One of the most commonly used arguments concerning an Intelligent Designer is the “Watchmaker” argument… Basically that anything complex requires an intelligent designer. Now Richard Dawkins basically blew this argument out of the water, but since ID people won’t read Dawkins, I’ll go ahead and explain the logically fallicy of the argument here.
Nothing designed is original… They are merely the result of small, incremental improvements over time. In other words, an evolution parallel.
Lets take the Watch as an example as it appears to be one of the favorite used by ID proponents:
The watch wasn’t invented one day by a man who decided, “Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to tell time?” It was a long, slow process involving thousands of years.
First there was observing the Sun. People could tell approximately what time of day it was merely by looking up and seeing where the sun was.
Of course that wasn’t always accurate enough so the Sundial was produced. Markings around the sundial could give much more accurate information in regards to what time of day it was.
Then there was the problem of cloudy days (not to mention nighttime) which led to the invention of the mechanical clock. The markings were the same as the sundial and even the hand moved in the exact same direction (clockwise). Other hands were eventually included to make the clock more accurate.
The first clocks weren’t very portable. They required weighted pendulums and weighed several tons. For that reason there was usually only one in each town (usually in a central location such as a church or clocktower). Refinements to the design were made until eventually the clocks weighed only a couple hundred pounds apiece and could therefore be placed in individual homes.
As clocks became shrinking in size, there became a challenge amongst engineers to create a portable version. Once the weighted pendulums were replaced by a series of springs, the clock became truly portable and the “watch” was invented.
Of course these first watches weighed between 10-15 pounds, but incremental improvements over the years eventually brought the size and weight down to the point where they could be comfortably strapped to the wrist.
Other improvements included a small pendulum inserted into the winding mechanism (self-winding) through replacing the mechanics of the watch altogether with piezoelectric crystals.
As you can see, the watch wasn’t just invented “out of the blue” by some genius in Switzerland, but rather evolved through thousands of years with small, incremental changes over time.
So, we can see pretty easily that the “Watchmaker” argument does not prove ID, but rather supports evolution rather nicely. ID proponents point to the watch as proof of the necessity of a designer. Dawkins refers to this as “The Blind Watchmaker” argument because it relies on the watch being invented by an individual that had never seen a clock, a sundial, or even the Sun itself to be valid.
