David Berlinski - The Devil's Delusion

These are words that display a somewhat Teutonic sternness in attitude. Less demanding critics might observe that shoveling problems backward until they are out of sight is not only the tactic of common sense but the only tactic in common use. When scientists appeal to various unobservable entities—universal forces, grand symmetries, twice-differential functions as in mechanics, Calabi-Yau manifolds, ionic bonds, or quantum fields—the shovel is in plain sight, but what is to be shoveled is nowhere to be seen. Why physicists should enjoy inferential advantages denied theologians, Zuckerkandl does not say.

The difficulty with these arguments—they form a genre—is that they endeavor to reconcile two incompatible tendencies in order to force a dilemma. On the one hand, there is the claim that the universe is improbable; on the other, the claim that God made the universe. Considered jointly, these claims form an unnatural union. Probabilities belong to the world in which things happen because they might, creation to the world in which things happen because they must. We explain creation by appealing to creators, whether deities or the inflexible laws of nature. We explain what is chancy by appealing to chance. We cannot do both. If God did make the world, it is not improbable. If it is improbable, then God did not make it. The best we could say is that God made a world that would be improbable had it been produced by chance.

But it wasn’t, and so He didn’t.

This is a discouraging first step in an argument said to come close to proving that God does not exist.

Let us say that Dawkins is quite right. God is improbable. The proposition is on the table. It is up for grabs.

What then follows?

Oddly enough, almost nothing. I say “oddly enough” because the thesis that God’s existence is improbable is the cornerstone of Dawkins’s argument and so an easement to his atheism. But atheists have traditionally been concerned not to push too vigorously on their own suspicions by presenting them in a way that owes too much to probability. The stuff—probability, I mean—is notoriously unstable.

The inference that Dawkins proposes to champion has as its premise the claim that God is improbable; its conclusion is that likely God does not exist. The inferential bridge invoked by the 747 gambit, if it goes anywhere at all, goes from what God is (He is unlikely) to whether He exists (it would appear not). Inferences of this sort are typically not deductive: they do not impart certainty to their conclusions. A deductive inference carries conviction straight on down. All men are mortal. Premise One. Socrates is a man. Premise Two. And the conclusion. Socrates is mortal. Given the premises, the conclusion is incontestable.

The attempt to shoehorn inferences hinging on likelihood into deductive form ends in disaster. An example? Judging by how Emile writes, it is likely that his native language is German. Premise One. Judging by where Emile lives, it is likely that his native language is English. Premise Two. Whatever conclusions may be drawn from the circumstances of Emile’s prose and his residence, they are not deductive. Otherwise, the result would be a contradiction, Emile afflicted with at least two native languages, and possibly more. It may well be—I am supposing—that certain considerations make God’s existence unlikely. Other considerations might make his existence likely. If both considerations are deductively controlling, the result is a form of logical chaos. The inference Dawkins champions cannot prove anything about God’s existence, and if it cannot prove anything about God’s existence, it cannot come close to proving anything either.

There is next the explosion that results when improbability and existence are foolishly mingled. In this regard it is curious that having declared God’s existence unlikely in virtue of His improbability, Dawkins never once considers that by parity of reasoning he could well have concluded that the existence of the universe is unlikely in virtue of its improbability. Unlikely is unlikely, as logicians say, never adding, of course, that if the universe is unlikely there is the slightest reason to suppose that it does not exist. Nonetheless, the assumption that the universe is improbable is the gravamen of the 747 gambit. It is indispensable.

The fact is that unlikely events do occur. They simply do not occur often. It is as difficult, the Bible recounts, for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as it is for him to pass through the eye of a needle; and if it is that difficult, I suppose it is that improbable. And yet some rich men manage. I might by this reasoning at least anticipate meeting King Farouk in the hereafter, where, having squeezed himself through the eye of that needle, he may be found enjoying the celestial gaming tables. It could happen. As quantum theorists never tire of reminding us, what could happen sooner or later will happen.

What holds for Farouk might well hold for the Deity.

Having brought the universe into existence, He might simply be improbable. It is just one of those things for which we have no further explanation.

This is not a conclusion that the soul on fire to know God will necessarily find discouraging. But if we have no further explanation for the existence of the Deity, we nonetheless do by this means have an explanation for the existence of the universe. It is this: In the beginning God created the heaven and earth.

Arguments trading on probability, I have suggested, are unstable. Like certain women, they go off at the worst possible moments. The theory of probability is in the business of assigning numbers to events. The theory assumes explicitly what everyone ordinarily takes for granted, and that is that if events are assigned probabilities, they are determined by means of a random process. An improbable God must thus be improbable in virtue of the process that controls his probability. Just which random process is designed to yield the Deity as a possible outcome? It is by no means easy to say, which is one reason, I suppose, that on this subject, Dawkins says nothing at all.

Whatever the process, the probabilities it reveals depend on the way they are described. Events that are improbable over the short term become probable and even certain over the long term, as when, typing randomly in solitude, a single monkey—a great ape in virtue of accomplishments to come—re-creates Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with every comma in place and variant spellings noted. No one expects this prodigy to finish up quickly, of course, which is another way of saying that it all depends.

An improbable God, denied access to Being over the short term, may find himself clambering into existence over a term that is long. But having failed to control the circumstances by which God’s probability is assigned, Dawkins has also neglected to mention how long those circumstances have been in operation. We are thus free to imagine some infernal cosmic experiment involving dice whose clatter is intended to evoke deities, with each round failing to elicit the Deity, until God finally appears, brimming with enthusiasm and ready to create the universe. So far as God is concerned, after all, He has all the time in the world.

It all depends, of course.

When expressed as Dawkins expresses it, the Ultimate 747 gambit explodes and then gutters out inconclusively. But often arguments of this sort carry with them a shadow, one prepared in a pinch to take over from the main character. In the case of the 747 gambit, the shadow is given over to meditations concerning the structure of rational explanations. It is an important topic, and one that Dawkins is prepared to cover in the cloak of his carelessness.