watchmaker’s dilemma

sculpture series
2017

Linn was invited to participate in the Fountainhead artist’s residency in Miami. During her time there she explored new materials and also focused on intention: for something to exist must there be a designer?

“The watchmaker analogy or watchmaker argument is a teleological argument which states, by way of an analogy, that a design implies a designer, especially intelligent design an intelligent designer, i.e. a creator deity. The watchmaker analogy was given by William Paley in his 1802 book Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. The original analogy played a prominent role in natural theology and the ‘argument from design,’ where it was used to support arguments for the existence of God of the universe, in both Christianity and Deism. Prior to Paley, however, Sir Isaac Newton, René Descartes, and others from the time of the scientific revolution had believed ‘that the physical laws he had uncovered revealed the mechanical perfection of the workings of the universe to be akin to a watch, wherein the watchmaker is God.’” (excerpt from Wikipedia)