The God Delusion: Improbable Complexity

In his book The God Delusion Richard Dawkins presents what he call "The Ultimate 747 Argument" to explain why he believes that God most certainly does not exist. The argument from improbability and its trademark image of the 747 is usually put forth by creationists or intelligent design proponents to argue for God's existence. Dawkins turns the argument on its head and posits that the argument from improbability actually is a good argument that God does not exist.

The argument from improbability and its image of the Boeing 747 and the scrapyard are credited to Fred Hoyle and simply put "the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance of a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747" (Dawkins 113). The same metaphor could be used to argue against the evolution or higher life forms like the odds or a hurricane putting together a live parakeet, a person, or a Paramecium. But Dawkins looks at this argument and asks 'what is the probability of the existence of God?' by questioning the idea that God is a simple being (if not the simplest of all beings). Many theologians, especially Richard Swinburne, have asserted the belief that God must be simple because He consists of a single substance (Dawkins 147-8). Dawkins argues that God, if He exists, must be more complex than the phenomena he has been posited to explain, namely matter, life, and intelligence.

So how does something's complexity affect the probability of its existence? It is assumed that the more complex a being, the less probable its existence becomes. Simple things are simply more likely to occur than complex things. This assumption is true more often than not. For example, on the atomic scale, hydrogen, the simplest element (just a single proton orbited by one electron) is more likely to be found than oxygen (with its eight protons, eight neutrons, and eight electrons. And oxygen is more likely to be found than uranium (containing 92 protons, 146 neutrons, and 92 electrons). On a larger scale we see the same pattern. Here on earth simple sedimentary or igneous rock is more likely to be found than organic life; and simple organic life is more likely to be found than intelligent beings. It follows quite easily that an immensely complex intelligence capable of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence must be very improbable indeed.

I agree with Dawkins on both points. A being "capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple" (Dawkins 149). And such a complex being must be immensely improbable. However, I don't think that admitting this presents nearly as big of a problem as Dawkins suggests.

Let's start with question of God's complexity. For centuries man has thought of God as the simplest explanation for the things we see. To answer the question 'Where did all the animals and plants come from?' we say: 'God made them' (Gen. 1:20-5). We now know that the diversity of life comes from natural selection acting on mutations to shape organisms more fit to survive and reproduce in a given set or range of conditions. In addition to natural selection other processes such as gene flow, genetic drift, and chance (such as a mass extinction or an unlucky misstep on a high tree branch) have also helped to shape Earth's current diversity of flora and fauna. But this explanation is far from simple. It is actually more complicated than believing that God spoke the animals into existence. And if you look at any other branch of knowledge you will see that the closer we come to the truth of the nature of things the more complex our explanations become.

We used to think that there were only four 'elements' in the world: air, water, fire, and earth. We now know that there are at least 110 different elements, a plethora of energy forms, subatomic particles, gravitons, etc. that make up the physical reality. We used to think that the human body was controlled and influenced by the proportions of four humors: blood, black bile, green bile, and mucus. We now know that the body has those fluid plus hundreds of hormones, proteins, electrical impulses, and ionic concentrations that control our inner workings. As our knowledge of the world increases it appears that our answers are not becoming simpler, but are becoming more complex.

Yes, God is very likely to be highly complex. But if the pattern we see with biology, chemistry, and physics of moving from simple answers to more complex explanations is true for theology as well we should expect to see that God is not simple, but is the most complex being possible. Furthermore, the progressive revelation of the Bible has painted us a picture of a God with increasing complexity, from the simple Yahweh of the Old Testament to the complex intertwining of the Father, Son, and Spirit of the New Testament. God as an immensely complex being makes perfect sense to the Christian believer.

What happens if we acknowledge that God is a very highly complex being and accept the assumption that complex things are less likely to occur than simple things? To put it shortly: nothing. Dawkins, and the creationists and intelligent design believers, make use of the sneaky art of statistics to support their cases. For instance, there are six crucial constants that must be fine-tuned to very exact numbers for matter to exist; and must be further fine-tuned to allow life to exist (this is known as the Anthropic Principle). The odds that those numbers are tuned to created the universe we see is very, very, very small. But the fact is those constants are tuned to create a universe like the one we see. Along the same line of reasoning as Dawkins employs I can argue pretty well that you do not exist.

The odds that the combination of genes from your parents would create your genome are very low (like 1 in 10 million low). Now the odds that the combination of genes from your grandparents would create your parents' genomes are similar to those of the previous calculation. The odds that your parents met and married are probably somewhere around 1 in 10 million. Now repeat the last two odds for the probability that your great-grandparents genomes combined to form your grandparents and the odds that your grandparents met. So what is the probability that you exist? One in 1070. I normally round off at the tenth decimal place so for me the probability that you exist is essentially zero. And if you are one of the few people that round off at the seventy-first decimal place, I can easily make the odds even smaller by calculating the odds your great-great-grandparents met and so forth back to the beginning of time. However, hopefully you are not quite convinced by the overwhelming odds against your own existence. That's because no matter how great the statistical odds are against you existing the fact remains that you do exist. And actually existing trumps probability every time.

So Dawkins is right. God is improbably complex, but so are you. And if the high probability against a being of your complexity existing doesn't make you doubt that you exist it shouldn't make you doubt that God exists. In fact, this argument can contend that if God is the most complex being possible (and He might possible be) then there can only be one of them. And you end up with monotheism instead of atheism. So it seems that Dawkins' argument from improbability shows us practically nothing about whether or not God exists and more about why we should be wary of blindly trusting probabilities.


Reference:
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 2006.