Religion is often a way of expressing a people’s national identity and differentiating it from that of its neighbours. The staunch Catholicism of the Poles, for example, is a symbol of national and cultural identity differentiating them from the Orthodox (or, previously, Communist) Russians to the East and the Lutheran North Germans to the West. Similarly, why is there a schism between the Roman Catholic Church and what became the Eastern Orthodox Church dating from the year 1054? This “Great Schism” was ostensibly largely caused by the refusal of the eastern churches to add the word filioque (“and from the Son”) to their creed. But the schism was really the result of a power struggle in the church between Rome and Constantinople, which in turn was a reflection of a linguistic, geographical and political divide. The rift has never been healed.
Yet another, and much more dangerous, religious divide is that between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Iran is the bastion of the Shia faith, claiming the adherence of no less than 89% of its population, while 9% are Sunni. Significantly, there is an ethnic difference between the two, as the ethnic Persian population itself is almost totally Shia, while Sunnis are largely drawn from the Lari, Turkomans, Baluchis or Kurds. But that has not always been the case. From the time of the Islamic conquest of Persia (637–51) until the sixteenth century the majority of the population of Iran was Sunni. The switch to Shia was the deliberate policy of Shah Ismail I of the Safavid dynasty (1487–1524), who forced his subjects to convert on pain of death. The purpose behind this policy was to give Iran a unique identity distinguishing it from its two neighbouring Sunni Turkish enemies, the Ottoman Empire to the West and the Central Asian Uzbeks to the North-East. Above all, the change to Shia enabled Ismail to establish an Islamic version of caesaropapism (sometimes misleadingly described as a theocracy), with the Shah at the head of the religion and at the same time a divinely ordained ruler — a foreshadowing of the current regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran, established in 1979. The point is that Iran owes its Shia identity not to any religious considerations but rather to political calculation.
Stages in the Development of the Universe
Science has identified a number of phases in the development of the universe, which can be identified and labelled in several different ways. One such classification identifies seven stages, phases or thresholds:
“Big Bang”
The formation of stars and galaxies
Chemical evolution — the coming into existence of the chemicals that make up the earth
Planetary evolution — the formation of our solar system among others
Organic evolution — the origin of life, with all life forms descending from the same initial living organism, so that human beings are related not only to apes and mice but also to bananas and bacteria.
Macro-evolution — changes occurring in living organisms over very long periods known as “geological timescales”
Micro-evolution — changes and variations in living organisms on the timescale of human lifetimes (i.e. in under 100 years or so).
For our purposes it will be more convenient to group the stages of the development of the universe under three headings:
The coming into existence of the universe, including the earth [= phases (i) to (iv) of the above list];
The origin of life [= phase (v)]; and
Change and variation in living organisms [= phases (vi) and (vii)].13
Big Bang?
The first of these stages is itself highly complex. Even the “Big Bang” theory itself does not claim that the coming into existence of the universe was instantaneous, but rather postulates that the Big Bang was quickly followed by three eras known respectively as “the Planck epoch”, “the grand unification epoch” and “the electroweak epoch”. It supposedly took 9 billion years after the Big Bang for the solar system, including the earth, to be formed. The earth is believed to be about 4.54 billion years old.
Current scientific theory dates the origin of the first life on earth, that of simple cells known as prokaryotes, to 3.6 billion years ago, with fish first appearing 500 million years ago, mammals 200 million years ago, primates 60 million years ago and modern man 200,000 years ago.
No Life, No Natural Selection
There is a worrying tendency on Dawkins’s part to blur the distinctions between the three phases of the universe’s development and to regard evolution as the key to all three, as in the subtitle of Dawkins’s Blind Watchmaker: Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design. When asked “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”, Dawkins replied:
I believe that all life, all intelligence, all creativity and all ‘design’ anywhere in the universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.14
The logic of this credo is less than impressive. Dawkins here lumps together at least two of the main stages of the universe’s development — the origin of life and natural selection — and possibly even all three, if the beginning of the universe itself is included as well. His attribution of all development to Darwinian natural selection makes no sense either from a developmental or from a logical point of view. For, as even Dawkins himself admits elsewhere (see below), natural selection needed life in order to kick-start it. Darwinian evolution by natural selection could not possibly have begun before the origin of life, because it is an explanation of changes and adaptations in living species. So, no life, no natural selection. There is therefore no basis to Dawkins’s conclusion that “Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe”. A distinction must be drawn between Design before there was life on earth and Design after the emergence of life. The school of “Intelligent Design” (ID) wrongly sees Design in each and every individual biological mechanism of “irreducible complexity” or “specified complexity” after the emergence of life on earth — each mechanism being seen as separately created by an unnamed Intelligent Designer, the thinly disguised theistic God of Christianity. Darwinian natural selection has a clear evidential advantage over this type of Design theory relating to the period after the origin of life on earth. But Design before the existence of life on earth is a completely different matter, to which evolution and natural selection have and can have no relevance whatsoever, because evolution cannot start by itself but needs life to initiate it.
The three stages in the development of the universe are very different, not least because the evidence for the first two is extremely meagre. Darwinian theory is primarily concerned with the third of these stages and has very little to say about the first two. Yet it is precisely the first two stages that are most relevant to the question of the existence or non-existence of God or of Design, and it is here, as we shall see, that belief in an impersonal God makes the most sense, coupled with acceptance of evolution after life on earth has begun.
The Origin of Life
Life is based on the cell, which in Darwin’s day was assumed to be a fairly simple blob of protoplasm. Cell biology has since revealed a much more complex picture:
Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10–12 grams, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of a hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machinery built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world.15
Here is Dawkins’s less than impressive attempt to answer the question about the origin of life put to him in an (undated) interview on America’s Public Broadcasting Service:
QUESTION: What do you say to the argument that some people are raising now that it’s all very well for evolution to be the mechanism once you have a self-replicating structure like DNA — but how do you get that complex structure in the first place? Maybe DNA is the work of God?
/> MR. DAWKINS: It’s a different argument to say how did the whole process start — how do we begin with the origin of life? The origin of life — the key process in the origin of life was the arising of a self-replicating molecule. This was a very simple thing compared with what it’s given rise to. By far the majority of the work in producing the elegant complexity of life is done after the origin of life, during the process of evolution. There does remain the very first step — I don’t think it’s necessarily a bigger step than several of the subsequent steps, but it is a step. And it’s a step which we don’t fully understand — mainly because it happened such a long time ago, and under conditions when the Earth was very different. And so it’s not necessarily possible to simulate again the chemical conditions of the origin of life. There are various theories for how it might have happened. None of them is yet fully convincing. It may be that none of them ever will be, because it may be that we shall never know fully what the conditions were. But I don’t find it at all a deeply mysterious step.16
Dawkins does at least admit that the origin of life is not “fully” understood, but at the same time tries to downgrade its importance and its degree of complexity compared with the evolution that occurred afterwards. In particular, he pooh-poohs the suggestion that the origin of life is “at all a deeply mysterious step” — contrary to Darwin, who specifically referred to it as a “mystery”.
Dawkins pointedly ignores his interlocutor’s question: “Maybe DNA is the work of God?” But what is the answer? Dawkins tries to tackle this in his book titled The Blind Watchmaker. Here is what he says:
To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like ‘God was always there’, and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say ‘DNA was always there’, or ‘Life was always there’, and be done with it.17
And:
Maybe, it is argued, the Creator does not control the day-to-day succession of evolutionary events; maybe he did not frame the tiger and the lamb, maybe he did not make a tree, but he did set up the original machinery of replication and replicator power, the original machinery of DNA and protein that made cumulative selection, and hence all of evolution, possible.18
Dawkins’s comment is: “This is a transparently feeble argument, indeed it is obviously self-defeating.”19 Who made God? Where did God come from? Or: Has God always existed? The atheist objection is that if God created the universe, who created God? Judging by the number of times that Dawkins repeats this same point in The God Delusion, one must assume that he sees this as a killer argument against the existence of God — and at first sight it is a strong argument.
It reminds me of one of my favourite lines from the movies. In Superman (1978), the superhero comes to Lois Lane’s rescue by grabbing her as she is falling out of a burning plane in a mid-air accident, with the reassuring words: “Easy, miss, I’ve got you.” Lois Lane’s anguished response is: “You’ve got me? Who’s got you?”20
Dawkins was not the first person to pose the question of the origin of God. The Prophet Mohammed himself was aware of this argument, and is reputed (by Sahih Al-Bukhari, a ninth century Persian Muslim scholar) to have remarked: “A day will certainly come when some people will sit with their legs crossed and ask: ‘If God created everything, who created God?’” The answer given is: “God does not need causes and effects to create; rather, we need them to understand what He has created.”21
In effect, this conundrum is unanswerable except by faith, and there is no relevant evidence one way or the other. But, as we shall see, there is no more evidence in favour of Dawkins’s alternative answer.
“Cumulative Selection”
Dawkins’s alternative is something that he calls “cumulative selection”: “Cumulative selection is the key to all our modern explanations of life.”22 But Dawkins does go on to admit that “cumulative selection” could not start operating by itself — it needed to be kick-started by something else: “Cumulative selection is the key but it had to get started, and we cannot escape the need to postulate a single-step chance event in the origin of cumulative selection itself.”23 Amazingly, Dawkins goes even further by adding: “And that vital first step was a difficult one…”24 Even more amazingly, Dawkins goes on to assert that a certain amount of “luck” (or chance) should be assumed as necessary for the origin of life on earth.
So “cumulative selection” turns out to have no relevance at all to the question of the origin of life. It merely adds another completely made-up and redundant step between the origin of life and evolution by natural selection. Why did Dawkins add this completely unnecessary and unproven step? Presumably because the jump from a chance event starting life and the blind but non-random step-by-step operation of natural selection seemed just too great.
Weasel Words
But what is “cumulative selection” anyway? It is based on a variation of the well-known “infinite monkey theorem” positing that “a monkey bashing away at random on a typewriter could produce all the works of Shakespeare”.25 Even to produce a single line from Hamlet, “Methinks it is like a weasel”, would take a monkey “more than a million million million times as long as the universe has so far existed”.26 Dawkins therefore modified the experiment so that at each attempt the simulated monkey (actually a computer program) chooses the variant that most closely resembles the target phrase.
This guided selection process is what Dawkins means by “cumulative selection”, and Dawkins is at least honest enough to admit in a throwaway remark that his computer model of “cumulative selection” “is strictly a model of artificial selection, not natural selection”.27 Artificial selection, now generally called selective breeding, is the oldest kind of selection of all, namely the process by which animal breeders or farmers breed animals or plants to obtain particular characteristics — for example the enormous bulk of a St Bernard or the diminutive size of a King Charles Spaniel. But the point about artificial selection or selective breeding is that it is exactly the opposite of what natural selection is supposed to be. It is a designed process carefully guided by a controlling mind. To suggest that it would operate automatically when not simulated by a computer is just wishful thinking.
“Cumulative selection” is therefore not undirected and, above all, is concerned only with variations that occur after life has begun. It has no relevance whatsoever to the question of how life began. And it is an extra step gratuitously added to the process without any evidence whatsoever that it actually exists unless added in deliberately by conscious effort. So it is no better than a belief that life was the work of a supernatural Designer. Dawkins’s ramblings about “cumulative selection” are weasel words indeed — or, to be more precise, merely a red herring.
Occam’s Razor
Dawkins expresses agreement with the theologian and Christian apologist Richard Swinburne in preferring “the simplest hypothesis that fits the facts”.28 This conforms to a belief in the theory of Occam’s Razor, which is discussed in Chapter 2.
However, because it adds an extra step to the process, “cumulative selection” is not simpler but actually more complex than belief that life was brought into being by a supernatural Designer. So Dawkins’s preference for a “simple” solution does not help him here.
But Dawkins is so intent on rejecting design at every point that he even goes so far as to claim that the “multiverse” theory of an infinite number of universes is simple compared to “the God hypothesis”:
The multiverse, for all that it is extravagant, is simple… The multiverse may seem extravagant in sheer number of universes. But if each one of those universes is simple in its fundamental laws, we are still not postulating anything highly improbable. The very opposite has to be said of any kind of intelligence.29
The multiverse theory postulates that, with an infinite number of universes in existence, it wa
s inevitable that life would exist in at least some of them. So a Designer is not needed to explain life on earth, which exists simply because this planet happens to allow life to exist.
Is this a “simple” explanation for life on earth? No. It is not an explanation at all, because:
The whole idea of infinite universes is pure speculation — even more so than the idea of a supernatural Designer.
If the idea of a supernatural Designer or God begs the question “Who made God?”, so the idea of an infinity of universes begs the question: “How did all these universes come into existence?” And “What kick-started life in those universes that support life?”
So it is hard to regard a theory of infinite universes as a simpler explanation of the origin of life than the theory of a supernatural Designer.
Dawkins’s argument is also an example of circular reasoning: life on earth exists because this planet allows life on earth to exist!
Rival Theories of the Origin of Life
So much for Dawkins’s fetish about simplicity. It is very important to recognise just how different and how much more difficult the question of the origin of life is than the question of how variations in life forms occur after life has commenced. Here are some of the many theories that attempt to explain the origin of life:
Several explanations of the jump from the inanimate to the living try to reduce it from a jump to a step-by-step process, which only begs the question of what caused this development. One theory of this kind is the so-called Clay Theory put forward by A. Graham Cairns-Smith of the University of Glasgow in 1985. Another is the recent theory put forward by Jeremy England of MIT: “You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant.”30 As far as I am aware, there is no experimental evidence for this theory.
God Without Religion Page 2