The GOD Delusion (17 page)

Admittedly,
people of a theological bent are often chronically incapable of
distinguishing what is true from what they'd like to be true. But, for
a more sophisticated believer in some kind of supernatural
intelligence, it is childishly easy to overcome the problem of evil.
Simply postulate a nasty god - such as the one who stalks every page of
the Old Testament. Or, if you don't like that, invent a separate evil
god, call him Satan, and blame his cosmic battle against the good god
for the evil in the world. Or - a more sophisticated solution -
postulate a god with grander things to do than fuss about human
distress. Or a god who is not indifferent to suffering but regards it
as the price that has to be paid for free will in an orderly, lawful
cosmos. Theologians can be found buying into all these rationalizations.

For
these reasons, if I were redoing Unwin's Bayesian exercise, neither the
problem of evil nor moral considerations in general would shift me far,
one way or the other, from the null hypothesis (Unwin's 50 per cent).
But I don't want to argue the point because, in any case, I can't get
excited about personal opinions, whether Unwin's or mine.

There
is a much more powerful argument, which does not depend upon subjective
judgement, and it is the argument from improbability. It really does
transport us dramatically away from 50 per cent agnosticism, far
towards the extreme of theism in the view of many theists, far towards
the extreme of atheism in my view. I have alluded to it several times
already. The whole argument turns on the familiar question 'Who made
God?', which most thinking people discover for themselves. A designer
God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God
capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand
the same kind of explanation in his own right. God presents an infinite
regress from which he cannot help us to escape. This argument, as I
shall show in the next chapter, demonstrates that God, though not
technically disprovable, is very very improbable indeed.

4

WHY
THERE ALMOST
CERTAINLY IS
NO GOD

The
priests of the different religious sects . .
.
dread
the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and
scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies
on which they live.

—
THOMAS JEFFERSON

THE
ULTIMATE BOEING 747

The
argument from improbability is the big one. In the traditional guise of
the argument from design, it is easily today's most popular argument
offered in favour of the existence of God and it is seen, by an
amazingly large number of theists, as completely and utterly
convincing. It is indeed a very strong and, I suspect, unanswerable
argument - but in precisely the opposite direction from the theist's
intention. The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes
close to proving that God does
not
exist. My name
for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not
exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit.

The
name comes from Fred Hoyle's amusing image of the Boeing 747 and the
scrapyard. I am not sure whether Hoyle ever wrote it down himself, but
it was attributed to him by his close colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe
and is presumably authentic.
⁵⁸
Hoyle said that
the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the
chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the
luck to assemble a Boeing 747. Others have borrowed the metaphor to
refer to the later evolution of complex living bodies, where it has a
spurious plausibility. The odds against assembling a fully functioning
horse, beetle or ostrich by randomly shuffling its parts are up there
in 747 territory. This, in a nutshell, is the creationist's favourite
argument - an argument that could be made only by somebody who doesn't
understand the first thing about natural selection: somebody who thinks
natural selection is a theory of chance whereas - in the relevant sense
of chance - it is the opposite.

The
creationist misappropriation of the argument from improbability always
takes the same general form, and it doesn't make any difference if the
creationist chooses to masquerade in the politically expedient fancy
dress of 'intelligent design' (ID).* Some observed phenomenon - often a
living creature or one of its more complex organs, but it could be
anything from a molecule up to the universe itself - is correctly
extolled as statistically improbable. Sometimes the language of
information theory is used: the Darwinian is challenged to explain the
source of all the information in
living matter, in the technical sense of information content as a
measure of improbability or 'surprise value'. Or the argument may
invoke the economist's hackneyed motto: there's no such thing as a free
lunch — and Darwinism is accused of trying to get something
for nothing. In fact, as I shall show in this chapter, Darwinian
natural selection is the only known solution to the otherwise
unanswerable riddle of where the information comes from. It turns out
to be the God Hypothesis that tries to get something for nothing. God
tries to have his free lunch and be it too. 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.

*
Intelligent design has been unkindly described as creationism in a
cheap tuxedo.

The
argument from improbability states that complex things could not have
come about by chance. But many people
define
'come
about by chance' as a synonym for 'come about in the absence of
deliberate design'. Not surprisingly, therefore, they think
improbability is evidence of design. Darwinian natural selection shows
how wrong this is with respect to biological improbability. And
although Darwinism may not be directly relevant to the inanimate world
- cosmology, for example - it raises our consciousness in areas outside
its original territory of biology.

A
deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy
assumption that design is the only alternative to chance, and teaches
us to seek out graded ramps of slowly increasing complexity. Before
Darwin, philosophers such as Hume understood that the improbability of
life did not mean it had to be designed, but they couldn't imagine the
alternative. After Darwin, we all should feel, deep in our bones,
suspicious of the very idea of design. The illusion of design is a trap
that has caught us before, and Darwin should have immunized us by
raising our consciousness. Would that he had succeeded with all of us.

NATURAL
SELECTION AS A CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISER

In a
science-fiction starship, the astronauts were homesick: 'Just to think
that it's springtime back on Earth!' You may not immediately see
what's wrong with this, so deeply ingrained is the unconscious northern
hemisphere chauvinism in those of us who live there, and even some who
don't. 'Unconscious' is exactly right. That is where
consciousness-raising comes in. It is for a deeper reason than gimmicky
fun that, in Australia and New Zealand, you can buy maps of the world
with the South Pole on top. What splendid consciousness-raisers those
maps would be, pinned to the walls of our northern hemisphere
classrooms. Day after day, the children would be reminded that 'north'
is an arbitrary polarity which has no monopoly on 'up'. The map would
intrigue them as well as raise their consciousness. They'd go home and
tell their parents - and, by the way, giving children something with
which to surprise their parents is one of the greatest gifts a teacher
can bestow.

It
was the feminists who raised my consciousness of the power of
consciousness-raising. 'Herstory' is obviously ridiculous, if only
because the 'his' in 'history' has no etymological connection with the
masculine pronoun. It is as etymologically silly as the sacking, in
1999, of a Washington official whose use of 'niggardly' was held to
give racial offence. But even daft examples like 'niggardly' or
'herstory' succeed in raising consciousness. Once we have smoothed our
philological hackles and stopped laughing, herstory shows us history
from a different point of view. Gendered pronouns notoriously are the
front line of such consciousness-raising. He or she must ask himself or
herself whether his or her sense of style could ever allow himself or
herself to write like this. But if we can just get over the clunking
infelicity of the language, it raises our consciousness to the
sensitivities of half the human race. Man, mankind, the Rights of Man,
all men are created equal, one man one vote - English too often seems
to exclude woman.* When I was young, it never occurred to me that women
might feel slighted by a phrase like 'the future of man'. During the
intervening decades, we have all had our consciousness raised. Even
those who still use 'man' instead of 'human' do so with an air of
self-conscious apology - or truculence, taking a stand for traditional
language, even deliberately to rile feminists. All participants in the
Zeitgeist
have
had their consciousness raised, even those who choose to respond
negatively by digging in their heels and redoubling the offence.

*
Classical Latin and Greek were better equipped. Latin
homo
(Greek
antbropo-)
means human, as
opposed to
vir (andro-)
which means man, and
femina
(gyne-)
which means woman. Thus anthropology pertains to all
humanity, where androl-ogy and gynecology are sexually exclusive
branches of medicine.

Feminism
shows us the power of consciousness-raising, and I want to borrow the
technique for natural selection. Natural selection not only explains
the whole of life; it also raises our consciousness to the power of
science to explain how organized complexity can emerge from simple
beginnings without any deliberate guidance. A full understanding of
natural selection encourages us to move boldly into other fields. It
arouses our suspicion, in those other fields, of the kind of false
alternatives that once, in pre-Darwinian days, beguiled biology. Who,
before Darwin, could have guessed that something so apparently
designed
as a dragonfly's wing or an eagle's eye was really the end
product of a long sequence of non-random but purely natural causes?

Douglas
Adams's moving and funny account of his own conversion to radical
atheism - he insisted on the 'radical' in case anybody should mistake
him for an agnostic - is testimony to the power of Darwinism as a
consciousness-raiser. I hope I shall be forgiven the self-indulgence
that will become apparent in the following quotation. My excuse is that
Douglas's conversion by my earlier books - which did not set out to
convert anyone - inspired me to dedicate to his memory this book -
which does! In an interview, reprinted posthumously in
The
Salmon of Doubt,
he was asked by a journalist how he became
an atheist. He began his reply by explaining how he became an agnostic,
and then proceeded:

And
I thought and thought and thought. But I just didn't have enough to go
on, so I didn't really come to any resolution. I was extremely doubtful
about the idea of god, but I just didn't know enough about anything to
have a good working model of any other explanation for, well, life, the
universe, and everything to put in its place. But I kept at it, and I
kept reading and I kept thinking. Sometime around my early thirties I
stumbled upon evolutionary biology, particularly in the form of Richard
Dawkins's books
The Selfish Gene
and then
The
Blind Watchmaker,
and suddenly (on, I think the second
reading
of
The Selfish Gene)
it all fell into place. It
was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally,
to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it
inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of
religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I'd take the awe
of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.
⁵⁹

The
concept of stunning simplicity that he was talking about was, of
course, nothing to do with me. It was Darwin's theory of evolution by
natural selection - the ultimate scientific consciousness-raiser.
Douglas, I miss you. You are my cleverest, funniest, most open-minded,
wittiest, tallest, and possibly only convert. I hope this book might
have made you laugh - though not as much as you made me.

That
scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that
evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: '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.'
⁶⁰
Darwin's
discovery of a workable process that does that very counterintuitive
thing is what makes his contribution to human thought so revolutionary,
and so loaded with the power to raise consciousness.

It
is surprising how necessary such consciousness-raising is, even in the
minds of excellent scientists in fields other than biology. Fred Hoyle
was a brilliant physicist and cosmologist, but his Boeing 747
misunderstanding, and other mistakes in biology such as his attempt to
dismiss the fossil
Archaeopteryx
as a hoax,
suggest that he needed to have his consciousness raised by some good
exposure to the world of natural selection. At an intellectual level, I
suppose he understood natural selection. But perhaps you need to be
steeped in natural selection, immersed in it, swim about in it, before
you can truly appreciate its power.