Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

This chapter in his book is particularly bad, so much so that I did not at first even want to review it. But here are a few points to illustrate my conclusion. First, Mills calls ID a “cult,” (Atheist Universe, 209) because it conflicts with the literal interpretation of early Genesis. In fact, of course, design theory is a purely scientific framework, a paradigm, if you will. To the extent that it says anything about God, and describing God is far from its main concern, it is a piece of natural theology rather than an article of faith. Its alleged conflict with Genesis is beside the point.

Second, Mills says about the anthropic principle that “the universe was not ‘fine-tuned’ to support human life. Rather, human life – and life in general – were fine-tuned to the universe through natural selection.” (226) But are not the chances that the universe is such that natural selection, assuming the correctness of Darwinism, could work and create humans miniscule? In other words, if any of the parameters of the universe were off by even a tiny amount, natural selection would have had no chance of succeeding in bringing about complex life or any life at all. To that our author responds as follows:

There was no preordained or predetermined reason why the universe had to be the way it is today. … Theoretically, “life as we know it” could have been “life as we don’t know it” or “life as we can’t possibly imagine it” or “life at another place and time” or “something other than life” or “no life at all.” … ID’s logical mistake is to assume what it sets out to prove. ID assumes that mankind’s appearance was inevitable. (227ff)

Here we have a conflict of worldviews. An atheist would claim that human life is not special and is an accident of a universe that just happens to be precisely made in order to support life (and, for that matter, discovery) on this one planet Earth. For a theist human life is indeed the reason why the universe exists, and the latter’s being fine-tuned is evidence for its having been intelligently designed. For an atheist, humans are, to be somewhat crude, bags of chemicals, pieces of meat, whose presence in the world is not really that interesting. As C.S. Lewis argues, “If H. ‘is not,’ then she never was. I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person. There aren’t, and never were, any people. Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there. What we call the living are simply those who have not yet been unmasked. All equally bankrupt, but some not yet declared.” (The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics, 450) If that is indeed his attitude, than I agree that the fine-tuneness of the universe cannot persuade our atheist. But I suspect that such a person would have more serious problems than indifference towards this particular version of the design argument.

(Elsewhere Mills asks for what reason there exist stars and galaxies that are far from our planet. (98) Several answers suggest themselves. First, just as the solar system formed naturally from cosmic gas and dust, as the modern theory goes, so did the other stellar objects. The laws, according to which the sun and the planets put themselves together, operated throughout the universe. Thus, the far-away systems are a “price” to be paid for the existence of our own home. Second, these distant galaxies are observable, and many interesting things can be learned by studying them. Third, perhaps there are out there planets suitable for human habitation, and it might be possible in some distant future to visit and colonize them. Fourth, the vastness of the universe is a sign of the vastness of God, and the multipicity of stars and planets is a sign of God’s abundant creative power. Fifth, the universe would be lacking in beauty if it was empty aside from our own solar system. Finally, an empty or small universe would prevent God from being hidden as well as He is.)

What Mills calls the kalam argument (231) is nothing of the sort. I don’t think he understands what the argument claims, and at any rate he provides no refutation of it. That God is eternal or outside of time is dismissed as “meaningless and slippery.” (238) What kalam argues is that the universe cannot have been around forever, but God is not like that; He possesses His life all at once. Hence there is no circularity, question-begging, or special pleading. Nor is God even more complex than created things; on the contrary, God is absolutely simple. And even if we assume that He is not simple, then as Alvin Plantinga pointed out, we are seeking a proximate explanation of specified complexity not an ultimate one, so God’s being complex is irrelevant to the problem, just as the complexity of human beings is irrelevant to explaining the origins of a watch one finds at the beach.

Finally, Mills complains that ID theorists fail to “incorporate specific mechanistic descriptions of how an event occurred. If ID’s preachers cannot explain how a Creator transformed nothing into something, then ID reverts to being a religion than than a scientific explanation.” (239) First, God did not “transform” nothing; He created being where there was none, as only He can. Second, ID-theoretic research program is only periferally concerned with the question of who the designer is; there is a good number of other, less nebulous problems to be worked on within this paradigm. Third, Mill’s charge is absurd if God is a free and omnipotent being. The first property means that God did not create by necessity but freely, and therefore according to no law; the second means that God can bring things into being just by willing them. Intelligent design is by definition non-mechanistic and unpredictable. If that is “unscientific,” then so is, for example, Mill’s own writing his book. It is, on the contrary, evolutionists whose task it is to describe a mechanism responsible for the evolution of irreducibly complex biological systems, something which has yet to be done.

Conclusion. Philosophically, Atheist Universe is rather unsophisticated and of only minor interest.