On C-Span last night I caught part of an address Richard Dawkins delivered at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia. He was talking up his new book, The God Delusion. See here for Jim Holt's NYT review. He's a charming man, Dawkins, and a very good public speaker. He trotted out his central anti-God argument, one he seems to repeat regularly. It is in the new book too. Holt describes it thusly:
At heart, this argument is an elaboration of the child’s question “But Mommy, who made God?” To posit God as the ground of all being is a nonstarter, Dawkins submits, for “any God capable of designing a universe, carefully and foresightfully tuned to lead to our evolution, must be a supremely complex and improbable entity who needs an even bigger explanation than the one he is supposed to provide.” Thus the God hypothesis is “very close to being ruled out by the laws of probability.”
But rather than rely on Holt's paraphrase, I'll pull a quotation from The Blind Watchmaker (Norton, 1996, p. 141, bolding added):
Organized complexity is the thing that we are having difficulty in explaining. Once we are allowed simply to postulate organized complexity, if only the organized complexity of the DNA/protein replicating engine, it is relatively easy to invoke it as a generator of yet more complexity. [. . .] But of course any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machine itself. Far more so if we suppose him additionally capable of such advanced functions as listening to prayers and forgiving sins. 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.
What is the argument here? It is none too clear to me, but here is what I make of it:
1. The explanandum, that which is to be explained, is organized complexity as such.
2. God is at least as complex as that which is to be explained.
Therefore
3. Any 'explanation' that invokes a supernatural designer explains "precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer." One cannot be said to have explained organized complexity as such if one postulates an unexplained explainer that is at least as complex as any being among the explananda.
4. If the response to the foregoing is that 'God was always there,' then one could just as well say that 'DNA was always there' and be done with the matter.
Now I may be dense, but I cannot see that this is an argument that any theist should lose sleep over.
Why should anyone accept premise (1)? Why should anyone accept that organized complexity as such needs explaining? A plausible principle is that, if x explains y, then x is not identical to y: Nothing explains itself. This is especially clear if the explanation is causal. For it seems self-evident that nothing can cause itself. (I interpret causa sui privatively, not positively: I take it to mean 'not caused by another' and not 'self-caused.') Now if nothing can explain itself, and if organized complexity is to be explained, then some of the organized complexity must remain unexplained, that portion residing in the ultimate explainer. It follows that one cannot reasonably demand that all organized complexity be explained. If this is right, then it is no objection to God to say that his complexity — assuming he is complex — has no explanation. For if one wants an ultimate explanation, then one must accept an entity whose own existence and complexity has no explanation in terms of something distinct from it.
This is an impossible or unsatisfiable demand: Give an ultimate explanation of the existence and complexity of each x in terms of a y distinct from x. This demand is unsatisfiable since an ultimate explanation must terminate in a being that either does not need, or cannot have, an explanation in terms of something distinct from itself. No theist who understands what he is about will make this demand.
At this point the reply might be: if God has no explanation, then why not say the same about the physical universe? If you are going to invoke something that itself is unexplained, why not just let that be the universe? The short answer is that the universe palpably needs explaining, just as processes in it need explaining. Given that it might not have existed, one reasonably wonders why it does exist. Note also that if A explains B, the explanation can be good even if A remains unexplained. Why so many wildfires this year? Because of a profusion of brush which in turn was caused by unusual spring rainfall. If this is a good explanation, its goodness does not require an explanation of why there was an unusual amount of spring rainfall.
Now suppose someone were to argue: Since you have no explanation of the unusual amount of rainfall, why not save yourself trouble and just say that the wildfires have no explanation? The answer, of course, is that the wildfires do have an explanation, and that the explanation is not rendered defective by the fact that the explanatory regress terminates in something that is unexplained. No doubt there is a difference between God and an unusual amount of rainfall. The latter can in principle be explained by something distinct from it whereas God cannot. But the general point remains valid: if there is a good explanation of B in terms of A, then that explanation is good whether or not A has an explanation. So if the universe does have an explanation in terms of God, then the fact that God cannot be explained has no tendency to show that the explanation is defective.
My point is not that theism is unproblematic, but that Dawkins has done nothing to refute it. He writes as if there is something logically defective in theistic explanations. But he has exposed no fallacy that I can see. He gives the theist no good reason to abandon his position. All he does is oppose him — which of course is fine, as long as it is understood that he is merely opposing not refuting.
It seems to me that we have a stand-off. We have two diametrically opposed positions each of which is rationally defensible. The theist interprets the order (organized complexity) and existence of nature as deriving from a transcendent mind-like Source, an intelligent, providential ground of finite being and its intelligibility. On this approach it makes no sense to try to explain all being and all organized complexity in terms of simpler and simpler, stupider and stupider, material elements. The theist finds in himself consciousness, self-consciousness, intentionality, purposiveness, moral awareness, aesthetic sensitivity, etc., and he cannot for the life of him understand how any of this can be made sense of in material terms. So he interprets what he finds in himself as a key to the ultimate makeup of the world. The naturalist, of course, adopting a ruthlessly third-personal point of view, will have none of this. For him, there is no explanation apart from materialist explanation, and what cannot be reduced to this form of explanation must be simply denied.
I agree with you that Dawkins has bitten off more than he can chew here, and that the existence or nonexistence of God is inherently unprovable. I admire the man a great deal, and I think it's regrettable that he is wasting his time and reputation like this.
That said, I think it is glib for you to suggest that we don't want an explanation for organized complexity. Of course we do. But what we do not have a need to explain is complexity popping up fully developed and in fixed form, as creationists maintain, because we have overwhelming evidence, of a great many mutually reinforcing kinds, of the progression of life from the simplest early organisms to the complexity we now observe.
As for consciousness, etc., Dawkins often refers to "the argument from personal incredulity", by which he means exactly the mindset you describe in the theist who "cannot for the life of him understand how any of this can be made sense of in material terms." The same could earlier have been said of any number of physical phenomena that are now well understood, and simply to posit God in order to plug the gaps in our account of the phenomena we observe -- and then to declare the matter settled -- seems to him (and me) an enormous cop-out.
But all of this is really an argument against creationism (in favor of the abundantly proven fact of evolution), and not an argument against theism (well, not a conclusive one, anyway). Imagining that he refutes God's very existence is where Dawkins goes too far. There are still ultimates to explain, and we continue to confront the subjectivity of consciousness with little more than bafflement. But the point is that again and again, the more we learn, the less we need to invoke the direct involvement of God to provide an explanation. In the example of life's complexity, we have an immensely detailed and coherent physicalist account, of surpassing beauty and elegance, supported by a mighty framework of evidence, that takes us right the way back to the earliest replicators. To someone like Dawkins, the obvious conclusion is that the limit of this process is that we soon won't need God at all.
Second, you may disagree that the existence or nonexistence of God is inherently unprovable, as I put it. Suffice it to say, then, that such proofs have not yet emerged.
I would actually agree with you that the "existence or nonexistence of God is inherently unprovable", because I think God in the end is not a scientific fact or object to be proven, but a metaphysical assumption that can, however, be defended with rational arguments. As Bill puts it (again and again), it is "rationally defensible" - which is all one can ask for, I think, regarding a metaphysical assumption...
When you say that evolution is an "abundantly proven fact", what do you mean by evolution? Strictly in terms of science, if evolution is taken to mean common descent with modification (i.e., speciation) then it is not a fact, not a theory, but a hypothesis for explaining the fossil record and the present diversity of life on Earth.
It strikes me as a sound hypothesis, but what is a fact is that scientists have made no controlled observation of speciation occurring, let alone one of a mechanism for speciation such as Darwinian natural selection. There are a lot of conjectures out by scientists like Dawkins about speciation and what drives it, but nothing proven.
Indeed, there is presently a big disconnect between microbiological functions which must ultimately drive speciation and large-scale changes in anatomy that mark, at least in one important respect, a change in species. So the more that science has established as the facts of biological, the more elusive natural selection has become as an explanation for speciation.
So it seems to me that the acceptance of Darwinism -- i.e., common descent with modification by natural selection -- as a true account of evolution requires a prior metaphysical commitment to naturalism. If I'm right about that, then why isn't invoking Darwinism as a mechanism of evolution in the absence of scientific evidence anything more than arguing a "Nature of the gaps"?
Regards, Bill T
In other words, Dawkins' objection doesn't even make sense unless you assume his reductionist view of intentionality, and then apply it to God himself, so that "God" is just a complex and contingent machine being invoked to explain less complex machines, which of course would just give you more to explain. But the theist considers intentionality, and in particular God's intentionality, to be irreducible and basic. So, rather than invoking more and more complex and organized things to account for complex and organized things, the theist is actually a reductionist too, but of a different stripe.
I wonder if any discussion we might have on the issues you raise should be "taken outside", as it were, as it would be a bit off topic in this thread.
I am curious, though, why you make the assertion you do that modern evolutionary science (and by that, of course, I mean Darwin's original account of life's diversity by descent with modification by natural selection, which by now has been enormously augmented and buttressed by fossil, genetic, and molecular evidence, as well as by a tremendously and increasingly sophisticated body of theory) is not even a "theory", but a mere "hypothesis".
I would also point out that when discussing speciation, it is important to bear in mind the distinction between microevolution, which has been lavishly confirmed by the direct observation you request, and macroevolution. Also, speciation is never marked by a salient, lab-observable "event", as in "speciation occurred at 10:41:27 PM", but is rather, by its very nature, observable only in hindsight. Even the word "species" itself is rather overworked by laypeople, implying as it does a sharp discontinuity that never really exists in nature. I have recently taken this up in posts here and here. The idea of the "species", while a useful notion, is hardly central to the evolutionary account of life's history, and could even be done away altogether without much effect (except to taxonomists, of course). "The Origin of Species" was a rather unfortunate title for Darwin's book, especially as the text itself says almost nothing on the subject.
The issues I raised do look a little off-topic. That's because I'm approaching Dawkins's argument against theism obliquely. He has claimed that the existence of God is a scientific question, yet his primary tool in trying to refute theism is Darwinism, which leaves a lot to be desired as science -- UNLESS, science is presumed to be a naturalistic enterprise. If so, then Dawkins's claim the question of God's existence is answerable in science begs the question.
I think packaging science with naturalism is wrongheaded. Science is not so much a particular body of knowledge as it is a method to knowledge. As a method, like logic or mathematics, it disciplines how knowledge is developed and in that manner circumscribes what is knowable by that means. But as a method it is applicable only to that which is amenable to it (in this case, those things that are measurable in some way or another) and cannot on its own preclude as true knowledge that which it is incompetent to address in the first place (that which is unmeasurable, such as the existence of God).
So back to Darwinism as science. If a scientific theory is an explanation for a set of facts confirmed by irrefutable observation, then the claim of Darwinism (common descent with modification by means of natural selection) does not meet that standard. Nor does the more modest claim of evolution (common descent with modification) as an explanation of the fossil record etc. This is because both of these claims posit speciation, which has not been observed either through experimentation or in nature. (I agree that the definition of species is an unsettled issue, so by speciation, I mean nothing more than the change of one type of organism over the generations into another type of organism, whether that change in type is quick or gradual or via saltation.)
So evolution as an explanation for the fossil record and the present diversity of life remains a hypothesis until speciation has been confirmed through observation (either in real-time or through discovery of a sufficiently detailed fossil record). Darwinism as an explanation for evolution remains something less than a hypothesis, because even if there is evidence of natural selection as the mechanism of speciation, that is evidence of microevolutionary changes only. It is nothing but conjecture that what drives microevolutionary changes is scalable to macroevolutionary speciation.
It may be reasonable to think that Darwinian conjecture is correct. But the reason for doing so is grounded in philosophy (namely, naturalism) and not in science.
Regards, Bill T
I agree with you that Dawkins is overreaching in his effort to refute the existence of God. I agree also that science is not synonymous with naturalism, though they may be coterminous depending on how broad your defintion of Nature is. Science concerns itself with creating theoretical frameworks that organize observable phenomena, and generating falsifiable predictions. What can and cannot be approached by this method I would not care to define in advance.
We disagree strongly about the extent to which we may consider Darwinism a confirmed theory of life; a disagreement that I think it would be well beyond the scope of this comment thread to pursue. I will say that your emphasis on observable speciation events rather misses the point, and substituting "type of organism" for "species" simply hides the ball.
I will add, however, that if you insist on speciation "events" as the touchstone for the validity of Darwinism, quite a few such observations have been made (I should have said "rarely", rather than "never", above, because there are cases where the generation interval is short enough that a retrospective assessment is in fact possible), and a list of such observations, assorted by the various groups of organisms and concepts of "species" involved, can be found here.
But, again, the drawing of species boundaries is really not at all central to Darwinism. The key idea, of course, is the descent of all present-day life from a common ancestor by the mechanism of variation and natural selection.
But I've said enough about this here, and you may take the last word, if you like.
Thanks for the link citing speciation events. I note that they are all examples of microevolution. So I don't know how they constitute the evidence necessary to elevate evolution to a theory, let alone Darwinism.
I believe we are on the same page regarding speciation, even if as a layman I have used terms loosely that have narrower technical meanings. I think of common descent with modification like I do the color spectrum. Red and blue are different "species" of color, but the change ("speciation") from one into the other along the spectrum is continuous and the identification of the boundaries between intermediate "species" is arbitrary. Unless organisms have changed from one species into another by saltation, that analogy seems applicable to evolution.
Of course, that's the problem. We don't know as a matter of science how such changes occurred. That said, I agree with you that further discussion on this point is a significant departure from the topic of Bill V's article.
Regards, Bill T
Thanks very much for the Nagel reference. Unfortunately, one has to subscribe to TNR to get the whole thing. But your excerpt was very helpful. If Nagel is right, then Dawkins is really dense: he doesn't understand that theists are not talking about a "physical inhabitant of the natural world." Could Dawkins really be this obtuse? In my post I just assumed that Dawkins could not be making this mistake, that he understood that God is a purely spiritual being by definition.
If Nagel is right in what he said in his review of Dawkins (in the excerpt supplied above by Deuce), then that bespeaks not just verificationism but obtuseness in Dawkins -- or else willful and perverse misrepresentation. Take a guy like Carnap. He wouldn't say that theists believe there is a Big Guy in the sky. He knows what theists (mainline theists like Aquinas) maintain. It is just that what they maintain, according to Carnap, is cognitively meaningless.
I think he's guilty as charged. Detractors of evolutionary science are regularly thumped for attacking bowdlerizations of the real thing. Detractors of religion should be thumped for acting similarly. Tit-for-tat, reciprocal altruism, and all that.
Hi Bill, I'm sure that Dawkins knows, intellectually, that God is supposed to be something called a "spiritual being" rather than an inhabitant of the physical world. However, I don't think he actually understands that. I think his mind is so materialism-ridden that he's not even able to conceptualize the idea, and therefore can't process it on its own terms. Like Dennett, he probably thinks of the spiritual as a sort "spooky stuff", really just another kind of material, placing it in a cognitive category that he's more familiar and comfortable with, and attacks it under that assumption.
Yes, Dawkins must know that, but then why does Nagel make him out not to know it? If Dawkins thinks that nothing that is not physical can exist, why the hell doesn't he just say that, give whatever argument he can muster, and stop repeating the same old crappy argument he has been repeating for years?
Your 'spook stuff' points are very good.
Positivism, yes, but not a "crude" positivism, really, because he makes the point that there is really no compelling reason to prefer one description of God (say, the Christian God) over another, unlike, say, positivist objections to atomicism or string theory, where there was indeed a detailed theoretical framework, which could make falsifiable predictions.
Say what you will about these guys, but they are far from dense or obtuse. They are stubborn, though, and are overreaching here, even though my own gut feeling is that they are right.
I suppose what we are converging on here is that silliness is a highly subjective matter. When these debates come down to axiom-choosing, there is little further headway that can be made.
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