Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

Stenger argues that there is no such thing as William Dembski’s “law of conservation of information” which states that sans intelligent intervention chance and necessity cannot generate novel specified complexity (SC). This law, according to Stenger, is equivalent to negative entropy. But since the Earth and the living beings are open systems, … . (God: The Failed Hypothesis, 57) First of all, SC is a more narrow concept than negative entropy. The latter applies to any order, be it complex or not or specified or not. SC is a very special kind of order and so is not the same as the more general negative entropy. Second, I think the idea here is that new SC can be created with the help of the energy of the sun and the earth. But this can’t be right. Information is not matter or energy, and energy is neither sufficient nor necessary to generate it. There is a reason for the distinction between “form” and “matter,” the formal and the material causes. As a physicist, Stenger should be the first to point out that energy applied indiscriminately will tend to erode the SC of a system. And novel information can be created with arbitrarily small amounts of energy. (An intelligence might choose between alternatives and actualize one while setting aside the others at the quantum level.)

It is certainly true that “a living organism is kept away from thermodynamic equilibrium by its use of sources of outside energy to maintain order.” (57) But the question is whether the organisms themselves and the order we see in them could have been generated by chance and necessity alone. Yet no matter how much light we shine on an amoeba, it will show no interest in replicating into Bill Gates. No one denies that organisms stay alive and orderly by consuming sources of energy from the outside. (We can even say that organisms maintain order within themselves but creating disorder outside of themselves.) But where have the energy-finding, -consuming, and -tranforming machines within organisms come from?

Dembski’s point is that natural processes can only either degrade SC or, at best, preserve it. Now the essence of SC is the improbability of an event coupled with its conditionally independent and easily described pattern. In other words, in order to infer design, the event being analyzed must be both improbable and interesting. If a natural process (such as Darwinian evolution) generates something from scratch, it will have to be either complex yet uninteresting or interesting yet simple. If it takes as input something that is already specified and complex, then it will output a system of no greater sophistication. This is a fundamental limitation of nature which Dembski picked up on. And this limitation does not apply to an intelligent cause.

Stenger argues that SC can be seen being produced naturally in, say, the Fibonacci sequence of the arrangement of petals on many flowers whose “purpose” is the minimization of potential energy. (62) Dembski counters by asking

Is the operation of that process natural? Or is the origin of that process natural? … Korthof’s example is logically equivalent to a computer programmed to output Fibonacci sequences. Once suitably programmed, the computer operates by necessity. Consequently, its outputs, when fed into the filter, will land at the necessity node of the filter. The computer-generated Fibonacci sequences derive, as Korthof might put it, from a “perfectly natural process.” But whence the computer that runs the program? And whence the program? …

Granted, the “biological software” that outputs Fibonacci sequences is probably quite simple and might even be due to purely natural forces like selective pressure. … Nevertheless, the simplest “biological hardware” that runs that software is a functioning cell. And the simplest functioning cell is staggeringly complex, exhibiting layer upon layer of specified complexity and therefore design. (The Design Revolution, 90)

What Dembski is saying is that design events have to be introduced somewhere into the sequence of causes that created an object with high SC. Just as one can write a computer program that outputs primes and send the results of the computation into outer space to be picked up by Earthlings, so one can write a program that outputs Fibonacci sequences. But in both cases either the program itself or the computer it ran on or both must have been put together by intelligent agents.

Here is how our author defines the different versions of naturalism:

The self-imposed convention of science that limits inquiry to objective observations of the world and generally seeks natural accounts for all phenomena is called methodological naturalism. We have also noted that methodological naturalism is often conflated with metaphysical naturalism, which assumes that reality itself is purely natural, that is, composed solely of material objects.

Methodological naturalism can still be applied without implying any dogmatic attachment to metaphysical naturalism. (God: The Failed Hypothesis, 29)

Stenger writes that he will “use the words natural and supernatural as synonymous with material and nonmaterial.” (14) This is rather confusing. If metaphysical naturalism is equivalent to materialism, then it suffers from all the problems identified with materialism. But if, say, substance dualism is true, are not animal souls entirely “natural”? Are human actions guided by intelligence supernatural? What of the immaterial numbers and sets and propositions and possible worlds and so on? Must we delete them from our ontology simply because we are committed to materialism? Is every “special science” merely applied physics? Are praxeology and economics not legitimate sciences? Clearly, materialism, apart from other unlovely things about it, inevitably leads to the most crude form of scientism, that is, the view that the correct methodology of every science must imitate the methodology of physics. I don’t know why Stenger would want to import materialism, with all its liabilities, into his unsuccessful search for God.

Suppose now that metaphysical naturalism is false. Should we nonetheless still abide by methodological naturalism? But why? If there are immaterial entities both immanent and beyond this universe, why must we deny them all causal efficacy? Who imposed this rule on what we can and cannot do in science? Should we not go where the evidence leads us? If our investigation leads us to postulate a designing intelligence, then shouldn’t we do just that? Stenger agrees with this position; his point is that the “hypothesis” of the existence of God is falsifiable and, in fact, falsified. This is a welcome change from the views of those atheists who refuse to countenance the idea that nature can, at least in principle, yield insights about God.

On infidels.org there appeared to me this random quote:

Mr. Behe has of course compared, like it or not, compared the extraordinary complexity of the human cell to the mousetrap. He said if we look at that mousetrap, it was created by a human. In fact, Mr. Miller improved on it, as you saw earlier tonight. Therefore, if that’s complicated, then indeed the cell must also have been designed by an intelligence. And as I thought about it tonight, it’s a little bit – we were all talking about nature analogies – it’s a little bit like looking at a mole build a molehill. You say, That’s very interesting. Then we walk out in the woods the next day and we notice a big mountain off in the distance. And we say, Good grief, that’s enormously large. A really big mole must have built that. The truth of the matter is, it’s not logical. We should be looking for different forces that result in different things. Your mousetrap was built by human hands because its components are inanimate objects. Cellular life is living, vibrant, breathing, changing matter. You’re not just comparing apples to oranges, you are comparing plastic apples to organic oranges, and I think therefore this analogy fails. (Ken Miller in “Resolved: That evolutionists should acknowledge creation,” Firing Line, 4 December 1997, 50.)

But wait a minute, the big mountain lacks specified complexity; it is not a machine; it performs no function; it does not move or do any work. There is no room for a design inference here. Miller’s error is that he thinks that our abduction in the case of irreducibly complex biological systems is based on an analogy with man-made machines. As a matter of fact, a mousetrap is merely an illustration of a principle, according to which design can be reliably inferred in anything. That principle, (contingent) specified complexity, governs our speculations of the origins of both mousetraps and, say, bacterial cilia with equal authority. However, if there is an argument from analogy here, it has in the following form:

(1) Everything that exhibits specified complexity and is such that we know whether or not it was the product of intelligent design, in fact was the product of intelligent design.

(2) Many biological systems exhibit specified complexity.

(3) Therefore, these systems are most likely the products of intelligent design.

Secondly, it is true that “[c]ellular life is living, vibrant, breathing, changing matter.” That property, life, the soul, the vital principle that animates every living creature and makes it different from inanimate objects is surely fascinating. But life is something in addition to the molecular nanotechnology within a cell. Now ID focuses on these sophisticated robots only because they are scientifically tractable, as “life force” is not. And it is sufficient, ID proponents claim, given also the failure of evolutionists to offer anything interesting in response, to infer design. Life and, for humans, mind are far beyond the design-theoretic research program which is preoccupied with material objects carrying high information content. But they do not detract from matter but are rather the forms of it. If anything, they make the case for design much stronger that it has so far been made, insofar as life cannot be reduced to matter or consciousness to computation, and assuming that the origins of both cannot have been purely natural.

Now perhaps Miller’s point is simply that life can change, unlike a mousetrap. But that’s where Behe’s irreducible complexity comes in. Even though life can change through random mutations, natural selection cannot build the systems Behe examines in his Darwin’s Black Box.

In his discussion of the TA, Carroll advances several objections to it. First, he points to the existence of evil or disteleology in the world:

…for all its beauty and grandeur, the universe is also full of, well, to be delicate, let us say that the universe is also full of nasties. I suppose I should be more specific, but I think the reader knows the kind of thing I mean: babies born without brains, good people suffering monstrous tortures such as neurofibromatosis, evil people basking in the sun and enjoying power, reputation, etc. Volcanoes erupting, earthquakes rattling the planet, hurricanes and tornadoes blindly wiping out thousands of lives a day.

To that it can be replied that imperfect or suboptimal design is not the same as no-design. A thing may be intelligently constructed even if the designer could have done a better, from some point of view, job. Nor do unseemly purposes invalidate design inferences. Dembski’s famous example is a torture chamber. It is designed despite its evil purpose.

Carroll continues, second: “One could, of course, attack Paley’s argument at this point and say, as Clarence Darrow did, that some stones would be just as puzzling as a watch; for, they are complex and could easily have been designed by someone for some purpose we are unaware of, and, in any case ‘on close inspection and careful study the stone… is just as marvelous as the watch.’” A reply to this is, of course, that stones have much lower specified complexity and information content than a watch. Therefore, even though a particular stone may have been designed (e.g., by a human for an unknown purpose), we may mistakenly think that it was not designed. So Dembski’s filter can result in false negatives though not in false positives.

Third, our author quotes Clarence Darrow to the effect that

To say that a certain scheme or process shows order or system, one must have some norm or pattern by which to determine whether the matter concerned shows any design or order. We have a norm, a pattern, and that is the universe itself, from which we fashion our ideas. We have observed this universe and its operation and we call it order. To say that the universe is patterned on order is to say that the universe is patterned on the universe. It can mean nothing else.

And yet we recognize order and judge it different from chaos. Ought not the order to be explained?

Dawkins tells the following charming story:

I was driving through the English countryside with my daughter Juliet, then aged six, and she pointed out some flowers by the wayside. I asked her what she thought wildflowers were for. She gave a rather thoughtful answer. ‘Two things,’ she said. ‘To make the world pretty, and to help the bees make honey for us.’ I was touched by this and sorry I had to tell her that it wasn’t true. (Climbing Mount Improbable, 256)

From the point of view of flowers, bees, for example, are “guided missiles” that transfer pollen from one flower to another. From the point of view of the bees, flowers are “for” the nectar they manufacture. Every creature thereby pursues its own ends and interests and uses other objects in the world in so doing. We cannot, therefore, responsibly say that man has dominion over the world and everything that exists is for his use and pleasure.

First of all, what Dawkins says is self-evidently false. For what of flowers specifically grown for the satisfaction of human aesthetic desires? Or what of bees kept by humans for their honey? Of course, in these cases flowers are “for” beauty, and bees are “for” honey. Even if humans are not special in any theological sense, teleology, the science of final causes, cannot be dispensed with. Humans are the kind of creatures, the only creatures, in fact, who purposively, consciously strive for ends. And flowers and bees are means to some of those ends. Dawkins goes to absurd lengths to ignore teleology, saying that viruses, for example, “are here because they are here because they are here.” Well, yes, they are here; is that all that can be profitably said about them?

He continues in the same vein:

Flowers and elephants are ‘for’ the same thing as everything else in the living kingdoms, for spreading Duplicate Me programs written in DNA language. Flowers are for spreading copies of instructions for making more flowers. Elephants are for spreading copies of instructions for making more elephants. (272)

But that’s just another way of saying that neither flowers nor elephants are for anything. At the very least, and second, Dawkins could have made an exception for elephants and said that their purpose is their own happiness. Elephants, possessing a sensitive soul, feel pleasure and pain, and a long temporal life of pleasure and good health would seem to be, therefore, their ultimate end. Instinctive behavior, is, as Mises writes, “quasi-purposeful.” (Human Action, 27ff) Dawkins would, of course, object that animals are slaves to their genes, obeying their dictates robotically. To an extent certainly they are and they do. But not completely; and the higher up the ontological hierarchy they are, the less they do so.

Third, why assume that no living creature is ordered to something or someone else? (Rightly it is written that God has “hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.” (Mt 11:25)) Dawkins fails to trace the chain of causes to their ultimate source. For just as for any event there is a chain (or “rope,” perhaps) of efficient causes that terminates in God as the “Alpha,” there is also a chain of final causes that terminates in God as the “Omega.” Indeed, bees do not care about humans. Neither do flowers. That does not mean that their existence as such is not due to someone’s wanting them to serve humans. We can use a thing even if that thing does not know or appreciate being used. In the theistic worldview, the purpose of humans would then be to reflect the goodness of God.¹ And just as God is the uncaused first efficient cause, so He is the uncaused final cause; He possesses and is perfectly happy with Himself and is the fully actual magnet that draws all created things to Himself.

“What are viruses for?” Dawkins imagines his sick daughter ask him. He ridicules the notions of various Christians that, e.g., “[h]orseflies… were created so ‘that men should exercise their wits and industry to guard against them’” or that “weeds [are] there to benefit us: it is good for our spirit to have to work hard pulling them up” (256ff)? But this is the standard soulmaking theodicy. What is so absurd about the idea that, as I write elsewhere, the world was created as a “hostile yet conquerable” place? The main difference between this world and heaven is that everything here is striving towards goodness and happiness against the forces of death, call them entropy or the devil. And in struggle and only in struggle character is built. Sounds absurdly trivial? Then why so much angst about evil in the world?

I think I’m done with Dawkins for now except to note his “argument from credulity” on page 281 of the same book. He writes of a self-replicating man-made robot that mimics lifeforms: “A TRIP robot such as we are now imagining is a machine of great technical ingenuity and complexity. … But… no [such] robot has yet been built. Perhaps it will never be built. Perhaps it is beyond the bound of practical feasibility.” Yet in the next paragraph he blithely compares living things to such robots. Perhaps Dawkins should go back to his NT roots and rediscover skepticism.

Similarly, Michael Behe points out: “Vesicular transport is a mind-boggling process, no less complex than the completely automated delivery of vaccine from a storage area to a clinic a thousand miles away.” (Darwin’s Black Box, 115) The interesting thing to note is that there is, of course, no such thing as a “completely automated delivery of vaccine from a storage area to a clinic a thousand miles away.” Such a system is utterly beyond the power of modern engineering. Yet there it is, working very well on the molecular level. Even if such a system could be built, it would surely function differently than the cellular mechanism. Is it reasonable to believe that natural undirected forces could create machines that human intelligence cannot now and never may be able to duplicate? Now I am being incredulous.

---

¹ If we say that humans are to show forth God’s goodness, does this make them merely instrumental? Is not each person an end in himself? He is, but he is an end in himself only insofar as he is like God. The less like God one is, the less human he becomes. In other words, the ultimate and instrumental ends of human beings are intimately linked; or we can say that the instrumental end is a necessary constituent of the ultimate one. One cannot be happy unless he is good.

Ludwig von Mises described the idea of historical progress (which he did not share) as follows: “Each later stage of human affairs is, by virtue of its being a later stage, also a higher and better stage. Nothing is permanent in human conditions except this irresistible urge toward progress.” (Human Action, 694) Something similar, according to the theory of evolution (TOE), is present in nature. Since “progress” is a valuation, we can avoid it by saying that creatures tend to become more complex as time goes on.

The supporters of the TOE rightly point out that the theory does not violate the 2^nd law of thermodynamics. Even though the universe as a whole is slowly dying and its entropy increasing, at the beginning it was “wound up.” The Earth is not a closed system in that the sun provides the energy claimed to be sufficient for evolution to occur. It is a temporary sanctuary for life. Be that as it may, the presence of this energy is clearly not enough. The fact remains that, according to the TOE, there is a natural law that acts cunningly, although quite without a purpose, to generate complexity from simplicity. Thus, it was not an accidental result when, say, on April 16^th, 271,392,812 BC at 3:15pm a simpler creature gave birth to a more complex creature; this was not in any sense a remarkable occurrence at all; on the contrary, there is a fundamental law of nature that, given the right conditions, biological organisms on this planet and perhaps other planets as well will tend to ever greater complexity. Darwin’s great achievement was to discover this alleged law.

Another way to put it is to make an analogy with teleology. Just as an acorn has a “purpose within” it to become an oak tree, so, too, were human beings implicitly, as an unactualized potentiality, present in the ancestor common to them and chimpanzees, in trilobites before them, in the first microorganisms before them billions of years ago, even, if life arose purely by natural means, in the chemical elements of early Earth, and ultimately in the quark-gluon plasma seconds after the Big Bang. Thus, in a way, the Big Bang necessitated humans and, through them, intelligently designed objects such as computers. Rather like materialism, evolution asserts that matter was there first and only later gave rise to mind, if there is such a thing. (Those who disagree with it might argue that no, it was mind that gave rise to matter, not vice versa.)

Yes, evolution is blind, yet the complex life it generated was inevitable. Chance and necessity, in the form of random mutation and natural selection, working together, have been sufficient to create all the variety of life on our planet. Hence even though randomness is by definition not law-like (mutations are random in the sense that the likelihood of a mutation is unaffected by whether it is beneficial to the organism or otherwise), nevertheless, mutations are expected, over a sufficiently long time, to generate enough beneficial changes which, winnowed by natural selection, will result not only in ever improving adaptation but to ever, in the long run, greater complexity of living beings. There are, in other words, statistical laws that say: “some mutations will benefit creatures” and “mutations create novel information.” Their corollary is another law: “species are limitlessly malleable.” Thus, it is not just that bacteria will develop insecticide resistance and finches will evolve longer beaks, but finches will evolve from bacteria.

To be sure, while “climbing mount Improbable” it matters where you begin. If you start on a high place, you can only go up, even if the highest peak you can surmount is lower than another peak separated from you by a valley. And there are other limitations. But the conjunction of natural and statistical laws described above nevertheless created all that there is.

These are, as I understand them, the major claims of the TOE.

Spider Webs. Our author showcases a computer program that can automatically, via simulated natural selection, adjust the parameters of a web through generations of spiders in order to improve its efficiency. The variables include the number of randomly shot flies caught and the cost of silk, both possibly subject to the law of diminishing marginal utility (or its spider equivalent). The web changes in shape and size. (Climbing Mount Improbable, “Silken Fetters”)

In so doing Dawkins demonstrates that it is not impossible that the quality of spider webs can improve with time. But this is precisely what William Dembski has identified as a “routine” problem in TRIZ which can be solved by trial and error. The question is, can evolution solve what is quite possibly an “inventive” problem of making web-producing insects in the first place? Once a decent web is there, I have no problem admitting that it can evolve in the fashion that Dawkins suggests, in the process becoming more and more efficient. But how to get from no-spinneret to a fully-functioning one?

Wings. Here is how insects developed wings: First, the tiny wings functioned as “solar panels.” At some point “further improvement in solar-panel performance tails off.” But, according to the research Dawkins cites, the wings would still not be large enough to be useful for flight. What to do? Wait a minute! “[S]ome insects evolved larger body size for a quite different reason” which would have caused the wing stubs to grow “automatically.” That’s about all Dawkins gives us. (114)

First of all, isn’t it obvious that if the wings grew proportionately to the rest of the body, they would still be mere “stubs,” only bigger in size? They would also have to carry greater weight, and as Dawkins himself points out, weight goes up as the cube of the linear dimension, while surface area goes up only as the square. And who is to say whether the most optimal wings’ shape for catching sunlight is the same as an appropriate shape for flying? Perhaps it was, in fact, impossible to go from solar panels as they efficiently developed to flight implements by a steadily rising path round the Mount Improbable. How does Dawkins know?

Second, the flying system in insects is more than just wings. It also involves, at the very least, the exoskeleton, muscles, and the nervous system, including the brain. Further, the entire insect has to be engineered with precision and optimized so that it can function. There would very likely have to be multiple genes controlling the subsystems jointly responsible for flight. A thorough genetic analysis would have to be done in order to find out whether the structure permitting an insect to fly is or is not irreducibly complex, and if so, then to what extent.

And the same goes for all winged animals. Dawkins recognizes the problem and writes that in one scenario “the same nervous circuits as were used to control the centre of gravity in the jumping ancestor would, rather effortlessly, have lent themselves to controlling the flight surfaces later in the evolutionary story.” This is the only place where he notices this problem, and the notice is not too helpful. For precisely how effortlessly? And where did the original circuits come from? With respect to God Dawkins is sensitive to the alleged problem of infinite regress: “Who created God?,” he asks. He does not seem to notice the problem of regressing from one complex system to another in his own writings.

Finally, it must be shown that genetic variation in the wingless ancestors of modern winged creatures included mutations that produced wings. This must, of course, be demonstrated independently of the fact that creatures with wings exist right now; we cannot reason from the existence of wings to their having evolved from no-wings. I have no idea how Dawkins would go about solving this problem.

Shells. By manipulating three parameters of shell construction our author creates a variety of mollusc shells on his computer screen which substantially resemble the real shells. (Ibid., “The Museum of All Shells”)

Very nice, but, in the first place, this is merely a simulation. No mollusc calculates flare, verm, and spire in making the shell. Yet they make them anyway. Secondly, once again we see how one species of mollusc can evolve into another (that is, into one with a shell that looks different), more suitable for its environment. But we get no clue as to how shells arose in the first place.

Here is exactly how it happened:

Elephant trunks contain no bones and do not fossilize, but we don’t need fossils to realize that the elephant trunk started out as just a nose. (Climbing Mount Improbable, 92)

There you have it, folks. Surely, this account is both obvious and complete and plausible. It is obvious, because what else could possibly serve as a precursor to the trunk? It couldn’t have been a tongue or an eye or anything crazy like that! Besides, it’s attached to the face right in the place where the nose would ordinarily be. Just put, say, a human nose on an elephant in your imagination – will not the resulting animal look reasonable and not at all absurd? No, it clearly had to be the nose.

It is complete, because the trunk’s evolution must have been exceedingly simple. The nose of some primordial mammal got longer and longer, becoming more and more useful in the process (perhaps, as Dawkins allows, for different purposes), until it ended up as a trunk. Yes, but what of the fact that it is “[e]quipped with fifty thousand muscles and controlled by a brain to match such complexity” (Ibid.)? Ah, who cares, evolution is so darn clever, it brings tears to my eyes as I marvel at its powers.

It’s plausible, because, surely, only religious fanatics believe that it is necessary to determine the specified complexity of biological systems and organs in order to infer whether they have most probably come about by chance and necessity or by design. Dawkins sees no need to back up his claims. He is committed to evolution, set in his ways, and no stinkin’ irreducible complexity, tight integration of parts, minimal function, and other like engineering concepts are going to shake his contentment as an “intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

Here are a few additional problems dealing with the (possible) evolution of the trunk.

1. Why have only elephants evolved the trunk, given its obvious usefulness? Dawkins would probably say that it was the most efficient tool given all the other physical properties of the elephant (such as its size). Further, the trunk would be inefficient for any other animal. But verifying whether these statements are true requires some real in-depth investigation which will use the principles of biology, anatomy, physics, and engineering. Questions such as “In what ways would a Malayan tapir have to change overall if it were to develop a trunk, and would such a creature be competitive in its present (or any) environment?” would need to be answered. If such work has not been done, then it is possible for a theist to say that the reason why no other animal has a trunk is not that it would be evolutionary suicide but that such animals have simply not been created.

   Alternatively, Dawkins could say that elephants filled an ecological niche. But surely, other niches have always been available for animals with trunks. If not, let Dawkins demonstrate it. (Yes, the burden of proof is on him; I’m not the one writing books promoting my pet theory.)

2. Darwinists always tell us that how the first lifeforms came into being is irrelevant to the problems of evolution. Why, then, could God (let’s say) not have made elephants first and then left them to evolve into proboscis monkeys and elephant seals, in part by having their trunks shrink until they turned into noses? Further, suppose that God did not create elephants but rather started out with single-celled organisms. Then it may be argued that a thing has to be short before it gets long, not vice versa. But one can easily imagine a snake (or something like that) somehow slowly developing an elephant body and turning into a trunk. How is that less plausible than Dawkins’s scenario?
3. According to Dawkins, “there must have been a smooth, gradual succession of steadily longer noses, a sliding gradient of thickening muscles and more intricately dissected nerves.” (Ibid.) First, this begs the question of whether “a smooth, gradual succession” could, indeed, occur. For goodness’ sake, if you want to neutralize ID theorists, just show that the trunk has low specified complexity, and the doubters will be convinced. Second, the trunk is different from any nose not by degree by in kind. It
   

   can wrench and push with tonnes of force. Yet, at the same time it is capable of performing the most delicate operations such as plucking a small seed-pop to pop in the mouth. This versatile organ is a siphon capable of holding four litres of water to be drunk or sprayed over the body, as an extended finger and as a trumpet or loud speaker. The trunk has social functions, too… (Ibid.)

   Of course, Dawkins can argue that changes in kind can occur as a result of numerous small changes in degree. But that means that the trunk’s intermediate stages in the course of its evolution had to be useful, too. Dawkins falls back onto the idea that “[e]arly elongation could have provided an advantage that had nothing to do with picking up objects.” Like what? I think that our author should be required to do better than simply tell an extremely incomplete just-so story.

The moral seems to be that Dawkins’s ruminations are quite useless for understanding how the trunk actually came about.

Here is Plantinga’s review. And here is Littlejohn’s commentary.

First, I don’t find Plantinga’s style to be grating; quite the contrary, I think it’s delightful. I’ve addressed the compatibility of simplicity and intelligence in the previous post. So that should alleviate some of Littlejohn’s distress.

I’ve also enjoyed Plantinga’s precious refutation of God’s complexity according to Dawkins’s own definition:

According to his definition (set out in The Blind Watchmaker), something is complex if it has parts that are “arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone.” But of course God isn’t a material object at all and hence has no parts. God is a spirit, an immaterial spiritual being, and therefore has no parts at all. A fortiori (as philosophers like to say) God doesn’t have parts arranged in ways unlikely to have arisen by chance. Therefore, given the definition of complexity Dawkins himself proposes, God is not complex.

Unfortunately, I have to end this post by being somewhat critical of Plantinga: I’m not sure that “According to classical theism, God is a necessary being; it is not so much as possible that there should be no such person as God; he exists in all possible worlds.” I think that that is actually a fairly modern refinement, reminiscent of the modal ontological argument. When Aquinas, for example, says that God is (absolutely) necessary, he means that God is imperishable – that He does not go out of existence. He does not go so far as to say that God exists in all possible worlds. But He may, for no matter the world we can imagine, it cannot but be incomplete and therefore stand in need of God.

I am also uncertain of Plantinga’s counter-argument about fine-tuning. The in itself improbable fine-tuning of our universe, which he labels alpha, is explained by it being one of countless others; the existence of humans in alpha is explained by its being fine-tuned, not, as Plantinga seems to think, the other way around. But maybe I don’t quite grasp his reasoning.

Our author writes:

Any Designer capable of construcing the dazzling array of living things would have to be intelligent ad complicated beyond all imagining. And complicated is just another word for improbable – and therefore demanding of explanation. A theologian who repostes that his god is sublimely simple has (not very) neatly evaded the issue, for a sufficiently simple god, whatever other virtues he might have, would be too simple to be capable of designing a universe (to say nothing of forgiving sins, answering prayers, blessing unions, transubstantiating wine, and many other achievements variously expected of him.) You cannot have it both ways. Either your god is capable of designing worlds and doing all the other godlike things, in which case he needs an explanation in his own right. Or he is not, in which case he cannot provide an explanation. (Climbing Mount Improbable, 77)

I am going to be charitable and not presume that Dawkins’s error is simple, no pun intended, equivocation. “Simple” can mean, among other things, either “not composite” or “mentally retarded.” God is, indeed, simple in the first sense as Dawkins allows, but He is not thereby made stupid. Furthermore, infinity and omniscience are not only compatible with absolute simplicity; they follow from it. How?

Aquinas writes, summarizing ST, I, 3, 1-6: “For there is neither composition of quantitative parts in God, since He is not a body; nor composition of matter and form; nor does His nature differ from His ’suppositum’; nor His essence from His existence; neither is there in Him composition of genus and difference, nor of subject and accident.” (I, 3, 7) Let’s go through these one by one.

1. That God is not a body means that he is not constrained by any physical shape. He is not confined to a particular spatial location or to any particular point in time. Nor is He bound by any laws of nature of the physical universe.
2. That He is pure form means that this form, God, is not contracted into any parcel of matter; nor is matter, which is potential to many forms bound to a particular form.
3. That the individual God is His own nature, that is, that God is divinity, means that God is not defined, and therefore limited, by any nature separate from Him, as humans, for example, are defined by their nature, humanity. The concrete in God is the same as the abstract; the particular, the same as the universal.
4. That God’s essence is His existence means that God’s being does not subsist in a given nature, again, being thereby limited by it. On the contrary, God is being itself subsisting in itself, and bounded by nothing.
5. That in God there is no composition of genus and difference means that God, being the principle of all being, is also the principle of all genera and is not reducible to (or contained in) any particular one.

These seem to cover all the ways in which God can be limited. And if God is not limited, then He is unlimited and infinite.

From God’s infinity we can infer the fact that God possesses great, perhaps perfect, knowledge. Aquinas does it by pointing out that “intelligent beings are distinguished from non-intelligent beings in that the latter possess only their own form; whereas the intelligent being is naturally adapted to have also the form of some other thing; for the idea of the thing known is in the knower. Hence it is manifest that the nature of a non-intelligent being is more contracted and limited; whereas the nature of intelligent beings has a greater amplitude and extension… But sense is cognitive because it can receive images free from matter, and the intellect is still further cognitive, because it is more separated from matter and unmixed… Since therefore God is in the highest degree of immateriality…, it follows that He occupies the highest place in knowledge.” (I, 14, 1) So, the logic is as follows:

1. God is immaterial (from I, 3, 1-2).
2. God is simple, infinite, and self-existing (from I, 3; I, 7, 1; I, 3, 4).
3. God is intelligent (because since human souls are intelligent, a fortiori, so is God’s infinite spirit).
4. God is supremely immaterial (the human intellect abstracts the immaterial “cupness” from this cup and that cup; the knowledge in the divine intellect, which is God’s essence itself, is not abstracted in this manner but is rather the cause of both cupness and this cup. It would seem that a thing is either material or not, but we can meaningfully say that God’s intellect’s immateriality is higher than human intellect’s, because God’s intellect and what it sees in itself are one and the same thing, and they do not depend on the existence of material things at all, being immaterial wholly of themselves.).
5. God is supremely intelligent (from (b) and (d)).

So, Dawkins is wrong to associate simplicity with primitiveness. He may be mistaken, because he confuses the simplicity of God with the simplicity of chemical elements, elementary particles, and, ultimately, “prime matter.” I will give a programming analogy: Two classes in OOP differ by their properties, methods, and so forth, but each property is simple and does not differ from other properties yet is nevertheless distinct from them. So two properties in an exemplar form are distinct because they occupy different “memory locations” in God’s celestial computer and mean different things. Of course, God and prime matter cannot be distinct in this manner; rather they are distinct as a (spiritually simple) programmer is distinct from a (materially simple) main memory location of a turned off computer. Prime matter objects, perhaps the physisist’s “strings,” are simple as the most primitive building blocks of all matter; God’s simplicity is the perfect unification of all great-making properties into an unlimited “One.”

But does not the fact that God knows many things mean that He cannot be simple? No more than Dawkins’s extensive knowledge of biology means that his mind is somehow composed of that knowledge. (Of course, God’s self-knowledge is His substance, but all truths are in God in a “natural unity.”) Dawkins’s own intellect is a unified single entity, Hume’s idea that “our attributions of identity result only from the easy transition of the mind from one perception to another” (Stroud, Hume, 122) notwithstanding, and the knowledge it possesses does not obviate its identity or relative simplicity.

More to the point, the perfecton of God’s knowledge consists not insignificantly in knowing how His own perfections can be imitated by or participated in by or communicated to creatures. In effect, God conceives of His essence getting “morphed” and lowered into the finitude of created things (as well as merely possible things) in every imaginable way. God knows “things other than Himself by His essence, as being the likeness of things, or as their active principle.” (I, 14, 11) Therefore it is no offense to God’s simplicity that He should know many things and have many ideas (exemplar forms) of created things through Himself.

In short, then, God’s simplicity is part of His perfection. Dawkins’s concerns are thereby addressed.

Oh come now, dude.

1. These do not have high specified complexity, nor are they irreducibly complex.
2. They are not molecular machines, biochemical robots, or complex systems, like the flagellum or the blood clotting cascade; they have no moving parts; nor do they perform any function whatsoever.
3. No matter how much they “evolve,” they still remain trees; they do not turn into, say, cyclic graphs.
4. The original tree, which, again, is of no greater sophistication than any evolved structure, is given as initial data. But where is it supposed to come from?
5. The “large” changes we see in the pictures are indeed cumulatively many small changes; this does not prove that all biological systems can be made in this fashion, or even that any can. How does Dawkins know that his computer simulation is in any way at all analogous to the real thing?
6. Dawkins writes: “The [evolved] biomorphs… seem to me to resemble wasps, butterflies, spiders, scorpions, flatworms, lice, and other ‘creatures’ that look vaguely biological…” (Climbing Mount Improbable, 32). Is he serious? These are pictures of tree-like structures bent an folded in various shapes. The leg of a wasp is not a segment of ink on paper. Nor is a wasp internally structured like a tree. The “resemblance” has, of course, no significance.

So, just as you can smoothly morph a torus into a teacup, you can morph one tree into another which will look rather unlike it. I don’t see, however, what that is supposed to demonstrate.

Has it occurred to anyone to ask why the DNA is a double helix? If G always pairs with C, and A with T, why do we need two strands? Isn’t the second strand fully specified by the first? From an engineering perspective it seems to follow that one would need a double helix only in order to make use of random mutations. If mutations did not occur, would not the double helix DNA be an absurd waste of cellular resources?

“God is not part of the universe; in science we can only refer to parts of the universe; therefore…”

God is indeed not part of the universe, but He interacts with the universe, and the consequences of His actions vis-à-vis the universe can be discerned by us. We can apprehend the effects of the First Cause and even attribute them as coming from the First Cause.