In yesterday’s episode, our heroine revealed how evolution demolishes the argument from design when it comes to the complexity of life, and how David Hume dismantles the argument from design when it comes to the complexity of the universe. In today’s conclusion, she reveals two more arguments against the argument from design – including the most devastating of all — and discusses how our minds can fool us into seeing intention where none exists.

Argument 2: If we didn’t exist, then  well, we wouldn’t exist.

The argument from design — both for life on earth specifically and the cosmos generally — often goes like this: The planet is so perfectly set up to support life — and the universe with its principles of physics is so perfectly set up to support the existence of the earth — that it can’t possibly be a coincidence.

My answer: And if it hadn’t happened the way it did, then we wouldn’t be here to be wondering about it.

Is it really that hard to imagine the possibility of life on Earth not existing?

Here’s an analogy. If your parents hadn’t met, hadn’t gotten together, hadn’t had sex on exactly the day that they conceived you, in exactly the right way to make that one particular sperm out of thousands fertilize that egg… you wouldn’t have been born. Ditto their parents, and theirs, and theirs… all making your birth even more unlikely, by several orders of magnitude.

Does that mean you were fated to be born? That everything about human evolution and reproduction was designed so that you could be born?

Or was it simply chance that you got born instead of somebody else? (Okay, chance plus adaptive descent with modification.)

The fact that you’re here doesn’t mean you were fated or designed to be here. It means that the million-sided evolutionary dice got rolled, and your number came up. You won the lottery. That doesn’t mean the lottery was designed so you could win it. If you roll ten dice, the chances that they’ll come up in the pattern 4636221434 is over 60 million to one… but the fact that this particular pattern is astronomically unlikely doesn’t mean it was designed to happen.

I get that it’s extremely difficult to conceive of a world without you in it. Here you are conceiving it, after all; your presence is kind of implied in the imagining. But if you step back from your own life and look at the world from an outside perspective, logically you have to admit that you’re not actually the one necessary lynchpin on which all of human existence turns. Sorry to be a buzz-kill (I’m pretty sure David Hume said that as well), but the human race could easily have happened without you.

And the exact same thing is true of life on this planet.

The universe existed for billions of years before this planet came along and spewed out this weird self-replicating DNA stuff. And it will continue to exist for billions of years after the earth is boiled into the sun. The fact that life happened to take hold on this planet doesn’t make it necessary that life had to have taken hold on this planet. If it hadn’t happened, then things would have happened some other way, and there’d be a bunch of planets and stars and stuff whirling around with nobody to wonder about them. (Unless there’s conscious life on other planets, which is of course a possibility.)

In the same way that you are not the necessary lynchpin on which all human life turns, human life is not the necessary lynchpin on which the entire universe turns. The fact that there is a hole in the universe perfectly shaped to fit the puddle of humanity doesn’t mean that the hole — much less the entire universe — was designed for that purpose. Our wondering about the universe isn’t required for it to exist.

And you know what? The exact same thing is true for the existence of the universe itself. Some have argued that the laws of physics and gravitational constants and whatnot are so perfectly balanced to allow the universe to exist at all, that it’s impossible for it to be a coincidence, for it to not have been designed. But I say again: If the laws of physics and gravity and such didn’t allow the universe to last billions of years, if they’d dictated that after the Big Bang the universe would either collapse instantly or expand so rapidly that everything just flew apart… well, then that’s what would have happened. And again, we wouldn’t be here to wonder about it.

Argument 3: God just begs the question.

If you’re going to argue that life and/or the universe is too amazing and complex to have just come into being on its own, that it had to have been designed by a creator… then where do you think that creator came from?

Wouldn’t the creator also be huge, amazing, complex, perfectly balanced  all of the qualities the universe has that make people think it had to have been designed?

If so… then who designed the designer?

And if not, if God has just always existed… then why is he logically necessary? If there’s some unbelievably huge, complicated, beautifully balanced entity that was the first thing to exist… why can’t that entity be the universe, and not God?

God doesn’t answer the question of design. God just begs the question. God just sets the question back one level, meanwhile adding an unnecessary layer of complexity to the explanation.

This is a rather shorter argument than the other two. But I think it’s far more devastating.

After all, with the first two arguments, people can always say, “Well, it just doesn’t seem likely to me.” Non-believers can wave evolution books and statistical principles in their faces all day; we can talk about Bertrand Russell’s imaginary teapot orbiting the sun and point out that just because something is theoretically possible doesn’t make it reasonable to believe it. But the believing mind can still say, “You can’t 100% prove it, therefore you still could be wrong, therefore the part of my mind that decides what is and isn’t likely still gets to make a choice.”

But I have never — and I mean NEVER — seen a counter to the questions, “Who designed the designer? And if the answer is ‘nobody,’ then why can’t that be the answer for the universe?” Not one that’s made a lick of sense, anyway. People always just say things like “There has to be an unmoved mover,” and when you ask them why there has to be an unmoved mover, they reply, “There just does. It just makes sense.”

They have no real reply. There isn’t one.

Finally:

The thing you have to remember is this. The human brain is designed — not by God, but by evolution, and for very good evolutionary reasons — to see the world in terms of intention. Our brains are designed to see things as happening because somebody made them happen — tigers who want to eat us, rabbits who want to escape from us, other people who want to have sex with us or make alliances with us or steal our yummy rabbit stew. It’s embedded in our language in ways we’re not even conscious of: water seeks its own level, the river is trying to return to the sea, the plant is reaching for the sun. (I’ve done it myself, right here in this piece, talking about the process of evolution “designing” the human brain and the laws of physics “allowing” the universe to exist.)

But it’s not always true. According to the best evidence we have, intentionality seems to be a very specific biological process, probably limited to animal species with nervous systems. The river isn’t trying to do anything. The river is moving towards the sea in accordance with the laws of nature. It seems as if it’s trying to get somewhere, but it isn’t, except in the most metaphorical or poetic sense of the word. It seems as if it’s trying to get somewhere because we’re trying to get somewhere, and because our brains have evolved to see the world in terms of things that are trying to get somewhere.

But that doesn’t mean that life as a whole, or the universe as a whole, is trying to get somewhere. And it doesn’t mean that life or the universe was designed by someone who was trying to get somewhere. Yes, it may seem as if life and the universe have a designer, but it also seems as if the sun goes around the earth, and that doesn’t make it true. We don’t need the God hypothesis to explain life or the universe, and the God hypothesis doesn’t answer any questions about the universe that don’t then immediately beg to be asked about God himself. “This had to have been designed by someone” may be the most common reason that people believe in God, but it really isn’t a very good one.

“This can’t have all just come into being by itself. It’s too big, too complex, too perfectly balanced. Nothing this amazing could have just come into existence on its own. It had to have been designed.”

This is the argument from design. And it’s not just for wacky creationists. According to Michael Shermer’s How We Believe, it’s the single most common reason that people give for believing in God — including progressive, rational, science-loving believers in God.

It’s the single most common argument for the existence of God. And it’s a terrible one.

I want to talk about why.

Argument 1: No, it isn’t.

The argument from design essentially says, “Look at the world, how wonderful and complex and perfectly balanced — it has to have been designed!”

The response to that argument: No, it doesn’t.

That’s the whole point of the theory of evolution. (Let’s start there — we’ll get to the cosmology in a minute.) If you believe in the argument from design, you really need to read about the theory of evolution a whole lot more. (I suggest The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, easily the best explanation of modern evolutionary theory for the layperson that I’ve read.) The whole point of evolutionary theory is that it explains exactly how life came to be the complex and amazingly balanced web of interconnections that it is, with species beautifully adapted to their environments — not through design, but through natural selection and descent with modification.

Some people — mostly creationists — mistakenly see evolutionary theory as saying that life evolved by accident. Nothing could be further from the truth. Evolution is the opposite of accident. Evolutionary theory says that accidents — mutations — happen… but only the ones that help the life form survive and reproduce will get replicated in the next generation. It’s the opposite of accident. It’s a series of accidents that get filtered out through the harsh, unforgiving, entirely non-accidental process called survival of the fittest.

Douglas Adams (the “Hitchhiker’s Guide” guy) summed this up beautifully in his posthumous book The Salmon of Doubt: “Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!'” That’s evolution in a nutshell. Just like the hole was not designed for the puddle, the world was not designed to fit us — we evolved to fit into the world.

Other people — many non-creationist theists — argue that evolution happened, but God helped it along. But there’s no evidence for that theory whatsoever. There’s no explanation as to what the mechanism for that process would be, or for how we would determine whether it’s true. And more to the point, there’s no need of it. There is an unbelievably enormous mountain of hard physical evidence — fossil records, DNA, anatomical studies, you name it — supporting the idea that evolution is entirely capable of happening all by its lonesome, as a 100% natural event with no divine intervention necessary at any point.

And here’s where we come to cosmology. Still other people completely accept evolution, accept that life on earth doesn’t need God to explain it… but think that the cosmos does.

This is where David Hume comes in.

I’m going to paraphrase here, since I don’t have his books handy, and don’t feel like ordering them from Powell’s just so I can quote them in my blog. Hume argued that order and stability in the universe can easily be explained without a designer. He pointed out that, even if you start with a completely chaotic, random, unstable universe, given enough time some forms are going to come into being, purely by chance, that are stable and orderly. And because they’re stable and orderly, they’re going to last longer than the forms that are unstable and chaotic.

Therefore, given the filtering process that you naturally get from huge gobs of time (I’m pretty sure that’s how Hume put it), you’ll eventually have a universe with fewer and fewer unstable and disorderly forms, and more and more stable and orderly ones.

Bear in mind — Hume was writing a good century before Darwin. And yet this is one of the best broad outlines of evolutionary theory to date. Especially if you add “self-perpetuating and self-replicating” to “stable and orderly.” Hume’s theory works even better then: in a chaotic universe, forms that are not just stable but good at perpetuating and replicating themselves (read: surviving and reproducing) will not only stick around but will proliferate. Hume was a goddamn genius. He rocks.

And the thing is, this principle DOESN’T just apply to biological life on earth. It applies to the cosmos as well. There are planets because planets are a stable form. There are stars because stars are a stable form. It’s not really evolution — it’s not descent with modification — but the filtering process over time is not at all dissimilar.

Now, it’s true that we know far less about the cosmos than we do about life on earth. (We know a lot more than we did fifty or even five years ago, but there’s still an enormous amount we don’t know.) Why the universe developed the way it did, how it came to exist in the first place… these questions, along with “What is consciousness?” and “What, if anything, is free will?” and “Will the Cubs ever win the World Series?” are the great mysteries of our time, the great questions that science is working on but has yet to answer.

So for about the billionth time on this blog, I’m going to cite my piece The Unexplained, the Unproven, and the Unlikely. And I will again say this: Look at the history of the world, and the history of knowledge in the world. The number of times that a once-mysterious phenomenon had a divine or supernatural explanation successfully replaced by a natural one — thousands upon thousands upon thousands. The number of times that a once-mysterious phenomenon had a natural explanation successfully replaced by a divine or supernatural one — zero.

Therefore, with any given unexplained phenomenon — including the nature and origin of the universe — it is about a billion times more likely that the explanation will eventually turn out to be a natural one rather than a divine or supernatural one. And David Hume’s “order out of chaos” filtering process provides an excellent basic framework for reaching that explanation.

To argue, “We don’t know exactly how this happened, therefore it’s reasonable to say that God made it happen” is called arguing from ignorance, and it’s a logical fallacy. There’s no more need to explain the cosmos with intelligent design than there is to explain life with it.

End of Part 1. In tomorrow’s conclusion: What we would do if we didn’t exist; begging the question; and what the river is trying to do.

It’s a beautiful Sunday for godless/ humanist/ naturalist/ atheist/ freethinker/ bright/ etc. blogging, as we have not one but two godless/ humanist/ etc. blog carnivals.

Carnival of the Godless #74 is up at the new Atheist FAQ blog. They were kind enough to include “Where is my Faith”: Mother Teresa and Suffering, my piece on Mother Teresa’s loss of faith and how it might have led to her obsession with suffering, and hence to the appalling conditions in her hospitals and hospices. Some pieces I especially like in the carnival: The Ridger’s I cast you in that role at The Greenbelt, which totally cuts to the heart of the “all powerful God vs. free will” problem, and vjack’s Belief Does Not Equal Truth!, at Atheist Revolution, which rips into the whole Bill Nye the Science Guy/”moon as reflected light” kerfuffle with an excellent analysis of the hypocrisy of religious extremists rejecting science while they happily accept its benefits. Neat stuff. Check it out.

And The Humanist Symposium #7 is up at Bligbi, with its tri-weekly collection of positive atheist thought. My faves from this one: Eric Michael Johnson’s The Sacrifice of Admetus at The Primate Diaries, about altruism as a natural phenomenon in social species; C.L. Hanson’s “He has his faults…” at Letters From A Broad, about relationships between atheists and believers; and The Ridger again, with Looking Up at The Greenbelt, on why looking up at the sky is less important than looking where you’re going. Lots of good stuff. Enjoy!