How We Believe, 2nd Ed.

by Michael Shermer

  Certainly it is time to reject Aristotelian physics and with it the ancient and medieval concepts of God and soul. And with Tipler’s narrow definition of life as information processing machines (with DNA coding for our anatomy and physiology and neurons coding for our thoughts and memories), it is conceivable the short-lived and fragile carbon-based, protein-chain life forms could be reconstituted into something more durable and long-lasting, such as silicon chips. A human life, by this analysis, is a “pattern” of information, and silicon can store the pattern much longer than protein, and there may be other future technologies we cannot yet conceive that could hold the integrity of the pattern still longer, perhaps approaching infinity, and thus immortality. As for God’s future tense, The Interpreter’s Bible notes that the common translation of Exodus 3:14 is “I AM WHO I AM,” with a secondary alternative of “I AM WHAT I AM,” and a tertiary translation of “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.” Richard Elliott Friedman, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego, told me: “Tipler and Luther are simply wrong. God is not a future-tense verb in biblical Hebrew.” Case closed. As for the Omega Point, Tipler says it is transcendent to time, but his God is the future c-boundary of the universe that acts back in time, not the personal anthropomorphic God who cares about us that most people think of when they think about God.

  Why must the God conclusion be drawn from science? Why not speculate on the possibility of space travel, human occupation of the galaxy and eventually other galaxies, machine intelligence, and even the far future of the universe, without trying to tie it into some ancient mythic Hebrew doctrine created by and for people living on the margins of the Mediterranean nearly 4,000 years ago? What are the chances that this agrarian society, constructing myths and stories whole cloth out of traditions that preceded them sometimes by as much as a thousand years (and rewritten and reinterpreted to fit their social and cultural needs, as all myths are), just happened to anticipate one interpretation of late twentieth-century cosmology? Much more likely is that Tipler is pushing a particular rendition of modern cosmology and physics—one that is by no means shared by his colleagues—into and beyond the borderline between science and religion. It may be that someday science will reduce all religious and metaphysical questions to the equations of physics, but we are so far from that stage that wisdom would seem to dictate that we leave the God conclusion out of science altogether.

  4.

  God and the Cosmologists. After reading Tipler’s book I thought perhaps I was missing something and that I better read what other cosmologists, astronomers, and physicists were thinking about the relationship of science and religion. According to David Deutsch, whom Tipler quotes in support, there is no God in his cosmos. Deutsch believes Tipler may be right about the Omega Point’s future existence, and that it is conceivable we could all be resurrected in the far future of the universe, but, he concludes: “Unfortunately Tipler himself … makes exaggerated claims for his theory which have caused most scientists and philosophers to reject it out of hand.” Deutsch points out that Tipler’s Omega Point not only differs from everyone else’s version of God, there are additional problems:

  For instance, the people near the omega point could not, even if they wanted to, speak to us or communicate their wishes to us, or work miracles (today). They did not create the universe, and they did not invent the laws of physics—nor could they violate those laws if they wanted to. They may listen to prayers from the present day (perhaps by detecting very faint signals), but they cannot answer them. They are (and this we can infer from Popperian epistemology) opposed to religious faith, and have no wish to be worshiped. And so on. But Tipler ploughs on, and argues that most of the core features of the God of the Judaeo-Christian religions are also properties of the omega point.

  Where Tipler and Davies see God in the cosmos, Deutsch and others do not. For example, in Alan Guth’s well-received book, The Inflationary Universe, there is no mention of God or religion whatsoever. In his final chapter, “A Universe ex Nihilo,” Guth concludes:

  While the attempts to describe the materialization of the universe from nothing remain highly speculative, they represent an exciting enlargement of the boundaries of science. If someday this program can be completed, it would mean that the existence and history of the universe could be explained by the underlying laws of nature. That is, the laws of physics would imply the existence of the universe. We would have accomplished the spectacular goal of understanding why there is something rather than nothing–because, if this approach is right, perpetual “nothing” is impossible.

  For Lee Smolin, in his 1997 The Life of the Cosmos, “the present crisis of modern cosmology is also an opportunity for science to finally transcend the religious and metaphysical faiths of its founders.” Smolin’s multiverse model includes an evolutionary mechanism where, like its biological counterpart, natural selection chooses from a variety of “species” of universes, each containing varying forms of laws of nature. Some of those universes with laws of nature like ours will be “selected” for intelligent life, which at some point in its evolution develops big enough brains to consider such questions of origins. Beyond that, Smolin admits, questions about ultimate existence and purpose “are in the class of really hard questions, such as the problem of consciousness or the problem of why there is in the world anything at all, rather than nothing. I do not see, really, how science, however much it progresses, could lead us to an understanding of these questions.”

  Maybe our universe simply popped into existence out of the quantum fluctuation of the vacuum of some larger multiverse. Maybe our universe is just one of those things that happened for no reason at all.

  THE NEW CREATIONISM

  On the heels of the new cosmology is the new creationism, but with a far more activist agenda in working to see Genesis taught in public schools. In the twentieth century, creationists have employed three strategies to achieve this end: (1) banning the teaching of evolution, (2) demanding equal time for Genesis with Darwin, and (3) the demand of equal time for “creation-science” with “evolution-science.” All three of these strategies were defeated in court cases, starting with the famed 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” and ending with the 1987 Louisiana trial, which went all the way to the United States Supreme Court where it was overturned by a vote of 7 to 2. This ended what I have called the “top-down” strategies of the creationists to legislate their beliefs into culture through public schools.

  With these defeats they turned to “bottom-up” strategies of mass mailings to schools with creationist literature, debates at schools and colleges, and enlisting the aid of mainstream academics like University of California-Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson and Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, and even roping in the conservative commentator William F. Buckley, whose PBS show, Firing Line, hosted a debate in December 1997, where it was resolved that “evolutionists should acknowledge creation.” The debate was emblematic of a new creationism, employing new euphemisms such as “intelligent-design theory,” “abrupt appearance theory,” or “initial complexity theory,” where it is argued that the “irreducible complexity” of life proves it was created by an intelligent designer, or God. In Behe’s book, Darwin’s Black Box, the biochemist, who has become something of a cult hero among creationists, explains this phrase: “By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning.”

  Consider the creationists’ favorite example of the human eye, a very complex organ that is, we are told, irreducibly complex—take out any one part and it will not work. How could natural selection have created the human eye when none of the individual parts themselves have any adaptive significance? There are four answers that refute this argument.

  1.

  It is not true that the human eye is irreducibly complex, so that the
removal of any part results in blindness. Any form of light detection is better than none—lots of people are visually impaired with any number of different diseases and injuries to the eyes, yet they are able to utilize their restricted visual capacity to some degree and would certainly prefer this to blindness. The creationists’ “irreducible complexity” argument is an either-or fallacy. No one asks for partial vision, but if that is what you get, then like all life forms throughout natural history, you learn to cope in order to survive.

  2.

  There is a deeper answer to the example of the evolution of the eye, and that is that natural selection did not create the human eye out of a warehouse of used parts lying around with nothing to do, any more than Boeing created the 747 without the ten million halting jerks and starts from the Wright Brothers to the present. Natural selection simply does not work that way. The human eye is the result of a long and complex pathway that goes back hundreds of millions of years to a simple eyespot where a handful of light-sensitive cells provides information to the organism about an important source of the light—the sun; to a recessed eyespot where a small surface indentation filled with light-sensitive cells provides additional data in the form of direction; to a deep recession eyespot where additional cells at greater depth provide more accurate information about the environment; to a pinhole camera eye that is actually able to focus an image on the back of a deeply recessed layer of light-sensitive cells; to a pinhole lens eye that is actually able to focus the image; to a complex eye found in modern mammals such as humans. And this is just part of the story—how many other stages of eye development were lost to the ravages of time because there was an organ that did not fossilize well?

  We can also use the human eye as an example of bad design. The configuration of the retina is in three layers, with the light-sensitive rods and cones at the bottom, facing away from the light, and underneath a layer of bipolar, horizontal, and amacrine cells, themselves underneath a layer of ganglion cells that help carry the transduced light signal from the eye to the brain in the form of neural impulses. And this entire structure sits beneath a layer of blood vessels. For optimal vision, why would an intelligent designer have built an eye backwards and upside down? This does not make sense. But it would make sense if natural selection built eyes from whatever materials were available, and in the particular configuration of the ancestral organism’s preexisting organic structures.

  The evolution of the eye from a simple eyespot to the complex eye, which has occurred independently at least a dozen times in natural history, shows that the eye is neither irreducibly complex nor intelligently designed. It was constructed by natural selection in fits and starts over hundreds of millions of years from available parts and systems already in use.

  The anatomy of the human eye shows that it is anything but “intelligently designed.” It is built upside down and backwards, with photons of light having to travel through the cornea, lens, aqueous fluid, blood vessels, ganglion cells, amacrine cells, horizonal cells, and bipolar cells, before reaching the light-sensitive rods and cones that will transform the signal into neural impulses. From the rods and cones, the impulses are then sent to the visual cortex at the back of the brain for processing into meaningful images.

  3.

  The “intelligent design” argument, similar to Aquinas’s fifth way to prove God, also suffers from the fact that the world is not always so intelligently designed! Look at the animal on the following page. It is Ambulocetus natans, a transitional fossil between the quadrupedal land mammal Mesonychids and the direct ancestor of modern whales, the Archaeocetes. Ambulocetus natans, say the paleontologists who discovered it, swam “by undulating the vertebral column and paddling with the hindlimbs, combining aspects of modern seals and otters, rather than by vertical movements of the tail fluke, as is the case in modern whales.” First of all, why would God, in His infinite wisdom and power, create a mammal that appears midway between a land mammal and a modern marine mammal, that combines the movements of both land and marine mammals, and, most uniquely, paddles with hind limbs obviously well designed for land locomotion? For that matter, why would He create air-breathing, warm-blooded, breast-feeding marine mammals only moderately well “designed” for living in the oceans, when he could have just stuck with the much more efficient fish design? Finally, on a larger scale, why would God design the fossil record to look like descent with modification was the result of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, rather than sprinkling geological strata willy-nilly with, say, trilobites in Cretaceous strata, and a T-Rex or two alongside some Neanderthal fossils? The fossil record screams out evolution, not creation.

  4.

  When Michael Behe defines irreducible complexity, he concludes: “An irreducibly complex system cannot be produced directly (that is, by continuously improving the initial function, which continues to work by the same mechanism) by slight, successive modifications of a precursor system, because any precursor to an irreducibly complex system that is missing a part is by definition nonfunctional.” Philosopher Robert Pennock has pointed out that this last phrase employs a classic fallacy of bait-and-switch logic—reasoning from something that is true “by definition” to something that is proved through empirical evidence. Creationists counter the above arguments about the eye by redefining what constitutes an eye, reducing its complexity until they get one that does not work. This is not allowed in the rules of right reasoning.

  The frequent rallying cry of creationists and other antievolutionists demands proof of the existence of “just one transitional fossil.” The discovery of Ambulocetus natans, a transitional fossil between the landbased Mesoynchids and the marine mammal Archaeocetes, the direct ancestor of modern whales, answers that demand. This fossil record has all the earmarks of an evolutionary process of Darwinian “descent with modification” rather than a creationist “abrupt appearance.”

  The new creationists have also mounted an attack on the very foundations of science—its philosophical naturalism (sometimes called methodological naturalism, materialism, or scientism). This is the belief that life is the result of a natural and purposeless process in a system of material causes and effects that does not allow, or need, the introduction of supernatural forces. The argument against naturalism is trumpeted by University of California–Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson, a self-proclaimed “philosophical theist and a Christian” who believes in “a Creator who plays an active role in worldly affairs.” In his book Darwin on Trial, Johnson claims that scientists unfairly define God out of the picture by saying, essentially, “we are only going to examine natural causes and shall ignore any supernatural ones.”

  This is a fallacy of fuzzy definitions. What does Johnson mean by supernatural? Cosmologists who find God in the anthropic principle are both theists and naturalists. Supernatural simply means a lack of knowledge about the natural. We might as well call it ignatural. To medieval Europeans the weather was caused by supernatural forces; they abandoned that belief when natural forces were understood. This is, once again, the “God of the Gaps” argument, which is what philosophers call “arguments from ignorance.” The rules of logical reasoning do not allow the following: “You cannot explain X, therefore Y must be the cause,” or, to cut to the chase, “Science cannot explain all life, therefore God must be the cause.” Of course, just as naturalism allows us to tell creationists that they cannot “prove” God through science, we cannot “disprove” God through science. After all, as the anthropologist Eugenie Scott cleverly notes, an “omnipotent God by definition can do anything it wants, including interfering in the universe to make it look exactly like there is no interference!”

  Even if we did allow creationists to make the gaps argument, it is easily countered. Although in their public debates and published works creationists replace “God” with such obfuscating phrases as “abrupt appearance” and “intelligent design,” their true colors fly when you attend their church services and monitor their Internet chat ro
oms. There is no question in anyone’s mind that when creationists argue for an intelligent designer they mean God, and it is almost always the Judaeo-Christian God and all that goes with it. But why must an intelligent designer be God? Since creationists like William Dembski argue that what they are doing is no different from what the astronomers do who look for intelligent design in the background noise of the cosmos in their search for extraterrestrial intelligent radio signals, then why not postulate that the design in irreducibly complex structures such as DNA is the result of an extraterrestrial experiment? Such theories have been proffered, in fact, by some daring astronomers and science fiction authors who speculated (wrongly, it appears) that the Earth was seeded with amino acids, protein chains, or microbes billions of years ago, possibly even by an extraterrestrial intelligence. Suffice it to say that no creationist worth his sacred salt is going to break bread or sip wine in the name of some experimental exobiologist from Vega. And that is the point. What we are really talking about here is not a scientific problem in the study of the origins of life, it is a religious problem in dealing with the findings of science.