The Blind Watchmaker Dawkins

I am part of the resistant audience but I would be open to hear more on this subject, even though I do not agree with it. The author is writing to the resistant audience by providing the facts to back up his claims. The author sites a lot of quotes from throughout the ages to pull people in by showing that the oldie but goody is still correct.

Gould explains how Evolution is a theory and a fact. Evolution is a fact but how evolution happened is a theory. Darwin's theory of natural selection as an example of how evolution happened. Creationists deny evolution. Creationists believes in a supernatural creator of plants and animals. They believe that science would never discover how the creator created creations. Gould believes that Scientific creationism is a meaningless phrase because it’s

1. Briefly explain the authors argument and whether you agree or disagree with their position. Why or why not?

Lewis. This paper will analyze the argument of the passage above by parsing it, examining formal and informal proof, while also discussing its fallacies.

Dawkins, Richard. The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design. New York: W.W. Norton, 1986.

wrong”, the author make a good claim. He or she talks about the winner takes all

In 1859, Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species, which set forth the new doctrine of evolution and attracted the ire and fury of fundamentalists. “Modernists” took a step from the fundamentalists and refused to believe that the Bible was completely accurate and factual. They contended that the Bible was merely a collection of moral stories or guidelines, but not sacred scripture inspired by God. Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll was one who denounced creationism, as he had been widely persuaded by the theory of evolution. Others blended creationism and evolution to invent their own interpretations.

The issues presented in these two letters both provide strong cases. However, in my opinion I feel the evidence found in the second letter is much more convincing than the first.

Paley's Argument For Intelligent Design and Its Criticisms Paley's teleological argument defends the idea of the existence of god through the idea of consistent and orderly design. Paley uses an example of finding a rock on the ground and then finding a watch. He argues that finding the watch, with all of its perfectly fit working parts, suggests an intelligent creator. In his argument, the watch is employed as an analogy for the universe.

The reading states that many skeptics doubt that the structures were created by bees and provides three arguments to support that. However, the professor states that skeptical arguments are not convincing and refutes each of the arguments in the reading passage.

Some, such as Paley, aimed to defend this idea using teleological arguments. Such arguments insist on the existence of God by “attempting to identify features of the world that constitute evidence of intelligent design and inferring God’s existence as the best explanation for these features.” Paley compares a watch to living organisms by analogizing: “Watches are complex and good at doing their job (i.e. keeping time). Therefore, it is a result of intelligent design. Living organisms are complex and good at doing their job (i.e. surviving and reproducing). Therefore, they are a result of intelligent design.” Paley believes that if a watchmaker made a watch, then an intelligent designer made other elaborate things, such as the eye or flowers. A problem with this reasoning is that analogies are comparisons, not evidence. Comparing two not identical, but similar things does not make their conclusions equivalent; if one conclusion is true for one argument, it is not guaranteed to be true for the other. In this situation, concluding that a watch has an intelligent designer does not validate the notion that living organisms do as well. In rebuttal, theists attempt to thwart this with the theory of irreducible complexity, or the belief that some traits are too complex to have been produced by evolution’s slow step-by-step process. Similar to the watch, theists believe life is too complex to have been affected by evolution, and the best explanation for living organisms is that they are a result of intelligent

Let’s look at a few more potential inferences and determine whether or not they are within the scope of the above argument.

A watch embodies all appearances of intelligent design. It has purpose, a certain disposition or instruction. It is a complex object; all parts are needed for it to fulfil its purpose and we could not substitute any of these parts. It is made of a specific set of materials; we do not find smelted gold or blown glass naturally occurring in nature. The watch also has a regular motion. All these properties and dispositions a watch personifies show it is a creation and not just a naturally occurring object. The same is said about the human eye through analogy. This is the reason William Paley chose to use the watch as well as the human eye to highlight his argument for design in his work Natural Theology, (1802). The teleological argument he puts forth is one we can know empirically through observation. It is not the purpose of the argument to fully convince us that the argument is correct in every way. The purpose is to offer the audience a logical and suggestible conclusion. However the argument

from opposing views. There is more than enough information in his book to form an

Creationists, mistaking the uncertain in science for the unscientific, see the debate among evolutionists regarding how best to explain evolution as a sign of weakness. Scientists, on the other hand, see uncertainty as simply an inevitable element of scientific knowledge. They regard debates on fundamental theoretical issues as healthy and stimulating. Science, says evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, is "most fun when it plays with interesting ideas, examines their implications, and recognizes that old information may be explained in surprisingly new ways." Thus, through all the debate over evolutionary mechanisms biologists have not been led to doubt that evolution has occurred. "We are debating how it happened," says Gould (1983, p.256).