The Insentient Watchmaker

You say that...
If I...
Stumbled on a watch I'd assume it had a watchmaker,
That a muffin presupposes a baker,
So you must agree sooner or later,
That this proves that there's a creator.
So if I put my foot in a stinker,
You'd assume the existence of a sphincter,
Thus you don't need to be a great thinker
To coclude that God's a bum,
...
--Exerpt from "Ten Foot Cock and a Few Hundred Virgins" by Tim Minchin

William Paley first posed the question of whether, if you found a watch on the ground, you would suppose that it had always been there, or that its complexity and apparent purposefulness implied that someone had made it. Would you assume that the watch had a watchmaker?

Well, I think most watches are made mostly by machines these days, but if you're asking if I would think it was the result of a series of improvements upon the designs of less sophisticated timekeeping devices leading back to something that I would not have recognized as one or if I would assume that it only existed by fiat of some magic man in he sky for whose existence I have no evidence, my answer would have to be the former.

Modern clocks are derived from sundials, which meter time using the motion of a shadow cast by a gnomon onto a dial. Anything that casts a shadow can function as a rudimentary gnomon, and any landmark that the shadow moves across can be used to measure its movement. I can just imagine a cave mother telling her cave children that they can play outside, but they have to come inside the cave when the shadow of the big mountain reaches the tree line. This type of primitive timekeeping system can be augmented with additional landmarks to measure a the shadow's movement with a finer gradation, and the addition of an artificial scale with regular intervals makes the measurement more systematic. Simple mechanisms can be added to continue measuring time when the sunlight is not available, and many types of minor improvements can be made to keep time in a way that is more precise, efficient or convenient. Moderns clocks are the result of a series of many such minute improvements, as well as many dead-end modifications to clocks that were not worth repeating, and may not have ever been built before that fact was determined.

This is a process of evolution. Memes arise as random thoughts and chance occurrences. Some are absurd and dismissed immediately, others are tried unsuccessfully, but only those that work are repeated and become the basis for further improvements. Evolution isn't a process of design that doesn't require intelligence, design is a process of evolution that does.

Maybe Intelligent Design Does Have a Place in Science Class

You'll probably be shocked to hear me say it, but I think that Intelligent Design should be included in science classes. In fact, I think ID could play a more important role in science class than evolution. You see, most current science classes are a big fat failure. They teach many things that we have learned through science, but they generally do a piss-poor job of defining science, which is why so many of the products our public school system (or worse, homeschoolers) think that ID is science.

But wait, didn't I just say that ID belongs in science classes?

Intelligent Design belongs in science class because it is a consummate example of what science is not. Children are leaving school thinking that science is a body of knowledge that includes categories like physics, chemistry and biology. Under this definition, an argument could be made that if the Intelligent Design hypothesis were true (which many already assume to be the case), that it would be scientific.

Science, however, is not a body of knowledge. Science is a methodology for attaining knowledge about natural phenomena in the material world through observation and experimentation and, by extension, a standard for evaluating that knowledge. Our science classes attempt to teach the scientific method, or at least to pay lip service to doing so, but they put far more emphasis on memorizing formulae and the names of anatomical structures. These classes would be better termed "History of Science". A true science class should not teach the fruits of science, but rather the methodology of science and the value of scientific scrutiny of ideas rather than the dogmatic acceptance or rejection of them.

Intelligent Design is an untestable postulation of an immaterial being acting upon the physical world by supernatural means based on claims that have not and could not be observed to be true, and nearly every word of that description contradicts the definition of science.