Watchmaker analogy
The watchmaker analogy is a often used as a teleological argument (argument from design) in support of Irreducible complexity by opponents of Evolution. If we find a watch in a field, it is too complex to have appeared there by natural process so we assume that there must be a watchmaker responsible for its creation. Similarly, the argument goes, life is too complex not to have a creator, God.
This analogy was anticipated by Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC) in De natura deorum, ii. 34
- When you see a sundial or a water-clock, you see that it tells the time by design and not by chance. How then can you imagine that the universe as a whole is devoid of purpose and intelligence, when it embraces everything, including these artifacts themselves and their artificers? (Gjertsen 1989, p. 199, quoted by Dennett 1995, p. 29)
The English divine William Derham (26 November 1657 – 5 April 1735) published his Artificial Clockmaker in 1696, a teleological argument for the being and attributes of God.
The watchmaker analogy was put by Bernard Nieuwentyt (1730) and referred to several times by Paley. A charge of wholesale plagiarism from this book was brought against Paley in the Athenaeum for 1848, but the famous illustration of the watch was not peculiar to Nieuwentyt, and had been appropriated by many others before Paley.
The argument was famously put by William_Paley in his book Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity collected from the Appearances of Nature, published in 1802. When Charles Darwin completed his studies of theology at Christ's College, Cambridge in 1831 he read Paley's Natural Theology and was convinced by it as a rational proof of God's existence in the complexity of living beings exquisitely fitted to their places in a happy world.
References
Full text of Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity