Philosophy

In the fourth grade, I attended a barbecue. As is customary on such summer occasions, there was ice cream, swimming, and music. It was during a break in the music when I—finding myself in that mysterious space between the one demarcated for “adults” and the one designated for “children”—decided to ask (addressing both groups), what it means to say that “God is dead.” I was not a popular child.

However, I have always been an inquisitive one. Growing up during South Africa’s period of transition and within a thoroughly secular family, I had a comparatively easy time of it. It saved me from the coming-of-age clichés which seem to initiate the careers of quite a few antireligious fanatics. Add to that the information explosion of the new millennium and my encounter with Francis Fukuyama’s thesis (drawing on Hegel) that “history” had come to an end, and I thought that all the great questions had been settled. The West had settled into a kind of comfortable disbelief. Religious belief was for the slightly backward, and atheism was embraced by the bright and inquisitive. Then came The God Delusion.

By the time The God Delusion was published, I was already lecturing in philosophy and therefore literate in the fundamental principles behind logical arguments. I had also been steeped for a significant time in the thoughts of Friedrich Nietzsche. Given the level of attention The God Delusion had received, I expected sparkling new arguments, a commitment to free thought, and above all, a commitment to science and logical thought. However, I came to see that The God Delusion is not only a shallow attack on a grand old tradition but badly constructed and ultimately an expression of what Nietzsche called ressentiment,  resentment—a feeling exhibited by those who find themselves outside of traditional power structures. There will be those who say that the New Atheists are far from excluded outsiders: they are highly respected academics and bestselling authors. In the parlance which became popular in the decade after they were the most controversial figures on the bestseller lists, they are very privileged indeed. But resentment is present everywhere, even among the most immediately privileged. In the case of the New Atheists, there should be no hesitation in pointing it out.

What bothered me most about The God Delusion, and what contributed most to my eventual turn to Christianity, was that it made enormous claims upon which it then failed to deliver. What is more, it was delivered in such a condescending and negative tone that one is forced to reconsider the validity of all this rage: it just could not form a whole, coherent worldview. I am by nature a very inquisitive person, and contrary to Dawkins’s assertion that believers do not submit their worldviews to critical analysis, I think most of us do. It certainly means that Dawkins’s own thoughts should also be carefully scrutinized. While I work in the humanities, I have an avid interest in the natural sciences—the other source of getting to know God—and I believe when one places The God Delusion in relation to the other sciences, its arguments go nowhere. If anything, they point right back at God. However, this will mean some serious engagement with other fields of science, such as probability theory. Kindly bear with me—it will be rewarding, I promise!

Considering Probability

The God Delusion had its origins in the attempt to deal once and for all with what Dawkins sees as the ultimate unscientific attempt to answer the question as to why things are the way they are—namely, that some Creator, or some Divine Intellect, has designed the universe and everything in it. Nature provides the one point of agreement between the radical evolutionists (who believe that evolution explains everything) and those who believe that the universe is designed: it is very complex. Even those who stand aloof to the entire debate would concur upon this point. Yet our relationship with our incredibly complex world is in itself at least equally complex: we are prepared to acknowledge the complexity of the unknown, the sublime, the exceptional, and sometimes the just plain immense, yet often overlook the wondrous complexity of living beings right in front of us. Walt Whitman famously said that a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars.[1] And the human being reading this statement is more complex still. It is very hard to believe that all of this, including us, could simply have fallen together by chance—taking the word in its broader metaphysical sense—over time, let alone continue so successfully. Some Mind had to be involved.

Fred Hoyle also thought so. In a now-famous radio lecture, the astrophysicist argues that the improbability of life occurring spontaneously compels us to accept the notion of life being designed by an intelligent being, God, as opposed to adopting the seemingly random occurrence of natural selection. Hoyle’s argument basically states that the probability of life occurring through pure chance alone is no greater than a hurricane sweeping through a scrap yard and assembling a Boeing 747. The original passage, first published in 1982, reads:

A junkyard contains all the bits and pieces of a Boeing-747, dismembered and in disarray. A whirlwind happens to blow through the yard. What is the chance that after its passage a fully assembled 747, ready to fly, will be found standing there?[2]

This famous statement is probably one of the most controversial in the history of the so-called Darwin wars. It is also one of the most misunderstood. Biological complexity has never been one of those quiet Sartrean questions on which philosophy undergrads could test their skills over a few glasses of wine. For biologists it is the question, and both those who believe that the universe is designed and the Dawkinites seem to agree that (1) as a complex phenomenon, life is statistically highly improbable, and (2) as improbable as it is, chance (in its metaphysical sense) is not a satisfactory explanation as to how the wondrous complexity of life on planet earth came about. Fred Hoyle was so confident of this that he felt convinced that the level of complexity present in nature suggests a force over and above random processes. The suggestion of a guiding hand left Hoyle, an atheist up until that point, badly shaken and convinced that there must be some guiding intelligence behind the properties of matter (as it also did in my case). When reflecting on the precise conditions that render possible the synthesis of carbon in the heat of the stars (nucleosynthesis), Hoyle writes:

Would you not say to yourself, “Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule.” A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.[3]

For Dawkins, the notion that mere random activity might lie at the root of biological complexity is as unacceptable as it was for Hoyle. Something as complex as the human being did not just fall together on a fine sunny day in March. One of Dawkins’s aims in writing his book The Blind Watchmaker, as he states in the preface, is “to destroy this eagerly believed myth that Darwinism is a theory of ‘chance.’”[4] However, with his consciousness thoroughly raised by Charles Darwin, the idea that God intentionally created humankind is equally unacceptable. For as statistically improbable as organized complexity is, a designer would have to be at least as complex—and experience tells us so far that designers are always more complex than that which they have designed. As Dawkins famously opines, “However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable.”[5] At a workshop held for journalists in Cambridge, Dawkins repeated his challenge, this time on a cosmological scale: a God capable of creating the universe would have to be so complex as to be statistically improbable.[6]

At first, this appears to make perfect sense. Even the laws of probability appear to support this. One of the most basic laws of probability, succinctly stated by Leonard Mlodinow in The Drunkard’s Walk, reads: “The probability that two events will both occur can never be greater than the probability that each will occur individually.”[7] In the language of probability theory, joint probability is never more likely than classical probability. The chances of a simple thing forming on its own are greater than a complex thing because a complex phenomenon would require the coming about of more than one event. A single cell is more likely to form than an antelope jumping into existence. If the antelope’s coming about is an unlikely event, it implies that anything that might have been responsible for the antelope, such as a divine Creator, is even more unlikely than the ex nihilo appearance of the antelope itself.

Daniel Dennett has called this argument “irrebuttable,” and Dawkins himself considers it to be “unanswerable.”[8] However, this is anything but the case. What Dawkins appears to be saying is that the cause of an improbable event must be improbable itself, or that the algorithm responsible for complexity must be responsible itself. If winning the New York lottery is highly improbable—18,009,460 to 1 to be exact—then the random activity that is responsible for the winning result must also be improbable. In short, if the odds of winning the New York lottery are 18,009,460 to 1, then the likelihood of randomness being involved in the coming about of the result must also be at least 18,009,460 to 1. But if this is the case, then why is there any need to overcome the problem of randomness? The chances of the existence of the phenomenon of randomness are then virtually zero!

Dawkins or his disciples are bound to respond that this is a category mistake and that random activity does not “cause” the lottery in the same way that natural selection brings about complex biological diversity. If the disciple in question had taken in the first chapter of The Blind Watchmaker, it should be clear that I, just like Dawkins, engage in hierarchical reductionism. Reductionism in this context, of course, has nothing to do with that infamous phantom that trendy theorists in the human sciences see everywhere when they are unable to offer a proper refutation of an argument they do not like. Such a reductionist would blithely ignore important facts in favor of trying to “explain complicated things directly in terms of the smallest parts, even, in some extreme versions of the myth, as the sum of the parts!”[9] This form of reductionism can rightly be denounced as crude thinking. The hierarchical reductionist, on the other hand, attempts to explain something complex on a particular level in terms of the next, more essential level of complexity until the explanatory possibilities of that level is exhausted. Obeying Ockham’s razor, he continues down the line until he finds the simplest explanation possible. Naturally, it goes without saying that the kinds of explanations that are suitable at high levels in the hierarchy are quite different from the kinds of explanations that are suitable at lower levels. It depends on the context, of course: “This was the point of explaining cars in terms of carburettors rather than quarks.”[10] However, when one makes ultimate, fundamental claims about the nature of reality, one has to go all the way down. After all, “reductionism, in this sense, is just another name for an honest desire to understand how things work.”[11] What makes our attempt so significant is that we are prepared to go down the organizational hierarchy to a point where explanations in concrete terms no longer work, where the obvious and tangible become abstract and counterinstinctual.

What makes the lottery, or gambling in general, possible is not the balls, cards, roulette table, or lotto machine. If this were true, one could simply throw all the balls one can find on a heap and sell tickets. But we all know that a heap of balls does not make a lottery. So what does? Certainly not the quasi-celebrity presenters. It is, among others, the movement of the balls and one’s inability to predict the outcome that make it a lottery: in other words, random activity. Randomness is a lack of order, purpose, cause, or predictability. A random process is a repeating process with outcomes that follow no describable deterministic pattern. But what is the relationship between an abstract principle like randomness and the concreteness of the balls and gambling paraphernalia? This brings us to the ultimate aporia or double bind: any attempt at a final explanation of reality in materialist terms is at once doomed to fail, because it would simply throw up more material entities requiring explanation or, alternatively, would be bound to be encapsulated by abstractions like randomness and symmetry. Dawkins’s problem is that he takes the first principles of his own field, biology, to be the first principles of science as such. This is one of our main objections: Dawkins has misunderstood the first principles of his own subject. Most of the contradictions and double binds that we encountered can be traced to a failure to acknowledge the fact that biology is not a fundamental science and cannot—by definition—give us first principles.

It is precisely because randomness, for example, is such a basic feature of earthly existence that no nonrandom process such as natural selection—defined by Dawkins in the Microsoft Encarta encyclopedia as “non-random survival of randomly varying hereditary units, resulting in the evolution and maintenance of adaptive improvements”[12]—can ever truly serve as a foundation for the scientific edifice, let alone as a source for the meaning of our existence. Contrary to Dawkins’s claims, natural selection does not overcome the problem of the statistical improbability of the occurrence of life. In fact, it does not even touch upon it. It still means that natural selection is a valid theory and that Charles Darwin was a remarkable scientist whose enormous contribution should be celebrated by contemporary science, but it is not fair to expect that his work should hold the answer to everything.

The Law of Large Numbers

It is no use appealing to the law of large numbers either. It is the kind of thing you appeal to when you are unsure of the success of your more particular arguments. Dawkins appears to use it as the final nail in the coffin of religious belief, blithely stating that “if the odds of life originating spontaneously on a planet were a billion to one against, nevertheless that stupefying improbable event will still happen on a billion planets.”[13]

However, like his other attempts at probability theory, this also fails abysmally. Again, Dawkins appears to use it as an absolute law when, just like the other instances of probability theory, it only makes sense when used in a demarcated sample space. A. J. Ayer reminds us that “the upshot of this law, which is mathematically demonstrable, is that in the case of any sufficiently large sample which is drawn from a larger population, there is a high probability that the ratio in which a given character is distributed in the sample approximately matches the distribution in the parent population; as the size of the sample increases, this probability approaches unity.”[14] All that the law of large numbers really means is that the more studies you conduct, the more you will find certain trends pitching up. What those trends may be are, of course, determined by the nature of the subject under discussion. In the context of trying to account for the origins of life, the law of large numbers means virtually nothing. It is only a statistical aid, not a “get out of jail free” card. This is how the science of probability theory works.

It is clear that once more, the Dawkinites need to be reminded that there is nothing necessary about the coming about of life. If the wind continues to blow over the sand surfaces of an infinite number of planets for an infinite number of years, it still does not entail that life will spring from such action. And if we are to take Dawkins at his word and apply the law of large numbers to the universe in general, we may just as well say that not only will life pitch up sooner or later but so will the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Batman, E.T., and Darth Vader. If the law of large numbers as Dawkins understands it is consistently applied, it means in effect that sooner or later, given the infinity of time and space, everything will turn up. This implies that, sooner or later, a redeemer will be born from a virgin. Who says you need Stephen Jay Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria to reconcile science and religion? Apparently, according to the law of large numbers, anything is quite literally possible.

The Category Mistake

The question that now suggests itself is, How does the Ultimate Boeing 747 argument yield such absurdities? The reason for this is the category mistake. The category mistake was identified by the British intellectual Gilbert Ryle during the mid-twentieth century in his book The Concept of Mind. This mistake occurs when two different categorical terms are treated as if they are categorically equivalent. Ryle uses the following example: “She came home crying in a flood of tears and a sedan chair.” The reader would have noticed that this statement sounds very strange, and for good reason. The category “to be in a flood of tears” is not the same as the category “to be in a sedan chair.” This difference is also found in phrases like “the tide is rising” and “hopes are rising.” Another example of a category mistake is when one puts forth the argument that one cannot blame soldiers for the wars they fight any more than you can blame firemen for the fires they fight. Obviously “fighting” in the sense of fighting fires and engaging in combat is not the same thing.

Dawkins commits the category mistake by treating probability as a property of complexity. Probability refers to the degree as to whether events will occur. However, probability is not a property in the same sense that mass, color, or even complexity are properties. Biological events may be extremely rare, and it may not be inevitable that they will occur on a planet or in a universe, but when you describe the cause of an entity in terms of probability in the way Dawkins does, you treat probability as if it is a property. It becomes a “property” of complexity. You are stating that probability is a property that is inherited alongside complexity and that complexity and improbability are inherited from that cause. In effect, you are stating that the reason biological organisms are complex is because they inherited the property of complexity from their designer, and because improbability goes alongside complexity, improbability is also inherited from the designer. However, the problem is that if probability is treated as a property that is inherited from a cause, then that cause must be improbable as well. In short, committing the category mistake of treating probability either as a property, which is inherent in an entity, or as an occurrence that has an improbable cause removes any possible cause for that effect.

The Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit raises yet another interesting question: Why is the question of the occurrence of life couched in terms of probability theory at all? After all, in its stronger version, the anthropic principle states that if the right factors did not combine in the right way, we would not be here asking the question about the origins of either life or the universe. It is rather like asking, “Why do I always find roads where I am driving?” It makes no sense to speak of the probability of something that has already happened. In such a case, one would be quibbling over the probability of an event that has already been accorded the status of 1. Strangest of all for a biologist is to treat life purely in hypothetical terms, when, in fact, as the anthropic principle reminds us, the fact that we as living beings are here talking about the likelihood of life’s occurrence renders the question meaningless. The strong version of the anthropic principle, with a healthy idealistic vibe, refers to the parameters of physics and reads as follows: “The Universe (and hence the fundamental parameters on which it depends) must be such as to admit the creation of observers within it at some stage.” In the Australian physicist Brandon Carter’s Cartesian terms, cogito ergo mundus talis est (I think, therefore the world is such [as it is]). This is a very significant statement since, from a logical point of view, it demonstrates that Dawkins is trying to saw sawdust: the fact that we as observers and representatives of life are here to ask the question about the origin of life renders the question about the improbability of life occurring superfluous.

In fact, the very reason for the biologist’s existence—both for his physical existence as well as the existence of his profession—is derived from an event that has definitely happened at some stage in the past, rendering the vocabulary of probability irrelevant. There is a very interesting literary parallel here known as the grandfather paradox, named after the famous scenario where a man travels back in time, kills his own grandfather before his parents are conceived, and thereby cancels out his own existence.

Once again we find ourselves upon the Greek road to nowhere, the aporia. The anthropic argument states that there must be living beings with a fairly sophisticated form of consciousness in order to ask the question of the origins of life. In other words, there has to be life and a form of consciousness at a distance from the origins of life, since the question of the origin of life can be asked only when there is an observer of life available to ask that question. Even if the actual probability of a universe that supports intelligent life is very low, the conditional probability of supporting intelligent life, given our existence in it, is 1. Even if there could be other universes, less “fine tuned” and so devoid of life, there would be no one there to observe them.

This brings us to yet another instance of the category mistake. Dawkins appears to regard the questions of the probability of complexity and that of the occurrence of life as identical. But demonstrating that natural selection renders complex phenomena more likely by breaking one big case of improbability into several small simple instances of the (more) probable does not mean that the question of the origin of life is solved. Natural selection, whether in its classic Darwinian variant or couched in the hip vocabulary of The Selfish Gene, is not a theory of abiogenesis but a theory about life’s history. It does not solve the improbability question at all. It is like the medical examiner who arrives at a crime scene: it gives us a great many details about the history of events, but only after the action has already occurred.

Dawkins’s question can be rephrased in proper Darwinian terms. Natural selection tells us a lot about what happened within the primordial soup can, but it tells us nothing about the probability or improbability of there being a primordial soup can in the first place. What are the odds for and against the soup, that is, for the complex falling together of the physical elements? What are the odds for and against the coming together in this particular way? Do we have this information? It looks as if we are right back in Hoyle territory. And to be painfully existentialist again, what are the odds for and against a single element, such as hydrogen, coming about? Whether you climb Mount Improbable or not, you are still stuck with pretty much the same problem.

Not only has Dawkins done away with both the possibility of human creation and the treasured notion of natural selection, he has almost pulled off the impressive metaphysical feat of doing away with the notion of cause altogether. Not only are complex phenomena like the Venus flower basket statistically improbable, but practically everything is. What is the probability of a stone for example? What are the factors for and against the coming about of a stone? Or sand? Is sand statistically probable or not? What about matter as a whole? This is known in the much-despised regions of continental philosophy as the “why is there something rather than nothing?” question. If you really think about it, just about everything has the odds stacked against its existence. The anthropic principle is not just about humans and life; it is about the world itself. We hope that you have not grown too attached to the easy answers science purports to give, for every answer encloses a further mystery within it. I believe the mystery can only ultimately be solved by turning to the original mystery writer.

[1] Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Gutman, Huck. “Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself'”. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. Ed. Jay Parini. Oxford University Press, 2004. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press.  Web. 20 October 2011.

[2] Fred Hoyle, The Intelligent Universe (London: Michael Joseph Limited, 1983), 19.

[3] Fred Hoyle, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections,” Engineering and Science 45.2 (Nov. 1981), 8–12.

[4] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (London: Longman, 1986), 11.

[5] Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Bantam Books, 2006), 114.

[6] Dawkins, The God Delusion, 153.

[7] Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (New York: Allen Lane, 2008), 23.

[8] Dennett quoted by Dawkins, The God Delusion, 157.

[9] Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (Oxford: Longman, 1986). 10.

[10] Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 13.

[11] Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, 13.

[12] Microsoft Encarta, Standard Version (CD-ROM, 2006), s.v., “Natural Selection.”

[13] Dawkins, The God Delusion, chapter 4.

[14] A. J. Ayer, Probability and Evidence (London: MacMillan, 1972), 40–41.