What is the Argument from Design / the Watchmaker Argument?
There are many arguments advanced by Christians that attempt to infer a God’s existence by the alleged evidences of intelligent design in nature. All are deeply flawed in that they commit the fallacy of first presupposing design in order to prove a designer, putting the cart before the horse. One of the most popular of these is the watchmaker argument, first advanced by theologian William Paley in 1802. Basically it goes like this. If you’re walking through the forest/along a beach/wherever, and you see a watch lying on the ground, you could pick it up and tell just by looking at it that the watch could not have just materialized there out of nothingness for no reason at all. Clearly this is a highly intricate piece of machinery, deliberately created and manufactured for a purpose. From here, the argument points out that since organisms in nature exhibit just as much complexity in their makeup as this watch, it is reasonable to assume that nature is the work of deliberate design too. A
There are many arguments advanced by Christians that attempt to infer a God’s existence by the alleged evidences of intelligent design in nature. All are deeply flawed in that they commit the fallacy of first presupposing design in order to prove a designer, putting the cart before the horse. One of the most popular of these is the watchmaker argument, first advanced by theologian William Paley in 1802. Basically it goes like this. If you’re walking through the forest/along a beach/wherever, and you see a watch lying on the ground, you could pick it up and tell just by looking at it that the watch could not have just materialized there out of nothingness for no reason at all. Clearly this is a highly intricate piece of machinery, deliberately created and manufactured for a purpose. From here, the argument points out that since organisms in nature exhibit just as much complexity in their makeup as this watch, it is reasonable to assume that nature is the work of deliberate design too. A
