology workers that managed to make minor improvements on the traditions of prior generations. That is, the cultural evolution in watchmaking from generation to generation demonstrates the very Darwinian accumulation of variations between generations in a population that creationists try to use the watchmaker analogy to disprove. It is not even a case of the watchmaker standing on the shoulders of giants. Developing the art of watchmaking is a case of "midgets standing on the shoulders of a vast pyramid of other midgets." For example, when John Harrison in 1759 created the most accurate watch that had ever been made for use on sailing ships, he used techniques from many generations of traditions in watchmaking and added in "a number of clever tricks borrowed from other technologies of the time, such as using bimetallic strips (you have seen them coiled behind the needle of oven thermometers and thermostats)" that kept his clocks from changing their rate even when the temperature rose and fell. There are so many hundreds of generations of innovations that go into making any good watch that "William Paley's famous Argument from Design would better support a polytheistic pantheon than his solitary Christian Creator; it takes many designers to make a watch." Also, critics of the watchmaker analogy note that it assumes a background of cultural knowledge -- familiarity with watches, clockworks, and time-keeping devices in general. It is this familiarity with watches that enables people easily to identify a watch as an artifact of human design. But (the objection goes) we have no analogous knowledge of the culture of an alleged designer of the universe, and thus conclusions about supposed design in nature cannot be drawn on the basis of an analogy to a watch.(Ref.) In 2005, Paley's watchmaker argument became an issue considered by the court in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the "Dover trial," where plaintiffs successfully argued that intelligent design is a form of creationism, and that the school board policy requiring the presentation of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution as an "explanation of the origin of life" thus violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. 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" and that the argument from design is subjective. See also Bibliography | |||||||||||||||
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