[this is the final section of a long essay]
Finally, we come to Dawkins attempt to refute the theists’ most powerful argument: the fine-tuned universe or the fine-tuning of life. Dawkins himself believes that this is the theists’ best argument as he stated such when, in a group discussion of the four horsemen, Sam Harris asked: what do you consider the most powerful argument against atheism and this was the argument that Dawkins pointed to. Dawkins is overwhelmingly confident that he has refuted this argument as can be seen with this passage:
I left the conference stimulated and invigorated, and reinforced in my conviction that the argument from improbability - the ‘Ultimate 747’ gambit - is a very serious argument against the existence of God, and one to which I have yet to hear a theologian give a convincing answer despite numerous opportunities and invitations to do so. Dan Dennett rightly describes it as ‘an unrebuttable refutation, as devastating today as when Philo used it to trounce Cleanthes in Hume’s Dialogues two centuries earlier.
Here is Dawkins’ rebuttal to what he calls the Ultimate Boeing 747 since it was Fred Hoyle who, when we finally discovered just how complex it is to form life spontaneously, claimed that the forming of life from chance would be like all the parts of a Boeing 747 assembling spontaneously to form a plane. Maimonides used a similar an analogy when he said that life forming by chance is as improbable as ink splashing on paper and forming an intelligible paragraph:
Intelligent design suffers from exactly the same objection as chance. It is simply not a plausible solution to the riddle of statistical improbability. And the higher the improbability, the more implausible intelligent design becomes. Seen clearly, intelligent design will turn out to be a redoubling of the problem. Once again, this is because the designer himself (/herself/itself) immediately raises the bigger problem of his own origin. Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as a Dutchman’s Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman’s Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance. … 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.
The most important words from his argument are: “the designer himself immediately raises the bigger problem of his own origin.” Dawkins argument could be given the logical structure without forming a strawman:
Me: I know that x caused y
Dawkins: But you do not know what caused x therefore you do not know what caused y
The ultimate consequences of this logic are:
Because you do not everything, you therefore know nothing
Using this logic anyone who asserts to know the cause of anything, all we have to do is ask keep asking them the cause of things until they profess ignorance and then use that ignorance as proof against their thesis. For example, choose any phenomenon of which you think you know the cause, let’s take, for example, the cause of fire.
Me: Fire is caused when heat causes the elemental bonds within a substance to break, the electrons of the elements then go to a more stable orbit releasing photons in the process and those photon are the flame.
Dawkins: What causes the electron to emit a photon.
Me: I don’t know.
Dawkins: Therefore you do not know what causes fire.
It’s true that I do not know everything about fire but I at least know some facts that cannot be refuted. We can even take an extremely simple phenomenon such as a ball falling to the ground.
Me: Gravity causes a ball to fall to the ground.
Dawkins: What causes gravity?
Me: Gravity is a property of mass, and the ground has mass.
Dawkins: What causes mass to have the property of gravity.
Me: I don’t know.
Dawkins: Therefore you do not know why a ball falls to the ground.
Whenever we posit a cause to any phenomenon there are always gaps in our knowledge which anyone can exploit. Ironically, Dawkins uses a materialism of the gaps argument to refute God:
Me: God caused the universe’s fine-tuning.
Dawkins: What caused God?
Me: I don’t know.
Dawkins: There is a gap in your knowledge, therefore materialism wins by default.
We could just as easily use Dawkins’ own strategy for defeating the theory of Natural Selection:
Dawkins: Natural Selection acting on random mutation causes a reptile to change into a mammal.
Me: What causes random mutation?
Dawkins: When the DNA is copied mistakes are made in the copying.
Me: What causes the mistakes to be made?
Dawkins: The atoms in the nucleotide move in a Brownian Motion and sometimes they do travel where they aren’t supposed to go one millionth of a percent of the time.
Me: What causes Brownian Motion?
Dawkins: It’s energy left over from the Big Bang
Me: What caused the Big Bang
Dawkins: There was a primordial ocean of bubbles like in a Champagne Bottle and bubbles kept flying out of it and each bubble was a universe.
Me: What caused that Champagne Bottle
Dawkins: I don’t know.
Me: There is a Gap in your knowledge, therefore theism wins by default.
Ask enough questions and a gap will always be exposed in someone’s knowledge. The mistake Dawkins is making is that he is confusing the solution to the infinite regress problem with the logical necessity of immaterial preceding material. When confronted with infinite regress, for example, what caused the first something, to just say that God is the first cause, does not really answer the question because then we are stuck with what caused God. This problem has been popularized by Stephen Hawking with his book A Brief History of Time:
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever”, said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
Now that we have more knowledge we can now say that the Earth does not rest on anything but that objects float through space and move according curvatures in space-time. But notice that we have not solved the problem of infinite-regress. Now all we have to do is ask what causes the curvature of space-time. However, just because we do not know what causes the curvature of space-time does not mean that we do not know that the curvature of space-time exists and it is factual cause of the movement of planets. Again, a gap in our knowledge, does not invalidate all of our knowledge.
Similarly, the fine-tuned universe proves the existence of God. We are still stuck with the problem of who or what caused God but that ignorance does not invalidate our knowledge that God created the universe.
Postulate: We are ignorant of the origins of God, we are not ignorant of the existence of God.
I now want to show that while I cannot solve the problem of infinite regress I can nevertheless make a convincing case that the immaterial must exist before the material. Since this is a mere review of Dawkins book I will give the short version.
Fact: Communication exists
1a. Communication requires intelligence, intention and power
1b. Communication does not require intelligence, intention and power
2a. The source of intelligence, intention and power cannot be located in material
2b. The source of intelligence, intention and power can be located in material
Fact: The employment of some communication requires material
Fact: The employment of intelligence, intention and power requires material
definition of communication: the conveying of intention through material objects, usually in the form of discreet sounds waves or symbols
There are exceptions to the above definition of communication, however, it is not certain if the exceptions could be truly classified as communication. For example, after proteins are translated in the Ribosome, they are then transferred to the Golgi Complex where a carbohydrate is placed on them which serves as a sort of postal address so that the organelle they are destined for will allow them to permeate its membrane. It is not completely known if there is a physical law that forces proteins to the proper organelle or even outside of the cell, however, the carbohydrate signal does act using its chemical properties to keep that protein out of the wrong organelles and into the right organelles. It would be like calling communication the design of a key and then sending it floating through a house and it fitting into the only keyhole that it can fit in. That would be communication if you accept that that which made that protein intends it to be placed in x organelle and the key’s shape communicates the designers intention.
Definition of intelligence: awareness of the property of objects.
Definition of intention: the desire to move to an object such that a state of affairs results
Definition of power: the ability to move an object to an intended location
I could go on to elaborate on the definition of desire, ability and awareness which are all, in truth, mere synonyms of the words I am trying to define, however, all definitions of words rely on basic ground words which cannot be defined. Theists and atheists agree on what these words mean, they disagree on the source of these phenomena.
There are certain facts that atheists and theists agree on. They are that some communication must occur in the material world. I say “some” because perhaps there is some form of telepathy but since that question is outside of the scope of this paper I will not address it. Irregardless, if telepathy does exist, no one doubts that some if not most communication is transmitted in the material world. The dispute is whether or not the source of that communication is material.
The first thesis is not very controversial but there might be some out there who disagree with it, namely, that communication requires intelligence, power and intention. First, if no one intends anything, which is the same as saying that one has no desire or no will, then they will do nothing. If they are forced to do something then they are not communicating, it is the person that is forcing them that is doing the communicating. For example, if I want to communicate my love for a woman by hiring a man to deliver her flowers, it is not the courier that is communicating, it is myself that is communicating the message, the courier is just some sort of robot, a sort of animated email delivery service. That communication requires intention is hardly controversial. Second, if one has no power, then one cannot communicate. For example, if I know what the word red means and if I intend to communicate this word but I have no power to embody this knowledge and intention in any material object than it cannot be communicated. Third, intelligence. If I have no knowledge of the language that the intention is communicated in, then communication will not take place. Again, the first thesis is hardly controversial.
The second thesis, that the source of intelligence, intention and power cannot be material, however, is more controversial. No hydrogen atom can “look” at ten carbon atoms and command (power, intention) them to form the word “red” (intelligence). No group of 20 helium atoms can (power, intention) spontaneously form the word “beautiful” (intelligence). While even atheists admit that, they do however believe that if an atom is located in the brain then, for some reason, it has these powers. When a human being writes the word “beautiful” on a sheet of paper, a huge array of perhaps million of atoms, located in thousands of neurons, do the equivalent of spontaneously forming the word beautiful in space, however, they do this by firing the correct neurons. There is no substantial difference between 20 atoms forming the word “beautiful” in space, and millions of atoms coordinating to cause muscle tissue to control a human hand to write the word “beautiful”. Both actions require the atoms to move to a certain location in space and in both cases the source of that power and intention and knowledge of which atoms in which place cannot be located in a single individual atom.
The same problem that exists with communication also applies to the fine-tuning of the universe and the fine-tuning of life.
Quasi-fact: The Universe is fine-tuned
(I say quasi-fact because this seems to mean a better word than theory or fact, since it can always be disproven and since the word theory too often confuses people)
1a. Fine-tuning requires intelligence, knowledge and power
1b. Fine-tuning does not require intelligence, knowledge and power
As it was shown with communication an immaterial phenomenon must have knowledge of which atoms to move into which location and it must have the intention and power to do it. Moreover, this knowledge, intention and power cannot be located in any one material body. We encounter the same problem with the fine-tuning of any material objects. With the universe we are discussing the fine-tuning of physical laws. Some entity needs to have knowledge of what the correct tuning of the physical laws are, it also needs to have the power to be able to tune them and the desire to do so. That entity we call God. Unfortunately, many people have tried to ascribe numerous fallacious qualities to God that it could not possibly have. However, what man ascribes to God does not invalidate God’s existence.
It is very difficult to put a probability on the six magic numbers that tune our universe being a certain quantity. Technically, I see no reason why any one of the numbers could be anywhere from zero to infinity. Even if we were to arbitrarily restrict the probability and say that lambda must be between negative million and positive million (the real number is 1 point followed by 119 zeroes, then any of the nine digits) so as to get an idea of what the minimum odds of a finely-tuned universe are and that therefore the odds of a universe appearing with the rightly tuned constants is one in x, the atheists could just imagine as many universes in the multiverse as they want to get around this problem as Dawkins has done. However, no amount of imagined universes can account for the problem that knowledge, power and intention exist and these three phenomena cannot have a material source.
Whatchoo been up to anyway…?
=D>
