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Blind Watchmaker?

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I wonder if Richard Dawkins actually knows any watchmaker. No actual horologist would take his notion of the Blind Watchmaker seriously in accounting for complexity, even as an analogy. If the analogy that is used won’t, in and of itself, work, then it doesn’t explain what it intends to illuminate by using it as an example of comparison. If there cannot be a blind watchmaker, there cannot be an analogy for a  blind watchmaker shedding light on some other mystery. It would be like saying the mechanism of natural selection accounting for evolution creating complexity and biodiversity is analogous to a blind abracadabra. It explains nothing.  But for those who are really interested in the language of watchmaking, and how absurd it is that it should be conducted by a blind and dumb process as Richard Dawkins contends (blind because it has no “purpose” or “end” in mind, and dumb because it has no mind, no Intelligent Design) then these videos may interest you. And of course we keep in mind that the living organism, down to the nano-technical scale within even the most “simple” cell, is staggeringly more complex than any watch ever designed.

Comments
"there is no watchmaker in nature beyond the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way." Seversky, Thanks for the quote. This appears somewhat contradictory. It seems that even Dawkins cannot escape the language of purpose "deployed in a very special way." Here's the conundrum. The purpose of evolution is to be purposeless. The plan of evolution is to not have a plan, and is "deployed" by natural causes, which mount upon previous natural causes ad infinitum, which render them causeless. I know that Darwinists insist that ToE does not deal with origin of life issues, but they need to do some hard thinking in that area in order to avoid not making any sense.CannuckianYankee
February 9, 2010
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Seversky, Sure thing. The laws of physics created that Urwerk watch too ;)Clive Hayden
February 9, 2010
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But as for blind watchmakers- just watch the movie "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"- it has a blind clock-maker. ;) It's just that his clock went backwards to try to turn back time...Joseph
February 9, 2010
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Dr Lee Spetner wrote "Not By Chance" in response to "The Blind Watchmaker". Blythe wrote about natural selection before Darwin. And there isn;t any data which demonstrtates an accumulation oif genetic accidents* can do what Dawkins claims. *accumulation of genetic accidents- in Dawkins' world all mutations are accidents and they accumulate via various processes- Dawkins calls it "cumulative selection".Joseph
February 9, 2010
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In 1802, the Rev. William Paley published his Natural Theology. As we all know, in this work he argued in essence that, just as the structure of a watch would lead us to conclude that there must have been a watchmaker, so should analogous properties in living things point towards the existence of a Creator. Dawkins' book was a response to Paley's thesis. As he wrote:
Despite all appearances to the contrary, there is no watchmaker in nature beyond the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. 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.
Seversky
February 8, 2010
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lars,
As such, it doesn’t seem clear to me that Dawkins intended the BW as an analogy to illuminate how intricate systems came about… but rather to provoke the reader by the intuitive impossibility of a literal blind watchmaker....
So he could've just as easily called his book The Impossibility?Clive Hayden
February 8, 2010
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Wasn't Dawkins' title intended to be an oxymoronic reference to Paley's watchmaker analogy? Oxymoronic in the sense that it intentionally invokes an apparent contradiction, for rhetorical effect. As such, it doesn't seem clear to me that Dawkins intended the BW as an analogy to illuminate how intricate systems came about... but rather to provoke the reader by the intuitive impossibility of a literal blind watchmaker; and then to illuminate the theorized mechanism by other analogies and arguments. (The latter fail, but I don't see that as a failure of the book title.) Disclaimer: I can't say I've read the book first-hand. I just know it through the numerous quotes and discussions about it.lars
February 8, 2010
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In a simpler, and perhaps happier time, "disabled" children (we must use the politically correct term, mustn't we?) found useful, skilled and fulfilling work in religious homes making items for which there used to be a demand. 'Blind watchmakers' indeed! It probably wouldn't be sufficiently "empowering" for modern sensibilities, though.P. Mahoney
February 8, 2010
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