In the beginning, we are told, was the Big
Bang. After aeons, everything calmed down, cooled down, settled down, until
conditions were just right for life. Next, various inanimate globules of matter
became animate and, at the same time, managed to reproduce themselves.
They were very simple and very primitive, you understand, so you needn’t think
too hard about them. A flash of lightning, perhaps, or maybe a long, slow
awakening, and eventually the little bits of
what’s-it came alive and straight away knew how to produce new generations of
living what’s-its. These simple, primitive life forms, which were totally
unconscious and mindless, managed (over aeons) to combine themselves into new
forms, and out of the blue developed sensitivity to light (= sight), sound,
touch, smell, taste, organs that enabled them to eat, drink, move, and even
reproduce in new ways. “Out of the blue” because these things had never existed
before. The very concepts were totally new. Pick up a pebble, and ask yourself
how you would make it see. Where would you, conscious though you are, even begin
the process? And “out of the blue” also because if they hadn’t worked straight
away, in their most primitive form, they wouldn’t have survived. What is the use
of something that doesn’t work?
But we are told that these unprecedented organs and concepts in their original
form were products of total blindness,
deafness, unconsciousness etc. Eventually, out of all this spontaneous
creativity, we humans arrived, and we’ve been investigating ever since. And
although we don’t actually understand how the simple, primitive forms of life
came alive or managed to reproduce themselves, and we can’t even replicate the
process whereby the inanimate becomes animate, we are so clever that one day
we’ll do it, and our cleverness will prove that you don’t have to be clever to
do it. It can happen all by itself.
The bottom line, then, for the militant atheist is that anyone who doesn’t believe in the
ability of chance to create all these hitherto non-existent, hugely complex
(even in their most primitive form) organisms – which require all the dazzling
talents of human consciousness merely to unravel and comprehend – is deluded.
And is also unscientific. Because belief in a conscious creator is irrational
and unprovable and untestable. Whereas belief in the creative genius of
unconscious chance is…ah! Well, maybe not rational. Maybe not provable. Maybe
not testable. But you don’t need a conscious creator to explain life. All you
have to do is believe in chance. Besides – trump card coming up – if you believe
in a conscious creator, who created him? You see, you only replace one mystery
with another.
But the trump card doesn’t work if it’s in the wrong game, and the game here is
Seeking the Truth. If you find it difficult to believe in the ingenious and
hugely complex inventiveness of unconscious chance, you have to consider other
explanations, regardless of where they lead. The question concerning the creator
of the creator is akin to a computer announcing that it put itself together,
because if it didn’t, who created Man? The answer to both questions is: we don’t
know. It is highly unlikely that we shall ever know – at least in this life. But
in any case, since we do not know now, it is arrogance for anyone –
believer or non-believer in a god or in chance – to claim that they have a
monopoly on truth.
This, however, is the pivotal point of Richard Dawkins' argument. Again and
again in The God Delusion, he comes back to the fact that: “A designer God
cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of
designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of
explanation in his own right” (p. 109). In other words, something cannot have
been designed if we cannot explain the existence of the designer. To the suggestion
that “there must be a cosmic intelligence who deliberately did the tuning" [of
the universe], he responds: “I have already dismissed all such suggestions as
raising bigger problems than they solve” (p. 147). But who says that different,
unsolved (possibly insoluble) problems invalidate a proposition? I have
difficulty working out how to operate certain computer programmes. An expert’s
explanation is not invalidated by the fact that I still don’t understand the
“bigger problem” of how computers work generally, or how they came to be
invented, or how the inventor evolved from, let’s say, an amoeba. For a renowned
scientist to argue that an explanation can’t be true because it leads to further
problems which he can’t explain is – to take Dawkins back into his own
specialized field – like saying that the theory of natural selection can’t be
true because we don’t know how life originated.
The fact is that sooner or later, despite the atheist's faith that science will
one day reveal all, we come up against a complete blockage. All we can do now is
speculate: either there is/was a designer, or we are the product of chance. That
is the point we have reached in our quest for knowledge. Speculation is allowed,
experimentation and research will continue, but it is an abnegation of
scientific objectivity for anyone to “dismiss” the suggestion that there may
be/have been a designer on the grounds that such a suggestion raises bigger
problems.
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