CHAPTER 7
A Curious Proof That God Does Not Exist
AN ARGUMENT for God’s existence is a commonplace; an argument against his existence is an event. Just such an argument comprises the centerpiece of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. It is an argument to which he attaches the utmost importance: In lectures and talks given since its publication, he has suggested that it now looms very large in the troubled imagination of religious believers. In this he is mistaken. His argument is nonetheless important in another respect. It is an object lesson.
Dawkins summarizes his views in a series of six very general propositions, of which only the first three are directly relevant to his concerns—or mine:
The first affirms that the universe is improbable.
The second acknowledges the temptation to explain the appearance of the universe by an appeal to a designer.
And the third rejects the temptation on the grounds that “the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer.” A variant of this argument has been known for a very long time.
“I venture to ask,” the Chinese sage Kuo Hsiang ventured to ask in the third century A.D., “whether the Creator is or is not. If He is not, how can He create things? And if He is, then (being one of those things), He is incapable (without self-creation) of creating the mass of bodily forms.”
This argument is exquisite because it is short.
Persuaded that God does not exist, Richard Dawkins might have quoted Kuo Hsiang and left matters there.
As it happens, Dawkins presents his argument in the first two pages of chapter 4 of his book and summarizes it in the chapter’s last two pages. The material in between—some forty pages—is given over to the “consciousness raising” that contemplation of natural selection is said to evoke. In all this, Dawkins has failed only to explain his reasoning, and I am left with the considerable inconvenience of establishing his argument before rejecting it.
THE DEAD ZONE
As a public figure and so a character in debate, Richard Dawkins may be found in the dead zone marking the intersection of a child’s question—“Who made God?”—and what the classicist R. R. Bolgar called “the peculiar debris of an abandoned and virtually forgotten science.” Although discussing rhetoric, Bolgar could well have been describing theology. The zone is dead because the questions it encourages are unanswerable. This hardly means that they are insignificant. Childish questions have their point, and in the case of God’s existence, their point is to place in doubt some of the intellectual maneuvers by which His existence is affirmed.
Doubt is very much a matter of temperament. It is rarely encouraged (or displaced) by argument. For certain temperaments, the existence of the universe is a mystery, one that gnaws irritably at the soul. Why is the damn thing there? The thought that it is there for no good reason is said by some to spoil their enjoyment of life. In time taken from writing, hunting, estate management, and fornication, Leo Tolstoy very often expressed sentiments such as this. Like Levin in Anna Karenina, he was widely regarded as a pest for doing so. On the other hand, a great many men and women take the universe in stride, and if they are disposed to ask why it is there, they are easily pleased with the answer that the physicist (and Nobel laureate) Frank Wilczek insouciantly offered: “The universe,” he wrote, “appears to be just one of those things.” A willingness to let the matter rest in this way is a characteristic of individuals that William James described as “healthy-minded”—another way of describing them as thick.
Of course, if physicists can believe that the universe is just one of those things, then believers can affirm that God is just one of those things as well.
To the question of why believers should not stop with the universe, there is only the counterquestion of why physicists should not proceed further to God.
I mention these points to stress what should be obvious: Questions arising in the dead zone are a matter of temperament. A religious instinct is universal: It arises in every human being—hence the popular observation that there are no atheists in foxholes. But whether an instinct is allowed to progress toward frank affirmation, or whether it is denied and then discarded—these are not issues that answer to any obvious claims of argument.
This is one reason the dead zone is dead.
If God did not create the world, then what is His use? And if He did, then what is His explanation? A child’s question has given way to an adult’s dilemma. A God too indisposed to do the work of creation is fated to drift into irrelevance, if only because His demand for adoration would be considerably out of line with His record of accomplishment. But if God did create the world, the problem that God is designed to solve reappears as a problem about God Himself.
It is this destructive dilemma that Dawkins calls the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. The appeal to a Boeing 747 is meant to evoke a lighthearted quip attributed to the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. The spontaneous emergence of life on earth, Hoyle observed, is about as likely as a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747 out of the debris. Although an atheist, Hoyle was skeptical about Darwin’s theory of evolution, and Dawkins passionate in its defense. Since the junkyard expresses with rare economy precisely the odds favoring the spontaneous appearance of life—they are remarkably prohibitive on virtually every calculation—it has been an irritation to Dawkins ever since it made its appearance. With their consciousness unraised, a great many people have evidently concluded that when it comes to the origins of life, the junkyard is all that Darwin offered.
But, Dawkins affirms, if a tornado cannnot do the job of creating life, then God cannot do the job of creating the universe. The tornado is inadequate because life is improbable, and God is inadequate for the same reason. This counterstroke has persuaded Dawkins that he has initiated an intellectual maneuver judo-like in its purity of effect and devastating in its consequences. The Ultimate 747 gambit, Dawkins writes, “comes close to proving that God does not exist” (italics added). Fred Hoyle’s death before he could appreciate the extent of his discomfiture Dawkins no doubt regards as a display of peevish irresponsibility.
Although Dawkins writes with quiet confidence about what he intends to do, which is to give the Deity a thrashing, and then, having thrashed him, writes again about what he has done, what he is doing is rather less clear.
At times, Dawkins asserts that God is an irrelevance because He has been assigned the task of constructing a universe that is improbable. If the universe is improbable, “it is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable.” Why an improbable universe demands an improbable God, Dawkins does not say and I do not know.
There are other passages in The God Delusion of more analytic refinement. In these, Dawkins extends a convivial pseudopod toward the concepts of complexity and information. Under the influence of these concepts, Dawkins often writes that unless God is Himself complex, He is bound to be inadequate to account for the complexity of the universe. The very same observation he sometimes makes in terms of information. If Dawkins is casual about these concepts to the point of slackness, it is because he believes that whether his argument is expressed in terms of information or complexity, God will emerge with His irrelevance undiminished.
The 747 gambit, although hardly a model of fastidiousness, conveys a beefy impression of authority, so much so that scientists who never once thought seriously about issues of religion at once wondered why they did not think of it themselves. Having not thought of it at all, they often appear to have thought of it after all. Publishing his thoughts in Gene (of all places!), the distinguished molecular geneticist Emile Zuckerkandl has argued that the Deity, if He exists, would represent “something like a pathology of the state of being.” I had very much hoped that after beginning with pathology, Zuckerkandl would continue to some form of exciting degeneracy, but it was not to be; what Zuckerkandl in the end does offer is homegrown but homeopathic, a dilute solution of the 747 gambit. His target is very much theories of intelligent design. Designating the intelligent designer as the Higher Intelligence, he writes that “if complexity is a problem for naturalistic explanations, the Higher Intelligence itself is first to have to face this problem. Intelligent Design thus does not solve any problem posed by complexity; it only transposes the origins of complexity from the observable to an unobservable world and makes these origins inaccessible to inquiry.”
These are words that display a somewhat Teutonic sternness in attitude. Less demanding critics might observe that shoveling problems backward until they are out of sight is not only the tactic of common sense but the only tactic in common use. When scientists appeal to various unobservable entities—universal forces, grand symmetries, twice-differential functions as in mechanics, Calabi-Yau manifolds, ionic bonds, or quantum fields—the shovel is in plain sight, but what has been shoveled is nowhere to be seen. Why physicists should enjoy inferential advantages denied theologians, Zuckerkandl does not say.
The difficulty with these arguments—they form a genre—is that they endeavor to reconcile two incompatible tendencies in order to force a dilemma. On the one hand, there is the claim that the universe is improbable; on the other, the claim that God made the universe. Considered jointly, these claims form an unnatural union. Probabilities belong to the world in which things happen because they might, creation to the world in which things happen because they must. We explain creation by appealing to creators, whether deities or the inflexible laws of nature. We explain what is chancy by appealing to chance. We cannot do both. If God did make the world, it is not improbable. If it is improbable, then God did not make it. The best we could say is that God made a world that would be improbable had it been produced by chance.
But it wasn’t, and so He didn’t.
This is a discouraging first step in an argument said to come close to proving that God does not exist.
AN UNLIKELY DEITY
Let us say that Dawkins is quite right. God is improbable. The proposition is on the table. It is up for grabs.
What then follows?
Oddly enough, almost nothing. I say “oddly enough” because the thesis that God’s existence is improbable is the cornerstone of Dawkins’s argument and so an easement to his atheism. But atheists have traditionally been concerned not to push too vigorously on their own suspicions by presenting them in a way that owes too much to probability. The stuff—probability, I mean—is notoriously unstable.
The inference that Dawkins proposes to champion has as its premise the claim that God is improbable; its conclusion is that likely God does not exist. The inferential bridge invoked by the 747 gambit, if it goes anywhere at all, goes from what God is (He is unlikely) to whether He exists (it would appear not). Inferences of this sort are typically not deductive: they do not impart certainty to their conclusions. A deductive inference carries conviction straight on down. All men are mortal. Premise One. Socrates is a man. Premise Two. And the conclusion. Socrates is mortal. Given the premises, the conclusion is incontestable.
The attempt to shoehorn inferences hinging on likelihood into deductive form ends in disaster. An example? Judging by how Emile writes, it is likely that his native language is German. Premise One. Judging by where Emile lives, it is likely that his native language is English. Premise Two. Whatever conclusions may be drawn from the circumstances of Emile’s prose and his residence, they are not deductive. Otherwise, the result would be a contradiction, Emile afflicted with at least two native languages, and possibly more. It may well be—I am supposing—that certain considerations make God’s existence unlikely. Other considerations might make his existence likely. If both considerations are deductively controlling, the result is a form of logical chaos. The inference Dawkins champions cannot prove anything about God’s existence, and if it cannot prove anything about God’s existence, it cannot come close to proving anything either.
There is next the explosion that results when improbability and existence are foolishly mingled. In this regard it is curious that having declared God’s existence unlikely in virtue of His improbability, Dawkins never once considers that by parity of reasoning he could well have concluded that the existence of the universe is unlikely in virtue of its improbability. Unlikely is unlikely, as logicians say, never adding, of course, that if the universe is unlikely there is the slightest reason to suppose that it does not exist. Nonetheless, the assumption that the universe is improbable is the gravamen of the 747 gambit. It is indispensable.
The fact is that unlikely events do occur. They simply do not occur often. It is as difficult, the Bible recounts, for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven as it is for him to pass through the eye of a needle; and if it is that difficult, I suppose it is that improbable. And yet some rich men manage. I might by this reasoning at least anticipate meeting King Farouk in the hereafter, where, having squeezed himself through the eye of that needle, he may be found enjoying the celestial gaming tables. It could happen. As quantum theorists never tire of reminding us, what could happen sooner or later will happen.
What holds for Farouk might well hold for the Deity.
Having brought the universe into existence, He might simply be improbable. It is just one of those things for which we have no further explanation.
This is not a conclusion that the soul on fire to know God will necessarily find discouraging. But if we have no further explanation for the existence of the Deity, we nonetheless do by this means have an explanation for the existence of the universe. It is this: In the beginning God created the heaven and earth.
Arguments trading on probability, I have suggested, are unstable. Like certain women, they go off at the worst possible moments. The theory of probability is in the business of assigning numbers to events. The theory assumes explicitly what everyone ordinarily takes for granted, and that is that if events are assigned probabilities, they are determined by means of a random process. An improbable God must thus be improbable in virtue of the process that controls his probability. Just which random process is designed to yield the Deity as a possible outcome? It is by no means easy to say, which is one reason, I suppose, that on this subject, Dawkins says nothing at all.
Whatever the process, the probabilities it reveals depend on the way they are described. Events that are improbable over the short term become probable and even certain over the long term, as when, typing randomly in solitude, a single monkey—a great ape in virtue of accomplishments to come—re-creates Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with every comma in place and variant spellings noted. No one expects this prodigy to finish up quickly, of course, which is another way of saying that it all depends.
An improbable God, denied access to Being over the short term, may find himself clambering into existence over a term that is long. But having failed to control the circumstances by which God’s probability is assigned, Dawkins has also neglected to mention how long those circumstances have been in operation. We are thus free to imagine some infernal cosmic experiment involving dice whose clatter is intended to evoke deities, with each round failing to elicit the Deity, until God finally appears, brimming with enthusiasm and ready to create the universe. So far as God is concerned, after all, He has all the time in the world.
It all depends, of course.
EXPLANATIONS WITHOUT END
When expressed as Dawkins expresses it, the Ultimate 747 gambit explodes and then gutters out inconclusively. But often arguments of this sort carry with them a shadow, one prepared in a pinch to take over from the main character. In the case of the 747 gambit, the shadow is given over to meditations concerning the structure of rational explanations. It is an important topic, and one that Dawkins is prepared to cover in the cloak of his carelessness.
A single power assumption is at work throughout: Unlikely events require an explanation. The power assumption trails in its wake two additional assumptions. The first is that old standby: The universe is unlikely. And the second has long stood by: If God created the universe, He must be more unlikely than the universe He created. From the power assumption and its sidekicks, an infinite regress very quickly arises, one in which God requires an explanation, which in turn triggers the demand for yet another explanation, and so another God.
It follows that if God created the universe, there are Gods stacked up behind him, each one creating the God below. Either we must give up on him (formerly Him) or we need to get to the God who really gets things going, and since there seems by this argument to be infinitely many of them, each presumably more powerful, and certainly more intimidating, than His Subordinates, this is an inquiry guaranteed either to fail or to lead to a revival of an especially vigorous form of polytheism.
Imagine addressing prayers to our fathers which art in heaven, as in one of those ghastly children’s books in which Heather has three mothers and Jamal a dozen fathers.
Depressing, no?
The demand that explanations mention only events no more improbable than the events they explain is in any case intolerably abstemious. “How often have I said to you,” Sherlock Holmes observed to Watson, “that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”
But if we explain an event by an appeal to an improbable event, it does not follow that we are bound to keep clambering up the ladder of an infinite regress. When in The Perfect Storm Sebastian Junger described a freak storm off the coast of Nova Scotia, he was explaining shipwreck at sea by means of a very rare confluence of meteorological factors. Such explanations are common throughout the sciences and they are common in ordinary life. About such rare events, all that we can say is that sometimes they happen. We do not need to say more. What more could we say? It may well be that God is improbable and that is the end of it. When Christian believers give thanks for the miracle of Christ, they mean by a miracle a miracle.
THE INADVERTENT THEIST
Although Richard Dawkins has nothing but contempt for theology, often glorying in his impressive ignorance, with his argument he finds himself occupying an unexpected position of prominence amid “the peculiar debris of an abandoned and virtually forgotten science.”
In addition to suffering the infirmity of improbability, the God whose existence Dawkins is prepared to challenge seems curiously a diminished figure. He has gotten the job of creation done. His time thereafter has been spent imposing onerous sexual constraints upon the Jewish people and when absolutely required undertaking a miracle or two. For the moment, He seems to have vacated the universe with a smashing headache. On his previous appearances, He seemed very much like a lumbering robot. One might almost expect to hear the lingering echos of divine clanking. Above all, He is very much a contingent deity. If He is here today, He may be gone tomorrow. If His existence were guaranteed, the argument that Dawkins has advanced would fail before it started instead of starting before it failed.
And yet these are considerations long familiar in the history of theological thought. They form the heart and soul of Aquinas’s second cosmological argument, and if Aquinas gives them only a few words, that is because he requires only a few words to say what needs to be said. Any conception of a contingent deity, Aquinas argues, is doomed to fail, and it is doomed to fail precisely because whatever He might do to explain the existence of the universe, His existence would again require an explanation. “Therefore, not all beings are merely possible, but there must exist something the existence of which is necessary.”
The conclusion that a religious believer will take from Dawkins’s argument is either that God is improbable or that He is necessary.
What Dawkins has established serves chiefly as a reminder: Explanations come to an end, and because we are human, they must come to an end before they have satisfied every one of our emotional needs. But scientific atheists should at least be open to the possibility that scientific explanations by their very nature come to an end well before they have done all the work that an explanation can do. If they have not read Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, physicists have nonetheless heard its music. They have hoped to discover laws of some final physical theory so powerful that they will explain the property of matter in all its modes. “The most extreme hope for science,” Steven Weinberg has written, “is that we will be able to trace the explanation of all natural phenomena to final laws and historical accidents.”
This is the most extreme hope for science for those, like Frank Wilczek, inclined to say at some point that that’s just how things are. For others, intellectual comfort is less easily purchased. “We feel,” Wittgenstein wrote, “that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.” Those who do feel this way will see, following Aquinas, that the only inference calculated to overcome the way things are is one directed toward the way things must be.
Perhaps in the end this will prove to be a matter of mathematics. MIT physicist Max Tegmark has argued that this is so. The physicist Edward Witten and the mathematician Alain Connes have both written suggestively about the origins of creation in some inexplicably austere and remote mathematical structure, one so powerful that from it space and time themselves may be derived.
With these ambitious speculations on the table, it is worth-while to recall that in locating the origins of creation in some fundamental abstract structures, mathematicians are assigning to them a degree of agency that until now they do not seem to have possessed.
There remains a final point. What a man rejects as distasteful must always be measured against what he is prepared eagerly to swallow. What Richard Dawkins is prepared to swallow is the Landscape and the Anthropic Principle. The Landscape does not, of course, answer the question what caused the Landscape to exist. How could it? And if nothing caused the Landscape, it does not answer the question why it should be there at all.
But having swallowed the Landscape with such inimitable gusto, Dawkins is surely obliged to explain just why he scruples at the Deity. After all, the theologian need only appeal to a single God lording over it all and a single universe—our own. Dawkins must appeal to infinitely many universes crammed into creation, with laws of nature wriggling indiscreetly and fundamental physical parameters changing as one travels from one corner of the cosmos to the next, the whole entire gargantuan structure scientifically unobservable and devoid of any connection to experience.
This is a point that Dawkins endeavors to meet, but with markedly insufficient success. “The key difference between the radically extravagant God hypothesis,” he writes, “and the apparently extravagant multiverse hypothesis, is one of statistical improbability.”
It is? I had no idea, the more so since Dawkins’s very next sentence would seem to undercut the sentence he has just written. “The multiverse, for all that it is extravagant, is simple,” because each of its constituent universes “is simple in its fundamental laws.”
If this is true for each of those constituent universes, then it is true for our universe as well. And if our universe is simple in its fundamental laws, what on earth is the relevance of Dawkins’s argument?
Simple things, simple explanations, simple laws, a simple God.
Bon appétit.
