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The watchmaker analogy or watchmaker argument is a teleological argument. By way of an analogy, the argument states that design implies a designer. The analogy has played a prominent role in natural theology and the "argument from design," where it was used to support arguments for the existence of God and for the intelligent design of the universe. The most famous statement of the teleological argument using the watchmaker analogy was given by William Paley in his 1802 book ''Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity''.〔(William Paley - William Carey University )〕 The 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection put forward an explanation for complexity and adaptation, which reflects scientific consensus on the origins of biological diversity,〔"Such controversies as do exist concern the details of the mechanisms of evolution, not the validity of the over-arching theory of evolution, which is one of the best supported theories in all of science." (Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences, Second Edition (1999) ) United States National Academy of Sciences〕 and provides a counter-argument to the watchmaker analogy: for example, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins referred to the analogy in his 1986 book ''The Blind Watchmaker'' giving his explanation of evolution. In the 19th century, deists, who championed the watchmaker analogy, held that Darwin's theory fit with "the principle of uniformitarianism—the idea that all processes in the world occur now as they have in the past" and that deistic evolution "provided an explanatory framework for understanding species variation in a mechanical universe."〔 In the United States, starting in the 1960s, creationists revived versions of the argument to dispute the concepts of evolution and natural selection, and there was renewed interest in the watchmaker argument. ==Argument== The watchmaker analogy consists of the comparison of some natural phenomenon to a watch. Typically, the analogy is presented as a prelude to the teleological argument and is generally presented as: #The complex inner workings of a watch necessitate an intelligent designer. #As with a watch, the complexity of X (a particular organ or organism, the structure of the solar system, life, the universe, anything complex) necessitates a designer. In this presentation, the watch analogy (step 1) does not function as a premise to an argument — rather it functions as a rhetorical device and a preamble. Its purpose is to establish the plausibility of the general premise: ''you can tell, simply by looking at something, whether or not it was the product of intelligent design.'' In most formulations of the argument, the characteristic that indicates intelligent design is left implicit. In some formulations, the characteristic is ''orderliness'' or ''complexity'' (which is a form of order). In other cases it is ''clearly being designed for a purpose,'' where ''clearly'' is usually left undefined. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「watchmaker analogy」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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