Mill and Russell Speak Up
And while we’re on the subject of ‘Intelligent Design’ and the people at the ‘Discovery Institute’ and so on – I just feel like aiming another kick at the design argument. I know I’ve done it before, I’m repeating myself, but – but I’m not sure they get shouted at enough about this.
Okay their big thing is ‘_____ is too complex to have come about without a designer. _____ is irreducibly complex, so a designer must have designed it, because otherwise it wouldn’t be there, being so complex and all.’ Complex things can’t just happen. A hurricane can’t whip through a junkyard and leave a 777 behind. An inebriated chimpanzee can’t shred a pile of old newspapers and end up with a first edition of Tobacco Road. A blizzard can’t produce a snowperson bearing an exact resemblance to Marie Dressler in ‘Dinner at Eight.’ What are the odds that there could be a universe so incredibly carefully calibrated that after some billions of years, what do we find? Us! How likely is that? The odds against it are – there are more numbers in that number than there are atoms in the universe. Therefore, there has to be a designer – that’s the only explanation. Anything else just can’t have happened the way it did.
Okay, so how did the designer get here? If ______ is too complex to have come about without a designer, then obviously whoever or whatever designed _____ has to be pretty complex too, right? So if the first item is inexplicable without a designer, why isn’t the second? Why is the cell too complex to explain without a designer, while the designer itself is not? Why is the designer, in fact, an explanation? Why is it an explanation at all? Why isn’t it more like a bad joke? (Well, it is, actually, it’s the tortoises all the way down joke. But do IDers get it?) It’s like saying ‘how did this chocolate cake get here?’ and being shown for answer – another chocolate cake.
No, the reality is, the argument from design is just a shop window thing. It’s just a pretense. IDers don’t want an explanation (that’s obvious, because if they did, by now they would have taken in the fact that ID isn’t an explanation at all) – they want their God, and they think ID is a respectable way to be able to have it. In fact it’s not respectable, because it’s so silly. An explanation that doesn’t explain anything is silly. But they do get people to listen to them. Maybe if the obvious problem with the designer were more widely noticed, they’d have more trouble.
Bertrand Russell had good blunt things to say about all this, as you might expect. In Why I Am Not a Christian, for instance.
you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: “My father taught me that the question ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?'” That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.”
Or in another version, ‘You can’t fool me, young person, it’s tortoises all the way down.’ (It’s a nice touch that it was Mill, because Mill was Russell’s secular ‘godfather.’ I find that a very pleasing small fact.)
O.K., but it works the other way around. Arguments from “reverse engineering” miss the point that thinking about natural evolution is a criticism of *all* arguments from design. It might be that such and such a feature is functionally deducible from such and such a contingent set of causes, but that’s a “might” rather than a “must”. It might be a function of sufficient redundancy to ensure survivability or it might be an accidental by-product of such redundancy. All told, engineers probably have more to learn from evolutionary inquiry than the latter has to learn from the former. (Of course, when it comes to cultural evolution, a.k.a. history, evidence for design, however misdirected, is all over the place.)
On the other hand, Russell’s bluff self-confidence just reveals something of his failure to comprehend historical antecedents, not the least of which are the Kantian antinomies with respect to the limits of our possible understanding. On the one hand, the Aristotelian account of the “unmoved mover” as “first cause” is a teleological account: things are moved by their “desire” for the divinized “unmoved mover”, through their participation in the order of being, which is why the “first cause” qua metaphysical “first principle” is “unmoved”, invariant. On the other hand, the Judaic account of creation,- “ex nihilo”, in the latinate variant-, precisely involves the contingency of the good in the face of the horror of brute existence, rather than the appeal to causal antecedence. Such topoi can be addressed in fully secularized “functional equivalents”. But there is some reason for preferring “deconstructive” historical accounts to bluff positivistic self-confidence.
If you want a different view of this issue which’ll make your eyes bulge try this:
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0505/reviews/bar.html
courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily.
One hopes they were being ironic in linking to it.
Given Russell’s view that mathematics and logic are analytic, not synthetic, it is hardly surprising that he was not moved by Kant’s antinomies.
“But there is some reason for preferring “deconstructive” historical accounts to bluff positivistic self-confidence.”
I’m probably being dense here, but what reasons? The teleological argument purports to be logical and therefore a counterargument from logic would seem to be appropriate. Surely a deconstructive historical account would only tell us why the teleological argument is given credence and perhaps how it has been rationalised; not whether it is either valid or plausible?
Unless, of course, we are happy with a man-made creator.
The complexity argument isn’t an explanation, but rather trying to point out that there can be no explanation. In that, it can have some validity; at least it is worth considering.
To the ‘what are the odds that life would develop’ argument, I have always had a ready answer. Say it is one in a billion, or one in a trillion that life would start up – then, given an infinite amount of time to work in, well, doesn’t that resolve to 1? Aren’t we only arguing this because it did happen?
The second half is how people always bring up how impossible it would be for us to evolve into what we are, bipedal, with hands, eyes, noses, etc. To them, it is like a shuffling of a deck of cards ending up with the suits all together and in a row, something essentially impossible. They fail to grasp that we aren’t a perfect shuffle, we only view what we have as that. I point out that the odds of drawing a 3 of clubs, a 5 of diamonds, a 9 of spades, a 10 of spades and a 6 of hearts is actually rarer than a Royal Flush. Every hand, after the fact, is impossibly rare to draw. And this evolutionary hand is just as wild as if we had tentacles and flippers – and if we evolved with them, people would be wondering how impossible it was we developed that way!
Innumeracy at its worst.
Some of us do have tentacles and flippers, thank you. (On the internet, no-one knows you’re from an alternate evolutionary tree.)
OBs point is one that I brought up over and over again back when I patrolled the Usenet alt.atheism and alt.evolution groups. Not just me either. It tended to come down to the first cause argument: God is the thing that by definition began and is the cause of all other things. Life doesn’t have that clause worked into its definition, so we can agressively ask “where did all this come from? Who made this?” but with god defined as we define him, the question is meaningless. Tricky bastards.
Alex: Exactly. This is in some ways a sleazy version of “moving the goalposts” — you make your opponent prove every step of his logic, even when the steps are near-infinite in count, and yet you simply define your own premise as unassailable.
In many ways, God becomes the default explanation for theists; it’s like the argument from ignorance (or “God of the Gaps” or “Goddidit” to the less kindly). Just because science cannot explain a natural phenomenon right now — God did it. Many theists I’ve spoken to really don’t see the lopsided nature of this argument; when you substitute “God didn’t do it” for “God did it” and use the same argument, it’s equally valid — in other words, not valid at all.
I really don’t see how people can miss the fact that positing the point you want to prove as the default, fall-back hypothesis is a completely bogus debate tactic.
And this is that argument; if everything else *must* be caused except God, then God automatically becomes the default answer when you run out of other answers. And humans being fallible (sp?) and finite, you will eventually run out of other answers.
It’s cheating.
I think the important point of the “turtle regress” argument is that, either the universe is infinitely old so the problem recedes to inaccessibility (this is reputed to be why Fred Hoyle preferred the Steady-State cosmos), or there is a First Cause which is God by another name. Thus, the coy assertion that “we don’t speculate on who or what the designer is” simply cannot stand. Intelligent Design means God. It’s religion. It shouldn’t be in a science class.