But What’s at the Top?
And another thing. That idea that Dennett mentioned in the Spiegel interview.
…the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation. You’ll never see a spear making a spear maker. You’ll never see a horse shoe making a blacksmith. You’ll never see a pot making a potter. It is always the other way around and this is so obvious that it just seems to stand to reason.
That’s the idea that ‘Intelligent Design’ is all about, of course. The argument from incredulity – we just can’t believe that something as complex as a cell could have turned up without being designed. The argument from nonexplanation – natural selection just can’t explain how something as complex as a cell, and birds and flowers and humans, could have turned up without being designed. But what’s odd about that, along with the regress problem, is the way it goes backwards. It goes farther and farther and farther away from explanation, rather than getting closer and closer and closer to it. Which means surely that it’s not all that credible or explanatory itself – in fact it’s less so.
What needs explaining is all this apparent design. The human mind, cells, eyes, all that. Find a watch, must be a watchmaker, all that. Okay so what kind of designer would that be? Quite a proficient one. Right? Quite skilled. To design all this, it has to be quite a lot more skilled than anyone we’ve ever met or seen or heard of. And to be that much more skilled, it has to be quite a lot more complex. In fact – you could say that it’s simply incredible that it could be for instance made of the same basic constituent parts that we are made of, and yet be able to design us and everything else. It has to be so immensely skilled and complex that we can’t even really imagine its skill and complexity – we can only fling vague superlatives in its direction.
Well, okay, so you see the problem. If it’s that complex, then how do we explain it? We explain our complexity by pointing to it, and then we explain its complexity x [vast number of your choice] – how? If the problem is, if the source of incredulity is, that a complex thing needs explanation other than brute natural processes, then whatever made the complex thing that needs explaining, needs explaining a trillion or so times more than the complex thing at the first level. Oh dear. And the problem doesn’t stop there, because the next thing up will be more complex again, and so on with every level we go up. It’s not just a regress, it’s a regress that gets astronomically more insoluble with each step. If you need a big fancy smart thing to make this world, what kind of big fancy smart thing must you need to make that big fancy smart thing? Very big fancy smart indeed. So big fancy smart that you might as well give up, since otherwise the process just keeps on going forever, and makes no kind of sense. Of course we’re all at liberty to think that’s exactly how it is, if we want to – that there is an infinite series of infinitely big fancy smart things that have designed each other all the way down. But as for calling it an explanation – I don’t think so.
OB, God (or Gods, if you like) does not have to be that difficult. Don’t you sense him (her, it, or both) when you see a sunrise? How about when you hear a baby laugh?
I’m always stunned at how quickly an otherwise reasonable person turns into a new-age mystic when the topic of G-O-D comes up. Tender feelings and warm memories conjure up divinity, not clear thought.
Dennett mentions the unclear logic used by YEC’s, but that’s pretty much common-place for your run-of-the-mill religionist. For most, God just ‘is’, and should always be treated as such. (Personally, I blame agnostics for giving up so many yards to religionists over the years.)
When I hear a baby laugh I hope its owners will soon be taking it away.
Yes, true, for most, God just ‘is’ – but not for IDers. They claim to be making actual arguments and offering a rival explanation or theory. So we get to pick apart their arguments all the livelong day!
That never-ending picking! The IDers ‘arguments’ are negative, not positive, which makes the picking all the more difficult – that that’s if you ignore the false dichotomy (evolution or ID)!
I almost feel sorry for the people over at PT, who end up like a 5 years old kid sister being teased by her 7 years old brother who repeats everything she says. Before she opens her mouth, she know exactly what that snot-nose kid is gonna say. What’s worse, she has about a million 7 years old brothers who only know that one tease, and they are always walking into the dang room.
You know, this argument from reason has never finally convinced me to be an atheist. I still have no problem with accepting the idea of a Creator “God” outside or transcending the rules of the physical universe. Can I prove this, explain it, rationalize it? Probably not. Do I believe that one semitic tribe three thousand years ago got it uniquely right? Nah.
I have no problem believing our physical reality is not “everything.” Hence, my militant agnosticism. :)
(Ducks and waits for the pile-on)
Yeah – PT does have a lot of religious droners in comments. I eventually terminate discussions like that, if they keep going on and on in big pointless circles. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to give up poking holes myself!
Brian, sure. But the IDers aren’t as modest as that. It’s their claims I’m poking at in this particular post. After all, I did say we’re all at liberty to believe that’s how it is if we want to. But that’s not the same thing as claiming we have good reasons to believe it, or good arguments that it’s true.
Am I being a religious droner? Don’t mean to be-haven’t been in church in 15 years, probably. :(
Except for sister’s wedding (which she admitted was embarrasingly fundie in tone)
No!! I didn’t mean you. No, I mean people who go on and on and on, saying predictable things and asserting instead of arguing. There seldom are discussions like that here, and when I say I ‘terminate’ it I just mean I say ‘let’s drop it now’ or some such. Nearly always that’s all that’s required.
Brian, you are on to something. ‘God’ makes 100% sense if it is safely outside of the physical world – no smell, no physical being, no interaction, no voices, no choosing presidential candidates, and no natural disasters.
IDers prefer to concieve of a framework built by a meddling ‘God’. By arguing that one cannot ‘prove’ ‘God’ does not exist, you grant them far too much. Their assumption of “God did it” as a first principal AND logical answer to scientific inquiry are both invalid and insincere.
There is no need for me to prove to anyone that God does no exist, since there was no need to suppose God’s existence in the first place. Theist forget that long ago God’s existence was first assumed, and lazily became proven fact over time. (IDers count on a lazy public for the promotion of their half-baked ideas.)
There are plenty of gaps in human knowledge, and to fill those gaps with ‘God’ does not make them any less enpty.
All good points. Ophelia, I was teasing. I may indeed drone on, but not typically about religion. I certainly agree with the dismissal of the IDiots, too.
My wholly irrational, emotional,non-scientific and vaguely formed theology is fuzzily Gnostic. No hell, no Creator God whose infinite wisdom we see proved around us (in fact, a very flawed creation) Certainly no worship of Jehovah, who to me is a rather nasty character.
Oh, you were teasing. Those :( things make me go all wobbly.
Yeah, Jehovah sucks. Guy dashes babies’ brains out against walls – even before they laugh.
Christians generally don’t think of God as being complex, but perfectly simple – absolutely pure spirit with no sub-parts, no complexity at all. From a dualist perspective, spirit’s not a complicated thing like biological life but a simple substance. It’s all wrong but it explains why IDists don’t believe the designer would need to be more complex than the designed.
Hmmmm.
But does it? Explain, I mean? Because I know they prevaricate and all – or, as the judge put it in his judicial way, ‘lie’ – but they don’t talk about pure spirit, they talk about intelligence and complexity and design. They do seem to mean the kind of intelligence that can design things (though they don’t talk about the manufacturing stage so much, which is another stumbling block, it seems to me).
Still, maybe so. Maybe that’s the card they keep hidden. Deceitful bastards.
Thanks, that’s interesting, I hadn’t thought of that.
I imagine that, eventually, the scientific world picture will have an influence on God — that Christians will eventually make God an evolving thing. Because, frankly, I can’t see how intelligent design could be intelligent without evolution. We love the myth that something is designed from out of nothing, like a Mozart piece (at least, Mozart in Amadeus). In reality, design is all about variation, learning, accidents, analogies — there are forms of selection that aren’t natural selection, but it is hard to imagine any form of intelligence that isn’t a process of selection. And the evidence of natural selection is too overwhelming to keep being denied.
I don’t think that a religion that says that God’s son, born from a virgin, died on the cross, should have that much of a problem giving up the eternally omniscient God for a changing one. Say one that co-evolves with the universe.
Of course, I’m not going to be here two hundred years from now to see if this prediction comes true. But the funny thing about fundamentalist Christians is that they are really defending an idea of God that comes from Plato more than the Bible.
“The Universe is mystic to man and will ever remain so.” George Henry Lewes
Brian, there will always be some deadwall of ignorance, some limit we cannot go beyond; yet being resigned to this I refuse to frame it in the muck & mysticism of the traditional muck & mystic mongers and am not any the less a convinced & passionate atheist. I feel no embarrassment in expressing ignorance of ultimate reality; others say they can explain all the wonders of existence in a single breath; with education, argument, and never-ending questioning we can help rid the world of these many varieties of tosh.
_
I’ve just completed the eye-opening task of, for the first time, getting almost all the books I own up on shelves, not excluding quite a few that made up my earliest childhood reading. Among them is “The Wonder Book of Tell Me Why?,” no publication date listed, but I estimate mid-Fifties, because Elizabeth II is already listed among British monarchs and the invention of colour television is predicted for the future. It has a strongly scientific bent (“… the age of the earth is invariably given as two thousand million years”) and yet… I have pleasure in sharing with B&W readers the entry entitled “What Are Boys And Girls Made Of?” No comment will follow:
Living flesh and blood possessing power to grow, move, think and speak. Their bodies are composed of millions of microscopical “cells,” called “protoplasm,” arranged so as to make: a “framework” of bone, “muscles” to move the frame, organs to digest food and, through the “blood,” nourish other parts, organs to take in air and extract the “oxygen” which the body must have, organs to get rid of used-up material, and an organ to think, remember, receive impressions and give orders to the body, also a “soul” or “spirit” which nobody can see or define.
Sounds almost sarcastic. “which nobody can see or define” – well in that case it’s a pretty empty postulate, isn’t it. Could the sarcasm be intentional, do you think?
You’re asking seriously, right? I doubt that very much, in a book for children written about half a century ago. My reference to an “eye-opening” experience was a general one, occasioned by realising how much I was then being spoonfed ideas I utterly reject. Some I rejected then, but understood myself to be in a persecuted minority whose views were seen as heretical and therefore unworthy of consideration.
Times change. Damn good thing, too.
That’s pretty much what the judge said…
I do have a 1963 book of “Bible Stories from the Old Testament,” whose opening sentence is “In the beginning, there was only God,” which includes a dinosaur looking nervously at a spewing volcano in the background of the cover art…
In this case, OB, maybe we can still find out what was meant, since it appears the artist, Geoffrey Biggs, is still with us at age 97 (unless he shares a birthday with my paternal grandmother, in which case correct to 96).