Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (6 page)

God has no parts; but isn’t God in
some
sense complex? Much ink has been spilled on this topic; but suppose, for the moment, we concede for purposes of argument that God
is
complex. Perhaps we think the more a being knows, the more complex it is; God, being omniscient, would then be highly complex. Perhaps so. But then why does Dawkins just assume that any such being would have to be such that its logical probability was small? Given
materialism
and the idea that the ultimate objects in our universe are the elementary particles of physics, perhaps a being that knew a great deal would be improbable—how
could those particles get arranged in such as way as to constitute a being with all that knowledge? But of course we aren’t
given
materialism.

So why think God would have to be improbable? According to classical theism, God is of course a being with knowledge—the maximal degree of knowledge—but is also a
necessary
being; it is not so much as possible that there should be no such person as God; God exists in every possible world. If God is a necessary being, if he exists in all possible worlds, then the (objective) probability that he exists, naturally enough, is 1, and the probability that he does not exist is 0. On the classical conception, God is a being who has maximal knowledge, but is also maximally probable. Dawkins doesn’t so much as mention this classical conception; he altogether fails to notice that he owes us an argument for the conclusion that this conception is impossible, or anyhow mistaken, so that there is no necessary being with the attributes of God. This version of his argument, therefore, fares no better than the others.

The conclusion to be drawn, I think, is that Dawkins gives us no reason whatever to think that current biological science is in conflict with Christian belief.

Of course Dawkins is not the only thinker to trumpet such conflict. Dawkins together with Daniel Dennett constitute the touchdown twins of current academic atheism: and Dennett follows Dawkins in claiming that evolutionary theory is incompatible with traditional theistic belief.
³⁵
In the next chapter we will see how Dennett develops this theme.

In the last chapter we considered Richard Dawkins’s case for the conclusion that current evolutionary theory is incompatible with Christian (and other theistic) belief. His reasoning was not impressive. Daniel Dennett is the second prominent authority I wish to examine, the other soloist in the choir of voices making that claim. I’ll first examine his argument for this conclusion; then I’ll turn briefly to arguments by Paul Draper and Philip Kitcher for a similar conclusion.

Dennett’s main contribution to this subject is
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
.
¹
What is this idea, and why is it dangerous? According to Dennett, “Darwin’s dangerous idea” (an idea he himself of course endorses and defends) is really the thought that the living world with all of its beauty and wonder, all of its marvelous and ingenious apparent design, was not created or designed by God or anything at all like God; instead it was produced by natural selection winnowing random genetic mutation, a blind, unconscious, mechanical, algorithmic process, a process, he says, which creates “Design out of Chaos without the aid of Mind”: “Here, then, is Darwin’s dangerous idea: the algorithmic level
is
the level that best accounts for the speed of the antelope, the wing of the eagle, the shape of the orchid, the diversity of species, and all the other occasions for wonder in the world of nature.”
²
(In
Breaking the Spell
he adds that the same goes for our moral sense, our religious sensibilities, our artistic strivings, and our interest in and ability to do science.
³
) All of the wonders of the living world have come to be without the help of God or anything at all like God; all of this has happened just by the grace of a mindless natural process. Human beings and all the rest are the outcome of a merely mechanical process; they are not designed or planned for by God (or anyone else). More broadly, the idea is that mind, intelligence, foresight, planning, and design are all latecomers in the universe, themselves created by the unthinking process of natural selection.

Now
why
is Darwin’s idea dangerous? Because if we accept it, says Dennett, we are forced to reconsider all our childlike and childish ideas about God, morality, value, the meaning of life, and so on. Why so? Christians and other theists, naturally enough, reject the thought that mind and intelligence, foresight and planning, are latecomers in the universe. They reject this thought because they believe that God, the premier exemplar of mind, has always existed; so
mind
has always existed, and has always been involved in the production and planning of whatever else there is. In fact many theists have thought it
impossible
that mind should be produced just from unthinking matter. In the last chapter I quoted John Locke: “It is as impossible to conceive that ever pure incogitative Matter should produce a thinking intelligent Being, as that nothing should of itself produce Matter.”
⁴
Darwin’s dangerous idea is that this notion is not merely not impossible; it’s the sober truth of the matter. This idea, then, is inconsistent with any form of theism, and that’s what makes it dangerous.

How does Dennett propose to argue for this idea? First, he insists that all of life
really has
come about by evolution (and here we are thinking of descent with modification). Indeed, he adds that if you so much as doubt this, you are inexcusably ignorant: “To put it bluntly but fairly, anyone today who doubts that the variety of life on this planet was produced by a process of evolution is simply ignorant—inexcusably ignorant.”
⁵
Note that you don’t have to
reject
evolution in order to qualify as inexcusably ignorant: all you have to do is harbor a doubt or two. Perhaps you are a theist; you believe that God created the living world in one way or another; you study the evidence for evolution with great care, but are finally doubtful that God did it that way (you think God might have created certain forms of life directly): according to Dennett, you are then inexcusably ignorant. Here he is stealing a march on Dawkins, who wrote in a 1989
New York Times
book review that “it is absolutely safe to say that if you meet someone who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).”
⁶
At least Dawkins gives skeptics a
choice
: they could be ignorant,
or
stupid,
or
insane or maybe even wicked. Not so for Dennett (he is made of sterner stuff); in fact he plumps for
two
of Dawkins’s possibilities: evolutionary skeptics are
both
ignorant
and
wicked (or at least inexcusable). Evolution, apparently, is like the law: ignorance of it is no excuse. Here Dennett and Dawkins remind one of a certain kind of religious personality with which we are all too familiar: if you disagree with them, you are not only wrong, but wicked, and should be punished, if not in this world then certainly in the next.

Of course Dennett’s claim is not merely that all the marvels of contemporary life have been produced by a process of descent with modification; he takes the very considerable step of claiming, further, that the mechanism underlying this process is Darwinian. This mechanism has two parts. First, there is a source of genetic variability: the usual candidate is random genetic mutation. Genetic mutations are allegedly caused by way of copying errors, or vagrant cosmic rays, or chemical agents, or something else; it doesn’t really matter. Most of the resulting changes are lethal; a few result in adaptive changes; and some of those adaptive changes are heritable. Perhaps the result is that the descendents of the organism to which the mutation accrues can run (or swim, or fly, or sidle) a bit faster, or see a bit better, or better digest a certain fruit. The other part of the mechanism is natural selection: under the usual conditions of population pressure and scarcity of resources, the descendents of the lucky organism sporting that mutation will tend to survive and reproduce at a greater rate than other members of the population; and eventually the mutation comes to be established as part of the genotype of the species in question. Then the whole process can begin over again. (Of course more than one such process can be under way at a given time.) It is by virtue of countless repetitions of this process, so the claim goes, that the immense variety of creatures in the living world has come to be.

As we’ve already seen, Dennett maintains that this whole process—the process of descent with modification driven by natural selection winnowing random genetic mutation—is not directed or guided or overseen by any intelligent agent. The whole process has happened without the aid of God or anyone (or anything) at all like God: “An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.”
⁷
Life itself
originated just by way of the regularities of physics and chemistry (through a sort of extension of natural selection); and undirected natural selection has produced language and mind, including our artistic, moral, religious, and intellectual proclivities.

Now many—theists and others—have found these claims at least extremely doubtful; some have found them preposterous. Is it really so much as possible that language, say, or consciousness, or the ability to compose great music, or prove Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, or think up the idea of natural selection should have been produced by mindless processes of this sort? That is an ambitious claim. For example, one of the most striking characteristics of thought is intentionality,
aboutness
. We can think about things of all sorts, some far removed from us: ancient Sparta, the big bang, the angel Gabriel, logical theorems, moral principles, possible worlds, impossible states of affairs, God himself, and much else. Is it really possible that this ability has come about (starting from bacteria, say) just by way of this unguided process? According to Dennett, all of this—mind-boggling or not—is part of Darwin’s dangerous idea. That mind and life in all its variety have come to be in this unguided fashion is of course inconsistent with Christian belief, as well as other kinds of theistic belief. For, according to Christians and other theists, God has designed and created the world; he intended that it take a certain form and then caused it to take that form. Further, Dennett claims that all minds have arisen out of matter; that “impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery” preceded the appearance of mind or mental phenomena.
⁸
But according to theists, of course, there is a mind that did not arise out of matter. It is mind that comes first; God, the premier instance of mind, has always existed, and has always had knowledge and intentions. God has not arisen from matter or anything else, and does not depend on anything else for his existence.

Dennett apparently thinks that Darwin’s dangerous idea will come to dominate, and that religious belief is doomed to extinction. While he thinks this is a good thing, he also notes that it is always a bit of a pity to lose part of the biosphere’s diversity; he therefore suggests that we should keep a few Baptists and other fundamentalists in something like cultural zoos (no doubt with sizable moats to protect the rest of us right-thinking nonfundamentalists). We should preserve a few Baptists for the sake of posterity—but not, he says, at just any cost. “Save the Baptists,” says he, “but not
by all means
. Not if it means tolerating the deliberate misinforming of children about the natural world.”
⁹
Save the Baptists, all right, but only if they promise not to misinform their children by teaching them “that ‘Man’ is not a product of evolution by natural selection” and other blatantly objectionable views.
¹⁰

Darwin’s dangerous idea as set out by Dennett is a paradigm example of naturalism. In this regard it is like Bertrand Russell’s famous essay of many years ago, “Why I am not a Christian,” except that where Russell appeals to physics, Dennett appeals to biology.
¹¹
Now Dennett’s naturalism, like Russell’s, is of course inconsistent with theistic religion. But that doesn’t automatically make Darwin’s idea
dangerous
to theistic religion—theists might just note the inconsistency and, sensibly enough,
reject
the idea. Many propositions are inconsistent with theism (for example, “nothing but turtles exist”) but are not a danger to it. Darwin’s idea is dangerous to theism only if it is somehow
attractive
, only if there are good reasons for adopting it
and rejecting theism. Why does Dennett think we should
accept
Darwin’s dangerous idea? Concede that it is audacious, with it, revolutionary, anti-medieval, quintessentially contemporary, appropriately reverential towards science, and has that nobly stoical hair-shirt quality Russell said he liked in his beliefs: still, why should we believe it? I
think
Dennett means to attempt an answer to this question (and isn’t merely preaching to the naturalistic choir).

As far as I can see, Dennett proposes two lines of argument for Darwin’s dangerous idea. The first is a reprise of Dawkins: he claims that it is
possible
that all the variety of the biosphere be produced by mindless natural selection: “The theory of natural selection shows how every feature of the world
can
be the product of a blind, unforesightful, nonteleological, ultimately mechanical process of differential reproduction over long periods of time.” He also claims that “the power of the theory of natural selection is not the power to prove exactly how (pre)history was, but only the power to prove how it could have been, given what we know about how things are.”
¹²
But does the theory of natural selection really show what Dennett says it does—that every feature of the world, including mind itself “
can
be the product of a blind, unforesightful, nonteleological, ultimately mechanical process of differential reproduction over long periods of time”?