Paley's Watchmaker Analogy: Valid or Invalid? Or Something Else?

Perfect, even.

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This is exactly what Dawkins did in The Blind Watchmaker, and it’s exactly what Dennett does in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea and elsewhere. Paley was not a laughingstock, not even a little, to either of them. In fact, Dawkins expresses admiration for Paley, because he “got it.”

The intelligent design movement is almost entirely vacuous apologetics, an embarrassment to Christianity that I think is richly deserved. This is not because design is “creationism” or because design is illusion, and it certainly isn’t because design is uninteresting or unimportant. Paley asked the right question. Modern IDists think that design is an answer, when in fact it is a question.

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Maybe some types of Christianity have invited this on themselves. I hope I am not that type. I think there is a better way.

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“Maybe”?!

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Ok, design in biology is the question. A question requires an answer, right? Evolutionists claim that blind material processes (chance and necessity) is the answer, whereas IDists argue that it is intelligence or mind. My understanding is that you think that only evolutionists are legitimate to offer an answer. Why is this? Why do you deny IDists the right to provide their answer?

I laughed at this.

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I would say that you would not because you don’t see an arrangement of parts that perform a function. You don’t have to know anything about clams.

Suppose I found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think … that, for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for [a] stone [that happened to be lying on the ground]?… For this reason, and for no other; namely, that, if the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, if a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner, or in any order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it (Paley 1867, 1).

Is that a rhetorical question??? :grin:

It’s not about the right to answer, or even about the answers they suggest. It’s the methods ID uses to reach those conclusions that are wrong. I could go into some depth, but we already have some of that above with the Watchmaker Analogy. Better to stick with a single example, I think.

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What is your basis of the claim that ID methods are wrong? By what criteria?

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Start with what I wrote above about how the Watchmaker Analogy breaks down, including the comments that follow about answering questions (Miller and Mercer).

More fundamentally, ID proposes hypotheses about a Designer that can only be (a) God. That should be a non-starter right out of the gate.In trying to avoid that necessary conclusion, ID fails to pose any useful (or testable) predictions. In frustration from the lack of being able to produce any evidence, some ID proponents say that science itself is flawed, and we must change how we do science.

Someone (memory fails) said it well in another current thread: The Designer is the question, not the answer.

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If one is doing science, it requires testable hypotheses.

It’s not a claim. The evidence is entirely consistent with that, not just retrospectively, but prospectively.

They do argue. They don’t do science, they are all rhetorical. See the difference?

Your understanding is flawed. We all encourage IDists (this autocorrects to “idiots,” btw) to do science, but they refuse.

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I agree with everything you wrote but this.

It’s important to distinguish between what can be done and what the ID movement actually does. For example, there’s absolutely nothing precluding generating empirically testable hypotheses about WHEN the Designer designed or implemented the design.

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Where do you see this proposed?

The evidence for design is all around the universe from atoms to molecules to DNA, proteins and living cells. Although the designer is not visible to us his creation is.

OK, I agree with that. There ARE testable hypotheses for ID, but they aren’t coming from ID (ie: Theobald 2005).

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Quoting myself in reply:

Hypotheses about God are scientifically infeasible and theologically unsound (if that’s the right word for it).

I’m out of time for now, but I invite you to choose an argument for ID and test it in the same way I tested Paley’s argument. Apply the same method to a series of slightly different questions. Use that to identify the necessary assumptions and find the limitation of the method.

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You’re saying that a clam shell isn’t an arrangement of parts that perform a function? Beg to differ.

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I agree with this but the design argument still stands as the clam shell is simpler then the watch but it still is a purposeful arrangement of parts. We can also infer design from a clam shell even though the inference is not as compelling as the watch given the part count and functional complexity.

I don’t think your comments are designed, as they don’t seem to be purposeful arrangements of parts that perform a function.

You need to establish a basis for your reply first as the design argument does not assume the identity of the designer. So far you are attacking a straw man.

I posted too soon please re read the comment.