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The Traditional Argument
The Watchmaker Analogy - William Paley, Anglican priest and philosopher, 1802.
Suppose a man walking along a path in the countryside finds a watch and, never
having seen one before, picks it up to examine it. He sees that it is not some randomly thrown together pieces of junk; rather it has very complex mechanisms. He notices how finely crafted they are and how
perfectly all the parts fit together. He sees how all the parts work together for a
purpose, to produce movement of the hands, which point to numbers. There are two conclusions he can
make from his discovery. Firstly, the watch cannot have come into being purely by chance, it must have been made for its purpose. Secondly, he can conclude that if the watch was made,it must have had a
maker.Christian philosophers, like Paley, have gone on to say that creation exhibits the same kind of design as the watch. They have pointed to the complexity of both living organisms and the cosmos as
having the similar kind of designed order purpose. The only conclusion, they say, is that where there is evidence of design, there must be a designer, i.e. God.
There are several problems with this argument, for example:
- 1. The watchmaker doesn’t have to be an all-powerful God. The universe is old enough for evolution to work like a blind
watchmaker randomly selecting parts from a huge collection; the ones that don’t work get discarded. Eventually the right parts for making complex life get selected.
- 2. The watchmaker idea based on a nineteenth century understanding of the laws of nature where everything works harmoniously,
like clockwork. We now know that the universe is not like this. At the subatomic level there is randomness and chaos, and the laws
of physics break down. In fact, this seems to have an important part of creation process. Also, the processes of creation are more
thoroughly understood now, and so far they don’t appear to require a creator, just the laws of physics, chemistry and so on.
- 3. Christians tend to focus only on the positive things in creation, how beautiful and amazing it all is, but forget the negative things
that are also a part of creation as David Attenborough pointed out:
- “My response is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance
hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the
eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that's going to make him blind. And [I ask them], 'Are you telling
me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying
that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball? Because that doesn't seem to me to coincide with a God who's full of mercy.”
- Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Attenborough
- A short interview with David Attenborough on this subject can be found at http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny
-2007/attenborough-on-god-p1.php
If God created everything, we need an explanation for natural suffering. Why did he create a world with earthquakes, volcanoes,
monsoons, floods, deadly bacteria and viruses (which are living creatures)?
So the traditional argument that the design of the universe proves the existence of a designer doesn’t work. Or does it? Just in the last
couple of years new discoveries in science have opened up the whole idea once more.
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Psalm 19:1 The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.