Q&A: Paley’s Watch
Paley’s Watch
Question
Hello. I want to point out what seems to me to be a flaw in Paley’s watch analogy, and also to point out that in my view, once you remove this flaw from the watch analogy, the whole thing collapses—and with it, I think, the entire physico-theological argument.
So here’s my point: I claim that a version in which the parable actually resembles the thing being explained would be this: imagine that you know nothing about the existence of living creatures (including yourself), and then you see a watch in the desert. Would you assume that the watch had a watchmaker? Why would you assume that? After all, a watchmaker is something far more complex than a watch (he has a developed brain, hands, muscles, etc. etc.). So why not simply stop at the watch? And the important point to stress here, in my opinion, is that the criterion by which you judge probability is not necessarily complexity; complexity is only one factor in your judgment. Another factor is experience. And the fact is that God is very far removed from experience (we have no experience with things that are intelligent but not complex, or with things that exist eternally, or with things that exist without a cause, etc.). And I think all these points connect to the following question: why not stop at the Big Bang as the ultimate explanation for everything? You can say that it is improbable that a universe would arise that produces something special (life) without planning, but then I would ask: how can you compare the probability of such a thing happening with the probability of God’s existence (which, as we saw above, is so far removed from experience)? In the end, there is no brilliant argument—at least none that I know of—that explains why God’s own existence, strange as it seems in relation to experience, is more probable than assuming that everything happened by chance.
I hope I was coherent enough to get some kind of point across. I already asked a similar question here and you referred me to the third notebook, but unfortunately I didn’t find there any response to what I’m saying.
Answer
Sh., hello.
With all due respect, this question has already grown a long beard in our region. I devoted an appendix to it in my book God Plays Dice (Appendix 7, the last one there), and I also answered it in post 144 (including the endless arguments with Y in the talkbacks there and elsewhere). I argue that there is no need for prior experience in order to draw a conclusion from a special phenomenon, and if I saw a watch I would ask myself where it came from even without knowing watchmakers, and even without knowing human beings. Similarly, when I see a die rolled with the result of thousands of consecutive 6s, I have no need whatsoever to know the person rolling the die or to encounter someone with the ability to control dice at will in order to conclude that the die is not fair, or that he somehow knows how to roll it as he wishes. The watch is a very special structure, like the result 6666, and the conclusion follows accordingly. You could perhaps argue that a person with the ability to roll a die that way is a creature no less special than that sequence of results (I’m not sure about that), and still I would assume that he exists.
Discussion on Answer
According to that, even if you know watchmakers and human beings, there’s no difference. Even if you know watchmakers, the question of who created them still remains. So the existence of the watchmaker doesn’t really answer the question of the watch even if you know watchmakers. This explanatory process can stop only at an object whose existence does not itself require an explanation (= God, the cause of Himself), and a watch is not such an object.
If I know watchmakers and human beings, then I know that the strangeness and improbability already exist, so I would associate the watch with them too in order to reduce the strangeness (to assume one improbable event instead of two).
Indeed, the question will stop at something that is its own cause, but as I said, it doesn’t seem clear to me that specifically God is the optimal option, because He is no less strange (= no more probable, in my opinion) than the other options (such as seeing the Big Bang as its own cause).
If you don’t know watchmakers and still assume their existence, that too is only one strange object. As stated, neither the watch nor the watchmaker is its own cause, and therefore it is preferable to assume that there is another object that created them and is its own cause.
The Big Bang is an event, not an object. An event is not its own cause, and in fact is not the cause of anything. A cause that brings something about is supposed to be an object, not an event (or an event brought about by an object). For example, in Newton’s second law, acceleration is produced by a force. But force as a phenomenon (perhaps not exactly an event) has a factor that produces it (the sources of the force). Beyond that, the Big Bang does nothing except within the framework of the laws of nature. And if there are laws, there is a lawgiver. The laws were not created in the Big Bang; they governed it.
Indeed, that would be only one strange object, but it would still be stranger than the object you started with (I hope you’d agree that the existence of an intelligent person is a bit stranger and less probable than the existence of a watch), so what is the benefit of assuming it?
Fine, I didn’t necessarily mean precisely the Big Bang, only the idea that there was some accidental (and initial) cause that started the whole process, without any need for an intelligent entity. I don’t see much point in getting into too many speculations about the details, but obviously that too would be outside the laws known to us.
We’re repeating ourselves. It isn’t stranger if it is its own cause. A watchmaker and a watch are not their own cause. Nor is it stranger than the watch if one knows about evolution, which produces people and not watches (and of course here too the question returns to the laws within which evolution operates).
A first accidental cause is a random universe-generator? And that is more reasonable than God? Why?
All right, I think we understand. Let the chooser choose.
The fact that it is its own cause only adds to its strangeness (because we have no experience with things that are their own cause, and because that is far from intuition).
I didn’t say it is more reasonable than God; I said it doesn’t seem clear to me that it is a worse explanation than God. In fact I think it’s a waste of time to deal with that question, because all the explanations are strange to more or less the same degree.
Just out of curiosity, if I were one of those boys who get sent to you so that you’ll convince them, would you also then give up this easily and say, “let the chooser choose”?
True, but that strangeness disappears when we understand that He is good and created the world, and we are His watches. He is the watchmaker; He made the watch. There is a purpose to the creation—a watch found in the desert just like that, why would it be there? But the good God created both good and evil in the world so that we may receive reward while overcoming transgressions… and performing as many commandments as possible.
Now let’s go back to the strangeness: what is stranger—to conclude that the watch came into being by itself, without cause and without purpose, or to conclude that there is a Creator of the world who made everything in order to bestow good? We cannot understand God, so we say that He is His own cause; we look at it from the other side, meaning that He created the world and is the cause of the world, not only His own cause. Could it enter your mind that the world is its own cause? Of the world? That’s absurd. God lives and gives life to all.
If you have no experience with things that are their own cause, how can you assume that the watch created itself?
God is His own cause because one cannot say that someone created Him, because if we say that, we will ask who created the one who created the one who created Him… and therefore there must be one Creator who was not created.
It really doesn’t disappear; it simply gets transferred from us (or from the universe) to God Himself. When you use the physico-theological argument, you take all the strangeness of our existence (intelligent beings, complex beings, etc., and therefore improbable ones) and simply transfer it to the strangeness of another entity, no less strange (intelligent, non-complex, self-caused, etc.). Maybe there is a purpose to the creation, but there is no purpose to the creator, and that is what I’m dealing with here.
“What is stranger, to conclude that the watch came into being by itself without cause and without purpose, or to conclude that there is a Creator of the world who made everything in order to bestow good?”
If the attributes of that Creator include things like being self-caused and having intelligence without complexity, then in my opinion the first option would be less strange.
“We cannot understand God”—really? That’s not something I’ve heard Rabbi Michi say (which is why I came to ask specifically on his site). Why assume the existence of something that we can’t understand anyway, and that has no clear advantage over any other option we can think of (like the one I suggested above)?
“Could it enter your mind?… That’s absurd.” You can say exactly the same thing about God. Why do you reject what I suggested? Because it is far from experience? God too is far from experience. Because it is improbable? In any case there is no way to measure the probability of God, so there is nothing to compare with.
I’ll just end with one additional point that perhaps wasn’t sharpened enough here, because we’re repeating ourselves.
The fact that something is its own cause is not strange at all, since there is a clear a priori consideration that there must be, at the beginning of the chain, an object that is its own cause; otherwise one falls into an infinite regress. It is unlikely that this would be an object from our experience, and an event is not the cause of anything (as stated). What remains is another object that is its own cause and the cause of everything else, and that is what in foreign parlance is called God.
By the way, even when someone is sent to me (usually they aren’t sent to me, but come of their own accord), if I see that my explanations are not being accepted (especially when in my opinion they are entirely sufficient, as in this case) and I have nothing to add because we’re just repeating ourselves again and again, then that is exactly what I say. So the answer to your question is: indeed yes.
I didn’t say that in the case I described you wouldn’t ask yourself where the watch came from, only that there would be no reason to assume that a watchmaker exists, because he would be no less puzzling (and even more puzzling) than the watch. I really don’t understand why, in such a case, it would seem intuitive to you that somehow a watchmaker arose (evolution, etc.) and made the watch, rather than simply stopping at the watch itself (for example, assuming it was created by random winds). Just to clarify again: I’m not claiming that in the case I described the watch wouldn’t seem puzzling to you or wouldn’t require an explanation, only that there would be no preference for the explanation of a watchmaker over, say, an explanation by chance. And the analogue is this: it’s not clear that there is any preference for assuming an intelligent designer (God) over assuming that all the complexity and wonder came about in some non-intelligent way (chance).