The Watchmaker

Imagine you are walking on a beach, a religious man would tell us. All of a sudden you spot a watch laying on the sand. You don’t know who made the watch or who it belongs to, but there is no question that someone made it. The world, too, is so perfect in its form that it must be designed. That designer, our theist tells us, is God.

This beautiful analogy sounds, at first, perfectly logical. Upon a second glance, however, it reveals a fatal flaw. No matter how complex the object designed, the designer must be more complex. In the watch analogy, this designer is a human watchmaker. If there is a God who created the world, he must, himself, be incredibly complex. And so our question would simply be delayed by one step, and now we must ask: who designed the designer?

Could we possibly solve this question in another way? I believe we can. The key to overcoming this sort of reasoning is to understand that complex things can come about without necessarily being designed. In cosmology this would happen through gravity and chance. In biology through evolution by natural selection. Some thing are still designed. No one is claiming that the watch our religious friend found on the beach was not designed. It was designed by a watchmaker, who, himself, was a product of evolution by natural selection.

But of course, even if we establish that complex things can come into being without being designed, that does not mean the world and everything in it is one of them. Could the earth and the life on it still have been designed by a higher being?

To answer that we would have to take a look at our world. If it were designed (especially by a perfect being), we would expect it to look a certain way. We would expect harmony and a perfect working order. We would expect it to be flawless in its design. If the human body were designed by a perfect being, it should have no redundant parts. it should be perfectly efficient. And yet, it is not.

In fact, when we study the many forms of life on our planet, we find they behave exactly as we would expect them to under the rules of natural selection. Rather than a perfect harmony we find a vicious fight for survival. Almost every living thing that ever lived has died before its time. Most likely in a horribly painful way. Such brutal competitions between living things are the driving force of evolution, but make no sense with design.

Our body, too, looks exactly as we would expect through evolution. Everything within us, from our body parts to our DNA, is reminiscent of millions of years of patchwork. Every generation leaving just a little on top of its predecessors. Our body is not perfect. It is full of flaws. Each flaw pointing us to its origin in our species past. None pointing toward design.

Our world, full of beauty and wonder, is also full of ‘design flaws’. But as we continue to discover, these are not flaws at all , they are just life as it evolves. No designer needed.