ORDER & REgularity
The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein - Fred Hoyle
This analogy is a sort of reductio ad absurdum. This is a type of argument that leads to absurd conclusions in order to show that there's something wrong with the premises. If you can't believe that a tornado could build a functioning jet aeroplane, then you need to go back and question the idea that natural forces could have produced living creatures on Earth by chance alone.
The Tornado Junkyard analogy was challenged by Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion (2006). He calls the Design Argument "the ultimate Boeing-747 gambit". In other words, if you think it is unlikely that life might have come about by chance, it's even more unlikely that something like God might exist. Dawkins argues that biological complexity rests on one very simple explanation - Charles Darwin's theory of evolution through natural section. It is God, according to Darwin, that is the complex explanation. |
Richard Dawkins was very good friends with Douglas Adams, who wrote "The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy" - another book that has fun with probabilities and pokes fun at God
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In Paley's analogy, the world is compared to a pocket watch (a cutting-edge invention in Paley's time).
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YES
This sort of analogy is used all the time, not just with God. Detectives investigating crimes assume that "similar effects have similar causes" when they work out a killer's M.O.; doctors make the same assumption when they diagnose an illness. The SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project scanned space for regular patterns of radiation, on the assumption that only intelligent agents produced regularity.
The analogy draws our attention to the awe-inspiring characteristics of the universe. It is therefore linked to the concept of religious experience. It also encourages us to believe that the universe is understandable and this motivates us to pursue science. The problem of induction raises the concern that science may be pointless, but the analogy argument reassures us that the universe was designed in order to be understood by minds like ours.
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NO
The analogy compares the Designer of the universe to human beings. This is anthropomorphic - making God "just like us". It invites the sort of sarcastic response created by David Hume. The "watchmaker God" proposed by this sort of analogy might not be worth worshiping - especially because the world he designed has so much pain and suffering in it. Islam, Judaism and Christianity are supposed to reject anthropomorphism.
The analogy leads us to question either God's goodness or God's wisdom. This is because the universe seems to be designed to produce colossal waste and suffering: whole species go extinct, living creatures feed off each other and experience pain. As John Stuart Mill pointed out, if "similar effects have similar causes", then this waste and suffering must be blamed fair and square on God, not on the Devil or natural forces.
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