Restoring the sight of the watchmaker

In 1802, William Paley posed the eponymous Paley Watchmaker argument as a rebuttal for evolution.

It was elegantly simple and many still use it in apologetic defenses.

He argued that if on a walk, you found a rock, you might say the rock was always there. But if you later came across a watch, you would reach a different conclusion: that it shows such elegance of design and complexity there must have been a watchmaker. Same for the universe.

An interesting observation is that such ideas were typically also used throughout history, to characterize God (think of the parables).

Britain then was the leading watchmaker and it gave her strategic advantages. However, industrialization led to a production line with 13 component being made by other makers.

As such, “the Watchmaker”, only made some of it but assembled all of it. He had to know how to make a watch so he could set a design standard and ensure quality.

How does that inform us about God? Well broadly speaking he made the laws of the universe and initiated the processes that drove the development of the universe. He also got involved in specific aspects, but generally outsourced a lot of it to the forces of matter.

The Paley argument has supposedly been refuted, and as such I have tended to skirt use of it … until I read the refutations. So, using a well-written paper by Frederick Bendz¹ that summarizes and supports the dissident view, I thought I would find out for myself.

Refutation 1 - contradiction: Paley said, "Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design that 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."

The refutation argues that Paley first differentiates the watch from nature (which I am not quite seeing) and then states that the universe is so complex it had to also have been created. Actually that is not what Paley is saying at all.

He is saying the watch is complex and we know it was made, but natural systems are more complex and the universe infinitely more so. Using an A fortiori principle he is saying, if the reasonable man deems the watch to be made, why should he not extrapolate that view to the universe?

Refutation 2 – shoemakers. Bendz then argues that if I later found a shoe, would I then argue that there must be a shoemaker. That is a non-sequitur. The point of the analogy is that complex things imply design and deliberate construction, be it by a watchmaker or a shoemaker.

It is an argument against random selection. That said, I will hasten to add that within certainly laws, random selection does happen. I am a product of the random mix of my parent’s genes and that mix makes me uniquely different to my siblings.

It is too narrow to say that randomness or natural volition is impossible. That would make science, alchemy, new products, cultivars of roses and breeds of dogs impossible. Nature offers design latitude, which enables mutations and micro adaptations. Its moot beyond that.

Refutation 3 - the watchmaker’s father. Bendz debates what theists also debate, namely “where did God come from?” It’s a spurious argument. If there is a generation before God, we don’t know that and as any court would hold, it cannot be led into evidence.

Motor manufacturers outsource their tyres, electronics and screeds of other componentry, but sell the package as a whole. We never demand to know who made the components. We accept that, for our purposes, it all started at the BMW factory.

Similar assumptions are common to science, because so much is still unprovable as in the wave-particle duality of light or the observable insides of the atom. We deduce from effects.

I have no information that predates God and it is irrelevant to my life. I accept that God was the factory gate. Besides, if we want a father, that father would ultimately be God or the same mystery that we cannot get beyond and which we now call God. It is self-defeating logic.

Refutation 4 - watches out of nothing. Bendz says that the Christian view is that God created from nothing, ex nihilo. Well that is really self-defeating. The notion that the universe could evolve from total disorder and chaos, or potentially nothing, is not a defensible rebuttal.

However, Christians do not say it came from nothing. Genesis 1 says the earth (the universe) was without form and void. Without form meant it was unformed but substantial, a clay lump waiting for a potter. It was void is not a contradiction. God was saying it was both.

It had and still has pockets of matter within a vast void. The generally acceptable Big Bang theory model argues that the universe expanded from a singularity of matter.

Maybe some theists see God as a wand-waving magician, but that is not the biblical perspective and it is not supported by reasonable believers.

Refutation 5 - the Blind Watchmaker. Richard Dawkins is doing such a fine job for Christianity by sustaining such a poor contrast to theism that theism is amplified by his subjective objections.

In the Blind Watchmaker argument, the title of a book by Dawkins, he argues that the universe evolved without purpose. It randomly developed. It was blind to reason. That is not an argument, but an opinion and, though he states it as fact, it is still called a theory.

I quote: “Natural selection, the blind unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know? is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”

That is a circuitous argument. It allows nature to be a proxy for God, to randomly select at its whim that which we ascribe to God and it supposedly does so from chaos and disorder along a rational continuum, yet achieves that rationality, irrationally.

So I gather that the idea that the universe can move from irrational chaos to order, is acceptable to him. His sole objection then lies in putting a face to that process. That’s a personal issue.  

Yet he is found out. Advances in stem-cell research follow the simple fundamental notion, that stem-cells will replicate their inherent code. They do not act randomly. They follow a blueprint. Same again for plant hybridization or GMO foods.

Refutation 6 - false analogy. Now those who blithely say that theists are losing ground to the superior arguments of evolution and are now pinning their desperate flagella to the watchtower of Paley, show why they are so blinded by their own arrogance.

I quote again, else you won’t believe me:

1. Leaves are complex cellulose structures
2. Leaves grow on trees
3. Money bills are also complex cellulose structures
4. Therefore money grows on trees (which, according to the idiom, they don't).

That is what they argue that we argue, but it is contrived. We all know that money is processed from cellulose materials, other chemicals and mechanical processes, to become the paper on which the mint prints the stuff that gives that paper value.

I can similarly take metal and make cars and planes. So the argument is just trite. It assumes that because we say the watch is complex and has a watchmaker, that the universe is more complex and has a universe-maker, and such thinking is disingenuous. Nonsense.

Refutation 7 - the empirical argument. The last section starts by saying that we deem everything to be created. In a sense it was and that is what the bible says. We say the same of BMW cars being made by BMW, which is only at best half-true.

God at least made matter or, if he didn’t make it, he expanded the matter in the singularity to fill the universe. He also made the laws that define that universe and science accepts that the 4 primary laws of matter emerged within the first second of the Big Bang event.

It suggests from the outset that the universe had rational beginnings, which is replicated in every building block of nature: the atom, the gene, molecules, light and so on. They are never random, always predictable in their nature and governed by universal laws.

That results in specificity: Hydrogen is consistently different to Helium, by virtue of one proton. Likewise Mercury is liquid and always will be, but lead with two more protons is thick, heavy and inert. Similarly humans are humans and apes are apes, each species of its own type.

The problem, in working through Bendz’s empirical summation, is that he assumes that we believe creation to mean a completed work in all respects, which extrapolates to the ridiculous notion that God also makes BMW’s.

Genesis supports that in general, let alone at the bizarre extreme. It shows discrete evolutionary steps that are ordered and rational, and build on preceding steps.

That supports all that we empirically observe in black holes, stars, our solar system and so on.

In conclusion. So, having so long skirted the Paley argument because I presumed it had been adequately invalidated, I find that simple as the idea is, it is still holds court. It may have holes, sure, but atheists are not filling them very well. Does that beat the Bendz.

http://www.update.uu.se/~fbendz/nogod/watchmak.htm

(c) Peter Missing @ Bethelstone.com