Watchmaker analogy
In broad terms, the watchmaker analogy states that just as it is readily observed that a watch (e.g.: a pocket watch) did not come to be accidentally or on its own but rather through the intentional handiwork of a skilled watchmaker, it is also readily observed that nature did not come to be accidentally or on its own but through the intentional handiwork of an intelligent designer.
Prior to Paley, however, Sir Isaac Newton, René Descartes, and others from the time of the Scientific Revolution had each believed "that the physical laws he [each] had uncovered revealed the mechanical perfection of the workings of the universe to be akin to a watch, wherein the watchmaker is God.
"[2] The 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's book on natural selection put forward an alternative explanation to the watchmaker analogy, for complexity and adaptation.
In the 19th century, deists, who championed the watchmaker analogy, held that Darwin's theory fit with "the principle of uniformitarianism—the idea that all processes in the world occur now as they have in the past" and that deistic evolution "provided an explanatory framework for understanding species variation in a mechanical universe.
[4] The Scientific Revolution "nurtured a growing awareness" that "there were universal laws of nature at work that ordered the movement of the world and its parts.
"[5] Amos Yong writes that in "astronomy, the Copernican revolution regarding the heliocentrism of the solar system, Johannes Kepler's (1571–1630) three laws of planetary motion, and Isaac Newton's (1642–1727) law of universal gravitation—laws of gravitation and of motion, and notions of absolute space and time—all combined to establish the regularities of heavenly and earthly bodies".
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 at least one watchmaker, 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.
Paley went on to argue that the complex structures of living things and the remarkable adaptations of plants and animals required an intelligent designer.
Butler noted: "As the manifold Appearances of Design and of final Causes, in the Constitution of the World, prove it to be the Work of an intelligent Mind ...
He wrote the following in his 1762 book, Emile: I am like a man who sees the works of a watch for the first time; he is never weary of admiring the mechanism, though he does not know the use of the instrument and has never seen its face.
Let us compare the special ends, the means, the ordered relations of every kind, then let us listen to the inner voice of feeling; what healthy mind can reject its evidence?
[13]Before Paley published his book, David Hume (1711–1776) had already put forward a number of philosophical criticisms of the watch analogy, and to some extent anticipated the concept of natural selection.
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 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."
"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.
"[16] Darwin, who spoke of the "fixed laws" concurred with Whewell, writing in his second edition of On The Origin of Species:[17] There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.By the time that Darwin published his theory, theologians of liberal Christianity were already supporting such ideas, and by the late 19th century, their modernist approach was predominant in theology.
[18] In a BBC Horizon episode, also entitled The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins described Paley's argument as being "as mistaken as it is elegant".
By amassing a large number of small changes, the theory of natural selection allows for a seemingly impossible end product to be produced.
[page needed] Biologist Peter Richerson and anthropologist Robert Boyd offer an oblique criticism by arguing that watches were not "hopeful monsters created by single inventors," but were created by watchmakers building up their skills in a cumulative fashion over time, each contributing to a watch-making tradition from which any individual watchmaker draws their designs.
[20] 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 that had a central concept of design in similar terms to Paley's argument.
[22] The defense's expert witness John Haught noted that both intelligent design and the watchmaker analogy are "reformulations" of the same theological argument.
[23] 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.
