If there is no design, there is no designer
As a companion piece to the one on Gary Gutting’s suggestions about god’s simplicity, here is Dawkins on why the whole idea is a non-starter (TGD p 121):
Creationist “logic” is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine. Therefore a designer must have done it. And science’s answer to this faulty logic is also always the same. Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative. Indeed, design is not a real alternative at all because it raises an even bigger problem than it solves: who designed the designer?
You see he’s not just talking about why the failure of the argument from design makes god seem improbable, he’s also talking about why the argument from design fails. This is central. The argument from design fails because the appearance of design is just that; it’s an illusion; and that makes sense because the designer is nowhere to be found, and not at all likely, and that in turn makes sense, because there is no design, so we might as well stop looking for a designer. There is no need to pace to and fro talking about how god can be simple and identical to all its qualities; we can just bag the whole thing. There is no design; there is no designer; let’s go have a glass of wine.
Creationist logic = fallacy of bifurcation. If today isn’t New Years day, it must be Christmas day….
Even better: if there was a designer, it must’ve been Rube Goldberg. The IDiots only focus what they consider the perfections of nature, but never seem to notice the myriads of co-options of features to do other things. Those co-options are the best evidence for evolution, and yet the IDiots never even attempt to explain them.
This argument is, I think, basically the same as I offered over at the NYT. The only reason for scouting the idea of the simplicity of god is that it seemed that god is necessary in order to account for the existence of the world, and, in particular, of life in the world. So, we play a logical game, and see how the divine simplicity could be understood. If you take Gutting’s original take on the argument, which he calls a non-sequitur, the point becomes fairly clear:
Strictly speaking, of course, it is a non-sequitur, if you take it as a formal argument. But the argument is not a formal deductive one. The point is that we do not need a god to explain why the world is as we find it. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that a god, that would explain the universe as it exists, itself exists. We have no need of that hypothesis.
Gutting wants to take us on a merry tour of philosophical theology, actually saying, at one point,
And this is where Gutting goes wrong. Dawkins doesn’t ignore this possibility, because the need for exploring such possibilities only exists where a need for a god exists, and we don’t need that hypothesis. It is very unilikely that a god exists for the precise reason that the existence of a god would serve no purpose. This is the main point that opponents of Dawkins’ argument don’t want to recognise. As some critics of Gutting have said, his whole article fails to take into account PZ’s courtier’s reply. The arguments for the existence of god won’t work unless we need a god to explain things. If we don’t, the arguments are just treading water, no matter how logically sophisticated and clever they seem to be. So the argument is not quite:
More completely, Dawkins’ argument is this:
It is Laplace’s “Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis” that makes Dawkins argument much more logically compelling than Gutting seems to think. He wants everyone to go swanning around in philosophical theology, but he hasn’t shown that there is any reason to do that, and that’s what he has to show if he is to give philosophical theology any bite.
Once you get to the point of recognition that the designer hypothesis isn’t needed, the question of designer probability isn’t very interesting. Theologians (Plantinga, for example) try to show that really bad arguments become good if they are needed and then make more bad arguments to show they are needed (irreducible complexity).
Eric, as you point out, Dawkins isn’t ignoring arguments he must pay attention to, he’s making better arguments. By having the good sense to be guided by evidence from nature rather than old beliefs wedded to logical apriorisms, he’s playing a far better hand.
As a male, middle aged owner of an expanding prostate with an increasingly impeded urethra passing through it, I would like to have a heart to heart talk with this so called designer.
We have at least two main alternatives here. We have a universe which:
1. we partially understand, and from contemporary processes which we do understand we can infer designed itself as it went, as there is no designer to be found.
2. we can find phenomena which appear to have been designed as if by some separate intelligence, presumably very powerful and knowing, but whose existence has not yet been proven or confirmed. But we do have unconfirmed sightings. It’s a bit like the case of the Tasmanian tiger.
If we incline to option 2, we are left with at least two further possibilities:
2a. The designer is hiding from us, for whatever reason or
2b. The designer set the whole universe we know in motion, and sometime later ceased to be. That is to say, the designer-creator died. That creationist explanation at least fits the facts.
2b is at least consistent with human experience. The manufacturer has gone out of business, and we are left with a product which has problems but no warranty, and the lights are all out in the Complaints Department.
Caveat emptor, or whatever the appropriate expression is.
An eloquent summing up of our situation, Ian! No warranty; no functioning Complaints Department. Siiiiiiigh.
This thread seems to have considerably more argument and less abuse than many I’ve seen, so I hope you don’t mind if I drop in to make a couple comments.
1. Many of you seem to think that my blog tried to argue for the existence of God. Not so. I was entirely concerned with the case Dawkins tries to make against the existence of God. Similarly, I did not assert that God is simple (i.e., not complex). I noted that Dawkins’ says that a God that designed the universe would have to be complex and asked how he could support that claim. Since Dawkins’ claim denies a long philosophical tradition that says God is simple, I also asked how he could support that claim without paying some serious attention to what that tradition says about God’s simplicity.
2. I was pleased to see Eric agreeing that Dawkins’ “central argument” (in GD, ch. 4) is a non-sequitur (that is, as formulated, its premises do not support the high probability of its conclusion). But I’m very happy to see if we can find a better formulation.
Eric’s reformulation is: “we do not need a god to explain why the world is as we find it. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that a god, that would explain the universe as it exists, itself exists.” But this also is a non-sequitur. Even if the premise is true, there might well be other arguments for God’s existence that do not posit him to explain the universe (for example, the ontological argument or arguments from direct awareness of God). Further, what evidence does Dawkins provide for the argument’s premise (that we don’t need God to explain the universe as it exists)? He seriously discusses only the argument that God is needed to explain the apparent design of the world. But what about the cosmological argument, which posits God to explain the existence, not the apparent design, of the universe? Here Dawkins offers only a couple pages discussing a caricature of Aquinas’ first three ways, which is hardly enough to dispose of this argument.
I know that many of Dawkins’ supporters insist that he doesn’t have to prove anything–it’s the theists who need to prove their claim. But to argue in this way you at least need to show (to a high degree of probability) that none of the theists’ arguments work. But how can you claim to have done this if you haven’t engaged with any of these arguments (except perhaps the design argument) in anything like their best formulations? It’s as if a creationist said: I don’t have to prove that evolutionary theory is wrong because none of the arguments for it work, but then criticized only over-simplified popular arguments for evolution. To make the there-are-no-good-arguments argument work, you have to come to grips with the best arguments available. Dawkins (and popular atheism in general) doesn’t do this.
Sorry, I should have signed the post.
Gary Gutting
Gary: ” I don’t have to prove that evolutionary theory is wrong because none of the arguments for it work, but then criticized only over-simplified popular arguments for evolution. To make the there-are-no-good-arguments argument work, you have to come to grips with the best arguments available. Dawkins (and popular atheism in general) doesn’t do this.”
The basic ideas of evolution are simple, as is the idea of universal gravitational attraction. It is thus an interesting sideline to investigate and speculate on why it took so much time for just a small number of intelligent humans to grasp each one. Following Kuhn, I would favour it having been a perceptual problem, of people not being able to see the wood for the trees; ie past the old paradigm.
The essential ideas of evolution are (a) like breeds like (b) there is random variation of characteristics amongst offspring and (c) some offspring are more suited to survival in a given environment than are others. Darwin knew nothing of genes, but a lot about the natural variety of the biosphere. He was also pretty adept at thinking for himself.
“The best arguments available” for evolution today are still based on the above three basic ideas, even though they might express the process in terms such as change in gene frequencies. Einstein is on record somewhere as having said: “Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.”
Thus to my mind the most persuasive creationist argument is the one set out at 2b in comment #6 above. If God existed, it would not be necessary to come up with endless and contorted philosophical argumentation to prove it so. Most likely, one would only need to look up in the sky, or perhaps just turn around.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions
Gary — if you happen to check this, I would invite you to take a look at what I wrote about your article on my blog;. My basic point is that even if I accept that there are very good modern refinements to the cosmological argument, etc., I only have to address them if I am rejecting the possibility of a deist God — which I am not. I happen to think the idea of a deist God is a bit silly, but I am not an “a-deist” in the sense that I think such a belief is clearly false, or even falsifiable. If a deist asks me, “Why am I wrong?”, really all I can do is shrug.
You cannot make a case against atheism by making arguments which only support deism.
Ian–I guess I just don’t see any reason for thinking that if there are good arguments for God’s existence, they would have to be easy to understand. I also think you’re over-optimistic about the general accessibility of scientific ideas and, particularly, of the evidence required to establish them.
Jame–I’m not quite sure how you’re using “deism”. Typically, it means a view that accepts the existence of God (as an all-good, all-powerful creator of the universe) but denies (or is agnostic about) claims that God has intervened in the history of the world and revealed himself in the ways that religions such as Christianity (Christ and his miracles, etc.) claim. A deist, as the term is generally used, accepts the God of “natural religion” but not the God of “revealed religion”. It seems to me very odd to say that you’re an atheist (that is, think it at least highly unlikely that there is a God) but to take that to mean only that claims of religious revelation are false.
I suspect you are thinking of a form of the cosmological argument that would claim to show only that there is some sort of first cause of the universe but say nothing at all about the personal or moral attributes of that cause. This would fall far short of what most theists (even if they don’t accept a particular religious revelation) would believe. But philosophers who use this sort of argument (e.g., Aquinas) typically go on to argue that the first cause must also have the standard religiously important divine properties. And the ontological argument, which, if it works, gives us God as maximally perfect, clearly does give us God as all-knowing, all-powerful, morally perfect, and all the other traits relevant to religious worship.
Gary,
The arguments for the existence of God can be convoluted and difficult to understand, especially for peasants like me. I grant you that. But my point is that the very need itself for such mental gymnastics is a pretty strong indicator that an intelligent designer-creator pobably does not exist, because if he/she/it did, the fact would probably be blindingly obvious, at least to physicists and astronomers, but probably other scientists and investigators as well.
Other possibilities are that he/she/it has died since the creation event; or has gone mad and turned malicious.
But to my mind a benevolent, loving and omniscient god who also chooses to remain incommunicado is the least likely possibility.
Ian,
If God is omniscient (or even if he just knows a great deal more than we do), there is no reason to think that he will make the same kinds of judgments that we do about how to act. Knowledge typically changes behavior. For all we know, God may have very good reasons for not making his existence obvious to everyone (or even to scientists). So I don’t see how you can base your denial of God’s existence on your assumptions about what God would want.
Gary
Gary,
What I deny is the likelihood of God’s existence, not the existence itself. “For all we know, God may have very good reasons for not making his existence obvious to everyone…” I agree. Possible very good reasons include: (1) he has died; (2) he has gone senile; (3) he has gone completely bonkers. Etc. But the phrase ‘for all we know’ is an unfortunate one, as everything we know has formed out of the pooled experience of humanity, and at this stage of history we know a surprisingly huge amount. What God’s reasons could be for hiding the way he does is indeed a puzzle, for it is inconsistent with his benevolent reputation.
If you ask me that is the sort of behaviour of men who are out to dodge alimony and maintenance payments.
One indisputable consequence of God’s perhaps deliberate obscurity is widespread lack of belief in his existence. Another is widespread confusion over his nature and intentions. Hence the profusion of religions and of sects within each religion.
I have yet to encounter anyone who does not believe in the existence of the Moon. It is very hard to maintain such a disbelief, though I did know two men who believed that the Earth was flat. One was a Christian fundamentalist who accepted that the Earth was round until he met the other man, who promptly proved via some passages from the Bible that it was flat.
Much of the aforesaid knowledge has been gained despite religion rather than because of it. Increasingly in the modern world, religion is at loggerheads with science, in ways explored in many of the discussions on this site, if you care to check the archive..
Ian,
It looks like our argument comes down to this: to justify your claim that God almost certainly doesn’t exist, you need to show that, if God existed, there would probably be readily accessible evidence for his existence. Your reason for this claim is that not providing such evidence would be “inconsistent with [God’s] benevolent reputation”. To that, of course, my suggestion is that we, having far less knowledge than God, cannot make reasonable judgments about what an omniscient God would do (so we don’t know that his benevolence would likely require making his existence obvious). You make various comments about how much we know, about how religion has obstructed knowledge, about difficulties for humans that would result from our not having clear proof of God’s existence, etc. But none of that shows what you need to show: that there’s good reason to think that a benevolent God would very likely make his existence obvious to us. If you can’t show this, then you’re case for atheism collapses. (And please don’t go back to “the atheist doesn’t have to prove anything”. As we’ve seen, you at least need to prove (with high probability) that there aren’t any good proofs for God’s existence.)
Gary,
“As we’ve seen, you at least need to prove (with high probability) that there aren’t any good proofs for God’s existence.”
Maybe one day someone will find a unicorn grazing in a field of mandrakes, and the find will be confirmed. Until then, I am happy with the proposition that neither unicorns nor mandrakes exist, except of course in the human imagination. Meanwhile, proving a negative is impossible. Proving a positive is relatively straight-forward.
If you have a ‘good’ (that is, watertight) proof of God’s existence, I would be most interested if you could tell me what it is. So far in my life, all such have eluded me. I am sure a few others around here would be interested as well.
Ian,
The unicorn has nothing to do with it, since there have been no argument developed in careful, detailed ways for the existence of unicorns. If there were, you couldn’t conclude that they almost certainly don’t exist without coming to terms with these arguments. Nor is the old claim that “proving a negative is impossible” relevant. At best that claim means that we can only prove that a denial of something’s existence is highly probable (which is exactly what Dawkins purports to do regarding God).
As any attentive reading of my two blogs will show, I have not tried to prove that God’s existence is certain or highly probable. But if, as you say, you are interested in finding a good argument for God’s existence, I fail to understand why you refuse to look at the best available efforts to give one and instead waste time beating up on amateur apologists. If you don’t have time or inclination to pursue the question seriously, that’s fine. But then you should stop claiming that you have good reason to think that there are no good arguments for theism; be content with an agnostic withholding of judgment.
Gary, ” I fail to understand why you refuse to look at the best available efforts to give one [namely?] and instead waste time beating up on amateur apologists. [Who specifically?] If you don’t have time or inclination to pursue the question seriously, that’s fine. But then you should stop claiming that you have good reason to think that there are no good arguments for theism; be content with an agnostic withholding of judgment.
I have good reason to think there are no good arguments for theism because I have not yet found one, and my request of you to cite one has proved fruitless. I’m sure the most convincing argument for the existence of the unicorn would be a specimen in front of a TV camera, vouched for by a team of zoologists. God likewise.
Ian,
Here are three arguments worth looking into (two of them were mentioned in my NYT blogs):
modal ontological argument: Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity, ch. 10
cosmological argument: Timothy O’Connor, Theism and Ultimate Explanation
teleological fine-tuning argument: Robin Collins, “The Teleological Argument: An Exploration of the Fine-tuning of the Cosmos”, in Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology
Note that I’m not endorsing any of these as decisive proofs that there is a God. But you’ve no right to say there are no good arguments for theism until you’ve evaluated arguments on this level.
Gary,
Cut to the 21st C. Surely these ‘non-decisive’ arguments must be accessible on the Net. My instincts tell me that if they were any good, they would be on every religious site in the world, and up there in neon lights on St Paul’s and St Peter’s.
Is it too much to ask for a hyperlink? I don’t have any of those books, and I doubt if my local library does either.
Gary,
So far I have found Plantinga’s book online at http://www.questia.com/read/13900994. Perhaps the others are around on the Net too.
There’s a preliminary version of Collins’ paper at http://home.messiah.edu/~rcollins/Fine-tuning/FT.HTM