If we were to follow Richard Dawkins as our guide, we would conclude that living creatures are not created.
Opposing Arguments Differ in Defining Design
The point to which Dawkins’ position is a counterpoint is the argument for God, dubbed “Intelligent Design”. Both arguments are based on mathematical probability, but reach opposite conclusions.
Biology is the science of the intelligible forms of living things, or simply the science of living forms. That which has form, or pattern or design is thereby intelligible. Of these three synonyms, all of which denote intelligibility, design may be said to have the connotation of a form produced by an intelligent agent. The Intelligent Design argument essentially denies this connotation. Rather, it attempts to demonstrate that the forms or designs, which are studied scientifically in biology, are the product of an intelligent agent.
In contrast, Dawkins defines the word design by that very connotation: “any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything” (The God Delusion, p. 31). In Dawkins’ lexicon, design identifies a form as produced by a creative intelligence, i.e. as created. If they used Dawkins’ definition of design, the proponents of ID would be assuming what they were attempting to prove.
Dawkins’ Argument
Richard Dawkins’ counter to the ID argument is that it is not a valid argument, but an inference drawn from a false analogy. Dawkins notes that artifacts are intelligible forms produced by intelligent agents, namely humans, “In the case of a man-made artifact, such as a watch, the designer was really an intelligent engineer” (p. 157). He argues that it cannot be inferred that the intelligible forms of living things must likewise be produced by an intelligent agent, a God. He argues, “Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it” (p. 31).
According to Dawkins, it is known that all living forms, including humans, who are intelligent agents, are formed by an agency, which is not intelligent, but merely intelligible. All living forms, including man, are formed by the agency of Darwinian evolution consisting of random mutation and natural selection. Also, in the course of evolution, living forms precede the only known intelligent agent, which is man. Therefore, life forms, including man, cannot be the creation of an intelligent agent.
Evaluation of Dawkins’ Argument
Dawkins should have claimed that, in the case of living things, it is an error to infer design, in its limited sense, as the product of an intelligent agent. Instead, he calls the inference of design an ‘appearance of design’ and an ‘illusion’, “We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that – an illusion.” (p. 158).
Dawkins’ argument is logical in its outline, but he messes it up with jargon. Rather than take the design of living things to be proven, whether due or not to an intelligent agent, Dawkins takes the word design to mean due to an intelligent agent. Thus, he says the appearance of design in living things is an illusion. He can’t mean that the intelligible forms of living things are illusory. That would mean that biology, rather than being a science, would be the study of illusion.
But the jargon gets worse. Dawkins refers to life forms as ‘living creatures’, when he hopes to conclude that they are not creatures, that they are not created.
In contrast to my outline, Dawkins does not use the terminology, intelligent agents, in referring to humans in their capacity to impart intelligible forms to artifacts. He uses the terminology, ‘creative intelligences’ to refer to human artisans. He concludes that based on Darwinian evolution, the only created forms are those of human artifacts.
Artifacts are human creations. Then in summarizing his position, Dawkins incongruously identifies living forms, not as life forms, but as “living creatures, with their . . . appearance of design” (p. 158). Thus, his literal conclusion is that creatures are not created.
Dawkins’ use of jargon obscures his argument and leads to a conclusion, which is a literal contradiction. However, I would argue that his argument has to be obscure to be affirmed.
Dawkins’ admits that, “In the case of a man-made artifact, such as a watch, the designer was really an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person” (p. 157). In his view these biological forms were randomly generated and then sorted by the discriminating filter of natural selection. He wishes the intelligibility of their form to be spontaneously generated, with their differential survivability determined by inanimate, material forces external to the form.
Different Meanings of Random
There are several problems with this understanding of random mutation as a spontaneous, non-algorithmic process.
The surviving biological form must have received its intelligibility from the process of random mutation because the other process, natural selection, can only destroy what already exists. Natural selection merely permits only one or a few of the already intelligible forms to survive. If random mutation is a process of spontaneity, it is thereby non-scientific.
Random mutation in Darwinian evolution is mathematical. In the mathematics of probability, in contrast to Dawkins’ view, random mutation is a fully structured algorithm. In mathematics, random mutation is in no sense amorphous or spontaneous and thereby lacking in intelligibility.
Philosophically, truth is what is. ‘What is’ excludes probability and thereby randomness. Also, when we refer to a proposition as probable, we are not discussing mathematics. We are referring to our lack of certitude. We are not characterizing the proposition. We are characterizing our opinion of it. The certitude of one’s opinion has nothing to do with mathematical probability or random mutation.
Conclusion
In Dawkins’ lexicon, design is creation, the product of creative intelligence. Within the context of his argument, Dawkins should have concluded that it was false to attribute the intelligibility of living forms to a creative intelligence. Instead, he concluded, “We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that – an illusion” (p. 158). In other words, creation is an illusion in created things.
A contrary statement to that of Dawkins would be: “We can now safely say that the illusion of accumulated mutations in evolved forms is just that – an illusion.” In other words, evolution is an illusion in evolved things. Like Dawkins’ conclusion, this contrary is self-contradictory.
In a rally in Washington, DC in March, 2012, Dawkins suggested that what he judged to be the errors of religion deserve public ridicule. Yet, The God Delusion, which elaborates the basis for urging such ridicule, presents a literal contradiction as its primary conclusion. It is not as if this contradiction was an offhand remark. It is one of his six bullet points summarizing the argument supporting the main thesis of his book. The thesis is that God, as creator, does not exist because living things are not living creatures.
Ironically, rather than deny that living things are living creatures Dawkins identifies them as living creatures. If we follow Dawkins, we can now safely say that they are not what they are. The fact that they appear to be what they are is an illusion.
8 thoughts on “Are Creatures Created?”
I don’t know why you give Dawkins so much credit – he is a simple minded atheist. He was even cornered into saying we all came from aliens which remarkable postulate begs the question of whence came the aliens. He also wrote a stupid computer program to ‘prove’ the efficacy of random selection by starting with a random string of letters and randomly ‘mutating’ them until they matched a target phrase. Of course the target phrase was a presumed intelligence that his so called randomness was seeking. Even a high school kid could easily see the logical fallacy. Dawkins is a jerk and you dshould stop giving him so much attention. Stephen Myers has roasted his pathetic arguments consistently, and in much clearer language than you employ.
But I love to argue and Dawkins’ expresses his erroneous views so clearly. Due to that clarity, he deserves considerable credit (1) for showing that sub-staging of the Darwinian algorithm increases the efficiency of mutation while having no effect on the probability of evolutionary success
https://catholicstand.com/intelligent-design-darwinian-gradualism/
and
(2) for elucidating a moderately coherent philosophy of human knowledge as probability https://theyhavenowine.wordpress.com/2015/03/01/dawkins-philosophy-of-probability-a-pro-view/.
With regard to one of your specific objections, I have argued that introducing a target phrase or target genome is not a logical fallacy within the context of Darwinian evolution as you and the mathematician, John Lennox, have claimed (God’s Undertaker, p. 167). See my critique, “The Biological Version of the Darwinian Algorithm
Is Not Circular” https://theyhavenowine.wordpress.com/2014/04/23/the-biological-version-of-the-darwinian-algorithm-is-not-circular/.
With regard to your other specific objection, I have demonstrated that both Stephen Meyer and Richard Dawkins argue from the same erroneous premise that the gradualism of sub-cycles ensures the generation of the entire spectrum of graduated mutations defined by the overall cycle of evolution. See my critique, “On the Intelligent Design View of Neo-Darwinism” https://theyhavenowine.wordpress.com/2015/01/31/on-the-intelligent-design-view-of-neo-darwinism/.
Waiting for Mutations: Why Darwinism Won’t Work
Ann Gauger September 23, 2015 10:33 AM | Permalink
Many scientists now recognize
the insufficiency of the classic Darwinian story to account for the
appearance of new features or innovations in the history of life. They
focus on other theories to account for remarkable differences between
genomes, the appearance of novel body plans, and genuine innovations
like the bat’s wing, the mammalian placenta, the vertebrate eye, or
insect flight, for example. They realize that the traditional story of
population genetics (changes in allele frequencies in populations due to
mutation, selection, and drift) cannot account for “the arrival of the
fittest” and not just the “survival of the fittest.” (Hugo DeVries,
1904).
One of the reasons many scientists acknowledge the insufficiency of
Darwinism is because they know the accounting won’t work. The mutation
rate, the generation times, the strength of selection versus genetic
drift, the population sizes, and the time available don’t match up.
For example, supposedly humans last shared common ancestry with
chimps about six million years ago. Since that time, we have accumulated
significant differences with chimps — genetic, anatomical,
physiological, behavioral, and intellectual differences, among others.
The genetic differences between humans and chimps are much more than the
(shrinking) 1.2 percent difference in base pairs that is so often
quoted in the media. Add small insertions and deletions and the
differences climb to about 3-5 percent, depending on whose estimate is used. Add another 2.7 percent for large scale duplications or deletions, another 6 percent for new Alu elements
(a kind of mobile genetic element) and some unknown number for
rearrangements of the DNA, other insertions of mobile genetic elements,
or new genes, we have more than 11.7 percent of our genome with unique
features not present in chimps.
There is only so much time for these differences to have accumulated.
Mutations arise and are propagated from generation to generation, so
the number of generations limits how many mutations can accumulate. The
estimated mutation rate is about 10-8 per base pairs per
generation, and we have an average generation time of somewhere between
10 and 25 years. Our estimated breeding population size six million
years ago is thought to have been about 10,000 (these are all rough
estimates based on numbers currently in use — see the papers cited
below). Based on these numbers, one can estimate how many years it would
take to acquire all those mutations, assuming every mutation that
occurred was saved, and stored up.
But there’s a difficulty — it’s called genetic drift. In small
populations, like the 10,000 estimate above, mutations are likely to be
lost and have to reoccur many times before they actually stick. Just
because of random effects (failure to reproduce due to accidental death,
infertility, not finding a mate, or the death of all one’s progeny), a
particular neutral mutation may have to arise many times before it
becomes established in the population, and then many more years before
it finally becomes fixed (that is, before it takes over the population
and replaces all other versions).
How long before a single, new mutation appears and becomes fixed? An estimate from a recent paper
using numerical simulations is 1.5 million years. That is within the
range of possibility. But what if two specific mutations are needed to
effect a beneficial change? Their estimate is 84 million years. Other
scientists have done this calculation using analytical methods, but
their numbers are even worse. One report calculates 6 million years for one specific base change in an eight base target typical of the size of a DNA binding site to fix, and 100 million years to get two specific mutations. (That work was later amended to 216 million years.) Extrapolating from other published data merely confirms the problem.
Another paper
came up with much shorter time frames by assuming that any 5 to 10 base
pair binding site could arise anywhere within 1 Kb of any promoter
within the genome.
Yet in all likelihood many more than two binding sites
would be required to change anything significant, and those binding
sites must be appropriate in location and in sequence to accomplish the
necessary changes. They must work together in order for a specific
adaptive change to happen.
Genes operate in networks, and to shift a gene regulatory network
would require many mutations, and not just random ones. Remember there
are anatomical physiological, behavioral, and intellectual differences
to explain, multiple traits each requiring multiple coordinated
mutations. Unless one invokes luck on a large scale, those traits would
not have come to be.
I’m not betting on luck.
Image: Homo georgicus, reconstruction, photo by 120 (Own work (photograph), model by Élisabeth Daynes) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
Thanks for a cogent argument. Nevertheless, science depends upon faith in other humans. It requires faith in the competence and veracity of the reporting and interpretation by others of their instrumental observations. Note that you express faith in only some reports and interpretations.
In contrast, theology, philosophy and logic (including much of math) are within the domain of everyman’s judgment without any intermediary. I have tried to focus my critiques of Dawkins on his logic and, in particular,
on his use of mathematics.
Everyone’s view of creation is non-scientific. Dawkins restricted the meaning of the word, designed, to ‘created’. Then, in a flamboyant attempt to label the views of others as illusory, he stumbled into expressing his own view as a self-contradiction, namely that ‘living creatures’ are not created.
No, as I pointed out before Dawkins suggested living creatures were brought here by aliens. No need for any logical analysis.
Imagine a World where mothers looked upon their children as artifacts; we are dangerously close. We would not exist, for there would be little purpose. The greater question, other than the magic of self created molecules has to be – Why Me? This is the question that Dawkins fears, because it has to be approached with humility. We are all given that choice, whether to believe, whether to search for God. And when we find Him – the One True God, we find the reason why we are here – Love.
Although many protesting Catholic communities engage in worshipping each other every Sunday, all the Creeds still begin with “I believe”, not “I know.” We believe in mystery. There is no logical syllogism or lab experiment that can prove God exists [nor can scientistic scientists via mere science prove he does not]- and we really don’t want such a “provable” God who would end up being just another “thing” or logical construct. Thank God His thoughts are not our thoughts. I will take a God any day who is God, and I am not. This is the God I need. Guy McClung, San Antonio Texas USA.
From Bhagavad-gita – Knowledge of the Absolute – Text 27 – Purport ” ,..deluded persons symptomatically dwell in dualities of dishonor and honor, misery and happiness, woman and man, good and bad, pleasure and pain, ect.,thinking, ‘This is my wife, this is my house; I am the master of this house; I am the husband of this wife.’ These are the dualities of delusion. Those who are so deluded by dualities are completely foolish and therefore cannot understand God.”
Jesus’ referenced this duality in his answer to the Pharisees about whose wife would (they) be in heaven.