Presupparables: The Clockmaker’s Sons

Presupparables, Ch. 1

The Parable of the Clockmaker’s Sons

There was once a clockmaker who lived at the edge of a great city. In his workshop hung a clock so vast it kept the time for all who dwelt within its sound. Its ticking was like the beating of a heart, and its chimes marked the passing of hours for merchants, magistrates, children, and kings.

The clockmaker had two sons.

The elder son loved his father and learned the way of wheels and gears and oil. He marveled that the ticking never failed and that each morning the sun rose with the same precision that the pendulum swung. The elder son knew that without the clockmaker, the clock would not tick. So he listened carefully, and he taught others to tell time by the sound of the chimes.

But the younger son grew proud and clever in his own eyes. One day he stood in the marketplace and said, “Why should we speak of the clockmaker? Does not the clock run by itself?”

A crowd gathered.

“See how the sun rises, and the gears turn, and time is kept without fail,” the younger son said. “The chimes do not speak of their maker; they speak of their own regularity. We need no father to tell us the time. We are the timekeepers now.”

And so a new school was formed—the Order of the Autonomous Chronologists. They drew charts and wrote treatises. They declared that the chimes were born from necessity, that the ticking was self-caused, and that anyone who spoke of the clockmaker was clinging to primitive superstition.

Yet still, the clock ticked.

They timed their experiments by it. They scheduled their debates by it. They mocked the clockmaker’s name precisely on the hour.

Then one day, the ticking stopped.

The marketplace fell silent. The Order gathered in panic.

One said, “Perhaps the clock was not eternal after all.”

Another said, “We must build a new one from the fragments.”

Still another whispered, “What if the elder son was right?”

So they visited the workshop.

Inside, they found the elder son kneeling beside the silent machine, oiling each gear, rewinding the mainspring.

“I knew it would falter,” he said. “But my father taught me to care for it in his stead.”

And with a gentle push, the pendulum swung once more.

The ticking returned, and the market breathed again.

But the younger son turned his face away and said, “It was luck, or hidden laws, or perhaps the machine restarted itself. In any case, we need no keeper.”

And he walked away to teach his doctrines to those who could not hear the ticking for themselves.

Explanation:

The clock represents the intelligibility, order, and uniformity of the universe—the realm of logic, science, and time.

The clockmaker is the Triune God: the Creator who not only makes but upholds (Heb. 1:3).

The elder son is the believer who acknowledges the source of order and lives accordingly, teaching others to hear the ticking as a gift.

The younger son is the autonomous thinker—the secularist who uses God's gifts while denying their Giver. He builds a worldview on borrowed capital, even timing his rebellion by God’s grace.

But when the “clock” stops—when his system collapses under the weight of its contradictions—he clings to invented explanations rather than repentance.

This parable illustrates the Transcendental Argument: unbelief cannot account for the very order it relies on. It mocks the Father on borrowed time.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear.