Evidence for God: The Watchmaker Analogy

One of the most obvious and convincing evidences for the God of the Bible has always watchmaker5.jpgbeen the wonderful innovations we find in nature. The Apostle Paul writing in the book of Romans said, “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20), and this is quite true.Biochemist Michael Behe says …

“The simplicity that was once expected to be the foundation of life has proven to be a phantom; instead, systems of horrendous, irreducible complexity inhabit the cell.” Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, New York: The Free Press, 1996, p. 252.

An absolute must read book!

Molecular Biologist Michael Denton says …

“We now know not only of the existence of a break between the living and non-living world, but also that it watchmaker4.jpgrepresents the most dramatic and fundamental of all the discontinuities of nature. Between a living cell and the most highly ordered non-biological system, such as a crystal or a snowflake, there is a chasm as vast and absolute as it is possible to conceive. Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex … a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world.” Michael Denton, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Adler & Adler, 1986, pp. 249-250.


Another must read. Also see Denton’s Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe.

Bruce Alberts, former President of the National Academy of Sciences wrote an article entitled The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines. In his article, Alberts admits that

We have always underestimated cells . . . . The entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of watchmaker3.jpginterlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines . . . Why do we call the large protein assemblies that underlie cell function protein machines? Precisely because, like machines invented by humans to deal efficiently with the macroscopic world these protein assemblies contain highly coordinated moving parts. (Alberts, Bruce. 1998. The Cell as a Collection of Protein Machines: Preparing the NextGeneration of Molecular Biologists. Cell 92 (8 February): 291-94).

Although he tries to explain it away, even the ardent atheist Richard Dawkins cannot escape the obvious fact of Design in Nature … he spends all of Chapter 2 of his book, The Blind Watchmaker, elucidating the wonders of bat echolocation, then says,

watchmaker1.jpg“We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully ‘designed’ to have come into existence by chance. How, then, did they come into existence?” Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, W.W. Norton, 1996, p. 43.

After this admission of apparent design, he spends the remainder of the book trying to make the reader believe that these wonders of nature are NOT designed! He says it took Darwin and Wallace a “very large leap of the imagination” (p. xvi) to see that there is another, more plausible way that these complex ‘designs’ arose. Yes, Richard, it takes a very large leap alright! In fact, it takes Blind Faith. And you say Christians are the ones who have blind faith!

Thinking about all this inspired me to write a poem, The Watchmaker. Here’s the text …

The Watchmaker

A long time ago on a planet so bare,
Some water and dirt got mixed up with the air.
Some sand and some rocks to make it just right,
The stage was all set in the deep of the night.

A bolt of white lightning, a great peal of thunder,
And suddenly there was a marvelous wonder.
The rocks yielded metal, the sand turned to glass,
And as the years flew, a new thing came to pass.

The metal formed gears, the glass a watch face,
And little by little, things fell into place.
The parts came together, just like a good rhyme,
With ticks and with tocks and with hands that tell time.
A beautiful watch began ticking one day,
Formed all by itself in a wonderful way!

“Ridiculous story!” you say with a grin.
“Impossible, laughable…surely a sin!”
A watch needs a watchmaker, that’s plain to see,
A designer and builder that makes it for me.

Now all life is made of some interesting stuff,
Cells of all shapes like blobs filled with fluff.
But looks are deceiving and what we find there
Are factories and highways and gadgets to spare.

Assembly lines, robots, electrical cable,
Libraries, software; just look, if you’re able!
The marvels we see with a microscope’s stare
Make a watch look so simple, we dare not compare.

Now the doctors from Oxford say cells came by Chance
From Goo down to You in a beautiful dance.
What’s wrong with their thinking to have such odd notions?
That cells could just happen from dirt and warm oceans!

A cell and its wonders amaze all who see;
And a cell, like a watch, by Chance cannot be.
Those cells can build hummingbirds, agile and free,
Bumble bees, snails, my backyard oak tree,

A woodpecker built with a jackhammer nose,
Lightning bugs, monkeys, a beautiful rose,
And beetles with bombs that give frogs a surprise,
Chameleons with camouflage and some weird eyes.

All nature on Earth is so wondrously fine,
We have to admit that it’s all by Design;
And our Maker owns everything both great and small.
He’s the masterful “Watchmaker,” Lord over all.

This poem has been beautifully illustrated by Marie Tabler (screenshots above) and hosted as a Dynamation at …
http://www.kids4truth.com/watchmaker/watch.html

For excellent information on Creationism, go to …
http://www.answersingenesis.org

For scholarly Creationist research articles, go to …
http://www.icr.org

For the latest info on Intelligent Design Theory, go to …
http://www.uncommondescent.com

Comments are closed.