What Was That Argument Again?

KEVIN HARRIS: Welcome once again to Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. I’m Kevin Harris. It wasn’t that long ago that we talked about the tenth anniversary of Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion. The book is still making an impact on popular culture, so perhaps you need a refresher on what the central argument of Dawkins’ book is. What’s the bottom line? Here’s a spoiler alert – the central argument of Dawkins’ book is not a very good one. I’ll leave that up to you to decide. It might be the case, however, that in causal conversation the argument comes up, and you’d like to address it intelligently. Today, we’ll check out Dr. Craig addressing the basics of Dawkins’ argument. What is Richard Dawkins’ argument? After an initial introduction, the argument is spelled out in a voice over presentation, and then Dr. Craig continues his response.

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DR. CRAIG: In recent years we’ve seen a surging new movement in Western culture that's been called the New Atheism. What distinguishes the New Atheism from the old traditional atheism seems to be that the New Atheists are not content simply to eliminate religion from the public square but rather they are set on the elimination of religious belief entirely, period. Certainly the enfant terrible of the New Atheism has been Richard Dawkins, who's professor of biology at Oxford University who has written a best-selling book called The God Delusion. What we're going to do is look at what Dawkins calls “the central argument of my book” which is summarized on pages 157 and 158. If this argument fails it means that at the heart of Dawkins’ book – at the heart of his case – is basically a vacuum, a void, because this argument constitutes the centerpiece of his case against God.

VOICE OVER: This chapter has contained the central argument of the book, and so, at the risk of sounding repetitive, let’s summarize it as a series of six numbered points.

1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.

2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.

3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a 'crane', not a 'skyhook', for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.

4. The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that - an illusion.

5. We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with.

6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.

If the argument of this chapter is accepted, the factual premise of religion - the God Hypothesis - is untenable. God almost certainly does not exist.

DR. CRAIG: Now, this argument is jarring because the conclusion –  therefore God almost certainly does not exist – comes at you out of left field without seemingly any preparation for it in the argument. You don't need to be a philosopher to realize that that conclusion doesn't follow from the six previous statements even if they're true. In fact, if we take these six statements as premises supposedly implying the conclusion, Therefore God almost certainly does not exist, then the argument is just patently invalid. There are no rules of logic that would permit you to draw that conclusion validly from those six premises.

So perhaps a more charitable interpretation of Dawkins’ argument would be to take these six statements not as premises in an argument but simply as summary statements of the six steps in Dawkins’ cumulative case for the conclusion that God does not exist. But even on this more charitable construal, it remains the case that the conclusion, Therefore God almost certainly does not exist, just doesn't follow from these six steps. Even if you concede that every one of them is true and justified, it doesn't follow that God doesn't exist.

What does follow from these six steps of Dawkins’ argument? At most all that follows is that we shouldn't infer God's existence on the basis of the appearance of design in the universe. In other words we shouldn't believe in God's existence on the basis of design in the universe. But, of course, that conclusion is quite compatible with God's existence or even with justifiably believing in God's existence. Maybe we should believe in God's existence on the basis of a cosmological argument or an ontological argument for God's existence or a moral argument for God's existence. Maybe our belief in God isn't based on arguments at all! Maybe it's grounded in religious experience or based on divine revelation. Maybe God wants us to believe in him simply on the basis of faith alone. The point is that rejecting design arguments for God's existence does nothing to prove that God does not exist nor even to prove that belief in God is unjustified. In fact, many Christian theologians have rejected arguments for God's existence without thereby thinking that they've committed themselves to atheism.

So the argument is a failure, it seems to me, even if we concede for the sake of charity all of its six steps. It simply doesn't lead to the conclusion that God doesn't exist or that belief in God is unjustified. At most it shows that we shouldn't believe in God on the basis of a design argument or inference.

But, in fact, I think that's conceding too much. It seems to me that several of the steps in this argument are plausibly false. For example, five and six. When Dawkins is talking about an equivalent explanation for physics, what he's referring to there is the extraordinary fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe for life. Scientists in recent years have been stunned to discover that the existence of life anywhere in the cosmos depends upon a complex and delicately balanced set of initial conditions simply given in the Big Bang. This is often called the fine-tuning of the universe for life, and will be the subject of my lecture later this afternoon. But that's what he's admitting here in five – we don't have anything comparable to Darwinian evolution as a theory for explaining the fine-tuning of the universe for life. So even if Darwinism succeeds in explaining the appearance of biological complexity, he says that does nothing to explain the fine-tuning of the universe which is required for life to exist at all. But six says we shouldn't give up hope for finding something comparable to Darwinism in physics. Well, that will be the subject of what I want to talk about this afternoon, so I'll just leave that aside. But, again, it seems to me that five and six are plausibly false. They're certainly not clearly true.

But more importantly take step three, for example. Step three says the temptation to attribute the appearance of design to design itself is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. Dawkins’ claim here is that you're not justified in inferring design as the best explanation for the complex order in the universe because then a new problem arises immediately, namely who designed the designer, and therefore the design inference fails.

It seems to me that Dawkins’ rejoinder here is flawed on at least two counts. First of all, in order to recognize an explanation is the best you don't have to have an explanation of the explanation. This is a very elementary point in philosophy of science concerning inference to the best explanation. For example, if archaeologists digging in the earth were to discover artifacts resembling tomahawks and arrowheads and pottery shards, they would certainly be justified in inferring that these were not the result of the chance processes of sedimentation and metamorphosis but were rather the products of intelligent design. They were crafted by intelligent agents, and that explanation would be the best even if they had absolutely no idea who these people were or where they came from. Or, again, imagine that astronauts going to the moon were to discover on the dark side of the moon a pile of machinery on the moon. Clearly they would be justified in inferring that this is the result of some sort of intelligent agency, perhaps extraterrestrial intelligent life, and that inference would be the best even if they had no explanation whatsoever of who these agents were or where they came from or how they got to the backside of the moon. So, in order to recognize an explanation as the best explanation you don't need to have an explanation of the explanation.

In fact, requiring that you have to have an explanation of the explanation obviously immediately leads to an infinite regress because then you would need an explanation of the explanation of the explanation, and so on to infinity, so that nothing could ever be explained and science would be destroyed. So, ironically, this principle that Dawkins seems to assume here or embrace would actually be destructive of science itself.

So in the case at hand, in order to recognize that intelligent design is the best explanation of the appearance of design in the universe you don't need to be able to explain the designer.

Second point, however: Dawkins thinks that in the case of a divine designer of the universe the designer is just as complex as the thing to be explained so that no advance in explanation is made. This objection raises all sorts of difficult questions about the role played by simplicity in assessing scientific explanations. Simplicity is just one of the criteria that scientists use in assessing competing hypotheses. Even more important than simplicity will be things like explanatory power, or, for example, explanatory scope. There will also be things like the degree of ad-hocness (the degree to which this is contrived or artificial), its plausibility, and so forth. Simplicity is just one of an array of criteria that must be balanced against each other in order to assess competing hypotheses. Some hypothesis may be less simple than another but have much greater explanatory scope or explanatory power and therefore be preferable despite its being less simple. You cannot simply dismiss a hypothesis on the grounds of simplicity without weighing it in conjunction with these other criteria.

But let's leave those questions aside. I think the more fundamental mistake that Dawkins makes is his assumption that a divine designer is just as complex as the contingent universe, and I think that's clearly false. As an unembodied mind, God is a remarkably simple entity. As a non-physical entity, a mind is incredibly simple because it has no parts. A mind isn't composed of different parts to be a composition. And as for the salient properties of a mind, things like self-consciousness, rationality, and volition – well, those are essential to a mind. A mind could not lack those properties and still be a mind. So, in contrast to the contingent and variegated universe with all its different properties and constants and quantities and inexplicable appearances of design, a divine mind is startlingly simple. Certainly, such a mind may have complex ideas. That's true. This mind might be contemplating the infinitesimal calculus which is a very complex idea. But the mind itself is a very simple entity being an immaterial entity not composed of parts. Dawkins has, I think, evidently confused a mind’s ideas (which may be very complex) with a mind itself, which is really an incredibly simple entity. Therefore, postulating a divine mind behind the variegated and contingent universe most certainly does represent a considerable advance in the simplicity of one's explanation, for whatever that might be worth.

Other steps in Dawkins’ argument, I think, are also problematic. I’ll be addressing those further this afternoon. But I think enough has been said at this point to show that this argument does nothing to undermine a design inference based upon the universe's complexity, and it certainly doesn't serve as any sort of justification for atheism. It does nothing to prove that God does not exist, and therefore it does seem to me that at the very center of Dawkins’ book there is a void. The book really collapses into this void that is taken by this clearly fallacious and invalid argument.[1]