(February 27, 2021 at 2:30 pm)Five Wrote: I actually really like to hear discussions of the Watchmaker argument and picking it apart. So, it's an appeal to the irreducible complexity argument in biology, where there are some things in nature that are so complex they must have an intelligent designer. Yet the analogy doesn't work at all.
Because in the example, you're walking along a beach and find a watch. Based on your prior knowledge of watches and comparing it to the simplicity of the sand around it, supposedly, you can assume the watch was created by an intelligent designer. But that's a contrast that hinges on "things made by a human" and "things not made by a human". So, when making the analogy fit with "things created by God" the answer is "everything."
The complexity of a thing doesn't actually matter.
I have never seen this as proving anything other than the existence of evolution.
How did the watch end up on the beach? Thousands of years ago a stoneage man discovered fire, then he discovered molten rocks turned into metals in that fire and through thousands to millions of further steps from that point, such as a discovery of time, the watch evolved.
To use the watch scenario as a comparison to man you need to think that the watch just appeared on the beach without thousands of years of progress to it's manufacture but everyone knows it didn't. Similarly, if you find a man lying on the beach you have two options: He just appeared or he evolved, just like a watch.
Maybe we should use finding a man on the beach (and saying this must have evolved) as an example of how a watch had to evolve.
