God: The Failed Hypothesis (9 page)

More recently, Dawkins has written, “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference
⁵¹
.”

Indeed, Earth and life look just as they can be expected to look if there is no designer God.

Notes

¹
William Paley,
Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearance of Nature
(London: Halliwell, 1802).

²
Keith Thomson,
Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 20.

³
Ibid., p. 6.

⁴
Charles Darwin,
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
(London: John Murray, 1859).

⁵
Michael Shermer,
In Darwin’s Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace
(Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

⁶
Phillip E. Johnson,
Evolution as Dogma: The Establishment of Naturalism
(Dallas, TX: Haughton Publishing Co., 1990);
Darwin on Trial
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991);
Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law, and Education
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995);
Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997);
The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001).

⁷
Ronald Numbers,
The Creationists: The Evolution of Scientific Creationism
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).

⁸
John C. Whitcomb Jr. and Henry M. Morris,
The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and Its Scientific Implications
(Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1961).

⁹
William R. Overton,
McLean v. Arkansas,
U.S. Dist. Ct. Opinion, 1982; Michael Ruse, ed.,
But Is It Science? The Philosophical Questions in
the Creation/Evolution Controversy
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996), pp. 307-31.

¹⁰
Michael J. Behe,
Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution
(New York: Free Press, 1996); William A. Dembski,
The Design Inference
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
Intelligent Design: The Bridge between Science and Theology
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999);
No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased without Intelligence
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).

¹¹
Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross,
Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

¹²
Robert Dorit, review of
Darwin’s Black Box
by Michael Behe,
American Scientist
(September-October 1997); H. Allen Orr, “Darwin v.

Intelligent Design (Again): The Latest Attack on Evolution Is Cleverly Argued, Biologically Informed—And Wrong,”
Boston Review
(1998); Brandon Fitelson, Christopher Stephens, and Elliott Sober, “How Not to Detect Design—Critical Notice: William A. Dembski, “The Design Inference,”
Philosophy of Science
66, no. 3 (1999): 472-88; Kenneth R. Miller,
Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for a Common Ground between God and Evolution
(New York: HarperCollins, 1999); Robert T. Pennock,
Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism
(Cambridge, MA:
MIT
Press, 1999); Niall Shanks and Karl H. Joplin, “Redundant Complexity: A Critical Analysis of Intelligent Design in Biochemistry,”
Philosophy of Science
66 (1999): 268-98; Taner Edis, “Darwin in Mind: ‘Intelligent Design’ Meets Artificial Intelligence,”
Skeptical Inquirer
25, no. 2 (2001): 35-39; James Rachels and David Roche, “A Bit Confused: Creationism and Information Theory,”
Skeptical Inquirer
25, no. 2 (2001): 40-42; Jeffery Shallit, review of No
Free Lunch
by William Dembski,
Biosystems
66, nos. 1-2 (2002): 93-99; Mark Perakh,
Unintelligent Design
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003); Forrest and Gross,
Creationism’s Trojan Horse;
Matt Young and Taner Edis, eds.,
Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004). For my own discussion, see Victor J. Stenger,
Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), chap. 4. Young and Edis contains a complete listing of current Internet sites discussing both sides of the issue.

¹³
A review by one of the main promoters of intelligent design has been published in the journal of a small biological society. See Stephen C. Meyer, “The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories,”
Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington
117, no. 2 (2004): 213-39. The society has publicly repudiated this publication in a statement on September 7, 2004. See
http://epsc.wustl.edu/~spozgay/home/id_statement.pdf
(accessed July 11, 2006).

¹⁴
Behe,
Darwin’s Black Box.

¹⁵
Dorit, review of
Darwin’s Black Box;
Miller,
Finding Darwin’s God;
Perakh,
Unintelligent Design;
David Ussery, “Darwin’s Transparent Box: The Biochemical Evidence for Evolution,” in Young and Edis,
Why Intelligent Design Fails,
chap. 4.

¹⁶
Stephen J. Gould,
The Panda’s Thumb
(New York: Norton, 1980), pp. 19-34.

¹⁷
H. J. Muller, “Reversibility in Evolution Considered from the Standpoint of Genetics,”
Biological Reviews
14 (1939): 261-80. Another bit of misinformation often bandied about by creationists is that no evolutionary biologist has ever won the Nobel Prize.

¹⁸
Richard Dawkins,
The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design
(London, New York: Norton, 1987), p. 93.

¹⁹
Kenneth R. Miller, “Life’s Grand Design,”
Technology Review
97, no. 2 (1994): 24-32.

²⁰
Richard Dawkins,
Climbing Mount Improbable
(New York, London: Norton, 1996). See the chapter “The Fortyfold Path to Enlightenment.”

²¹
R. D. Fernald, “Evolution of Eyes,”
Current Opinions in Neurobiology
10, no. 4 (2000): 444-50.

²²
Dembski,
The Design Inference, Intelligent Design,
“The Design Inference.”

²³
For the most recent work at this writing, see the chapters by Gishlack, Shanks, and Karsai; Hurd, Shallit, and Elsberry; and Perakh in Young and Edis,
Why Intelligent Design Fails.

²⁴
Dembski,
Intelligent Design,
p. 168.

²⁵
Stenger,
Has Science Found God?
pp. 102-10. The connection between information and entropy was shown in C. E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,”
Bell System Technical Journal
27 (July 1948): 379-423; (October 1948): 623-25. See also Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver,
The Mathematical Theory of Communication
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949).

²⁶
“Department Position on Evolution and Intelligent Design,” Department of Biological Sciences, Lehigh University,
http://www.lehigh.edu/~inbios/news/evolution.htm
(accessed July 11, 2006).

²⁷
Stenger,
Has Science Found God?
pp. 100-102.

²⁸
Laurie Goodstein, “Intelligent Design Might Be Meeting Its Maker,” Ideas and Trends,
New York Times,
December 4, 2005.

²⁹
Matthew J. Brauer, Barbara Forrest, and Steven G. Gey, “Is It Science Yet?: Intelligent Design Creationism and the Constitution,”
Washington University Law Quarterly
83, no. 1 (2005), “http://law.wustl.edu/WULQ/83-1/p%201%20Brauer%20Forrest%20Gey%20book%20pages.pdf”:http://law.wustl.edu/WULQ/83-1/p%201%20Brauer%20Forrest%20Gey%20book%20pages.pdf (accessed December 28, 2005).

fn30._ Kitzmuller, et al. v. Dover Area School District et al., Case No. 04cv2688, Judge John E. Jones
III
presiding, December 20, 2005.

³¹
Overton,
McLean v. Arkansas,
1982.

³²
Larry Laudan, “Science at the Bar—Causes for Concern,” Science,
Technology, & Human Values
7, no. 41 (1982): 16-19. Reprinted in Ruse,
But Is It Science?,
pp. 351-55.

³³
Discovery Institute,  
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=443
(accessed October 28, 2005).

³⁴
Philip Ball,
The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature
(New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

³⁵
John Gribbon,
Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity
(New York: Random House, 2004).

³⁶
Dembski,
The Design Inference, Intelligent Design,
“The Design Inference.”

³⁷
Dembski,
Intelligent Design,
pp. 128-31.

³⁸
Ball,
The Self-Made Tapestry,
pp. 105-107.

³⁹
S. Douady and Y. Couder, “Phyllotaxis as a Physical Self-Organized Growth Process,”
Physical Review Letters
68 (1992): 2098.

⁴⁰
Stuart Kauffman,
At Home in the Universe: The Search for the
Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

⁴¹
Christoph Adami,
Introduction to Artificial Life
(New York: Springer, 1998).

⁴²
Christoph Adami, Charles Ofria, and Travis C. Collier, “Evolution of Biological Complexity,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA
97 (2000): 4463-68.

⁴³
Martin Gardner, “On Cellular Automata, Self-Reproduction, the Garden of Eden, and the Game of ‘Life,’”
Scientific American
224, no. 2 (1971): 112-17; William Poundstone,
The Rescursive Universe
(New York: Morrow, 1985).

⁴⁴
Stephen Wolfram, A
New Kind of Science
(Champagne, IL: Wolfram Media, 2002).

⁴⁵
James Gleick,
Chaos: The Making of a New Science
(New York: Viking, 1987).

⁴⁶
Nicholas Everitt,
The Non-Existence of God
(London, New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 85.

⁴⁷
A good example is Dembski,
The Design Inference, Intelligent Design,
“The Design Inference.” On the other side of the argument, Dawkins,
The Blind Watchmaker
is also somewhat inconsistent in his use of the term “design.”

⁴⁸
S. Jay Olshansky, Bruce Carnes, and Robert N. Butler, “If Humans Were Built to Last,”
Scientific American
(March 2001).

⁴⁹
Dawkins,
The Blind Watchmaker.

⁵⁰
Charles Darwin,
The Correspondence of Charles Darwin
8, 1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 224.

⁵¹
Richard Dawkins,
River out of Eden
(New York: HarperCollins, 1995); “God’s Utility Function,”
Scientific American
(November 1995): 85.

For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any
thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any
thing
that is done under the sun.

—Ecclesiastes 9: 5-6 (King James Version)

Mind and Soul

A
lmost from the moment that modern humans appeared on the scene tens of thousands of years ago, they seem to have possessed a vague notion that they were more than the physical bodies that were born of women, grew and aged, eventually ceased to move and breathe, and finally disintegrated into a small pile of dusty bones. At some point in their development, people in almost every culture have imagined invisible spirits acting as agents for events around them, including the animation of living things such as themselves.

Such thinking was perfectly reasonable during the childhood of humanity. One moment a person is talking and walking around and in another moment he is forever silent and immobile. Whatever animated the person was suddenly absent. Furthermore, a dead person still seemed to live on in thoughts and dreams—a ghostly spirit surviving death.

A widespread ancient belief held that the heart is the center of being and intelligence. This idea carries metaphorically down to today, as when we say someone has a “good heart” or talk about some act “coming from the heart.” When Egyptian priests prepared the dead for their afterlife, they disposed of the brain but kept the heart within the body. Early Greek philosophers, such as Empedocles (d. 490
BCE
), attributed thinking and feeling to an immortal soul that resides around the heart but leaves the body after death.

The brain was not regarded as an important organ in ancient times, although Alcmaeon (c. 500) declared, “All senses are connected to the brain.” Still, like other ancient Greeks, he viewed the body as containing channels for spirits (
pneumata
) that were composed of air—one of the four elements of the cosmos that included fire, earth, and water. Plato (c. 347
BCE
) placed a “veg-etative soul” in the gut, a “vital soul” in the heart, and an immortal soul in the head. His most famous student, Aristotle (d. 322
BCE
), restored the immortal soul to the heart. Whatever its location, in the common view the soul was a conduit for spirits—the force that gave a body life and thought
¹
.