Science of Discworld III

one, he said.’
    ‘Didn’t need a god? But it says here he’s a priest of some sort!’
    ‘Er … sort of, sir. In the … history where Charles Darwin wrote Theology of Species , it had become more or less compulsory to take holy orders in order to attend university. Dawkins said evolution happened all by itself.’
    He shut his eyes. Ridcully alone was a much better audience than the senior faculty, who’d taken cross-purposes to the status of a fine art, but his Archchancellor was a practical, sensible man and therefore found Roundworld difficult. It wasn’t a sensible place.
    ‘You’ve foxed me there. How can it just happen?’ said Ridcully. ‘It makes no sense if there isn’t someone who knows what’s going on. There’s got to be a reason .’
    ‘Quite so, sir. But this is Roundworld,’ said Ponder. ‘Remember?’
    ‘But surely this other feller, Dawkins, made it all right again?’ Ridcully floundered. ‘You did say it was the right book.’
    ‘But at the wrong time. It was too late, sir. He didn’t write his book until more than a hundred years later. It caused a huge row—’
    ‘An ungodly one, I suspect?’ said Ridcully cheerfully, dipping the toast in the egg.
    ‘Haha, sir, yes. But it was still too late. Humanity was well on the road to extinction.’
    Ridcully picked up Theology and turned it over in his hands, getting butter on it.
    ‘Seems innocent enough,’ he said. ‘Gods making it all happen … well, that’s common sense.’ He held up a hand. ‘I know, I know! This is Roundworld, I know. But where there’s something as complicated as a watch, you know there must be a watchmaker.’
    ‘That’s what the Darwin who wrote the Theology book said, sir, except that he stated that the watchmaker remained part of the watch,’ said Ponder.
    ‘Oilin’ it, and so forth?’ said Ridcully, cheerfully.
    ‘Sort of, sir. Metaphorically.’
    ‘Hah!’ said Ridcully. ‘No wonder there was a row. Priests don’t like that sort of thing. They always squirm when things get mystical.’
    ‘Oh, the priests? They loved it,’ said Ponder.
    ‘What? I thought you said vested interests were against it!’
    ‘Yes, sir. I meant the philosophers and scientists,’ said Ponder Stibbons. ‘The technomancers. But they lost .’

FOUR
PALEY ONTOLOGY
    P ALEY’S METAPHOR OF THE WATCH , alluded to by Ridcully, still remains powerful; powerful enough for Richard Dawkins to title his neo-Darwinian riposte of 1986 The Blind Watchmaker . Dawkins 1 made it clear that in his view, and those of most evolutionary biologists over the past fifty years, there was no watchmaker for living organisms, in Paley’s sense: ‘Paley’s argument is made with passionate sincerity and is informed by the best biological scholarship of his day, but it is wrong, gloriously and utterly wrong.’ But, says Dawkins, if we must give the watchmaker a role, then that role must be the process of natural selection that Darwin expounded. If so, the watchmaker has no sense of purpose: it is blind. It’s a neat title but easily misunderstood, and it opens the way to replies, such as the recent book by William Dembski, How Blind Is the Watchmaker ? Dembski is an advocate of ‘intelligent design’, a modern reincarnation of Paley with updated biology which repeats the old mistakes in new contexts. 2
    If you did find a watch on a heath, your first thought would probably not be that there must have been a watchmaker, but a watch- owner . You would either wish to get the owner’s property back to them, or look guiltily around to make sure they weren’t anywhere nearby before you snaffled it. Paley tells us that if we find, say, a spider on the path, then we are compelled to infer the existence of a spider-maker. But he finds no such compulsion to infer the existence of a spider-owner. Why is one human social role emphasised, but the other suppressed?
    Moreover, we know what a watch is for, and this colours our thinking. Suppose, instead, that our nineteenth-century heath-walker chanced upon a mobile phone, left there by some careless time traveller from the future. He would probably still infer ‘design’ from its intricate form … but purpose? What conceivable purpose would a mobile phone have in the nineteenth century, with no supporting network of transmission towers? There is no way to look at a mobile phone and infer some evident purpose. If its battery has run down, it doesn’t do anything . And if what was found