Richard Dawkins, appearance of design, and the Bible

In the opening paragraphs of "The Blind Watchmaker" (1986), Richard Dawkins states that 

"Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose" 

and then goes on to explain that the appearance is misleading, there is no particular designed purpose, and that no designer is required to explain the observed complexity.

Christian apologists and others have given him a hard time over this statement ever since. For the apologists, ID proponents and other evolution sceptics, the apparent face value completely trumps the hidden and complex set of processes which need to be explained to provide the evolutionary story.

So what has this got to do with the bible?

Well, I was thinking about this the other day and I realised that there are several things in the bible which appear to be something at face value, but theologians and apologists have to do a lot of wriggling around to provide complex explanations of why the face value is not the truth.

For example: The literary relationship between Matthew, Mark and Luke, a.k.a. the Synoptic Problem. At face value, it looks as though one or more of the gospel writers was copying from the others. These are not independent stories, told by eyewitnesses, these are stories copied from one source to another and edited to fit the agenda of the author. And yet many apologists will totally dispute this, providing complex but 'plausible' sequences of events that could maybe explain how these supposedly independent gospels could have come to look so similar.

Or, for example: The authorship of the Pauline Epistles. Once I read Romans and Ephesians more or less back to back. While the theology of both epistles is broadly similar (as far as I can tell), the writing style is completely different. If you look at it objectively - at face value - the epistle to the Ephesians looks to have a completely different author to the epistle to the Romans. Indeed, even within the epistle to the Romans, chapters 9-11 seem to be written by someone with a different style to the writer of the other chapters. The face value appearance, based on writing style, is that if Paul wrote most of the epistle to the Romans (Ch 1-8 and 12-16) then he did not write chapters 9-11, or Ephesians, or Colossians, or the Pastorals, etc. And yet apologists will bend over backwards to provide convoluted theories about how people can change their writing style over time, and what we are seeing here is the difference between young Paul and older Paul. But, as far as I can tell (I'm no expert here), there is little evidence from secular scholars of writing style to support such a radical shift in someone's writing style as they get older. Face value suggests multiple authors, some of whom must be pretending to be Paul.

The thing is, sometimes things are what they appear to be at face value, and sometimes they are not. You can't simply dismiss face value, but then again, you have to take complex and convoluted explanations seriously, because sometimes they might be the way things are. Life isn't simple. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it isn't. And that - in itself - is a complex issue to resolve.

On the origin of life...

I've just been listening to last week's Unbelievable podcast addressing the question "How did life begin?" 

While the debate between (atheistic scientist) Adam Rutherford and (theistic evolutionist) Fuz Rana was fairly interesting, I felt that their discussion didn't really address the question posed.

Put simply, you cannot invoke pre-existent life (i.e. God) as an explanation for the origin of life, as that is a contradiction in itself. If a living entity creates another living entity, this is not the origin of anything. It may be the start of a new phase, as it were, but it cannot be the origin.

The philosophical question at the root of the discussion should not have been "How did life begin?" but rather "Did life begin?" - was there ever a time before life, or has life existed from eternity, with no beginning and no end?

Science vs Intelligent Design

If you've read my last few posts, you'll know that I got pretty fed up with some Intelligent Design (ID) arguments in a book I've been reading. What I want to discuss here is how ID relates to 'science' in general.

Science is:

"a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe"

(from Wikipedia, paraphrasing Webster's Dictionary)

I would like to tighten that definition up slightly. I would argue (perhaps controversially) that science is a method of testing and explaining how the universe works, in the current moment. Science is fundamentally based on a (usually unstated) presupposition that the way the universe works now is the same as the way it has always worked. "Ye canna change the laws o' physics" as a great man once said. Or, more importantly, the laws of physics don't change. (Whether an agent can change them is a discussion for another day.)

When I do experiments in the lab, I assume that, given the same environmental conditions, the experiment would work in exactly the same way in Beijing as in Edinburgh, and in exactly the same way in 1812 as in 2012. Experience bears this out. When we find discrepancies between experiments carried out in one place and time from results obtained in another place and time, we always find that it is the environmental conditions that are different, not the laws of physics.

Fundamentally, science is the study of the ways things work now, assuming that this will not change in the future and would have been the same in the past.

Science works by proposing a hypothesis (or a range of hypotheses), then carrying out experiments or observations to collect data, which can be used to either confirm or refute the hypothesis.

If a hypothesis has gone through this cycle of experimentation and analysis sufficiently many times, has not been refuted but has been confirmed many times over, then the hypothesis gets upgraded to the rank of 'Theory'. Like the theory of evolution or the theory of gravitation.

In common parlance (particularly in the minds of anti-evolutionists) there is no distinction between a hypothesis and a theory. "It is only a theory" is used to scoff at evolution. The phrase "It is only an experimentally validated hypothesis" should be equivalent, yet this doesn't sound so dismissive, so isn't generally used...

When we come to evolution, we have a problem as far as science goes. In an ideal world we'd simply set up an experiment, wait a couple of hundred thousand years, then examine the data. If we could do that, I have little doubt that the theory of evolution would be validated. Then, evolution would be what I can real science - we'd have proof that evolution is how the world works now.

In the absence of that data (which our descendents will get eventually!) we have to rely on observations rather than experiments. (OK, yes, we can do experiments with bacteria and the like and observe 'micro-evolution' over many hundreds of generations, but we still don't have the timescale to observe 'macro-evolution' whereby those bacteria evolve into non-bacteria.) We can observe the fossil record and we can study the DNA of living (and preserved) animals and make inferences from that. In essence, we can construct an 'experiment' where we take the evidence at the start of the trial (i.e. fossils from a particular early stratum) and compare these with evidence midway through the experiment (i.e. fossils in a more recent stratum) and also with evidence at the end of the experiment (i.e. animals now) and see if the evidence supports or refutes the theory. Much of the evidence examined in this way does indeed support the theory of evolution.

Thus, from a scientific viewpoint, the theory of evolution is validated. Micro-evolution is observed at the micro-scale, and has been shown to have predictive capabilities - predictions have been made regarding bacteria evolution (or adaptation, if you would rather) and these have been demonstrated by experiment.

But evolution only goes so far. It is, by definition, a theory which shows how a population of organisms can change over many thousands of generations. What it can't do is explain how the original population came to be. This is where ID likes to jump in.

The basic point of ID is that because science has no explanation how the original population of organisms came to be, it is plausible to suppose that perhaps an Intelligent Designer started the whole ball rolling. To be honest, I don't have an issue with that line of reasoning, but it is philosophy, not science.

The ID hypothesis has no predictive power. It tells us nothing about how organisms in the present day will react, adapt, evolve, or otherwise change with subsequent generations. Given this, it is not and should not be regarded as science.

ID also pre-supposes the actions of an agent from outside of science effecting change inside science. This basically constitutes a discontinuity in reality, whereby we must (if we accept ID) assume that science changed at the time of the action. In other words, there was a change in the laws of physics. Once again, this is not science, based on the fundamental assumptions of what science is.

ID should only be discussed in the philosophy class, not the science class.

Evidence for God: Arguments 17-26 (Science, part 2)

See the previous two posts on this book before reading this one [1,2].

So I've now read 26 chapters (that's just over half the book) of "Evidence for God: 50 Arguments for Faith from the Bible, History, Philosophy, and Science" edited by William Dembski and Mike Licona, and I'm still fed up by all the ID nonsense. At least this now brings us to the end of the Intelligent Design section, or "Science" as the book calls it.

In this chunk of the book are the following chapters:

17. Evolutionary Computation: A perpetual motion machine for design information by Robert J Marks II
This chapter had a point to make, but I have pretty much forgotten it now. I think it was something to do with how 'evolutionary computing' software actually requires an intelligent user, and without that it wouldn't work. But I may just be making that up. It didn't offer any evidence for God anyway.

18. Science, Eugenics an Bioethics by Richard Weikart
An odd title for this chapter, in that it doesn't really talk about science or bioethics. All this sets out to say is that Eugenics is a direct descendent of Darwinism. And by implication Darwinism is bad. Again, no evidence for God.

19. Designed for discovery by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards
This is an odd piece of 'evidence'. The point it makes is that our planet appears to be particularly well placed for observing the universe around us. If we'd been further inside a galaxy, we'd never see out, if we'd been inside a dust cloud, we'd never see out, etc. The case being made is that the planet we live on is 'fine tuned' for observation of the universe and this implies design.

I'm not so sure. Its a very now-centric view of the state of things. Its as if the writers of the chapter are assuming that the whole reason for creation is not just humans, but humans at this point in history. We've learned more about the universe around us in the past 100 years than in the hundred centuries before that. And it won't be too many decades in the future before we are sending probes and ships to explore distant parts of the galaxy, in other words, in not too long our view of the universe won't be limited by our place in the cosmos. The authors are basically saying that God placed us here (within the universe) so that humans (at our stage in development) can investigate the universe. Sorry guys, its not all about us.

For thousands of years, the visible universe has been a mystery to humans and has actually been the source of many, if not most, of the superstitious and pagan beliefs which have rivaled the worship of the 'true God' for most of human history. By placing us here, God promoted astrology and superstition? Not sure this reasoning works.

While it may be an argument for God, I'm not sure its a very compelling one.

20. Intelligent Design: A brief introduction by William A. Dembski
So finally, after six chapters that were devoted to ID and another five or six which were linked to ID, we finally get an 'introduction' to it. This is totally out of place, but compared to the rest is quite refreshing. It says:

"As a theory of biological origins and development, ID's central claim ins that only intelligent causes can adequately explain the complex, information-rich structures of biology and that these causes are empirically detectable."

Which is fair enough. I agree that ID is a valid hypothesis. It may not be a truly scientific hypothesis (see another post I'll write soon), but it is valid. Of course, it explains nothing about how the world works now, it is purely a matter of deistic origin belief, but at present there is no good scientific explanation for the origin of life, so I don't have a problem with people believing it or defending it.

But ID is not a rival to Darwinian evolution - ID is a hypothesis about how things got started, evolution is a theory (i.e. a tested and validated hypothesis) of how things have progressed since then. Evolution theory has no origin explanation, ID has no development explanation.

The main issue I have with ID is that it is a science stopper. Science asks 'How?' ID answers 'No, the question is Who?' - even if it can be demonstrated that there was an original intelligent designer, I still want to ask "How did the designer do it?", ID doesn't seem to even want to ask that question.

21. Intelligent, optimal and Divine design by Richard Spencer
This chapter addresses the criticism of ID which basically says 'if we are designed, why are we not perfect?' and spends a few pages explaining why imperfect things may be desirable. Not an argument for God, rather a defence from attack.

22. Molecuar Biology's New Paradigm: Nanoengineering inside the cell by Bill Wilberforce
Another pointless ID chapter. Its basically the 'life is too complicated to be a product of chance' argument again. Sigh.

23. Panning God: Darwinism's Defective Argument against Bad Design by Jonathan Witt
This seems a rerun of chapter 21. It is a defence of God creating imperfect things. But this time the argument is that God made things imperfect because he wants to have to intervene and 'meddle' with his creation in order to keep it going. The problem this chapter faces is that there is simply no evidence - at all - that God's intervention is necessary to keep the universe running properly. God's intervention is assumed by certain theistic belief structures, but is not demonstrated. If anything, this chapter is evidence against God rather than for him.

24. The role of agency in science by Angus Menuge
This is another defence of ID. Does science assume that the universe works in an entirely materialistic way, or can the involvement of an 'agent' be considered as a hypothesis. Generally no agents are assumed. This chapter argues that by assuming no agents are active, science restricts itself and is therefore not truly 'scientific'.

25. The scientific status of design inferences by Bruce L. Gordon
This chapter aims to blind the non-science literate reader with science. It uses conditional probability as a smokescreen to cover up the fact that it is treading the same ground as the previous chapter.

26. The Vise Strategy: Squeezing the truth out of Darwinists by William A. Dembski
As I've said several times before on this blog, I do not believe there is any such thing as a perfect argument. That is, all arguments have holes in them, and if you pick at the holes the arguments will eventually unravel.

This chapter is not an argument for ID, but rather an unnecessarily detailed description of how to pick holes in the arguments of Darwinists, if you happen to get a chance to cross-examine a Darwinist in the witness box. In other words, its ammunition for ID proponents.

The chapter tells how to get a Darwinist to admit (a) that they don't know everything, (b) that evolution might not fit into a very tight definition of 'science', and that (c) ID might fit into a broad definition of science. That is all it sets out to do, and by doing so, this chapter thinks it proves its case. Maybe it does, but it is very annoying and makes me very angry while it does this. Aaaaargh!

I'm so annoyed that I now feel the need to address ID in a future blog post. So watch this space for details.

In the meantime, finally, the 'Science' section is over. Whew. We move on to 'Jesus' next.

I have to say that in the first 26 chapters of 'evidence' for God, there have only really been about five half-decent arguments for a deistic God, and none completely compelling. I had hoped for more. Is this really the best that Christianity has to offer in its defence?