Response to Apologetics III: Aquinas and Occam’s razor

All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is—marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity. — Joseph Conrad, note to The Shadow Line

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So after spending quite a bit of time reinstalling Windows XP and the gazillion updates that have been released since I installed the OS, I am now getting back to reading through this book, which at this point in Chapter 3, is beginning to dredge up the very tired and very bad arguments for God from Saint Thomas Aquinas, arguments that have already been picked apart by numerous others. The authors here are attempting to put forward what they call 20 arguments for the existence of God. I haven’t time to get to all of them, but I’ll start with Aquinas, whose sophistic arguments, and many arguments in the above book, may make a lot of sense to folks who by their faith have erected a thick set of blinders, but they don’t make much sense to the rest of us. Not the least of whom is Richard Dawkins, who deals with Aquinus’ popular five main points ably enough:

The five ‘proofs’ asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century don’t prove anything, and are easily – though I hesitate to say so, given his eminence – exposed as vacuous. The first three are
just different ways of saying the same thing, and they can be considered together. All involve an infinite regress – the answer to a question raises a prior question, and so on ad infinitum.

1 The Unmoved Mover. Nothing moves without a prior mover. This leads us to a regress, from which the only escape is God. Something had to make the first move, and that something we call God.

2 The Uncaused Cause. Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect has a prior cause, and again we are pushed back into regress. This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call God.

3 The Cosmological Argument. There must have been a timewhen no physical things existed. But, since physical things exist now, there must have been something non-physical to bring them into existence, and that something we call God.

All three of these arguments rely upon the idea of a regress and invoke God to terminate it. They make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress. Even if we
allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts. Incidentally, it has not escaped the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can’t change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent.

It is by no means clear that God provides a natural terminator to the regresses of Aquinas. That’s putting it mildly, as we shall see later. Let’s move on down Aquinas’ list.

4 The Argument from Degree. We notice that things in the world differ. There are degrees of, say, goodness or perfection. But we judge these degrees only by comparison with a maximum. Humans can be both good and bad, so the maximum goodness cannot rest in us. Therefore there must be some other maximum to set the standard for perfection, and we call that maximum God.

That’s an argument? You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion.

The argument from design is the only one still in regular use today, and it still sounds to many like the ultimate knockdown argument. The young Darwin was impressed by it when, as a
Cambridge undergraduate, he read it in William Paley’s Natural Theology. Unfortunately for Paley, the mature Darwin blew it out of the water.

The authors’ fifth argument is from design, and they over and over assert that the only two alternatives to explaining how immense complexity exists today is either through some intelligent design or by chance. But evolution by natural selection has nothing to do with chance, and to say it is the result of mere chance fails to understand the premises put forth by science. If mere chance were the only option making us living, breathing, thinking human beings, scientists wouldn’t think such a theory held much creedance. The argument for religion by chance is absurd. Here, I would recommend Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker or Climbing Mount Improbable. No one knows how life sprang from this planet. Theories suggest that the ingredients for life came from a more highly developed species or that the ingredients for life (enzymes) were transported to Earth from another portion of the Universe via one of numerous comets or astroids that struck the planet in the distant past. But what we do know is this, and I’ll assert it again: we exist on a spiral arm on a minute corner of the Milky Way, one of an unknown number of millions of galaxies in the universe. Prime the calculators, and that means that millions, or more likely, billions of planets do or have at some time existed in the universe. The sheer number of planets that do or have at one time existed is astounding. Earth and earthlings are a speck of dust tossed about in the vastness of the universe, and already, our telescopes can view moments just after the big bang. The light from stars that, perhaps, just hit some astronomer’s telescope came from light years away, and that light, greedily viewed from the astronomers eye, has come to the end of its gigantic journey across the cosmos.

Still, the authors of the above book insist that “It is surely up the nonbelievers to produce a credible alternative to design. And ‘chance’ is simply not credible.'” Chance isn’t even what is claimed, it’s only a crux for believers clambering to make some sense out of their beliefs. So, I might ask: who would be the judge of what is credible and what is not? Believers? No. The onus is squarely on believers to explain why they seek to introduce an infinitely complex being into the already complex universe, which science is, by degrees, at least attempting to explain scientifically. Occam’s razor cuts to the quick on this point, for to introduce a creator to explain away the exquisite nature we see around us is a very boring attempt at some theory, and frankly, it complicates matters further, while a simpler explanation will do. Indeed, that immense complexity grew, in tiny degrees over millennia, from simpler forms presents an exceedingly more remarkable and more believable reality.

 

Stein, Dawkins on ‘intelligent’ design

Here is a debate between Richard Dawkins and Ben Stein, the intelligent design proponent who starred in the film, “Expelled,” which, in fact, I quite enjoyed, but which had its flaws.

But, here, Stein wholly misrepresents what Dawkins is attempting, and does in his book, convey.

At one point, when Stein and Dawkins hit an impasse, Stein asks,

“Well then, who did create the heavens and the Earth?”

In which Dawkins answers:

Why do you use the word, “who?” You see, you immediately beg the question when you use the word, “who.”

Actually, Stein begged the question twice when he, not only used the word, “who,” but assumed the world was “created” in the first place.

The interview continued with the question from Stein:

What do you think is the possibility that intelligent design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics or Darwinian evolution?

When Dawkins probably should have given a more critical, balking answer, he actually attempts to give this thoughtful and honest reply:

Well, it could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved by probably some kind of Darwinian means to a very, very high level of technology and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. Now, that is a possibility and an intriguing possibility, and I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry and molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.

Here, we are interrupted by Stein, who says,

Wait a second, Richard Dawkins thought intelligent design might be a legitimate pursuit?

Dawkins continues:

… And that designer could well be a higher intelligence from elsewhere in the universe, but that higher intelligence would have itself would have had itself come about by some explicable or ultimately explicable process. It couldn’t have just just jumped into existence spontaneously. That’s the point.

Stein:

So Professor Dawkins was not against intelligent design but just certain types of designers, such as God.

Yes, and the flaw in logic here is easy to uncover. Dawkins made it clear that any “intelligent design” that may come about would, itself, have origins in highly evolved species that may have grown to the heightened extent that it is, itself, capable of “seeding” new civilizations, but the process of how this species was adapted, as Dawkins clearly says, and Stein ignores, would have to be a wholly natural process, following a pattern akin to how species on Earth adapt in nature. Stein seems to be suggesting that any use of the words, “intelligent design,” assumes some sort of metaphysical explanation for how everything came about, and it’s here that he tries to pin Dawkins into the infinite regress, but Dawkins’ argument has no spiritual element to it, regardless of how much Stein seems to be so desperate to pursue and inculcate such a position.

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.