So you’re saying that God is like a benevolent grocer, handing out rewards when organisms modify themselves according to His will? That seems a far-from-intelligent design
Alright, so I slept. Here’s my response.
I think people here addressed the issue of “evolution” quite well, but what about the issue of “the creation of the universe?” Let’s expand the question by judging my friend meritoriously and try and make his argument as strong as possible, for the sake of argument. We need the world to get started and THEN evolution. To have both happen, in the Goldilocks Zone, with the precise calculations needed, and then to have that self-replicating happen with the natural selection and all…it is hard for the human mind to fathom that that all happened without some other guiding force.
Dawkins’ The God Delusion (which I have recently finished) posits an answer to all of this, see 162-169 of his book (for your convenience, this section is available on Google Books.).
But to the mind of somebody like my friend, I don’t think Dawkins’ arguments would do. He would probably answer the way Polkinghorne & Beale do in their book, Questions of Truth, see 44-50 of that volume (available on Google Books, I should note I haven’t read this volume but just this section).
What would you say to their arguments?
Sorry, that’s 162-180 of Dawkins’ book, only most of which is available via google books.
The probability of a unique event cannot be calculated. How do we know that the spontaneous creation of something out of nothing was unlikely? (And I say all the being a person of faith.)
Staggerlee, the banana isn’t a stand-in for some literal reward, just like the coherent English isn’t a stand-in for achieving some specific pre-planned goal. And, of course, the grocer in question is nature, red in tooth and claw. What Walton is saying is that when any organism has a mutation or moves into a new area or is present for some environmental change that gives it or its offspring increased survivability or fertility, it gets “rewarded” with increased presence in the gene pool. In early days, there are lots of open niches and less biodiversity, so it’s easy to fill a niche and take over the gene pool. But over time, more niches get filled, and there’s stiffer competition, so it takes a more drastic change to increase your genetic presence. In essence, the banana has become harder to get.
Evolution does not speak of the genesis of life or the creation of the universe. There are a lot of theories about the genesis of life (and some very promising laboratory work) but evolution isn’t about that.
Evolution is very, wonderfully, delightfully, beautifully simple.
Imagine taking two big bags of guppies from the pet store with a good mix of flashy males and dull-colored females. You put one bag into a pond that has lots of fish-eating birds hanging out around it. You put the second bag into a pond that has no birds.
One month later, the flashiest of males in the first pond will be eaten by the birds because they are the easiest to see. In the second pond this is not the case and the flashy males remain.
Two months later, the fish in both ponds have bred. The females in the first pond prefer flashy males, as do all female guppies, but their options are limited because most of the flashy males have been eaten. So they mate with the blander males, producing offspring that share some of their fathers’ traits. The females in the second pond prefer flashy males and they are in luck! All of them are there. The flashiest of males get to reproduce while the blander males have a harder time of it, so that the offspring from this mating mostly inherit the flashy scale traits.
Three months later, the birds have continued eating from the first pond. Any male who doesn’t blend into his surroundings perfectly is under threat. Regardless of what the females prefer, a flashy male has very poor chances of surviving to breed. This is not the case in the second pond. Because there are no predators thinning the herd, there is intense competition for mates. Only the most attractive males can breed.
Two years later, the two pond populations look completely different. Bit by bit, fish by fish, their gene pools have been plucked away. This is a reproducible experiment that anyone could do (simply put cover over the second pond to prevent predation). Little steps every day, with every death and birth, are changing the gene pool and through those changes the species. It’s not about evolving to a more complex lifeform or anything like so many people misunderstand. It’s simply a description of natural processes. Some live and some die; some breed and some don’t. Those who live and breed have a genetic impact on future generations.
You have to remember probability doesn’t tell you what WILL happen. It tells you what is LIKELY to happen.
If I toss a coin in the air ten times, probability tells me that it should land 5 times head and 5 times tails. But if the coin landed all ten times tails, that wouldn’t violate any probability law. It just isn’t likely to happen. It doesn’t mean it can’t happen
We just don’t KNOW how likely it is that a universe “happens”. We certainly don’t know how likely it is that it works somewhat like ours. And even if both are unlikely events, there could still be many other universes “out there” with completely different properties.
Even if the supposed fine tuning of the universe is true (and not due to some “natural” restrictions we just don’t know about yet), then it could still be due to chance. If you’re really willing to put “god did it” there, fine. That would make it more or less the very weakest Deist argument possible, and if your friend is happy with Deism, then I’m not going to argue against it. It’s functionally indistinquishable from Atheism anyway, unless you’re a research physicist.
However, once we get a universe that works like ours, it’s pretty much inevitable that you eventually get planets like ours. The earth isn’t as special as all that.
I’m not going into the origins of life, since your friend doesn’t seem to be concerned about that. Or he’s confusing evolution with abiogenesis, which is just ignorant.
First of all, my story was meant as an (imperfect) analogy for evolution, not for God. Secondly, it is indeed an imperfect analogy, which I attempted to address in the paragraph which immediately followed the two which you quoted:
The nice thing about natural selection is that there’s no artifical rewards mechanism needed. The reward for being good at survival is that you get to live longer. The reward for being good at producing offspring, is that a larger percentage of the next generation will contain your genes.
Sure we do. The universe happened 100% of the time.
Depends on what you mean by “ID” and how you believed “God started evolution”. After all, we learned about evolution in Catholic school – yes, Darwin and all.
Right. ID is NOT “god started evolution”. ID is more or less “all the big changes in evolution were directly guided by a sentient designer”. ID doesn’t even say anything about how evolution “started”, though presumably most ID proponents think “god did it”.
Agree. The ID line of thinking is similar to confronting someone who’s just won the lottery with, “You know, of course, that it’s virtually impossible to win the lottery. Therefore, you did not win the lottery.” That we exist and are sentient is a given.
Also, evolution and natural selection are slightly different. Natural selection explains why evolution of life happened so darned quickly, and can be demonstrated rather quickly with experiments such as one Peeta Mellark described. Evolution, OTOH, is a “fact” in the way Noel Prosequi noted: so much overwhelming evidence that we can’t consider it anything other than a fact. Until the description of natural selection, evolution seemed like, indeed, a million monkeys banging away at keyboards.
Natural selection explains something very important about evolution, which I believe is called “punctuated equilibria.” Mutations keep happening at a very small rate, and most provide no benefit. However, at some point, there’s a game-changing mutation that allows the population to completely or almost completely replace its progenitors in, from an evolutionary perspective, the blink of an eye in a particular environment. However, as one part of that population gains an evolutionary advantage, say, having a change that allows it to reach higher to get access to foliage, that mutation may not be an advantage in another environment. In another environment, maybe another mutation of the original species allows it to keep food in its stomach just a little longer, and that mutation works out very well. Then you might have two populations that are different, but both are successful in their own particular way.
This is an important thing: one (I’m envisioning a proto-giraffe) did not evolve from the other (I’m envisioning a progenitor of something that chews its cud). They both evolved from something that is different from both of them. Likewise, we did not evolve from present day monkeys – both monkeys and humans evolved from some common ancestor, and both species were successful, but in different ways. (If giraffes also chew their cud, I don’t really care – I’m just trying to describe possibly different adaptations).
This is the only way I can posit the existence of a god – creation of the universe and specifying relevant constants that govern the interaction of everything with everything. Then just stepping back and letting things unfold. I could believe it. It doesn’t affect my life in any way, but sure, why not?
But did God create me in particular with an apparent plan? Are we made in God’s image? I’d like to think not, because despite the miracle of life, I’m rather poorly designed, particularly my lower back and my eyes. Does God have to do crunches every day to help keep his back in place? Is he getting presbyopia? Does he have to put sunblock on when he goes out in the sun?
Why are womens’ hips too narrow to give birth without massive pain? Is God punishing us for eating some friuit we shouldn’t have, or did our combination of bipedal mobility and large brain pan allow us to develop into what we are (a very successful organism, at least in the past 100,000 years) without evolving a less distressing birthing process? That’s just the order in which things seem to have happened.
We know that in this particular instance the universe happened. We don’t know how many scenarios it failed to happen in. Assuming that our universe is the sum total of all existence is probably a mistake, even if we have no means of accessing or even verifying the existence of other universes.
Just to beat a dead horse (stupid horse should have evolved faster to put up with more beatings), here’s a better typing monkey analogy:
After typing each letter, the pages are checked, and almost every one that doesn’t match Hamlet is destroyed. Luckily, there are infinite monkeys, so you still end up with an infinite number of right answers. Suddenly, getting Hamlet doesn’t seem all that unlikely. Sure, you’ll end up with some copies with typos, because not all bad copies are destroyed in each cycle, but “Hamlet” and “Hamnet” both still work.
And before someone says, “Ah ha! But who’s doing the checking?!”, the answer is “the environment.” The checking is symbolic of the ability of the creature to survive and reproduce.
This is an excellent example of evolution in action. Something that a lot of ID advocates don’t seem to understand is that the theory of evolution doesn’t involve species moving towards some ideal, perfect life form. Natural selection exerts pressure based only on the environment that exists at the time - beneficial traits are only beneficial in that time and space. So a super colourful male guppy in pond number two has got it made, but if you picked him up and moved him to pond number one he’d be toast.
This is the problem with intelligent design - it necessarily does involve the creation of a perfect life form - a species by design and not by chance. But if God got to make the guppies however he wanted, why wouldn’t he make them perfectly suited to either habitat (either by changing the female preference or by using a colour scheme somehow invisible to predatory birds)? Why does he like the guppy one way in pond number two, but that same guppy is dead meat in pond number one?
To put this in human terms, the intelligent design crowd tend to look at humans and think “Wow, we’re so perfectly designed for human-ness! We fit so perfectly into our environment! How amazing is that!” But it only looks that way to us now because we have evolved into the environment that exists on Earth. If that environment were to suddenly change - say, the temperature increased or the percentage of oxygen in the air changed - we suddenly wouldn’t seem so very perfect.
The problem with that train of thought is that it seems to assume that Earth was the only planet ever created. If that were true, of course it would be unlikely that the one planet in the entire universe would just happen to support life.
There are likely hundreds of billions of planets just in our own galaxy. Just try and wrap your mind around that. Let’s say to form a planet you roll dice to select for the type of star, orbiting distance from the star, and various metallicity compositions. The chance of you getting an Earth-like planet aren’t that great. But if you do it a hundred billion times, you’re going to get that combination sooner or later. Multiple times, probably.
The fact that we’re finding such a wide range of planet types out there (like the hot Jupiters) just goes to show how random and chaotic the planet forming process is. There clearly isn’t any kind of design going on. If you flip a coin a hundred billion times, sooner or later you’re gonna get a string of 20 heads in a row. It won’t happen often, but there’s nothing unnatural about it.
Sorry, when I look up Question of Truth in Google books it only goes up to page 31.
As others have said, we have no idea of the probability of the universe, since we don’t know exactly how it started. The question may have no meaning. How do you measure the probability of something coming from nothingness with no time?
Once the universe began, things are a little easier. The formation of stars and planets was inevitable given matter and gravity. We know there are lots of planets, so one of the right size being formed in the zone of life is not at all odd - I suspect we will find many once the results start coming in. Water and carbon are common. If life and evolution began with a self-replicating molecule, even if it takes a while for that molecule to be formed by accident, there are billions of years and trillions of combinations in which this can happen. We don’t know if intelligent life is inevitable - it certainly took a long time for humans to show up - but if there were no intelligence there would be no one asking the question.
In any case, if some god did create the universe, why not create us right away, and not many billions of years after it was possible for earthlike planets to exist?
What other instances? What other scenarios? By definition, they’re non-existent.
The point is that if you believe that the Dallas Cowboys will win the 2011 Superbowl, then you’re entitled to your opinion. But if you believe that the Dallas Cowboys won the 2010 Superbowl, then you’re wrong. Some things are not subject to belief.