Think Again
An old thought for the day from Philip Johnson, from a 1990 essay in Robert Pennock’s anthology Intelligent Design Creationism and its Critics – ‘Evolution as Dogma: the Establishment of Naturalism’.
If some powerful conscious being exists outside the natural order, it might use its power to intervene in nature to accomplish some purpose, such as the production of beings having consciousness and free will.
Such as. Such as the production of beings having consciousness and free will – beings like us, I daresay he means. Well, yes, it might. But – is it likely? I mean, seriously. Think about it. Is it likely? At all? Does it seem even remotely plausible? That ‘some powerful conscious being’ (but who? oh, who? who might it be? Rodan? Mighty Mouse?), powerful enough to ‘produce’ perhaps the cosmos and anyway some conscious beings with free will – would create us? I’m serious, here. Why would it create us? Why not something else? And if it is the same powerful conscious being who is suspected (by IDers anyway) of having ‘produced’ the universe, why would it be interested in us? Are we interested in dust? Yes, some of us are, but as a species? Well surely dust is many trillion times more interesting and attractive and likely-looking to us than we could be to Anonymous Powerful Conscious Being Outside the Natural Order. I’m serious. Because that’s the odd thing about ID – they pretend to be all serious, to be grown-up and philosophical and thoughtful. But in that case – the whole thing just seems so glaringly implausible and ridiculous that it falls to pieces. I can sort of see how people can be theists if they just never think about it very hard or directly, but IDers do (in a sense) think about it, in order to do what they do. And if you do that it just frankly seems ludicrous.
And then, besides that, what on earth makes these people so confident about what the being’s purpose is? What makes them so confident that they know what it is, and what makes them so confident that it’s something they want it to be? What can possibly make them so confident that the being produced us because it wanted something that has consciousness and free will? Why not consider the possibility that it wanted something that jumps when you burn it, runs when you send tigers after it, screams when you torture it? Or that it wanted a snack? Or that it wanted a source of methane? Why not consider an infinite array of possibilities, all of them horrible? Why are they so smugly, mindlessly confident that the one possibility out of all the endless branching possibilities is that the being made us in its own ‘image’ and therefore likes us and is concerned about us and hopes we’ll get it together and do well one of these days?
The more I think about this question, the more puzzling I find it.
But it is puzzling, because they are exposed to other possibilities. It seems puzzling that arrogance should be enough to keep the other possibilities offscreen.
…is that the being made us in its own ‘image’ and therefore likes us and is concerned about …
Perhaps it’s the other way around. We (present company excluded) made ‘the being’ in our own image, and therefore like us. That is why this mighty god seems to have made a dog’s dinner of quite a few things.
Shafika
When you talk to beievers, particularly the more reflective ones, you can often tease out that to a very great extent they believe because they want to believe, because the alternative terrifies them.
“If some powerful conscious being exists outside the natural order…”
Everything else follows on from this, doesn’t it? Why not start the sentence “We have no evidence that any powerful conscious being exists outside the natural order, nor reason to believe that it might, but if it did…”
… then why are we wasting our time on such an “if”?
I think you need to start with the foundation stone of faith; ‘I am special.’
Then move on to ‘So special that…’
The rest just follows naturally.
If there is a “powerful conscious being,” of the “god” type out there, those who believe in him don’t claim he has any need of us. It’s pretty clear many of us need him. I’m sure all will agree that there is a far greater likelihood that a frightened and ignorant life form will create the concept of an all-powerful father-figure than that such a being should create a frightened and ignorant life form which contributes nothing to his well-being.
“the production of beings having consciousness and free will”
I find this can lead to an interesting thought, particularly in light of the clear way Judge Jones demolished the analogies the IDers were trying to make with design by known, human creators. If we give them the latitude they want and ignore the fact that we know nothing of the needs, desires etc. of the unidentified Designer, we could compare the Designer’s efforts with our own in robotics and Artificial Intelligence. A great deal of these efforts, as in the creation of all earlier machines that had no AI-related aims, is simply to relieve us of much of the tedium of work. (It is beside the point I’m trying to make that the god of the believers created everything else first, leaving the intelligent helpers to last.) When we work at engineering intelligence, it is still largely connected to saving us still more time and energy in supervising our creations. Consciousness and free will are precisely the things that worry us about our creations. We almost fear we might get there. It is certainly not the case that that was our starting point. If we think seriously about it at all (and with trepidation) it’s only because we’ve already come so far, but for completely different reasons.
I have worked hard to change the circumstances of my life so that I no longer have many opportunities to enter into arguments with believers, but I think it would be instructive to ask people like, for example, Iqbal Sacranie, what they think their attitude to issues like homosexuality would be (and why) if there were no Koran telling them what to think. I doubt one would find many willing even hypothetically to put themselves in such a position, but for those who agree, it might be an enlightening way of showing them how little their own thoughts are connected to their beliefs.
“Or that it wanted a source of methane”
You echo here rather uncannily another thought I’ve had that sounds so silly that it requires the same disclaimer you make (“I’m serious”). It makes perfect sense, surely, that what something does, whether it be organism or machine, is what it was “supposed” to do, “intended” to do, “designed” to do. A machine makes auto parts; that’s its main purpose for existing. Living organisms reproduce themselves, and there we’ve outdone the competition, because we produce a lot more than just copies of ourselves. Along comes a Dawkins and says, no, it’s the genes, they’re reproducing themselves and everything else in the organism is just a vehicle to help them do that. But if you think with sufficient flexibility, you realise that among organisms visible to the unaided human eye, the only thing we all produce in significant quantities other than copies of ourselves… is excrement. Why have so many intelligent believers missed out on the revelation that’s staring us all in the face: god created life because he loves shit.
Exactly.
Which leads on to a further interesting thought – that the invention of sewer systems was not primarily, as had been thought, to prevent cholera and other communicable diseases, but to obscure from us the extent to which we are machines for the production of doodoo.
Why did the all-powerful Designer need us for that? Why didn’t he just create a universe full of it? Though, looking around sometimes, it does give one pause (as opposed to paws, which He only gave to life forms cuter than us).
Well, true. That is indeed a deep theological question. Why create two things when one would do? Why create shit-making machines instead of just creating shit?
The whole designer line of thought is like that, I find. Every truth claim they make suggests a whole fireworks display of new and very puzzling questions – all of which they ignore.
This is a great discussion, by the way.
“Perhaps it’s the other way around.”
It certainly appears that way! Or at least, it’s certainly a blindingly obvious possibility, which IDers bashfully sweep under the carpet, and hope we won’t notice.
‘I am Special…so Special that’
Just so. Six little words, and a whole theology. A smile, two bangs, and a religion. (One of my favourite catch-phrases of all time.)
We do lots of interesting arguing here and in order to have some of those arguments, we have to hypothetically accept something the believers believe in in order to be able to demolish arguments we would never even get to unless we did. Why talk about whether god’s behaviour in the tsunami lends moral support to his existence or not unless we pretend to ignore the lack of evidence for his existence for the few minutes we’re discussing that point? I’m gradually discovering easily expressed rules of thumb that need to be invoked to prevent certain arguments from going too far and I’m quite pleased about the way I expressed one of them here the other day: mystery-transference solves nothing. You want to solve a mystery? Investigate it. Don’t invent an answer that you claim solves it but actually only compounds the mystery and draws your attention away from the mystery that you wanted to solve. It’s all 139 pages of Judge Jones’ judgement in four words (ok, yeah, minus the condemnation of all the lying Buckingham and his accomplices did).
Next time I have a t-shirt custom-made…
“we have to hypothetically accept something the believers believe in in order to be able to demolish arguments we would never even get to unless we did.”
Exactly. I’ve been playing around with that for the past couple of days (as may be obvious from the fragments of playing that turn up here). It’s as if there is a series of forking (forking, I said forking) paths, and each time you for the sake of argument take the theist fork, you are immediately confronted with an infinite array of forks, and you wonder ‘well how do they manage to pretend there’s only the one?’ In other words they only manage to make their argument by blithely ignoring all the oddities their own argument kicks up.
“mystery-transference solves nothing”
Yes; v. good.
Another way of looking at it is that it’s part of their whole pattern (or ploy, or both) of pretending there are only two possibilities – as their critics keep pointing out. They pretend that: if evolution has holes in it (which of course it does), then the only alterantive is ID. That’s ridiculous. But that’s the basis of their campaign; and they extend that kind of thinking everywhere. If there is a designer, then the only possibility is that it’s a designer of exactly the kind they want. Oh? Why would that be? What, exactly, rules out all the other possibilities?
Ah, yes, “Ken Buddha and his Inflatable Knees.” I will never forget how exciting it was when I was able to identify the music accompanying the next part of the sketch, the animation of “Brian Islam and Brucey” as “Banjoreno,” a late 20s jug band recording.
I took off in a different direction after those last remarks, thinking not of all the forking you brought up, but that it’s worth going beyond the barrier of “no evidence for god” occasionally, because they seem to think they have so much else going for them beyond that in terms of morality, social cohesion, an entire level of existence without which our lives cannot be worth living. It’s worth going there to tear that all to shreds, as can be so easily done (not that they’ll ever accept you’ve done it) and then come back to the sane side of the barrier and say “and I didn’t even have to show it was wrong and unjust and evil and divisive and frankly loopy, because it isn’t even true in the first place.”
I also went a little further on the “special” bit than you wrote above. I think what believers in all religions I know have in common is an adamant refusal to consider the possibility that everything isn’t centred on them. Thinking out of their box is dangerous because they might have to consider the possibility that they themselves, not just god or one of his offspring, may not be vitally important in a cosmic sense. God has to care whether they do good or not. Are there religions out there with a god who has created everything and doesn’t care about it subsequently?
Sure, deism. Deism isn’t all that up to date now, but that is one familiar option. (And, again, IDers sometimes pay lip service to it, at least in public – in private it’s Wedge Wedge Wedge all the way.)
OB, I’m not sure you can extrapolate from the IDers to theism in general. Who can actually imagine a consciousness that isn’t embodied? Ghosts traditionally have bodies. Jesus promised resurrection in the flesh, neatly bypassing a problem he would, perhaps, either have not understood or have laughed at. Something “outside of nature” really depends on an idea of nature that can be translated back into the terms of the religious founders in the ‘seedtime of religion” only with a lot of difficulty. I actually think there is a popular understanding of what Gould called the two magesteria on a grassroots level — which is why I think the citizens of Dover can give the IDers the heave ho while still calmly attending Church. Was it Wells who said people exist simultaneously in two epochs?
So, when you have weasel words like “produce” connected to a disembodied agent, this might be a compromise for anguished scientists between faith and science, but I imagine it is just nonsense for the majority of believers, who definitely are thinking in terms of emanations, forces, the “hand of God” — all things that are, ultimately, matter. They definitely want to die and see their loved ones — not communicate in a disembodied way, supernatural essence to supernatural essence. Even that conjures up a vision of ectoplasmic orgies.
Paul — I think it was Saint Paul — once asked what the god of Athens had to do with the God of Jerusalem. But I don’t think either of them have to do with the God of Seattle.
Maybe I became more alert to “forking” after you mentioned it, because I came across a ridiculously extreme example in my bedtime reading. On a pretty random whim, I had opened David Frost’s “The Americans” (1970) to the interview with Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, who I see is described on his page in the Keeping Catholics Catholic Network as “one of the most brilliant men the world has ever known.” The interview is headed “How Do You Justify the Church’s Stand on Birth Control.” The second paragraph of Sheen’s reply begins:
“First of all, the Holy Father in his letter, the Humanae Vitae, never mentioned the pill. Now what he held out for was that Eros leads to Bios – that love leads to life. If the purpose of sex is not life, then what is it? Death.”
Yes, folks, that’s it. As logically inevitable as not having ice cream for lunch proves that you are a cannibal. And then – hallelujah – a miracle occurs, because on the next page Frost asks “But you’re not suggesting that there would be issue in the case of every time that a couple made love anyway, are you?,” to which Sheen replies “No, no, no, of course not. Not any more than every time I talk I make sense.”
Following which there was, as you all recall, an alarming drop in the population…
One possible reason that it’s simply assumed by believers that God would of course create us out of a desire to love us might be that the theory advanced by M.D. Faber in “The Psychological Roots of Religious Belief” has some validity: that the foundations for religious feelings developed in infancy, as our brain and sense of self formed from primary experiences with an all-knowing, all-giving, all-loving caretaker — the mother. The idea of God is therefore easily introduced because it is already unconsciously familiar. In Faber’s words, we are simply “recontacting, or relocating, the benign internalization, the benign inward relationship, upon which (our) life and well-being have been founded.”
Maybe. As babies we never questioned that our mothers were concerned about us, and knew what we were supposed to be doing. It’s a powerful image writ large on the cosmos.
”… among organisms visible to the unaided human eye, the only thing we all produce in significant quantities other than copies of ourselves… is excrement… god created life because he loves shit”
As a gardener and vegetable grower, I can confirm that Homo sapiens’ excrement cannot be used to increase soil fertility. There is nothing special about us; not even about our shit. Implications: god is not a keen gardener, otherwise he would have created many more horses and cows and much fewer humans.
Apologies for the scatological digression.
Shafika
No need to apologise; the scatological digression was my initiative (albeit jogged by OB’s reference to methane). Though I don’t think we were in any sense contradicting each other, I’d like to clarify that I wasn’t implying god was a keen gardener (Eden notwithstanding), merely that looking at us through a particular prism might lead one to conclude that that by-product of our existence might have been what he had in mind (surely it would have been better design to nourish us with things that left no waste products over). Religious leaders can’t fathom his ways, so why should I try? If he were a human being, I’d say, let’s look into his infancy, see if there was anything abnormal about his toilet training…
This is the most recent ID-related thread around, so I thought I’d paste in something I hadn’t seen before, a kind of practical amusement:
http://udel.edu/~mcdonald/mousetrap.html
It’s a graphic rebuttal of Behe’s IC ideas called “A reducibly complex mousetrap,” showing with a series of gif animations exactly how badly Behe chose one of his analogies.
Apologies to anyone for whom this is already old hat…