Paley was not the first to compare God to a watchmaker, but he did so in a more nuanced way than those who preceded him. If we own watches, we might realize that someone made them, but who that person is and what they do is largely an abstraction today. It's hard to imagine what we could say today about a God who is like a watchmaker. The metaphors that help people understand God are reflections of the kind of God they desire, whether it’s one who works mysteriously, one who cares about human welfare, or one who rewards some people and punishes others.

Design arguments have never been intended to prove the mere existence of God, they’ve always been used to tell us something about the kind of God who designed us.

One’s choice of technology might have little consequence for design arguments’ logic, but each evokes a different image of divine power. With accurate clocks built into our cellphones, a device whose main purpose is to tell the time seems quaint-an eccentric luxury, not the work of awe-inspiring genius. Dover trial, where a Pennsylvania school district was sued for presenting intelligent design to students, Paley’s watchmaker was invoked by expert witnesses for both sides to explain the state of antievolutionism in the 21st century.īut does “watchmaker” really say God to us in the digital age? If we want to understand God through a technological metaphor, wouldn’t the computer programmer, the genetic engineer, or the environmental scientist seem more apt? With accurate clocks built into our cellphones, computers, coffeemakers, and cars, a device whose main purpose is to tell the time seems quaint-an eccentric luxury, not the work of awe-inspiring genius. People involved in today’s debates over evolution and design clearly have different interpretations of how the watchmaker argument works, but they agree that it still matters. Michael Behe, the biochemist who helped launch the modern intelligent design movement with his 1996 book Darwin’s Black Box, embraced Paley and his watchmaker, while maintaining that the argument for design was scientific, not religious. Richard Dawkins borrowed from Paley for the title of his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, which attacked the idea that complex life needed a religious explanation. The analogy has had generations of supporters and critics. As the watch is the design of a watchmaker, nature is the product of a designing intelligence, or God. Just as a watch is made up of several different pieces, “framed and put together for a purpose,” he reasoned, so too are natural objects-eyes, ears, wings, and bones-made up of parts that combine to serve a higher function. The most famous version comes from the English clergyman William Paley’s 1802 book Natural Theology. The watchmaker analogy seems timeless-antiquated, yet always in fashion.

Clockmaker analogy