Paleyological Argumentation

"In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there."

William Paley in Natural Theology, 1802.

Obviously, Paley knows something about the watch. Even if he has never seen a watch, he has seen the handiwork of human designers, and he can identify characteristics which the watch shares in common with their artifacts. His argument assumes that these characteristics are shared by the manifold of nature:

"Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation."

From this, Paley draws the conclusion that nature is the handiwork of a designer, one of incomputably more power than a watchmaker. The weakness of this argument is located in the premise that nature shows "every manifestation of design". Paley gives a few examples, but this hardly buys a designer for the Whole Shebang. At best, it merely admits a designer for those aspects of nature which actually do show "every manifestation of design", and not neccessarily a designer of infinite power, merely one capable of getting that particular job done. The real kicker is, though, Paley can't prove that any of the handiwork of nature requires any kind of designer at all. One man's design may be another man's accident. What he has here is an analogy.

This becomes clearer if we think about that rock. Paley states that for all he knows, the rock could have been there forever. What he's really saying is that the rock doesn't look at all like anything he's accustomed to attributing design to, so there's nothing inviting him to conclude that the rock has a designer. Is he justified in this belief? Perhaps, but not absolutely. The rock may very well have been designed and placed there. What prompts Paley to pleed ignorance about the origin of the rock is precisely the fact that he has experience with rocks!

The watch and the rock are both objects with which Paley is familiar, and he draws his conclusions based on this implicit knowledge. It is only on the basis of this experience that he can affirm or deny whether each object has "every manifestation of design". If Paley wishes us to conclude that nature has an intelligent designer, he can't do so based on the fact that nature shows "every manifestation of design", because his experience is based only on human designers, and this premise (and the fact that he's never seen the work of a verifiable non-human intelligent designer), can lead him to conclude no more than that nature is not the handiwork of a human designer.

Bitch is, breeders have been around for a long time.