sbiederman@mntgfx.mentor.com (Steve Biederman) (12/16/87)
I have in front of me a new book by Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish
Gene. The new book is called The Blind Watchmaker, and the review quote
on the cover calls it "As readable and vigorous a defense of Darwinism as
has been published since 1859." This is am finding it to be.
Chapter One contains the following passage:
"The watchmaker of my title is borrowed from a famous treatise by
the eighteenth-century theologian William Paley. His "Natural Theology --
or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the
Appearances of Nature", published in 1802, is the best known exposition of the
'Argument from Design', always the most influential of the arguments for
the existence of a God. . .
Paley begins "Natural Theology" with a famous passage:
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 for ever: 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 which I had
before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might
have always been there.
Paley here appreciates the difference between natural physical objects like
stones, and designed and manufactured objects like watches. He goes on to
expound the precision with which the cogs and springs of a watch are fastened,
and the intricacy with which they are put together. If we found an object
such as a watch upon a heath, even if we didn't know how it had come into
existence, its own precision and intricacy of design would force us to conclude
that the watch must have had a maker: that there must have
existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an
artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose
which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its
construction, and designed its use.
Nobody could reasonably dissent from this conclusion, Paley insists,
yet that its just what the atheist, in effect, does when he contemplates
the works of nature, for:
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.
Paley drives his point home with beautiful and reverent descriptions
of the dissected machinery of life, beginning with the human eye, a favourite
example which Darwin was later to use and which will reappear throughout
this book. Paley compares the eye with a designed instrument such as a
telescope, and concludes that 'there is precisely the same proof that the
eye was made for vision, as there is that the telescope was made for assisting
it'. The eye must have had a designer, just as the telescope had.
Paley's argument is made with passionate sincerity and is informed
by the best biological scholarship of his day, but it is wrong, gloriously
and utterly wrong. The analogy between telescope and eye, between watch
and living organism, is false. All appearances to the contrary, the only
watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very
special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs,
and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind's eye.
Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin
discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and
apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no
mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision,
no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of
watchmaker in nature, it is the *blind* watchmaker.
I shall explain all this, and much else besides."
-- from: Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker
(Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe
without design)
W.W. Norton and Company (c) 1987, 1986
-- his bibliography lists:
Paley, W. (1828), Natural Theology, 2nd edition
Oxford: J. Vincent
Steve Biederman
tektronix!sequent!mntgfx!sbiederman
P.S. -- the original article asking for this reference has expired at this
site, and I'm not positive that it was actually in sci.misc. If not, would
some kind soul please cross post this to the original group? thanks.