Of all the many reasons people give for theistic belief, the argument from statistical improbability is the one I meet by far the most often. Frequently, as I said, it goes with a naive mathematical calculation of the stupendous odds against something as complex as an eye or a haemoglobin molecule coming into existence ‘by chance’. It also extends to the idea of the Big Bang as the origin of all things. Here are a couple of examples from a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet, and they are entirely typical of the genre:
Imagine that someone told you that there was an explosion at a printing plant and that the ink spattered onto the walls and ceilings and formed an unabridged dictionary. Would you believe it? How much more unbelievable is it that everything in the orderly universe came about as a result of a random big bang?
If you were walking through the forest and discovered a beautiful log cabin, would you think: ‘How fascinating! The trees must have fallen in just the right way to make this house.’ Of course not! It’s just not reasonable. So why should we believe that everything in the universe just happened to come about?
I have to confess that this kind of thing frustrates me and sometimes provokes me to an impatience which I (only slightly) regret. This is for three reasons. First, if it were really true that the odds stacked against a naturalistic explanation of apparent design really were monumental on this scale, outnumbering the atoms in the universe, only an equally monumental fool would fall for it. I hate to descend to an argument from authority, but is it too much to ask that this might perhaps arouse a little inkling of a misgiving in the mind of the creationist? Isn’t it worth at least a fleeting thought that those who trot out these gigantic improbabilities might, just conceivably, have missed the point? Scientists get things wrong sometimes. They seldom get things wrong by 80 orders of magnitude.
My second reason for irritation is that the ‘argument against blind chance’ misses so much of real value, mainly the spectacular power and elegance of science, epitomized by Darwin’s theory. Supremely powerful yet supremely simple, it really is one of the most beautiful ideas ever to occur to a human mind, and the uninitiated are missing it. Worse, if they thrust their misunderstanding on children they are denying children that beauty, the beauty of intellectual consummation.
And, third, the argument from statistical improbability (or complexity) is irritating because the astronomical odds against complexity arising by blind chance are simply a restatement of the problem that must be solved by any theory of existence, whether it is the Big Bang, or evolution, or the God theory. Anybody can see that the answer to the riddle of existence cannot be blind chance, or sudden springing into existence from nothing. This is especially true in the case of life, because the illusion of design there is so stunningly persuasive. The problem is to find the alternative to blind chance. The improbability of life is precisely the problem we need to solve. The God theory conspicuously doesn’t solve it: merely restates it. Natural selection, being gradual and cumulative, solves the problem and is probably the only process that could solve it. It is clearly futile to try to solve the problem of life’s complexity by postulating another complex entity called God. The same applies, albeit less obviously, to the problem of cosmological origins. The more the creationist piles on the statistical improbability, the more he shoots himself in the foot.
The God delusion
That point, about the statistical improbability of apparent design, pervades The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable, and I nominated it explicitly as the central argument of The God Delusion (it is, of course, not original). The publication of the latter book led to a large number of alleged replies to the point about God being complex and therefore no solution to the riddle of complexity. The replies are all the same and all equally weak. They can be summed up in one sentence: ‘God is not complex but simple.’ How do we know? Because theologians say so, and they’re the authorities on God, are they not? Easy. Win the argument by fiat! But you cannot have it both ways. Either God is simple, in which case he doesn’t have the knowledge and design skills to provide the explanation of complexity that we seek. Or he is complex, in which case he needs explaining in his own right, no less than the complexity that he is being invoked to explain. The simpler you make your god, the less qualified he is to explain the complexity of the world. And the more complex you make him, the more does he require an explanation in his own right.
Peter Atkins dramatized the point in his beautifully written Creation Revisited, where he postulated a ‘lazy god’ and then, step by step, whittled down what the lazy god would need to do in order to make the universe we see. He concluded that the lazy god would need to do so little he might as well not bother to exist at all. As for granting God the complex supplementary skills he is supposed to deploy – listening to the thoughts of seven billion people simultaneously (not to mention conversing with dead ones too), answering their prayers, forgiving their sins, meting out posthumous punishment or reward, saving some cancer patients but not others – that only adds to the problem, and in a big way.
Darwinian evolution uniquely solves the problem of life’s statistical improbability, because it works cumulatively and gradually. It really does broker a legitimate traverse from primordial simplicity to eventual complexity – and it is the only known theory capable of doing so. Human engineers can make complex things by design, but the whole point is that human engineers need to be explained too, and evolution by natural selection explains them at the same time as it explains the rest of life.
Of course, there’s much more in The God Delusion than the central argument about statistical improbability. There are passages on the evolutionary origins of religion, on the roots of morality, on the literary value of religious scriptures, on religious child abuse and many other things. I like to think it’s a humorous and humane book, far from the angry and strident polemic that is sometimes alleged. Some of the humour is satire, even ridicule, and it’s true that the targets of such humour often have a hard time distinguishing good-natured ridicule from hate speech. One of the things I learned from Peter Medawar is that precisely aimed satirical ridicule is not the same thing as vulgar abuse (see also page 432 below). Nevertheless, religiously motivated critics often seem incapable of seeing the difference. One even suspected me of Tourette’s Syndrome, though it is hard to believe he had read the book – he probably just fell in love with his own simile!
Given the level of vitriol visited on this book, it is quite surprising that, in all my hundreds of public appearances, including many in the so-called ‘Bible Belt’ of the United States, I have hardly ever experienced any heckling of any sort to my face, indeed, scarcely ever been subjected to any critical questioning. This is actually quite a disappointment, for I have found myself enjoying the rare exceptions – in particular the occasion when I was invited to lecture at Randolph Macon Women’s College in Virginia (they now take men too). Randolph Macon is a decent liberal arts college, with high standards. But Liberty ‘University’, founded by the infamous Jerry Falwell, is in the same town, and a substantial busload from Liberty came across and occupied the front row of the lecture theatre at Randolph Macon. They monopolized the question and answer session, lining up in a body behind the microphones in the two aisles. Their questions were courteous to a fault, but all were frankly motivated by fundamentalist Christianity, profession of which is an entrance requirement imposed by that ‘university’. I had, of course, no difficulty in disposing of each one in turn, to cheers from the Randolph Macon women. One questioner began by telling us that Liberty University possesses a dinosaur fossil labelled as three thousand years old. He asked me to explain how they might go about demonstrating the true age of such a fossil.1 I explained that fossils are dated by several different radioactive clocks, running at very different speeds, and all independently agree that dinosaurs are no less than 65 million years old. I added:
If it’s really true that the museum of Liberty University has a dinosaur fossil which is labelled as bein
g 3000 years old, then that is an educational disgrace. It is debauching the whole idea of a university, and I would strongly encourage any members of Liberty University who may be here to leave and go to a proper university.
That got the biggest cheer of the evening – because Randolph Macon is a proper university. Another of the questions that evening, ‘What if you’re wrong?’ (Google it), together with my answer, has gone viral.
The only hostile heckling I have experienced was in Oklahoma where, in an enormous sports stadium, one man stood up in the middle of my speech and started yelling ‘You have insulted my Saviour!’ He was hustled out by uniformed bouncers, not by my wish. That same event, at the University of Oklahoma, was the only occasion where an attempt was made to prevent me speaking by legal means. State Representative Todd Thomsen introduced a bill into the state legislature of which the following is an extract (when you see a page littered with lots of Whereases you know to brace yourself for trouble).
WHEREAS, the University of Oklahoma, as a part of the Darwin 2009 Project, has invited as a public speaker on campus, Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, whose published opinions, as represented in his 2006 book ‘The God Delusion’, and public statements on the theory of evolution demonstrate an intolerance for cultural diversity and diversity of thinking and are views that are not shared and are not representative of the thinking of a majority of the citizens of Oklahoma; and
WHEREAS, the invitation for Richard Dawkins to speak on the campus of the University of Oklahoma on Friday, March 6, 2009, will only serve to present a biased philosophy on the theory of evolution to the exclusion of all other divergent considerations rather than teaching a scientific concept.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE 1ST SESSION OF THE 52ND OKLAHOMA LEGISLATURE:
THAT the Oklahoma House of Representatives strongly opposes the invitation to speak on the campus of the University of Oklahoma to Richard Dawkins of Oxford University, whose published statements on the theory of evolution and opinion about those who do not believe in the theory are contrary and offensive to the views and opinions of most citizens of Oklahoma.
Rep. Thomsen further alleged that I was paid $30,000 for the lecture, and tried to get officials of the university penalized for squandering public money in this way. He ended up with egg on his face because I neither received, nor asked for, a penny. Moreover, his bill failed to pass. It is truly astonishing that his main objection to my lecturing on evolution was that I held ‘views that are not shared and are not representative of the thinking of a majority of the citizens of Oklahoma’. What does Rep. Thomsen think a university is for?
Here’s an example of the kind of thing in The God Delusion to which, I suspect, critics take exception as savage or strident, aggressive or offensive, but which I see as good-natured satire: a touch of the stiletto perhaps, but miles away from the bludgeon or from vulgar abuse. After pointing out that Roman Catholicism, though avowedly monotheistic, has leanings towards polytheism, with the Virgin Mary a goddess in all but name and the saints attracting personal supplication as demigods each in his own specialist field of expertise, I continued:
Pope John Paul II created more saints than all his predecessors of the past several centuries put together, and he had a special affinity with the Virgin Mary. His polytheistic hankerings were dramatically demonstrated in 1981 when he suffered an assassination attempt in Rome, and attributed his survival to intervention by Our Lady of Fatima: ‘A maternal hand guided the bullet.’ One cannot help wondering why she didn’t guide it to miss him altogether. Others might think the team of surgeons who operated on him for six hours deserved at least a share of the credit; but perhaps their hands, too, were maternally guided. The relevant point is that it wasn’t just Our Lady who, in the Pope’s opinion, guided the bullet, but specifically Our Lady of Fatima. Presumably Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Medjugorje, Our Lady of Akita, Our Lady of Zeitoun, Our Lady of Garabandal and Our Lady of Knock were busy on other errands at the time.
Wounding sarcasm perhaps; but ‘strident’? I don’t think so; and certainly not symptomatic of ‘Tourette’s Syndrome’. I think it’s legitimate satire and would like to think quite funny, but it gave grave offence not only to Catholics but even to the rightly admired Melvyn Bragg, a non-religious cultural commentator and enabler who is well on his way to national treasurehood. Such censure arises only, I suspect, because we have taken on board a convention that religion is off limits to criticism, even to the gentle mockery indulged in the above passage. The point was well put by Douglas Adams in his impromptu speech in Cambridge (see page 394) some years before The God Delusion:
Religion . . . has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, ‘Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it. But on the other hand if somebody says ‘I mustn’t move a light switch on a Saturday,’ you say, ‘I respect that.’
Why should it be that it’s perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows – but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe . . . no, that’s holy? . . . We are used to not challenging religious ideas but it’s very interesting how much of a furore Richard creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you’re not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn’t be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn’t be.
I emphasized this double standard again in the preface to the paperback edition of The God Delusion (built around the commonly heard weasel phrase, ‘I’m an atheist but . . .’; I’ve already mentioned Salman Rushdie’s more recent noticing of the ‘but brigade’). I compared the relatively understated language of my book to the savagery we take for granted in theatre criticism, in political commentary, even in restaurant reviews: ‘. . . the most disgusting thing I’ve put in my mouth since I ate earthworms at school’ ‘. . . quite the worst restaurant in London, maybe the world . . .’
That notorious passage about the eight Catholic Virgin goddesses occurs in chapter 2 of The God Delusion. It is the long opening sentence of that same chapter that has undoubtedly given the most offence – and even led to charges of ‘anti-Semitism’, as I have noted in an earlier chapter.
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
And yet, whether apologists like it or not, every single word of that list is eminently defensible. Examples abound in the Bible. I considered listing them here but soon realized that the illustrative quotations would fill a book. And my goodness, there’s an idea: a book! I know of nobody better qualified to write such a book than my friend Dan Barker. I put it to him and he jumped at it.
Dan used to be a preacher. As I wrote in my foreword to his 2008 book, Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists,
The young Dan Barker was not just a preacher, he was the kind of preacher that ‘you would not want to sit next to on a bus’. He was the kind of preacher who would march up to perfect strangers in the street and ask them if they were saved; the kind of doorstepper on whom you might be tempted to set the dogs.
Dan knows his Bible as intimately as Charles Darwin knew his beetles and his
barnacles, and I am delighted to say he took my suggestion and is now writing a book devoted to illustrating, chapter and merciless verse, every word of that opening sentence of my chapter 2, in order.
Of course, Christian apologists reply, we all know about the awkward and embarrassing passages in the Old Testament. But whatabout1 the New Testament? Yes, you can find some gently humane wisdom in the teachings of Jesus. The Sermon on the Mount is so good, one wishes more Christians would follow it. But the core myth of the New Testament (for which, to be fair, St Paul not Jesus is to blame) shares the obnoxiousness of the Genesis myth of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac,1 from which it may be derived. I made this point in The God Delusion and later reprised it in a P. G. Wodehouse parody that I wrote for a Christmas anthology in 2009. I was unfortunately obliged, for copyright reasons, to change the names of Jeeves, Bertie and the Reverend Aubrey Upjohn, Bertie’s headmaster at the school where he had once won a prize for Scripture Knowledge.
‘All that stuff about dying for our sins, redemption and atonement, Jarvis. All that “and with his stripes we are healed”’ carry-on. Being, in a modest way, no stranger to stripes administered by old Upcock, I put it to him straight. “When I’ve performed some misdemeanour” – or malfeasance, Jarvis?’
Brief Candle in the Dark Page 41
