Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb on Richard Dawkins' Master Argument

this chapter has contained the central argument of the book and so at the risk of sounding repetitive let's summarize it as a series of six numbered points one one of the greatest challenges to the human intellect over the centuries has been to explain how the complex improbable appearance of design in the universe arises two the natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself in the case of a man-made artifact such as a watch the designer really was an intelligent engineer it is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing a spider or a person three the Temptation is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer the whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability it is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable we need a crane not a Skyhook for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from Simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity four the most genius and Powerful crane so far discovered is darwinian evolution by natural selection Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design have evolved by slow gradual degrees from simple Beginnings we can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that an illusion five we don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics some kind of Multiverse Theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology this kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological verion of Darwinism because it makes heavier demands on luck but the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with six we should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology but even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one the relatively weak cranes we have at present are when abetted by the anthropic principle self-evidently better than the self-defeating Skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer if the argument of this chapter is accepted the factual premise of religion the the god hypothesis is untenable God almost certainly does not exist let's say Richard Dawkins Richard Dawkins wrote a book against religion and he has in it what he calls his master argument the master argument this is an argument which covers the whole ground and it goes like this there are complex things in the world things that look designed this he said in his earliest books and his carried ear few people take it from him the business of Evolutions to explain the appearance of design appearance of design things do look designed but their claim is they can explain how they exist without they really being designed fine that's the bulky now he says perod of design usually involves complexity things that are very simple don't look designed only things that have certain complexity interacting Cooperative kind of complexity look designed he says but look how are you going going to explain design by invoking a designer you're going to say the appearance of design is produced by a designer but then the designer will have to be at least as complex as the thing you're trying to explain the designer would have to have I mean he doesn't say all of this he just says that as if it were obvious to every seven-year-old think of the designer designing it presumably he have to have a picture in his mind of the whole thing how it works what it's supposed to do that means in his mind is the whole complexity of the thing plus more more natural resources and how to do it and energy and who knows what else so if you're going to explain the existence of a complex thing on the grounds that there's a designer you're going to be stuck with a designer who's at least as complex maybe more complex then you'll have to repeat it again who designed the designer oh well then you're going to need an even more complex designer so if you keep pushing this you're going to end up with an infinite regress and you end up nowhere therefore he says it's always wrong to explain complexity by appealing to a designer just a wrong move I'm not going to spend the rest of the evening on all of what's wrong with that though we could but as a philosopher this isn't biology this isn't plate tectonics what he's talking about this is how explanations work what explanations do how they function that's plain philosophy philosoph been talking about that for thousands of years so he stepped out of his expertise well philosophers have answered him I mean they do so with a Snicker because it's so it's so silly and childish but they answer him as as follows number one you're really telling me that in invoking design never works it never works it's never reasonable so if we're doing archaeology and we find cave paintings which they tell you are 30,000 years old beautiful and they are beautiful I don't know if you've seen them and you you can look at them on the Internet they are enchantingly beautiful it's wrong to say they were painted by an intelligent designer that's wrong cuz then you'll have to ask who designed the designer to be back on an infinite of course it's not wrong of course they were painted by intelligent beings nothing but intelligent beings makes representative art of that kind wasn't dripping uh residu from from from rocks or acids that created pictures of those animals it's ridiculous can't always be wrong what about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence started by Carl seon that Paradigm of atheism you're looking for things in the universe that indicate there are other intelligent life forms so for example you get coded the decimal expansion of pi to the first million places everybody agrees that if you found that coming in from a Galaxy that would be knock down proof that there must be other must be intelligent life in that Galaxy nothing in the um purely mechanical physical World produces the decimal expansion of Pi but how why why is that you're telling me I have these radio waves coming in these radios have a certain structure and I'm inferring that they're produced by an intelligent designer is dawkings telling me I can't do that that's wrong to do that everybody agrees that that's correct so the idea that you can't describe you can't explain complexity complexity in organization by intelligent design is just dumb of course you can of course we do and of course we should do will that leave over a question as to the identity of the designer and where he came from okay it will okay but so what the first step in explaining where this came from is definitely appropriate step that's Point number one point number two you don't always when you have a cause for something you don't always ask for a cause for the cause you don't always ask for an explanation of the explanation you don't always do that classical theology is based on the following idea there's a table in this room I can ask why is there a table in the room because I can tell you what the alternative is the alternative is that there wouldn't be a table in the room and that's perfectly possible I I know there are two possibilities table in the room or no table in the room and I want to know why one is right the other one's wrong when you ask why is something the way it is you are required to State another way in which it could have been and then what you're saying at least is why is it this way rather than that way suppose someone says why is q and you ask him why is Q how else could it be what alternative are you imagining that it should be and he says oh I don't know I'm just asking why is it Q then we have a right to respond then you're not asking a question the why question is always what they call a contrastive question it's why is this rather than that if there isn't any other alternative then why is it the way it is doesn't have any purchase doesn't have any any content why is 2+ 2 4 well what else would you have it be five 3 27 I mean like what are you offering as an alternative if something is the way it is of necessity then it is the way it is because of itself not because of something else it's only when you're asking why is q and somebody says q and not what oh why is it Q not R oh okay it's q and not R presumably there's something that made it that way didn't get that way all by itself but if you if you ask why it's q and the response is but Q's got to be that way there's no other way that it could be then there's no pressure to ask for what made it that way or why is it that way because there's no other way it could be okay now how does religion regard God does religion regard God as an accident does religion regard God as something which might have been and might not have been they could yes be a God or not be a God and then say well okay there is a God but there might not have been a God so what is it that made it that there is a God religion doesn't have that position religion position is that God's existence is necessary there isn't any alternative so there's no pressure whatsoever to ask where did God come from my mind says this in the guide and everybody else before him and after him agrees to this now maybe Dawkins doesn't like that maybe Dawkin doesn't like the idea that something's existence could be necessary then fight with that let's hear your arguments against that but he doesn't do that he simply says if there is a designer you're going to have to ask who made the designer well excuse me according to the religious position which he's fighting with he's trying to show why religion is wrong according to religion position when you come to God there isn't any alternative there isn't any alternative then the question why doesn't the it's the second problem in his argument third problem his argument is this he says that if you have a complex thing that's that exists and you invoke a designer to explain where it came from designer will have to be at least as complex as the thing that's designed what kind of designers do you have in mind Richard physical designers designers that are part of our physical universe that store information the way we store information other things store information maybe you're right there but that's not the way traditional religions think about God Trad religion think about God is ultimately simple God does have any structure internal parts organization God is ultimately simple and yes complexity comes out of a source that's ultimately simple now maybe you don't like that maybe you think that it's somehow in principle even including God complex things can't come out of simple sources well then argue that argue that let's hear your Arguments for that that he doesn't present any arguments at all this master argument that he presents is just the the most obvious na when it comes to philosophy and it's an argument in philosophy and it is absolutely worthless