This article was written in response to a publication by William Paley regarding God’s existence. He argues that the world is too complicated of an object to be formed randomly. Someone must have created it and that someone is God. In his publication, he gave an analogy: if you found a watch on a beach, someone must have left it there. He argues that it is impossible for the watch to have formed naturally. Note that I am only commenting on his argument and this does not imply my view on God’s existence.

Argument’s Strength

It is apparent that Paley attempts to use a real life example that everyone can conceive (the watch), to bring the point across. This is, in my view, an extremely good strategy. We are all trapped in our beliefs that we generated from our lives in the world as we live in. Most people refuses to throw away what they already believe to think and look harder for other possibilities. They accept and believe whatever is easier to understand. On top of this, by providing visualization for the argument (everybody knows what a watch is and how it could be assembled in a factory), he further eases the process of explaining his argument.

Paley also used the method of prove by contradiction, which is equally effective. If you agree that something cannot happen this way, you automatically agree that it must have happened the other way. In this case, Paley’s standpoint would be: if the watch was not formed by coincidences, then there must exist a creator of the watch.

Argument’s Weakness

Paley dismissed the possibility of the watch you found while crossing a heath being formed “naturally” only by freak accidents or countless coincidences. This is outright misleading. A watch is a man-made item. Everybody knows the manufacturer makes the watch; every part is being assembled by machines. By using a watch as the object in question, Paley is misleading the crowd to agree to his argument that the world is made by “someone”. I doubt his argument will be as striking if he uses objects such as a pearl, which most people know that it is formed naturally, without a creator.

Moreover, it was wrong for Paley to say that even if we have never witnessed a watch made, his conclusion would not be weaken. It certainly would. Paley failed to see, or avoided pointing out, that the watch is an end result. To look at the end result and imagine how it is formed is extremely hard. Take my pearl example. When you look at a well rounded and milky white pearl, it is not easy to imagine how it was formed and you might say, “It’s too beautiful to be formed naturally.” However, if you know that it was not like that at first, but instead it was originally tiny little packs of white substances. Then after ages more of these substances gathered and they slowly got packed together and form the end result, you will have no trouble envisioning the end result being formed naturally. The bottom line is, the initial formation of any object in this world does not necessary have to be as complicated as the end result. The world, for all we know, could have been started merely as a random collection of chemical matters that by coincidence triggered some domino effects that formed the world as we know it. The same weakness can be applied to Paley’s further writings regarding not understanding the parts of the watch. If you do not understand how a pearl can be formed naturally, you will most likely dismiss the fact that it is indeed, formed naturally.

In addition, although I don’t know exactly what Paley’s view on God’s properties is, his argument clearly implies that God is not perfect. It is because if God is perfect, his creation must also be perfect. For a perfect being must be perfect in everyway such that he cannot create an imperfect object. It is the same as if an archer has 100% accuracy (i.e. perfect accuracy, although it cannot happen), he or she cannot ever miss his or her target. Nonetheless, in Paley’s view, he states that the watch is not perfect (”the watch sometimes went wrong, or that is seldom went exactly right.” - textbook pp. 61 lower first column). Since he uses the watch to represent the world, he meant that the world is not perfect. This contradicts to a common ground established by the theists that God must be perfect.

Furthermore, most of the rest of the essay that are supposed to strengthen the argument by saying “even if X is true, it will not hinder the conclusion”, are all based on the dismissal of the possibility that a delicate and complicate object cannot be formed by combinations and coincidences alone. If anyone disagree with this (see my point regarding visioning process from end result), all the rest of the counter-arguments are effectively useless.