Pamphlet

It's time for some edutainment! (Although realisitically very few, if any, will find what follows either educational or entertaining.) Now that I've disposed with the opening thrust, we can proceed. Someone found a pamphlet on the street from some religious center or other which outlined a kind of Argument from Design. Normally, I take the pamphlet and sneer. But today I thought, in the interests of intellectual honesty, I'd make explicit the reasons I sneer. So I will present the pamphlet in its entirety, with running commentary.

"Suppose you find a watch in the middle of a desert. What would you conclude? Would you think that someone dropped this watch? Or would you suppose that the watch came by itself?"

This opens into an argumentation style called an intuition pump, arguing from analogy. But this is just the preamble.

"Of course no sane person would say that the watch just happened to emerge from the sand. All the intricate working parts could not simply develop from the metals that lay buried in the earth. The watch must have a manufacturer."

Of course. I wonder where this is going. The use of the word "sane" seems a bit perjorative, but I'll let that go.

"But what else tells accurate time? Consider the sunrise and sunset. Their timings are so strictly regulated that scientists can publish in advance the sunrise and sunset times in your daily newspapers. But who regulates the timings of sunrise and sunset? If a watch cannot work without an intelligent maker, how can the sun appear to rise and set with such clockework regularity? Could this occur by itself?"

Yes. If we accept for a second that something cannot come from nothing (in my mind I find this too simplistic, but let's run with it.), then your creator needs a creator. And that creator needs a creator. Where do we stop the regress? Is it turtles all the way down? It seems more parsimonious to postulate so-called brute existence at some point. Where shall we put that? Does the "creator" exist brutely? Or does the universe exist brutely? I propose the universe is more likely to exist brutely. Why? Well ,then we can avoid questions like: if there is an intelligent designer, why are there so many examples of sub-optimal design in all aspects of the universe? I'll take the astronomical view. Why do comets crash into Jupiter if the system is so perfectly in balance? Why do stars burn out? Why have there been six mass extinctions on Earth, most likely caused by astronomical collisions? By refusing to accept the premise implicit in the rhetorical question there is no need to go through the rest of the argument, but I will anyway.

"Consider also that we benefit from the sun only because it remains at a safe distance from the Earth, a distance that averages 93 million miles. If it got too much closer the Earth would burn up. and if it got too far away the Earth would turn into an icy planet making human life here impossible. Who decided in advance that this was the right distance. Could this hapen by chance?"

This is the Anthropic argument for design, stating that the parameters of the universe are too finely calibrated to have happened by chance. Apart from stretching the analogy even more, the argument now veers into biology , which is where we can pick it apart. What always irks me about these arguments is that they gloss over the fact that life is inherently opportunistic. Without getting into the details of evolutionary theory (which I can argue endlessly, if you so wish), it is safe to say that evolution is a bottom-up process. Looking at ti from this point of view, we can say that the existence of life does not explan the exstence of (near)-optimal conditions for life, but the existence of near-optimal conditions explains why there is life here, as opposed to, say, Mercury. It's a curious inversion of reasoning that often goes undetected. It ptems, of course, from the premise that something must have designed the universe. That's a circular argument, however. The argument uses the existence of life to assume near-optimal conditions for the existence of life, and then uses those near-optimal conditions to explain life. Hmm. Very sneaky. We go on.

"Without the sun plants could not grow. Then animals and humans would starve. Did the sun just decide to be there for us?"

Of course it didn't.

The rays of the sun would be dangerous for us had it not been for the protective ozone layer in our atmosphere. The atmosphere around the Earth keeps the harmful ultraviolet rays from reaching us. Who was it that placed this shield around us?"

I'm getting tired of answering these rhetorical questions. Consider this: if the creator is capable of placing a protective shield around our planet (presumably because She loves us), why doesn't She use that pretty awesome-tastic power to feed the 30,000 Africans who die of malnutrition every single day? Or to stop El Nino? Or to allwo humans to synthesize vitamic C like most animals? Or to stop debilitating genetic abnormalities caused by those same ultraviolet rays?

"We need to experience sunrise. We need the sun's energy and its light to see our way during the day. But we also need sunset. We need a break from the heat, we need the cool of the night and we need the cool of the night and we need the lights to go out so we can sleep. Who regulated this process to provide what we need?"

Except in polar regions where there is no sunrise and sunset. But again we see the inversion of reasoning. Why is visible light only a small band on the electromagentic spectrum? I actually found this quite fascinating. Visible light (of wavelength of about 700-350 nm) is a region of the EM spectrum that is not absorbed by water. Life evolved in the oceans. And the EM spectrum is a great way to get information about the world. Light-sensitivity is widely spread on the tree of life, and eye-like structures have independently arisen at least three times. An eye is an incredibly intricate thing, and the costs and odds against its evolution were huge. Except that it did not happen by chance. The payoff would have been huge and the process of natural selection would have favoured the eye-enabled individuals in a major way. But I'm straying off topic. This could not have occurred to someone who accepts the creator. I don't and I find nothing inconsistent in my position. (You are free to disagree; I do feel as if I'm giving short shrift to a number of very interesting controversies.)

"Moreover, if we had only the warmth of sun and the protection of the atmosphere we would want something more--beauty. Our clothes provide warmth and protection, yet we designe them to look beautiful. Knowing our need for beauty, the designer of sunrise and sunset also made the view of them to be simply breathtaking."

I agree with everything that was said, except the part about the creator--obviously. Look, I'm not a machine-head. Beauty is hugely important in my life. But it is at least plausible to explain beauty in a non-trivial way. A friend of muine suggested this long ago: "when you look at a valley, or a forest, or the colours of the clouds, or light seeping in through cloud cover, a part of you buried deep under your sophisitcated, rational brain is saying "you can survive here!"". And this should not, indeed cannot, take anything away from the "wow!" experience.

The creator who gave us light, energy, protection and beauty deserves our thanks. Yet some people insist that [She] (paraphrase mine) does not exist. What would they think if they found a watch in the desert? An accurate, working watch? A beautifully designed watch? Would they not conclude that there exists a watchmaker? An intelligent watchmaker? One who appreciates beauty? Such is God who made us."

The watch analogy doesn't really hold up. Why? Well, to begin with, the watch does not reproduce. The watch is not subject to selection. But I won't take that up here. Seeing as the writer ended with an eloquent (though vague) appeal to our emotions, so I shall end.

We do not look around ourselves and find a watch. We find complexity; we find chaos and turbulence. Can you compute the trajectory of a ten-dollar bill thrown off a balcony on an even mildly windy day? Can the most brillain physicist? What is amazing is that in this world of uncertaintly and change, we manage to persist, to endure. In you is the combined weight of the good decisions of all your ancestors, the wisdom of your body and the wisdom of your intelligence. This is what carved out our place and what allows us to hope and live life in a disaffected universe. We share our voyage into the unknown with all life on this planet. We were throwin into it; we did not decide to live. But most of us accept it. Creators have always been comfort zones and repudiations of our vast cosmic responsibility. I ask you this, for the sake of your life, your morals, whatever progeny you decide to leave: would you cower under the awning when you wish to dance in the rai? Be not created, be a creator!

Consider: "After all that: Voidness."