But does “watchmaker” really say God to us in the digital age? If we want to understand God through a technological metaphor, wouldn’t the computer programmer, the genetic engineer, or the environmental scientist seem more apt? With accurate clocks built into our cellphones, computers, coffeemakers, and cars, a device whose main purpose is to tell the time seems quaint—an eccentric luxury, not the work of awe-inspiring genius.

One’s choice of technology might have little consequence for design arguments’ logic, but each evokes a different image of divine power. Design arguments have never been intended to prove the mere existence of God, they’ve always been used to tell us something about the kind of God who designed us. The metaphors that help people understand God are reflections of the kind of God they desire, whether it’s one who works mysteriously, one who cares about human welfare, or one who rewards some people and punishes others. It's hard to imagine what we could say today about a God who is like a watchmaker. If we own watches, we might realize that someone made them, but who that person is and what they do is largely an abstraction today.

Paley was not the first to compare God to a watchmaker, but he did so in a more nuanced way than those who preceded him. And he wrote at a precise moment in the history of watch- and clock-making: when the world’s best watches were made in England, and watchmaking was an essential technology in modern society. When Paley began his book by considering a watch, he wasn’t just choosing the most complicated piece of technology at hand, and he didn’t want to just prove the existence of some generic designer; he was arguing for a specific interpretation of the Christian God, one who smiled upon British industry and imperialism.

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Perhaps the most important thing to know about English “watchmakers” in the 18th and early 19th centuries is that they rarely spent any time making watches.

As early as 1729, Bernard Mandeville wrote that “Watch-making… is come to a higher degree of Perfection, than it would have arrived at yet, if the whole had always remain’d the Employment of one Person.” Different parts were made in separate workshops and factories around the country. Mandeville inspired Adam Smith, who used watchmaking to describe how the division of labor led to more efficient production in his 1776 Wealth of Nations. By 1819, Abraham Rees’s Cyclopedia listed 13 different “principal workmen employed in manufacturing a movement” and 21 additional “workmen employed on a watch to complete it from the state in which the movement is received from the country.” None of these workmen were “watchmakers”; that title was reserved for the masters who were responsible for overseeing the final assembly and arrangement of these components. As Robert Campbell described in 1747:

The Watch-Maker puts his Name upon the Plate, and is esteemed the Maker, though he has not made in his shop the smallest Wheel belonging to it. It is supposed, however, that he can make all the Movements… He must be a Judge of the Goodness of Work at first Sight, and put his Name to nothing but what will stand the severest Trial; for the Price of the Watch depends upon the Reputation of the Maker only.

This was the watchmaker-God who Paley proposed: an assembler, an overseer, a judge. One who has the power and knowledge to make every component personally, but actually delegates some work of creation to “the ministry of subordinate agents.” Paley argued, “it is as though one Being should have fixed certain rules; and, if we may so speak, provided certain materials,” and left the task of creating the complex parts of living things to the appointed agency of natural laws. The watchmaker is not alone in his workshop, meticulously filing each gear and chain link and polishing each crystal; nor is the watchmaker God personally crafting the eyes of each animal, nor shaping their wings or eardrums. It is a managerial God, with important business to run and with a reputation for good products.