By Douglas Anele

Next, Dawkins considered Stephen Unwin’s Bayesian probabilistic argument for the existence of God. In his book with the pompous title The Probability of God: A Simple Calculation that Proves the Ultimate Truth, Unwin listed six items which reflect his own personal judgments: he arbitrarily assigns numbers to them and, with a facetious emergency injection of faith, arrives at the ridiculous conclusion that the probability of God’s existence is 95%.

Dawkins correctly dismisses Unwin’s Bayesian finagling as absurd, and pointed out that people with a theological bent usually conflate what is true with what they’d like to be true. In chapter 4 which contains the central thesis of the book, Dawkins provides reasons for the virtual impossibility of God’s existence. Entitled “Why there almost certainly is no God,” the chapter makes the case that the statistical improbability of complex things (biological systems, for example) arising from pure chance does not mean that those things were designed (p. 139).

He referred to the astronomer, Fred Hoyle’s Boeing 474 argument in which Hoyle suggested that the probability of life originating on earth by pure chance is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747. Creationists such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses fallaciously argue repeatedly ad nauseam that in order to explain incredibly complex entities, appeal to chance or to creative design are the only available options.

But the Boeing 474 and kindred creationist arguments lose their plausibility after Dawkins showed that the real alternative to design is natural selection, the linchpin of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Natural selection provides a beautifully simple and elegant solution to the problem of improbability, because it is a cumulative process which breaks the problem of improbability into small steps. Each of the small steps is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so (p.147). Consequently, when sufficiently large numbers of these slightly improbable events are stacked up in series, the end product of the accumulation is very improbable as a matter of fact, far beyond the reach of chance.

The eyes, wings and all the complex organs of living things can be naturalistically explained in this way, due to the power of accumulation by natural selection which creates the illusion of intelligent design. Moreover, creationists often make the mistake of not considering that an intelligent, supernatural, designer of the universe will be so unimaginably complex and improbable that it would require an even much more complex and improbable being to explain its existence. According to Dawkins, “However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable.

God is the ultimate Boeing 747” (p.138). A summary of the major points of chapter 4 (p.187) is as follows:

(1) One of the greatest challenges or puzzles that have confronted the human mind from time immemorial has been to provide a satisfactory explanation of how the complex improbable appearance of design in the universe arose;

(2) There is a natural tendency to attribute the appearance of design to real design itself. For instance, from the fact that a wristwatch was made by an intelligent human engineer, it is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye, brain, immune system, horse, or a human being;

(3) The temptation leads to the fallacious teleological argument, or argument from design, because it raises the bigger problem of who designed the designer.

Thus, the basic problem of explaining improbability obviously cannot be resolved by postulating something or a being that is even more improbable; (4) The best explanation for the incredibly complex biological structures on earth is Darwinian evolution by natural selection, which is a crane for surmounting the mountain of biological improbability.

Darwin and his successors have demonstrated naturalistically how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings.

Therefore, the idea that living creatures were designed is an illusion; (5) The anthropic principle, which postulates that for anything to exist the basic ingredients and conditions of its emergence must have been available, can be applied to the emergence of life on earth and to the universe in general, which may or may not be unique events in themselves. In that connection, the idea of life-friendly planets and multiverse or many universes co-existing like the bubbles of foam has been put forward by physicists and cosmologists; (6) Although for the time being a crane for physics or cosmology equivalent to the Darwinian crane for biology does not yet exist, what is available now, when conjoined with the anthropic principle, is clearly better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.

The concatenation of arguments in chapter 4 points to the conclusion that the central factual premise of religion, the God hypothesis, is untenable. Now, if it is accepted that God doesn’t exist, some interesting questions rear up, such as, is religion totally useless? Isn’t religion helpful in consoling people, in motivating them to be virtuous or in helping them to know what is good and to do it? Why is religion so ubiquitous throughout human history and cultures, if it is based on a false premise? These are the questions Dawkins addressed in the remainder of his book. Chapter 5 is devoted to unravelling the roots of religion.

In it, Dawkins proffers a Darwinian explanation of the origin of religion and the rituals that are connected with it. According to him, religion and the rituals that go with it are both time-consuming and scandalously wasteful in terms of human and material resources, which implies that if religion was not beneficial to the human species in some way, that is, if it does not have any adaptive value, natural selection would long ago have favoured irreligious individuals (p.192).

Dawkins considered what the probable benefits of religion could be, such as relief of existential stress in believers, and the enhanced chances of survival in a hostile environment which it allegedly confers on groups that have appropriate religious beliefs (pp.190-200). He acknowledged that reduction of stress might have played a subsidiary role in the emergence and continuation of religion. Yet, why should a mind evolve which finds comfort in beliefs it can clearly see are false?  To be continued.