I caught
Richard Dawkins' appearance on Bill Maher the other night, and alas, nothing
much has changed - he still doesn't quite get this whole complexity thing. He's
always been stuck on the notion that the cause for why there is something rather
than nothing must have been something alarmingly simple, because "complex
things had to emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings"
Not only does
Dawkins have this entirely backwards, he doesn't seem to be able to
intellectualise the fact that if he turned his proposition around 180 degrees
he'd have a much better argument for atheism than his current playpen philosophy. Because it is
evidently not true that complex things have to emerge gradually from simple
beginnings - the natural numbers are more complex than anything in the physical
universe and they don't satisfy the condition of emerging by gradual degrees from
simpler beginnings.
Dawkins is
desperate to be seen as one of the smartest atheists, yet staring him in the
face is the best argument against God he could ever come up with - that the
universe doesn't need a creator God because it is the result of mathematics.
Instead of
arguing that God does not exist because complex things must begin with simplicity,
he would have been better trying to argue that God does not exist because
complex things do not have to begin with simplicity, therefore the complexity of
mathematics could be behind the universe instead of God. Anyone tempted to
argue that numbers don't actually exist can be directed to where I've covered
this at least twice before (here and here).
It wouldn't be
quite so bad if Dawkins failed at that level of the task - that would be
somewhat understandable. But alas Dawkins takes his argument down an even more
preposterous cul-de-sac:
"Where does Darwinian evolution leave
God? The kindest thing to say is that it leaves him with nothing to do, and no
achievements that might attract our praise, our worship or our fear. Evolution
is God's redundancy notice, his pink slip."
Oh dear! Biological
evolution can't serve God His redundancy notice because biological evolution
(at best) explains organisms that evolved with biological properties, and that
has never been the ultimate thing that needs explaining. Asserting that biological
evolution implies God has nothing to do is as silly as saying that filling a
hotel with staff and guests implies that there was nothing for the planners and
builders to do in constructing the hotel.
Biological
evolution only explains the relatively easy part - that is, once we have the mathematical underpinnings, the
laws of physics, and the informational
platform, then biological life, once it gets going, is a relatively
straightforward step by step cumulative selection process, certainly in
comparison to creating a universe and designing the complex physical laws that
act as a canvas for the colours and textures of evolution of life.
The hard part
is in explaining why the universe is made of mathematics, why there is any
mathematics at all, and why anything so complex exists in the first place. The
natural numbers show that Dawkins' underpinning premise is wrong: complexity
can not arise only from simplicity. You can use just a fraction of the
complexity of the natural numbers to encode the entirety of the genomes of
every living thing biochemistry has ever created.
So in my view the best
argument for the non-existence of God is that there is already something infinitely
complex that could explain the existence of nature - numbers and the laws of arithmetic. This does not prove or disprove God, of course, but it does show that
Dawkins has this entirely backwards, and cannot even recognise a better proposition
for the cause he wants to champion.
Whichever side
of the line you fall on - theist or atheist - the most primary fact you have to
begin with is the fact that something infinitely complex exists (the natural
numbers), that it has always existed, and that it stands outside of the
constituents of evolved nature.
Further reading - The Mathematical Bias Theory: Why There Probably ‘IS’ a God – in 20 Steps
