Neo-Darwinian Teleological Redundancy California State University, Fresno The discoveries of modern science have fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the world in many surprising ways. Science has increased our experience of the world. With modern technology the vast expanses of the universe as well as the smallest microcosms of space are within our range of experience. The explosion of new data produced in the last half century has tempted many to make claims about the origins of the universe and nature of God. This practice is not new, as David Hume, an 18th century philosopher generally thought to be one of the greatest thinkers of western philosophy, questioned his contemporaries who did the same. In more recent history a group of scientists and intellectuals united by an atheistic worldview have begun to utilize the discoveries of science to attempt to make claims about the existence of God and the creation of the world. These attempts are nothing more than a thinly veiled continuation of the skeptical enquiry born of enlightenment-era philosophical discourse. The self-proclaimed new breed of atheists is in fact doing nothing new at all: the scientific discoveries are new, but the framework of skepticism and reason has not changed since Hume's day. Below are a few major arguments from David Hume, Daniel Dennett, Victor Stenger, and Richard Dawkins that show how science provides us with exciting opportunities to study the world but cannot produce knowledge pertaining to the transcendent nature of the universe. David Hume is one of the most celebrated thinkers in Western history. While not an atheist in his public life and works, Hume's skepticism and espousal of rational enquiry as the best means of examining the world and deriving meaning kept him at odds with the religious establishment of his day. Many of his contemporaries found his writings to be subversive and even atheistic. Though his works appear antithetical to the majority of the religious writings of his day, Hume is guilty of no more than applying the principles of rational enquiry and empiricism to religious works and institutions. A firm believer in an omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity Hume, however, did not believe the teleological argument could cogently prove the existence or nonexistence of such a god in any meaningful way. In fact, Hume believed that the nature of the world is inconsistent with humankind's preconceived notions as to what a universe designed by a being of such characteristics would entail. Hume describes his doubts about the argument from design in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: "It must, I think, be allowed, that, if a very limited intelligence, whom we shall suppose utterly unacquainted with the universe, were assured, that it were the production of a very good, wise, and powerful Being, however finite, he would, from his conjectures, form beforehand a different notion of it from what we find it to be by experience; nor would he ever imagine, merely from these attributes of the cause, of which he is informed, that the effect could be so full of vice and misery and disorder, as it appears in this life." (Hume 1998, 105) Hume admits that there is a fundamental problem with the benevolent and omnipotent nature of the creator and the state of the world. He finds that authors of Theodicy neglect to take into
18 account the incredible nature of God's mind when accounting for the evils, both natural and moral, in the world. We know from experience that flaws in design can be made better if a wholly new design is drawn up through superior skill and ingenuity. This is, of course, the nature of human progress on the macro level. "But still you would assert in general, that, if the architect had had skill and good intentions, he might have formed such a plan of the whole, and might have adjusted the parts in such a manner, as would have remedied all or most of these inconveniences." (Hume 1998, 106) The crux of the matter is Hume's deep mistrust of human nature and reliance upon skepticism and empiricism as means to transcend the ignorance of the true nature of the world that has been a problem for people since the beginning of thought. This is one of Hume's greatest gifts to philosophy and indeed Western thought, he states in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion that "All that belongs to human understanding, in this deep ignorance and obscurity, is to be sceptical, or at least cautious; and not to admit of any hypothesis, whatever; much less, of any which is supported by no appearance of probability." (Hume 1998, 107) It seems that the ultimate negative response to an argument is one in which a person espousing the same worldview as that which the argument supposedly supports claims that the argument does only the opposite. As you can see, Hume believes that the teleological argument casts as much doubt upon the existence of a creator God as it provides for the existence of such a god; he states: "But let us still assert, that as this goodness is not antecedently established, but must be inferred from the phenomena, there can be no grounds for such an inference, while there are so many ills in the universe, and while these ills might so easily have been remedied, as far as human understanding can be allowed to judge on such a subject." (Hume 1998, 113) The matter at hand for Hume is thus: while it is perfectly reasonable to see analogous designs in the veins of a leaf and the blood-filled capillaries of a human being, therein lies the seeds of the argument's own destruction. For, if one can find clues that point to some cosmic creativity, that same person can also find flaws and ugly patches not readily indicative of a perfect creator, and in fact what one would expect to see from purely natural origins. Hume states: "What a noble privilege is it of human reason to attain the knowledge of the supreme Being; and, from the visible works of nature, be enabled to infer so sublime a principle as its supreme Creator? But turn the reverse of the medal. Survey most nations and most ages. Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are any thing [sic] but sick men's dreams " (Hume 1995, 32) Hume believes that ultimately one should be able to see the evidence of the creator God not just in the workings of nature but also in human societies and institutions. In doing so he delivers one final crushing blow to the teleological argument. It is telling that a great theist and believer in enlightened enquiry can cast so much doubt on an argument for God's existence which attempts to prove using those very same principles that God does in fact exist. Let us now move forward a few hundred years to our contemporary period. Modern science has taken human beings to new and fantastic places. Scientists have electron microscopes capable of taking pictures of individual atoms and molecules. Biologists cut and paste biological molecules containing genetic information into organisms large and small. Advances in nanotechnology have allowed scientists to manipulate individual atoms. On a grander scale physicists and cosmologists have used sophisticated equipment to see into the furthest reaches of
Neo-Darwinian Teleological Redundancy 19 space and time. Pulsars, quasars, dark matter, up-quarks, down-quarks, strange quarks, and other such concepts have enriched the modern lexicon. Springing from this soup of new discoveries are a self-proclaimed new breed of atheists. These militant critics of religion have charged onto the public field of battle under the banners of reason and science in defense of a naturalistic worldview. These atheists have championed Darwin's theory of evolution and have used it to cast doubt upon religious institutions past and present. For clarity's sake I've labeled them neo-darwinian atheists in contrast to pre-darwinian skeptics like Hume. Daniel Dennett is one of self-titled four horsemen of atheism (Dawkins 2010), a group which also includes Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. Dennett is a philosopher currently working at Tufts University. In the last few years his research has been devoted primarily to studying cognition and how information in the form of 'memes', or the socio-cultural equivalent of the gene, are passed on from generation to generation and culture to culture. In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, published in 1991, Dennett develops the impact Darwin's theory has had upon the scientific and philosophical communities. Specifically he addresses early reactions to the Origin of the Species regarding the moral implications that the theory has for human beings. In the book he states: "In the wake of Darwin's publication of Origin of Species, Friedrich Nietzsche rediscovered what Hume had already toyed with: the idea that an eternal recurrence of blind, meaningless variation- chaotic, pointless shuffling of matter and law- would inevitably spew up worlds whose evolution through time would yield the apparently meaningful stories of our lives." (Dennett 1996, 181) He goes on to show that evolution represents a challenge to religious adherents because seeming proof of the natural origin of human beings appears to entail moral nihilism and the inherent meaningless of human lives. Now, Dennett spends much time later in his book showing that there is no conceptual relationship between the espousal of evolution and moral nihilism, but he accepts this view as a natural response to the theory. The implications of evolution in regard to the teleological argument are various. Dennett briefly cites Paley's watchmaker analogy wherein the universe is made to be analogous to a watch and therefore necessitates a creative designer. Dennett states that evolution provides a naturalistic explanation for the apparent design of the universe and living things, quote: "When we looked through Darwin's eyes at the actual processes of design of which we and all the wonders of nature are the products to date, we found that Paley was right to see these effects as the result of a lot of design work, but we found a non-miraculous account of it: a massively parallel, and hence prodigiously wasteful, process of mindless, algorithmic design-trying, in which, however, the minimal increments of design have been thriftily husbanded, copied, and re-used for billions of years." (Dennett 1996, 184) In Dennett's view this at present satisfactorily answers the problem of the teleological argument for the existence of God. Evolution is the natural explanation for apparently supernatural origins purported by the argument.
20 I note that Dennett's rebuttal of the teleological argument is nothing new: it is the same criticism that Hume brought to light centuries ago. Even though modern evolutionary science can provide a naturalistic explanation for living things the inference between what science tells us about the world and the proof that it lacks a creator is still just as weak as one that tries to make an inference that there is a God. Another modern critic of the design argument is Victor Stenger, a cosmologist who believes that science has successfully proven that there is no God. Through the systematic application of scientific principles, Stenger attempts to show in his many books that science, while not ultimately proving that God does not exist, proves beyond a reasonable doubt that there is no God because there is no discernable evidence for God. In Stenger's most recent book, The New Atheism, he spends much time arguing with the proponents of intelligent design theory, who may be called the neo-creationist complement to the neo-darwinian atheists. Like Dennett, Stenger states that because the origin of living things can be shown to be natural, doubt is cast upon proving the existence of God via teleological arguments, quote: "The argument from design was originally a god of the gaps argument, when science had no explanation for how the complexity of life arose naturally. When, fifty years after Paley, in 1859 Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace showed how complex biological systems can evolve from simpler ones by means of natural selection, the argument from design evolved from a god of the gaps into an argument from ignorance." (Stenger 2009, 98) In his book, Stenger goes on to reveal the specious reasoning involved in the claims of irreducible complexity used by the intelligent design movement. Like Hume, Stenger also believes that if designed, the universe is ultimately not the best possible artifact, especially considering that the artificer is supposedly orders of magnitude more competent then the best of human architects. In a delicious modern twist, he shows this to be true in his 2007 book God: The Failed Hypothesis, in which he states: "Some evolutionists have tried to counter the Paley claim with what might be called the argument from bad design, pointing out all the ways that a competent engineer could improve upon what nature has given us." (Stenger 2007, 68-9) According to Stenger using new information from biophysics it is possible to show how humans can be improved with the elongation of certain bones and muscles as well as encephalopodic eyes that eliminate blind spots. It goes to show that Hume's original claim that the universe is evidence of a bad designer as well as a good designer has been shown true through the work of science hundreds of years later. The heart of the newest attacks on the teleological argument is an assumption that progress in the sciences has given modern humans a privileged position from which to make claims about the divine. Another atheist famous for using advances in science, specifically biology, against the teleological argument is Oxford professor Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is one of the most famous, or, depending on your own world view, infamous atheists of the 20th century. He has written many books defending the mechanisms of evolution as the cause of the apparent design we see in organisms today. His latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, is just one more book in a long series that attempts to show that reason and scientific inquiry are superior to faith and religious ideologies. Dawkins uses evidence from evolutionary biology to close the holes that the proponents of intelligent design attempt to poke in the theory of evolution, he writes:
Neo-Darwinian Teleological Redundancy 21 "Eyes and nerves, sperm tubes, sinuses and backs are poorly designed from the point of view of individual welfare, but the imperfections make perfect sense in the light of evolution. The same applies to the larger economy of nature. An intelligent creator might be expected to have designed not just the bodies of individual animals and plants but also whole species, entire ecosystems." (Dawkins 2009, 375) Dawkins uses data from various advances in biology in his expansive book to show that the 'bad design' that Hume and others have spent time elaborating upon casts doubt upon a perfect creator God but makes sense within the context of evolution as the propulsive method by which life has sprung into existence. He also sheds light upon the existence of natural evil in the world when he states: "Parasites probably cause even more suffering than predators, and understanding their evolutionary rationale adds to, rather than mitigates, the sense of futility we experience when we contemplate it." (Dawkins 2009, 391) Certainly parasites cause much suffering in the world for humans and other animals. While this concept is not fully developed by Dawkins, it goes to show that the evils of the world that Hume talked about as a theist are still problematic for secular thinkers as well. But what accounting does Dawkins provide for our moral squeamishness when confronted with the suffering of other human beings? He provides an explanation in his other recent book, The God Delusion, and I quote: "Natural selection, in ancestral times when we lived in small and stable bands like baboons, programmed into our brains altruistic urges, alongside sexual urges, hunger urges, xenophobic urges and so on." (Dawkins 2008, 253) Evolutionary theory is very powerful in that it provides explanations not just for the development of complex organisms from simple ones but for the development of complex ideas and institutions such as ethics. The proponents of the new atheism are excited by these developments and wish to take the tenets of evolution and apply them to various fields such as ethics and consciousness. Critics have suggested that the theory has been applied too broadly, and to perhaps exercise restraint by avoiding using evolutionary theory to pick the best strawberry jam or predict whether it will rain. Hume's skepticism serves us as we venture further into the twenty-first century. While it seems by its very inductive nature to be the ideal philosophical stance for post-enlightenment rational thinkers, the teleological argument fails to provide a cogent argument for either the theistic or the atheistic conclusion. While theists try to argue that the nature of living things is evidence for supernatural design their reasoning is just as specious as those atheist thinkers who claim that the nature of living things is evidence for the non-existence of God. The burden of proof most definitely falls upon the theist who uses the argument to make a positive claim. This releases the neo-darwinian atheists from any true irrational culpability. However, time spent and pages spent on nothing more than refuting the teleological arguments are a waste. Victor Stenger is the most guilty, as he has made the strongest claim of all- that science can prove the non-existence of God, that God as a hypothesis for explaining the existence and properties of the world is irredeemably flawed. Darwin's theory of evolution has fundamentally changed the biological sciences, as well as sociology, cognition, and other academic fields. This being said, making Darwin the central figure of an atheist movement smacks of the cultish thinking that atheists should wish to escape from. Charismatic figures such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett seem to be inadvertently paving the way for a quasi-religion centered around Darwin and science.
22 As far as science takes us, we must remember that although science has proven to be the best tool that humanity has to study the nature of the world which surrounds us, the implications of the various facts and theories mined from data must still come under the scrutiny of rational enquiry and skepticism. Only through this enlightenment practice can we keep the darker parts of our own nature at bay and advance as a community and a species. REFERENCES Dawkins, R. The God Delusion. New York: Mariner Books, 2008. Dawkins, R. The Greatest Show on Earth. New York: Free Press, 2009. Dennett, D.C. Darwin's Dangerous Idea Evolution and the Meanings of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Hume, D. Dialogues and Natural History of Religion. Oxford World's Classics. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Hume, D. "The Natural History of Religion" James Fieser, 1995. www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/texts/hume-nat%20hist%20rel.txt (accessed 22 Sept. 2009.) Stenger, V.J. God: The Failed Hypothesis. New York: Prometheus Books, 2007. Stenger, V.J. The New Atheism. New York: Prometheus Books, 2009.