I’ve been following the brouhaha around the ‘intellegent’ design thing, and recall that in the old intro to philosophy class ca 1990 when we were going over the famous theological arguments that we covered this whole issue in the “you’re walking through the desert and come upon a pocketwatch. You assume it has a maker. Now, considering the complexity of the human eyeball etc etc” analogy. Now, aside from trying to decide whether pocketwatches hump or have millions of years to develop and that non-working pocketwatch designs don’t appear, etc, who first made this argument? Was it in something we read or was it just a standard chestnut the professor repeated? It doesn’t sound like Bp Berkeley to me-- it has to be older than that. . . anyone?
Except that the eye doesn’t seem to be referenced in that document.
By the way, it’s not a good analogy, in that an “incomplete” eye can still have benefits to the organism. There are organisms on Earth currently with light-sensitive spots, for instance. Eyes can still produce vision when missing parts - for instance, you can see without the lens.
The analogy didn’t originally have anything to do with Intelligent Design. It was an argument for the intelligent creation of the universe. The jist (sp?) of the argument is that thinking that the universe, with its complex and orderly physical structures, might have been created by random chance is akin to finding a pocketwatch in the desert and thinking that it formed there naturally.
The pocketwatch analogy is one of the standard examples of the philosophy of Natural Theology.
William Paley’s argument is probably the most well known, but I think the analogy predates Paley.
In 1664, Robert Hooke wrote:
It’s a natural analogy, since complex mechanical devices were pretty much synonymous with timekeeping for centuries. (Consider that “clockwork” referred to the motivating mechanism of any mechanical device, horological or not.)
Of course people are going to make analogies with mechanical contrivances when talking about a Creator – clockwork has the most isomorphism with life. It has the appearance of self-motivation, unlike any other type of artifact.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there are much older examples of the analogy.
Hooray for smart people. Thanks for the leads.
If watches don’t evolve, then why weren’t people wearing Patek Pilippes or Casio digitals in the 16th Century?
Hopefully I can ask this without taking the discussion out of the realm of factual answers:
Does anyone take the “blind watchmaker” arguement seriously any more? I mean, is this still commonly used by scholarly proponents of intelligent design?
I’m asking because I don’t understand how the argument is convincing to anyone. Maybe I’m misunderstanding the “blind watchmaker” argument. It seems like it’s just “If something is sufficiently complex, we tend to see this as evidence of design. Thus, complexity is evidence of design.” Isn’t this an obvious fallacy?
Yes, begging the question. And yes, the blind watchmaker bit is frequently quoted as proof of ID. As is: “intelligence cannot have arisen spontaneously because it’s too complex, therefore it must have been created by a previous intelligence,” which is a more complex example of the same fallacy (as well as being flawed as an inductive proof because it lacks a base condition).
I’m going to claim that this is about as far as this can get discussed without being in GD territory.
I think it is. In fact, increased simplicity is more often a sign of more advanced design.
However, mere complexity isn’t the ID argument. The argument is that a structure couldn’t have been built up step by step because if any part of it is missing it doesn’t work. It isn’t complexity per se but rather irreducible complexity that is their watchword.
By “irreducible” they mean that they can’t think of any way the feature would have any value at all in a simpler form.
Or, in case the last part isn’t factual enough, let me rephrase:
If this is still put forward as a serious argument for intelligent design, and if my condensation of that argument represents it accurately, then:
(1) This argument seems to assume that our tendency to see complex things as designed is correct. How do its proponents respond to the suggestion that perhaps we’re just wrong when we make the leap from complexity to design?
(2) I didn’t really mention this above, but it seems to me that we only assume the watch is designed because it resembles things we know are designed (even if we’d never seen that particular kind of watch before, we’ve seen watches, or at least things made of metal with gears inside.) How do proponents of this argument respond to the claim that it’s not the complexity of the watch that makes us think it’s designed, but rather its resemblance to things we know are designed.
Sorry if it seems like I’m trying to turn this into a great debate. I’m trying to couch these as factual questions, e.g. “Do the proponents of intelligent design still rely on this argument? Is my understanding of the argument correct? How do they respond to these two criticisms (which I assume are fairly common)?” If a mod tells me this is out of bounds for this forum, I’ll drop it.
How do you know they weren’t? We all know that carbon dating is a crock and the uneven deposition of sediment means you can’t rely on strata to determine the age of a fossil - in this case, possibly a fossil Fossil. It’s very convenient that the same scientists who make outlandish claims about the evolution of timepieces are the ones who decide what “evidence” to share regarding their history.
Right, I know about irreducible complexity, I just thought maybe the blind watchmaker argument (which doesn’t make any claim of irreducibility, does it?) was another of the ID arguments.
I don’t buy into “irreducible complexity” either, but it’s easier for me to see how someone might find it convincing. The main problem I see is how can something possibly be shown to be irreducibly complex? But that’s probably not a General Question. 
Yes. Attempts to update the analogy by non-scholarly proponents of intelligent design (such as Kirk Cameron’s celebrated “Can of Pepsi → Banana” argument) have so far failed to prove more persuasive than the old standby.
Hm. Maybe if watches had DNA and reproduced themselves, it would be a better analogy. As it stands, it ain’t even apples and oranges; it’s apples and toothbrushes. Or capacitors. Or hairnets. Or something.
It’s not in the extract Blake linked to - the full text of Natural Theology can be found here - but the eye was regarded by Paley as his best example and he deploys it immediately after introducing the watch analogy. Thus Chapter I describes that thought experiment, Chapter II expands upon it and then Chapter III is straight into his long discussion of eyes and telescopes. When he sums up the basic argument of the book in Chapter VI, it’s as follows:
For Paley, the eye sufficied as his “one watch”.
The comparison of living organisms to clocks or watches was indeed not new - Descartes had already famously compared animals to clocks, although, of course, he did so in order to deny that such a simple comparison could be true for humans. But comparing living organisms to clocks or even comparing the Creator to a clockmaker is not quite the same as saying that life must have a Creator in the same way that a clock must have a clockmaker.
It is sometimes said that Paley had been anticipated by William Derham in his book, The Artificial Clock-maker (1696). Well, sort of. What Derham had actually done was merely to gloss the earlier argument made by Cicero in his De natura deorum.
The thing is that Derham wasn’t making a theological point when he discussed this passage. He merely mentioned it as evidence for a knowledge of clockwork in the ancient world in the context of his brief discussion of the technological precursors of modern clocks. But he did make it clear that he agreed with Cicero and, as The Artificial Clock-maker is really a manual on clockmaking, it would have been an obvious step for his original readers to think of the argument in terms of clocks and watches.
As a nitpick, the concept of a “blind watchmaker” isn’t used for ID; it’s the title of a book by Richard Dawkins, a heavy proponent for evolutionary theories.
{it’s been a while since I read the book, so I may misremember some of the details}
He basically laid out that the process of evolution is at best a “blind” watchmaker: making tweaks to existing designs with no fore-thought as to what the eventual result will be. The tweaks are solely a local reaction to the current environment (what works, what leads to reproduction before death, etc) without an overall plan. It’s this lack of planning that makes it “blind”.