The God Truthiness: Building the Ultimate 747
Chapter 4 is where Dawkins lays it all out. It has his central ideas for “Why there almost certainly is no God”. As the title shows he's still open to the existence of God, but the proof has got to come from science. “Why there almost certainly is no God” is the scientific explanations for creation rather than the hand wave that believers accept.
One weakness of the chapter is that it is written as an answer to Intelligent Design (ID); doing away with all creation myths is just a byproduct. Dawkins begins by showing how ID consistently misunderstands evolution. In ID literature it is referred to as chance. Chance is the bugbear ID frightens people with into accepting their argument for design.
IDer: Do you really think we're here by chance?
Us: No.
IDer: Well we must be here by God. QED.
For an inquiring mind “God” as the answer answers nothing. The ID's answer of “God” is interchangeable with “magic”. If you think I'm being harsh, then take a look at Judge John E. Jones III's decisions in the recent Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, a case where the science (or lack thereof) of ID was put on trial. It must be noted that Judge Jones is a Republican and a churchgoer. If you can't even preach to the choir then its time to give up.
Dawkins then talks about the consciousness-raising power of natural selection. The way natural selection totally changed the way the problem of the abundance and diversity of life was looked at. Before natural selection it was assumed that it had to have come about by a creator, for only a being of immense power could have the ability to create the wonder of our living natural world. Natural selection turns this idea on its head; its actually small steps over a long time. Natural selection is a crane that builds rather than ID, which is a skyhook that suspends. Since Darwin's time the fields of genetics and molecular biology have added to the theory of natural selection, so that even without the fossil record there would be enough grounds to accept natural selection. Thank goodness scientists questioned what religion taught. But I digress, for Dawkins point is that by solutions like natural selection he'll show that creation doesn't require God.
Dawkins begins with life on earth and moves back to the formation of the cosmos. I'll look at Chapter 4 the other way around, because his strongest writing is in what he knows best, whereas when he writes about cosmology he's out of his field and quoting others. His arguments are to show that our existence on this planet at this time has little to do with chance.
'The Anthropic Principle: Cosmological Version' is an overview of current scientific theories for the origin of the universe (multiverse). I won't pretend to understand them. I did some cursory wikipediaing and was left with the understanding that I have little understanding. I feel pity for theoretical physicist's because after applying the last full measure of their brain power to this stuff their brain burns out and they are carted away to the funny farm to sculpt baskets out of gnocchi. Dawkins favors some theories over others, but I don't get why. Nothing is proved, but nothing can be. This is the origin of everything so right here, right now its going to theoretical. The point I took away from it was that at least these scientist are taking measurements, looking at data, forming theories. In short they are applying the scientific method to our deepest question, the origin of the universe, and not just saying “God”.
'The Anthropic Principle: Planetary Version' answers the Intelligent Designer's question about the chance of life appearing in this universe. In answering chance Dawkins invokes statistics:
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 reason of ordinary prudence, a billion billion is a conservative estimate of the number of available planets in the universe... If the odds of life originating spontaneously on a planet were a billion to one against, nevertheless that stupefyingly improbable event would still happen on a billion planets. (165-166)
That's quite amazing. At a billion to one against we'd still have a conservative estimate of a billion planets. And remember, we're not talking about the chance of something which we could conceive of happening, say a planet existing made of fairy floss. We are talking about something which has happened - we are the living proof of that.
'The Worship of Gaps' apart from showing the vacuousness of ID as science, should also be of a warning to religious apologists to start searching for new sanctuaries for God before His refuges disappear altogether. The gaps spoken of are the gaps in scientific knowledge. ID's proponents argue that since science has no explanation for some things, it must be God. Dawkins sums it up, “'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.'” It is the laziest of reasonings, and at its heart unscientific. Dawkins goes on to give the analogy of watching a magician's trick. The art of the world class illusionist is such that we cannot fathom how the trick was done. But do we believe it to be supernatural? No, and the same should be with the natural world. Mysteries of the natural world require a natural explanation, not recourse to the supernatural. And so as science fills in the gaps, ID scurries for new gaps to house God.
Dawkins finishes the chapter with an overview of 6 points. For brevity I'll paraphrase:
For centuries their has been the problem of how to explain the apparent appearance of design in the universe.
The natural temptation has been to ascribe it to a designer.
This is false because it explains nothing. A crane not a skyhook is need.
The best crane we have so far is Darwinian natural selection. It build an improbable complexity from the gradual accumulation of the plausibly simply.
We don't yet have a crane for physics.
We shouldn't give up hope that a crane for physics will be found. After all, there was no crane for biology until fairly recently.
Labels: Dawkins
posted by winstoninabox @ 5:47 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
You have neatly summarised Dawkins' arguments in this chapter, but do you have anything of your own to add? For instance, any comments on my suggestion that his six point summary has it exactly backward, and that the postulation of the designer predates the observation of the design?
As a person who, as a churchgoing albeit-briefly-not-Republican, spent much of my undergraduate years fiercely arguing with creationists, I can't see how a comprehensive demolition of Intelligent Design et al has anything to do with the existence of God. Indeed, I would see this comprehensive demolition as an essential first step in 'justifying God's ways to man.' The God who would create the universe as we see it by an arbitrary act of special creation would *not* qualify as God by my definition: 'an entity at a level of reality more fundamental than our own who is omnibenevolent and omniscient with respect to our level of reality.' A God who arbitrarily created the universe just as we see it, filled with all sorts of evils, would not be omnibenevolent and hence would be unworthy of human consideration.
dr clam rereading your post about chapter 4 I don't think it matters whether point 1 or 2 of Dawkins' 6 came first or second. It is a summation of the chapter. Change them around and you'd still have chapter 4's opening “The argument from improbability is the big one” (137) . You and I may not see the argument from improbability as importantly as Dawkins does, but I guess in his world where he may well spend part of every day fighting ID, it seems like the 'big one'.
I do feel that Dawkins has placed too much emphasis on this chapter as the proof that God doesn't exist. As I said possibly he's blinkered because he spends a fair amount of time arguing against ID as a science. Also possibly because the question he most encounters from the person in the street is “Well if God didn't make all this, who did?”
To wit I'll make a sweeping and unsubstantiated generalization that while many people over the age of 45 have heard of natural selection, few really understand how it works or the ramifications it's had on Christianity. Continuing in this vein I'd guess almost nobody has any idea about the cosmological theories he writes about.
Back on track, maybe he thinks the argument from improbabliity is so important because it involves his specialty of biology.
Speculation aside I think that the book as a whole would be a stronger argument against the existence of God if each chapter had been presented as a scientific answer to a religious apologist's hypothetical. That's why I like the subtitle of chapter 6 so much “The roots of morality: why are we good?” I can picture a believer asking “Well if there is no God why are we good?” Chapter 6 is the scientist's answer to that. Thus chapter 4's title might be “Without a God how could we have creation?”
I like this approach better because it takes the onus of proof off one chapter and spreads it out over the whole book. As it stand believers may well claim “Dawkins says chapter 4 is the proof and I'm not convinced by it, therefore his whole argument falls down. QED.” This is harder to do if each chapter is a small chink in the wall.
And also it could be better used as an atheist's handbook in answering religious apologists - “Funny you should ask that question about morality without God. Chapter 6 is what you're looking for.”
I'm sorry, what was your question?
Yes, and a book like you describe would be much more satisfying to argue with, too! It would be more like the blog, the highest existing form of intellectual expression.
I guess, to rephrase my question in a more twisted and evil way, which I am asking chiefly to stir up trouble:
How much of that regularity in the universe which Dawkins says is so improbable has been socially constructed by a prior assumption that the universe *ought* to be regular because it had a designer?
Which came first, historically, the designer or the design?
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