The God Delusion, Part 4, Why there is almost certainly no God

I am not the only blogger who is discussing The God Delusion. If you want a view that is really different from mine you can go to the Apologetics homepage where you will find comprehensive criticism of Richard Dawkins latest book. Deepak Chopra whom I recently criticized for his abuse of quantum physics also taken the challenge of trying to break the arguments put forth in The God Delusion. Needless to say I don't think that the Apologetics or Chopra are able to break the very strong message in the God delusion, but that should be up to you readers to decide.

After having met the many arguments or proofs for God, one by one, in chapter four Richard Dawkins goes on to describe not only why we do not need a God to describe our world but also why such a God in fact is quite implausible.

He starts out by explaining why the alternative to a creator God, Charles Darwin's (see picture) Theory of Evolution, is not, as many people tend to think, the same as blind chance. It is really quite wearisome to hear people say "so you think we just popped into existence" when you say you believe in evolution, but I have already written about this issue in my blog post Evolution is NOT blind chance. Dawkins also points out that to call upon a creator in order to explain complexities which we have not yet understood does not solve nothing, all it does is to invent another complexity that needs to be explained. I would like the ID proponents to suggest an empirical test, similar to the one below, which if it succeeded would support their "theory" and if it failed would falsify it. Dawkins writes:

"Darwin himself said as much: 'If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.' Darwin could find no such case, and nor has anybody since Darwin's time, despite strenuous, indeed desperate, efforts. Many candidates for this holy grail of creationism have been proposed. None has stood up to analysis"

Another common tactic used by religious people is "The worship of gaps". Whenever there is something science cannot explain such as for instance language, certain religious people take this as proof of God's existence. After all, if science doesn't have the explanation, then it has to God right, right?

"The logic turns out to be no more convincing than this: 'I [insert own name] am personally unable to think of any way in which [insert biological phenomenon] could have been built up step by step. Therefore it is irreducibly complex. That means it is designed."

But what about the Universe and what about us humans? Why should there be a Universe? Why should we exist? Surely someone must have wanted us to exist? No not of necessity. Though I am still merely an amateur astronomer (I am trying to help that by following a lecture series by Professor Alex Filippenko available at Berkeley's webcast), I know that there are theories out there which could potentially elucidate why our Universe looks the way it does. There are also good attempts to explain how the first cells arose. These theories I admit can sound a bit far fetched an even unlikely. However, it seems that we are also relatively lonely in our Universe and so the unlikely event of a cell (see below) forming spontaneously from various organic constituents only had to happen once for us to exist. If you throw a dice billions and billions of times you are likely to at least once get say 10 sixes in a row even though the probability of this series is as low as 0.00000002.

We humans are also ill equipped to accept hard nosed scientific theories instead of explanations that invoke an agent such as God. Humans have a natural tendency to see agents everywhere. Dawkins writes:

"Maybe the psychological reason for this amazing blindness has something to do with the fact that many people have not had their consciousness raised, as biologists have, by natural selection and its power to tame improbability. J. Anderson Thomson, from his perspective as an evolutionary psychiatrist, points me to an additional reason, the psychological bias that we all have towards personifying inanimate objects as agents. As Thomson says, we are more inclined to mistake a shadow for a burglar than a burglar for a shadow. A false positive might be a waste of time. A false negative could be fatal. In a letter to me, he suggested that, in our ancestral past, our greatest challenge in our environment came from each other. 'The legacy of that is the default assumption, often fear, of human intention. We have a great deal of difficulty seeing anything other than human causation.' We naturally generalized that to divine intention."

In summary, chapter four in The God Delusion, bring up a few quite important points. It is shown that a creator God is really an inadequate answer since it merely brings up another problem namely who created the creator, or who designed the designer? The best theory we have to explain our own existence without invoking an agent is the beautiful and simple Theory of Evolution.

The argument from design

Imagine that you are out walking an early Monday morning. Suddenly you detect something shining on the ground. You pick it up and see that it is a delicate watch. Intrigued, you take the clock back home and pick it apart. Amazed by the fine, very complex machinery inside you say to yourself "this cannot have just come about by chance, someone must have made this clock". Tuesday morning, when you are out walking again your foot suddenly bumps into something, and you look down… There lies a dead man. You take him home and dissect the body. With the aid of electron microscopy and other high tech tools you look into the cells and see how extremely, impressively complex they are. Again you look up and say to yourself "this human being is far more complex than the watch I found yesterday, this human cannot have just come from nothing, there must have been a creator"…

This argument which I believe is referred to as the argument from design or the watchmaker analogy, was put forward by a man named Paley (actually I think I have read somewhere that he was not the first person to use the argument, but it is associated with him). Unless this is the first time you read my blog you will probably know that I do not buy this argument, for several reasons. First of, this is an analogical argument, and analogical arguments are only as good as the analogy. In other words, the argument is valid only to the extent that a clock and a human being are similar, and we all know they are not very similar. For example, I happen to know that humans can make babies. In contrast, I have never seen clocks make new clocks, not even when I put my different clocks in the same drawer (though maybe that is because all my clocks are broken?). There are of course many other differences between clocks and human beings but I will let the reader use her imagination here.

The perhaps biggest flaw in the argument from design is to suppose that the alternative to design is sudden, random formation. Paley simply did not understand evolution, and neither does anyone today who argues that the theory of evolution by natural selection suggests that things just come about by chance (see my previous post called, "Natural selection is NOT blind chance"). Mutations, which are approximately random will give rise to new DNA molecules every now and then. Some DNA molecules, independent of whether they are in a virus, bacteria, mouse, dog, cat, whale, monkey or human being, will be more successful in terms of survival and replication, than the average DNA molecule. Sometimes the molecules just "gets lucky", but over time the phenotype (the characteristics) of the DNA molecule plays an important role in determining the fitness of that molecule. Say that one DNA molecule contains the code for making Prions, which then goes up and destroys the brain of its host. This molecule would not be very successful (unless it lets its host reproduce before starting to express the protein)... The Ebola virus is another example of a rather "unintelligent" strand of DNA (or is it RNA, I don't really know). Sure it is great at spreading between different individuals, however, this does not compensate for the fact that Ebola viruses kill their host really rapidly and brutally. Had the virus been a little bit more subtle and patient it would have been much more successful.

The point here is simply that the fitness of a particular strand of DNA is not random. Depending on what it does it will have a larger or lesser chance of getting into the next generation, and this process is referred to as natural selection. It is quite ironic that the argument from design so often comes from those who believe in God.

In essence, the argument from design becomes something like the following: No, humans surely cannot have come about through natural selection, that is just too unlikely! It is much more likely that we have a divine being, superior to all human being who came about (wait a minute, how did he come about???), and made the humans, that is much more likely… hmmm. Seems to me that creationists are undermining themselves…

For a much more thorough analysis of the argument from design I recommend Richard Dawkin's "The Blind watchmaker".