The God Delusion Review (Part II)
Posted by Ray @ 1:47 am(This is part II of a two-part review of The God Delusion. Part I deals with its weaknesses, part II deals with its strengths).
Where the book shines is its scientific treatment of why there is no God. It comes as no surprise that Dawkins is himself a prominent evolutionary biologist; his philosophical arguments are far less convincing than his scientific ones. Fortunately, the scientific arguments are convincing enough that I feel they need no further bolstering.
Dawkins clarifies early on what his idea of “God” is: a personal God, an omniscient and omnipotent being, who not only created the universe but is active in its management and in the lives of its denizens - humans. He goes to great lengths to distinguish it from other characterisations of God (for example, God as the being who set the universe in motion, but is otherwise impersonal and uncaring about our fate; or God as something within all of us).
Then the main thrust comes, in which he promotes evolution as the most elegant and deeply satisfying explanation for creation and complexity there is. And I can’t help but feel firmly convinced, because it’s just so simple when you look at it, that you really couldn’t think it happened any other way.
On Evolution
(Amateur biologist alert! Remember, I’m not an expert, but I do try to verify what I read at least with Wikipedia.)
At its core, evolution dictates that individual organisms with “better” characteristics are more likely to survive than those with “worse” characteristics. What is “better” depends on environmental and internal pressures; for example, an eye is quite a useless tool in total darkness (see: life in the marianas trench).
Dawkins then deftly parries Intelligent Design’s protest: “Only a full eye is useful. The entire eye must form spontaneously; evolution does not allow for that. Evolution is wrong, because it cannot explain the use of half an eye!”. The rebuttal is blindingly obvious (pardon the pun): half an eye is better than 49% of an eye, which in turn is better than 48% of an eye, all the way down to complete blindness.
The beginnings of a new characteristic are humble. An eye starts off as a simple light-detecting membrane or cell. If useful within the environment, in a sense that the organism lives longer beacuse of it, there is a higher chance it passes that characteristic on. From there, that eye mutates into as complex an eye as is beneficial within the environment. Perhaps a cell that can detect different shades of brightness comes up. Or one that can tell the organism where the light is coming from. Time passes, and eventually we get a golden eagle’s eye, which can spot a hare from a mile away. A golden eagle needs that super-sharp vision because that’s how it hunts and survives. To the eagle, a human eye is a rather pathetic thing, far less than “half an eye”.
But then Intelligent Design protests again: “Mutations are extremely rare; there has not been enough time for all this diversity to develop!”. Again, it is easily rebuttable. Radiometric dating techniques puts the age of the earth at about 4.5 billion years old. There is great debate as to when life began, but certainly by 3.5 billion years ago single-celled oganisms were crawling around. 3,500,000,000 years is a long, long, long, long time.
The time frame is undisputed; if you want to argue that radiometric dating is inaccurate, I point you here, and be off with you. What’s difficult is that the human mind is quite incapable of putting the concept of 3.5 billion years into his poor brain. We’re not built that way. Once a number gets to a certain size, our brains can’t handle it anymore and it just becomes an abstraction.
As an experiment, try imagining a bag of ten marbles. Easy, right? Now imagine a bag of a hundred. Not so difficult, but not too easy either. Now imagine a bag of a million marbles. Try as you might, you can’t imagine a million, can you? Let’s break it down: a marble is about 1.5 centimetres in diameter. A million marbles put in a line will therefore stretch for 1,500,000 cm, which is about 15 kilometres! A billion marbles would stretch for 15,000 km, which is just 5,000 km short of being halfway around the world.
Early progress was incredibly slow. It took a billion years before single celled life appeared. It took another 2.5 billion years for multicellular life to appear. According to our fossil records, the real explosion of life only happened in the last 500 million years.
Even so, 500 million years is an incredibly long period of time, a period that is long enough that were our brains capable of grasping it, we should not be surprised that the diversity we see today exists. Going back to the eye example, there are many kinds of eyes that have independently evolved. My poor layman mind can name two right off the bat: compound eyes, found in insects, and pinhole camera-lens eyes, like the ones we humans have. Scientists have identified 40 different kinds of visual sensors. 40! Given 3.5 billion years, I’m surprised that number isn’t bigger.
Evolution is supported by a wealth of evidence so compelling that you cannot help but accept it as truth. Every time I ask “but how?”, I get an answer that is itself backed up with empirical, tested evidence. This cycle runs all the way up to the ultimate “how” question: how did life begin?
On the origins of life
This is something that is subject to great debate within the scientific community. The short answer is, we don’t know. “Victory is mine!” shouts the Intelligent Design camp. But victory is far from their grasp.
Dawkins explains that the core concept behind life requires just one simple characteristic: the ability to replicate with relative (not absolute) consistency. The chemical mechanism for such replication is DNA. By simple chemistry, a DNA molecule is able to split itself into two and form two identical DNA molecules.
But what is a DNA molecule? I’ve already given the game away; it’s a molecule! Just like the ones you learnt about in secondary school. It’s made up of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorous and oxygen, combined in various interesting permutations. Most importantly, it consists of “base pairs”, or nucleobases, so-called because they will only “pair up” with each other. There are four in DNA: Thymine, adenine, cytosine and guanine, or T, A, C and G, respectively.
(Incidentally, remember the movie GATTACA? The one with Jude Law and Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman? The title is made up using only the letters that make up DNA, a cool in-joke for anyone who’s seen the movie, which is about eugenics).
Back to nucleobases. Thymine will bond with adenine, and cytosine will bond with guanine. When a thymine-adenine bond is broken, the thymine bit will look for another piece of adenine to join with, while the adenine looks for another available thymine bit. Same for cytosine and guanine. And there you have it; the basics of a replication system! (Biologists, please stop cringing).
Dawkins suggests that this system need only appear from the primeval soup once, and then evolution takes over. It may seem statistically improbable, he argues, but because the earth at the time was covered in the ingredients of life [methane (CH4), ammonia (NH3), water (H2O), hydrogen sulfide (H2S), carbon dioxide (CO2), carbon monoxide (CO), and phosphate (PO43-)], it is not inconceivable that in the violent, dynamic, volcano- and lightning-ridden environment, the chemical replication system that forms the basis of all life could have formed.
The only thing I can say about his account is that it bruises my ego - I’d like to believe that I was special. But that’s not sufficient reason for me to dismiss it. In fact, Dawkins account is a whole lot more plausible to me than believing that God made the lions and lambs and dogs and cats and giraffes and elephants and tapeworms and HIV and lobsters and fish and birds all by Himself.
On the origins of the Universe
So God didn’t create, directly, the abundance of life we see today. We didn’t even need Him to start the ball rolling. The final fallback (as if the first two fallbacks were not devastating enough) is that you need God to create the universe.
This is one tiny part where Dawkins falters, because he’s talking about astrophysics and not biology. In addition, known physics breaks down at the point of the Big Bang. Our best theories - quantum mechanics, general relativity, all break down at the point of singularity. This is fertile ground for the religious man to plant his feet, and say “thus far, and no farther”. As to what happened before the Big Bang… physicists cannot even begin to imagine that, as time hadn’t even started. Again, fertile ground.
Dawkins’ explanations as to the possible origins of the universe are unconvincing, because we know so little about that time period. His guess is as good as the next guy’s; it is pure speculation.
There’s a reason we don’t know anything about the big bang. Our main method of observing the universe is through the electromagnetic spectrum - light, x-rays, gamma-rays, ultra-violet rays, radio-waves, etc. The instant after the big bang, there was just so much energy flying around that none of these could actually get out. Electromagnetic energy was too busy reacting with other stuff. Only when the universe had calmed down a little did EM-radiation finally escape. From the period of singularity until the time light could escape, 100,000 years passed. Not good.
So we need a less-promiscuous method of viewing the universe. Advances in science has allowed us to observe neutrinos - really cool, chargeless, super-light particles. A neutrino is remarkably unreactive; it can pass through miles and miles of lead like it didn’t exist. The only reason we can catch them is because there are so many pouring out of the sun at any one time, there’s bound to be one or two that hit a nucleus head-on. But even neutrinos only take us back to about 1 second after the big bang.
No, we need something with which to observe the universe at the moment of the big bang. That something is gravity, which hardly reacts with anything at all in the universe, and the instrument we use to look at it is the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO.
Data from LIGO is still being processed, and observations are still being made. Plans are being made for LIGO 2. We don’t know what the outcome is, yet… but it’s definitely going to be something cool, and it’s most probably going to be something that doesn’t require God.
Concluding thoughts
Phew, that was a huge, meandering review! My apologies for going off track.
There are areas I haven’t touched. Dawkins is dead set against teaching Intelligent Design alongside Evolution in school, and I have to agree with him. ID is an insulting joke, supported only by omission evidence - that is, there is no real evidence for ID, just a bunch of gaps in scientific evidence that the ID crowd seizes to their advantage. And should we fill that gap, the ID crowd would squeeze itself into the tinier gap that formed between previously existing gaps, and claim that as their evidence.
Dawkins is also angry at people co-opting Einstein and Jefferson and other great minds to serve their own religious ends; similarly, the co-opting of Hitler and Stalin as villainous atheists disgusts him. Interestingly, Einstein and Jefferson were arguably atheists, while Hitler appeared to be very Christian, at least prior to WWII.
I strongly encourage everyone to read The God Delusion, because I suspect the biggest sticking point for people is that they simply cannot grasp evolution in its entirety. I thought I understood evolution, but I still had doubts because there were holes in my understanding. Dawkins fills those gaps, insofar as a layman text can do so.
But the biggest impact the God Delusion had upon me was this: belief in an omnipotent, omniscient God who answers your prayers is an extremely childish belief, tantamount to “Daddy, daddy, help!”. There is a difference between believing and wanting to believe, just as there is a difference between love, and loving the idea of love. If you need religion to tell you what to believe and have it “fill the void” inside of you, you have a big problem. Because the only person who can really fill that void and give your life meaning is you, not God.
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