lpetrich

I've thought about this, and I've concluded that Archdeacon Paley was cheating with his example, because his audience would be familiar with watches and how they are intelligently designed.

I've come to that conclusion with a thought experiment. Imagine that Archdeacon Paley, after having found that watch, journeyed to some of the many parts of our planet that had had little contact with northwestern-European technology; remember, this is around 1800, when Paley wrote.

He drops it, and notices it only when he is too far away from it.

And someone else finds it. What would he/she think? That it was the egg of some fabulous bird? That it was some odd jewelry?

Would even the local medicine man / witch doctor / shaman be able to guess what it is? And what its origin was?

And imagine that this watch was teleported back in time. In the Greco-Roman world, the makers of the Antikythera Machine might have been able to identify it, but most others would have concluded that it was some mysterious mechanical contraption ("By Hephaestus! What fine smith work!").

So it would have stayed until late medieval / early modern times, when mechanical clocks started becoming common. By then, it would be quickly identified as a miniature clock. Which is what a watch is.

And the same can be said of other examples sometimes offered by various Defenders of the Faith: TV sets, computers, even extraterrestrial spaceships -- would they be correctly identified by those not familiar with them?

Valentine Pontifex

I think I am going to (gasp) defend Paley here.

Paley's argument does not depend on the person finding the watch on the beach knowing what its function is. The only think needed is for it to be obvious that the watch is not a natural object. Anyone exposed to a society with designed objects with multiple parts is going going to figure it out. I don't think that the person on the beach being familiar designed objects is an unreasonable assumption. And certainly no one, who closely examined a watch will mistake it for an egg!

Paley's real fallacy is watches cannot reproduce. If watches produced baby watches who grew up to reproduce themselves and had mutation and recombination then the situtation will be different from what we find today. That living
beings reproduce is why evolution of complexity can happpen.