Does anyone still use “the watchmaker” argument? It goes something like: the complex inner workings of a watch require an intelligent designer so the complex inner workings of the universe also require an intelligent designer — let’s call that intelligent designer … oh, I don’t know … how about … “God.”
But what about watches that tell “fuzzy” time. You’ve seen them for your computer on those download-a-useless-app-or-two pages, right? You can control how fuzzy the time is so the clock could read “almost 3:30″ or “around 5″ or “afternoon.” Does it take an intelligent designer to make one of those? I mean a chimpanzee can look at the sun and determine that it’s time to get home and groom his mate. (And I’m not talking about the chimp that “accidentally” wrote Shakespeare’s Othello on the typewriter.)
I think this watchmaker argument hearkens back to an out-dated way of looking at the universe. I mean, back when atoms were mini solar systems with the electron orbiting the nucleus like a tiny Jupiter, this would have been a pretty apt argument. “Look how ordered and mechanical and deterministic the world is. It reminds me of … of … a watch! And we all know that watches don’t assemble themselves so there must have been an atommaker to make those orderly, precise, deterministic, indivisible little critters.”
But that’s not what an atom is at all! The electron is a probability cloud, not a satellite. It has no state until it’s measured. Chaos makes things anything but deterministic. Wind up a watch and you can predict what time it will read in the future. Wind up the weather or a fractal and you never know where it will end up. The world is not based on order and precision. It’s based on probabilities and averages with our meddling scientific observation changing (or determining) the future — literally!
So, I think it’s time to retire this analogy and get one that fits the world as we know it today.
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