The God Delusion - Chapter 4

[otseng]

What arguments does Dawkins present that God does not exist?
Are they valid arguments?

McCulloch's questions:
Does evolution by natural selection demonstrate that the argument from design is wrong? He suggests that a hypothetical cosmic designer would require an even greater explanation than the phenomena that they intended to explain.

[Confused]

He suggests that a hypothetical cosmic designer would require an even greater explanation than the phenomena that they intended to explain.

My first issue is that this argument is philosophical in nature rather than scientific. One might balk at the requirement of applying science to demonstrate the non-existence of something. But, I'm simply holding Dawkins to the standard that he has set for himself. "Either he exists or he doesn't. It is a scientific question" (page 48) And if it is a scientific question, then evidence needs to be brought forth. If he has no evidence, then I do not see how his approach can be scientific.

Also, this argument is simply a restatement of "who (or what) designed the designer?" or "what caused God?". In the realm of science, the lack of a underlying cause does not invalidate an explanation. For example, the theory of evolution is linked to how did the first life come about. ToE would require an even greater explanation of abiogenesis. But, it is not necessary for abiogenesis to be explained in order for the ToE to be valid. Also nobody knows what caused the Big Bang. The Big Bang theory is not dependent on having an explanation of its cause. Likewise, it is not necessary to explain what/who caused God in order for God to be valid.

Also, even if there exists a more complex explanation of God and that we don't understand it currently, it does not show that God could not exist.

Finally, to assign any probability of God's existence based on his "Ultimate 747" argument would be purely arbitrary. What would the probability be? 99%? 50%? 1%? There would be no way to assign a value, or even a possible range of values. If no possible value can be determined, then it's erroneous to claim there is little probability for God's existence with this argument.

I think the main bulk of his argument with the philosophical into the scientific realm of improbability hit me starting on pg 138:

"If the odds of life originating spontaneously on a planet were a billion to one against, nevertheless that stupefying improbable event would still happen on a billion planets. The chance of finding any one of those billion life-bearing planets recalls the proverbial needle in the haystack. But we don't have to go out of our way to find the needle (back to the anthropic principle) because any beings capable of looking must necessarily be sitting on one of those prodigiously rare needles before they even start the search"

He goes in further through page 140 on a planetary level. But ends it on pg 141 when he says

"The anthropic principle states that, since we are alive, eucaryotic and conscious, our planet has to be one of the intensely rare planets that has bridged all 3 gaps (origin of life, origin of consciousness, and made it across the gap to become eucaryotic cells). Natural selection works because it is a cumulative one way street to improvement. It needs some luck to get started, and the 'billions of planets' anthropic principle grants it that luck.........But whatever else we may say, design certainly doesnt work as an explanation for life, because design is ultimately not cumulative...."

[otseng]

What has had me stumped occurs on page 136:

What the religious mind then fails to grasp is that two candidate solutions are offered to the problem. God is one. The anthropic principle is the other.

I'm glad you brought this up too cause this was going to be my next point.

What does he mean by there are only two alternatives? God is one and the AP is the other? Doesn't make any sense to me. He's right, the religious mind fails to grasp exactly what he is talking about.

[QED]

What has had me stumped occurs on page 136:

What the religious mind then fails to grasp is that two candidate solutions are offered to the problem. God is one. The anthropic principle is the other.

I'm glad you brought this up too cause this was going to be my next point.

What does he mean by there are only two alternatives? God is one and the AP is the other? Doesn't make any sense to me. He's right, the religious mind fails to grasp exactly what he is talking about.

I think quoting the first couple of paragraphs from Wikipedia's entry on Anthropic principle is in order here:

In physics and cosmology, the anthropic principle says that we should take account of the constraints that our existence as observers imposes on the sort of universe that we could observe. Originally proposed as a rule of reasoning, the term has since been extended to cover supposed "superlaws" that in various ways require the universe to support intelligent life, usually assumed to be carbon-based, and occasionally to be specifically human beings. Anthropic reasoning involves assessing these constraints by analysing the properties of universes with different fundamental parameters or laws of physics from ours, and has frequently concluded that essential structures, from atomic nuclei to the whole universe, depend for stability on delicate balances between different fundamental forces; balances which only occur in a small minority of possible universes — so that ours seems to be fine-tuned for life. Anthropic reasoning also attempts to explain and quantify this fine tuning. Within the scientific community the usual approach is to invoke selection effects from a real ensemble of alternate universes, which cause an anthropic bias in what can be observed; competing strategies, occasionally also called anthropic, include intelligent design.

The anthropic principle has led to more than a little confusion and controversy, partly because several distinct ideas carry this label. All versions of the principle have been accused of providing simplistic explanations which undermine the search for a deeper physical understanding of the universe. The invocation of either multiple universes or an intelligent designer are highly controversial, and both ideas have been criticized by some as being presently untestable, and therefore not within the purview of contemporary science.

I emphasised the first sentence which really says it all. Constraints on what we see are imposed by the fact that we can see. It says it all, and in a sense it says nothing.

Perhaps his exposure to Antrhopic reasoning is predominantly of the sort that I highlighted in blue?

[FinalEnigma]

Also, this argument is simply a restatement of "who (or what) designed the designer?" or "what caused God?".

That's not really a weak point in the argument. That question has never really been answered to anyone's satisfaction. Or at least, anyone who is an atheist presumably.

No Christian I know of tries to answer this question because the question is meaningless. That is, all Christians (that I know of) believe God is uncaused.

Well of course they believe God is uncaused, and thats an answer. But then when asked to explain that answer(how could that be true?). They shrug their shoulders and just say "Well, it's God. Thats just the way he is."
to atheists that sounds like your saying "because I said so" Which isn't a sensible answer. God can't just have been there forever just as he is, that doesn't make sense.
Think back 10 million years. 10 billion, 10 trillion, 100 trillion. ok, what is god doing now? 100 trillion years ago God was sitting there, waiting for an infinite period of time to pass before he decided to create the universe? And how did God come to be who he is? where did he come from? Why has he always existed?
Bear in mind, there is no question in the universe adequently answered with "Because it(he) just is(does/was)" except for "why is x, x?"

God tries to be the entire puzzle, but when your entire puzzle is completed, and suddenly, you just have a bigger puzzle than you started with, that is not a valid answer.

We're only trying to solve the God puzzle here. We don't need to try to solve the "bigger" puzzle. That is, the question is simply does God exist or not? If God does not exist, then asking what caused God would be meaningless. If God does exist, then there are other issues that are more important than what caused God.

This is a distraction. when someone is trying to show that something probably doesn't exist, because there is no way it could have come about, you can't say "wait, that doesnt matter, we're trying to determine if it exists or not."
God's origin is important, because if it is shown to be very unlikely or improbable that would be a hit against the likeliness of God existing.

Dawkins isn't assigning an arbitrary value to the probability. he is actually using this argument to disprove the intelligent design argument.

The chapter is titled, "Why there almost certainly is no God". This implies that some low probability is assigned to God's existence. The question is how did he derive this low probability estimate?

IDers look at the universe and say "Look how complicated this is! it could not possible have come about by chance, it is so very improbable for it to have come about by chance it must have been designed."

God is necessarily orders of magnitude more complicated than the universe, because of his mere omnipotence, and even if that weren't there (im gonna give this its own line)

Unless you are willing to admit that a less complicated thing can create a more complicated thing, than God has to be more complicated than the universe. If you do admit that more complicated can come from less complicated, than you don't need God to explain how the universe is so complicated, because it could have come about through a long chain of events, resulting in steadily more complicated things

When you correlate complicated with improbable,(which is a foundation of ID) you stab ID in the foot, because a being with the capabilities to create the universe and do everything else the christian God does, is necessarily more complicated than the universe. When you don't correlate complicated with improbable, then you dont need ID to explain the universe to begin with.
ID is a self defeating argument

If he is using the Ultimate 747 argument to "disprove" ID, then it would also be fallacious. As we've noted, his argument is a philosophical argument, not a scientific one. To disprove it, it would require empirical evidence. (And as a note, the book God - The Failed Hypothesis does attempt to approach it scientifically. And in my opinion it is a superior book to TGD.)

Wait, you need empirical evidence to disprove a philosophical argument? Show me empirical evidence of ID and i'll admit you need empirical evidence to refute it.
And the complexity of the universe in not sufficient for empirical evidence of ID because it requires a philosophical leap to turn it into evidence of ID. That philosophical leap is what is being attacked philosophically.

It's equivalent to going to a bank robbery scene where the vault door was broken open and nobody can figure out how(except in some way that would require an enormous amount of skill at something), then deciding, because its unlikely that anyone in town at the time had the necessary skill, that it was done by invisible space aliens that are 3 inches tall and as strong as superman.

Actually, this is a good analogy. The only thing ID says is that someone from out of town did it. It says nothing about the color, height, nationality, or planetality of the person.

actually, it says someone from out of town with superhuman powers because

(breaking the analogy for one second) ID actually says an omnipotent being far beyond all human capacity for understanding or emulation. Not just "somebody from outside our universe"

[FinalEnigma]

Ugh, sorry, I should have previewed that, usually I dont mess up with quoting.

[otseng]

I think the main bulk of his argument with the philosophical into the scientific realm of improbability hit me starting on pg 138:

"If the odds of life originating spontaneously on a planet were a billion to one against, nevertheless that stupefying improbable event would still happen on a billion planets. The chance of finding any one of those billion life-bearing planets recalls the proverbial needle in the haystack. But we don't have to go out of our way to find the needle (back to the anthropic principle) because any beings capable of looking must necessarily be sitting on one of those prodigiously rare needles before they even start the search"

However, this has nothing to do with the probability of the existence of a God.

Also, his argument here on the probability of life originating is also spurious. Where exactly did he get the "billion to one" odds on "a billion planets"? How does he know there are a billion planets? How does he know it's a billion to one of life arising? I would suggest he picked these numbers out of the air so that he can arrive at 1. Here is another example of Dawkins simply making up things to support his own ideas but lacks any substance.

[FinalEnigma]

Also, his argument here on the probability of life originating is also spurious. Where exactly did he get the "billion to one" odds on "a billion planets"? How does he know there are a billion planets? How does he know it's a billion to one of life arising? I would suggest he picked these numbers out of the air so that he can arrive at 1. Here is another example of Dawkins simply making up things to support his own ideas but lacks any substance.

actually he is saying even if the odds were a billion to one life would still arise on a billion planets. He is starting with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets. his probability of life arising, if the chance is one in a billion is one billion/1. and while i have heard many estimates of the probability of life arising on a given random planet, i have never heard it placed as lower than 1,000,000,000,000,000,000(10^-18)(whetever number that even is)

[otseng]

Perhaps his exposure to Antrhopic reasoning is predominantly of the sort that I highlighted in blue?

The AP is a description of what we observe, not a solution to what we observe. What you highlighted in blue, the multiverse explanation, would be one solution to the observation of the AP. It would make sense to say there are two solutions to AP - God and a multiverse. But to say there are two solutions, God and AP, is conflating two different things.

[otseng]

Ugh, sorry, I should have previewed that, usually I dont mess up with quoting.

You still have several hours before editing your own post is not permitted.

[otseng]

Think back 10 million years. 10 billion, 10 trillion, 100 trillion. ok, what is god doing now? 100 trillion years ago God was sitting there, waiting for an infinite period of time to pass before he decided to create the universe? And how did God come to be who he is? where did he come from? Why has he always existed?

If God created space-time and time started at the moment of creation, there is no such thing as 10 trillion years ago. If time did not exist prior to creation, then it is meaningless to ask what did God do before he created the universe.

God's origin is important, because if it is shown to be very unlikely or improbable that would be a hit against the likeliness of God existing.

Likewise, we should all reject evolution since the origin of life is important, yet highly improbable and unexplained.

Unless you are willing to admit that a less complicated thing can create a more complicated thing, than God has to be more complicated than the universe.

I'd go along with God being more complicated than the universe.

When you don't correlate complicated with improbable, then you dont need ID to explain the universe to begin with.

The argument of improbability doesn't argue against a designer, but against a materialistic explanation. The correlation between complexity and improbability only arises when a pure random chance explanation is sought. As something is more complex, it is proportionally improbable that it happened by random chance. So, the argument of complexity is not self-defeating for ID, but rather a support of ID.

Show me empirical evidence of ID and i'll admit you need empirical evidence to refute it.

One of my favorite arguments is that the Earth is at the center of the universe. If you'll read through this thread, you'll see the evidence that I present to support this.

ID actually says an omnipotent being far beyond all human capacity for understanding or emulation.

You'll have to show me where ID says this.