Swinburne vs. Dawkins on the Mystery of Existence Part One

KEVIN HARRIS: Premier Unbelievable in the UK recently joined The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast and the Global Philosophy of Religion Project at the University of Birmingham in hosting a panel discussion called “The Mystery of Existence.”^[1] It featured four philosophers and scientists, two of whom we are particularly interested in – Richard Dawkins and Richard Swinburne. This was before a live audience. The main contention between them on the program was God's simplicity, or as Dawkins put it “God's complexity.” So did Swinburne straighten Dawkins out on this? We'll see in a moment. But first, Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion that one can legitimately ask “Who designed the designer?” as his primary defeater of theism. Do you think Dawkins was arguing for God's complexity in that so-called defeater?

DR. CRAIG: I think that he was rather assuming God's complexity in pressing that defeater. He has the opinion that in order for an explanation to be the best one, the thing that is doing the explaining needs to be simpler than the thing to be explained. And he thinks that God (or assumes that God) is a very complex entity, and therefore by positing a divine designer of the universe we are not making any advance in simplicity, and hence a divine designer is not a good explanation of the evident or apparent design in the universe.

KEVIN HARRIS: So many people, including yourself, tried to straighten Dawkins out on this whole thing. When you see this panel – well, I'm jumping ahead just a little bit, but – when you see this panel discussion you think he has read none of it. Let's see how it plays out just from watching these clips. Let's go to the first excerpt from Dawkins’ opening statement. Here's clip number one.

RICHARD DAWKINS: The mystery of existence is indeed a deeply profound mystery, and a biologist is perhaps best qualified of anybody to expound this mystery because at least until 1859 it was a total mystery. The facts of life being both highly complex, almost unbelievably complex, and also carrying a gigantic illusion of design. Living things appear to have design written all over them. And until Darwin came along, that's what most people thought – almost everybody thought. Darwin had the effrontery almost to realize that it was possible that all this complexity and this illusion of design could come about through blind mechanical forces, evolution by natural selection. Pushing back before biology, the origin of all things – the origin of the universe, the origin of matter, the origin of the laws of physics – we need a physicist on this panel. I think we haven't got one. Because that’s where the problem is at present. Biology is essentially solved, and that was the big one. William Paley in his book on natural theology in 1803 said that physics is comparatively easy. It's biology that really demonstrates the role of the Creator. But nevertheless since biology is solved, we're now pushed back to physics and cosmology as the place where the mystery is now deepest. And, as you know, there's a strong argument to say that these fundamental constants are fine-tuned in the sense that if any of them were slightly different from what they are then we would not have galaxies, we would not have matter, we would not have chemistry, we would not have biology, and we would not have us. So there are various solutions to this riddle of where the fine-tuning comes from. I think the one that is most favorite at the moment is the multiverse idea. Other physicists say that it's just we don't yet understand enough; that there will come a time when we have a Theory of Everything, and then we will know why these physical constants have the values that they do and where the laws of physics come from.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, he predicts a Theory of Everything. He talks about fine-tuning. He talks about multiverses, among other things. What do you think about this excerpt from his opening statement?

DR. CRAIG: I thought it was very effective as an opening statement. He delivers it with confidence and eloquence. He gives the impression to the audience that through the biological theory of evolution design has been explained away and so just a sort of mopping up needs to be done now to get rid of the fine-tuning in physics. He's optimistic that can happen. So I think that a layman listening to him would find this very persuasive. However, I think there are some problems with it when you begin to probe it critically. For example, I'm not sure what Dawkins means by “the mystery of existence.” I've not seen the context of these clips. But my understanding of the mystery of existence is that this is most fundamentally Leibnitz's famous question: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does anything at all exist? And that is a philosophical question which the biologist is very ill-equipped to answer. It seems to me that, contrary to Dawkins, it's not the biologist who is best equipped to expound this mystery. There's no reason to think that someone who has devoted his scientific career to studying, say, Hox genes in fruit flies or the coloration in Florida beach mice or photosynthesis in cyanobacteria would be able to expound and answer the question of the mystery of existence. I also think that Dawkins rather misleads the layman in giving the impression that the field of evolutionary biology is now solved and everything is tidy and in order. That's not at all the case. The fact is that there has been an evolution of the theory of evolution since Darwin proposed it. Even if we ignore pre-Darwinian theories of evolution, there has been three broad stages in the evolution of evolutionary theory. The first stage was Darwinism itself as expounded in Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859. The centerpiece of this version of the theory was the thesis that all living organisms have descended from a very few common ancestors, and that the mechanism which accounts for the origin of new species is natural selection. Well, this original theory was virtually dead on arrival. Although the thesis of common ancestry very rapidly won wide acceptance, for 70 years after The Origin was published, scientists remained highly skeptical about the adequacy of the mechanism of natural selection to explain the origin of new species. That led to stage two in the evolution of the theory which occurred during the 1930s and 40s. During that time, experts in population genetics married Darwin's natural selection with Gregor Mendel's genetics, and this enabled them then to explain how it is that the variations arise in organisms on which natural selection can work by weeding out organisms that are ill-adapted as the environment changes. This theory is often called neo-Darwinism. It prevailed up until almost the end of the 20th century when evolutionary theory entered a third stage of its development which is known as the extended evolutionary synthesis. Proponents of this extended theory have been very critical of the causal mechanisms that are posited in the modern synthesis (or so-called neo-Darwinism). They challenged its obsessive centricity on the gene as the mechanism of evolutionary change and on its failure to address issues pertinent to developmental biology or embryology. So now many would say the modern synthesis is dead and we are now in this period of an extended evolutionary synthesis. But that doesn't mean that all the problems have been solved. On the contrary, many of the theories and mechanisms suggested by the extended evolutionary synthesis are conjectural, uncertain, unjustified, and the field is very much in ferment today which makes it a very exciting field of study for evolutionary biologists. Nobody's exactly sure what's going to come out of this. One prominent evolutionary biologist named Eugene Koonin has said that what follows in “a post-modern biology” (and by that . . . it's a pun . . . he means post-modern synthesis, in a post-modern synthesis) what follows, he says, is not a new synthesis but rather “a chaotic pluralism of different approaches” and research programs and avenues of exploration. He said it remains to be seen – it's too early to know – whether or not this can all be synthesized into a consensus package. But he does say this. He says, “I will venture one prediction.” He says, “When we celebrate the 200th anniversary of The Origin of Species in 2059, the landscape of evolutionary biology will look completely different than it does today.” And so I think Dawkins is blowing smoke when he tries to give his audience the impression that this has all been settled and done with. Finally, very briefly, his comments on physics, I think, are inconsistent as well. The appeal to a multiverse hypothesis to explain the fine-tuning of the universe is basically an appeal to chance. It's saying if you multiply your probabilistic resources then the chances are increased that you will get a finely tuned universe somewhere. It's basically saying that if you have many roulette wheels spinning then your chances of getting the number you picked are much greater. But that's very different from The Theory of Everything which is an attempt to give an explanation of these constants or quantities in terms of physical law – of natural law. Not chance, but necessity. And a Theory of Everything doesn't literally try to explain everything. This is another one of these scientific nicknames that can be very misleading to the layman. What a Theory of Everything aims to do is to integrate the four fundamental forces of nature (electromagnetism, the subatomic weak force, the strong force, and gravity) into a single, unified force carried by a single particle. And so far that has eluded physicists. But even if you manage such a unified theory, obviously that doesn't do anything to explain all of the finely tuned constants and quantities. So he's, I think, a little bit confused and inconsistent with respect to what he says about the physics.

KEVIN HARRIS: He intimated that we biologists have done our work. We can all go home and relax, and now it's up to you physicists to figure this out and come up with a Theory of Everything. That's still going to take philosophical introspection – isn't it? – even if they were to find such a theory.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, we'll see in the remaining clips how philosophy comes to play a key role in the discussion of alternatives.

KEVIN HARRIS: Each one of the panelists had about ten minutes to articulate their opening statement. We're just going to do an excerpt here from Swinburne's opening statements. Clip number two.

RICHARD SWINBURNE: Theism is a very simple hypothesis. It postulates the existence of only one entity (not many), one substance (as philosophers call it), God, and it postulates about him that he is essentially everlasting and omnipotent – that he is able to do anything logically possible. So theism postulates that there are zero limits to God's length of life and zero limits to his power. Zero is a simple number, and so the whole nature of God is a very simple nature.

KEVIN HARRIS: Professor Swinburne said a lot of things in his opening statement there, but we're kind of focusing in on simplicity here. What did he mean by God's having zero logical limitations in his attributes, and zero is a simple number?

DR. CRAIG: It is vitally important, as we view this dialogue, to understand that Richard Swinburne and Richard Dawkins are working with two different definitions of simplicity when they discuss whether or not positing God as a divine designer is a simple explanation. What Swinburne is talking about is what makes an explanation a simple explanation. He gives this definition in his book The Evolution of the Soul on page 13, and I quote, “The simplest theory is that which postulates few substances, few kinds of substances, and mathematically simple properties of substances determining their mode of interaction with other substances.” So he thinks that God fits all those criteria. Just one God. One kind of substance. And mathematically simple properties, and that's where it gets into this zero degree of limit on God's properties. Swinburne's point here is that to posit any finite number (non-zero number, any finite non-zero number) like 3.54 or 10.5 or something of that sort would cry out for some sort of further explanation as to why just that finite value was ascribed. But he says zero or infinity are equally simple. They don't cry out for explanation in that sort of way. So he wants to maintain that God has these sort of mathematically simple properties and that he has, for example, infinite power with zero limitations on his ability to bring things about.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's go to this next clip. Here's the conclusion of Swinburne's opening statement. Clip number three.

RICHARD SWINBURNE: But of course there isn't the slightest reason for supposing these things would occur unless there is a God. Why should there be a physical universe at all? If there is, why should it be governed by simple laws of nature or any laws of nature at all? Without a hypothesis such as theism, one would expect the different chunks of matter to behave in entirely different ways from each other. But in fact every fundamental particle in the universe behaves in exactly the same way as every other one in conformity with laws of nature. Unless someone arranged things in this way, it would be immensely improbable that this would happen and an aspect of that is, of course, the fine-tuning. Likewise, it would be immensely improbable that the laws, even if they were simple and comprehensible, would be such as to bring about the evolution of humans. And there would have to be an enormous set of laws quite different from those of physical science to explain the evolution of consciousness. Maybe there are such laws, but again this is not to be expected unless God made it so. Since the postulated God is simple, since these data are such as might probably occur if there is a God and such as if they probably would not occur if there is no God, I conclude that any rationally and scientifically-minded person must, on the basis of these data, conclude that there is a God. On the basis of these data conclude that there is a God.

KEVIN HARRIS: A lot of things to comment on there. Swinburne will repeat that – all the fundamental particles behave in the same way – several times in this exchange. Why does he think that that's inexplicable apart from God?

DR. CRAIG: I think it's because he believes that the laws of nature are not metaphysically necessary but contingent. Therefore it's highly improbable that we should find ourselves with just this set of laws of nature which are fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent life. But not only that, but, as I said, for the evolution of human beings and of consciousness which is not written into the laws of nature so far as we know. So he thinks that a better explanation is to say that there is a divine designer who has established laws of nature that operate in such a way as to permit or perhaps even facilitate the origin of life, the origin of consciousness, and the evolution of human beings.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK, let’s stop right there for today, but you don’t want to miss what’s coming next in this exchange. In the meantime, I want to encourage you to bless Reasonable Faith with a financial gift to keep Dr. Craig speaking out all over the world with all the great resources that are available to a world that desperately needs to hear them. Give online at ReasonableFaith.org. We’ll see you next time on Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig.^[2]