What follows is my first attempt at writing about philosophical theory. I’ve been thinking about the nature of probability and its relationship to the concept of God since I re-read God’s Debris by Scott Adams a couple weeks ago. I was thinking about writing an essay, but couldn’t decide on a specific approach until I saw the cover story of this month’s Wired magazine.
Intelligent Design, the Unknowable and Probability
Bradley J. Eisenhauer
The October 2004 issue of Wired magazine features a cover story on the resurgence of creationism in the form of a doctrine called intelligent design. The proponents of this argument seek equal footing, or better, with evolution in the public school classrooms and curricula of the United States. Their stated goal is not to use intelligent design to explain anything, because it doesn’t, as several experts the article cites attest. What they do is use a “wedge” to exploit any weakness they can find in the theory of evolution. Having latched on to such a weakness, they seek to supplant all of evolution, and perhaps much of the rest of materialist science, with their notion of an intelligent creator. In an attempt to appear scientific, they have left behind mention of the Bible, and in fact spend little focus on the merits of their own case at all, preferring instead to hammer away at that wedge, driving it further into the supposed weaknesses of evolutionary theory. Despite this non-Biblical spin, their argument suffers, as it must, from the same weaknesses and logical impossibilities that have doomed previous attempts at defending creationism.
The one central feature of all “arguments from design” is the insertion of a supernatural cause for an unexplained event or fact. (In formal logic this is called the argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy, literally “argument according to ignorance.”) In the current incarnation, this unexplained fact is called “irreducible complexity” and refers to complex (i.e. multi-part) biological structures whose individual parts serve no independent function. From this observation, the creationists leap, as they always do, to the conclusion that biological life must have some supernatural, or perhaps extra-terrestrial, creator.
The fundamental errors of this approach are well-documented, not least of which is the question of the creator’s creator and the impossibility of an infinite regress of such creators, each more “irreducibly complex” than that which they create. One that is not frequently mentioned, though it is perhaps the most intellectually dangerous aspect of the creationists’ argument, is the substitution of an unknowable cause for one which is merely unknown. One possible reason this is rarely mentioned is that it is the popular view that reality is, in principle, unknowable. This is just the sort of mentality that is ripe for the creationists’ picking. Immanuel Kant, the father of this worldview, said that he “found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”
Let us assume, for the moment, that the theory of evolution, or at least our understanding of it, is somehow incomplete, that it does not adequately and causally explain the beginning and development of life on earth. That life did in fact come to be on earth is indisputable. (Even if you tend toward the extra-terrestrial origin of life, that merely transposes the location of its beginnings.) There are two alternatives in seeking answers to how life began: either it came about by natural processes, or in some supernatural manner.
Natural processes are causal processes. Everything that exists in the natural, material world has a specific identity and behaves according to that identity. Supernatural entities, if they exist, are not subject to causality. That is their nature, or rather, their lack of a specific nature. Since natural entities have a specific nature, that nature can be discovered. Supernatural entities, having no specific nature, are unknowable in principle. To posit a supernatural origin or cause for life on earth, or for any unexplained phenomenon, is to substitute the unknowable for the unknown. In doing so, one abandons any hope of discovering the true cause. One has rejected knowledge, or at least the expansion of knowledge, in principle.
One of the creationists’ favorite methods of lending scientific credence to their views is to quote some astronomically high probability against the formation of life, given our current understanding of science. Regardless of their assumptions, methods or the numbers they come up with, these results are always misleading, and are based on an erroneous view of what probability is, why it arises and what it means. The fundamental mistake is to reify probability, that is, to make it something real, a property or attribute of reality. Probability, in fact, is not real.
What is probability? When we flip a coin, we say that it has a 50% probability of coming down heads versus tails. What do we mean by that? That it will come down both heads and tails? Clearly not, the coin will come down either heads or tails; always one, never both. We mean, of course, that in a series of such flips, one result will occur about the same number of times as the other. But why is this so? Is any given toss truly a random, probabilistic event, or is the outcome the result of external factors acting on the coin? In fact, we could construct a mathematical model of the coin toss, accounting for such things as the initial orientation of the coin, the spin rate and the amount of time the coin spends in the air, and predict with some accuracy the result of any toss if these factors were known ahead of time. When the flipping of the coin is performed by a human being, these factors may vary greatly relative to the small changes necessary to alter the outcome. We could, however, construct a “coin-tossing machine” which could reproduce these factors consistently and thus produce a consistent result. We could then toss a coin with 100% probability, or very close to it depending on the quality of our machine and the completeness of our model, of coming down on whatever side we would choose.
We see then that what we refer to as probability in the outcome of an event can be reduced to unknown or uncontrolled causal factors in the context in which that event occurs. We observe different outcomes in what we consider similar events, and so we say that the possible outcomes of that event have certain corresponding probabilities. But since no two events occur in precisely the same context (if they did they wouldn’t be distinct events) those differences can be attributed to the context in which the event occurs. Probability is a stand-in for what we don’t know about an event’s context.
The critical sleight-of-hand that is frequently made is to switch the concept of probability from being an expression of the unknown context of the event to an attribute of the event itself. The reason this is critical is that it switches probability from being an epistemological tool to a metaphysical existent. It becomes an attribute of reality with independent existence apart from any observed events.
Since probability is not an intrinsic, metaphysical attribute of an event, it cannot be applied to past events whose outcome is known. It is therefore logically improper, and utterly nonsensical, to discuss the probability of life coming to exist on Earth. It does exist. The only task remaining is to seek a cause.
It is no accident that the creationists seek to reify probability in order to justify their position. Metaphysical probability, in which a particular event may have a multitude of outcomes in a particular context, renders the nature of the event and the entities involved unknowable. It deprives the event and its cause of their respective identities. This unknowable, indeterminate universe is precisely what their belief depends on. Since knowledge is made impossible, they must necessarily give up the notion of ever expanding that knowledge. They quite literally seek “to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.”
This is the intellectual danger of creationism. By turning the universe into an unknowable chaos, they throw up an impenetrable barrier to knowledge. Left to the mystics who substitute God for that which humanity has yet to discover, human knowledge would never advance at all. It is only those who ask, “What is it?” and believe they can find an answer that make such advances. The alternative is an abandonment of the power of the human mind.
October 2004
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