God’s existence is hard to prove, but so is one of nature’s most whimsical creations, the platypus. If it didn’t really exist, no one would give much credence to this improbable creature. It has webbed feet and a bill like a duck. The male can deliver a venomous sting with his hind feet. The female doesn’t give birth like other mammals but lays eggs like a fish, reptile, or bird. Let’s say that a mathematician is called in to prove how unlikely such a creature is. With enough reliable variables, he could give you a statistical probability, and it would be very low. A fishlike, reptilian mammal defies all the odds. Yet lo and behold, those odds prove to be wrong as soon as a platypus is dug out of its burrow beside an Australian stream. (They are shy, nocturnal creatures.)
Beware of arguments based on probability. When he was a young man, Einstein worked as a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office. What are the odds that a clerk in the same office today will be the next Einstein? It’s an absurd question to pose that way (like asking the odds that a deaf person will become the next Beethoven). Even if you came up with plausible odds (ten zillion to one), the next Einstein won’t be found using probability. Likewise, when you want to get on a bus, you don’t calculate the probability of its taking you where you want to go. You consult the schedule and find out. There are lots of wrong questions that lead to wrong answers.
In The God Delusion, Dawkins makes improbability the centerpiece of denying God’s existence. It’s a classic case of asking the wrong question. His argument can be found in a chapter titled “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God,” which poses as objectivity. On a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is certainty that God exists and 7 is certainty that he doesn’t, he counts himself a 6: “I cannot know for certain, but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.”
Why should the existence of God come down to calculating the odds like a horse race? You don’t need to call in a statistician if you’ve found a platypus, and for three thousand years the same has held true of God. People have had many direct experiences of God throughout history. Writing in the generation after the Crucifixion, Saint Paul declared that more than five hundred converts had seen the risen Christ. Muhammad went up to a cave above Mecca where he found peace and quiet, only to be confronted by the angel Gabriel, who commanded him to “Recite!” Spontaneously Muhammad began to speak the verses of the Koran. Religious history is filled with epiphanies, revelations, visions, miracles, and wonders. With a phenomenon as universal as spirituality, direct experience means something. A skeptic has a right to discount something generic like a public opinion poll. The fact that 80 to 90 percent of Americans believe in God is weak evidence unless you interview each respondent and ask them why they believe.
God (unlike the platypus) may be invisible, but so is music. We trust our experience of music, but what if a deaf skeptic came along? How would you prove the existence of music to him? You could take him to concert halls where people have gathered to enjoy music. If he remained unconvinced, you’d have many other options: music conservatories, factories where musical instruments are made, and so on. At a certain point, even if a deaf skeptic had no ability to validate that music is real, the vast experience of others would be convincing—unless he was dead set against it.
Dawkins is dead set against acknowledging the existence of God; therefore the direct experience of other people carries no weight with him. All are deluded and duped. The God Delusion has a detailed index at the back. Here are some names that do not appear in it: Buddha, Lao-tzu, Zoroaster, Socrates, Plato, Saint Francis of Assisi, and the gospel writers Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Dawkins dismisses all spiritual experience from the past with a shrug. He doesn’t mention Confucius, either, and his single reference to Confucianism gets lumped in with Buddhism because to Dawkins they aren’t really spiritual in nature:
I shall not be concerned at all with other religions such as Buddhism or Confucianism. Indeed, there is something to be said for treating these not as religions but as ethical systems or philosophies of life.
This will come as news to many generations of Buddhist priests and Tibetan lamas. But then, Dawkins is the kind of writer who wants the reader to accept that Judaism was “originally a tribal cult of a single fierce, unpleasant God, morbidly obsessed with sexual restrictions, with the smell of charred flesh,” and so on. He doesn’t consider that exaggerated put-downs might undermine his own credibility as an objective scientist.
A large body of scientific research attempts to verify spiritual experiences and the paranormal. The God Delusion spends little time on impartial research findings and no time objectively weighing the pros and cons on controversies about reincarnation, near-death experiences, and the efficacy of prayer. Beginning in the 1960s, for example, at the psychology department of the University of Virginia, psychiatrist Ian Stevenson headed a long-term study to investigate children who seem to remember their past lives. Typically this happens between the ages of two and seven; it fades quickly after that. From over four decades of research, more than twenty-five hundred case studies have been compiled. The children bring up memories of where they used to live, their friends and family, and the details of their deaths. A number of children in Japan and the United States remember dying in combat in World War II. In one case a little boy got excited seeing a newsreel of fighter planes over the Pacific, and when one went down, he pointed to the television screen and said, “That was me.” The family sought out survivors of that particular battle, and they described in detail the pilot whom the little boy thought he was. He got every detail and even a few names right.
Coming from India, I was well aware of such incidents, which are widely known and believed. Children have been tested by taking them to the village they remembered living in, and quite often their recollections of streets, houses, and people are verified. Stevenson pursued these anecdotal stories, and by now the research team that continues his work has amassed hundreds of verified examples from around the world. The most startling examples are probably those in which a child is born with birthmarks that duplicate the wounds, such as where a bullet entered the chest, that correlate to how his previous incarnation died.
An independent study reviewing the data that Stevenson’s program gathered came to the conclusion that “in regard to reincarnation he has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases … in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds.” A fascinating subject has been held under scientific scrutiny for anyone to examine. The same is true of every phenomenon that skeptics like Dawkins ridicule rather than investigate. At the very least, experiences that you don’t understand deserve to be examined scientifically, especially if you are a scientist. Dawkins considers such research bogus by definition, so all he has to do is cite a single contrary study to avoid even looking at masses of objective research.
Dawkins devotes a few pages to scientists who believe in God. He shrugs off Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton immediately because their prestige gives little weight to “an already bad argument.” But Darwin, who is Dawkins’s household god, should have given him pause. As a young man, Darwin was conventionally religious. In his autobiography he writes, “Whilst on board the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being heartily laughed at by several of the officers (though themselves orthodox) for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality.” His doubt arose over a conventional question that many other Victorians wrestled with: How could one God countenance the existence of many gods, like Shiva and Vishnu? Did he have separate messages for Hindus and Christians? Darwin found many reasons to doubt that the Gospels were literally true, and after much consideration, he tells us, “I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation.”
But it isn’t on the basis of evolution that Darwin abandoned Biblical religion, which makes for discomfort if you rely on evolution as a mainstay of your atheist position. Darwin didn’t consider the issue of a personal God until late in life, at which point he did use natural selection to refute arguments in favor of a benign, loving creator. It is striking how diffident he is when writing about his unbelief. He compares himself to someone who is blind to the color red in a world where everyone else can see red. Thus he understands that “the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep inward conviction and feelings which are experienced by most persons.” As a young man he had the same feelings—in a journal entry from his voyage on the Beagle, he recalls being so overawed by the Brazilian jungle that he was convinced that only the existence of God could account for it. But in later life those feelings looked untrustworthy: “I cannot see that such inward convictions and feelings are of any weight as evidence of what really exists.”
Without a doubt, he was laying the ground for a modern scientist’s reliance on objective evidence alone. But Darwin was far from being a God-basher. After discussing the possibility of immortality and other attributes of God, he says, “I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble to us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.” Dawkins’s way of wriggling out of this inconvenient fact is to say that in the nineteenth century the pressure to believe was so great that unbelievers were reluctant to really speak their mind. He quotes Bertrand Russell, a famous atheist among philosophers, to the effect that such pressures inhibited scientists well into the twentieth century: “they conceal the fact in public, because they are afraid of losing their incomes.”
Against this conjecture, which seems weak even for Dawkins, he fails to consider that a scientist can believe in God because, as the geneticist Francis Collins says, science is good at commenting on the natural world but not on the supernatural. For Collins as a believing Christian, “both worlds, for me, are quite real and quite important. They are investigated in different ways. They coexist. They illuminate each other.”
Does it matter if great scientists believe in God? Copernicus, Newton, and the rest didn’t conduct experiments on the existence of a deity. Nor did they rely on direct personal experience (although their biographies reveal some such experiences, as all kinds of people have had). Polling great scientists for their opinions on art wouldn’t matter; the two fields are entirely separate.
Since The Origin of Species did so much to crush the Bible and Christian belief in general, why did Darwin avoid atheism? A young admirer wrote a letter asking Darwin about his religious beliefs and received a careful reply. It was a study in high-minded fence-sitting. Darwin wrote,
It is impossible to answer your question briefly; and I am not sure that I could do so, even if I wrote at some length. But I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide.
This brings us back to chance and probability. In the age of faith, people beheld the intricate patterns in nature and immediately saw the hand of a creator. The rise of science undermined such intuitive perceptions. Every aspect of nature demanded some kind of data. Mathematics trumped “natural religion,” as it was called. So let’s see which side the probabilities actually favor. Is it more likely that God exists or that he doesn’t?
There’s a famous answer to that question. In 1982 the British astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle gave a radio lecture in which he mentioned in passing that “a colleague of mine worked out that a yeast cell and a 777 airplane have the same number of parts, the same level of complexity.” The current scientific explanation for how all the complex parts of a yeast cell came together is randomness. Hoyle tried to calculate how unlikely it was that random chance had assembled a living cell. The odds were very low. But what has survived is a striking analogy that doesn’t depend upon whether he got his numbers right (the model of airplane changed along the way):
The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way [i.e., randomly] is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.
The analogy was brilliant because it can be easily understood, and believed, by anyone. A Boeing 747 has around six million parts, and it takes intelligence, design, and planning to fit them all together. Hoyle wasn’t a creationist, and he didn’t believe in God. His aim was to show that highly complex structures can’t be explained by chance.
It’s easy to amplify the Boeing 747 junkyard analogy to make it even stronger—a thousand times stronger, in fact: There are six billion, not six million, genetic letters strung along human DNA. Their arrangement is precise and delicate. Major impairments like birth defects and genetic disorders can result if the arrangement of even a few genes is imperfect. This implies that an Intelligent Design is present, even though the words intelligent and design have turned into buzzwords for creationism. Creationism enjoyed a flurry of publicity as fundamentalist Christians dressed up the Biblical creation story in wobbly science. The long-term damage was that it tainted the concept of intelligence in nature.
Dawkins makes hay by aiming chapter after chapter against religious fundamentalists. As he presents it, if you suggest that nature looks designed, you are in the same leaky boat as someone who believes that the Book of Genesis is literally true. Dawkins participates in debates with theologians and emerges unscathed (by his account), since his opponents are befuddled and intellectually outgunned, forced to retreat to musty arguments about God having a special place in nature outside the reach of science. In effect, he says, they put God in a safe zone, making him exempt from scientific reasoning. If he weren’t securely tucked away in a safe zone, God couldn’t survive the scrutiny we apply to amoebae, electrons, and dinosaur bones.
The Boeing 747 junkyard analogy is too convincing to ignore, however, and The God Delusion must face it squarely. As Dawkins writes, “The argument from improbability is the big one.” He picks up a religious pamphlet published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society—the publishing arm of Jehovah’s Witnesses—that defends creationism. The pamphlet cites examples of complex life-forms that indicate the hand of a creator God. One is Euplectella, a deep-sea sponge popularly called Venus’s Flower Basket. (It is a traditional gift in Asia as a symbol of romantic love, because inside each sponge lives a male and a female shrimp, protected in their nest. When they mate, their offspring swim out into the ocean to find their own nest in another Euplectella.) The sponge’s skeleton is formed of millions of glass fibers so intricately interwoven that their design has interested the makers of fiber optics; the sponge converts silicic acid, found in seawater, into silica, the chemical basis of glass. The Watchtower pamphlet declares that science cannot explain how such complexity arose: “But one thing we do know. Chance is not the likely designer.”
Dawkins intends to surprise the reader by agreeing. Randomness is indeed a bad explanation for the glass skeleton of Venus’s Flower Basket, he says. No one would credit that such exquisiteness came about by chance. Dawkins intends to surprise us with this apparent flip-flop, since he relies so heavily on randomness and probability. But he refutes the Boeing 747 junkyard analogy by using it against itself. The problem, he says, is that Fred Hoyle, brilliant as he was, misunderstood evolution completely. The secret of natural selection, the source of its brilliance as a theory, is that it doesn’t need random chance. Living things compete selfishly. They take deliberate action. Plants want light and water. Animals want food and a mate. As soon as a liana vine evolves and can twine to the top of a tree in the jungle, it gets the light it craves. A cheetah that evolves loose shoulder joints to enable it to stride longer and faster is going to beat out other big cats chasing after gazelles. Step by step, each living thing earns its right to survive; the steps aren’t random at all.
So why, he asks, do our minds keep reaching for God as the designer of the physical world? Because we falsely assume that some things are so beautiful and complex that their design cannot be denied—think of the intricate helix of a chambered nautilus shell or the same spiral helix at the heart of a rose, the double strands of DNA, and the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower. Our eyes tell us that a designer must have devised this beauty and complexity.
Well, yes and no. It’s natural to connect a man-made machine like a pocket watch with a maker, says Dawkins. Watches don’t assemble themselves. But the same isn’t true in nature. Galaxies, planets, DNA, and the human brain did assemble themselves. How? For life to appear on Earth, Darwin shows the way. Intricacy is built up by a sequence of tiny steps. You may stand in awe of a Roman mosaic wall, but if you get close, you’ll see that it’s made of tiny chips of colored stone. A chip isn’t awesome. Darwinism explains that the tiny steps of evolution are not improbable at all; they are the building blocks of everything complex in the natural world. The choice between God and chance is a false one, Dawkins writes. The real choice is between God and natural selection.
If you want to see something really improbable—to the point of laughing it out of existence—look at God. Dawkins calls God “the ultimate Boeing 747 gambit.” A God who could create every form of life in one stroke, as the Book of Genesis declares, would have to be more complex than what he created—more complex than DNA, quarks, billions of galaxies, and everything else that emerged over 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang.
It is extremely improbable that such a being stands behind the curtain of nature. You can peer at the fossil record and prove the slow, inexorable process of evolution to yourself. Hoyle brought up a red herring when he tossed randomness into the ring. The right answer is that a designer God defies any odds. Dawkins cites his atheist colleague Daniel Dennett from Tufts University, who as a philosopher has been given the role of deep thinker in these matters. In a 2005 interview with a German journalist, Dennett addresses “the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing.” If you’re naïve, this notion seems intuitively right, Dennett says. “You’ll never see a spear making a spear maker. You’ll never see a horseshoe making a blacksmith. You’ll never see a pot making a potter.”
Dennett labels this the “trickle-down theory of creation.” God is a blacksmith hammering out horseshoes on a cosmic scale. Dennett, whom Dawkins offers up as a “scientifically savvy philosopher,” lends credence to the argument of improbability. They both agree that a cosmic blacksmith or watchmaker is too intricate to be likely. Science, when faced with a choice, prefers the simplest explanation that fits. Random chance is too far-fetched, so it doesn’t fit. A God who is infinitely complex doesn’t fit. What’s left is evolution. Case closed.
In real life, only the tiniest handful of people believe in God because they’ve waded into the weeds of probability theory. But let’s stay with this knotty problem. Do you believe the Boeing 747 analogy? I do. At its crudest, The God Delusion turns God into a simplistic caricature. It’s absurd to ask whether Jehovah created DNA or not. We must toss out Dawkins’s straw man, a personal God who designed the universe. This is just another variant on seeing God as a human being, only much smarter. Many people, as we’ve discussed, can conceive God only in a human image. When someone runs away from organized religion, this is the God they are rejecting.
Dawkins takes nearly four hundred pages to demolish God without seriously considering that a father in the sky might not be the only way to think about the divine. As soon as you reply, “That’s not the God I had in mind,” the straw man of God the Father becomes irrelevant. Organized religion has been backed into a corner by its refusal to find a viable alternative to God the Father, but such alternatives do exist. Saint Augustine had already rejected a literal reading of the Bible in the fifth century AD. Modern belief has gone much further away from literalism, but it serves Dawkins not to even take a peek.
One possibility is that God became the creation. (Einstein suggested something like this in his famous quote about wanting to know the mind of God, although he didn’t explicitly say that God was inside the laws governing time and space.) In other words, God is not a person but the totality of nature. As the source of existence, he is the starting point of your being and mine. God isn’t our father; he isn’t a watchmaker assembling parts into a watch (an image devised in the eighteenth century to explain how a single intelligent creator put all the moving parts of the cosmos together); he doesn’t have feelings and desires. He is being itself. All things exist because he existed first. There is no need for such a God to be intricate.
Setting up a God who must be more complex than the entire universe is merely a ploy. Medieval theologians argued that God had to be more complex than his creation. Dawkins and Dennett should be arguing in the lecture halls of the University of Paris around 1300. In the eighteenth century, the watchmaker analogy became popular because a movement known as deism, which Thomas Jefferson belonged to, wanted to reconcile faith and reason. Deists accepted that God isn’t present in the world, and reason told them that miracles can’t exist, because they defy the laws of nature. What sort of deity can be worshipped who isn’t present and who doesn’t perform miracles? A rational god, one who constructed the universe, set it in motion, and then walked away. For Deists, God is like a watchmaker who built his machine, wound it up, and let it run on its own.
The Dawkins twist is to demand that the watchmaker God be more complex than the universe. It’s not a demand anyone should accept, for good reason. When you lift your hand to switch on a lamp, you carry out a simple intention. The fact that your brain contains a hundred billion neurons and perhaps a quadrillion synaptic connections is irrelevant. No one needs to examine all those neurons and connections to calculate the probability that they will result in moving your hand. Your intention moves it; the brain’s complexity serves the performance of a simple act. Complexity is no obstacle to creating the thoughts, words, and actions that make up the human condition. The brain is too complex for anyone to understand, yet we use it every day.
God could be the simplest thing of all, in fact. He is a unity. Diversity unfolds from this unity, and diversity—the expanding universe, billions of galaxies, human DNA—is bewilderingly complex. But its source doesn’t have to be diverse. Picasso was the source of tens of thousands of artworks, but he didn’t have to imagine all of them at once in his mind. Like natural selection, God is allowed to produce the natural world step by step, unless you insist, as Dawkins does, that the literal acceptance of Genesis is the only creation story religious people believe in. The alternative I posed, that God became the creation, has a long tradition as well.
The next point that Dawkins makes is quite crucial: complex designs don’t need a designer. In a triumphant sentence, The God Delusion explains why natural selection is the only successful theory for how life evolved:
Once the vital ingredient—some kind of genetic molecule—is in place, true Darwinian natural selection can follow, and complex life emerges as the eventual consequence.
Most nonscientists won’t spot the sleight of hand here. The Boeing 747 junkyard analogy isn’t refuted by what happened after life already appeared. What about how DNA got formed in the first place? DNA is a chemical, but in order to explain its structure, you must invoke physics. The sequence of events that led from the Big Bang to DNA is a single chain as far as physics is concerned. The same laws of nature must be at work; there can’t be any breaks in the chain, or DNA wouldn’t have come about.
It would only have taken a few dropped stitches, billions of years ago, for the whole enterprise to have collapsed—for example, if water didn’t emerge from the combination of oxygen and hydrogen. The early cosmos was full of free-floating hydrogen and oxygen, as it is today. DNA cannot exist without water, and the water must have been in abundance for hundreds of millions of years. Since 99.9999 percent of the oxygen and hydrogen in the universe didn’t turn into water—add as many decimal places as you like—the fact that water appeared on Earth isn’t a matter of tiny probable steps. Quite the opposite—arguments for the uniqueness of life on Earth still hold enormous power, and they don’t have to be arguments based on a Biblical God.
The God Delusion offended some scientists as much as it did creationists. They pointed out, in their hostile reactions, that science depends on data, of which Dawkins offers none. He has conducted no experiments and made no calculations in support of his atheistic ideas. The most severe scientific rebuke, however, is that The God Delusion doesn’t really present a hypothesis that could be tested. Its author is wedded to preordained conclusions and has no time for any arguments except the ones that get him where he wants to go.
A distinguished biologist, H. Allen Orr, quotes Dawkins’s claim that “we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism—as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion.” Orr dryly comments, “As you may have noticed, Dawkins when discussing religion is, in effect, a blunt instrument, one that has a hard time distinguishing Unitarians from abortion clinic bombers.” Dawkins tries to knock the stuffing out of the Biblical God, but to make sure that he can kick him when he’s down, he uses only the most simplistic version of the Biblical God.
If you explore the universe mining it for data and discount everything else, most of what makes life rich and beautiful goes out the window. God isn’t a strange supernatural fiction, as Dawkins asserts. He’s the source of our inner world, the same place where art, music, imagination, visionary conceptions, love, altruism, philosophy, morals, and human bonding are born. This world has its own truths. We can reach them by experiencing them. Only an alien from another planet would try to prove the existence of love by weighing the probabilities. Only someone who has never seen a platypus would rely on statistics to prove that one couldn’t exist. The same goes for Dawkins’s approach to God.