The Blind Watchmaker?

One of the points I was trying to make was that the cited watch was evidence of a lot more than just intelligent design and, by implication, if the proposition is that natural structures are also the result of intelligent design, then ID would need to be set against a similar background for the analogy to work effectively.This would lead to questions like what pre-existing evolved, accumulated design intelligence was available for the designer to draw upon when formulating their design? Given the several billion years that have elapsed since that earlier design, what has the designer learned that could be applied to a new design if they were to start all over again? What ”need’ did the design fulfill? This is a little off topic, but I did not expect anybody to suggest there is evidence of homo sapien populating the planet over 250 million years ago. Do you wish to elaborate? Again, this is a little off topic, but you’ve raised an interesting point. I’m no biologist, but it’s always struck me that the positioning of the vagina on female homo sapiens only really makes sense if you view it as an evolved version of what is found on four-legged mammals. Indeed, when we observe the design features favoured by intelligent design, they invariably produce a flush, vertically positioned receptacle, which receives at right angles to itself - the ubiquitous wall socket and power plug being an obvious case in point.

Definitely off the top of your head, (or rather, dogrelata's head, as I've just checked the O.P.) because Paley died in 1805. Actually, the quote is from 1802, which doesn't effect the point you're trying to make.Whether a watch in 1802 or a modern space satellite, that it takes a lot of cultural evolution to produce Paley's analogy seems to be the point dog's making. However, I don't really see that the fact that we couldn't make things of a complexity comparable to what's seen in nature in the stone age makes the analogy any worse in the context of its times.As no one had really come up with a viable alternative, intelligent design by an invisible designer was the standard view, and the young Darwin considered Paley's ideas to have merit, before he actually started looking closely at nature.Who knows, as someone who still follows 200 year old outdated ideas, you may follow Darwin's route in the future, Nemesis, if you actually look closely enough at biology.

Interesting choice the watch is.The various forms of watches exhibit exactly the patterns that we can NOT have with evolving life forms.The quartz timed, electronic, watch on my wrist which sets itself by radioing to Colorado has no nested hierarchy relationship to Paley's watch. This is a very good example of why we can distinguish the different forms of products of different processes.

Paley's ideas are compatible with Darwin's. Darwin's ideas ore only incompatible when one tries to read the Bible as the YEC group do. If the Bible is read as the vast majority of Christians,and as far as I know Jews, over the years have read it there is no contradiction. This includes Josephus in the 1st century AD through Augustine and Lewis.

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Everybody is entitled to my opinion.

I had always assumed that Paley had chosen a watch for his analogy, because he was responding to the Enlightenment view of the universe as a great mechanism, a "clockwork universe", which the "Great Clockmaker" had constructed and set into motion and then left it to run on its own.I'm more familiar with the general progression of German culture than English, but the mid-to-late 18th century was the Classical Period, characterized by formal structure, orderliness, and rationalism. It was the period of the Enlightenment, as well as in the study Greek and Roman ideals (eg, James Madison's studying up on the Roman Republic just before the Constitutional Convention). The Classical Period was followed briefly by Sturm und Drang ("storm and stress") which was a reaction against the Classical Period's unemotional rationalism (this was true in German culture, but I'm not sure what the English equivalent was). Sturm und Drang was in turn followed by a further reaction against the Classical Period, the Romantic Period, which delved more into the emotional and the mystical, among other things (eg, turning to folk traditions, stories, and music for inspiration).The transition from Classical to Romantic was around the first decade of the 18th Century, which has been identified as the time at which Paley presented his watchmaker analogy. Hence, I would tend to interpret it as his reaction against the Enlightenment.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)

From a purely detached, scientific approach? I don't know. My religious and philosophical side says that nothing designed the designer.

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“There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the 'wisdom' of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious" -C.S. Lewis

Similarly, what happened before the Big Bang?

I know what you mean, GDR, but that's not true. I agree that Darwin's ideas are not incompatible with theism, but they do take away the necessity of a direct, interventionist creator God. Paley, on the other hand, like his descendants the modern I.D.ers, was saying that complex biological organisms, like watches, must have a direct designer. So he was what would be called on EvC a creationist.My point in that post is really that Paley's ideas were not ridiculous in the context of the knowledge of the times.

But all of the above can be said of the Biblical model. It also involves gathering data, corroborating the evidences, exploration, logic, experience, observation of effects on cultures, etc.As with your model, the unknown faith aspects of the varied hypotheses are supported by the corroborated evidences and gathered info. We've debated a few of these evidences in the threads over time and there's more. Our faith is by no means blind. Not so. We debate these alledgements regularly in the threads.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

I agree to a point. Paley did use words like "must" when he talked about the requirement for a designer but as I understand him he wasn't making a direct scientific claim. I understand him to be speaking more about the philosophy of science. I think it would be more of a telelgical conclusion as I understand both Paley and the word teleology.If this is the case then i still hold that view. It still seems to me that the world is such that it is more reasonable to conclude that there is an intelligence behind it than to conclude that there isn't. That however, is in no way a scientific conclusion. It is JMHO.

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Everybody is entitled to my opinion.

So, replacing a natural explanation with a supernatural explanation is better how?

As I’ve already mentioned, I’m not so interested in the evolution, or otherwise, of the designs themselves. I’m much more interested in the evolution of design intelligence and the amount of intelligence actually required to drive the design process.At some point in the future, should we ever figure out how to travel through time, a watch may be designed that incorporates this facility. It may have no direct descendant in the evolutionary path of watch making, but the knowledge required to design it will most likely have been accumulated incrementally to get it to the stage where it can be incorporated in designs in other fields. It would be the design intelligence through the accumulation of knowledge that resembles evolution through natural selection, as opposed to the designs themselves which might not necessarily do so.Finally, if there is a proposition that the complexity of structures observed in nature is the result of design intelligence, it seems reasonable to ask how closely the processes involved might resemble those found in human design intelligence. We can be confident we understand the latter but what can we say about the former?

No problems.Would you like to share with us what has been learned as regards the nature of the design processes and design intelligence/s involved?For example, when we look back through the history of human design intelligence, we frequently see the results of research in one field being applied to design advances in other fields. In Message 33 NosyNed makes reference to the quartz timed watch. Here is an example of the results of research in one field being applied to designs in another, that of time-keeping appliances. Given all the painstaking research you talk of within the area of design intelligence in the Biblical model, would you like to suggest an example or two of the intelligent designer/s having utilized knowledge gained in one field to advance designs in another?Further, when we examine the evolution of human design intelligence, we can see many of the hopes and aspirations of the cultures reflected in the designs they produce. Much of what we know about ancient cultures is based upon what the designs they left behind tell us about the types of lives they led. Based upon the design intelligence you observe within the Biblical model, what have you learned about the culture and the hopes and aspirations of those behind the design intelligence you speak of?Whilst there may be plenty still to be learned as regards our understanding of complex structures in nature, there is mountains of evidence which suggests a common strand or strands running through the processes that led to life on earth as we know it today.Let me end with an example of what I’m trying to get at.Let’s say I want to understand the processes that went into the design of a particular make and model of motor car. One means of doing this would be to wade through many tomes on the subject of motor car design, followed by a more specialized search for literature regarding earlier versions of the model I wish to examine. I might choose to supplement this by speaking to the design team responsible for the final design. This ought to give me a solid understanding of the design process and the reasons why that particular model turned out the way it did.An alternative route may be to ask somebody. But what if all they can tell me is, “Bert designed it”. Okay, that’s not really what I’m looking for so they refer me to somebody else. The second person also tells me that Bert designed the car, but they add what a great design they think it is.This still doesn’t help me, so they refer me to another source. This third person confirms that Bert designed it; they think it’s a great design and they’ve joined a design appreciation society, which has changed their life.So I spend the next five years of my life researching the matter and at the end of it I have countless volumes of data which tell me Bert designed the car, it’s a great design and it has profoundly changed the lives of large parts of the population. So I guess that’s the answer then - Bert designed the car. Right?

Replacing a natural expanation with a supernatural explanation is better when the supernatural explanation is close to The Truth^TM.But that is another topic...

I also find the choice of a watch interesting. If I found a watch, even if I had never seen one before, I would assume that it had a purpose, namely telling the time, in a 24-hour day. There is no such purpose within biology. What is the purpose of a sparrow? What is a platypus actually for?

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Mutate and Survive