Paley's watch and a caveman

I was teaching Paley, for the nth time, and it hit me to wonder how I would react to finding the watch if I was a caveman. There is one thing I would be sure of: the watch is not the work of a human—the difference between the watch and the most complex human technology of the time would be too vast (think of a bow and arrow—impressive as that is). Would I think it the work of a non-human designer? I am not sure. Supposing that I already thought that nature was the product of a non-human designer, it might be reasonable to think that the same designer produced the watch. The intricacy of the watch’s insides might have some resemblance to the intricacy of the internal parts of animals. But if I did not already think nature around me to be the work of design, I doubt the watch would move me. Whatever stories, if any, I told myself about nature, I would try to extend to the watch. Maybe it sprouted from the ground?

This is making me think that the objection—dismissed by Paley—that the reason we think the watch to be the product of design is that we’ve seen similar things made has more force than he grants it. It is pretty clear to me that the fact that we’ve seen things of “this sort” (understood broadly enough to included non-watches but not so broadly as to include the works of our cave-dwelling ancestors) made is an important ingredient of our inference that the watch was made.

However, I also don’t think this undercuts Paley’s argument. For it may be that seeing really complex things made opens our eyes to the possibility of an explanation that would not occur to a caveman. Indeed, here is a second thought experiment. Suppose we find something with the mechanical and functional complexity of a watch, but (a) we have never seen an artifact with this kind of function, and (b) we can determine conclusively that the item was not made by a human. How would we get (b)? Maybe the item came from space, buried in the center of a meteorite. I think I would be pretty completely confident that the item had a designer (presumably an alien). And I would surely be right.

So I think that seeing really complex things made is important to inferring design—but nonetheless the inference may be a sound one. When we find a watch on a heath, we are not just inferring that a human designed the watch, and hence the watch was designed. For even if we knew no human designed the watch, we would be confident the watch was designed. It’s just that our “explanatory imagination” has an advantage over the caveman’s.

But I am no caveman. I could be very wrong when trying to put myself in the sandals of one.