Rationality Rules FAILS in Debunking the Watchmaker Argument

In 1802 Paley published his work called “Natural Theology”. In it he argued that biological organisms are the result of Intelligent Design. He is known for using a watch as an illustration to make his case. Atheist Stephen Woodford, known by his popular channel Rationality Rules, made a video ‘debunking’ the watchmaker analogy from Paley. It might surprise you, but I agree with many of the arguments Stephen makes. There is just one problem: Paley’s argument is completely different from what Stephen thinks it is, so his whole video is not a response to Paley, but simply a straw man argument.

0:00 Introduction
1:13 False analogy straw man
3:40 False cause straw man
6:47 Paley's actual argument
8:14 What about evolution?
10:00 special pleading fallacy leads to God

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[phillipplays]

even if you swap functionality with complexety it does not make his arguments invalid. So i don't see how any of this matters to the first two arguments

[stefanheinzmann]

Sorry, dutchman, you probably should have done some more thinking before attesting failure in other people's arguments.

You think you (and Paley) escape the false analogy fallacy by exchanging "complexity" with "functional coherence". If that is the fundamental difference between a rock and a watch, I would have expected a more formal definition of what functional coherence actually is. The way you explain it is more or less an appeal to common sense. That is not enough to avoid circularity of your argument.

What about a river and its riverbed, is there functional coherence between the two? This means the riverbed could be intelligently designed to hold the river that flows in it. If not, why not?

Or what about the crystals that make up Paley's rock? I'm sure you have looked at the regularity of such a crystal, which looks anything but random. Is there a functional coherence between the atoms that make up the crystal lattice? Does this mean the crystal was intelligently designed?

And, coming from the other side, how do we know that the watch shows functional coherence? It presupposes that we know the functions, doesn't it? We know what a spring is and what it is used for. We know about gears and bearings. And we know about the way we are keeping time - how hours, minutes and seconds are subdivided, so we can infer that the watch must be about keeping time. If we didn't have a clue about any of this, say we were indigenous amazonians who grew up in an as yet undiscovered village with absolutely no contact to our civilization, would we be able to identify functional coherence in the watch?

There's another, quite different counterargument against the watchmaker argument, which @Rationality Rules hasn't touched upon: It uses an overblown, unrealistic, and frankly anthropocentric notion of design. It is as if a human would say: If I was only a bit more powerful, I could design a universe, too.

But that's not how design works in practice. I doubt that proponents of intelligent design actually have designed anything and know how the process works. Their idea of design appears naive to the extreme. No watchmaker has ever designed a watch from scratch. Every instance of watch design builds upon a centuries old history of timekeeping and clock making. At each step, previous designs were modified somewhat in an attempt to improve on some property. Sometimes this is successful, often it isn't. If it is successful, the watches have a greater chance of being bought, and the watchmaker has a greater chance of becoming rich and be able to finance further design iterations. What does this resemble? Evolution. Bingo!

Take this home: Any actual design activity that is beyond trivial is invariably iterative, and often deeply so, with many cycles of iteration, and relatively small improvements made each time. Actual design of complex things IS evolution - in other words evolution is the ONLY practical way to design complex things. Show me a single item of some sophistication that was designed from scratch with no precursor to learn and draw from - I bet you can't!

You may object that I'm not talking about evolution here because the mutations aren't random, they are the result of intelligent thinking. You would be right about that, but evolution doesn't require mutations to be random. It works perfectly well with nonrandom mutations, provided they lead to successful improvements. The key realization here is that evolution is a mechanism that leads to complexity and functional coherence (whatever that is) regardless how mutations arise - randomly is fine, it just takes longer, but the process can be sped up by mutating more selectively and purposefully. Randomness is a minor and nonessential point in evolution! Tell that to all the anti-evolutionists who seem to think evolution is nothing but randomness!

If you think about it, intelligent design is a thoroughly narcissistic idea. It extrapolates the little intelligence we have (or haven't) to an idealized and inflated version of us whom we call "god", a kind of superhuman, and have him "design" the universe in our place. We have him do what we can't, but would like to. He can "create" the most intricate and complicated things by merely speaking them into existence. For somebody who lacks this narcissism, it is simply nonsense with no connection to reality. Neither the notion of "design" nor of "intelligence" as presumed here has anything to do with what those terms mean in reality. It would be more appropriate to call a supernova a light bulb than calling the universe the result of "intelligent design".

Even for someone with no clue of contemporary cosmology it should be apparent that the attempt to apply everyday notions (or "common sense") like "intelligence", "design", "creation" or "complexity" to the universe as a whole is utterly preposterous. It is only ignorance that allows people to treat the universe like an ordinary "thing" that can be reasoned about as if it was similar to a watch.

[rtond]

3:20 you go from comparing watch to a stone then to writing and the to living organisms. If you keep expanding this line of reasoning it eventually leads to comparison to the universe. Point here is that your assertion that Rationality Rules creates a straw man is not convincing.
4:33 the assertion that the one statement has functional coherence while the other doesn’t is an unsupported assumption. The letters look random but may make sense in some context( i.e different languages, encryptions, computer code etc…)

[jtramelli]

Functional complexity requires an intelligence but intelligence always comes from a biological system (by the same logical as the first premise, ) thus it may very well be it's actually the biological system required ... But wait, all biological systems are The result of chemical processes thus functional complexity is actually the result of chemical process.... In order to counter this, give me just one example of an intelligence that exists outside of the biological system that is A brain, and a brain that is not made of chemical processes.... Your assumption That a intelligence is the behind biological systems when we have zero evidence that an inteligencecould exist outside of a biological system is unsupported

[bennetmoatshe]

the only valid point made here is that rationality rules did not address functional coherence (or at least not directly). But everything else is nonsense and you should have stayed off the topic of evolution, you clearly don't understand it. Your last section of the video was also idiotic. RR points out the special pleading fallacy and your response is to commit the special pleading fallacy that he just pointed out.

[Jambuc]

The entire argument is flawed because we actually have watch makers you can even watch YouTube videos of watches being created there are no examples of an intelligent designer. And Steven argument wasn’t a straw man. He literally said he was paraphrasing.

[chekitatheanimatedskeptic]

You are correct in correcting his use of complex, substituting it by functionally complex and purposeful, but otherwise you are missing the point by arguing he is strawmaning by not reading the entirety of the reasons for the analogy to work.
So far as ive seen his video there are several good objections and some of them not, but the argument is made in two phases: one is the forst analogy that doesnt work, and two the series of descriptions that are usually used in conjuction nowadays by criationists to point out complex irredutibility.
All of those examples used by either Paley or creationists today have been studied and can be explained by natural and gradual processes.

To expect that every single case of unknown evolution of a structure needs to be explained today, otherwise Evolution by natural selection is out, its not very reasonable. Try to look at the other side a little and you might see that this argument is outdated.

This inference of design is an hypothesis that cant explain the other data that natural selection can. Even David Hume's objetctions, before the ones from nowaday, to the argument are not responded. Why DNA shows correlation between ancestral species, why defects of design, why mass extinctions, why vestigial organs and appendages and many other not functional structures, why many of such structures share most of its DNA sequences with other structures, Why inactive genes... the list can go on forever, but u get the gist of it. All of those have a good explanation in evolution by natural causes, cant say they have in the case of a weak argument solely based on intuition and not actual research, a posteriori data and predictions.

[kasperg]

Trying to maintain the teleological is valid? That's so very UNTHINKING Dutch man. Wallowing in the weeds of Paley's words does not hide the paucity of evidence supporting ID. Presups mistake apologism for thinking.

[legendaryone]

4:28 yes making sense but what's the point?
6:18 well what was the argument? he just talked about a watch, he didn't make an argument 🤦🏽‍♂️
6:48 🤦🏽‍♂️🤦🏽‍♂️🤦🏽‍♂️🤦🏽‍♂️ you just 🤦🏽‍♂️ ugh... nvm
7:05 but you can't just make a premise like that. I already don't agree with premise 1, my parents design me 😦

7:34 i can't, i'm disappointed, i really thought i was gonna hear something profound 😒

So if intelligent design dictates functionality and purpose... what is the purpose of humans? Planets? Galaxies void of life? space in general? we could just be system of earth, sun and moon, and probably be ok. Screw that a designer could make it so we survive on the earth alone in a sort of snow globe fashion.

[jtramelli]

Accuse Steven if strawmanning, proceed to strawman and directly lie about evolution... Gotcha

[hsgtg]

Return to school and do Not sleeping during the biology lessons.

[scarziepewpew]

The thinking dutchman fails miserably to defend paileys argument

[FrankMeester]

Suggestion "Change to "Delusional Dutchman"

[shail]

Still doesn't prove anything...need the creator to show up...

[jamesyoung]

· Pretending to know the unknowable does not serve the interests of human enlightenment or progress.
· Encouraging others to pretend to know the unknowable is a “dumbing down” initiative.
· The ability to make a distinction between what is imaginary and what is real is only possible when we make a conscious decision to reject untestable claims.
· Investing confidence in untestable claims is the path to self-delusion. Skepticism of untestable claims is the path to enlightenment.

[BabbleCacophony]

I am confused about what is meant by functional coherence. Can I have another explanation?

My personal intuition tells me to expect simplicity and efficiency when looking for design since that is the goal for most designers. Especially for a designer without limitations.

My criteria for determining intelligent design to be likely would be 1. Doesn't occur naturally 2. We know there is an intelligent designer with the capacity to create the object. 3. The object can function to fulfill a purpose. We typically look at the desires and needs of a possible creator to determine the purpose.

This has real world applications. We have found rocks that are chipped into wedges. This doesn't occur naturally. We know hominids can make tools from rocks. Wedges can be used to cut or open things. Hominids have a need to break open nuts and bones for food.

[righty-o]

And in the case of the universe, more specifically, the big bang. It doesn't say that the universe began to exist at the big bang. It says that all the ingredients that would eventually make what is now the universe already existed, and the big bang is when is started to expand. So as far as we know, the universe has always existed in one form or another.. No creator needed

[truerealrationalist]

Stephen Woodford routinely fails to "debunk" what he claims to refute because he commits a false equivalence fallacy with regard to the terms "rebuttal" and "refutation." Rebutting an argument simply entails proving reasonable objections to accepting that a claim is _true._ To genuinely _debunk_ or _refute_ a claim, on the other hand, requires one demsontrate that it is _false, _ which he consistently fails to do.

[Anonymous-sdhq]

9:46 Actually i would argue that there are and they can. It's not that things were made to be complex but simply by chance ended up arranging themselves in a way that they got the function in the present . For example, the best theory we have right now about how mitochondria got to be in cells in the first place is there were certain bacteria that were ingulfed by some other eukaryotic cells which resulted in a symbiotic relationship between the two and an emergence of a new quality of the whole. These are called emergent properties. So undeniably there is a process to everything things, we simply don't know it yet. And I think it's lazy and just flat out wrong to default to "idk how this happens so god did it"

[Nuffsed]

The original argument was saying just because two things are complex that does not mean both those two things must have been created.

So you think that changing the word "complex" to "functional coherence" makes any difference? Well it doesn't, the same argument stands. Just because two things may be "functionality coherent" does not mean those two things must also have a creator.

The are argument has not changed. You changed the wording but the faulty reasoning is exactly the same. Did you not understand Wooodfords argument?