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March 12, 2009 • Thursday 06:55 AM
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Current mood:  contemplative Category: Religion and Philosophy
The Improbability of God
by Richard Dawkins
from Free Inquiry, Volume 18, Number 3.
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Richard Dawkins is Oxford's Professor of Public Understanding of Science. He is the author of The Blind Watchmaker (on which this article is partly based) and Climbing Mount Improbable. He is a Senior Editor of Free Inquiry. |
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Much of what people do is
done in the name of God. Irishmen blow each other up in his name. Arabs
blow themselves up in his name. Imams and ayatollahs oppress women in
his name. Celibate popes and priests mess up people's sex lives in his
name. Jewish shohets cut live animals' throats in his name. The
achievements of religion in past history -- bloody crusades, torturing
inquisitions, mass-murdering conquistadors, culture-destroying
missionaries, legally enforced resistance to each new piece of
scientific truth until the last possible moment -- are even more
impressive. And what has it all been in aid of? I believe it is
becoming increasingly clear that the answer is absolutely nothing at
all. There is no reason for believing that any sort of gods exist and
quite good reason for believing that they do not exist and never have.
It has all been a gigantic waste of time and a waste of life. It would
be a joke of cosmic proportions if it weren't so tragic.Why do people believe in
God? For most people the answer is still some version of the ancient
Argument from Design. We look about us at the beauty and intricacy of
the world -- at the aerodynamic sweep of a swallow's wing, at the
delicacy of flowers and of the butterflies that fertilize them, through
a microscope at the teeming life in every drop of pond water, through a
telescope at the crown of a giant redwood tree. We reflect on the
electronic complexity and optical perfection of our own eyes that do
the looking. If we have any imagination, these things drive us to a
sense of awe and reverence. Moreover, we cannot fail to be struck by
the obvious resemblance of living organs to the carefully planned
designs of human engineers. The argument was most famously expressed in
the watchmaker analogy of the eighteenth-century priest William Paley.
Even if you didn't know what a watch was, the obviously designed
character of its cogs and springs and of how they mesh together for a
purpose would force you to conclude "that the watch must have had a
maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or
other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which
we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and
designed its use." If this is true of a comparatively simple watch, how
much the more so is it true of the eye, ear, kidney, elbow joint,
brain? These beautiful, complex, intricate, and obviously purpose-built
structures must have had their own designer, their own watchmaker --
God.So ran Paley's argument,
and it is an argument that nearly all thoughtful and sensitive people
discover for themselves at some stage in their childhood. Throughout
most of history it must have seemed utterly convincing, self-evidently
true. And yet, as the result of one of the most astonishing
intellectual revolutions in history, we now know that it is wrong, or
at least superfluous. We now know that the order and apparent
purposefulness of the living world has come about through an entirely
different process, a process that works without the need for any
designer and one that is a consequence of basically very simple laws of
physics. This is the process of evolution by natural selection,
discovered by Charles Darwin and, independently, by Alfred Russel
Wallace.What do all objects that
look as if they must have had a designer have in common? The answer is
statistical improbability. If we find a transparent pebble washed into
the shape of a crude lens by the sea, we do not conclude that it must
have been designed by an optician: the unaided laws of physics are
capable of achieving this result; it is not too improbable to have just
"happened." But if we find an elaborate compound lens, carefully
corrected against spherical and chromatic aberration, coated against
glare, and with "Carl Zeiss" engraved on the rim, we know that it could
not have just happened by chance. If you take all the atoms of such a
compound lens and throw them together at random under the jostling
influence of the ordinary laws of physics in nature, it is theoretically
possible that, by sheer luck, the atoms would just happen to fall into
the pattern of a Zeiss compound lens, and even that the atoms round the
rim should happen to fall in such a way that the name Carl Zeiss is
etched out. But the number of other ways in which the atoms could, with
equal likelihood, have fallen, is so hugely, vastly, immeasurably
greater that we can completely discount the chance hypothesis. Chance
is out of the question as an explanation.This is not a circular argument, by the way. It might seem to be circular because, it could be said, any
particular arrangement of atoms is, with hindsight, very improbable. As
has been said before, when a ball lands on a particular blade of grass
on the golf course, it would be foolish to excl.. "Out of all the
billions of blades of grass that it could have fallen on, the
ball actually fell on this one. How amazingly, miraculously
improbable!" The fallacy here, of course, is that the ball had to land
somewhere. We can only stand amazed at the improbability of the actual
event if we specify it a priori: for example, if a blindfolded
man spins himself round on the tee, hits the ball at random, and
achieves a hole in one. That would be truly amazing, because the target
destination of the ball is specified in advance.Of all the trillions of
different ways of putting together the atoms of a telescope, only a
minority would actually work in some useful way. Only a tiny minority
would have Carl Zeiss engraved on them, or, indeed, any
recognizable words of any human language. The same goes for the parts
of a watch: of all the billions of possible ways of putting them
together, only a tiny minority will tell the time or do anything
useful. And of course the same goes, a fortiori, for the parts
of a living body. Of all the trillions of trillions of ways of putting
together the parts of a body, only an infinitesimal minority would
live, seek food, eat, and reproduce. True, there are many different
ways of being alive -- at least ten million different ways if we count
the number of distinct species alive today -- but, however many ways
there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more
ways of being dead!We can safely conclude
that living bodies are billions of times too complicated -- too
statistically improbable -- to have come into being by sheer chance.
How, then, did they come into being? The answer is that chance enters
into the story, but not a single, monolithic act of chance. Instead, a
whole series of tiny chance steps, each one small enough to be a
believable product of its predecessor, occurred one after the other in
sequence. These small steps of chance are caused by genetic mutations,
random changes -- mistakes really -- in the genetic material. They give
rise to changes in the existing bodily structure. Most of these changes
are deleterious and lead to death. A minority of them turn out to be
slight improvements, leading to increased survival and reproduction. By
this process of natural selection, those random changes that turn out
to be beneficial eventually spread through the species and become the
norm. The stage is now set for the next small change in the
evolutionary process. After, say, a thousand of these small changes in
series, each change providing the basis for the next, the end result
has become, by a process of accumulation, far too complex to have come
about in a single act of chance.For instance, it is
theoretically possible for an eye to spring into being, in a single
lucky step, from nothing: from bare skin, let's say. It is
theoretically possible in the sense that a recipe could be written out
in the form of a large number of mutations. If all these mutations
happened simultaneously, a complete eye could, indeed, spring from
nothing. But although it is theoretically possible, it is in practice
inconceivable. The quantity of luck involved is much too large. The
"correct" recipe involves changes in a huge number of genes
simultaneously. The correct recipe is one particular combination of
changes out of trillions of equally probable combinations of chances.
We can certainly rule out such a miraculous coincidence. But it is
perfectly plausible that the modern eye could have sprung from
something almost the same as the modern eye but not quite: a very
slightly less elaborate eye. By the same argument, this slightly less
elaborate eye sprang from a slightly less elaborate eye still, and so
on. If you assume a sufficiently large number of sufficiently small differences
between each evolutionary stage and its predecessor, you are bound to
be able to derive a full, complex, working eye from bare skin. How many
intermediate stages are we allowed to postulate? That depends on how
much time we have to play with. Has there been enough time for eyes to
evolve by little steps from nothing?The fossils tell us that
life has been evolving on Earth for more than 3,000 million years. It
is almost impossible for the human mind to grasp such an immensity of
time. We, naturally and mercifully, tend to see our own expected
lifetime as a fairly long time, but we can't expect to live even one
century. It is 2,000 years since Jesus lived, a time span long enough
to blur the distinction between history and myth. Can you imagine a
million such periods laid end to end? Suppose we wanted to write the
whole history on a single long scroll. If we crammed all of Common Era
history into one metre of scroll, how long would the pre-Common Era
part of the scroll, back to the start of evolution, be? The answer is
that the pre-Common Era part of the scroll would stretch from Milan to
Moscow. Think of the implications of this for the quantity of
evolutionary change that can be accommodated. All the domestic breeds
of dogs -- Pekingeses, poodles, spaniels, Saint Bernards, and
Chihuahuas -- have come from wolves in a time span measured in hundreds
or at the most thousands of years: no more than two meters along the
road from Milan to Moscow. Think of the quantity of change involved in
going from a wolf to a Pekingese; now multiply that quantity of change
by a million. When you look at it like that, it becomes easy to believe
that an eye could have evolved from no eye by small degrees.It remains necessary to
satisfy ourselves that every one of the intermediates on the
evolutionary route, say from bare skin to a modern eye, would have been
favored by natural selection; would have been an improvement over its
predecessor in the sequence or at least would have survived. It is no
good proving to ourselves that there is theoretically a chain of almost
perceptibly different intermediates leading to an eye if many of those
intermediates would have died. It is sometimes argued that the parts of
an eye have to be all there together or the eye won't work at all. Half
an eye, the argument runs, is no better than no eye at all. You can't
fly with half a wing; you can't hear with half an ear. Therefore there
can't have been a series of step-by-step intermediates leading up to a
modern eye, wing, or ear.This type of argument is
so naive that one can only wonder at the subconscious motives for
wanting to believe it. It is obviously not true that half an eye is
useless. Cataract sufferers who have had their lenses surgically
removed cannot see very well without glasses, but they are still much
better off than people with no eyes at all. Without a lens you can't
focus a detailed image, but you can avoid bumping into obstacles and
you could detect the looming shadow of a predator.As for the argument that
you can't fly with only half a wing, it is disproved by large numbers
of very successful gliding animals, including mammals of many different
kinds, lizards, frogs, snakes, and squids. Many different kinds of
tree-dwelling animals have flaps of skin between their joints that
really are fractional wings. If you fall out of a tree, any skin flap
or flattening of the body that increases your surface area can save
your life. And, however small or large your flaps may be, there must
always be a critical height such that, if you fall from a tree of that
height, your life would have been saved by just a little bit more
surface area. Then, when your descendants have evolved that extra
surface area, their lives would be saved by just a bit more still if
they fell from trees of a slightly greater height. And so on by
insensibly graded steps until, hundreds of generations later, we arrive
at full wings.Eyes and wings cannot
spring into existence in a single step. That would be like having the
almost infinite luck to hit upon the combination number that opens a
large bank vault. But if you spun the dials of the lock at random, and
every time you got a little bit closer to the lucky number the vault
door creaked open another chink, you would soon have the door open!
Essentially, that is the secret of how evolution by natural selection
achieves what once seemed impossible. Things that cannot plausibly be
derived from very different predecessors can plausibly be
derived from only slightly different predecessors. Provided only that
there is a sufficiently long series of such slightly different
predecessors, you can derive anything from anything else.Evolution, then, is theoretically capable
of doing the job that, once upon a time, seemed to be the prerogative
of God. But is there any evidence that evolution actually has happened?
The answer is yes; the evidence is overwhelming. Millions of fossils
are found in exactly the places and at exactly the depths that we
should expect if evolution had happened. Not a single fossil has ever
been found in any place where the evolution theory would not have
expected it, although this could very easily have happened: a
fossil mammal in rocks so old that fishes have not yet arrived, for
instance, would be enough to disprove the evolution theory.The patterns of
distribution of living animals and plants on the continents and islands
of the world is exactly what would be expected if they had evolved from
common ancestors by slow, gradual degrees. The patterns of resemblance
among animals and plants is exactly what we should expect if some were
close cousins, and others more distant cousins to each other. The fact
that the genetic code is the same in all living creatures
overwhelmingly suggests that all are descended from one single
ancestor. The evidence for evolution is so compelling that the only way
to save the creation theory is to assume that God deliberately planted
enormous quantities of evidence to make it look as if evolution
had happened. In other words, the fossils, the geographical
distribution of animals, and so on, are all one gigantic confidence
trick. Does anybody want to worship a God capable of such trickery? It
is surely far more reverent, as well as more scientifically sensible,
to take the evidence at face value. All living creatures are cousins of
one another, descended from one remote ancestor that lived more than
3,000 million years ago.The Argument from Design,
then, has been destroyed as a reason for believing in a God. Are there
any other arguments? Some people believe in God because of what appears
to them to be an inner revelation. Such revelations are not always
edifying but they undoubtedly feel real to the individual concerned.
Many inhabitants of lunatic asylums have an unshakable inner faith that
they are Napoleon or, indeed, God himself. There is no doubting the
power of such convictions for those that have them, but this is no
reason for the rest of us to believe them. Indeed, since such beliefs
are mutually contradictory, we can't believe them all.There is a little more
that needs to be said. Evolution by natural selection explains a lot,
but it couldn't start from nothing. It couldn't have started until
there was some kind of rudimentary reproduction and heredity. Modern
heredity is based on the DNA code, which is itself too complicated to
have sprung spontaneously into being by a single act of chance. This
seems to mean that there must have been some earlier hereditary system,
now disappeared, which was simple enough to have arisen by chance and
the laws of chemistry and which provided the medium in which a
primitive form of cumulative natural selection could get started. DNA
was a later product of this earlier cumulative selection. Before this
original kind of natural selection, there was a period when complex
chemical compounds were built up from simpler ones and before that a
period when the chemical elements were built up from simpler elements,
following the well-understood laws of physics. Before that, everything
was ultimately built up from pure hydrogen in the immediate aftermath
of the big bang, which initiated the universe.There is a temptation to
argue that, although God may not be needed to explain the evolution of
complex order once the universe, with its fundamental laws of physics,
had begun, we do need a God to explain the origin of all things. This
idea doesn't leave God with very much to do: just set off the big bang,
then sit back and wait for everything to happen. The physical chemist
Peter Atkins, in his beautifully written book The Creation,
postulates a lazy God who strove to do as little as possible in order
to initiate everything. Atkins explains how each step in the history of
the universe followed, by simple physical law, from its predecessor. He
thus pares down the amount of work that the lazy creator would need to
do and eventually concludes that he would in fact have needed to do
nothing at all!The details of the early
phase of the universe belong to the realm of physics, whereas I am a
biologist, more concerned with the later phases of the evolution of
complexity. For me, the important point is that, even if the physicist
needs to postulate an irreducible minimum that had to be present in the
beginning, in order for the universe to get started, that irreducible
minimum is certainly extremely simple. By definition, explanations that
build on simple premises are more plausible and more satisfying than
explanations that have to postulate complex and statistically
improbable beginnings. And you can't get much more complex than an
Almighty God!
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The Improbability of You |
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To Live at All
Is Miracle Enough
by Richard Dawkins
excerpt from Chapter I, "The Anaesthetic of Familiarity,"
of his 1998 book Unweaving the Rainbow
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To live at all is miracle enough.
-- Mervyn Peake,
The Glassblower (1950) |
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We are going to die, and
that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die
because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could
have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of
day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts
include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We
know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so
massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these
stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.Moralists and theologians
place great weight upon the moment of conception, seeing it as the
instant at which the soul comes into existence. If, like me, you are
unmoved by such talk, you still must regard a particular instant, nine
months before your birth, as the most decisive event in your personal
fortunes. It is the moment at which your consciousness suddenly became
trillions of times more foreseeable than it was a split second before.
To be sure, the embryonic you that came into existence still had plenty
of hurdles to leap. Most conceptuses end in early abortion before their
mother even knew they were there, and we are all lucky not to have done
so. Also, there is more to personal identity than genes, as identical
twins (who separate after the moment of fertilization) show us.
Nevertheless, the instant at which a particular spermatozoon penetrated
a particular egg was, in your private hindsight, a moment of dizzying
singularity. It was then that the odds against your becoming a person
dropped from astronomical to single figures.The lottery starts before
we are conceived. Your parents had to meet, and the conception of each
was as improbable as your own. And so on back, through your four
grandparents and eight great grandparents, back to where it doesn't
bear thinking about. Desmond Morris opens his autobiography, Animal Days (1979), in characteristically arresting vein:
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Napoleon
started it all. If it weren't for him, I might not be sitting here now
writing these words ... for it was one of his cannonballs, fired in the
Peninsular War, that shot off the arm of my great-great-grandfather,
James Morris, and altered the whole course of my family history. |
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Morris tells how his
ancestor's enforced change of career had various knock-on effects
culminating in his own interest in natural history. But he really
needn't have bothered. There's no 'might' about it. Of course
he owes his very existence to Napoleon. So do I and so do you. Napoleon
didn't have to shoot off James Morris's arm in order to seal young
Desmond's fate, and yours and mine, too. Not just Napoleon but the
humblest medieval peasant had only to sneeze in order to affect
something which changed something else which, after a long chain
reaction, led to the consequence that one of your would-be ancestors
failed to be your ancestor and became somebody else's instead. I'm not
talking about 'chaos theory', or the equally trendy 'complexity
theory', but just about the ordinary statistics of causation. The
thread of historical events by which our existence hangs is wincingly
tenuous.
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When
compared with the stretch of time unknown to us, O king, the present
life of men on earth is like the flight of a single sparrow through the
hall where, in winter, you sit with your captains and ministers.
Entering at one door and leaving by another, while it is inside it is
untouched by the wintry storm; but this brief interval of calm is over
in a moment, and it returns to the winter whence it came, vanishing
from your sight. Man's life is similar; and of what follows it, or what
went before, we are utterly ignorant.
-- The Venerable Bede,
A History of the English Church and People (731) |
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This is another respect in
which we are lucky. The universe is older than a hundred million
centuries. Within a comparable time the sun will swell to a red giant
and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in
its time, or will be when its time comes, 'the present century'.
Interestingly, some physicists don't like the idea of a 'moving
present', regarding it as a subjective phenomenon for which they find
no house room in their equations. But it is a subjective argument I am
making. How it feels to me, and I guess to you as well, is that the
present moves from the past to the future, like a tiny spotlight,
inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the
spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything
ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The
odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the
odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant
crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. In
other words, it is overwhelmingly probable that you are dead.In spite of these odds,
you will notice that you are, as a matter of fact, alive. People whom
the spotlight has already passed over, and people whom the spotlight
has not reached, are in no position to read a book. I am equally lucky
to be in a position to write one, although I may not be when you read
these words. Indeed, I rather hope that I shall be dead when you do.
Don't misunderstand me. I love life and hope to go on for a long time
yet, but any author wants his works to reach the largest possible
readership. Since the total future population is likely to outnumber my
contemporaries by a large margin, I cannot but aspire to be dead when
you see these words. Facetiously seen, it turns out to be no more than
a hope that my book will not soon go out of print. But what I see as I
write is that I am lucky to be alive and so are you.We live on a planet that
is all but perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold,
basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently spinning, green
and gold harvest festival of a planet. Yes, and alas, there are deserts
and slums; there is starvation and racking misery to be found. But take
a look at the competition. Compared with most planets this is paradise,
and parts of earth are still paradise by any standards. What are the
odds that a planet picked at random would have these complaisant
properties? Even the most optimistic calculation would put it at less
than one in a million.Imagine a spaceship full
of sleeping explorers, deep-frozen would-be colonists of some distant
world. Perhaps the ship is on a forlorn mission to save the species
before an unstoppable comet, like the one that killed the dinosaurs,
hits the home planet. The voyagers go into the deep-freeze soberly
reckoning the odds against their spaceship's ever chancing upon a
planet friendly to life. If one in a million planets is suitable at
best, and it takes centuries to travel from each star to the next, the
spaceship is pathetically unlikely to find a tolerable, let alone safe,
haven for its sleeping cargo.But imagine that the
ship's robot pilot turns out to be unthinkably lucky. After millions of
years the ship does find a planet capable of sustaining life: a planet
of equable temperature, bathed in warm starshine, refreshed by oxygen
and water. The passengers, Rip van Winkles, wake stumbling into the
light. After a million years of sleep, here is a whole new fertile
globe, a lush planet of warm pastures, sparkling streams and
waterfalls, a world bountiful with creatures, darting through alien
green felicity. Our travellers walk entranced, stupefied, unable to
believe their unaccustomed senses or their luck.As I said, the story asks for too much luck; it would never happen. And yet, isn't that what has happened to each one of us? We have
woken after hundreds of millions of years asleep, defying astronomical
odds. Admittedly we didn't arrive by spaceship, we arrived by being
born, and we didn't burst conscious into the world but accumulated
awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we slowly apprehend
our world, rather than suddenly discover it, should not subtract from
its wonder.Of course I am playing
tricks with the idea of luck, putting the cart before the horse. It is
no accident that our kind of life finds itself on a planet whose
temperature, rainfall and everything else are exactly right. If the
planet were suitable for another kind of life, it is that other kind of
life that would have evolved here. But we as individuals are still
hugely blessed. Privileged, and not just privileged to enjoy our
planet. More, we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes
are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they
close for ever.Here, it seems to me, lies the best answer to those petty-minded scrooges who are always asking what is the use
of science. In one of those mythic remarks of uncertain authorship,
Michael Faraday is alleged to have been asked what was the use of
science. 'Sir,' Faraday replied. 'Of what use is a new-born child?' The
obvious thing for Faraday (or Benjamin Franklin, or whoever it was) to
have meant was that a baby might be no use for anything at present, but
it has great potential for the future. I now like to think that he
meant something else, too: What is the use of bringing a baby into the
world if the only thing it does with its life is just work to go on
living? If everything is judged by how 'useful' it is -- useful for
staying alive, that is -- we are left facing a futile circularity.
There must be some added value. At least a part of life should be
devoted to living that life, not just working to stop it
ending. This is how we rightly justify spending taxpayers' money e
species and beautiful buildings. It is how we answer those barbarians
who th ink that wild elephants and historic houses should be preserved
only if they 'pay their way'. And science is the same. Of course
science pays its way; of course it is useful. But that is not all it is.After sleeping through a
hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a
sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within
decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an s
sssssenlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at
understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This
is how I answer when I am asked -- as I am surprisingly often -- why I
bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn't
it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born?
Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume
discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?
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Gender: Male
Status: In a Relationship
Age: 28
Sign: Virgo
City: TUCSON
State: Arizona
Country: US
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