Richard Dawkins: Gods and earthlings

Richard Dawkins is the world's most famous out-of-the-closet living atheist. He is also the world's most controversial evolutionary biologist. Publication of his 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene," thrust Dawkins into the limelight as the handsome, irascible, human face of scientific reductionism. The book provoked everything from outrage to glee by arguing that natural selection worked its creative powers only through genes, not species or individuals. Humans are merely "gene survival machines," he asserted in the book.

Dawkins stuck to his theme but expanded his territory in such subsequent books as "The Blind Watchmaker," "Unweaving the Rainbow" and "Climbing Mount Improbable." His recent work, "The Ancestor's Tale," traces human lineage back through time, stopping to ponder important forks in the evolutionary road.

Given his outspoken defense of Darwin, and natural selection as the force of life, Dawkins has assumed a new role: the religious right's Public Enemy No. 1. Yet Dawkins doesn't shy from controversy, nor does he suffer fools gladly. He recently met a minister who was on the opposite side of a British political debate. When the minister put out his hand, Dawkins kept his hands at his side and said, "You, sir, are an ignorant bigot."

Currently, Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, a position created for him in 1995 by Charles Simonyi, a Microsoft millionaire. Earlier this year, Dawkins signed an agreement with British television to make a documentary about the destructive role of religion in modern history, tentatively titled "The Root of All Evil."

Gods and earthlings

If we were visited by aliens from a distant planet, would we fall on our knees and worship them as gods? The difficulty of getting here from even our nearest neighbor, the red dwarf star Proxima Centauri, constitutes a filter through which only beings with a technology so advanced as to be god-like (from our point of view) could pass. The capabilities and powers of our interstellar visitors would seem more magical to us than all the miracles of all the gods that have ever been imagined by priests or theologians, mullahs or rabbis, shamans or witch doctors.

Arthur C. Clarke, who died last month, said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." If we could land a jumbo jet beside a medieval village, would we not be worshiped as gods? The technology of interstellar travel, and the scientific knowledge on which it would be based, are as far beyond us as our present-day knowledge surpasses that of Dark Age peasants. Parting the Red Sea -- or splitting the moon in two as Muhammad is alleged to have done -- would be child's play to those who command forces powerful enough to propel them from star to star.

But now the question arises: In what sense would the god-like aliens not be gods? Answer: In a very important sense. To deserve the name of God, a being would have to have designed more than just a jumbo jet or even a starship. He would have to have designed the universe. And therein lies a fundamental contradiction. Entities capable of designing anything, whether they be human engineers or interstellar aliens, must be complex -- and therefore, statistically improbable. And statistically improbable things don't just happen spontaneously by chance without an explanation trail. That is what "improbable" means, as creationists never tire of assuring us (they wrongly think Darwinian natural selection is a matter of chance).

In fact, natural selection is the very opposite of a chance process, and it is the only ultimate explanation we know for complex, improbable things. Even if our species was created by space alien designers, those designers themselves would have to have arisen from simpler antecedents -- so they can't be an ultimate explanation for anything. No matter how god-like our interstellar aliens may be, and no matter how vast and wonderful their starships, they cannot have designed the universe because, like human engineers and all complex things, they are late arrivals in it.

Intelligent design "theorists" (a misnomer, for they have no theory) often use the alien scenario to distance themselves from old-style creationists: "For all we know, the designer might be an alien from outer space." This attempt to fend off accusations of unconstitutionally importing religion into science classes is lame and disingenuous. All the leading intelligent design spokesmen are devout, and, when talking to the faithful, they drop the science-fiction fig leaf and expose themselves as the fundamentalist creationists they truly are.

Nevertheless, despite their notorious dishonesty, I sometimes hand an olive branch to these people by pretending to take their "space aliens" political ploy seriously. Unrealistic as the space alien theory is, it constitutes intelligent design's best shot.

The distinguished molecular biologists Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel advanced a version of the notion, probably tongue in cheek, called "Directed Panspermia." Life, they argued, could have been "seeded" on the early Earth by a spacecraft packed with bacteria. Maybe little cellular machines like the bacterial flagellar motor were designed by ingenious nano-technologists from Betelgeuse. But you still have to explain the prior existence of the Betelgeusians and how they became so advanced and god-like. Even if Betelgeusian life was, in turn, seeded by another rocket from Aldebaran 4 billion years earlier, eventually we have to terminate the regress.

We need a better explanation, such as evolution by natural selection or an equally workable account of the painstaking R&D that must underlie complex, statistically improbable things. Gods, if they are complex enough to be capable of designing anything, are, by virtue of their very complexity, not in a position to design themselves.

Theologians attempt two (mutually incompatible and pathetically inadequate) answers to this unanswerable point. Some say their God is not complex but simple. This obviously won't wash. No simple god could design bacterial flagellar motors or universes, let alone forgive sins or impregnate virgins. Presumably recognizing the justice of that, other theologians go to the opposite extreme. They admit that their god is complex but assert that he had no beginning: He was always there and always complex. But if you are going to resort to that facile cop-out, you might as well say flagellar motors were always there. You cannot have it both ways. Visitations from distant star systems are improbable enough to attract ridicule, not least from the advocates of intelligent design themselves. A creator god who had always existed would be far more improbable still.

This technique of arguing against a theory by setting up its most plausible version and dismissing it is commonly used in science and philosophy. The late, great evolutionist John Maynard Smith used it in his 1964 attack on the then-popular theory of "group selection." He set himself the task of devising the best possible argument for group selection. The details don't matter; he called it the Haystack Model. He then proceeded to show that the assumptions that the Haystack Model needed to make were highly unrealistic.

Everybody understood that this was an argument against group selection. Nobody twisted it to trumpet to the world, "See? Maynard Smith believes in Group Selection after all, and he thinks it happens in Haystacks, ho ho ho!" Creationists, by contrast, never miss a trick. When I have raised the science-fiction olive branch to try to argue against them, they have twisted it -- most recently in a movie scheduled to open this week -- in order to proclaim loudly, "Dawkins believes in intelligent design after all." Or "Dawkins believes in little green men in flying saucers." Or "Dawkins is a Raelian." It's called "lying for Jesus," and they are completely shameless.

Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, is a professor at Oxford University

The Divine Comedy: Dawkins’ Disco Inferno
By: Bruce L. Gordon, Ph.D.
Discovery Institute
April 21, 2008

Richard Dawkins has got himself in a bit of a pickle and, in an effort to wash off the brine, now appears to be lathering up mountains of foam. In an article in the LA Times (see here), he is at pains to distance himself from remarks he made in the newly released movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Toward the end of the film, in an interview with Ben Stein at the British Museum, Dawkins confesses he has no idea how life originated on earth — nor does anyone, he admits — but, as Nobel laureate Francis Crick once theorized, it could well be explained by having been seeded here by an alien intelligence. Of course, he demurs with great gravity, this alien race would itself have evolved elsewhere in the universe by Darwinian means.

In other words, Dawkins recognizes that blind evolutionary processes seem an insufficient explanation for how life originated on earth — no one knows how it could have happened and intelligent design is a real possibility — but miraculously enough, he asserts, elsewhere in the universe under conditions we have no access to and can’t really imagine, blind evolutionary forces are completely sufficient to the task! After all, we have to terminate the regress somehow and we can’t possibly terminate it with God.

You see the problem. No wonder Dawkins is a bit embarrassed and trying to dance around these frank admissions. So let’s turn up the heat on this disco inferno: what’s he saying now? It turns out that he has decided to have a go at philosophical theology. Unfortunately, he appears to have even less talent in this arena. He rehearses in short compass an argument offered in his recent book, The God Delusion: God can’t be the explanation for design because he’s too complex, and therefore statistically improbable, and as we all know “statistically improbable things don’t just happen spontaneously by chance without an explanation trail.”

I see. That sounds rather like a design argument. As Alvin Plantinga — a formidable intellect and the world’s foremost analytic philosopher of religion — remarked in a review of Dawkins’ book, “You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores” (see here).

Let’s take a brief look at Dawkins’ “God is too complex to be the explanation for the design we observe” polemic. His suggestion is that entities capable of designing anything must be complex, and God, if he existed, would be a designer par excellence. But what does Dawkins mean by “complex”? He does not care much to define terms in his op-ed — undoubtedly a strategy to his advantage — so we must look elsewhere among his writings for enlightenment. In The Blind Watchmaker we find his declaration that something is complex if it has parts “arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone.” Indeed. This sounds rather like Michael Behe, but with less precision and far less discernment. Behe, no doubt, would recognize that applying such a characterization to God would constitute a category mistake. God is not a material object, he is an immaterial Mind, in consequence of which he has no parts. Not having parts, therefore, God certainly doesn’t have parts that are “arranged in way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance.” Given Dawkins’ understanding of complexity, then, God is neither complex nor statistically improbable.

But perhaps we are being ungenerous, so let us concede, for the sake of argument, that God is complex. Perhaps we think that the more a being knows, the more complex it is, and since God is omniscient, he must be highly complex. This seems a fair interpretation of Dawkins’ claim that beings capable of designing things are complex. But how is this supposed to make God improbable? As Plantinga points out, if one were a materialist and thought that the only way a being with great knowledge could exist is if he were made up of elementary particles arranged in such a way as to constitute a being with great knowledge, then perhaps God might seem improbable. But one can hardly argue that God is improbable by assuming materialism, for materialism logically entails that God does not exist, and this would beg the very question at issue.

What reasons are left for thinking that God is improbable? By the lights of classical theism, God is a necessary being in the sense that it is not possible for him not to exist. Such a conception certainly seems logically coherent: it is logically possible, is it not, that the necessary existence of a transcendent personal being of consummate greatness (God) is possibly exemplified, i.e., that the concept is logically consistent and therefore exemplified in some possible world? But a being that exists necessarily must exist in every possible world, and since the actual world is a fortiori possible, we may conclude, without qualification, that God exists. As Plantinga points out, if Dawkins wants to maintain that God’s existence is improbable, he owes us an argument that there can be no necessary being with God’s attributes, an argument that does not start with materialism as one of its premises. No one has ever provided a decent argument to this effect, but Dawkins doesn’t even seem to be aware that he requires one.

Lastly, Dawkins takes exception to the idea that God had no beginning, arguing that “if you are going to resort to that facile cop-out, you might as well say that flagellar motors were always there.” Again, his ignorance of philosophical theology and his lack of talent for philosophical argument are on display. Dawkins would surely admit that space-time, matter and energy came into existence with the beginning of the universe, or perhaps, if he’s a fan of avant garde cosmology, the multiverse. Regardless of which scenario you choose, the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem demonstrates that the universe/multiverse has a beginning in the finite past. Prior to the universe, therefore, there was no time, and God, who is logically and ontologically prior to the universe, was therefore not temporally prior to it. Before the universe was created, God existed timelessly and so had no beginning; his relationship to time began with his creation of time. So Richard, please take note: there is a fundamental difference between the claim that God had no beginning and the claim that flagellar motors were always there.

Dawkins’ disclaimers and his invective will no doubt continue. Theists may look on his performance benignly and with a sort of amused sympathy. Dance, Richard, dance: perhaps one of these days you’ll recognize that you’ve tripped and God has caught you.

Bruce L. Gordon, Ph.D. is Research Director for the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute.