The God Hypothesis

[The Duke of Vandals]

The following is from Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion:

http://edge.org/3rd_culture/dawkins06/d ... index.html

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Stephen Jay Gould's 'NOMA' 'non-overlapping magisteria'. Gould claimed that science and true religion never come into conflict because they exist in completely separate dimensions of discourse:

To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists.

This sounds terrific, right up until you give it a moment's thought. You then realize that the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science. A universe with a god would be a completely different kind of universe from one without, and it would be a scientific difference. God could clinch the matter in his favour at any moment by staging a spectacular demonstration of his powers, one that would satisfy the exacting standards of science. Even the infamous Templeton Foundation recognized that God is a scientific hypothesis by funding double-blind trials to test whether remote prayer would speed the recovery of heart patients. It didn't, of course, although a control group who knew they had been prayed for tended to get worse (how about a class action suit against the Templeton Foundation?) Despite such well-financed efforts, no evidence for God's existence has yet appeared.

To see the disingenuous hypocrisy of religious people who embrace NOMA, imagine that forensic archeologists, by some unlikely set of circumstances, discovered DNA evidence demonstrating that Jesus was born of a virgin mother and had no father. If NOMA enthusiasts were sincere, they should dismiss the archeologists' DNA out of hand: "Irrelevant. Scientific evidence has no bearing on theological questions. Wrong magisterium." Does anyone seriously imagine that they would say anything remotely like that? You can bet your boots that not just the fundamentalists but every professor of theology and every bishop in the land would trumpet the archeological evidence to the skies.

Either Jesus had a father or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it. The same is true of any miracle and the deliberate and intentional creation of the universe would have to have been the mother and father of all miracles. Either it happened or it didn't. It is a fact, one way or the other, and in our state of uncertainty we can put a probability on it an estimate that may change as more information comes in. Humanity's best estimate of the probability of divine creation dropped steeply in 1859 when The Origin of Species was published, and it has declined steadily during the subsequent decades, as evolution consolidated itself from plausible theory in the nineteenth century to established fact today.

....

Accepting, then, that the God Hypothesis is a proper scientific hypothesis whose truth or falsehood is hidden from us only by lack of evidence, what should be our best estimate of the probability that God exists, given the evidence now available? Pretty low I think, and here's why.

First, most of the traditional arguments for God's existence, from Aquinas on, are easily demolished. Several of them, such as the First Cause argument, work by setting up an infinite regress which God is wheeled out to terminate. But we are never told why God is magically able to terminate regresses while needing no explanation himself. To be sure, we do need some kind of explanation for the origin of all things. Physicists and cosmologists are hard at work on the problem. But whatever the answer a random quantum fluctuation or a Hawking/Penrose singularity or whatever we end up calling it it will be simple. Complex, statistically improbable things, by definition, don't just happen; they demand an explanation in their own right. They are impotent to terminate regresses, in a way that simple things are not. The first cause cannot have been an intelligence let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshipped. Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.

Another of Aquinas' efforts, the Argument from Degree, is worth spelling out, for it epitomises the characteristic flabbiness of theological reasoning. We notice degrees of, say, goodness or temperature, and we measure them, Aquinas said, by reference to a maximum:

Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus, as fire, which is the maximum of heat, is the cause of all hot things . . . Therefore, there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.

That's an argument? You might as well say that people vary in smelliness but we can make the judgment 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. That's theology.

The only one of the traditional arguments for God that is widely used today is the teleological argument, sometimes called the Argument from Design although since the name begs the question of its validity it should better be called the Argument for Design. It is the familiar 'watchmaker' argument, which is surely one of the most superficially plausible bad arguments ever discovered and it is rediscovered by just about everybody until they are taught the logical fallacy and Darwin's brilliant alternative.

In the familiar world of human artifacts, complicated things that look designed are designed. To nave observers, it seems to follow that similarly complicated things in the natural world that look designed things like eyes and hearts are designed too. It isn't just an argument by analogy. There is a semblance of statistical reasoning here too fallacious, but carrying an illusion of plausibility. If you randomly scramble the fragments of an eye or a leg or a heart a million times, you'd be lucky to hit even one combination that could see, walk or pump. This demonstrates that such devices could not have been put together by chance. And of course, no sensible scientist ever said they could. Lamentably, the scientific education of most British and American students omits all mention of Darwinism, and therefore the only alternative to chance that most people can imagine is design.

Even before Darwin's time, the illogicality was glaring: how could it ever have been a good idea to postulate, in explanation for the existence of improbable things, a designer who would have to be even more improbable? The entire argument is a logical non-starter, as David Hume realized before Darwin was born. What Hume didn't know was the supremely elegant alternative to both chance and design that Darwin was to give us. Natural selection is so stunningly powerful and elegant, it not only explains the whole of life, it raises our consciousness and boosts our confidence in science's future ability to explain everything else.

Natural selection is not just an alternative to chance. It is the only ultimate alternative ever suggested. Design is a workable explanation for organized complexity only in the short term. It is not an ultimate explanation, because designers themselves demand an explanation. If, as Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel once playfully speculated, life on this planet was deliberately seeded by a payload of bacteria in the nose cone of a rocket, we still need an explanation for the intelligent aliens who dispatched the rocket. Ultimately they must have evolved by gradual degrees from simpler beginnings. Only evolution, or some kind of gradualistic 'crane' (to use Daniel Dennett's neat term), is capable of terminating the regress. Natural selection is an anti-chance process, which gradually builds up complexity, step by tiny step. The end product of this ratcheting process is an eye, or a heart, or a brain a device whose improbable complexity is utterly baffling until you spot the gentle ramp that leads up to it.

Whether my conjecture is right that evolution is the only explanation for life in the universe, there is no doubt that it is the explanation for life on this planet. Evolution is a fact, and it is among the more secure facts known to science. But it had to get started somehow. Natural selection cannot work its wonders until certain minimal conditions are in place, of which the most important is an accurate system of replication DNA, or something that works like DNA.

The origin of life on this planet which means the origin of the first self-replicating molecule is hard to study, because it (probably) only happened once, 4 billion years ago and under very different conditions from those with which we are familiar. We may never know how it happened. Unlike the ordinary evolutionary events that followed, it must have been a genuinely very improbable in the sense of unpredictable event: too improbable, perhaps, for chemists to reproduce it in the laboratory or even devise a plausible theory for what happened. This weirdly paradoxical conclusion that a chemical account of the origin of life, in order to be plausible, has to be implausible would follow if it were the case that life is extremely rare in the universe. And indeed we have never encountered any hint of extraterrestrial life, not even by radio the circumstance that prompted Enrico Fermi's cry: "Where is everybody?"

Suppose life's origin on a planet took place through a hugely improbable stroke of luck, so improbable that it happens on only one in a billion planets. The National Science Foundation would laugh at any chemist whose proposed research had only a one in a hundred chance of succeeding, let alone one in a billion. Yet, given that there are at least a billion billion planets in the universe, even such absurdly low odds as these will yield life on a billion planets. And this is where the famous anthropic principle comes in Earth has to be one of them, because here we are.

If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible. But if you are alive (as you manifestly are if you are about to step into a spaceship) you needn't bother to go looking for that one planet because, by definition, you are already standing on it. The anthropic principle really is rather elegant. By the way, I don't actually think the origin of life was as improbable as all that. I think the galaxy has plenty of islands of life dotted about, even if the islands are too spaced out for any one to hope for a meeting with any other. My point is only that, given the number of planets in the universe, the origin of life could in theory be as lucky as a blindfolded golfer scoring a hole in one. The beauty of the anthropic principle is that, even in the teeth of such stupefying odds against, it still gives us a perfectly satisfying explanation for life's presence on our own planet.

The anthropic principle is usually applied not to planets but to universes. Physicists have suggested that the laws and constants of physics are too good as if the universe were set up to favour our eventual evolution. It is as though there were, say, half a dozen dials representing the major constants of physics. Each of the dials could in principle be tuned to any of a wide range of values. Almost all of these knob-twiddlings would yield a universe in which life would be impossible. Some universes would fizzle out within the first picosecond. Others would contain no elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. In yet others, matter would never condense into stars (and you need stars in order to forge the elements of chemistry and hence life). You can estimate the very low odds against the six knobs all just happening to be correctly tuned, and conclude that a divine knob-twiddler must have been at work. But, as we have already seen, that explanation is vacuous because it begs the biggest question of all. The divine knob twiddler would himself have to have been at least as improbable as the settings of his knobs.

Again, the anthropic principle delivers its devastatingly neat solution. Physicists already have reason to suspect that our universe everything we can see is only one universe among perhaps billions. Some theorists postulate a multiverse of foam, where the universe we know is just one bubble. Each bubble has its own laws and constants. Our familiar laws of physics are parochial bylaws. Of all the universes in the foam, only a minority has what it takes to generate life. And, with anthropic hindsight, we obviously have to be sitting in a member of that minority, because, well, here we are, aren't we? As physicists have said, it is no accident that we see stars in our sky, for a universe without stars would also lack the chemical elements necessary for life. There may be universes whose skies have no stars: but they also have no inhabitants to notice the lack. Similarly, it is no accident that we see a rich diversity of living species: for an evolutionary process that is capable of yielding a species that can see things and reflect on them cannot help producing lots of other species at the same time. The reflective species must be surrounded by an ecosystem, as it must be surrounded by stars.

The anthropic principle entitles us to postulate a massive dose of luck in accounting for the existence of life on our planet. But there are limits. We are allowed one stroke of luck for the origin of evolution, and perhaps for a couple of other unique events like the origin of the eukaryotic cell and the origin of consciousness. But that's the end of our entitlement to large-scale luck. We emphatically cannot invoke major strokes of luck to account for the illusion of design that glows from each of the billion species of living creature that have ever lived on Earth. The evolution of life is a general and continuing process, producing essentially the same result in all species, however different the details.

Contrary to what is sometimes alleged, evolution is a predictive science. If you pick any hitherto unstudied species and subject it to minute scrutiny, any evolutionist will confidently predict that each individual will be observed to do everything in its power, in the particular way of the species plant, herbivore, carnivore, nectivore or whatever it is to survive and propagate the DNA that rides inside it. We won't be around long enough to test the prediction but we can say, with great confidence, that if a comet strikes Earth and wipes out the mammals, a new fauna will rise to fill their shoes, just as the mammals filled those of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And the range of parts played by the new cast of life's drama will be similar in broad outline, though not in detail, to the roles played by the mammals, and the dinosaurs before them, and the mammal-like reptiles before the dinosaurs. The same rules are predictably being followed, in millions of species all over the globe, and for hundreds of millions of years. Such a general observation requires an entirely different explanatory principle from the anthropic principle that explains one-off events like the origin of life, or the origin of the universe, by luck. That entirely different principle is natural selection.

We explain our existence by a combination of the anthropic principle and Darwin's principle of natural selection. That combination provides a complete and deeply satisfying explanation for everything that we see and know. Not only is the god hypothesis unnecessary. It is spectacularly unparsimonious. Not only do we need no God to explain the universe and life. God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs. We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we can't disprove, we can say that God is very very improbable.[/indent]

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Do you agree that the question of god'e existence is a scientific one? If not, how do you justify this? Do you support Dawkins' stance?

Discuss.

[Easyrider]

Dawkins is an arrogant, condescending, spiritually-challeged nincompoop.

Several of them, such as the First Cause argument, work by setting up an infinite regress which God is wheeled out to terminate. But we are never told why God is magically able to terminate regresses while needing no explanation himself. To be sure, we do need some kind of explanation for the origin of all things. Physicists and cosmologists are hard at work on the problem. But whatever the answer a random quantum fluctuation or a Hawking/Penrose singularity or whatever we end up calling it it will be simple. Complex, statistically improbable things, by definition, don't just happen; they demand an explanation in their own right. They are impotent to terminate regresses, in a way that simple things are not. The first cause cannot have been an intelligence let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshipped.

No foundation.

If God did not come about spontaneously, then where did the first thing / cause come from? Dawkins is unable to answer this without resorting to unproven, hypothetical reaches. Until he can offer up something better than what he has, his conclusions are specious at best, and an exercise in GREAT FAITH at worst - something he accuses the religious community of indulging in without reason.

[McCulloch]

Dawkins is an arrogant, condescending, spiritually-challeged nincompoop.

For once Easyrider and me find agreement. Dawkins is arrogant, condescending, and spiritually-challenged. He happens also to be right, but that is beside the point, isn't it?

If God did not come about spontaneously, then where did the first thing / cause come from? Dawkins is unable to answer this without resorting to unproven, hypothetical reaches. Until he can offer up something better than what he has, his conclusions are specious at best, and an exercise in GREAT FAITH at worst - something he accuses the religious community of indulging in without reason.

Dawkins nor anyone else I know can honestly answer this question. Those who do answer this question provide us with only specious conclusions or, as you say, at worst, great faith.

[Easyrider]

Dawkins is an arrogant, condescending, spiritually-challeged nincompoop.

For once Easyrider and me find agreement. Dawkins is arrogant, condescending, and spiritually-challenged. He happens also to be right, but that is beside the point, isn't it?

No, he's wrong. There is a God. But he should know science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. He should simply acknowledge that and let it go from there.

If God did not come about spontaneously, then where did the first thing / cause come from? Dawkins is unable to answer this without resorting to unproven, hypothetical reaches. Until he can offer up something better than what he has, his conclusions are specious at best, and an exercise in GREAT FAITH at worst - something he accuses the religious community of indulging in without reason.

Dawkins nor anyone else I know can honestly answer this question. Those who do answer this question provide us with only specious conclusions or, as you say, at worst, great faith.

Yes, they have great faith. They do not know how a whole universe suddenly appears, but because they dismiss God, they have faith it had to be something else. If and when they might get evidence to the contrary, then their faith would be replaced with reason / evidence.

[juliod]

If God did not come about spontaneously, then where did the first thing / cause come from?

If god did come about spontaneously, where did the first thing/cause come from?

You're believing, without thinking about it, that god answers the question. But it doesn't. Any hypothesis you advance about god is infinitely more improbable than any hypothesis that could be advanced based on evidence and reason.

The god hypothesis only multiplies problems. You have the illusion that he resolves problems because when you hear "god did it" you stop thinking about causes, reasons or evidence.

As for the OP, yes, I agree that the god question is a scientific one. Or rather, it would be if it had not already been falsified repeatedly and conclusively. As far as I am concerned, the GH is old news. But Dawkins is trying to reach a wider audience. And it's my opinion that Dawkins is not firm enough in his statements and arguments.

DanZ

[achilles12604]

After reading through his entire article for the first time, I have to admit I am disappointed.

After all the hype and praise Dawkins has recieved on this forum by the non-theists here, I thought for sure he could present new evidence or at the very least promote some new or better arguments.

Honestly I think McC would whip his butt in a debate competition. But let me explain why point by point.

The first half of his article is nothing but propaganda and insults. Example:

It gains crucial electoral support from a religious constituency whose grip on reality is so tenuous that they expect to be 'raptured' up to heaven, leaving their clothes as empty as their minds.

What we have here is nothing less than a global assault on rationality, and the Enlightenment values that inspired the founding of this first and greatest of secular republics.

are now waking up to the threat from the American Taliban.

I am fairly certain that Dawkins would be banned from this forum for his boistrus, arrogant and attacking remarks.


But this isn't really important unless you actually care what people think of you, so lets move on to when he FINALLY addresses something.

God could clinch the matter in his favour at any moment by staging a spectacular demonstration of his powers, one that would satisfy the exacting standards of science.

Here Dawkins begins to build a base for his arguments. He is using the premise that if God existed, he would SHOW himself for all to see.

Well to this I would simply ask Mr. Dawkins if this event would cause him to become a theist. If he said yes, then he has proven that his free will was violated. If he said no, then good for him. However, I would question his sainity at this point.


As I have pointed out, and been misunderstood by numerous people so far, God's sudden appearance would cause individuals to change their beliefs solely out of his appearance. If God's intention was to have a group of people who CHOSE to be with him and sought after him, then he would have ultimately caused his creation to fail, simply by appearing.

Then after several paragraphs of beating his chest he moves on to address Christian arguments.

Several of them, such as the First Cause argument, work by setting up an infinite regress which God is wheeled out to terminate.

If Mr. Dawkins had stopped to examine this argument he would quickly realize that it is a philosophical argument, not a scientific one.

Since he doesn't really do it justice, allow me to express it how I understand.

Everything that begins to exist needs a cause. Nothing comes from nothing. Without a cause, nothing happens.

The universe began to exist. Therefore the universe needs a cause.


Now Dawkins goes on to write:

But we are never told why God is magically able to terminate regresses while needing no explanation himself.

The answer to this is extreamly simple. Read the logical premise carefully. Whatever BEGINS to exist must have a cause. If God never began to exist, then he is without cause and therefore, first. It doesn't say whatever exists had a cause. It says whatever begins to exist. This plays off the scientific law of cause and effect.

Physicists and cosmologists are hard at work on the problem. But whatever the answer a random quantum fluctuation or a Hawking/Penrose singularity or whatever we end up calling it it will be simple. Complex, statistically improbable things, by definition, don't just happen; they demand an explanation in their own right.

This is the scientific answer to this question. However as said by Robert Jastrow "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. (Robert Jastrow)"

I believe that science may one day scale this peak. But I also believe that the conclusion that they eliminated before they ever began to look will be waiting there for them.

I actually laughed at this next part

The first cause cannot have been an intelligence let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshipped. Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.

I could be wrong, but isn't one of the multiverse theories that there are many universes created by aliens in another universe?

Anyway, this statement is without proof. It is even without evidence. Heck, it is without a plausible hypothesis since it is assuming the outcome as a foundation for its premise.

Another of Aquinas' efforts, the Argument from Degree, is worth spelling out, for it epitomises the characteristic flabbiness of theological reasoning. We notice degrees of, say, goodness or temperature, and we measure them, Aquinas said, by reference to a maximum:

Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus, as fire, which is the maximum of heat, is the cause of all hot things . . . Therefore, there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.

This I have no knowledge of so it must not be very widely used.

The only one of the traditional arguments for God that is widely used today is the teleological argument, sometimes called the Argument from Design although since the name begs the question of its validity it should better be called the Argument for Design. It is the familiar 'watchmaker' argument, which is surely one of the most superficially plausible bad arguments ever discovered and it is rediscovered by just about everybody until they are taught the logical fallacy and Darwin's brilliant alternative.

Here we finally get to Dawkins area of expertise. Natural selection. I agree with Dawkins as far as the science expert goes. However, when Dawkis states :

The origin of life on this planet which means the origin of the first self-replicating molecule is hard to study, because it (probably) only happened once, 4 billion years ago and under very different conditions from those with which we are familiar. We may never know how it happened. Unlike the ordinary evolutionary events that followed, it must have been a genuinely very improbable in the sense of unpredictable event: too improbable, perhaps, for chemists to reproduce it in the laboratory or even devise a plausible theory for what happened.

like the first creator, no matter what science discovers, God can always be the author of life. This is why creation and life are not scientific questions for the theologian. We simply tack on one extra step which scientists deem "unnecessary".

We explain our existence by a combination of the anthropic principle and Darwin's principle of natural selection. That combination provides a complete and deeply satisfying explanation for everything that we see and know. Not only is the god hypothesis unnecessary. It is spectacularly unparsimonious. Not only do we need no God to explain the universe and life. God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs.

Ultimately THIS is what it boils down to. Who is our God going to be? For the non-theists (at least the truely honest ones), the answer is themselves. For the Theist, it is God.

This too is rooted in theology. As Satan challanged God, so too is Dawkins. So too are those who say "we don't need God. We are God."

And yet. . . .

Scientists and physicists are looking for that one simple combining factor of everything. I wonder what they will do when they find it?

Concluding, Dawkins did not understand (or accept) the philosophical argument for God. His entire existence and work is based in science and he is convinced that nothing exists outside of science.


But I ask you, how does he intend on testing this theory? Can it be scientifically tested? Can it be scientifically proven?

If not, then science can't answer all questions. If science can't answer all questions, then it is very arrogant to proceed on the assumption that nothing exists outside of science.

[juliod]

Everything that begins to exist needs a cause. Nothing comes from nothing. Without a cause, nothing happens.

The universe began to exist. Therefore the universe needs a cause.

Your arguments are vacuous, merely assuming that they must be true because an apologist told them to you.

Prove that the universe began to exist. Go on, prove it. We can't move forward until you do.

Prove that god did not begin to exist. Go on, prove that. We can't move forward until you do.

DanZ

[Easyrider]

Ranks of Scientists Doubting Darwins Theory on the Rise

Discovery Institute
February 8, 2007

SEATTLE Another 100 scientists have joined the ranks of scientists from around the world publicly stating their doubts about the adequacy of Darwin's theory of evolution.

"Darwinism is a trivial idea that has been elevated to the status of the scientific theory that governs modern biology," says dissent list signer Dr. Michael Egnor. Egnor is a professor of neurosurgery and pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook and an award-winning brain surgeon named one of New York's best doctors by New York Magazine.

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture today announced that over 700 scientists from around the world have now signed a statement expressing their skepticism about the contemporary theory of Darwinian evolution. The statement, located online at www.dissentfromdarwin.org, reads: "We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."

"We know intuitively that Darwinism can accomplish some things, but not others," added Egnor. "The question is what is that boundary? Does the information content in living things exceed that boundary? Darwinists have never faced those questions. They've never asked scientifically if random mutation and natural selection can generate the information content in living things."

"More scientists than ever before are now standing up and saying that it is time to rethink Darwin's theory of evolution in light of new scientific evidence that shows the theory is inadequate," said John West, associate director of the Center for Science & Culture. "Darwinists are busy making up holidays to turn Charles Darwin into a saint, even as the evidence supporting his theory crumbles and more and more scientific challenges to it emerge."

The list of signatories includes member scientists from National Academies of Science in Russia, Czech Republic, Hungary, India (Hindustan), Nigeria, Poland, and the United States. Many of the signers are professors or researchers at major universities and international research institutions such as Cambridge University, Moscow State University, Chitose Institute of Science & Technology in Japan, Ben-Gurion University in Israel, MIT, The Smithsonian and Princeton.

http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB ... ew&id=2732

[juliod]

Oops, rules violation, off topic: "4. Stay on the topic of debate."

Why bother, Easyrider? Is that supposed to convince anyone? Why not debate the topic at hand?

DanZ

[wrekk]

So after all this critique of Dawkins, I ask you...

What is Dawkins' agenda?

A. To forward mankind, and the scientific community.

B. To attack religion, and prove God's non-existence.

C. To make money selling his books.