by Graham Veale
So consider the paradox that pop culture’s faith in science cannot resolve. The very power that scientific progress has brought to society makes that society vulnerable. We can now devour resources and destroy life at unprecedented rates. Simply reflect on the power that scientific progress put in the hands of a Soviet nuclear submarine commander during the Cuban missile crisis. If we ignore the anarchy that reigns in the human heart, the very power of scientific discovery could bring scientific progress to a terrible end.
* * *
12 Brian Silver, The Ascent of Science (Oxford University Press, 2000). The role of Christianity in the rise of modern science is discussed in James Hannam’s ‘God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science’ (Icon:2010) and John Henry’s ‘The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science’ (Palgrave MacMillan:2008), 85-97.
13 Find Greta Christina’s thoughts on science and atheism at www.alternet.org/story/126118/10_myths_and_truths_about_atheists_/?page=entire (retrieved 17 April 2012).
14 Discussions of ‘Agent Explanation’ can be found in EJ Lowe ‘A Survey of Metaphysics’ (New York: Oxford University Press: 2002), 195-213; Richard Swinburne ‘The Existence of God’ (Oxford: 2008) 35–45; and Paul K Moser ‘The Evidence for God’(Cambridge: 2010), 48–63
15 Lady Diana died August 31st, 1997. A full discussion of the conspiracy theories inspired by her death can be found in David Aaronovitch Voodoo Histories (Vintage:2010), 141–161.
16 Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Vintage:2011) and Ian Kershaw’s Hitler (Penguin:2008) are harrowing but enlightening.
17 Jerry Coyne’s response to Kenneth Miller can be read at whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2009/06/16/science-vs-theism-a-debate-with-kenneth-miller-part-i-throat-clearing/ (retrieved 1st July 2010).
3
Design, Dawkins,
and the Problem with Having a Big Brain
‘Any intelligent fool can make things more complex; but it takes a touch of genius to move in the opposite direction.’
Albert Einstein
Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one!
PZ Myers, New Atheist extraordinaire, responds to the learned criticisms of Richard Dawkins’ ‘The God Delusion’ with a parable: ‘the Courtier’s Reply.’ 18 This story describes an episode which took place after the events of ‘the Emperor’s New Clothes’. The Emperor in PZ Myer’s sequel represents the Church and the non-existent ‘clothes’ worn by the Emperor are religious beliefs. The young boy, who has pointed out that the Emperor is not wearing any clothes, symbolises Richard Dawkins. Richard has just embarrassed the Emperor by pointing out that his majesty is naked. The Emperor’s subjects can now enjoy a hearty chuckle at their ridiculous ruler.
In Myer’s parable the Emperor decides to strike back. He commissions the court intellectuals to pen a letter which explains why the little boy was in error. In contrast to the youngster, many of society’s intellectuals adored the Emperor’s new clothes. The letter reads thus:
I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor’s boots, nor does he give a moment’s consideration to Bellini’s masterwork, On the Luminescence of the Emperor’s Feathered Hat. We have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor’s raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion; Dawkins cavalierly dismisses them all. He even laughs at the highly popular and most persuasive arguments of his fellow countryman, Lord D. T. Mawkscribbler, who famously pointed out that the Emperor would not wear common cotton, nor uncomfortable polyester, but must, I say must, wear under-garments of the finest silk.
Dawkins arrogantly ignores all these deep philosophical ponderings to crudely accuse the Emperor of nudity.
Personally, I suspect that perhaps the Emperor might not be fully clothed—how else to explain the apparent sloth of the staff at the palace laundry—but, well, everyone else does seem to go on about his clothes, and this Dawkins fellow is such a rude upstart who lacks the wit of my elegant circumlocutions, that, while unable to deal with the substance of his accusations, I should at least chide him for his very bad form.
Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor’s taste. His training in biology may give him the ability to recognize dangling genitalia when he sees it, but it has not taught him the proper appreciation of Imaginary Fabrics.
Myer’s argument can be summarised thus:
Theistic belief is analogous to the Emperor’s belief that he was wearing new clothes—that is to say, theism is obviously false, absurd and dangerous.
Of course theists have arguments that attempt to show that Theism is not obviously false, absurd and dangerous.
But we don’t need to consider those arguments as theism is obviously false, absurd and dangerous.
New Atheists are reduced to such circular arguments because they are selling a feeling; the assurance that unbelief is infinitely superior to theistic superstition. If a New Atheist acknowledged that there was a smidgen of evidence for God’s existence, then theism would cease to be a superstition. The atheist’s sense of superiority would suddenly seem unwarranted. So writers like Myers make a virtue of their ignorance. They do not expand their minds by considering the alternatives to atheism; they do not research their opponents. New Atheists don’t study up; they dumb up.
Dealing with Design
So which arguments should PZ Myers consider? Many theists argue that the exquisite order of our universe is compelling evidence for the existence of God. But New Atheists feel that they have an unanswerable reply to the design argument. The evidence for a designer can be explained away by the theory of evolution. Greta Christina summarises: 19
The argument from design argues that the evidence for God lies in the seemingly inexplicable complexity and functionality and balance of life: of individual life forms, of specific biological organs and systems, of the ecosystem itself. ‘Look at the eye!’ the argument goes. ‘Look at an ant colony! Look at a bat’s sonar! Look at symbiotic relationships between species! Look at the human brain! They work so well! They do such astonishing things! Are you trying to tell me that these things just... happened? How can you possibly explain all that without a designer?’
Not to be snarky, but: Have you heard of this Darwin fellow?
Just to reassure Greta that I have heard of Darwin, and some of the science based on his work, I’ll give a brief description of the theory of evolution. All living things descended from one form of life, which arose some four billion years ago. Offspring inherit traits from their parents with a high degree of reliability. However, traits are not reproduced with perfect reliability. There is some variation and some creatures are born with traits that they did not inherit. There are insufficient resources for every organism to survive and reproduce; some organisms have traits that give them an advantage in the reproductive stakes. Through this process of natural selection, organisms become better and better adapted to their environments, acquiring distinctive features and novel forms. 20
Evolution by natural selection does more than give an unified account of the history of life on earth, or tell us how new species form. For Richard Dawkins the central problem of evolutionary biology is the existence of complex adaptation. How could intricately complicated adaptations like the verte-brate eye exist unless they were designed? It is inconceivable that a fully formed eye could form by accident: it simply has too many parts which must be arranged in the correct way. But Darwin showed that design and purely random ‘all-at-once’ events were not the only options. The evolution of the eye, for example, did not occur all at once. It happened gradually, over thousan
ds of generations.
A simple light-sensitive spot on the skin of some ancestral creature gave it an advantage by allowing it to detect and move towards light sources, thereby aiding photosynthesis. It passed this advantage to its descendants. Then, in one descendant, random changes created a depression in the light-sensitive patch, effectively placing it in a little ‘cup’, which enabled that creature to better detect the direction of the light. More random changes in one of its descendants would cause little ‘pin holes’ to develop over the cup, greatly increasing resolution and imaging. More and more specialised cells would evolve over time until we have the camera type eyes characteristic of vertebrates.
Mathematical modelling indicates that the octopus eye could have evolved in 2000 steps occurring over 400 000 generations. The process need not have taken more than 500 000 years. Only a little ‘luck’ was needed at each stage of the eye’s development, and each ‘improvement’ of the eye was preserved by natural selection. The mechanisms involved were normal physical and chemical processes. There was no need for a divine engineer to tinker with cells. Biology need only appeal to physical events, making it as ‘scientific’ as Physics or Chemistry.
Would biology become any more ‘atheistic’ than Chemistry or Physics if evolution can account for organised complexity? In the preface to Should Christians Embrace Evolution? conservative evangelical theologian Wayne Grudem states: 21
…when atheists assure us that matter + evolution + 0 = all living things, and then theistic evolutionists answer, no, that matter + evolution + God = all living things, it will not take long for unbelievers to conclude that, therefore, God = 0.
Perhaps many unbelievers do reason this way; if so, their reasoning is deeply flawed. No one can claim that matter + evolution + 0 = all living things. The most that anyone can claim is that a very specific kind of matter + very specific laws + very specific initial conditions of our universe = life is possible. The atheist still needs to explain why we live in the right type of universe with the right physical laws. Particles must have very specific properties, and be able to combine in very specific ways, to form elements like carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. If those atoms could not be arranged in particular patterns the organic compounds essential for life could not occur.
One’s opinion of Intelligent Design or Creationism is beside the point (although both are dismissed too casually by the intelligentsia). Evolution is a poor excuse for atheism. Even if Coyne and Dawkins are correct, even if ‘evolution is true’, evolution could not occur without very specific conditions! If the force of gravity was even slightly weaker every star would be a red dwarf; if it was slightly stronger, every star would be a blue giant. In either case, life would not be possible. Several other basic physical constants must be ‘fine-tuned’ for a universe of galaxies, stars, planets and biological life.
The cosmological constant, the strong and electromagnetic forces, gravity, the weak force, the proton/neutron difference, and carbon production in stars all needed to have values that fell within a very narrow range. The probability of all being ‘fine-tuned’ to life-permitting values turns out to be less than 1 in 10100. To give you a sense of the size of that number, there are only 1080 subatomic particles in the known universe! The universe gives every indication of being ‘set up’ for life. 22
Furthermore, to explain away the evidence for design, natural selection needs to do much more than account for complex adaptations, like the eye or the ear. It also needs to explain why life managed to make all the transitions from bacteria and algae to birds, reptiles and mammals. Granted, most evolutionary biologists would expect some increase in complexity over time. But the journey from the first cells to human beings requires numerous transitions, some less probable than others. It is this journey that stands in need of explanation.
Imagine all the evolutionary transitions that would need to take place to get from the first cells all the way up to us. As Elliott Sober has pointed out:
Even if each transition in this chain—from the first to the second, from the second to the third, and so on—were highly probable, it would not follow that the transition from the first to the last is highly probable. The problem is that probabilities multiply; multiply a big probability like 9999/10000 by itself enough times and you obtain a probability that is very small indeed. 23
And in The God Delusion Richard Dawkins concedes that some key transitions in life’s history were incredibly improbable. Dawkins believes that the origin of the first cells was statistically improbable. It was also extremely unlikely that life would evolve past the level of bacteria, and even more unlikely that the complex nervous systems necessary for consciousness would evolve. Dawkins testimony is that evolution, unaided, does not fully explain why human life exists on Earth.
Dawkins argues instead that evolution explains why human life exists in a universe which contains billions of Earth-like planets. While intelligent life failed to evolve on the vast majority of these planets, on our planet the cards fell just right. There are billions of planets that have developed life at the level of bacteria, but only a fraction of these life forms ever made it across the gap to something like the eukaryotic cell. And of these, a yet smaller fraction managed to cross the later Rubicon to consciousness. 24
And what is Dawkins’ evidence for these billions of life-bearing planets? He doesn’t present any! To ‘explain away’ the evidence of design, Dawkins would need to calculate the probability of intelligent life evolving on Earth. Suppose he came up with an answer of a trillion to one. Then he would need to show that evolution has taken place on something close to a trillion planets. These planets require the right type of solar system, the right atmosphere, the right geology and many other conditions. There could be fewer planets capable of supporting higher mammals than Star Trek fans would like to believe. Dawkins hypothesises that chance, plus evolution, plus billions of opportunities on Earth-like planets explains appearance of design in the living world. That hypothesis leads to a prediction: even if we found trillions of Earth-like planets, the majority would be lifeless, a small fraction would have bacterial life, and we would only find conscious animals on the tiniest fraction. However, suppose we discovered that all of these planets were teeming with creatures like birds and mammals. Dawkins’ hypothesis would be falsified.
The point is that Dawkins is helping himself to billions of worlds, then telling us what life is like on those worlds; and he is doing this without a shred of evidence. To put it as gently as possible, that doesn’t seem like much of an objection to the design argument. It can’t explain the laws of nature or ‘fine-tuning’ nor does it explain away the wonders of the living world around us.
Richard Dawkins: Darwin’s Rottweiler? Or Hume’s Poodle?
Yet, Dawkins insists that theism has no explanatory power because theism is as complex as a hypothesis gets. His reasoning is remarkably straightforward. Theists often use God to explain highly improbable events, like the origin of complex living cells. Cells have numerous parts that must be arranged in a precise manner for the cell to function. It is extremely improbable that a cell would arise merely by chance. So the organised complexity of the cell demands an explanation.
But Dawkins insists that God cannot explain organised complexity because a designer’s mind would also be organised and complex. After all, the only system known to be capable of design is the human brain. The brain has much more organised complexity than a living cell. Naturally, we seek explanations for the existence of the brain. But God’s mind has much more organised complexity than the human brain! If the organised complexity in a cell or brain stands in need of explanation, how much more the organised complexity of God’s mind? Saying that God designed the universe just leads to the question ‘Well, who designed the designer’? At first glance, this seems like a powerful objection to the simplicity of theism.
To some extent we can attribute this argument to the 18th Century philosopher David Hume. Hume argued that no design argument could eve
r succeed.
We are still obliged to mount higher in order to find the cause of this cause which you had assigned as satisfactory and conclusive. … a mental world or universe of ideas requires a cause as much as does a material world or universe of objects, and, if similar in its arrangement, must require a similar cause. 25
Hume’s language is a little antiquated, but he is essentially making the same argument as Dawkins in The God Delusion. Basically, Hume is saying that God’s mind would contain so many ideas that it would be more complex than the universe it is supposed to explain. This leads us to ask, ‘Who designed God’s mind?’ Hume seemed to believe that minds were just collections of ideas; but Hume’s metaphysics seem a little odd in the modern scientific age. So Dawkins is, quite deliberately, popularising and updating Hume’s argument.
A crucial point follows. Science does not overturn the design argument. As Darwin’s agnostic ally, Thomas Huxley, pointed out ‘the doctrine of evolution does not even come into contact with Theism, considered as a philosophical doctrine.’ 26 Even if we accept the modern scientific consensus, and agree that evolution by natural selection adequately explains the history of life on earth, we are left with a further question: Why is evolution possible? Dawkins knows that we need to explain why the laws of physics and chemistry, and extraordinarily precise cosmological constants, allowed evolution to occur in the first place.
Furthermore, why did evolution take a course that resulted in a beautifully complex world and rational beings? This outcome was extremely improbable! The theory of evolution does not rid the world of a designer. So Dawkins is forced to use David Hume’s philosophical argument—that God lacks an explanation because God would be more complex than the world he created. But Dawkins’ impatience with philosophy of religion is notorious, and he makes no attempt to understand the worldview he is critiquing. This leaves Dawkins confined to the limits of his own speculation. He makes what we can call a ‘Big Brain’ Assumption. He assumes that God would be like a very big, indescribably complex brain.