#God as clockmaker pdf#

The Watch and Watchmaker analogy for the existence of a god 2 Comments / Religion / By Stephen Hicks The text of William Paley’s famous analogy is below (and here is a PDF version). He also presents arguments to refute certain criticisms made on his first book, The Selfish Gene. The Watch and Watchmaker analogy for the existence of a god Stephen Hicks, Ph.D. If natural selection can be said to play the role of a watchmaker in nature, it is a blind one-working without foresight or purpose. It basically says that God built a massive clock called The Universe, he wound it up, and then he just took a step back to watch. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design is a 1986 book by Richard Dawkins, in which the author presents an explanation of, and argument for, the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins crafts an elegant riposte to show that the complex process of Darwinian natural selection is unconscious and automatic. Important scientific advances impressed upon that age just how rational that is, how understandable nature really was. The “teleological argument,” better known as the “argument from design,” is the claim that the appearance of “design” in nature-such as the complexity, order, purposefulness, and functionality of living organisms-can only be explained by the existence of a “designer” (typically of the supernatural variety). > National Portrait Gallery, London Reason and Nature were inseparable concepts during the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. Deist could mean a person who denied God’s providence, but it could mean other things as well. I addressed this point in a post at Cato Unbound: People in 18th-century Anglo-America did not always use our textbook definition of a deist.

Basically, it was the watchmaker analogy that was used, “To support argument for the existence of God and for the intelligent design of the universe in both Christianity and Deism.” What is William Paley’s argument from design? Deism is usually described by non deists as a believe that God is like a clock maker, meaning he simply created the universe and walked away with no concern. In the 18th century, deist did not always entail the idea of an absent clockmaker god. His argument played a prominent role in natural theology. William Paley’s watchmaker analogy is basically a teleological argument. In “The Blind Watchmaker”, Richard Dawkins writes, “Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. This 30th Anniversary Edition features a unique biomorph (see Chapter 3 for more details).