William Paley's Weak Analogy

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William Paley claimed that the universe itself is extraordinarily complex in its structure, as well as how it functions. Paley expresses his point by using an analogy involving a rock and watch. He states that we would not question the purpose for the stone being on the ground or anything further. However, if we found a watch laying on the ground, it would require an explanation as to why it was there. It may seem like common sense for us not to question the rock just because we know that a rock appears within the natural world and a seemingly man-made watch does not, however, Paley states that we should assume that the watch has a designer because of its complexity as well as the purpose of how it was put together. That even if we did discover …show more content…
He claims that the entire strength of the argument that Paley proposes is based on the strength of his analogy from man-made complex objects to the complexity and purpose of occurrences within nature. It is a large jump to assume that just because we deem a watch as a complex set of parts that work together for a common goal and has a designer, and the universe is similar regarding having parts that work together, that it must have a designer. When we are starting with the watch, and trying to connect those similarities to the universe it isn’t as difficult as starting with the universe and trying to draw similarities to a watch. The watch is very specific and has a finite amount of parts in it, and when Paley is comparing this to the universe, he is comparing something finite into something that is seemingly infinite. Of course, this would seem easy to do because you will eventually always find something to compare a part in a watch to out of the infinite amount and broadness that is within the universe. With doing this it would appear there is a very large percentage of the watch that is similar to the universe so one could draw the conclusion of their strong similarity. However, when you try to compare the universe to that of a watch, you find that it is only a very small percentage of the universe that would be similar to a watch. Resulting in not being able to confidently conclude they are very like each other. It would appear this objection shows a major flaw within the argument by analogy that Paley attempted to

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