xingu wrote:By the way Dembski makes a declarative statement that the complexity of nature cannot be explained by natural selection. He is stating that this statement is absolute and beyond question. I would suspect that Dembski is wrong here. I suspect that at some point science will be able to explain the development of complex structures in nature without the aid of a God. Perhaps they can now, I don't know. I just happen to put far more faith in science answering our questions rather then passing it off to some deity.
In 1802, the Reverend William Paley, in his book
Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature, proposed the rather simplistic thought experiment to the effect that if one finds a watch in a field, this is evidence of the existence of a watchmaker. This "watchmaker analogy" became the more popular after the publication of
The Origin of the Species. It was not, however, new. At sometime before his death in 43 CE, the Roman orator Cicero wrote:
Quote:When you see a sundial or a water-clock, you see that it tells the time by design and not by chance. How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is devoid of purpose and intelligence, when it embraces everything, including these artifacts themselves and their artificers?
Cicero's argument could obviously
not have been described as "the watchmaker analogy," there being no watches in his era. It has been called the watchmaker analogy since Paley's book came out. The best term is "the argument from complexity." It was articulated by Robert Hooke in 1664 as follows:
Quote:For, as divers Watches may be made out of several materials, which may yet have all the same appearance, and move after the same manner, that is, shew the hour equally true, the one as the other, and out of the same kind of matter, like Watches, may be wrought differing ways; and, as one and the same Watch may, by being diversly agitated, or mov'd, by this or that agent, or after this or that manner, produce a quite contrary effect: So may it be with these most curious Engines of Insect's bodies; the All-wise God of Nature, may have so ordered and disposed the little Automatons, that when nourished, acted, or enlivened by this cause, they produce one kind of effect, or animate shape, when by another they act quite another way, and another Animal is produc'd. So may he so order several materials, as to make them, by several kinds of methods, produce similar Automatons.
Which suggests the Mr. Hooke deserves the dubious distinction of author of the watchmaker analogy. Voltaire also advanced the argument from complexity, and in more than one passage of his writing.
Paley gets the honors because of the historical context of his pronouncement. In the 17th century, many members of the Puritan sect of congregational Calvinists had taken up "natural philosophy" (roughly, what we call science) as the study of the wonder of "God's" creation. This not only continued unabated by the calamities of sectarian-inspired civil wars in England, it prospered in the 18th century. When Paley proposed his watchmaker analogy at the beginning of the 19th century, he was responding to the growing unease with which theologians viewed the enormous and ever increasing evidence, especially in geology, which contradicted a simple literalist adherence to biblical writ, and threatened to bring Bishop Ussher's exegesis alleging a 6000-year-old earth into disrepute and ridicule.
The subsequent publication of the theory of Darwin and Wallace made Paley's version of the argument from complexity, or watchmaker analogy, all the more appealing to the religionists who now adopted the attitudes and hysteria of a beseiged force, fighting in the last ditch. It should surprise no one that Dembsky trots the old whore out, dresses her in the latest fashions, trowelling on a thick layer of make-up, to attempt to make her appealing to the masses. There is nothing new under the sun, the poet tells us, and that seems to apply to "intelligent design" as much as it does to poetry.
