I googled it: “While both terms are related to forceful influence on someone’s beliefs, “indoctrination” generally refers to the process of teaching someone to accept a set of ideas without critical thinking, often through repetitive instruction, while “brainwashing” implies a more extreme and often forceful method of manipulating someone’s mind, usually involving isolation, deprivation, and intense psychological pressure to completely change their beliefs and behaviors.”
I considered brainwashing a part of indoctrination. If you fight against the indoctrination, it escalates into brainwashing. As in the US military.
Watches are not naturally occurring. If you showed me a watch next to a tree I might believe that God designed the watch. But he didn’t. Watches were created by humans. So as long as evolution provides for the existence of humans then evolution provides for the existence of watches. It’s that simple. The first eye in nature was not nearly as complex as the human eye.
The watchmakers arguement…isn’t that the one where if one finds a watch on a beach, one knows that someone made it?
What about the sand? A Christian claims EVERYTHING is made by god. So, in this analogy sand is the thing which was not made, so the the argument doesn’t seem to hold up.
Can a Christian point to something which has NOT been created to compare to something which has been created? Its kind of hard to marvel at the regular structure of a crystal, as god’s creation…and ignore the amorphous structure of glass. And yes, there is natural glass. Both are created substances according to Christians.
This is exactly my response, Paley infers design, in his argument, by asserting we instinctively recognise a watch as out of place in a natural setting, but fails to understand what he is actually saying. If everything were designed then designed things would not contrast at all with nature.
The argument is rife with false equivalences as well, since watches are human designs, and he is arguing for supernatural designs and creations, we also have sufficient objective evidence to demonstrate that watches are designed and created, we have none that anything natural is, or for any deity, or anything supernatural. When we know something is designed, they never appear randomly in nature, that’s why of course a shiny metal watch would look out of place in an entirely natural setting.