Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit is a counter-argument to the modern form of the argument from design

Teleological argument

A teleological or design argument is an a posteriori argument for the existence of God based on apparent design and purpose in the universe. The argument is based on an interpretation of teleology wherein purpose and intelligent design appear to exist in nature beyond the scope of any such human...

. It was introduced by Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins

Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL , known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author...

in chapter 4 "Why there almost certainly is no God" of his 2006 book The God Delusion
The God Delusion
The God Delusion is a 2006 bestselling non-fiction book by British biologist Richard Dawkins, professorial fellow of New College, Oxford, and inaugural holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford.In The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that...

.

Context and history

Richard Dawkins begins The God Delusion by making it clear that the God he talks about is the Abrahamic concept of a personal god

Personal God

A personal god is a deity who can be related to as a person instead of as an "impersonal force", such as the Absolute, "the All", or the "Ground of Being"....

who is susceptible to worship. He considers the existence of such an entity to be a scientific question, because a universe with such a god would be significantly different from a universe without one, and he says that the difference would be empirically

Empiricism

Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...

discernible. Therefore, Dawkins concludes, the same kind of reasoning can be applied to the God hypothesis as to any other scientific question.

After discussing some of the most common arguments for the existence of God

Existence of God

Arguments for and against the existence of God have been proposed by philosophers, theologians, scientists, and others. In philosophical terms, arguments for and against the existence of God involve primarily the sub-disciplines of epistemology and ontology , but also of the theory of value, since...

in chapter 3, Dawkins concludes that the argument from design is the most convincing. The extreme improbability of life and a universe capable of hosting it requires explanation, but Dawkins considers the God hypothesis inferior to evolution by natural selection as explanations for the complexity of life. As part of his efforts to refute intelligent design

Intelligent design

Intelligent design is the proposition that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." It is a form of creationism and a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for...

, he redirects the argument from complexity

Irreducible complexity

Irreducible complexity is an argument by proponents of intelligent design that certain biological systems are too complex to have evolved from simpler, or "less complete" predecessors, through natural selection acting upon a series of advantageous naturally occurring, chance mutations...

in order to show that God must have been designed by a superintelligent designer, and then goes on to present his probabilistic argument against the existence of God.

Dawkins's name for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the "Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit". This is an allusion to Hoyle's fallacy

Hoyle's fallacy

Hoyle's Fallacy, sometimes called the junkyard tornado, is a term for Fred Hoyle's flawed statistical analysis applied to evolutionary origins, in which he compares the probability of cellular life evolving to the chance of a tornado "sweeping through a junkyard" and assembling a functional aeroplane...

. Fred Hoyle

Fred Hoyle

Sir Fred Hoyle FRS was an English astronomer and mathematician noted primarily for his contribution to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and his often controversial stance on other cosmological and scientific matters—in particular his rejection of the "Big Bang" theory, a term originally...

reportedly stated that the "probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747

Boeing 747

The Boeing 747 is a wide-body commercial airliner and cargo transport, often referred to by its original nickname, Jumbo Jet, or Queen of the Skies. It is among the world's most recognizable aircraft, and was the first wide-body ever produced...

." The basic argument against empirical theism dates back at least to David Hume, whose objection can be popularly stated as "Who designed the designer?", but according to Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett

Daniel Clement Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of...

the innovation of Dawkins's argument is: first, to show that where design fails to explain complexity, evolution by natural selection succeeds and is in fact the only workable solution; and, second, to argue how this should illuminate the confusion surrounding the anthropic principle

Anthropic principle

In astrophysics and cosmology, the anthropic principle is the philosophical argument that observations of the physical Universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it. Some proponents of the argument reason that it explains why the Universe has the age and the fundamental...

Dawkins's statement

Dawkins summarizes his argument as follows. The references to "crane" and "skyhook" are ideas from Dennett

Daniel Dennett

's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life is a book by Daniel Dennett which argues that Darwinian processes are the central organizing force that gives rise to complexity...

.

A central thesis of the argument is that, compared to supernatural abiogenesis, evolution by natural selection requires the supposition of fewer hypothetical processes and thus, according to Occam's razor

Occam's razor

Occam's razor, also known as Ockham's razor, and sometimes expressed in Latin as lex parsimoniae , is a principle that generally recommends from among competing hypotheses selecting the one that makes the fewest new assumptions.-Overview:The principle is often summarized as "simpler explanations...

, a better explanation than the God hypothesis. He cites a paragraph where Richard Swinburne

Richard Swinburne

Richard G. Swinburne is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Over the last 50 years Swinburne has been a very influential proponent of philosophical arguments for the existence of God. His philosophical contributions are primarily in philosophy of religion and...

agrees that a simpler explanation is better but reasons that theism is simpler because it only invokes a single substance, God, as a cause and maintainer of every other object. This cause is seen as omnipotent, omniscient and totally free. Dawkins argues that an entity that monitors and controls every particle in the universe and listens to all our thoughts and prayers cannot be simple. His existence would require a "mammoth explanation" of its own. The theory of natural selection is much simpler than the theory of the existence of such a complex being, and thus preferable.

Dawkins then turns to a discussion of Keith Ward

Keith Ward

Keith Ward is a British cleric, philosopher, theologian and scholar. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and an ordained priest of the Church of England. He was a canon of Christ Church, Oxford until 2003...

's views on divine simplicity

Divine simplicity

In theology, the doctrine of divine simplicity says that God is without parts. The general idea of divine simplicity can be stated in this way: the being of God is identical to the "attributes" of God. In other words, such characteristics as omnipresence, goodness, truth, eternity, etc...

to show the difficulty "the theological mind has in grasping where the complexity of life comes from." Dawkins writes that Ward is sceptical of Arthur Peacocke

Arthur Peacocke

The Reverend Canon Arthur Robert Peacocke MBE was a British theologian and biochemist.-Biography:Arthur Robert Peacocke was born at Watford in on 29 November 1924...

's ideas that evolution is directed by other forces than only natural selection and that these processes may have a propensity toward increasing complexity. Dawkins says that this scepticism is justified, because complexity doesn't come from biased mutations. Dawkins writes:

[Natural selection], as far as we know, is the only process ultimately capable of generating complexity out of simplicity. The theory of natural selection is genuinely simple. So is the origin from which it starts. That which it explains, on the other hand, is complex almost beyond telling: more complex than anything we can imagine, save a God capable of designing it.

Assessment and criticism

Theist authors have presented extensive opposition, most notably by theologian Alister McGrath

Alister McGrath

Alister Edgar McGrath is an Anglican priest, theologian, and Christian apologist, currently Professor of Theology, Ministry, and Education at Kings College London and Head of the Centre for Theology, Religion and Culture...

in The Dawkins Delusion?
The Dawkins Delusion?
The Dawkins Delusion?, subtitled Atheist fundamentalism and the denial of the divine, is a book by Christian theologian Alister McGrath and psychologist Joanna Collicutt McGrath. It is written from a Christian perspective as a response to arguments put forth in The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins...

, and philosophers Alvin Plantinga

Alvin Plantinga

Alvin Carl Plantinga is an American analytic philosopher and the emeritus John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is known for his work in philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics, and Christian apologetics...

and Richard Swinburne

Richard Swinburne

. Another such negative review, by biologist H. Allen Orr

H. Allen Orr

H. Allen Orr is University Professor and Shirley Cox Kearns Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester.- Education and career :He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Biology and Philosophy from the College of William and Mary and his Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Chicago. At...

, has sparked heated debate. Norman Levitt

Norman Levitt

Norman Jay Levitt was a mathematician at Rutgers University. He was born in The Bronx and received a bachelors degree from Harvard College in 1963. He received a PhD from Princeton University in 1967...

disagrees with Orr, asking why theologians are assumed to have the exclusive right to write about who "rules" the universe. Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett

also took exception to Orr's review and the two had an exchange of open letters. The philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny

Anthony Kenny

Sir Anthony John Patrick Kenny FBA is an English philosopher whose interests lie in the philosophy of mind, ancient and scholastic philosophy, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and the philosophy of religion...

also considers this argument to be flawed. Stephen Barr responds as follows, "Paley

William Paley

William Paley was a British Christian apologist, philosopher, and utilitarian. He is best known for his exposition of the teleological argument for the existence of God in his work Natural Theology, which made use of the watchmaker analogy .-Life:Paley was Born in Peterborough, England, and was...

finds a watch

Watchmaker analogy

The watchmaker analogy, or watchmaker argument, is a teleological argument for the existence of God. By way of an analogy, the argument states that design implies a designer...

and asks how such a thing could have come to be there by chance. Dawkins finds an immense automated factory that blindly constructs watches, and feels that he has completely answered Paley’s point."

Simplicity of God and materialist assumptions

Both Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne raise the objection that God is not complex. Swinburne gives two reasons why a God that controls every particle can be simple. First, he writes that a person is not the same as his brain, and he points to split-brain

Split-brain

Split-brain is a lay term to describe the result when the corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres of the brain is severed to some degree. The surgical operation to produce this condition is called corpus callosotomy and is usually used as a last resort to treat otherwise intractable epilepsy...

experiments that he has discussed in his previous work, thus he argues that a simple entity like our self can control our brain, which is a very complex thing. Second, he argues that simplicity is a quality that is intrinsic to a hypothesis, and not related to its empirical consequences.

Plantinga writes:
Proceeding in this thinking, Plantinga concludes that the argument, to be valid, would require materialism to be true and, since materialism is a vision not compatible with traditional theology, the argument turns out to be a fallacy of begging the question

Begging the question

Begging the question is a type of logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proven is assumed implicitly or explicitly in the premise....

– in order to accept the argument as valid and the conclusion of the non-existence of God, you must require His non-existence since the beginning, in the premise.

In an extensive analysis published in Science and Christian Belief
Science and Christian Belief
Science and Christian Belief is an academic journal published twice yearly by Christians in Science and the Victoria Institute. The journal focuses on the traffic of ideas between science and religion, with particular reference to Christianity...

Patrick Richmond suggests that "It seems that Dawkins is right to object to unexplained organised complexity in God" but that God is simply specified and lacks the sort of real composition and limitations found in creatures, so the theist can explain why nature exists without granting unexplained organised complexity or the extreme improbability of God."

Some, such as Stephen Law

Stephen Law

Dr. Stephen Law is a philosopher and senior lecturer at Heythrop College in the University of London. He also edits the philosophical journal Think, which is published by the Royal Institute of Philosophy and aimed at the general public. Law currently lives in Oxford, England, with his wife and two...

, have suggested that God is indeed complex because since he has a mind and created the universe and everything in it, he must have all the complexity of the universe in his mind in order to have done so, and therefore is complex. God is in fact omniscient so in knowing everything he would have in his mind a huge amount of knowledge that was complex and therefore his mind is complex. Others have employed Kolmogorov complexity

Kolmogorov complexity

In algorithmic information theory , the Kolmogorov complexity of an object, such as a piece of text, is a measure of the computational resources needed to specify the object...

to show that God is complex.

Necessity of external explanations

There are many variations on how to express this objection. William F. Vallicella

William F. Vallicella

-Biography:Vallicella has a Ph.D. , taught for a number of years at University of Dayton and Case Western Reserve University , and retired to Gold Canyon, Arizona from where he now contributes to philosophy mainly online...

holds that organized complexity as such does not need explanation, because when in search of an ultimate explanation, one must in the end accept an entity whose complexity has no external explanation. Dawkins has stated that we should search for simple beginnings for explanations, like in evolution which moves from simple to complex, and so what we ultimately accept with no external explanation must be simple for it to be a good explanation. And Plantinga writes that when not in search for an ultimate explanation of organized complexity, it is perfectly fine to explain one kind of complexity, that of terrestrial life, in terms of another kind of complexity, namely divine activity. Dawkins addresses this point in his debate with John Lennox over The God Delusion, saying that it would be perfectly reasonable to infer from artifacts on earth or another planet that an intelligence existed, but that you would still need to explain that intelligence, which evolution does, while for God's existence there is no such explanation.

Alister McGrath suggests that the leap from the recognition of complexity to the assertion of improbability is problematic, as a theory of everything

Theory of everything

A theory of everything is a putative theory of theoretical physics that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena, and predicts the outcome of any experiment that could be carried out in principle....

would be more complex than the theories it would replace, yet one would not conclude that it is less probable. Dawkins has responded to this point in his debate with Lennox and at other times, saying that while physics is hard to understand fundamentally it is simple, unlike biology. McGrath then argues that probability is not relevant to the question of existence: life on earth is highly improbable, and yet we do exist. The important question in his view is not whether God is probable, but whether God is actual. In his interview of McGrath for The Root of All Evil Dawkins says in response that the existence of life on earth is indeed highly improbable, but that that is why we must develop an explanation for it that explains that improbability, such as evolution. In the case of God, Dawkins says, there is no such satisfactory explanation. On the point of probability, Alvin Plantinga says that since according to classical theism, God is a necessary being, he is by definition maximally probable, and thus to show the improbability of God, one has to present an argument showing that there is no necessary being with the qualities attributed to God. Eric MacDonald has pointed out that theists assume the coherence of their position when they make arguments for God when by Plantinga's standard they would have to present an argument that the concept of God is not logically incoherent before discussing other arguments. Plantinga's objection would seem to apply to all atheist arguments that contend that God is improbable, such as evidential arguments about the problem of evil

Problem of evil

In the philosophy of religion, the problem of evil is the question of how to explain evil if there exists a deity that is omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient . Some philosophers have claimed that the existences of such a god and of evil are logically incompatible or unlikely...

and the argument from nonbelief

Argument from nonbelief

The argument from nonbelief is a philosophical argument against the existence of God, specifically, the God of theism...

. But the reason why theists and atheists do not usually address this prior to making their arguments is because they want to go beyond merely discussing whether God is maximally probable or impossible.

Dawkins's response to criticism in The God Delusion

Dawkins writes about his attendance at a conference in Cambridge sponsored by the Templeton Foundation

John Templeton Foundation

"The John Templeton Foundation is a philanthropic organizationthat funds inter-disciplinary research about human purpose and ultimate reality. It is usually referred to simply as the Templeton Foundation...

, where he challenged the theologians present to respond to the argument that a creator of a universe with such complexity would have to be complex and improbable. According to Dawkins, the strongest response was the objection that he was imposing a scientific epistemology on a question that lies beyond the realm of science. When theologians hold God to be simple, who is a scientist like Dawkins "to dictate to theologians that their God had to be complex?" Dawkins writes that he didn't get the impression that those employing this "evasive" defence were being "wilfully dishonest," but were "defining themselves into an epistemological Safe Zone where rational argument could not reach them because they had declared by fiat that it could not."

The theologians, he writes, demanded that there must be a first cause

Cosmological argument

The cosmological argument is an argument for the existence of a First Cause to the universe, and by extension is often used as an argument for the existence of an "unconditioned" or "supreme" being, usually then identified as God...

, which can be given the name God. Dawkins responds that it must have been a simple cause, and he contends that God is not an appropriate name for it, unless God is divested of its normal associations. Dawkins wants the first cause to be a "self-bootstrapping crane" that slowly lifts the world to its current complexity. Postulating a prime mover that is capable of indulging in intelligent design is in Dawkins's opinion "a total abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation." He says that he doesn't require a narrowly scientific explanation, but what any honest theory that accounts for the complex phenomena of the natural world requires is a crane and not a skyhook.

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