Monotheism

2008-05-17T17:13:09Z

Bushin2008: full of truthiness

'''Monotheism'''
It is impossible to exaggerate the magnitude of the problem that
Darwin and Wallace solved. I could mention the anatomy, cellular
structure, biochemistry and behaviour of literally any living
organism by example. But the most striking feats of apparent
design are those picked out - for obvious reasons - by creationist
authors, and it is with gentle irony that I derive mine from a
creationist book. Life - How Did It Get Here?, with no named
author but published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society in
sixteen languages and eleven million copies, is obviously a firm
favourite because no fewer than six of those eleven million copies
have been sent to me as unsolicited gifts by well-wishers from
around the world.
Picking a page at random from this anonymous and lavishly distributed
work, we find the sponge known as Venus' Flower Basket
(Euplectella), accompanied by a quotation from Sir David
Attenborough, no less: 'When you look at a complex sponge
skeleton such as that made of silica spicules which is known as
Venus' Flower Basket, the imagination is baffled. How could quasiindependent
microscopic cells collaborate to secrete a million glassy
splinters and construct such an intricate and beautiful lattice? We
do not know.' The Watchtower authors lose no time in adding their
own punchline: 'But one thing we do know: Chance is not the likely
designer.' No indeed, chance is not the likely designer. That is one
thing on which we can all agree. The statistical improbability of
phenomena such as Euplectella's skeleton is the central problem
that any theory of life must solve. The greater the statistical
improbability, the less plausible is chance as a solution: that is
what improbable means. But the candidate solutions to the riddle
of improbability are not, as is falsely implied, design and chance.
They are design and natural selection. Chance is not a solution,
given the high levels of improbability we see in living organisms,
120 T H K G O D I) E I, V S I O N
and no sane biologist ever suggested that it was. Design is not a real
solution either, as we shall see later; but for the moment I want to
continue demonstrating the problem that any theory of life must
solve: the problem of how to escape from chance.
Turning Watchtower's page, we find the wonderful plant known
as Dutchman's Pipe (Aristolochia trilobata), all of whose parts seem
elegantly designed to trap insects, cover them with pollen and send
them on their way to another Dutchman's Pipe. The intricate
elegance of the flower moves Watchtower to ask: 'Did all of this
happen by chance? Or did it happen by intelligent design?' Once
again, no of course it didn't happen by chance. Once again, intelligent
design is not the proper alternative to chance. Natural
selection is not only a parsimonious, plausible and elegant solution;
it is the only workable alternative to chance that has ever been
suggested. Intelligent design suffers from exactly the same objection
as chance. It is simply not a plausible solution to the riddle of
statistical improbability. And the higher the improbability, the more
implausible intelligent design becomes. Seen clearly, intelligent
design will turn out to be a redoubling of the problem. Once again,
this is because the designer himself (/herself/itself) immediately
raises the bigger problem of his own origin. Any entity capable of
intelligently designing something as improbable as a Dutchman's
Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a
Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God
aggravates it with a vengeance.
Turn another Watchtower page for an eloquent account of the
giant redwood (Sequoiadendron giganteum), a tree for which I
have a special affection because I have one in my garden - a mere
baby, scarcely more than a century old, but still the tallest tree in
the neighbourhood. 'A puny man, standing at a sequoia's base, can
only gaze upward in silent awe at its massive grandeur. Does it
make sense to believe that the shaping of this majestic giant and
of the tiny seed that packages it was not by design?' Yet again, if
you think the only alternative to design is chance then, no, it does
not make sense. But again the authors omit all mention of the real
alternative, natural selection, either because they genuinely don't
understand it or because they don't want to.
The process by which plants, whether tiny pimpernels or
W H Y T l i l - I U ; A L M O S T C F R T A I X L Y I S N O G O D 121
massive wellingtonias, acquire the energy to build themselves is
photosynthesis. Watchtower again: ' "There are about seventy
separate chemical reactions involved in photosynthesis," one
biologist said. "It is truly a miraculous event." Green plants have
been called nature's "factories" - beautiful, quiet, nonpolluting,
producing oxygen, recycling water and feeding the world. Did they
just happen by chance? Is that truly believable?' No, it is not believable;
but the repetition of example after example gets us nowhere.
Creationist 'logic' is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is
too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too aweinspiring
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? Chance and design both fail as
solutions to the problem of statistical improbability, because one of
them is the problem, and the other one regresses to it. Natural
selection is a real solution. It is the only workable solution that has
ever been suggested. And it is not only a workable solution, it is a
solution of stunning elegance and power.
What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to
the problem of improbability, where chance and design both fail at
the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative
process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into
small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not
prohibitively so. When large numbers of these slightly improbable
events are stacked up in series, the end product of the accumulation
is very very improbable indeed, improbable enough to be far
beyond the reach of chance. It is these end products that form the
subjects of the creationist's wearisomely recycled argument. The
creationist completely misses the point, because he (women should
for once not mind being excluded by the pronoun) insists on treating
the genesis of statistical improbability as a single, one-off event.
He doesn't understand the power of accumulation.
In Climbing Mount Improbable, I expressed the point in a
parable. One side of the mountain is a sheer cliff, impossible to
1 2 2 • •! • ; . . ; • ) > ! » r i s ; s i o
climb, but on the other side is a gentle slope to the summit. On the
summit sits a complex device such as an eye or a bacterial flagellar
motor. The absurd notion that such complexity could
spontaneously self-assemble is symbolized by leaping from the foot
of the cliff to the top in one bound. Evolution, by contrast, goes
around the back of the mountain and creeps up the gentle slope to
the summit: easy! The principle of climbing the gentle slope as
opposed to leaping up the precipice is so simple, one is tempted to
marvel that it took so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene and
discover it. By the time he did, nearly three centuries had elapsed
since Newton's annus mirabilis, although his achievement seems,
on the face of it, harder than Darwin's.
Another favourite metaphor for extreme improbability is the
combination lock on a bank vault. Theoretically, a bank robber
could get lucky and hit upon the right combination of numbers by
chance. In practice, the bank's combination lock is designed with
enough improbability to make this tantamount to impossible -
almost as unlikely as Fred Hoyle's Boeing 747. But imagine a badly
designed combination lock that gave out little hints progressivelythe
equivalent of the 'getting warmer' of children playing Hunt the
Slipper. Suppose that when each one of the dials approaches its
correct setting, the vault door opens another chink, and a dribble
of money trickles out. The burglar would home in on the jackpot
in no time.
Creationists who attempt to deploy the argument from improbability
in their favour always assume that biological
adaptation is a question of the jackpot or nothing. Another name
for the 'jackpot or nothing' fallacy is 'irreducible complexity' (IC).
Either the eye sees or it doesn't. Either the wing flies or it doesn't.
There are assumed to be no useful intermediates. But this is simply
wrong. Such intermediates abound in practice - which is exactly
what we should expect in theory. The combination lock of life is a
'getting warmer, getting cooler, getting warmer' Hunt the Slipper
device. Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount
Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting
precipice at the front.
Darwin devoted an entire chapter of the Origin of Species to
'Difficulties on the theory of descent with modification', and it is
W H Y r i-i r R r A I M O S T C t R T A I N I Y IS NO <> o D 123
fair to say that this brief chapter anticipated and disposed of every
single one of the alleged difficulties that have since been proposed,
right up to the present day. The most formidable difficulties are
Darwin's 'organs of extreme perfection and complication', sometimes
erroneously described as 'irreducibly complex'. Darwin
singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: 'To
suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting
the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts
of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic
aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I
freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.' Creationists gleefully
quote this sentence again and again. Needless to say, they never
quote what follows. Darwin's fulsomely free confession turned out
to be a rhetorical device. He was drawing his opponents towards
him so that his punch, when it came, struck the harder. The punch,
of course, was Darwin's effortless explanation of exactly how the
eye evolved by gradual degrees. Darwin may not have used the
phrase 'irreducible complexity', or 'the smooth gradient up Mount
Improbable', but he clearly understood the principle of both.
'What is the use of half an eye?' and 'What is the use of half a
wing?' are both instances of the argument from 'irreducible complexity'.
A functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the
removal of one of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning.
This has been assumed to be self-evident for both eyes and wings.
But as soon as we give these assumptions a moment's thought, we
immediately see the fallacy. A cataract patient with the lens of her
eye surgically removed can't see clear images without glasses, but
can see enough not to bump into a tree or fall over a cliff. Half a
wing is indeed not as good as a whole wing, but it is certainly better
than no wing at all. Half a wing could save your life by easing your
fall from a tree of a certain height. And 51 per cent of a wing could
save you if you fall from a slightly taller tree. Whatever fraction of
a wing you have, there is a fall from which it will save your life
where a slightly smaller winglet would not. The thought experiment
of trees of different height, from which one might fall, is just
one way to see, in theory, that there must be a smooth gradient
of advantage all the way from 1 per cent of a wing to 100 per
cent. The forests are replete with gliding or parachuting animals
124 T H E G O D 1> E I U S I O N
illustrating, in practice, every step of the way up that particular
slope of Mount Improbable.
By analogy with the trees of different height, it is easy to imagine
situations in which half an eye would save the life of an animal
where 49 per cent of an eye would not. Smooth gradients are provided
by variations in lighting conditions, variations in the distance
at which you catch sight of your prey - or your predators. And, as
with wings and flight surfaces, plausible intermediates are not only
easy to imagine: they are abundant all around the animal kingdom.
A flatworm has an eye that, by any sensible measure, is less than
half a human eye. Nautilus (and perhaps its extinct ammonite
cousins who dominated Paleozoic and Mesozoic seas) has an eye
that is intermediate in quality between flatworm and human.
Unlike the flatworm eye, which can detect light and shade but see
no image, the Nautilus 'pinhole camera' eye makes a real image;
but it is a blurred and dim image compared to ours. It would be
spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody
could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes, and many others, are
all better than no eye at all, and all lie on a continuous and shallow
slope up Mount Improbable, with our eyes near a peak - not the
highest peak but a high one. In Climbing Mount Improbable, I
devoted a whole chapter each to the eye and the wing, demonstrating
how easy it was for them to evolve by slow (or even, maybe, not
all that slow) gradual degrees, and I will leave the subject here.
So, we have seen that eyes and wings are certainly not irreducibly
complex; but what is more interesting than these particular
examples is the general lesson we should draw. The fact that so
many people have been dead wrong over these obvious cases should
serve to warn us of other examples that are less obvious, such as the
cellular and biochemical cases now being touted by those
creationists who shelter under the politically expedient euphemism
of 'intelligent design theorists'.
We have a cautionary tale here, and it is telling us this: do not
just declare things to be irreducibly complex; the chances are that
you haven't looked carefully enough at the details, or thought carefully
enough about them. On the other hand, we on the science side
must not be too dogmatically confident. Maybe there is something
out there in nature that really does preclude, by its genuinely
W H Y ' 1 1 I K R K A L M O S T (.: F R T A 1 N [. Y 15 NO (, O I) 125
irreducible complexity, the smooth gradient of Mount Improbable.
The creationists are right that, if genuinely irreducible complexity
could be properly demonstrated, it would wreck Darwin's theory.
Darwin himself said as much: 'If it could be demonstrated that any
complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed
by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would
absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.' Darwin could
find no such case, and nor has anybody since Darwin's time, despite
strenuous, indeed desperate, efforts. Many candidates for this holy
grail of creationism have been proposed. None has stood up to
analysis.
In any case, even though genuinely irreducible complexity would
wreck Darwin's theory if it were ever found, who is to say that it
wouldn't wreck the intelligent design theory as well? Indeed, it
already has wrecked the intelligent design theory, for, as I keep saying
and will say again, however little we know about God, the one
thing we can be sure of is that he would have to be very very
complex and presumably irreducibly so!
==See also==
* [[Atheism]] - the lack of belief in gods.
* [[Polytheism]] - the belief in many gods.

[[Category:Types of Theism]]

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Monotheism