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Watchmaker analogy

The watchmaker analogy, or watchmaker argument, is a teleological argument for the existence of God. By way of an analogy, the argument states that design implies a designer. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the analogy was used (by Descartes and Boyle, for instance) as a device for explaining the structure of the universe and God's relationship to it. Later, the analogy played a prominent role in natural theology and the "argument from design," where it was used to support arguments for the existence of God and for the intelligent design of the universe.

The most famous statement of the teleological argument using the watchmaker analogy was given by William Paley in 1802. Paley's argument was seriously challenged by Charles Darwin's formulation of the theory of natural selection, and how it combines with mutation to improve survivability of a species, even a new species. In the United States, starting in the 1980s, the concepts of evolution and natural selection (usually referred to by opponents as "Darwinism") became the subject of a concerted attack by Christian creationists. This attack included a renewed interest in, and defense of, the watchmaker argument by the intelligent design movement.

The Watchmaker argument

The watchmaker analogy consists of the comparison of some natural phenomenon to a watch. Typically, the analogy is presented as a prelude to the teleological argument and is generally presented as:

The complex inner workings of a watch necessitate an intelligent designer.
As with a watch, the complexity of X (a particular organ or organism, the structure of the solar system, life, the entire universe) necessitates a designer.

In this presentation, the watch analogy (step 1) does not function as a premise to an argument — rather it functions as a rhetorical device and a preamble. Its purpose is to establish the plausibility of the general premise: you can tell, simply by looking at something, whether or not it was the product of intelligent design.

In most formulations of the argument, the characteristic that indicates intelligent design is left implicit. In some formulations, the characteristic is orderliness or complexity (which is a form of order). In other cases it is clearly being designed for a purpose, where clearly is usually left undefined.

Arguments that emphasize the appearance of purpose (as in Voltaire, see below), often appeal to biological phenomena. It seems natural to say that the purpose of an eye is to enable an organism to gather information about its environment, the purpose of legs is to enable an organism to move about in its environment, and so on. Even for non-biological phenomena, scientific explanations in terms of purpose were accepted well into the 19th century. Natural phenomena were explained in terms of how they were designed for the benefit of humanity. It was held for instance, that the highest mountains on earth are located in the hottest climates by design — so that the mountains might condense the rain and provide cool breezes where mankind needed them the most. In arguments that emphasize on orderliness or complexity, the argument is often supplemented by a second argument that proceeds this way:

This argument is basically a process of elimination: three possible explanations are offered. If the first two (random chance, natural causes) can be ruled out, intelligent design is left standing as the only plausible explanation.

The Achilles heel of the argument is that it fails if there exists a plausible explanation of phenomenon X in terms of natural processes. This makes it vulnerable to advances in science, which has progressively found more and more naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena, and progressively abandoned explanations in terms of teleology. The location of mountains, for instance, is now explained in terms of plate tectonics. The structure of biological organisms is explained in terms of the theory of natural selection. The structure of the solar system is explained in terms of the nebular hypothesis and its refinements.

History

Cicero

Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC) anticipated the watchmaker analogy in De natura deorum, (About the nature of the gods)'', ii. 34

To Cicero more than one designer was reasonable. The watchmaker analogy was logically an argument for polytheism as much as it was an argument for monotheism.

René Descartes

One of the earliest expressions of the idea that human and animal bodies are clockworks made by God can be found in the work of René Descartes.

Descartes developed the concept of Cartesian dualism, which held that human beings are composed of two distinct substances: matter and spirit. According to this theory, humans have both material bodies and non-material souls, whereas animals have only material bodies but no souls.

Descartes observed that people often reduced their minds to nothing but a function of their body. In Part V of his Discourse on Method (1637), Descartes provided a brief synopsis of his thinking about all aspects of the physical world. This discussion includes a long exposition of his theory about the cause of the circulation of the blood: that the heart functions like a furnace, heating the blood and forcing it to expand out into the circulatory system. This motion of the blood, he wrote,

Descartes had a hydraulic theory of how the brain causes the muscles to move the body. He explains that the "common sense" causes an animal or human body to move by "distributing the animal spirits through the muscles". See The Description of the Human Body.

Descartes then goes on to assert that brute animals have no reason at all, and pauses to consider an objection: that there are some things that animals do better than humans.

Note that Descartes is writing before the invention of pocket watches, so his examples of clockworks are clocks powered by weights. Descartes' God is a clockmaker, not yet a watchmaker.

Invention of the Watch

A pocket watch or watch is a small portable clock.

In the early 16th century, the development of reliable springs and escapement mechanisms allowed clockmakers to compress a timekeeping device into a small, portable compartment. In 1524, Peter Henlein created the first pocket watch.

For more information on the early development of watches, see the entry for clock.

Invention of the Orrery

What makes a watch a suitable component in an argument from design is that a watch is composed of clockworks — that is, a watch has many moving parts that interact with each other in complex ways.

An orrery or armillary sphere — a machine that models the solar system and the motion of the planets, using a complex set of clockworks — has a similar appeal. Since the construction of an orrery clearly requires intelligence and design, so (it can be argued) the construction of the actual solar system, whose parts and motions are similar to those of the orrery, must have required intelligence and design.

The first modern orrery was built circa 1704 by George Graham, an English clockmaker and member of the Royal Society. Graham gave the first model (or its design) to the celebrated instrument maker John Rowley of London, who made a copy for Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery, thus the name.

Joseph Wright's picture "The Orrery" (c. 1766) is an excellent portrayal of both an orrery and the wonder and awe that conveyed.

Robert Boyle

During the 17th century, a new vision of the universe, and of natural law, emerged. In this Cosmology God was no longer seen as constantly active in the world, but as a relatively distant creator being who created the universe, set it in motion, and left it to run under the control of natural laws. Robert Boyle (1627–1691), for instance, argued that the universe

In this conception, the universe manifests the wisdom and power of a God who could create a universe so skillfully that, once it had been set in motion, would run properly without any further intervention by its creator. It was felt that a universe that required constant divine tinkering in order to run properly would have reflected badly on its creator's skills, the way that a watch that keeps time poorly would reflect badly on the watchmaker's skills. This increased regard for the laws of nature was one of the reasons for the growing skepticism regarding reports of miracles (that is, reports of events that defied natural law).

Robert Hooke

Robert Hooke (1635–1703) formulated Hooke's law, invented the anchor escapement and may have invented the balance spring before Christiaan Huygens.

He was also a pioneer in the development and use of the microscope. His revolutionary book Micrographia. featured drawings of life as it had never been seen before — through the lens of a powerful microscope. (The picture on the right is one of many that Hooke drew from a microscope.)

Like Descartes, he compared natural organisms to man-made artifacts, concluding that artifacts paled in comparison with the "Omnipotency and Infinite perfections of the great Creatour. Hooke compared the way watches were assembled with the workings of the organisms he was examining. He saw these pictures as providing further proof that life was divinely designed.

Other Writers

The English divine William Derham (26 November 1657 – 5 April 1735) published his Artificial Clockmaker in 1696, a teleological argument for the being and attributes of God. The watchmaker analogy was also made by Bernard Nieuwentyt (1730).

Voltaire

Voltaire (1694–1778) was fond of the argument from design, but also seemed aware of its limitations and treated it gingerly. In his unpublished A Treatise on Metaphysics (1736) Voltaire considered the watchmaker analogy and concluded that it probably indicated the existence of a powerful intelligent designer, but that it did not prove that the designer must be God.

Laplace

The watchmaker analogy has been used to support the argument that the complexity of the structure of the solar system can be explained only by an intelligent designer. Today, that explanation has been replaced by the nebular hypothesis.

The account of the interaction between Laplace and Napoleon goes goes, Laplace explained his theory of celestial mechanics to Napoleon. Napoleon, who had not heard God mentioned in the exposition, asked what role God played in Laplace's system. Laplace famously replied, "I have no need of that hypothesis".

Thomas Paine

William Paley

Perhaps most famously, William Paley (1743–1805) used the analogy in his book Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature, published in 1802. 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 a watchmaker and not by natural forces.

Paley went on to argue that the complex structures of living things and the remarkable adaptations of plants and animals required an intelligent designer. He believed the natural world was the creation of God and showed the nature of the creator. According to Paley, God had carefully designed "even the most humble and insignificant organisms" and all of their minute features (such as the wings and antennae of earwigs). He believed therefore that God must care even more for humanity.

Paley recognised that there is great suffering in nature, and that nature appears to be indifferent to pain. His way of reconciling this with his belief in a benevolent God was to assume that life had more pleasure than pain. (See Problem of Evil).

As a side note, a charge of wholesale plagiarism from this book was brought against Paley in the Athenaeum for 1848, but the famous illustration of the watch was not peculiar to Nieuwentyt, and had been used by many others before either Paley or Nieuwentyt.

Charles Darwin

When Charles Darwin (1809–1882) completed his studies of theology at Christ's College, Cambridge in 1831, he read Paley's Natural Theology and believed that the work gave rational proof of the existence of God. This was because living beings showed complexity and were exquisitely fitted to their places in a happy world.

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.

Darwin reviewed the implications of this finding in his autobiography:

The idea that nature was governed by laws was already common, and in 1833 William Whewell as a proponent of the natural theology that Paley had inspired had written that "with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this—we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws. By the time Darwin published his theory, liberal theologians were already supporting such ideas, and by the late 19th century their modernist approach was predominant in theology. In science, evolution theory incorporating Darwin's natural selection became completely accepted.

Creationist revival of the analogy

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 which had a central concept of design in similar terms to Paley's argument. A series of rulings culminating in the Edwards v. Aguillard Supreme court judgement held that the attempts to ban teaching of evolution or to introduce creation science as an alternative were unconstitutional as they violated the establishment clause of the US constitution, which forbids the government from advancing a particular religion. Creation science was then relabelled intelligent design which presents the same analogy as an argument against evolution by natural selection without explicitly stating that the "intelligent designer" was God. The argument from the complexity of biological organisms was now presented as the irreducible complexity argument.

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins' book The Blind Watchmaker (1986) is a reply to the watch argument. Dawkins argues that highly complex systems can be produced by a series of very small randomly-generated yet naturally selected steps, rather than an intelligent designer.

He further points out the self-refuting nature of the argument: that if complex things must have been intelligently designed by something more complex than themselves, then anything posited as this complex designer (i.e. God) must also have been designed by something yet more complex.

In a Horizon episode also entitled The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins described Paley's argument "as mistaken as it is elegant". In both contexts he saw Paley as having made an incorrect proposal as to a certain problem's solution, but did not disrespect him for this. In his essay The big bang, Steven Pinker discussed Dawkins' coverage of Paley's argument, adding: "Biologists today do not disagree with Paley's laying out of the problem. They disagree only with his solution."

Challenges to the Watchmaker Analogy

Cultural anthropologists challenge the watchmaker argument both as a 1) faulty analogy and also as a 2) mistaken idea about the matching of people, animals, and plants to their natural settings. That is, a man's mother and father make the man, not a god. And people, animals, and plants have many biological mistakes in their design.

Furthermore, the anthropologists Richerson and Boyd (see below) note that, though one man or woman may make a watch, the know-how that the watchmaker uses consists of the accumulated learning of many generations of technology workers that managed to make minor improvements on the traditions of prior generations. That is, the cultural evolution in watchmaking from generation to generation demonstrates the very Darwinian accumulation of variations between generations in a population that creationists try to use the watchmaker analogy to disprove. It is not even a case of the watchmaker standing on the shoulders of giants. Developing the art of watchmaking is a case of "midgets standing on the shoulders of a vast pyramid of other midgets."

For example, when John Harrison in 1759 created the most accurate watch that had ever been made for use on sailing ships, he used techniques from many generations of traditions in watchmaking and added in "a number of clever tricks borrowed from other technologies of the time, such as using bimetallic strips (you may have seen them coiled behind the needle of oven thermometers and thermostats)" that kept his clocks from changing their rate even when the temperature rose and fell. The fact that so many hundreds of generations of innovations that go into making any good watch leads to claims that "William Paley's famous Argument from Design would better support a polytheistic pantheon than his solitary Christian Creator; it takes many designers to make a watch."

Also, critics of the watchmaker analogy note that it assumes a background of cultural knowledge — familiarity with watches, clockworks, and time-keeping devices in general. It is this familiarity with watches that enables people easily to identify a watch as an artifact of human design. But (the objection goes) we have no analogous knowledge of the culture of an alleged designer of the universe, and thus conclusions about supposed design in nature cannot be drawn on the basis of an analogy to a watch.

In 2005, Paley's watchmaker argument became an issue considered by the court in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, the "Dover trial," where plaintiffs successfully argued that intelligent design is a form of creationism, and that the school board policy requiring the presentation of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution as an "explanation of the origin of life" thus violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. In his ruling, the judge stated that the use of the argument from design by intelligent design proponents "is merely a restatement of the Reverend William Paley's argument applied at the cell level and that the argument from design is subjective.

Deism

The clockmaker hypothesis is a tenet of deism that states that God created the universe, but has not interfered with its operation since then. The analogy is that of a clockmaker who makes a clock, winds it up, and lets it run.