David Berlinski - The Devil's Delusion

And the third rejects the temptation on the grounds that “the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.” A variant of this argument has been known for a very long time.

“I venture to ask,” the Chinese sage Kuo Hsiang ventured to ask in the third century A.D., “whether the Creator is or is not. If He is not, how can He create things? And if He is, then (being one of those things), He is incapable (without self-creation) of creating the mass of bodily forms.”

This argument is exquisite because it is short.

Persuaded that God does not exist, Richard Dawkins might have quoted Kuo Hsiang and left matters there.

As it happens, Dawkins presents his argument in the first two pages of chapter 4 of his book and summarizes it in the chapter’s last two pages. The material in between—some forty pages—is given over to the “consciousness raising” that contemplation of natural selection is said to evoke. In all this, Dawkins has failed only to explain his reasoning, and I am left with the considerable inconvenience of establishing his argument before rejecting it.

As a public figure and so a character in debate, Richard Dawkins may be found in the dead zone marking the intersection of a child’s question—“Who made God?”—and what the classicist R. R. Bolgar called “the peculiar debris of an abandoned and virtually forgotten science.” Although discussing rhetoric, Bolgar could well have been describing theology. The zone is dead because the questions it encourages are unanswerable. This hardly means that they are insignificant. Childish questions have their point, and in the case of God’s existence, their point is to place in doubt some of the intellectual maneuvers by which His existence is affirmed.

Doubt is very much a matter of temperament. It is rarely encouraged (or displaced) by argument. For certain temperaments, the existence of the universe is a mystery, one that gnaws irritably at the soul. Why is the damn thing there? The thought that it is there for no good reason is said by some to spoil their enjoyment of life. In time taken from writing, hunting, estate management, and fornication, Leo Tolstoy very often expressed sentiments such as this. Like Levin in Anna Karenina, he was widely regarded as a pest for doing so. On the other hand, a great many men and women take the universe in stride, and if they are disposed to ask why it is there, they are easily pleased with the answer that the physicist (and Nobel laureate) Frank Wilczek insouciantly offered: “The universe,” he wrote, “appears to be just one of those things.” A willingness to let the matter rest in this way is a characteristic of individuals that William James described as “healthy-minded”—another way of describing them as thick.

Of course, if physicists can believe that the universe is just one of those things, then believers can affirm that God is just one of those things as well.

To the question of why believers should not stop with the universe, there is only the counterquestion of why physicists should not proceed further to God.

I mention these points to stress what should be obvious: Questions arising in the dead zone are a matter of temperament. A religious instinct is universal: It arises in every human being—hence the popular observation that there are no atheists in foxholes. But whether an instinct is allowed to progress toward frank affirmation, or whether it is denied and then discarded—these are not issues that answer to any obvious claims of argument.

This is one reason the dead zone is dead.

If God did not create the world, then what is His use? And if He did, then what is His explanation? A child’s question has given way to an adult’s dilemma. A God too indisposed to do the work of creation is fated to drift into irrelevance, if only because His demand for adoration would be considerably out of line with His record of accomplishment. But if God did create the world, the problem that God is designed to solve reappears as a problem about God Himself.

It is this destructive dilemma that Dawkins calls the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. The appeal to a Boeing 747 is meant to evoke a lighthearted quip attributed to the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. The spontaneous emergence of life on earth, Hoyle observed, is about as likely as a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747 out of the debris. Although an atheist, Hoyle was skeptical about Darwin’s theory of evolution, and Dawkins passionate in its defense. Since the junkyard expresses with rare economy precisely the odds favoring the spontaneous appearance of life—they are remarkably prohibitive on virtually every calculation—it has been an irritation to Dawkins ever since it made its appearance. With their consciousness unraised, a great many people have evidently concluded that when it comes to the origins of life, the junkyard is all that they need.

But, Dawkins affirms, if a tornado cannnot do the job of creating life, then God cannot do the job of creating the universe. The tornado is inadequate because life is improbable, and God is inadequate for the same reason. This counterstroke has persuaded Dawkins that he has initiated an intellectual maneuver judo-like in its purity of effect and devastating in its consequences. The Ultimate 747 gambit, Dawkins writes, “comes close to proving that God does not exist” (italics added). Fred Hoyle’s death before he could appreciate the extent of his discomfiture Dawkins no doubt regards as a display of peevish irresponsibility.

Although Dawkins writes with quiet confidence about what he intends to do, which is to give the Deity a thrashing, and then, having thrashed him, writes again about what he has done, what he is doing is rather less clear.

At times, Dawkins asserts that God is an irrelevance because He has been assigned the task of constructing a universe that is improbable. If the universe is improbable, “it is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable.” Why an improbable universe demands an improbable God, Dawkins does not say and I do not know.

There are other passages in The God Delusion of more analytic refinement. In these, Dawkins extends a convivial pseudo-pod toward the concepts of complexity and information. Under the influence of these concepts, Dawkins often writes that unless God is Himself complex, He is bound to be inadequate to account for the complexity of the universe. The very same observation he sometimes makes in terms of information. If Dawkins is casual about these concepts to the point of slackness, it is because he believes that whether his argument is expressed in terms of information or complexity, God will emerge with His irrelevance undiminished.

The 747 gambit, although hardly a model of fastidiousness, conveys a beefy impression of authority, so much so that scientists who never once thought seriously about issues of religion at once wondered why they did not think of it themselves. Having not thought of it at all, they often appear to have thought of it after all. Publishing his thoughts in Gene (of all places!), the distinguished molecular geneticist Emile Zuckerkandl has argued that the Deity, if He exists, would represent “something like a pathology of the state of being.” I had very much hoped that after beginning with pathology, Zuckerkandl would continue to some form of exciting degeneracy, but it was not to be; what Zuckerkandl in the end does offer is homegrown but homeopathic, a dilute solution of the 747 gambit. His target is very much theories of intelligent design. Designating the intelligent designer as the Higher Intelligence, he writes that “if complexity is a problem for naturalistic explanations, the Higher Intelligence itself is first to have to face this problem. Intelligent Design thus does not solve any problem posed by complexity; it only transposes the origins of complexity from the observable to an unobservable world and makes these origins inaccessible to inquiry.”