Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic riffs on William Paley's famous "watchmaker analogy," a classic argument for intelligent design. In the original argument, Paley proposed that if you found a watch on the ground, its intricate design would lead you to conclude it had a designer, and similarly, the complexity of the natural world implies a divine creator. The comic extends this analogy: the man (depicted as Paley himself) asks the audience to further suppose the watch also kept shocking you at random times regardless of your behavior, and that this appeared to be a deliberate feature rather than a defect.

The caption reads: "William Paley proves that there's a God, and that he's a dick." The joke takes the intelligent design argument and turns it on its head. If the complexity of the natural world proves a designer, then the suffering, cruelty, and randomness of that same world -- where bad things happen to good people for no apparent reason -- must also be by design. The comic uses the watchmaker analogy to arrive at the conclusion that the designer, if one exists, is intentionally malicious, engaging with the classic theological "problem of evil" in a humorous way.