The Watchmaker

The Watchmaker Argument

So I've decided to do a series of posts on philosophy of religion, I'll discuss interesting figures in philosophy, such as Plantinga and Kierkegaard, but I'm going to start with the watchmaker argument.

The watchmaker argument, often called the watchmaker analogy, was first put forward by William Paley in 1802, as an argument in support of intelligent design.

A Watch (Source unknown)

The argument goes something like this; I'm walking along a beach, and I find a watch on the ground. I can see that a watch is complex, and it doesn't seem rational to assume that a watch randomly made itself. I naturally assume that there must have been a watchmaker.

Why then should the universe be any different? It's many orders of magnitude more complex than even the finest Swiss watch, so surely it must have had a creator, just like the watch did?

Helix Nebula (Source: Hidden Universe, IMAX)

The Creator's Complexity

Now there are a few possible objections to this argument, the first that I'll be covering relates to the complexity of the creator. 

A watch is much less complicated than a human, with a few years training, I could start to make my own watches, and I could buy one on Ebay for just a few dollars. I cannot build a human from scratch, the closest I can come is reproduction, where I let the new human develop by itself. Not even our greatest scientists could make a human from scratch, they could clone one, or make an embryo from existing DNA, but they certainly couldn't build a new human.

Dolly, a cloned sheep (Source: Wikimedia)

The creator of the universe then, should be much more complicated than the universe itself, and if we require that the universe have a creator because of its complexity, then surely the creator must also have a creator, which must also have a creator, ad infinitum.

Of course, we know that the universe had a beginning, a requirement that the creator doesn't have. It is conceivable that the creator exists outside of time, particularly when you consider than many think that time is just another dimension of our universe.

Our Experience of Watchmakers

Another objection, first posited by David Hume, is that we have no experience with making the universe. We would expect the watch to have been made by a person because every watch we have encountered before has been made by a person. Our experience has shown us that there are many watches, and none have appeared randomly.

By contrast, I've only ever encountered a single universe, and we have no real proof that any others exist. Even if we do accept that there are many universes, we have no evidence that any of them have makers. We thus shouldn't expect that all universes have builders, the same way that we do of watches.

In my mind, this is a much better objection than the complexity of the creator. Of course, just because the watchmaker argument doesn't necessarily hold doesn't mean that there is no intelligent design, and even if it did hold, it wouldn't tell us anything about the nature of the designer.

It seems then that the watchmaker analogy is of no use to us in any discussion about the nature of God, or even if He/She even exists.