would you believe it had an intelligent designer or that it evolved through a series of random events?
This was someone else’s answer to a skeptic, but I thought I would ask it, as I think it deserves some attention.
The Argument From Design is often stated by analogy, in this analogy we find a computer chip in the forest. I know, who would be looking through the forest. I normal look to see what has washed up on the beach. For the sake of this argument, and since Jim Darwin has alluded to wanting his afterlife to be like spending time at the beach, let’s move the argument to the beach. Hey and while we are at it, who takes a chip to the beach? I’ll use a pocket watch. People are always losing those. If you find this less valid than a chip in the forest, please feel free to point that out as well.
So, imagine that one has found a watch on the beach. Does one assume that it was created by a watchmaker, or that it evolved naturally? Of course one assumes a watchmaker.
Yet like the watch, the universe is intricate and complex; so, the argument goes, the universe too must have a creator.
The Watchmaker analogy suffers from three particular flaws, over and above those common to all Arguments By Design. Firstly, a watchmaker creates watches from pre-existing materials, whereas God is claimed to have created the universe from nothing. These two sorts of creation are clearly fundamentally different, and the analogy is therefore rather weak.
Secondly, a watchmaker makes watches, but there are many other things in the world. If we walked further along the beach and found a nuclear reactor, we wouldn’t assume it was created by the watchmaker. The argument would therefore suggest a multitude of creators, each responsible for a different part of creation (or a different universe, if you allow the possibility that there might be more than one).
Finally, in the first part of the watchmaker argument we conclude that the watch is not part of nature because it is ordered, and therefore stands out from the randomness of nature. Yet in the second part of the argument, we start from the position that the universe is obviously not random, but shows elements of order. The Watchmaker argument is thus internally inconsistent.
Apart from logical inconsistencies in the watchmaker argument, it’s worth pointing out that biological systems and mechanical systems behave very differently. What’s unlikely for a pile of gears (or diode filled silicon) is not necessarily unlikely for a mixture of biological molecules.
OK, I went a little long. I admit I will get slammed ahead of time.
JUANA
