In one episode Peter is filming a plastic bag being moved to and fro by the wind and saying that there’s so much beauty in the world, obviously in a reference to the movie American Beauty. Then there is a shot of God on a cloud yelling at him: “It’s just a piece of trash blowing in the wind! Do you have any idea how complex your circulatory system is?!”
I mean, I’m having an intellectual orgasm here. That’s from reading Michael Behe’s second book on evolution and design, The Edge of Evolution. If I weren’t a philosopher, I’d go into biology for sure. You can just feel the Godlike engineering power crystallized in the molecular “nanobots” Behe describes. The “trench warfare,” which is how our author labels the evolutionary battle between malaria and men, though indeed blind, is as exciting as any action movie, wherein both sides appear fiendishly clever and yet desperate to win at any cost. And then it should always be remembered that these molecular machines are alive, and they’ll do anything to survive. It’s mortal combat, and it’s riveting. Moreover, Behe makes you a spectator of an epic struggle of good and evil, the good starring the human body, scientists, and doctors; and evil, the merciless malaria microbes.
And then there are his eye-opening calculations of the probabilities of constructive mutations. But those will have to await a full review. For now, if you don’t mind, I’ll just be enjoying the ride.
Update. I just learned why my cat doesn’t need to eat fruit to obtain vitamin C, a question that has bothered me for some time. That’s because humans and chimps have a broken copy of the gene which in my cat makes his own vitamin C. How cool is that?!
Update. Conspicuously absent from this list is sociology.
Almost every point in this critique of ID is off the mark. It is simply not true that ID deals with the origins of life; and evolution, with the “progress” of life once life arose. ID claims that numerous biological systems could not have come about via the Darwinian pathways from whatever their physical precursors were; that is, by slight, successive modifications of the previous, presumably less complex and less specified, system in the changing organisms. This becomes especially clear if we examine cellular structures and molecular machines.
On the issue of testability, etc. as signs of ID’s scientific nature, see William Dembski’s “Is Intelligent Design Testable?”
Intelligent Design is not theology. Congdon writes: “In other words, science, by the very nature of the discipline, is naturalistic and materialistic.” Nonsense. Methodological naturalism must be defended not merely asserted. Further, intelligent causes are clearly part of nature: we humans are intelligent. We encounter effects of intelligent causes all the time. Speaking of design in nature does not require us to discuss the designer of nature at all, although nothing prevents figuring out who the designer is from being part of the ID research program.
For these reasons ID is not “a contemporary version of natural theology.” In The Design Revolution Dembski devotes an entire chapter to distinguishing between intelligent design and the design argument for the existence of God. (Part I, Question 7, p. 64) At this point we come to the strangest part of Congdon’s essay, in which he condemns philosophy of religion and natural theology, whereby we can come to know God by reason without any aid from revelation, as illegitimate and “anti-Christian” disciplines. Even according to the Vatican Council, “If anyone says that the one true God, our Creator and Lord, cannot be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason by means of the things that are made, let him be anathema.” And if indeed it is true that “by and large, natural theology is dead,” then I suppose it falls onto me and, hopefully, a few other folks to revive it.
ID does not postulate a god of the gaps; it is an inference to the best explanation, seeing that there exist rigorous ways of detecting design.
Finally, the Christian faith may not blithely allow for scientific naturalism which does not admit intelligent causation, as such a thing is contrary to its understanding of grace. If God designs souls — that is, uplifts them into fellowship with Him, then it is unnatural flatly to deny, without adducing any evidence, that He can design bodies, as well.
According to many scientists, the clergy and the Church are:
A ridiculous stereotype, sure. But I’d like to point out that scientists are themselves not innocent of crimes against humanity. Consider all the terrible weapons which have been created, especially in the 20th century, and are being created now. It is scientists who are doing this work, contrary to any kind of ethical imperative or religious impulse to love our fellow man, etc. As Oppenheimer famously thought after witnessing the first nuclear bomb test, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” according to the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun,” Tom Lehrer sings. Then there are the numerous issues such as stem cell research, about whose ethically controversial nature most scientists apparently could not care less. In short, an NT may give you the means to your ends, but it takes an NF to figure out if the ends ought to be striven for.
The moral from this tu quoque is, let’s understand each other, rather than thinking the worst of our temperamental complements.
Victor Stenger, the toughest-minded NT stone-cold sonofabitch this side of Californie, angrily rips apart the mystical anthropic principle and its allegedly theism-friendly consequences. Apart from that scary spectacle, there is an interesting note that “André Linde proposed that a background spacetime ‘foam’ empty of matter and radiation will experience local quantum fluctuations in curvature, forming many bubbles of false vacuum that individually inflate into mini-universes with random characteristics. In this view, our universe is one of those expanding bubbles, the product of a single monkey banging away at the keys of a single word processor.” (The Improbability of God, 145) Isn’t this an efficient way of creating our universe? All God would have had to do was prune the dead universes and wait until the one in which we live budded off. This is kind of divine artificial selection.
Then there is the theory of natural selection as collapsing black holes turn into random universes, such that “by chance some small fraction of universes will have parameters optimized for greater black hole production. These will quickly predominate…” (146) Of course, this differs from Darwinism in that the universes do not interact with one another, and unfit universes do not get eaten or starved by the fit ones. And this selects for black hole production efficiency not for intelligent life.
Finally, our author argues that natural laws emerged naturally. They evolved on their own, without divine intervention. The evolution of natural laws, in other words, was itself law-abiding. So, there is a meta-law governing the cosmic becoming. I don’t see how this helps Stenger. Where did these meta-laws come from?
Let’s consider the case of Michael Ikeda and Bill Jefferys who claim that “the more ‘finely-tuned’ the universe is, the more a supernatural origin of the universe is undermined.” (150) Here are their assumptions:
a) Our universe exists and contains life. L = “The universe exists and contains Life.”
b) Our universe is life-friendly. F = “The conditions in the universe are ‘life-Friendly’.”
c) Life cannot exist in a universe that is governed solely by naturalistic law unless that universe is “life-friendly.” N = “The universe is governed solely by Naturalistic law.”
Our authors say that
d) P(F | N & L) = 1.
This follows from (c) written as P(~L | ~F & N) = 1 or P(F or ~N | L) = 1. In other words, L → (F or ~N). It follows that (L & N) → ((F or ~N) & N) = (L & N) → (F & N). But (F & N) → F. Hence P(F | L & N) = 1. So, P(N | F & L) ≥ P(N | L). “The observation F cannot decrease the probability that N is true…, and may well increase it.” (155) The question is why this is so. Obviously, because if F, then there is no need for supernatural life support which is an option when only L is true. But the life support possibility is clearly unacceptable on numerous other grounds. So, this proves little.
They also charge theists with a contradiction. Both P(N | ~F & L) < P(N | L) and P(N | F & L) < P(N | L). What gives? Well, if ~F & L, then we would be having a direct experience of God keeping us alive supernaturally in a hostile universe, rather like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fire (Dan 3). But if F, then presumably, the anthropic argument kicks in.
They say that from P(F | N) << 1 it does not follow that P(N | F) << 1. Yes, it most certainly does! P(F | N) << 1 entails that N → ~F or that F → ~N which can be written as P(~N | F) ≈ 1 or as P(N | F) << 1.
I saved the best for last. Who would possibly deny that the universe is governed by natural law? Grace is not law; human law can be broken; the divine law applies to realms other than earth; so what are Ikeda and Jefferys talking about? They must be thinking of the law according to which universes spawn or are selected. But they fail to suggest the content of such a law, though they criticize, unjustly in my view, theists for ascribing intentions to God, such as to create a universe which can support human beings. If they don’t want to defer to theologians, they’d best come up with a scientific alternative. Otherwise, be quiet.
And I thought I first generalized intelligent design as a form of grace! But William Dembski got there before me: “In book two of the Physics Aristotle referred to design as completing ‘what nature cannot bring to a finish.’ (Note that Thomas Aquinas took this idea and sacramentalized it into grace completing nature.)” (The Design Revolution, 132) It looks like we have a case of independent discoveries.
Suppose there are 100 balls in the urn. Each ball is either red or black, but you don’t know how many balls are of what color. You start taking the balls out of the urn one by one. Each time you get a red ball. What is the probability after you have taken out 99 balls, each of which has turned out to be red, that the last ball you take out will also be red?
Or, in other words, does that fact that the 99 balls were red somehow increase the chances that the last ball, too, will be red (e.g., because if it were black, chances are, we would have seen it among the first 99 balls)?
Again, suppose that there are three balls in the urn. The hypothesis is that one of them is black. The evidence is that two balls we have taken out so far turned out to be red. To what extent does the evidence support the hypothesis? The probability of getting the black ball at first is 1/3. The probability of getting it the second time is 2/3*1/2 = 1/3. The total probability is 2/3. So, if the last ball is black, the probability of getting two red balls in a row is 1/3. Similarly, if the last ball is black, then getting 99 red balls in a row would be extremely unlikely (1%) and count against the hypothesis that the 100th ball is black.
This is Carnap’s “inductive probability.”
The universe is too big, says Nickolas Everitt. And why has much time passed since the beginning of the universe until humans came onto the scene? It’s just so… “inapt,” unfitting given what theists take God to be, unlike even the Genesis account. (The Improbability of God, 2, 1)
So far this is the funniest atheistic argument I’ve ever encountered. But I plead guilty to harboring such thoughts myself: before becoming Christian in a letter to a friend I asked: What about the dinosaurs? For what possible reason did these preposterous lizards exist?
Instead of my usual attempt at analysis, I’ll leave this one as an exercise for the reader.
(OK, here are some hints. Also, when I asked Dembski why it was necessary to go through the TRIZ-imitating process of evolution/intelligent design which took billions of years, he replied that solving mechanical biological problems seems to have taken place according to TRIZ, but TRIZ itself need not have been the methodology chosen. The point is that the becoming of the universe, of life, of humans, of civilizations obeys the rules laid out in TRIZ. God could have created things already fully formed, and did — it’s called heaven and angels. For humans He chose a more roundabout process. Could there have been a third option? That’s for Everitt to surmise.)
Our author invokes the Hartle-Hawking model of the Big Bang to prove that the universe appeared by itself out of nothing. (The Improbability of God, Ch. 7, “Why Stephen Hawking’s Cosmology Precludes a Creator”)
Stephen Barr explains: “Some idea of what is involved can be had by the analogy of a mathematical cone. Such a cone has a singular point at the sharp end, where its curvature is infinite. We can call that point ‘t = 0′ and imagine ‘time’ as running down the cone from the smaller to the larger end. Hartle and Hawking’s idea has the effect of smoothing out that sharp point. One might imagine that, smooth or not, there still has to be an ‘earliest’ point on the cone. But it turns out that in the Hartle-Hawking scheme time radically changes its character near ‘the beginning’ and becomes like space. Instead of three spatial and one temporal dimensions, there are four space dimensions. It becomes impossible, then, to talk about which point is really ‘first’.”
(NB: Barr doesn’t get the First Cause argument right either. The First Cause must be present not in some remote past but in simultaneous series of causes right now. And yes, the natural laws are the formal cause of the universe, but God is the efficient cause of that form.)
So, timeline of the universe does not span [0, now] but (0, now]. Sufficiently close to 0 the universe “just is.” But where is the “nothing”?
Thus, Craig, though criticized by Smith, seems to be right in saying that “the probability of finding any three-dimensional cross-section of spacetime in such quantum models is only relative to some other cross-section given as one’s point of departure.” (98) Given Barr’s explanation, Craig’s comment seems almost self-evident. Smith goes into “Bible study,” attempting to prove that Hartle and Hawking meant something different, but I don’t see how they could.
Smith considers an objection: “It may be said that God could will that the Hartle-Hawking wave function law obtain and leave it to chance, a 99 percent chance, that a Hartle-Hawking universe begin to exist uncaused. But then God is not the creator of the universe, and we no longer have the god of classical theism.” (97) Well, why can’t God work through secondary causes to finish His work of creating the universe? And as for the 1% risk that God supposedly takes, then surely if God is omniscient, he had foreseen that the universe would be created. Moreover, perhaps this was the most efficient and elegant way of making a universe, and as Smith himself points out elsewhere,
Quentin Smith objects to the theistic implications of Big Bang cosmology as follows:
If God intends to create a universe that contains living beings at some stage in it history, then there is no reason for him to begin the universe with an inherently unpredictable singularity. Indeed, it is positively irrational. It is a sign of incompetent planning to create as the first natural state something that requires immediate supernatural intervention to ensure that it leads to the desired result. The rational thing to do is to create some state that by its own lawful nature leads to a life-producing universe. (The Improbability of God, 47)
Smith’s mistake is two-fold. In the first place he assumes that it is possible to seed a singularity that “by its own lawful nature” leads to the right kind of mature universe. It is contended precisely that created nature is not as potent and creative in its own right as God is creative. Smith shows no sign of recognizing the possibility that the natures of the initial singularity (or whatever the beginning of the universe consisted in) and of all of its states subsequent to expansion are so much removed from the nature of God that their power, unlike God’s, is fundamentally and inescapably limited. This limitation is one of the things enumerated under the rubric of “metaphysical evil,” which covers finitude and its consequences, as opposed to the infinity of God.
But what nature alone cannot do, nature assisted by grace might. Grace in it numerous manifestations is essentially creation of information, imparting a form, defining things, eliminating chaos and formlessness in favor of definiteness and even beauty. Since the singularity is assumed by Smith to be utterly chaotic, with maximum entropy allowed by it, it was, like prime matter for the Schoolmen, “pure potentiality,” formless void susceptible to being informed or made into something, into anything. And doing that was God’s job. Just as a sculptor does not go around looking for a lump of clay that can by itself transform itself into a precisely chiseled statue (an impossible quest anyway, if I am right), so God does not go around looking for a universe that can make itself. Rather, he wants matter which, though it has its own mind, He can guide, by actualizing some possibilities and setting aside others even without expending any energy, towards His chosen goal; matter which can be intelligently designed into a form.
Imparting grace is not therefore “intervention” in the sense of a miracle. God does not move around particles of matter; He manipulates possibilities, allowing some event to happen and precluding every other event. He “chooses between.” It is not that the “inherently unpredictable singularity” wanted, according to some natural law, to do X, and God violently stopped it from happening. On the contrary, the universe was in principle undetermined, capable of resulting in X but also in Y, Z, etc. Even if X was the one desired result among millions of undesirable ones, guiding the evolution of natural laws, stars and the solar system, animals and humans, does not irrational God make, any more than sculpting an initially cubical piece of marble into a bust of Smith makes the sculptor irrational, because through his actions he has prevented any other form from being attached to the matter of marble.
In other words, it is eminently rational go and get oneself some matter, potential to any form, and then hew at it and chip at it in such a way as to create something definite and beautiful. And no one will deny that this world seems beautiful sometimes.
See also: William Dembski, The Design Revolution, Ch. 20, “Nature’s Receptivity to Information.”
“They” are trying to turn us into obedient slaves! Well, not exactly, and there are easier ways. (Write columns for the NY Times, for example.) But here is an example of a private company blowing the lid off the problems with government water which, according at least to the NYC government, “continues to meet all federal and state regulations regarding drinking water quality in the watershed and the distribution system.” Be calm, therefore, citizen. The authorities will take care of it.
Give it a bit of time, and you’ll see bottled water suppliers get their water cleansed of all pharmaceuticals in response to these revelations. The governments will end up catching up years later.
And here is Rothbard on fluoridation.
Wallace I. Matson considers the following two arguments equally weak:
I. Natural objects share with artifacts the common characteristics of adjustment of parts and curious adapting of means to ends.
II. Artifacts have these characteristics because they are products of design.
Conclusion. Therefore natural objects are probably products of a great designer.
and
I’. Natural objects share with artifacts the common characteristics of being colored.
II’. Artifacts are colored by being painted or dyed.
Conclusion’. Therefore natural objects are probably colored by a great painter-dyer. (Critiques of God, 84ff)
But of course they are in no way equivalent. For we do not infer that an object is intelligently designed from its being colored. But we can so infer this from its having adjustment of parts and curious adapting of means to ends. In other words, it is true that everything that exhibits curious adaptation of means to ends and is such that we know whether or not it was the product of intelligent design, in fact was the product of intelligent design. But it is not true that everything that is colored and is such that we know whether or not it was the product of intelligent design, in fact was the product of intelligent design.
Our author, of course, disagrees: “Proponents of the design argument take it for granted that the properties according to which we judge whether or not some object is an artifact are accurate adjustment of parts and curious adapting of means to ends. But that is not the way we judge, even provisionally, whether something is an artifact or not. This is clear from our being able to tell whether something is an artifact without knowing what it is for or whether its parts are accurately adjusted.” (88) But of course, these criteria are sufficient for correct identification of intelligently designed objects; they need not be necessary, as well. For example, specified complexity is another general algorithm for inferring design which does not reference means and ends. As I point out here, purpose of design is a different measure than complexity of design. And irreducible complexity is a mark of design which is specifically aimed at countering the possibility of undirected Darwinian evolution of biological structures.
Purpose of design, however, is linked to complexity, and complexity, to purpose. For specified complexity requires “conditionally independent patterns.” As Dembski writes,
Crucial here is that patterns not be artificially imposed on events after the fact. For instance, if an archer shoots arrows at a wall and we then paint targets around the arrows so that they stick squarely in the bull’s-eyes, we impose a pattern after the fact. Any such pattern is not independent of the arrow’s trajectory. On the other hand, if the targets are set up in advance (”specified”) and then the archer hits them accurately, we know it was not by chance but rather by design (provided, of course, that hitting the targets is sufficiently improbable). The way to characterize this independence of patterns is via the probabilistic notion of conditional independence. A pattern is conditionally independent of an event if adding our knowledge of the pattern to a chance hypothesis does not alter the event’s probability under that hypothesis. (The Design Revolution, 82)
And the purpose of design is one such independent pattern. For example, getting a royal flush in poker is the specification of an event, precisely because there is a purpose to getting it, namely winning the game. Victory in poker is an example of a pattern which is indeed not imposed after the fact but is “conditionally independent.” Or, a biological system is specified, because it is essential for the organism to survive and prosper, also a clear purpose (for the organism).
On the other hand, specified complexity ministers to purpose. As I write elsewhere,
What’s more, “In order to be a candidate for natural selection a system must have minimal function: the ability to accomplish a task in physically realistic circumstances.” (Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, 45) This is an additional requirement to IC, which merely lists the parts that are jointly necessary for any function, even that below minimal. Minimal function demands that, even if all the parts are present, they be such as to 1. enable the molecular machine to do its job with at least minimal competence; 2. make the machine be not less efficient than can be achieved with simpler means. The proper function is one that requires “the greatest amount of the system’s internal complexity. … The function of a system is determined from the system’s internal logic: the function is not necessarily the same thing as the purpose to which the designer wished to apply the system.” (Behe, 196)
But, we might say, any machine worth building is inevitably going to be complex, even irreducibly complex. Thus, if a system (such as a computer or the immune system) is to fulfill its function, its specified complexity must needs be very high.
Here is Draper’s original article.
Our author is not done yet. “Our cognitive faculties are, however, much less reliable when it comes to moral and religious matters. Surely this is much more surprising on theism than on (Darwinian) naturalism. Or consider the moral qualities of human beings. Humans are as a rule very strongly disposed — I’m tempted to say ‘hard-wired’ — to act selfishly. They are instinctively much more concerned about their own interests than about the interests of others. They do possess some altruistic tendencies, but these are typically very limited. This combination of a deeply ingrained selfishness and limited altruism can be given a plausible Darwinian explanation, but is very hard to understand if, for example, God wants human beings, through the exercise of their free wills, to make substantial moral progress in their short time on earth.”
And well they should be “much more concerned about their own interests.” Everyone ought to love those closer to him more than those further away (in some sense). But one is substantially united with himself and therefore closer to himself than anyone else. Hence one must seek his own happiness first before seeking other people’s. At any rate, the lives of numerous saints attest to the possibility of rising above one’s nature into holy charity and heroic virtue.
Conclusion. I would concede that, if Draper is correct, then apart from every other piece of evidence, naturalism enjoys slight advantage over theism on scope and simplicity alone. But this advantage is ephemeral and will make no difference in the end, as soon as we begin with natural theology and natural atheology. Ultimately, in a debate, nothing will turn on scope and simplicity. Finally, the problem of evil, formidable though it is for a theist, is not necessarily better evidence for naturalism than it is for theism, because theism, too, predicts a battlefield Earth, a bleak yet full of potential world suspended between heaven and hell, in which human souls are forged.
Here is Draper’s original article.
Our author’s evidence for naturalism, “E,” is as follows:
“For a variety of biological and ecological reasons, organisms compete for survival, with some having an advantage in the struggle for survival over others; as a result, many organisms, including many sentient beings, never flourish because they die before maturity, many others barely survive, but languish for most or all of their lives, and those that reach maturity and flourish for much of their lives usually languish in old age; in the case of human beings and some nonhuman animals as well, languishing often involves intense or prolonged suffering.”
This statement is unimpeachable. Kudos to Draper for putting the matter in such stark terms.
Let
P(N/T) x P(E|N/T)
P(N/T|E) = -----------------
P(E)
, where N is naturalism, and T is theism (so, there are two formulas here). Draper writes that “the fact, reported by E, that countless living organisms, including sentient beings, never flourish at all and countless others flourish only briefly is extremely surprising given theism. It is not what one would expect to find in a living world created by a perfect God.” Our author’s claim, then, is that P(E|T) is low, while P(E|N) is high.
What of P(E), expectedness? Thomas Jefferson once advised someone to “murmur not at the ways of Providence.” That we find ourselves in this world/country/town/family rather than in some other, either better or worse, one is neither expected nor unexpected. We are placed here, in this particular time, with our own unique battles to fight. There are no guarantees in life, either for good or for evil. In short, there is no “background knowledge” to help us judge how surprised we are at E, when we abstract from both naturalism and theism; E is the background knowledge for all our other conclusions. So, it is extremely hard to figure out what the value of expectedness ought to be.
Let’s go back to the likelihoods. As Draper wisely notes, “almost all sentient organisms are capable of flourishing in biologically realistic circumstances. This is proven by the fact that many do flourish and by the fact that the differences between those that do flourish and those that do not are in almost all cases relatively small.” So, victory over evil is possible, and so is the imperfect happiness that can be had in this life. It is true that not everyone flourishes, but not everyone fails, either. That, I’d like to argue, is unsurprising, given either naturalism or theism.
It is unsurprising given naturalism, because humans and other animals are adapted to their environments, but the adaptation is imperfect due to constant change in other species and in the environment, which is why there always exist the unfit to be winnowed out by natural selection.
It is unsurprising given theism, because of the existence of sufficiently powerful theodicies which explain why there is suffering and why much of it seems random. Some of the proposed theodicies are (1) soul-making; (2) the value of second-order moral goods and the third-order good of free will; (3) the value of permitting extremely intense good/virtues/happiness in humans, whose price is the possibility of extremely intense evil/vices/misery; (4) the value of a world that is governed by natural laws; (5) evil as necessary for a greater good to be eventually brought about by God; (6) evil as punishment for the Original Sin. These explain why we are placed in a challenging environment, both for the body and for the soul, in which we must do good and fight evil. Draper needs to deal with these arguments somehow, yet there is not even a mention of the word “theodicy” in his paper.
But why do the good and evil things that happen to us appear so random? We can explain only in general why we are in the fight for our lives. But no particular combination of pleasures and pains, joys and sorrows can be expected. For some of those, indeed, we are responsible ourselves. Some belong to fortune or even sheer luck. Yet to whatever seemingly random trials we are to undergo, God’s grace adapts in helping us to overcome them; so, grace is the third influence on us.
Therefore, P(E|T) is quite high and in my estimation no lower that P(E|N). Look, in what other world, given theism, does Draper expect to be born? If it’s the Garden of Eden, then we already know why we are not there. If it’s heaven, then we cannot determine our own character there by way of exercising our moral and intellectual faculties nor improve. Design a better world, Paul; only then will you show that God screwed up.
Here is Draper’s original article.
Our author continues:
Considerations of simplicity understood in this way provide another reason to believe that naturalism is intrinsically more probable than theism. On the one hand, theism postulates that one sort of entity — a perfect God — is the ultimate cause of other entities of a fundamentally different sort — natural entities. Naturalism, on the other hand, attributes one kind of ontological uniformity to the world: all entities that affect the natural world are themselves natural. Since naturalism attributes greater uniformity to reality than theism, it is simpler than theism in the crucial sense of the word.
My first note is that God is “natural,” too. He has a nature. For some of the reasons to use the term “supernatural” in our talk of God see here and here. But the main basis for attributing super-nature to God is not found in either of those entries. (That’s because I did not think of it until later.)
As we have seen earlier, there are three groups into which all sciences fall: natural sciences which describe natural laws to which entities necessarily obey, social sciences which deal with human actions, plans, beliefs, feelings, etc., and theology which deals with God. Draper’s objection could be construed as arguing that it is simpler to suppose that there are only two such groups of sciences: natural and social, and this view is superior to the three-group view by reason of its very simplicity.
It should be noted that many economists deny that there is a difference even between natural and social sciences with respect to the correct methodology of doing either. Only the Austrian school of economics has remained steadfast in its defense of the uniqueness of the sciences of human action and their separateness from natural sciences like physics or chemistry. In like fashion, the “Chernikov’s school of theology” insists that theology is a branch of human knowledge that is fundamentally distinct from both natural and social sciences with its own characteristic methodology.
Similarly, within natural sciences there is a crucial distinction between inanimate things and things that are animate and alive. Physics studies the former, biology, the latter, and chemistry stands somewhere in between. We have just postulated a serious lack of uniformity in the world. But few people doubt that biological sciences are profoundly distinct from physical sciences.
My reply to Draper, therefore, is that the world is not simple at all. In fact, it is exceedingly complex, and expecting simple theories to describe it will make for a very unhappy career, if one wishes to be a scientist. Our observation of “objective uniformity” in the world is due a certain efficiency in the structure of reality. For example, the same four physical forces describe a vast variety of phenomena everywhere. Yet sitting on top of that efficiency are, for instance, enormously complicated machines, either man-made or biological. Occam’s razor counsels us not to multiply entities beyond necessity. But what if it is necessary to multiply them? In other words, simplicity is a virtue, but it is all the way down on the list of other virtues that hypotheses must have. If all things are indeed equal, a scientist might tentatively suppose that the simpler hypothesis is more likely, and even that for purely pragmatic reasons. But a lot of things have to be equal (such as falsifiability, confirmation, predictability, explanatory power) for that criterion to kick in.
It is true that we seek uniformity in terms of consistent behaviors of things which are generalized into regularities or natural laws. But postulating God is not an ad hoc addition to our ontology. For it helps us explain things like miraculous events, near-death experiences, the difficulty of explaining away the cosmological arguments in favor of the existence of God, a human desire for righteousness despite the apparent sacrifices required for attaining it, seemingly intelligently designed biological systems, and many other things, things that naturalism has trouble explaining. Furthermore, on Draper’s own terms, these are explained as being due to a single cause, whereas naturalistic explanations require multiple causes to explain these phenomena. I fully understand that Draper’s notion of simplicity has to do with treating God as a unique supernatural entity, while naturalism posits only natural entities. Still, “God did it through His love and omnipotence” is a simpler explanation for NDEs than the highly complex “the dying brain did it, and this is how” explanation for them.
Lastly, Draper uses the example of Aristotle’s postulating that celestial objects are composed of different stuff than terrestrial objects. But terrestrial objects are, too, composed of four elements, the ancients held. Wouldn’t it be simpler to postulate only two elements (e.g., fire and frost)? Or only one? Why isn’t having four elements as opposed to some smaller number not a “weakness” in Aristotle’s physics? The simplicity criterion, it seems to me, is of extremely limited use.
After disputing the validity of the fine-tuning argument in a number of ways, Stenger presents us with an apparent difficulty:
It is rather amusing that theists make two contradictory arguments for life requiring a creator. … In the fine-tuning argument, the universe is so congenial to life that the universe must have been created with life in mind. But if it is so congenial, then we should expect life to evolve by natural processes and a sustaining God is unnecessary. In the second argument, the universe is so uncongenial to life that life could not have occurred by natural processes and so must have been created and be sustained by the constant actions of God. (God: The Failed Hypothesis, 163ff)
So, which is it? Well, both. This illustrates precisely the interplay of nature and grace that is so familiar to us in theology. Nature may well be very congenial to life, but even that may not be enough. The fine-tuning may be necessary for life but not sufficient. But given God’s grace (working with nature) and maybe an occasional miracle (working against it), life could have arisen and did, in fact, arise.
Equivalently, we can say that the universe is uncongenial to life but would be much more so if it were not fine-tuned.
Somebody more familiar with physics than I am should examine Stenger’s scientific claims in God: The Failed Hypothesis.
Stenger believes that there may have been no singularity at the beginning of the Big Bang and that this universe may have sprung from an earlier one “by a process called quantum tunneling or so-called quantum fluctuations.” (126) That is supposed to provide “another nail in the coffin of the kalam argument.” (125) I don’t see how. He seems to be giving us a modus tollens: “If an actually infinite period of time cannot be traversed, then the universe has a beginning. The universe does not (or may not) have a beginning. Therefore …” I think we should be honest and point out that Stenger’s scenario is obviously speculative. Perhaps he should be wary of accepting something so philosophically dubious. One man’s tollens is another man’s ponens.
Our author argues that even though the entropy of the universe increases, its maximum entropy increases even faster. So, the universe started out as completely chaotic (though with a very low maximum entropy) as basically a black hole and then gradually became ever more orderly, such that now its entropy is less than the maximum though greater than it was at the beginning. Thus, islands of order emerged from disorder. Stenger concludes that “the complex order we now observe could not have been the result of any initial design built into the universe at the so-called creation.” (121) Suppose that he is right. It is still possible that design was introduced into the universe as its history unfolded. Now whether God is an interventionist is beside the point. The issue here is, as Dembski argued, at what point the working out of the design of the universe or of objects within it becomes evident to us (The Design Revolution, Ch. 23, “Interventionism”). Whether all design was front-loaded in the beginning or whether the designer continuously steered the universe toward whatever end he had in mind is not that important. (However, if grace is given all the time to humans, might we not expect it to be given to other things, as well, in the form, perhaps, of engineering improvements of biological systems?) The question is, in other words, Are natural processes sufficient to create order that is both complex and specified?
But even the first premise of kalam, viz., that everything that begins to exist has a cause, is suspect; e.g., “We have a highly successful theory of probabilistic causes – quantum mechanics. It does not predict when a given event will occur and, indeed, assumes that individual events are not predetermined.” Craig admitted that causation on the quantum level is probabilistic and thereby “destroy[ed] his own case for a predetermined creation.” (124) In other words, it is now not true that whatever begins to exist has a determinate cause, and presumably, if God willed the universe into existence, He would not have relied on mere probability.
One reply to this is that God caused the quantum fluctuation that was the seed of the expansion in the first place. Or, as time went on within the singularity (or whatever it was), the probability of a fluctuation that would kick-start the Big Bang approached 1, which means that God could simply sit and wait for this event to occur.
A second reply is simply “So much the worse for quantum mechanics. Scientists should be looking for some as yet undiscovered deterministic causes.” To be sure, no success at this task has so far been had, but far be it from me to put artificial constraints on the future development of physics.
Third, it is true that “virtual particles” can apparently pop into existence from nothing quite without divine intervention. (Radioactive decay, too, follows a statistical law.) But it does not follow from this that the universe as a whole could have sprung into being in the same manner. Virtual particles, to use that particular example, appear in space for a (short) period of time subject to the Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle, which works within the existing universe. But space and time themselves, along with the reality described by the Indeterminacy Principle, could not have appeared from a state of non-existence in which there were no space, time, or natural laws. There was no Indeterminacy Principle or some equivalent of it prior to the universe naturally to account for its creation. Stenger’s reply is remarkable:
many simple systems of particles are unstable, that is, have limited lifetimes as they undergo spontaneous phase transitions to more complex structures of lower energy. Since “nothing” is as simple as it gets, we cannot expect it to be very stable. It would likely undergo a spontaneous phase transition to something more complicated, like a universe containing matter. (133)
I’ll leave you to marvel at the chutzpah here.
The first thing to realize is that evolutionary theory (TOE) makes no quantitative predictions. So all comparisons of the strength of confirmation of the TOE with, say, quantum mechanics are completely out of place. Quantum mechanics is a highly precise branch of physics, and while the TOE does use math in things like game-theoretic models of evolution and stable equilibriums or in sequence comparisons, in general it is pretty easy on precise numerical predictions.
Second, the TOE is primarily an historical science. Therefore, it can only make “retrodictions,” i.e., it can be shown to be consistent with past events. It does not predict the way in which a species will evolve. With respect to the future it can only say that, when faced with unfavorable circumstances, a species will either evolve or die out which is not a prediction but a tautology that can be understood without any appeal to our theory.
Third, it is true that the TOE predicts that organisms will be adapted to their environment. But it says nothing about how they will be adapted or what features the organisms will or must have; it does not even say that there will exist the particular organisms under investigation. Yes, indeed, evolution will favor certain variations and keep the organisms in a given species protected against certain kinds of environmental changes within well-defined limits, but it is powerless to bring about novel specified complexity. Or so, at any rate, ID claims.
Fourth, the predictions of the TOE, such as they are (e.g., that fossils are stratified in a particular way) are extremely general. For example, Stenger writes:
Darwin specifically predicted that recognizable human ancestors would be found in Africa. Many now have been. Evolutionary theory predicted that the use of antiviral or antibacterial agents would result in the emergence of resistant strains. This principle is, of course, a mainstay in contemporary medicine. Paleontologists correctly predicted that species showing the evolution from fish to amphibian would be found in Devonian strata. (God: The Failed Hypothesis, 50)
The trouble is that the TOE did not predict the shape of the fossils of human ancestors or of what material they consisted. It did not predict what kind of changes will occur in bacteria as a result of widespread use of antibiotics. (Wouldn’t that be useful to medical researchers! They would be able to create drugs to attack disease-causing germs long before they evolved into resistant strains.) I, too, could have made the same prediction: bacteria will either evolve or perish. And as for transitional forms, some words from Behe will suffice to drive the point home:
Anatomy is, quite simply, irrelevant to the question of whether evolution could take place on the molecular level. So is the fossil record. It no longer matters whether there are huge gaps in the fossil record or whether the record is as continuous as that of U.S. presidents. And if there are gaps, it does not matter whether they can be explained plausibly. The fossil record has nothing to tell us about whether the interactions of 11-cis-retinal with rhodopsin, transducin, and phosphodiesterase could have developed step-by-step. (Darwin’s Black Box, 22)
I think that we should all agree that the fossil record is not a good piece of evidence either for design or against it.
In sum, the TOE fares quite poorly with respect to predictive power.