Chapter Six of Hitchens’ book is all about “Arguments from Design.” I have gone back and forth in my mind about how to approach this one. Should I do a slow inexorable build to the point in my last paragraph where I place the capstone of a fun quotation from this chapter, doing so with loud whoops, or should I just start with that point? I decided to just start with it.
I am afraid that Hitchens does not really respect his creationist adversaries. He is glad that the courts have protected Americans from “the inculcation of compulsory ‘creationist’ stupidity in the classroom” (p. 78). Now I understand a fierce uppercut, and I actually respect the ability to deliver one. But you really shouldn’t write things like that, not in a chapter where you also (for inexplicable reasons) wrote something like the following:
“We have only recently established that a cow is closer in family to a whale than to a horse; other wonders certainly await us” (p. 94).
Well, on the principles that appear to be operating here, it certainly looks as though other wonders do promise to prance across the stage in front of us. This is the victory of vaudeville in the natural sciences. And this wonder, along with the next ones, will be inculcated in classrooms across America, with no judge available to snort rudely at them, or declare them, if not unconstitutional, at least mildly amusing. But we do not dare to call this kind of thing compulsory stupidity, for it is a Decree of Science.
Proceeding to an actual argument, Hitchens attributes arguments from design to a universal solipsistic tendency among human beings to assume that they are being “waited on.”
“The design arguments, which are products of this same solipsism, take two forms: the macro and micro” (p. 77).
Our self-centeredness makes us think that it is “all about us.” But, Hitchens argues, it is not all about us, because the planet where we live is just right for us. I know, but I am pretty sure that that is what he said.
“This vanity allows us to overlook the implacable fact that, of the other bodies in our own solar system alone, the rest are all either far too cold to support anything recognizable as life, or far too hot. The same, as it happens, is true of our own blue and rounded planetary home, where heat contends with cold to make large tracts of it into useless wasteland, and where we have come to learn that we live, and have always lived, on a climatic knife edge. Meanwhile, the sun is getting ready to explode and devour its dependent planets like some jealous chief or tribal deity. Some design!” (p. 80).
So then, we live in a place well suited for life, and this is an argument against God putting us here because other places (where He didn’t put us) are not well suited for us? I see. A housewife is taunted with incompetence because she keeps the toaster on the kitchen counter, where it works well, instead of in the toilet, where it wouldn’t? But of course, that whole family is on a knife edge, for one day she might go nuts and throw it in the toilet (where scientists tell us it will not work well), and then where will our toast be? Exactly.
“Fish do not have fins because they need them for the water . . . It is exactly the other way about: a process of adaptation and selection” (pp. 78-79).
What does Hitchens mean exactly by “the other way about?” How do you turn this sentence around? “Fish do not have fins because they need them for the water.” Okay then. Why do they have them? I don’t think he means to turn it around by giving another assigned reason — e.g. they need them for playing the guitar. He must mean that there is no reason they have them. They mutated a proto-fin which gave a small survival advantage, but the whole thing was blind, dumb luck. There is a reason why surviving fish have fins (fins helped them survive), but there is no reason related to them needing them for the water. I think that must be what he is saying, but it is a curious way of saying it. It seems to me that “fish have fins because they need them for the water” and “fish randomly developed fins because they provide a survial advantage in water” amount to the same thing. But I am a ignernt creationist, so what do I know?
Hithens professes to have an open mind.
“Our side willingly concedes this point: we are prepared for discoveries in the future that will stagger our faculties even more than the vast advances in knowledge that have come to us since Darwin and Einstein. However, these discoveries will come to us in the same way — by means of patient and scruplulous and (this time, we hope) unfettered inquiry” (pp. 80-81).
Unfettered inquiry, aye. Hitchens has just finished chortling (exactly three pages earlier) about how the courts have protected Americans from hearing a dissenting viewpoint on the subject of design. Unfettered inquiry means (allow me to translate) that there will be no crazy viewpoints that challenge the reigning orthodoxy. Other than that, the sky’s the limit. For us to have unfettered discourse we have to keep fettering these pesky creationists. Such is the price of true academic freedom.
But let us move on and talk about the evolution of the eye. We “evolved from sightless bacteria” (p. 82). This is a huge big deal, and we ought to pay it the attention it deserves.
“It is immensely fascinating and rewarding to know that at least forty different sets of eyes, and possibly sixty different sets, have evolved in quite distinct and parallel, if comparable, ways” (p. 83).
Quoting Dr. Michael Shermer, Hitchens describes the long, torturous climb to the Rube Goldberg eyeball we all know and love. First a handful of light sensitive cells, then on to a recessed eyespot, then the deep recession eyespot, and then, mirabile dictu, a pinhole camera eye focusing images on the deeply-recessed layer of light-sensitive cells, and then, mucho macaronic mirabile dictu, a pinhole lens eye that can focus the image, and then on to the complex version found, for example, in my very own baby blues (pp. 82-83).
Heh. Just imagine (to take one example out of countless thousands) how many millions of years blind evolution spent in trying to get the placement of the first pinhole right. Doesn’t even know that a pinhole could possibly be helpful, and, even though random mutation does serve up random pinholes from time to time (not to mention gaping holes), there is nothing to prevent it from placing the pinholes in places where they would be absolutely useless.
This is a good example of what Behe means by irreducible complexity. In the long developmental journey from the first three light sensitive cells to the eye of the osprey, what percentage of that time was the eye closed for remodeling (and therefore possessed of that condition that scientific laymen call blind)? And during those periods of blindness, what evolutionary advantage was conferred such that the remodeling continued apace?
Nevertheless:
“The real ‘miracle’ is that we, who share genes with the original bacteria that began life on the planet, have evolved as much as we have. Other creatures did not develop eyes at all, or developed extremely weak ones. There is an intriguing paradox here: evolution does not have eyes but it can create them” (p. 84).
Hitchens calls it a paradox when he is waving his hands over an incoherence, but is quite impatient when he thinks Christians are doing it. And he thinks we are doing it when we say that all-seeing God created the eye. No, he counters, trenchantly. That would have to have been done by a blind process. The blind leading the blind got us out of the evolutionary ditch.
“Why do people keep saying, ‘God is in the details’? He isn’t in ours, unless his yokel creationist fans wish to take credit for his clumsiness, failure and incompetence” (p. 85).
This is one place where a central problem of atheism (ingratitude) comes out with a vengeance. The apostle Paul says that the sinfulness of man is revealed in two central things — a refusal to honor God as God, and a refusal to give Him thanks. Ingratitude is the fountainhead of a lot of problems. In this case, Hitchens thinks that his body is an enormous bit of luck provided it was a sheer accident. But if it was designed by a loving Father in heaven, Hitchens wants to know where the complaint department is. But shall the pot say to the Potter, “Why did you make the handles like this?” Would not a far more graceful response be a simple thank You? Everyone one of us, every day, is standing under an enormous waterfall of cascading blessings. The fact that my ankles work, for example, and that my body is fighting off infection, and that my lunch tastes good, and the pleasure I get from a good sneeze, and the blessing of sleep (every night!), and the fact that I can see things (in color), and that . . . but I have to stop. I could spend the rest of my life writing about all the ways that God was good to me in the last fifteen minutes alone. This is, in my mind, a fundamental argument for the existence of the triune God of Scripture. Without Him, I have no one to thank. In Hitchens’ worldview, he has no one to thank, but this appears to be the way he wants it.
But we must continue.
“This is what makes piffle out of the ignorant creationist sneer, which compares evolution to a whirlwind blowing through a junyard of parts and coming up with a jumbo jet. For a start, there are no ‘parts’ lying around waiting to be assembled. For another thing, the process of acquisition and discarding of ‘parts’ (most especially wings) is as far from a whirlwind as could conceivably be. The time involved is more like that of a glacier than a storm. For still another thing, jumbo jets are not riddled with non-working or superfluous ‘parts’ lamely inherited from less successful aircraft. Why have we agreed so easily to call this exploded old nontheory by its cunningly chosen new disguise of ‘intelligent design’? (pp. 86-87).
Allow me to answer this paragraph in the brief compass that it deserves. First, it is not an “ignorant” creationist sneer — it is an illustration offered by Fred Hoyle, not exactly your average creationist cornpone. Second, the fact that the illustration has pre-assembled parts was a way of giving evolution a head start in the comparison. So okay, have it your way. Let’s have the whirlwind manufacture the parts too, just like evolution had to. That better? Third, slowing the process down to glacier speeds makes things worse for Mr. Hitchens, but I am happy to work with it. Okay, let’s have a glacier inch through the junkyard and make us a plane. And last, the way Hitchens glibly pronounces the body full of vestigal leftovers is something that the continued development of medical science should have taught us to quit doing. Ignorance of function does not mean there is no function. As my wise grandmother used to say, “Never celebrate vestigialness prematurely.”
Hitchens goes on to claim that “researchers were able to show how the nontheory of ‘irreducible complexity’ is a joke” (p.87). And he says this while not bothering to define irreducible complexity, and the behavior of proteins that he goes on to describe (as discovered by this study) has nothing to do with irreducible complexity, except, perhaps, as yet another example of it. A mechanism is irreducibly complex when the removal of any one part does not give you partial function, but rather no function. And what this means is that there is no evolutionary advantage in the manufacturing of parts individually — they confer no advantage until they are all assembled into the final functioning unit.
Hitchens then returns to his idea of Ockham’s razor.
“No divine plan, let alone angelic intervention, is required. Everything works without that assumption” (p. 95, emphasis his).
The assumption he makes here in his application of “the simplest explanation is most likely” is that the elimination of God from the creation of all things is a simplifying move. It may have simplified Hitchens’ personal life, but it most emphatically does not simplify our explanations of how spiders figured out web engineering. The fact that a story can be told without appeal to the divine purposes is a simplistic move, but that is not the same thing as a simplifying move. In fact, evolution requires us to gather an almost endless series of rocks in our pockets, and once we get past a certain point, we start to walk all crooked.
“What believers will do, now that their faith is optional and private and irrelevant, is a matter for them. We should not care, as long as they make no further attempt to inculcate religion by any form of coercion” (p. 96).
What we really need here is a commitment from Hitchens to reject the inculcation of any worldview (secular or otherwise) through “any form of coercion.” I could go for that. But I don’t believe that a supporter of a tax-funded secular school system can really afford to make that move. A genuine free market of ideas (that included the schools) is a terrifying thought for them. It is one of the reasons we are seeing this rash of books from the atheist corner.