“In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer that for anything I knew to the contrary it had lain there forever. ... But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for anything I knew the watch might have always been there.”
The above quote belongs to the Reverend William Paley, taken from
Natural Theology: or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, written in 1831.
Paley’s arguments are the basis for what is now known as intelligent design (ID). But his analogy has always struck me as being a little odd.
To explain why I say that, let’s send Paley back from the 19th century, to the Stone Age for example. Would he have been able to imagine his famous analogy then? Or similarly, in the above quote, why did he use a watch to represent complex design as opposed to a quad-core microprocessor, for instance?
The answer to both of these questions seems fairly simple. To the best of our knowledge, based on all the evidence we have available to us, the watch that Paley imagines did not exist in Stone Age times, or the microprocessor in the 19th century.
But why should this be? Paley’s argument is that the watch he talks of is evidence of complex design, which in turn requires an intelligent designer. Based on his argument, there seems no reason why Stone Age man should not have designed the watch of which he talks. Wasn’t Stone Age man as intelligent as his descendants? Wouldn’t he have had use for a sophisticated timepiece?
Most of the evidence we have suggests that, for all practical purposes, Stone Age man was little different to modern man in terms of his mental capabilities.
So what then does Paley’s imagined watch actually represent? Surely what it represents is not intelligent design, but
evolved, accumulated knowledge.
Take an example of something like the modern car or automobile. Its lineage can be traced back to vehicles such as the more humble Roman chariot and beyond. Whilst these two vehicles share some common traits, the technologies employed are literally eons apart. But what if we compare this year’s car to last year’s model. The design differences are going to be minor, as car design tends to advance in small increments.
So a large part of the design of the latest models is simply evolved, accumulated knowledge, with a relatively small amount of design intelligence thrown in.
But what does design intelligence actually amount to? Is design intelligence anything more than a mutant idea or two, set apart from the accumulated knowledge base, which happens to work well or catch the eye of the marketing man?
If we look at the fossil record, we see no evidence of homo sapiens walking the planet with the dinosaurs. Similarly, when we examine the design record, we see no evidence of Stone Age man having designed a quad-core microprocessor or plasma TV.
In neither case were the underlying conditions sufficiently ”advanced’ to allow these events to occur, despite the intelligence of the would-be designers in the latter case.
I suggest that Paley’s analogy points not to intelligent design, as he intended, but unwittingly to the process of evolution via natural selection. That is, apply mutant ”left field’ ideas to the evolved, accumulated knowledge base, see which work and which don’t, update the knowledge base and move on.
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