My friend Mike comments that he recently read a quote by physicist Stephen Barr in response to Darwinians like Richard Dawkins who think that because Darwinism can explain (they believe) how things like an eye evolved that they have thus refuted the argument from design. You may recall that William Paley back in 1802 suggested that the existence of a complex device like a watch implies an intelligent watchmaker and that, by analogy, a complex device like an eye also implies an intelligent artisan.
Not so fast, says Dawkins. The processes of chemistry and physics and natural selection and genetic mutation can cooperate to produce an eye. These are, in Dawkins' famous phrase, a blind watchmaker.
Barr observes:
What Dawkins does not seem to appreciate is that his blind watchmaker is something even more remarkable than Paley's watches. Paley finds a "watch" and asks how such a thing could have come to be there by chance. Dawkins finds an immense automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that he has completely answered Paley's point. But that is absurd. How can a factory that makes watches be less in need of explanation than the watches themselves?
Quite so. Dawkins thinks he refutes Paley by pointing out that there's a fully automated watch factory (the world) that churns out watches so we need not seek an intelligent explanation for the watch. As Barr notes, however, it's at least as difficult to imagine how such a factory, capable of producing information-rich artifacts, could have sprung up as it is to imagine how a watch could have arisen by chance.
Philosopher Angus Menuge uses a different metaphor to make the same point. He observes that one has hardly explained the complex pattern woven into a carpet by pointing to the loom upon which the carpet was fashioned.
What critics of the design argument seem to ignore is that the fact, if it is a fact, that the universe is the sort of place that could produce complex life and biological information is a state of affairs which itself cries out for explanation. When a naturalist like Dawkins, however, is asked how such a thing can be he offers little more than a shrug of his shoulders.
RLC
