There are some reviews on this argument. The philosopher David Hume argued that we cannot make an analogy between clocks and other familiar works of art and the universe and living beings, since we know that clocks are man-made. Still, the universe and living beings have no idea how they were created. We can rely only on our experience, so we have no justification for concluding that the universe and living beings were designed in a planned way like clocks.
But Hume’s critique is flawed because the intelligent design argument does not require an analogy or direct experience to infer the planner’s existence from the complex work. Imagine that whoever finds the clock in the sand is a primitive tribe member who has never seen how clocks are made. Will he, therefore, conclude that the clock was created by chance?
Certainly not. The very structure of the clock as a complex, precise, and versatile system indicates its underlying design, even if we have no idea who designed it.
To understand how the universe and living beings were created, we have to rely on our experiences. Clocks are very complex, and we would never just believe that they happened by chance if we had never seen one before, right? Of course not. We would know someone or something created it. So how can we look at living beings and say they just happened by chance? We can’t because logically and intuitively, that answer doesn’t make sense.
