These letters are sampled from twenty years of intermittent correspondence with a friend I met at Light and Life Christian Schools in the late ... well, never mind. Suffice it to say, it's been a while.
At one time, Harry wanted to be a pastor. We lost touch for a while. Then out of the blue, twenty years ago, Harry called me up to say he was a member of Mensa, a society of geniuses. He had also lost his faith during the time we had been out of touch, and he had come to regard himself as an atheist. Harry did clarify that he was only agnostic toward the idea that there might be some kind of god, but decidedly atheistic regarding the God of the Bible.
Eventually, Harry became rather indignant - to the point of hostile - any time I mentioned anything to do with God, the Bible, or faith. So, we found other things to write about - Einstein's theories of relativity, for example, and differences in our theories of knowledge and experience. After years of short exchanges, we finally got some good volleys going. Harry commented at one point that he has been a member of eleven genius and super-genius societies, but that he had never found the kind of communication that we enjoyed in our email exchanges. His genius friends generally wanted to talk about their I.Q.'s or other matters that really didn't interest him.
We finally turned a corner when Harry asked me to read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. I reluctantly agreed to do so, but on the condition that I could share my reactions and we could finally, at long last, carry on a meaningful discussion about the existence of God. Harry agreed, so I read Dawkins' sad little book.
Until I have asked and received Harry's permission to post his letters alongside mine, I will show only my own. Later, I may dig up some of our earlier exchanges, but for the time being I will show only my own emails since reading The God Delusion.
March 18, 2007
March 22,2007
Dear Harry,
Before I begin to respond to Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, I want to take the time to lay out a synopsis of my own worldview. You are familiar with some of it by virtue of having grown up in a Christian home. You are familiar with other parts because I have shared bits and pieces with you over the years. But I think some of it may be new to you, and I will try to give you this Where-I’m-Coming-From in a few words so you may better understand my forthcoming comments on some of Dr. Dawkins’ claims and arguments.
Here we go:
Such a Being can jolly well do anything he pleases. He is by definition omnipotent.
That said, Harry, was there anything about The God Delusion that you found especially compelling or interesting? You commented earlier that you agree with Dawkins on almost every point. On what points do you not agree?
Your Pal,
Jim
May 12, 2007
Dear Harry,
Don’t let Richard Dawkins fool you. Every night, while Lalla is sleeping, Richard carries bowls of deer’s milk, berries, and sprigs of heath down to the bottom of his garden where he does obeisance to his very own ethereal fairy, a conception of natural selection that knows no counterpart in nature. This is his god, and his delusion.
In Chapter 2 of The God Delusion, Page 31, Richard Dawkins names his target, “The God Hypothesis,” and describes it thus: “there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.” He continues, “ This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution.”
The neo-Darwinian concept of natural selection is elegant in its simplicity, and intuitively appealing. It is appealing in the same sense that perpetual motion is appealing – a putative departure from the second law of thermodynamics, allowing complex functional information to naturally accumulate rather than degenerate.
In The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and in Climbing Mount Improbable, Dawkins emphasizes the role of cumulative natural selection in breaking up absurdly improbable feats into countless smaller steps, each one only slightly improbable. By this scheme, tiny bits of good luck are teased apart from tiny bits of bad luck, and allowed to stick together, accumulating into magnificent edifices of functional complexity. I don’t know that Dawkins ever uses the following illustration, but it admirably illuminates the concept:
Collect 64 pennies. Toss them all up into the air and allow them to fall onto a table. What is the chance they will all come up heads? Each penny has one chance in two that it will come up heads. By the Law of Compound Probability, the chance that all 64 pennies will come up heads in the same toss is ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝ x ˝. This is of course (1/2)64, and if you will key in [.5] [YX] [64] [=] on a scientific calculator, it will tell you that the chance of getting all heads on any given toss of 64 pennies is 5.42 x 10-20 . That is to say, (taking the reciprocal) the condition of 64 heads-up pennies is only one combination in a field of 1.84 x 1019 contingencies. Or, to say it still another way, the chance of getting all heads when you toss 64 pennies onto the table is roughly one chance in 18.4-thousand-million-billion.
But, you and I both know that if you were to actually conduct 18.4-thousand-million-billion tosses of 64 pennies, we are statistically guaranteed that somewhere in all those trials, all 64 pennies will almost certainly come up heads together.
If with practice you could learn to toss 64 pennies, check the result, scoop them up and prepare to toss them again, all in a second’s time, you could perform 18.4-thousand-million-billion tosses in the same number of seconds. 18.4-thousand-million-billion seconds works out to more than half a trillion years {584-billion years, to put a finer point on it) required to achieve the statistical certainty of one successful toss.
(1.84 x 1019 sec) / (60 sec/min x 60 min/hr x 24 hr/d x 365.25 d/yr) = 5.84 x 1011 years.
But, cheer up! Chances are 1 in 2 that the all-heads contingency will occur in the first half of 18.4-thousand-million-billion trials, or in only 292-billion years worth of one-second trials. In fact, chances are as high as about one-in-a-half-million that you’ll get the all-heads toss in the very first million years!
ENTER CUMULATIVE SELECTION:
The winsome beauty of Darwin’s “dangerous idea,” as emphasized by Dawkins, is that you get to keep your successes and retry your failures. Statistically speaking, on your first toss, about half of the 64 pennies, will come up heads. So, you physically set aside the successes of the first trial, and for the second trial re-toss only those pennies that came up tails. Upon re-toss, about half, or 16, will come up heads. These, too, are set aside in the accumulating successes corner, while the remainder are tossed for the third time. This continues until all 64 pennies have come up heads. On average it will take about 6 tosses to get all 64 pennies to come up heads. I actually conducted this experiment three times. The first time, it took five tosses. The second time it took ten. And the third time it took six tosses. Since 64 = 26, we can be sure the statistical mean number of trials will be six.
Please note, 6 cumulative selection tosses are significantly fewer than 18.4-thousand-million-billion all-or-nothing tosses. Can it be any wonder that Dawkins gets so enamored with the idea of cumulative natural selection breaking up highly improbable events into many smaller less improbable steps?
It is such a pity nature doesn’t play by these rules.
Here, briefly, are a few problems that reveal Dawkins’ actual descriptions of cumulative natural selection to be a mere fairytale:
1. Natural selection creates nothing – it can only bestow reproductive advantage or disadvantage on organisms harboring nucleotide sequences that have already come into existence.
2. Natural selection never, ever directly favors or disfavors an individual gene or nucleotide within a gene. Natural selection can only bestow reproductive advantage or disadvantage on whole organisms containing tens of thousands of genes, and billions of nucleotides.
3. “Genetic interference” describes the damping down of selection for or against the organism hosting a particular gene, owing to the presence of multitudes of genetic differences simultaneously in play between that individual and every other member of the population.
4. Most mutations are simple nucleotide substitutions, called “point mutations”.
5. As genetic spelling errors, nearly all mutations cause at least slight degradation or loss of function. Most mutations, however, are recessive, and are only expressed when paired with copies of themselves on a matching chromosome.
6. Unexpressed recessive mutations, and dominant mutations that are only slightly harmful, are essentially invisible to natural selection and cannot be systematically selected out of a population.
7. Genes never transfer alone, but in linkage blocks containing on the order of ten-thousand to a million nucleotides that never separate, generation after generation after generation.
8. If, on average, one in 10,000 mutations is slightly beneficial, then 9,999 degrading mutations will arise, on average, between beneficial occurrences.
9. Linkage blocks steadily acquire new point mutations that cannot be removed. The hypothetical occurrence of a good mutation is thus overwhelmingly offset by the accumulation of degrading mutations in the same linkage block.
10.
Recent studies have shown the rate at which
new point mutations accumulate is amazingly high – in humans, it is on
the order of 100 to 300 new point mutations per person per generation!
Darwinian evolution by natural selection could work, given the right unnatural parameters. If the ratio of beneficial mutations to detrimental ones were high, and if mutation rates were keyed to selection in such a way that negative mutations were consistently cycled out of a genome at least as fast as new ones were added, while beneficial mutations remained, Darwin and Dawkins would be right – complex functional information could gradually accumulate – over eons and eons and eons of time. But, alas, those parameters cannot be found in nature. And worse, even if they could be found in nature, the temporal resources of the universe are insufficient to accommodate the long succession of genetic events envisioned by the neo-Darwinian theory of common ancestry.
I am attaching a link that may help drive this point home. It is random mutation generator that places spelling errors in any message you may choose to write or copy into a text box, up to 500 words in length: http://www.randommutation.com/. It’s actually kind of fun to play with.
By way of analogy, in Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, Michael Denton discusses the rates of occurrence of English words in random letter strings. There are 263 or 17,000 three-letter combinations, for example, of which about 500 are words in the English language. So, about one in 34 three-letter combinations is a functional English word.
When we look at seven-letter strings there are 267 or eight billion combinations. Of these, fewer than 10,000 are English words, so the ratio is about one seven-letter word in every 800,000 random combinations.
Twelve-letter words are so rare, only one occurs in every hundred trillion random combinations! (A “hundred trillion” is incomprehensible by any stretch of the imagination. It may help a little though just to remember, a hundred trillion seconds is more than thirty one million years).
In the same sense, for every sequence of DNA base pairs (nucleotides) that provides some metabolic function, there are a considerable number of possible combinations that are metabolically dysfunctional.
The no-brainer bottom line is this: Negative genetic spelling errors occur far more frequently than positive ones, and they accumulate much faster than natural selection can possibly remove them. Ergo, genomes display the same drive toward degradation, as does all of nature, via the second law of thermodynamics.
Harry, don’t believe anything I’ve said just because I said it (not that you would.) I highly recommend John Sanford’s book, Genetic Entropy & The Mystery of the Genome. He documents that the problems with natural selection that I mentioned above are well known among mainline geneticists who, (like our friend Francisco Ayala), refuse to connect the dots. In his Appendix 1, Sanford quotes from a few papers in mainline genetics literature: (the underlined captions are Sanford’s, but at least some are popular epithets for the problems described in the papers cited).
In my next installment I’ll examine one or more of Dawkins’ bait-and-switch philo-sophestry arguments.
Harry, what is your projected launch date? And where will you go first? If you ever put in at Long Beach, Huntington Harbor, Newport Beach Harbor, or anyplace else within reasonable driving range, we would love to take you and yours to dinner.
Jim
May 22, 2007
Dear Harry,
Imagine Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife arresting a local homeowner for trespass because after posting “No Trespassing” signs around his house, the homeowner has continued to frequent his own property. Deputy Fife, of course, would be making a serious category error.
Richard Dawkins commits the same type of logical fallacy in his “Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit.”
In Chapter 2 of The God Delusion, Page 31, Richard Dawkins names his target, “The God Hypothesis,” and defines it thus: “there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.”
On Page 36, Dawkins says, “I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented.”
On Page 37, he says, “Unless otherwise stated, I shall have Christianity mostly in mind, but only because it is the version with which I happen to be most familiar.”
Then, in Chapter 4, on Page 113, Richard Dawkins trots out his prize frog, “The Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit”, which he heralds, “the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exit.”
First, by way of background, Dawkins recounts Sir Fred Hoyle’s comment that the probability of life originating on Earth [by random processes] is no greater than the chance that a hurricane sweeping through a scrap yard could assemble a Boeing 747.
Dawkins, of course, takes exception with Hoyle on this point, but I’ll save that for a later discussion.
On Page 114 Dawkins says, “However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747.”
On 141 Dawkins says, “But whatever else we may say, design certainly does not work as an explanation for life, because design is ultimately not cumulative and it therefore raises bigger questions than it answers – it takes us straight back along the Ultimate 747 infinite regress”.
On Page 147 Dawkins says, “God, or any intelligent, decision-making, calculating agent, would have to be highly improbable in the very same statistical sense [ my emphasis] as the entities he is suppose to explain.”
Take note: Naturalism proposes that the universe is a grand accident, and the fact that we are here is generally regarded as a marvelous confluence of stupendous coincidences. It is therefore entirely appropriate to speak of the universe in terms of its statistical improbability. By contrast, I have never heard anyone seriously propose that God is an accident. While many doubt God’s existence and think it highly improbable, no one I know of proposes that his existence is statistically improbable in anything remotely like the sense in which the universe is thought of as statistically improbable. Statistical improbability is based on the random occurrence of one or more specified condition from a field of many contingencies. But, the existence of the Creator of nature is not generally attributed to a quirk of nature.
On Page 149 Dawkins says, “His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right.” Shades of Barney Fife: If I may put words in Dawkins’ mouth, ‘Everything in nature had a beginning; therefore any hypothetical Creator of nature had a beginning, and that needs explaining.’ [ Category error ].
On Page 153 Dawkins recounts an event at which he says, “I challenged the theologians to answer the point that a God capable of designing a universe, or anything else, would have to be complex and statistically improbable.”
But back on Page 134 Dawkins let slip a frequent answer to his question. “Ask for an explanation of where that bloke came from, and odds you’ll get a vague, pseudo-philosophical reply about [his] having always existed, or being outside nature. Which, of course, explains nothing.”
Again, on Page 156 Dawkins dogmatically rejects a God who has always existed. “… It may even be a superhuman designer – but, if so, it will most certainly not be a designer who just popped into existence, or who always existed”.
Bait and switch. Bring in the straw man.
H e l l o ! The lights are on. Is anyone home?
This is GOD we are talking about here! What part of “S U P E R N A T U R A L” does Dawkins not understand?
The prevailing, historical concepts of God, based on his purported self-revelation, have nothing to do with his being an accidental occurrence from a field of many contingencies. They have nothing to do with a being confined to our spacetime domain, or to the laws of nature. They have nothing to do with an entity that had a beginning, the most recent step in an infinite regression.
Harry, I think I lost you on this point in my earlier ‘where-I’m-coming-from’ statement. So let me say this very carefully. Though you do not believe that he actually exists, you will be bound to agree that even if considered as only a purely literary invention, the God of the Bible purports to be:
If you cannot agree with this simple statement, stop now and call a therapist – you have issues!
The Judeo-Christian conception of God flows from the purported self-revelations of the God of the Bible. In turn, certain fundamental precepts about God permeate Western culture and dot the landscapes of other cultures as well, emanating ultimately from purported self-revelations of the God of the Bible.
And what does the God of the Bible, (whether real, or a literary invention), say about himself? Among many, many other things, consider his following claims:
In denying God his self-described supernatural attributes such as having always existed, and of existing outside nature, Dawkins has quietly spirited away the definition of GOD with which he baited us, “…[T]here exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us,” and has set up in its place a straw man. This straw man is not supernatural. He is subject to the laws of nature, and had a beginning. He is a freak of chance, and is therefore statistically improbable in greater measure than any entity he is reputed to have designed. His existence therefore requires a mammoth explanation!
But, hold on. That’s not so hard as you might expect. I will tell you exactly where this straw man came from. Richard Dawkins invented him.
Next time I hope to rescue part of Dawkins’ ‘Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit’ for him. Though misapplied in The God Delusion, an element of his argument holds true, and has daring implications.
I hope you are doing well, winning at poker, and tidying up [your boat].
I have very fond memories of going with my Dad and Uncle Carroll to see a boat in a farmer’s field. By my recollection, ... weeds were growing up through the hull. My uncle bought the boat for $50, towed it home, and went to work on it. It was his after-hours hobby for several months. Then he took it down and launched it in the Long Beach Harbor. He and my Aunt Bernice, my cousin Pug, my Dad and Mom and brother Bob and I all clambered onboard and toured the harbor. My uncle didn’t know anything about signaling – he just tooted his horn to be friendly. - This is looking kind of familiar in print. Did I already tell you all this. Sorry if I did… I was just enjoying the memories, and thought I would share.
<><
Jim
May 29, 2007
Harry,
In the God Delusion, Chapter 4, Richard Dawkins soft pedals the magnitude of coincidence involved in the life-supporting fundamental constants and parameters of the universe as viewed from a naturalistic worldview.
Let me digress a moment to make an important distinction about worldviews. As I shared with you earlier, I subscribe to Christian Theism, which, taking the God of the Bible at his word, regards him as the Creator of the universe, and the self-described Author of the biblical text. In my worldview, the existence of God has nothing to do with chance or probability. God is the beginning point, the Source of all being, both material and abstract. God’s self-attesting Word is the transcendental from outside our spacetime domain through which I view and interpret the world around me. In my worldview, God is Certainty personified, the bedrock of reality.
When I speak of probabilities, I am stepping into the worldview of Naturalism, to critique it from within. I do not subscribe to Naturalism. Rather, I inspect Naturalism from inside, connecting dots, checking for logical soundness and internal consistency. With this in mind, please consider the following.
With reference to the Anthropic Principle, Dawkins speaks of Martin Rees’ six fundamental constants. “Each of these six numbers is finely tuned in the sense that, if it were slightly different, the universe would be comprehensively different and presumably unfriendly to life.” Then, Dawkins selects just one of these six numbers, the magnitude of the Strong Nuclear Force, E = 0.007, and reports that if its value were off, either larger or smaller, by 0.001, there could be no chemistry, and hence no life in the universe. This works out to a tolerance ratio of something less than 1 part in 7/2, or about 35%.
The reader is left to suppose that each of the other fundamental constants must be accurate to within about 35 % also, or life could not exist. In fact, Dawkins says, on Page 143, “ I won’t go into the rest of Ree’s (sic) numbers. The bottom line for each of them is the same. The actual number sits in a Goldilocks band of values outside of which life would not have been possible.” In so saying, Dawkins grossly under-represents the magnitude of ‘fine-tuning’ associated with the Anthropic Principle.
A tour of Internet sites on the subject of the Anthropic Principle reveals that:
From
http://www.geraldschroeder.com
“Besides
the BBC video, the scientific establishment's most prestigious journals, and its
most famous physicists and cosmologists, have all gone on record as recognizing
the objective truth of the fine-tuning. The August '97 issue of
"Science" (the most prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal in
the United States) featured an article entitled "Science and God: A Warming
Trend?" Here is an excerpt:
”’The fact that the universe exhibits
many features that foster organic life -- such as precisely those physical
constants that result in planets and long-lived stars -- also has led some
scientists to speculate that some divine influence may be present.
‘”
·
From
http://www.beliefnet.com/story
“The cosmic mass density. Physicists have calculated that for physical life to ever be possible at any time in the universe, the overall cosmic mass density must be fine-tuned to a mere 1 part in 1060.
“The cosmic space energy density. Likewise, physicists have calculated that the value of the cosmological constant … must be exact to 1 part in 10120.
“Small-mass and large-mass stars. Both are needed in order for life to exist. For this to be possible, the ratio of the electromagnetic force constant to the gravitational force constant must be correct within 1 part in 1040. An increase or decrease in this ratio by only that factor would make life untenable.”
“Roger
Penrose, the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford,
discovers that the likelihood of the universe having usable energy (low entropy)
at the creation is even more astounding, "namely, an accuracy of one part
out of ten to the power of ten to the power of 123. This is an extraordinary
figure. One could not possibly even write the number down in full, in our
ordinary denary (power of ten) notation: it would be one followed by ten to the
power of 123 successive zeros!" That is a million billion billion billion
billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion
zeros. Penrose continues, "Even if we were to write a zero on each separate
proton and on each separate neutron in the entire universe -- and we could throw
in all the other particles as well for good measure -- we should fall far short
of writing down the figure needed. The precision needed to set the universe on
its course is to be in no way inferior to all that extraordinary precision that
we have already become accustomed to in the superb dynamical equations
(Newton's, Maxwell's, Einstein's) which govern the behavior of things from
moment to moment."”
[Harry, do you remember my argument
the that published estimates of the information content of bacteria being on the
order of 1012 bits translates to a probability of 1 chance in 10301
billion , and the lengths I went to to express the
significance of such a number – an argument you called “formidable,” but
said, “I still think there is a chance”? Well, my number absolutely pales
into oblivion compared to
Penrose’s one part in 10^10^123 ].
·
Again
from http://www.beliefnet.com/story
” Once
some astrophysicists started discovering the amazing precision of the cosmos,
others started seeking additional parameters that might have been preprogrammed
into the universe to make an environment suitable for life.
“Since that time, about 10 to 15 new critical parameters have been discovered each year. A small change in any one of these would make life impossible. To date, more than 152 have been identified.”
Dawkins reports two primary responses to the evidence of fine-tuning:
Let me address the second point first. This goes back to the idea that no matter how improbable an event or condition may be as a consequence of random shuffling, given enough random trials that event or condition will certainly transpire. It fact, keep the trials coming, and that event or condition will occur an infinite number of times!
But here’s the catch- The argument Dawkins misapplied in his failed attempt to disprove a supernatural designer, (he had to switch out the supernatural Creator he began with for a non-eternal straw man confined to the bounds of nature in order to fake an argument), is perfectly valid when applied to naturalistic generators of low entropy universes. Any naturalistic generator of low entropy universes must be even more complex and more improbable than the universes it generates, and, to transplant and re-plumb one of our mentor’s comments, “needs a mammoth explanation in its own right”. Furthermore, any mechanism capable of producing universe generators must be likewise still more complex and more improbable, ad infinitum. And so Dawkins’ infinite regression argument goes home to roost.
Now, back to the first point. For this I offer the following riddle:
An amateur philosopher drifted into consciousness, becoming slowly aware of several sensations: the color red; a directional sense of radiant warmth; the cool stirrings of a gentle breeze on her skin; a vague discomfort of the lower pelvis as if she were sitting on an oversize bowling ball; and a gentle rocking motion. Her bowling ball perch was swaying rhythmically back and forth.
Cautiously, she cracked open the slits of her eyes – and immediately squeezed them shut! A moment later, still hyperventilating, she forced open her eyes and incredulously took in her surroundings. She was sitting atop the ornamental sphere of an eighty-foot flagpole -without a stitch on!
The amateur philosopher ran a quick diagnostic of her mental faculties. She felt quite certain she was not dreaming, and tried to administer the self-tests for hallucination, but couldn’t remember exactly how they went. A memory scan turned up disturbing news. She knew art, philosophy, and science. And she could think in three languages. But she didn’t know the first thing about herself. In fact, she could not recall her name or any specific experiences. She could not remember having ever seen herself in a mirror.
As a first hypothesis, she reasoned that she must have climbed the flagpole and managed to pull herself up to a sitting position on top the brass ball. But, glancing down, she was horrified to discover the flagstaff was wrapped in razor wire. She checked her hands, feet and skin. No cuts, no scratches. She clearly had not climbed the flagpole.
A new hypothesis presented itself. She might have been the victim of a highly resourceful and treacherously malicious prank.
Then a third idea pushed its way to her frontal lobe. If a tiny fluctuation in the quantum vacuum once spawned the entire universe, why couldn’t she have erupted from an infinitely smaller and much simpler fluctuation of the same emptiness – the smallest hint of an encore or an echo? Since something as incredibly complex and improbable as the whole universe had just happened into existence, un-caused and undirected, perhaps she too had just popped in uninvited, sitting atop a flagpole.
Considering the matter further, she concluded this must indeed be the truth. No matter how unlikely the odds, the very fact that she was sitting there contemplating such an extraordinary origin was sufficient proof that it had occurred! In fact, her very act of thinking about it was a kind of selection, sweeping away an infinitude of alternative contingencies and securing her place in the world of being!
Now the riddle:
Blonde, brunette, or redhead?
Ultimately, Harry, there are only two viable explanations for how our finely tuned universe came into existence: chance, and design. Within my Christian Theist’s worldview, design is a given – it is heralded by the self-declared Creator of the universe, the God of the Bible himself. Design, in the context of my transcendental worldview is certain.
And what says the naturalistic worldview?
Let me say it again. (I will ignore Richard Dawkins’ wishful thinking about perpetual motion bootstrap cranes to mimic his sadly mistaken conception of natural selection.)
Ultimately, there are only two viable explanations for how our finely tuned universe came into existence: chance and design. Within the naturalistic worldview, the probability of origin by chance is recognized as exceedingly small, so small in fact as to be indistinguishable from impossible, given the limited probabilistic resources of the universe. But many scientists accept this extreme improbability, and move forward, keeping a stiff upper lip.
Now, Harry, hold on to your hat! I’m about to set your mind on fire.
Within the Naturalistic worldview, the probability of origin by design is the reciprocal of the probability of origin by chance.
PD = 1 / PC. *
[*While improperly stated, this turns out to almost exactly true. In probability calculations, 1 = mathematical certainty, and PD = 1 - PC. Suppose for example an "anthropic coincidence" is found to have a probability of one in a million, or 1x10-6 or 0.000001. If PC = 0.000001, then PD = (1 - .000001) = .999999. The ratio of the probability of design compared to the probability of chance is PD / PC = .999999/.000001 = 999,999 : 1, or almost exactly 1 million to one in favor of design. ]
The proper way to calculate PD would be to apply the Law of Compound Probabilities, multiply the tolerance ratios of all 152 (and counting) Anthropic parameters together, (which include numbers like 10 -60, 10-120, 10-40, 10^ -10^123, etc.) and then take the reciprocal. But, I don‘t have all those values at my fingertips and for the present cannot perform the calculation.
Just for the purpose of illustrating this principle, however, we can pick an almost infinitely more generous probability. Say, for example the probability of tossing 64 pennies onto a table and getting 64 heads on one try.
If the probability of our finely tuned universe were as enormous as 5.4 x 10-20 as a consequence of chance (the 64 heads probability), then the reciprocal probability that our finely tuned universe was the consequence of design would be 1.8 x 1019 to one. Again, this is 18 million-trillion to one!
So, let’s compare answers in the two opposing worldviews.
So, you see, stepping up to faith in God would really be no more than stepping “up” onto a nano-thin sheet of paper. The change in elevation is indiscernible.
To borrow another (only slightly) out-of-context phrase from Dawkins, “ …[W]e might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and allow a God.”
But here’s the rub. An old proverb says, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.”
In discussing Pascal’s Wager, Dawkins concludes, “On the face of it the decision is a no-brainer. Believe in God.” But then he sinks into sophistry.
“Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don’t. Pascal’s wager could only be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he’d see through the deception.”
Harry, let me ask you something. Of all the things you believe, on any subject, how many of them do you believe because you fully understand them, top to bottom, through and through? If understanding a thing top to bottom, through and through were a requirement for belief, I doubt any of us could believe anything. Believing always requires an element of trust that fills in and supplements what we do understand. Trust, otherwise known as faith, is being willing to believe before we fully understand.
______________________________
I hope you had a pleasant train trip home and have settled back into your familiar digs by now. Sue and I really enjoyed the time we spent with you and your family, and we look forward to your putting into port down here not too far in the future.
I have several topics I still hope to discuss regarding Dawkins’ book. But they will have to wait for now.
Your Pal,
Jim
June 9, 2007
Harry,
Another example of Richard Dawkins’ bait-and-switch rhetoric is found in a section of Chapter 4 under the subheading, “THE ANTROPIC PRINCIPLE: PLANETARTY VERSION”, which begins on Page 134. He lets us know in the opening sentence that he is about to tackle the thorny issue of the origin of life. Here’s the bait.
“Gap theologians who may have given up on eyes and wings, flagellar
motors and immune systems, often pin their remaining hopes on the origin
of life. The root of evolution in non-biological chemistry somehow seems
to present a bigger gap than any particular transition during subsequent evolution.”
And now the switch. After introducing the history of the term, “Anthropic Principle,” Dawkins immediately begs the question at hand with the following non sequitur:
“We exist here on Earth. Therefore Earth must be the kind of planet that is capable of generating and supporting us, however unusual, even unique, that kind of planet might be.” (My emphasis).
He dangles the bait, once or twice more, “The origin of life was the chemical event, or series of events, whereby the vital conditions for natural selection first came about.”
“The origin of life is a flourishing, if speculative, subject for research. The expertise required for it is chemistry and it is not mine. I watch from the sidelines with engaged curiosity, …” and then he completes the switch,
“Just as we did with the Goldilocks orbits, we can make the point that, however improbable the origin of life might be, we know it happened on Earth because we are here. Again as with temperature, there are two hypotheses to explain what happened – the design hypothesis and the scientific or ‘anthropic’ hypothesis.”
And now he is off and running, talking about how many life-friendly planets there might be in the universe. It isn’t long before he betrays his woeful ignorance of the improbabilities involved in hypothesizing an origin of life by chance.
“Now, suppose the origin of life, the spontaneous arising of something equivalent to DNA, really was a quite staggeringly improbable event. Suppose it was so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets.”
Notice! Dawkins has:
1. switched from talking about the probability that random chemical reactions produced a self-replicating entity,
2. assumed the certainty that such an event is inherent in Earth-like planets,
3. and gone on to speculate how many life-generating planets there may be in the universe.
In so doing, he has assumed the point he is trying to prove, and using it to prove itself. Call it what you like. It is both begging the question and circular reasoning.
Cutting through the baloney, we do at least find a number that represents of Dawkin’s confused estimate of the probability of spontaneous generation.
So, what do you think, Harry? Does Dawkins really believe a random assemblage of atoms capable of replicating itself is no more improbable than tossing thirty pennies onto a table and having them all come up heads? “One in a billion” is the chance of getting 30 heads.
(229. 897 = 109) , (230 ~ 109)
Does he really think the amount of information needed for a molecule to specify and execute a copy of itself could be no more than 3.75 bytes?!
(30 bits / 8 bits per byte = 3.75 bytes)
– (Please note: A byte is a unit of storage holding one text character, so just the word ‘byte’ contains 4 bytes of information! )
Probably not. More than likely, Richard Dawkins has never had his consciousness raised to the vastness of random combinatorial space versus discrete functional combinations. In a word, the poor man doesn’t a clue. Perhaps we should tell him.
Evolutionist Hubert P. Yockey, (no friend to creationists!) tackles the problem of spontaneous generation in proper fashion in his book, Information Theory and Molecular Biology. Relying on his evolutionary naturalistic worldview, Yockey asks the questions,
“Could life have originated in a primeval soup containing the ‘building blocks’ of life had such a soup existed?”
He begins by looking for minimal information content in living organisms and even in viruses of today (though viruses lack a mechanism to replicate themselves on their own, and must hijack the molecular machinery of host cells to do it for them.). Then he notes,
“The discussion above demonstrates clearly… that the minimum information content of the protobiont must be in the range of hundreds of thousands to several million bits. Scenarios on the origin of life must show how a complexity of that magnitude, which is characteristic of organisms, was generated.”
He goes on to use Information Theory and mathematics way beyond my reach to arrive at his final conclusion, which I will share with you in a moment. But first, let me unpack the quotation above so we don’t miss the point. Let’s consider the very least information content in the range Yockey gives. In fact, let’s go just below the given range and suppose that the minimum information content for any self-replicating clump of atoms is only one hundred thousand bits (as opposed to ‘hundreds of thousands’ of bits).
One hundred thousand bits is the amount of information that would be required to specify a functional replicator out of a field of 2100,000 non-functional candidates. By changing base from 2 to 10, we find that 2100,000 is equivalent to 10 30,103 . So, 100,000 bits is the amount of information to specify one contingency from a field of 10 30,103. The probability of such an entity arising by accident is one in 10 30,103 accidents.
So, here we are again. Within a naturalistic worldview, following naturalistic evolutionary presuppositions, you are faced with two hypotheses:
1) the first self-replicating entity occurred accidentally against minimal odds of 10 30,103 to one; or else
2) 2) life occurred by design, an hypothesis favored by odds of 10 30,103 to one!
Golly Zooks, Batman. Which horse will you bet on?
By the way, in The Design Inference, William Dembski argues for a very reasonable upper limit on what measure of lucky coincidence the universe can be expected to host. He argues that the number of specified ev