The Watchmaker
Okay, folks. We’re going to go through this one more time, because some of you still haven’t got it, and even periodically knock on my door in your confusion.
The wondrous complexity of the universe is no evidence of a creator god. The basic argument that it is derives from William Paley, who suggested a pocket watch as a metaphor for a biological organism in Natural Theology in 1800. (Eager students can read this excerpt.) He proposes that, should we come across a watch in the wild, we would not conclude it simply appeared there by undirected natural law; its complexity and its apparent purpose prevent us. How, then, can we conclude that equally complex and purposeful organisms are natural products? At the time of his proposal, Paley’s argument was a powerful one. There were no satisfactory explanations of the mechanism by which life might appear or evolve, except as something engineered. With the benefit of molecular biology and the theory of natural selection, we are in a position to offer undirected natural law as a plausible creator. If metals formed imperfectly self-replicating compounds, and watch-like behavior improved self-replication, we could well find natural watches in the wild.
Because we can now plausibly assert the existence of spontaneous natural phenomena, the metaphor, and thus the argument, rapidly falls disintegrates. So evangelists have altered the metaphor, likening a watch to the entire universe: “A simple universe might exist spontaneously, but a complex and sophisticated one such as this could not; therefore a creator exists, and this creator is God.”
1. A watch in the wild is an anomaly. We may see any number of stones, leaves, and bugs on our nature hike, but few if any watches. While this does not prove a watch is artificial any more than a nugget of gold lodged in ten tons of rock must have been placed by intelligent design, it is suggestive. A watch is sufficiently different from the environment to imply it is not there naturally. By contrast, the universe does not appear out of place within its surroundings; there are no surroundings to which we might compare it. By definition, the universe includes any environment we might witness.
2. We are familiar with other examples of watches, and know them to be manufactured. By induction, if we have seen a thousand watches in people’s vest pockets, and know them to be manufactured, before finding one in the wild, we might well conclude that it, too, is artificial, though we must offer some mechanism by which it may have come there – such as a careless hiker dropping it. By contrast, we have no other universes from which we might deduce a pattern of creation. By definition, the universe includes all with which we are familiar.
3. A watch whole apparent behavior reflects a purely artificial institution, namely the subdivision of the day into twenty-four equal parts. A sundial might occur naturally; a sixty-minute hour is an implausible natural occurrence. By contrast, the universe exhibits no unnatural behavior; nature is by definition the behavior of the general universe.
But even if we were to grant the point, and admit that the universe is too sophisticated to exist without design, the argument would accomplish nothing. If we grant the premise that all sufficiently sophisticated things must have a creator, and that the universe is sufficiently sophisticated, we must grant a creator. But the syllogism must apply equally well to the creator itself. Any entity capable of designing the universe must itself be terribly sophisticated. Who created God? Granting the premise forces us immediately into an infinite regression of creators. Simply snickering and saying, “that’s silly, so we may as well stop at God,” as medieval scholars did, is insufficient; the syllogism rigidly demands it. Conversely, anyone willing to grant an uncreated God should be willing to admit to an uncreated universe.
None of this disproves the existence of a creator, but then, the burden of proof lies with the affirmative. Anyone wishing to establish an invisible, ineffable being had better have some mighty strong evidence to back it up, and neither Paley’s argument nor its modern revision are up to the job.
Okay, is that settled? Right. Take a deep breath, believers, because the door-knockers always give up and move down the block before I can point the next part out, and I'm going to finish this. If we define God as the logically necessary creator of the universe, there is no logical connection between God and any moral code. Stop and think about this. The great monotheistic religions take it as given that the guy who made the universe is the same guy for whom we shalt and shalt not. It’s not there in the definition. Even if Paley had been right, and the universe must be the product of intelligent design, the argument makes no reference to any ethical frame. The universe could just as easily be the work of an ineffable demon, or, for that matter, an omnipotent being who created kumquat trees in its own image. Hey, it makes as much sense as what you get in some of the holy books I’ve seen.