by Sam Fryman
It does not happen by division into a cumulative sequence of less improbable steps, because otherwise we could all do it, we could all write a hit song or a symphony or draw a great painting.
But Dawkins says, ah, the thing is, when we look at the formation of life, it is again just a question of statistics.
Well, we did mention Darrel Huff’s book How to Lie With Statistics didn’t we, and though we might have pointed out that politicians were forever using these statistics selectively to make their cases and deceive the public, it was surely not clear that scientists might be doing the same.
So is he?
Let’s have another verbatim quote:
Hoyle said that the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747. Others have borrowed the metaphor to refer to the later evolution of complex living bodies, where it has a spurious plausibility. The odds against assembling a fully functioning horse, beetle or ostrich by randomly shuffling its parts are up there in 747 territory. This, in a nutshell, is the creationist's favourite argument - an argument that could be made only by somebody who doesn't understand the first thing about natural selection: somebody who thinks natural selection is a theory of chance whereas - in the relevant sense of chance - it is the opposite.
We read these words of Dawkins’ in astonishment and disbelief. Does he, a biologist, knowing how incredibly complex are the biochemical mechanisms of life, such as DNA and cell structure and nerve development and brain chemistry and physiology and so on, think that the process of the “creation” or “origination” of life is in any way comparable in complexity of structure to a Boeing 747, which any boy engineering genius like Howard Hughes could probably put together with the right machines to aid him almost single-handedly, like a glorified Meccano kit?
This is what Dawkins is basing his whole sham on. He is saying, that the creation of life yes, admittedly looks virtually impossible if we tried to do it all at once, but if we just break it up into tiny, insignificant little steps, it becomes easy.
Well, please show us then Mr Dawkins, show us these easy little steps which have been defying science stubbornly with not the slightest sign of any genuine progress for the well over fifty long years since the discovery of DNA.
And no, Mr Dawkins, when you admit that you can’t, we won’t then turn around and illogically say “Ah, therefore God exists.” But what we will say is: you do not as you claim have any alternative explanation for the origin of life to a cosmic intelligence, as opposed to a blind watchmaker.
That leaves open the possibility of a God existing who creates everything. That is all.
Your ignorance of how life came to be does not prove God exists. But what it definitely does not do is discount the possibility that he does, as you claim.
But in any case, fearing such a logical response, which would leave people free to speculate on the God issue, he writes the following:
The origin of life is a flourishing, if speculative, subject for research. The expertise required for it is chemistry and it is not mine. I watch from the sidelines with engaged curiosity, and I shall not be surprised if, within the next few years, chemists report that they have successfully midwifed a new origin of life in the laboratory. Nevertheless it hasn't happened yet, and it is still possible to maintain that the probability of its happening is, and always was, exceedingly low - although it did happen once!
How is this scientific? He is saying, hey, there are these really smart guys called chemists, and you know, it’s just a matter of time, and they’ll replicate the process of the creation of life. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised!, he says.
This is as much science as the religious believers who say the second coming is at hand. He does admit it’s pure speculation, but again, he says it is “flourishing”, he says it wouldn’t be “surprising” if they created life in the laboratory a few years hence, he thus again assigns a probability to how likely he thinks this is, which he obviously imagines is quite likely.
On what scientific basis does he make such a statement? He has absolutely zero rational argument for this wholly unfounded speculation. It is just wishful thinking. This is the province of crystal ball gazers, and tea leaf readers Mr Dawkins, not rational scientists.
The shocking abuses of logic and rationality continue.
“The anthropic alternative to the design hypothesis is statistical. Scientists invoke the magic of large numbers. It has been estimated that there are between 1 billion and 30 billion planets in our galaxy, and about 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Knocking a few noughts off for reasons of ordinary prudence, a billion billion is a conservative estimate of the number of available planets in the universe. Now, suppose the origin of life, the spontaneous arising of something equivalent to DNA, really was a quite staggeringly improbable event. Suppose it was so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets. A grant-giving body would laugh at any chemist who admitted that the chance of his proposed research succeeding was only one in a hundred. But here we are talking about odds of one in a billion. And yet . . . even with such absurdly long odds, life will still have arisen on a billion planets - of which Earth, of course, is one.”
Again, Dawkins writes with the artistic license of a Douglas Adams: i.e. “suppose the origin of life was a quite staggeringly improbable event.” Real scientists don’t write like that. They don’t indulge in flowery qualitative descriptions, they assign numerical values to probabilities, and they base those on reasonable assumptions or preferably well established facts.
But in this case there are neither. We don’t know if there are other life forms elsewhere in the universe, we are not wholly sure if there are any even in our own solar system (perhaps very primitive life forms subterranean on Mars or whatever).
But Dawkins says, “Suppose it (life) was so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets.”
Let’s suppose not. Let’s suppose that it’s one in 10 to the power 100 planets (you know, the fabled googol)
Tell me why Mr Dawkins that your figure is any more “probable” than the one we’ve just suggested? And if you can’t, your whole theory is exposed as nonsense.
Dawkins wants us all to climb Mount Improbable with him, but there seems to be a total discontinuity between life and non-life.
A sudden zero to one moment.
Even if we accept “the Big Bang Theory” of “creation” of the universe, this likewise suggests that there was a sudden unexplained discontinuity, a sudden moment of transition from no universe to universe, another zero to one moment.
Dawkins talks of these matters as if they were mere trifles, to be dealt with over breakfast a week next Tuesday, nothing to worry much about.
Whereas what does mathematics have to say about zero to one events, i.e. today nothing exists, tomorrow a universe suddenly appears. What are the odds?
Mathematics would regard such events as infinitely improbable.
i.e. the likely truth of the universe, life and everything is perhaps closer to Douglas Adams’ concept of the infinite improbability drive he powered his fictional spacecraft with in the Hitchhiker’s Guide.
Thus if the transition from no life to life – before ever Darwin’s natural selection even has a chance to enter the fray – is not one of Dawkins’ not so improbable little baby steps, but actually one of almost infinite improbability, then once again, Dawkins’ whole theory breaks down in tatters.
As we have also pointed out, nowhere does Dawkins explain how favourable mutations occur. He tries to hide the concept that chance is involved, but only by as we have said trying to chop it like salami into such tiny pieces we won’t know it was once a salami sausage any more.
But that’s a sophism, that’s where he is hiding his ignorance.
In the end, all he is saying is “there’s a monkey on a typewriter somewhere” (i.e. a blind watchmaker) and he keeps battering on the key
s relentlessly until eventually a sentence comes out. And then if we get one sentence, someday we’ll get another, and then sooner or later we’ll get a Shakespeare play.
We pointed out that it would take the average person guessing once a week around a quarter of a million years just to successfully guess six numbers from forty-nine as per the British National Lottery.
So just how long do we think that monkey is going to take to come up with Macbeth?
Our educated guess (i.e. based on ¼ million years just to win a six number lottery) is that the universe will have imploded back into the void again before that happens, so what about the staggeringly more complex question of the creation of life?
But that random tapping of the monkey on the typewriter is not even how the fractal world of mathematically generated “organisms” functions. It functions on formulae, created by humans, i.e. by intelligent designers.
Likewise he raises this “anthropic” argument of how the universe originated, or how life did.
This sounds all complicated and sophisticated does it not, one feels very educated, doesn’t one, tossing phrases around like “the anthropic argument”?
As we explained in our How the Feminists Stole Psychology the formulation of an abstruse and inaccessible but meaningless terminology is a popular trick of pseudo science to keep the public from seeing that there is no real understanding or proven, working “hard science” there at all.
But really this “anthropic argument” is the most fatuous and vacuous tautology, and merely says life exists on earth (or elsewhere) because it can. Because the preconditions are right.
Would you call that any explanation of anything, because we certainly wouldn’t?
i.e. the still unanswered question is why or how does life develop despite these necessary preconditions?
That is, in mathematics we have the concept of necessary and sufficient conditions, and Dawkins fails to distinguish these two types of condition.
That is, having certain key elements in a planet’s atmosphere, and a certain limited surface temperature range and so on are necessary conditions for life to evolve, but they are not necessarily sufficient ones. The sufficient condition for all Dawkins knows may be only the presence of the all seeing watchmaker and his “divine spark.”
And then to our great surprise (not), we find Dawkins’ book liberally sprinkled with feminist plaudits. He actually says in Chapter 4 he was inspired by the feminists.
There are cringing tributes to women and feminists all over his “science” book. Is this any place for such tributes? If he wants to sing the praises of women or feminism why put that in a science book? Or were we right all along that this was not remotely a science book? e.g. Dawkins somehow finds an excuse for the following quote:
The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three anti-human religions have evolved - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are, literally, patriarchal - God is the Omnipotent Father - hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates.
GORE VIDAL
What sheer misinformation and nonsense is this? The loathing of women? Where is the evidence that the Jews or Christians or Muslims loath their women? As we pointed out in our earlier work The Psychology of Prejudice, Mohammed was perhaps the first major liberator of women in known history, and please read a woman’s book on this subject, the excellent Islam – A Short History by Karen Armstrong, to rid yourself of this racist propaganda against the Muslims (and Christians and Jews) that Gore Vidal is expressing in this quote, and Richard Dawkins dishonours himself further by ignorantly quoting.
The issue is that women have been given in outer society a subservient role. They have not been given the role of presidents, generals and priests. But on the other hand women have always been protected and privileged. The issue here is merely that of mens’ and womens’ gender roles, it is not about hate of women, and never has been.
It has been a common observation, that the modern men who pander to womens’ rights all the time are mostly trying to fawningly use this as a means to get women’s approval so they can get jobs, pats on the head, and opportunities for sex they otherwise wouldn’t on their own merits as men.
Such behaviour in our view would be considered contemptible by any real man, who had any dignity and self-respect, and to introduce such gender politics into a scientific and philosophical debate about the existence of God is surely no more than a cheap publicity stunt, a seeking to gain womens’ votes and approval for his work, rather than having it judged on its own intrinsic merits. Why does he not put a great big sticker on the front of the book to sum his philosophy up “HATES GOD, BUT LOVES FEMINISTS”? That appears to be the real truth of his mindset.
So then we come to Chapter 6, which Dawkins amazingly entitles: “The Roots of Morality: why we are good.”
Just what planet is this man living on?
Where are all these moral good people he is talking about, in this world full of infidelity, addiction, crime, conflict and war?
Dawkins is right about one thing in terms of his evolutionary theory. Most of us alive now are not too far from savages, not too far from Neanderthal man. We all need to be controlled, we need to agree common laws, or else we will be all murdering and raping one another, and religion provides not only the laws, but unlike secular authority alone, provides a motive for obeying them, as opposed to just fear, i.e. spiritual advancement, or “liberation.”
The “good people” Dawkins is referring to however are the privileged elite like himself, who because they are the haves, have lots of money, and social status, and the favours of glamorous women as opposed to the ones most of the rest of us are likely to get, are interested in supporting the law, upholding the status quo, because it favours them against the less privileged ones.
Dawkins has got no conception of what life is like for the billions of ordinary people who are in the gutter of the capitalist society, or not far way from it, who live in constant fear of their neighbours and any stranger that passes by, or if they have an attractive daughter or wife, in fear of her being attacked or raped by the envious and sex crazy men, that the average Western nation breeds like rabbits.
No. Dawkins instead sits on his academic throne in the celebrity sky and writes “Why we are good.”
He even has the gall to described his analogy of climbing “Mount Improbable” as a parable, which clearly shows his mocking envy of Christ and the prophets to the discerning eye.
We are aware of course he is arguing some kind of Darwinian group advantage of morality, but tell that one please to the starving millions, tell that one please to all the war ravaged and crime dominated zones of the earth, to the billions who unlike him don’t have their own personal redwood tree growing in their back garden, and in many cases don’t even have a back garden.
In this chapter, Dawkins goes on to point out what hostile hate mail he has received mostly from “Christians”, which he seems to relish quoting at length as a demonstration of how “un-Christian” they really are.
Well, again, we beg to differ.
When he insults billions of religious believers for no good reason, he can consider himself fortunate that they stop at insult, just as if one were to shout across the street at the man who passes by that his wife is a whore.
Dawkins’ is trying to pass the death sentence on religious believers worldwide, but cannot apparently see what an upsetting thing it is to them.
Of course they feel threatened in their beliefs. Most of them don’t care about their lives, which unlike his own are not privileged. The billions in the gutters of the world, such as in South America, one of the strongholds of Christian belief, have little other hope. But Dawkins, the big rich successful famous man of “science”, mocks their belief, feels entitled to take it away from them, and call them unscientific fools.
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He cannot it appears see what an act of gross inhumanity that is.
He thinks – oh no, the inhumanity is to raise a child as a Christian or as a Muslim or a Jew presumably even, but the people thus raised do not in the vast majority of cases agree.
He makes exactly the same mistake as the feminists, who imagine the average woman thinks as they do, when the average woman does not. She doesn’t care much for a career, except for money, given the choice she doesn’t spend her money on education, she spends it on breast implants or a nose job to attract men.
In Chapter One he quotes even Einstein in support of his case:
I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Do you mind if we ask a question please, Mr Einstein? It suffices for WHAT to stand in awe at the structure of the world?
Does it suffice to explain our existence? No.
Does it suffice to explain if we have any other destiny than mass extinction or indeed personal extinction? No.
As to Dawkins’ general assertion that “great scientists” can’t be used as God supporters, that is also an illogical and irrelevant issue.
Greatness in one field does not necessarily confer any understanding in another. Just because Newton or Einstein is an outstanding scientist, this does not necessarily confer upon them the ability to decide if there is a God or not, any more than the average citizen.
For what Mr Dawkins and his kind have failed to realise, as all the spiritual teachers have expressed is that the vision of God does not come to one specific class of people, no matter how high their alleged IQ is or how great their alleged scientific achievements are.
And that class is the class of arrogant people.
If God exists, every scripture concurs in saying that he doesn’t visit the arrogant. That’s why Christ found disciples amongst the fishermen, and not amongst the scribes and priests of the time.