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I am very tempted to refer you all here and just be done with the whole thing, but as I have promised to complete my critique of Dawkins’ Delusional argument (yes, I admit it’s a cheap shot, but then I was raised watching Johnny Carson and David Letterman), I will continue with my thoughts on the central argument of The God Delusion as laid out by Richard Dawkins.

I left off discussing his 3rd point and the Cosmological Argument, my point being that his argument so far (leading to the question of “Who designed the Designer?”) fails to deal with the real issues. I did not mention one other key problem with his 3rd point. While the Cosmological Argument proposes that “everything that begins to exist has a cause,” this only applies to material things that began to exist.

When we are dealing with the proposal that there exists a pre-existent Creator-being who is outside of the natural world He created, including being outside of time itself, a different set of rules obviously apply. And, since time is a part of the created universe, there is no basis for claiming that such a Creator had a “beginning” as we understand it. There is, therefore, no logical inconsistency in holding that a physical universe had a beginning, but that a spiritual Creator did not. This may at first seem to be nothing more than a logical “sleight of hand” but upon serious consideration, it is nothing of the sort. That being said, let us move on.

The proverbial crane vs the skyhook

Dawkins’ point three includes the proposition that “only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbably complexity.” The crane, again, refers to a purely natural process, a process which exists entirely within the material universe, and the skyhook refers to a non-material process, such as a non-material, intelligent Designer-being. Dawkins believes the neo-Darwinian hypothesis that evolution must be a slow, gradual process from simplicity to complexity.

I find it very interesting that Dawkins throws this in his argument, as it’s a point which is not only questionable based on available information, it is debated by some fellow non-design evolutionists. The fossil record at the moment indicates periods of plateaus followed by relatively sudden extinctions and appearances of new species, such as what is known as the Cambrian Explosion. Here’s Dawkins on the importance of gradualism:

Evolution is very possibly not, in actual fact, always gradual. But it must be gradual when it is being used to explain the coming into existence of complicated, apparently designed objects, like eyes. For if it is not gradual in these cases, it ceases to have any explanatory power at all. Without gradualness in these cases, we are back to miracle, which is simply a synonym for the total absence of explanation. Dawkins, R. (1995) River Out of Eden, Basic Books, New York, p. 83.

Stephen J. Gould, on the other hand, had this to say:

The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless. 2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and “fully formed.” (Gould, Stephen J., “Evolution’s Erratic Pace,” Natural History, Vol. 86, No. 5, May 1977, p.14).

Each, of course, have there own naturalistic explanations of the data, and I don’t mean to misstate their positions. The point is merely that there are issues with the concept of gradualism, and it isn’t necessarily the given that Dawkins would want us to believe.

Also, recent discoveries would indicate that “simple to complex” isn’t necessarily correct. From TheScientist.com, Melissa Lee Phillips writes:

The genome of the sea anemone, one of the oldest living animal species on Earth, shares a surprising degree of similarity with the genome of vertebrates, researchers report in this week’s Science.

The study also found that these similarities were absent from fruit fly and nematode genomes, contradicting the widely held belief that organisms become more complex through evolution. The findings suggest that the ancestral animal genome was quite complex, and fly and worm genomes lost some of that intricacy as they evolved.

She also writes:

Previous studies have shown gene loss in flies and worms, but this work shows that loss “was highly substantial, even more significant than we expected before,” said Eugene V. Koonin of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in Bethesda, Md., who was not involved in the work.

Now, the question arises, “Even if gradualism is the correct viewpoint, why is it essential that it be a natural process and not the result of a ‘skyhook?'” The answer is that it isn’t essential. It is, rather, a presumption from his overall argument that there is no Designer. In other words, it appears merely to be circular reasoning. There is no reason why a Designer could not choose to design a process which operates gradually. I think even the most ardent Fundamentalist Creationist would agree with the concept that God designed processes which does not require Him to personally raise up every stalk of corn, or what have you. Whether animals “poofed” into existence or resulted from an amazingly complex designed process, design is still design.

I think that’s quite enough for point #3. Points 4-6 follow from the “crane v skyhook” argument, so I am hoping to be able to sum all of this up in one more post. Keep your fingers crossed (but don’t hold your breath…).

To recap briefly, Dawkins’ central argument in The God Delusion consists of 6 points. So far, we have listed three:

1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself.
3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.

Point number three is presented thus:

• You cannot imply there is a designer, because then you have the origin of the designer to deal with.
• The problem is in explaining the improbable with something more improbable
• To explain the improbable, only a gradual process from the simple to the more complex will do.

Dawkins errs here, I believe, in how he presents his 3rd point. Granted, he has oversimplified here for brevity’s sake, but I think the problems are not due merely to oversimplification. Explaining the origin of the universe is more than just dealing with probabilities, although that is one way to approach the question. Here the issue often gets muddled up with arguments about whether God has to be a “simple” or “complex” being, forgetting that God would first of all not be subject to the same laws He created for the universe, and the issue of “simple or complex” is mostly irrelevant. Then, he assumes that a gradual process is required, which the evidence – for the Big Bang as well as the origin of species – does not support a gradual process. But, rather than get stuck here, let’s look at the origin of the universe from a different angle.

The cosmological argument in support of a god/creator is quite simple. While the basic argument has existed for many hundreds of years, within the last 100 years science has supplied support for the argument:

1. Whatever has begun to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

You would think that our first point would be a given, especially with scientists. If we were to assume that some things could pop into being without cause, then science for the most part falls apart. We couldn’t duplicate anything with any real assurance, and we’d be left to worry about random acts of creation. There is talk in quantum theory about the uncaused appearance of theoretical particles from a quantum vacuum, however this is not in any way related to the appearance of both matter and energy from absolutely nothing (besides which, the created particles are all hypothetical particles). Quantum models rely on a fine-tuned preexisting set of conditions (which beg questions of origin, etc.) and suffer from other problems as we shall see. I don’t claim to be an expert, so I will run the risk of oversimplification and briefly deal with some of the proposed alternatives to a “caused” universe.

Prior to Einstein’s work on general relativity and the development of the Big Bang theory, the universe was thought (except in the Bible, of course) to be eternal. However, this has now been shown not to be the case. There are those trying to come up with other explanations, such as Carl Sagan with his oscillating universe concept. The oscillating universe, besides breaking some laws of physics, has been shown mathematically to not be infinite after all, as entropy is preserved from oscillation to oscillation. Eventually, working backward, you’ll eventually come to a point of origin. Furthermore, indications are that the rate of expansion might be accelerating, not decelerating as in the oscillating hypothesis.

Some have proposed an eternally-existing state out of which the universe simply appeared, without any specific cause. However, this assumes an eternally existing set of conditions suitable for the creation of the universe, which means that as soon as the proper conditions existed, the universe would form. This would require the universe also to be essentially infinite. In the alternative, we still need a catalyst (cause) to explain the change from a stable set of conditions to a large, sudden, explosion.

Stephen Hawking has admitted in A Brief History of Time that “So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator.” He has, however, proposed the interesting Wave Function of the Universe hypothesis, in which the universe is finite, but does not have a Big Bang singularity. The point at which the universe came to be would be similar to the North Pole, a point among an infinite number of points on a curved surface, rather than a point on the end of an arrow. When you go back in time and approach the first fraction of a second of creation you never reach zero; somewhere close to zero time ceases to exist, and the curve takes you around going forward in time again.

Hawking accomplishes this by using imaginary numbers (i.e. the square root of -1) to avoid the singularity. The use of imaginary numbers is fairly routine, but they are always converted back to real numbers; in this case case, however, Hawking never converts the imaginary numbers back into real numbers. To do so, he has admitted, would cause the singularity to reappear.

However, even if we give Hawking his imaginary numbers, we still have a situation in which we have a point at which there are no prior points – in effect, there is still a beginning, it’s just not “zero.” To make his formula work, he also has to treat time as a spatial dimension, which is not necessarily justifiable. Hawking believes that this theory has done away with God (I believe he has calculated that there is a 95% chance that God doesn’t exist under this theory), but that does not appear to work in the event that God designed the universe this way. Hawking apparently has, by the way, admitted that this theory is not necessarily describing reality.

Looking at these proposals and the others that are out there, it seems that the chances that the universe had a beginning are still quite high. And, the chances are that if the universe had a beginning, it had a cause. If this is the case, then we must at some point deal with the nature of that cause (aka the First Cause). The question of what caused the cause, or “who designed the Designer” is not an argument against design; we are looking at the issue from inside the universe, and have no option but to work our way outward. If our study of the universe from within using the known laws of the universe leads us to conclude that there was a beginning, and that the beginning had a cause, then that is what we must consider. The next step, then, is to try to find that cause, if possible. Dawkins insists that we must look to a “crane” and not a “sky-hook;” next time we’ll take a look at this to see how it holds up.