Jun 22 2008
No Solitary Creator
Why Paley’s Watch Makes a Better Case for Evolution
The Paley’s watch analogy persists as an argument for a great creator. But the analogy is critically flawed. Never in history has a human artifact been the product of one mind working in isolation.
Here’s a handy piece of advice: If you need a simple answer to a complex question, personify. Conjure up a single, invisible agent, like a booming-voiced Mighty OZ, and voilá, your work is done. You can go back to watching television. No need to look behind the curtain.
It’s no secret that lurking behind the Intelligent Design hypothesis and the pseudo-scientific arguments about irreducible complexity and grab-bag of mostly bogus critiques of evolutionary theory, there hides a most-favored designer, otherwise known as “God.” Very importantly, the creator of the universe is said to be a single entity, not a guild of munchkins. It seems the human mind seeks simplicity, preferring phenomena to have a unitary source. But rarely do they.
The Flawed Analogy Behind Intelligent Design
In his 1802 book, Natural Theology, William Paley presented an argument for a great creator that involved finding a watch and concluding that due to its complexity and apparent design, that there must have been a designer. Since then, the creation-science/intelligent-design folk have saddled and ridden their analogy as if it were horse of a different color. A watch is too complex to have arisen on its own — ergo, there must have been a creator. The human being and biological life in general are extremely complex as well, so these, too, must have a creator. This analogy comprises the core of their case. And they’ve got it wrong.
The Paley’s watch argument suffers from many faults (such as the endless regress generated by asking who designed the designer), but one I never see mentioned, and one that when exposed drops a house on the argument, is not that a watch doesn’t have a creator, but that it has many. Even if granted the point, life is pretty darn complex, kinda like a watch, we can still shoot down the second premise: where you find a watch you will also find the work of a designer/creator. A smart one.
Sorry, but that’s false. It’s so wrong, in fact, that the watch analogy makes a better argument for evolution, or if you’re averse to science, polytheism. A mono-creator? Definitely not.
Consider my watch. It’s a $30 Casio with traditional minute and hour hands as well as a small LCD display. If you found this watch in the forest beside the yellow brick road and thought, well, gee, Dorothy, this thing was obviously designed, therefore it must have a designer/creator, you would be wrong.
The Watch and its Many Creators
No individual stepped into an empty room, drew up a design, and then fashioned my Casio from scratch. Instead, countless people played a role in the design and construction of it: from the plastic wrist strap to the glass face, LCD display, tiny gears and lithium battery.
Additionally, the 21st-century designers of my watch borrowed and built upon the designs of others. First came the sun dial thousands of years ago,. Later came the water clock. Thanks to scores of creators and refiners of ideas and technology, the pendulum clock was built and perfected. In a cumulative fashion, one development led to another. A great leap forward came with the portable, spring-driven clock, which no doubt relied upon dozens if not hundreds of minds and twice the number of hands for its creation. Next came the pocket watch, the engineers facing and conquering the challenge of miniaturizing the clock works. Finally we arrive at the ever-popular wristwatch. Add a plastic strap, digitalize it, and you’ve got the watch I wear today. As we can see, it most definitely wasn’t a one-man, one-act play we can call The Wiz! and award it critical acclaim. The design of my watch evolved. As did the technology and production processes responsible for the materials and manufacture of it.
Objects manifesting design are never the product of one mind and two hands. A watch has no single creator, no solitary agent who dreamt it up and constructed it entirely from raw materials all by him or herself. Attributing it to a troop of flying monkeys would be as close to the truth. A watch has creators, plural. To continue to employ their favorite analogy, and be logically consistent, IDers ought to convert to polytheism.
Engineering Manifests Descent with Modification
In a podcast debate I once heard, an anti-evolution proponent, Todd Friel, challenged Dan Barker with this question, “Do you believe an automobile could evolve into an airplane?”* The audience laughed. Obviously, Todd and the amused audience members haven’t seen any James Bond movies.
Having already raised the watch argument, Todd decided to pound the point home by offering a second version of the analogy. He said the automobile is also evidence of a designer. No one would assume a complicated machine like that would arise on its own.
The second premise may be true, but the first is false. Once again, no single agent walked into an empty garage and then, presto, drove out behind the wheel of a sparkling Mercedez-Benz. The automobile, as historians of engineering know, illustrates descent with modification. One could argue that today’s automobile is the offspring of a horse-drawn carriage mated with a train. Or at least a small steam engine. The popular model-A variety was born only after combustion engine technology had advanced, along with the refinement of crude oil into a usable fuel, and countless other developments.
Is a Mercedez-Benz automobile evidence of “a” creator. Absolutely not. Ask Mercedez. Ask Benz. The truth? Automobiles and watches are the product of many, many individuals working alone and in concert over decades if not centuries.
Creation means creator. Or so some persist in insisting. IDers use this argument against evolution. More generally, believers of all kinds use it as evidence for a god. But the argument is critically flawed. Never will you find some object manifesting design that is entirely the product of one mind and two hands. Indeed, not even the most basic of human innovations – the stone cutting tool – arose in final form via the work of a single ancestral primate. It is far more complicated than that.
[*From, "Does God Exist?" www.wotmradio.com/2006/04/04/friel-barker-debate, recorded March 2006 at the University of Minnesota.]
podcast directory…
Couldn’t have said it any better…
[...] Bernardin at The Evolving Mind comes forward with a very interesting twist on the old Paley’s watch argument used by IDiots to disprove Evolution. Whilst trying to prove that some things have a grand [...]
First, I have to say that I think that Paley’s argument was far more brilliant than the creatonists/ID’ers give credit. He was working with the knowledge of biology that existed at the time. It was 1802, and Chambers had yet to write, Blythe had yet to write and of course Darwin and Wallace were 66 years from the presentation to the Linnean Society.
Given all that, I was thinking that The Watchmaker argument could also serve as a great case for paganism with its multiple gods and goddesses. Hanging on to the watchmaker will lead creationists to disprove their “One God” case, if followed to the conclusion that they want to take it and as illustrated in your argument here.
Of course, a natural explanation is the parsimonious one.
Absolutely brilliant! I never thought of it that way. The same thing applies to software, what with its many version changes. Even if a intelligence is behind it, it still requires evolution.
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you down the road!
[...] the past post, No Solitary Creator, I argued that the Paley’s Watch argument is bogus. In fact, the analogy that biological life [...]
It only took us two hundred seven years to come up with a complete answer to this simpleminded little argument. No I don’t agree that Paley was brilliant, as Mr. Bernardin put it: “Conjure up with a single, invisible agent, like a booming-voiced Mighty OZ, and voilá, your work is done.” The less understand there is, the easier the misdirection is to make.
This is perfect answer and one I will be adding to my repertoire. Thank you and keep the epiphanies coming.
Well, your watch idea is sort of flawed. Because technically, someone could by themselves, make a watch, including your Casio, granted he had enough knowledge to do so. And to Christians, he does have that knowledge, and that power to do so.
BUT, yes, you’re correct. The watch analogy is very flawed. I’ve seen the one where they take it apart, put it in a bag and shake it, and they say it’ll never come back together.
TECHNICALLY. If it were given an INFINITE amount of time, then at that point, anything is possible. And under infinite time, the watch will eventually put itself back together. People underestimate how long infinity is and what can happen given that much time.