On the weekend I sat through a sermon about ... well i'm not precisely sure. But it had a basic theme of 'God made everything so God is fantastic'. In it, there was a slight variation of the watchmaker analogy.
This version is a conversation. It finishes with one guy asking the other 'how can you look at your watch and deduce that it has a designer, and yet look at the complexity of the inner workings of your hand and believe it developed on it's own'. (Forgive any inaccuracy - i'm paraphrasing).
OK preachers, put your thinking caps on. I now present to you Occam's razor. It's a scientific concept (though Occam was a theologian) that recommends the simplest most-evident hypothesis over one that involves many assumptions (given that both hypotheses can explain the observed result).
For living things, the simplest and most evident hypothesis is gradual change over time. That is, i can do things now that i couldn't when i was aged five. However, my watch has not developed any new functions since i first received it - nor has it grown. Even if it could reproduce, or last forever, it would not improve. So the gradual improvement hypothesis is ruled out. In the case of the watch, we must proceed to the next most-evident explanation.
So, preachers of the world, please realise the inadequacy of this comparison. Apart from being a flimsy piece of reasoning - which repels scientific people and drives a wedge between faith and science - it sails awfully close to the wind in terms of denying evolution. That's probably a topic for another day, but to introduce additional (non-gospel) beliefs to Christianity does no-one any favours.
