If you are walking down a beach and find a watch is it rational to pick that watch up and assume over billions of years, it formed itself ?
The watchmaker analogy? Old school.
We recognize what a watch is, and know who makes it (we do). This is false inductive reasoning again. Because we know that watches are designed, doesn't mean we can conclude that anything else that isn't man-made, is designed, such as the beach, the ocean, trees, etc... That's an unsound assumption.
It still holds true according to the evidence.
I'm surprised that Christian creationists even bother with your silly argument as it has been refuted more times than I can count.
The Analogical Argument follows the paradigm first asserted by William Paley in the 1600's. He asserted the following scenario: While walking through the woods, one sees a watch lying on the ground. Picking it up, one is struck by its intricacy and quickly concludes that this object is too complicated to have evolvedout of nothing; since reality is vastly more complicated than a simple watch,it therefore follows that nature itself has a vastly more complicated Designer. The first rebuttal to this argument is a repeat of the one above: Even if nature does display design, doesn't it follow that the Designer, vastly more complicated than that which it designs, should also have a Designer, and so on? After all, one is implying: • I find a watch which impliesa designer.
• I meet the watchmaker who is more complicated than the watch, hence the watchmaker must have a designer as well.
• Why do I stop assuming designers when I reach the watchmaker's designer?
Also, how does the watch imply its designer is still an existing entity? Suppose the same watch is found 300 years later. Even though the watch implies a designer,it would be foolish to assert that watchmaker was stillalive. Wecouldbefairly certain he was long dead.
It is true the watch impliesa designer,yet naturedoesnot imply thesameand herein lies the single most devastating element to the theist's analogical argument from design.
How do we know the watch is an artifice,and not simply yet anothernaturally occuring item lying in the woods? Why is it that we don't stop by every tree, flower, rock, blade of grass and pine cone, considering who might have created each, yet we stop at the watch and think, "Hmmm. Someone left a watch here..."?
Simply put, it is because the watch specifically displays attributes APART from that of nature that we know it is a designed item!
Said another way, man attributes design or artifice to an item because it displays properties that by definition set it apart from nature, which does not display any artificial attributes of any kind. We know the difference because the two are inherently different.
To say that nature and the watch are equally designed is to empty the word "design" of all meaning. It is to say we cannot distinguish between something created with a goal in sight (an artifice) from a tree (a naturally occuring object). No one sees a tree toppled from a storm or burned in a fire and claims,"That tree is broken". No one sees a broken watch and states, "That watch is dead" (they might use that phrasing in slang, but they do not mean it was once alive and now has no biological functions).
As it can easily be seen, the Christian creationist is forced into eradicating the context in which we can separate artifice from nature, and then turns around and compares the two having already destroyed it. On this one point alone the analogical argument from design topples into irrationality
