The Probability of God
If you read Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, you'll realize that Dawkins' position isn't that God doesn't exist. He argues that God probably doesn't exist. By implication, this of course means that God must have had a beginning and must be the result of some random process.
This raises the question of what random process could produce a god, let alone a god capable of building a fine-tuned universe that caters to the needs of life like ours. On this point Dawkins says nothing. That’s probably because that's something he cannot know. No one has a clue about the laws governing the supernatural realm, nor how we could possibly learn and study them if they exist at all. That doesn't stop Dawkins from asserting that his laws apply there, and his laws say that the random process that produces a god has exceptionally improbable odds. Telling, to say the least.
What is strange about all this is how Dawkins uses the complexity we observe in the universe to determine the probabilities of its origins. Basically, he assumes that a complex universe either needs a designer that is more complex, or its complexity can arise on its own, being orchestrated and implemented by absolutely nothing at all. This line of thinking is obviously counter-intuitive, and maybe even self-refuting. It makes me wonder if this is the best he can come up with. Boiling everything down into a simple binary choice between all or nothing, which is based solely upon his own philosophical beliefs is hardly an argument. And it certainly isn’t one that argues in his favor.
The question that he should be asking - which I think he knows he should be asking, but he just doesn’t want to because he already knows the answer - is which case is more plausible using the observations gathered. One point I think he is mishandling is the fact an active intelligent agent is able to effectively eliminate chance processes for a great multitude of tasks, which vastly reduces the overall probability that a symbiotic system arising by chance would naturally have. The simple reason for this is an intelligent agent has the capacity to channel the intelligence, materials, force, and energy into particular processes and sequences to constructively create complex systems.
Dawkins is right to assume that something complex and intelligent that could do those things has a very high improbability of arising by chance. But the disparities in the rates of cumulative improbabilities between agent created and naturally arising complexity signifies that there is a point where the improbability of naturally arising complexity overtakes the creation of the agent and the agent’s created complexity.
Let me color this with an example.
The device you are viewing this article with either arose through natural forces, or it was designed and built by an intelligent agent. If we look at complexities alone, it is more probable that it was the result of natural processes building and putting it together. Somehow, rocks heated up, smashed together, and were affected by natural magnetic fields to produce and program that thing.
Zoom out a bit and add on all the interconnected communication equipment, servers, switches, and routers between were this information is stored and your device. Now we have some mutually defining and irreducibly complex components in two systems, one within the device itself, and one being the network. Here, the odds that the miles of cable and all those interdependent components arising by chance are adding up exponentially and catching up to an agent-created scenario quickly.
Let’s go global and account for it all. Every power station, every data center, each transformer, diode, capacitor, and processor that is part of humanity’s vast computer internet. Everything in its own, proper place with its own programming, parts, and power supplies. With all that considered, is it still plausible that nobody built it? Is the wind, rain, earthquakes, volcanoes, and all the other forces in nature able to birth such a system with the precision and function that we observe?
No. It’s not even close. Like the computer world we so overwhelmingly rely on, this universe and all its complexity didn’t just happen to build itself. Dawkins and those that think like him can try and project the rules of probability and apply their assumptions to the supernatural realm, they can try to tip the scales by invoking a theory that we live in a multiverse with ten to the five hundredth power universes laying around, and they can use wordplay to undermine the complexity and overplay the abilities of natural processes. But all these philosophical arguments are of little use in trying to explain away the stupefying levels of complexity our scientific research has revealed. Our universe was created by a brilliant and able creator. That’s the only rational conclusion we can come to.
