Irreducible complexity and the anthropic principle

Returning to matters of religion and science, I’ve been listening to scientist Richard Dawkin’s “The God Delusion” audio book, and he, like other authors, who have taken up the subject of God, visited the ideas of irreducible complexity and the anthropic principle. I’ll take both one at the time.

They are both interesting and quite detrimental to the idea of a creator. Creationists argue from the irreducible complexity stance that we can point to certain body parts, like eyes or wings, as irreducibly complex, meaning that they would be useless organs if they were missing parts. Essentially, that they are uniquely perfect in their whole form and would serve no purpose if any of the parts were not there.

Apologists argue that since eyes, wings and other examples would be useless in such unwhole states, thus providing supposed evidence that a creator must have brought these elements into being. They also argue that the theory of natural selection breaks down. Natural selection posits that life evolves, not randomly or by chance, but by an intricate process that, over time, roots out the unfit elements in body parts and species, in favor of those parts that support survival of given species. Natural selection, then, according to some apologists, is invalid because we can find examples of organs or body parts that are complete in and of themselves and are useless without existing as a whole.

Charles Darwin, himself, even said that the “eye … could have been formed by natural selection seems, I fully confess, absurd in the highest degree,” which Dawkins noted that Darwin’s statement was a rhetorical device, not an admission that the eye was irreducibly complex. Dawkins notes that “a cataract patient with the lens of her eye surgically removed cannot see clear images without glasses but can see enough not to bump into a tree or fall over a cliff.” Flat worms have a “blurred and dim image, compared to ours” and have something less than half of human eyes. The cephalopod nautilus has an intermediate eye between flatworm and human.

Dawkins:

It would be spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes and many are all better than no eye at all.

For another discussion about the eye, see here and for another on the flagella motor, another mechanism claimed to be irreducibly complex, see here.

Now, turning to the anthropic principle, has anyone reading this ever wondered about the probability of a world like ours forming that was perfect for the development of life? Surely so. But probably so, also, there is another world, yet undiscovered, possibly undiscoverable, that also houses life. It blows my mind, and it should yours, the sheer number of, not only planets, but galaxies in our universe. Not only that, but some scientists suggest that we are part of something called a multiverse, a group of universes, which in themselves, contain billions of galaxies, and dare I say, trillions of planets.

According to Dawkins, which is also according to astrophysicts, our galaxy contains between one billion and 30 billion planets. Moreoever, our universe contains about 100 billion galaxies. Take the irrefutable low number here. We don’t need 30 billion. Just take one billion: what would it mean to believe that a creator has fashioned this planet uniquely and ignored the others among a pool of one billion planets?

Did he fashion any others? Did life develop on any others naturally? It’s possible. The sheer number of planets in the universe suggests that we might not be alone, and further, that we might not be so unique after all. It also raises the probability, incredibly, that life on this planet was formed naturally. Dawkins, here, takes the estimation of a billion billion planets in the universe:

Knocking a few noughts off for reasons of ordinary prudence, a billion billion is a conservative estimate of the number of available planets in the universe. Now, suppose the origin of life, the spontaneous arising of something equivalent to DNA really was a quite staggeringly improbable event. Suppose it was so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets.

A grant-giving body would laugh at any chemist who admitted that the chance of his proposed research succeeding was only one in 100, but here, we are talking about odds of one in a billion, and yet even with such absurdly long odds, life will still have arisen on a billion planets of which Earth, of course, is one.

This conclusion is so surprising, I’ll say it again. If the odds of life originating spontaneously on a planet were a billion to one against, nevertheless, that stupifyingly improbable event would still happen on a billion planets (my emphasis). — “The God Delusion,” Richard Dawkins

This conclusion was so stunning that I have rewinded numerous times. Apologists, of course, simply ignore talk that the planet is millions of years old and the universe billions. They also ignore more irrefutable evidence that we now know that “things” existed well before God’s supposed creation of all things 6,000 years ago, including the domestication of dogs and humans.

But now turning to God. What would it mean to believe that a creator put this whole cosmic slideshow into action? What would it mean that he was the creator of all things, living and non. It would mean that he would have to be incredibly complex, not simple, and as Dawkins states, irreducibly complex:

Even though generally irreducible complexity would wreck Darwin’s theory, if it were ever found, who’s to say 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 irreducably so. — “The God Delusion,” Richard Dawkins

Thus, if we assume a creator, we get ourselves into an infinite regress, which eventually begs the question: Who created this extremely complex creator? He was always there, you say? Did he create himself? How could he possibly just always be there ad infinitem given his apparently complex attributes? Because he’s a god? That explains nothing. If he is actually active in our universe and in our dimension, does he supercede the natural laws that govern them? How can he supercede them? Because he’s god? That’s just a statement that means nothing. Simply stating that Poseideon or Zeus or Allah or Yahweh are gods does not make it so, nor does it ascribe to them attributes which trespass on natural laws that govern the world. 

The Bible, of course, begins on this assumption, and moves forward on a pre-known set of events that, if God really loved us, he would have stopped the whole stupifying process from the time Adam and Eve first tasted of the fruit and stopped the entire bloody, hellbent affair that will lead millions of his creation to fire and brimstone. But no, he persisted and allowed thousands of years of suffering in the name of, and because of, religion. Moreover, he sat by idly amid tens of thousands of years of early human suffering and clambering toward enlightenment they would never know. He watched it all with folded arms, and then, from the Christian view, finally decided to intervene about 2,000 years ago in illiterate, Bronze Age Palestine, not in China or other parts, where folks could actually read. A fine place to begin a new religion, indeed.