In crossing a beach, suppose I pitched my foot against a watch, and were asked how it came to be there. I might possibly answer, that it had lain there since the beginning of time when God created it and placed it there.
But suppose I had found a grain of sand upon the beach, and it should be inquired how the grain happened to be in that place. I should hardly concede the same legitimacy to this question as to the one I had been previously asked – that this particular grain of sand somehow stood out in contrast with its peers in demand of a special explanation for its whereabouts. After all, it is all good and proper to lend oneself to the ponderance of anomalies, but an anomaly repeated a billion times over quickly becomes an expected regularity with no means to cause undue perplexity. I should therefore rightly think the question daft.
Yet why should not this objection serve for the grain of sand as well as for the watch? For this reason, that, when we come to inspect the grain of sand, we find that – unlike the watch – it has no parts put together for a purpose. We do not think that the grain attests to a creator in the same way as the watch. We presume not that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, a vast range of artificers with little grain-shops wherein they toil to assemble the best quality sand-grains for capital gain, and who designed the grain’s beachy function.
If indeed it is so, that for every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, the same might be said to exist in nature. What then – which unearthly and inexplicable lapse in judgement – would ever compel you to pick up the watch in contemplation of its anomalous placement instead of doing the exact same to every single grain of sand in the immediate vicinity?
Were there indeed an artificer of natural phenomena an accurate depiction of the situation would not be that of walking on a beach of grains containing a single watch. Rather it could be likened to walking on a heap of tiny little watches with cawing watches flying around in the watch-coloured sky occasionally to swoop down into the waves of liquid watches to catch a swimming watch to eat. In the distance you might hear the joyful laughter of playing watches and the sound of their warden-watch telling them that there is watch for dinner and they should come into the watch to sit down at the watch to eat. Remember to wash your watches before you dig in!
In a world of magic watch-making governed in its entirety by the whims of a magical watch-maker, and where nothing exists that is not a watch, why would you ever ponder the explanation of anything? It should be no more surprising to find an intricately designed laptop at the surface of one of Jupiter’s moons than it is to find a drop of water in the ocean. A living and breathing dragon or a fairy in your cup-board should hold no greater degree of strangeness to you than a lion or a zebra in Africa.
By all means the universe should be entirely devoid of wonder because anything, no matter how bizarre, could pop into existence by decree of the watch-maker at any moment. Nothing ought to merit any sort of explanatory research because a world run on say-so should have no need of causal contingency. A lamp need not be shining because it is hooked up to an electrical outlet. It might just be obeying orders. A perceived sound does not necessarily stem from anything causing it. It might as well have just spontaneously formed in your inner ear because the watch-maker designed it so.
Why did you pick up the watch? There is nothing to distinguish it from anything else. There is nothing special about a watch among a world of watches, right?
Last Christmas, I gave you my heart
