Despite his inability to grasp the nature of his own faith in chance, Dawkins does not
entirely ignore the problem of origins. His solution lies in something so nebulous that
it can be made to fit any theory. It is the so-called “anthropic principle”, whereby we
can be certain that we are on one of the few planets that are suitable for sustaining
life, because we know that we are on one of the few planets that are suitable for
sustaining life. Dawkins is surprised that religious apologists love the principle,
because they think it supports the case for design, whereas he loves it because he
thinks it does the opposite. So much for the decisive influence of the anthropic
principle.
He now – all credit to him – forgets his equation of natural selection with the whole
of life, and declares (p. 137) that “Darwinian evolution proceeds merrily once life has
originated”, though he glosses over the fact that his merry procedure still requires
countless random mutations for the production of new organs. “But how does life get
started?” Again he admits that this “may have been a highly improbable occurrence”.
“The origin of life was the chemical event, or series of events, whereby the vital
condition for natural selection first came about. The major ingredient was heredity,
either DNA or (more probably) something that copies like DNA but less accurately,
perhaps the related molecule RNA.” This is an extraordinary simplification. The
origin of life must at the very least have had two major ingredients, and they must
have sparked into life at precisely the same moment: heredity was one, but what
Darwin called the “breath” was the other. DNA is not much use in a lifeless body. By
only calling on DNA/RNA, at a stroke Dawkins has halved the degree of the already
high improbability. But be reassured: “I shall not be surprised if, within the next few
years, chemists report that they have successfully midwifed a new origin of life in the
laboratory” (p. 137). That’s OK then. Dawkins thinks that the combined knowledge of
the finest brains, working on the findings of generations of earlier fine brains, will
soon be able consciously to put together the ingredients and breathe the spark of life
into them … which will prove that life came about through unconscious chance. Abiogenesis is the name of the theory that inanimate matter spontaneously assembled
itself to create life. And it requires just as much credulity as the genesis theory it seeks
to replace.
But Dawkins has one more theoretical trick up his sleeve. Statistics. There are
billions and billions of galaxies in the universe, and so life is statistically bound to
have arisen by chance not only on this planet but probably on millions more. “The
beauty of the anthropic principle is that it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical
model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion to give us
a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here” (p. 138). The
beauty of the Dawkins principle is that it tells us, against all reason, that if you want
to believe in miracles, you need only cloak them in chemical or statistical terms to
make your belief entirely satisfying. “The spontaneous arising by chance of the first
hereditary molecule strikes many as improbable. Maybe it is – very very improbable”
(p. 137). But the fact that we are here, and that there are billions and billions of
planets, proves that this very very improbable event took place by accident through
the laws of probability. And so “this statistical argument completely demolishes any
suggestion that we should postulate design to fill the gap” (p. 139). Given enough
time and space, then, chance might produce absolutely anything. Presumably even
Hoyle's Boeing 747.
After this complete demolition comes another small concession before the final
hammer blow, with its heavy reliance on the totally non-committal “anthropic
principle”: “[Natural selection] needs some luck to get started, and the ‘billions of
planets’ anthropic principle gives it that luck. Maybe a few later gaps in the
evolutionary story also need major infusions of luck, with anthropic justification. But
whatever else we may say, design certainly does not work as an explanation for life,
because design is ultimately not cumulative and it therefore raises bigger questions
than it answers” [i.e. who designed the designer] (p. 141). A few later strokes of luck
would have to include the ability of organisms to adapt themselves to new conditions
and to produce the primitive but immediately functioning organs we have listed
earlier, without which there would be no evolution. There is also a different form of
gap in the evolutionary story: the fact that the fossil record has still failed to come up
with the millions of missing links Darwin was hoping for, which presumably is just a
matter of bad luck. (The Cambrian Explosion surely puts paid once and for all to
Darwin's gradualism and to Dawkins' smooth ride.) Design “certainly” does not work
- by this stage in Dawkins’ thesis we are indeed dealing in certainties - because it is
“ultimately not cumulative”. Isn’t it? Did Hoyle’s Boeing suddenly spring into
perfection from nowhere in no time? Are there any precedents in any field of design
that are not cumulative but automatically come up with spontaneous perfection?
Earlier, Dawkins points out that there are flaws in evolved organs – “exactly as you
would expect if they have an evolutionary history, and exactly as you would not
expect if they were designed” (p. 134). He may get away with this if we stick rigidly
to the concept of the omnipotent, omniscient, all-perfect God, but for an agnostic who
finds it difficult to believe in the miraculous creativity of chance and yet at the same
time keeps an open mind about the existence and nature of a possible designer, the
statement is quite baseless. Design requires experimentation, and just like natural
selection functions by eliminating the unnecessary and perfecting the necessary.
Consider the history of cars, planes, ships, and you will see that human design follows
precisely the same process as evolution - a gradual elimination of flaws and
enhancement of qualities. Besides, it seems reasonable to assume that the history is
not yet finished: the work is still in progress, and still "perfecting" itself, whether by
chance or by design.
But if it's hard to believe that life came about by chance, it's just as hard to swallow the explanations offered to us by religion and myth. According to Genesis, in a
version accepted by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, God created the heaven and
the earth, then said, "Let there be light: and there was light", and went on saying, "Let
there be this and that" for six days, and the job was done. What could be simpler?
Many Creationists stick to the literal truth of this account (or dispute the meaning of
the word "day"), argue that humans and all other species were created separately and
individually, and by diligent biblical calculations have worked out that we have all
been on the Earth for only about 6000 years. Even allowing for the possible
inaccuracies of scientific research, current knowledge suggests that homo sapiens has
been around for about 200,000 years, and probably diverged from the chimpanzee
family about 5 million years ago. It is true that many believers reject the
fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible, but once they begin to question the literal
truth of what they believe to be the word of God (and we should not forget that
Genesis is billed as the First Book of Moses, who had direct access to the Lord), it
becomes increasingly difficult to accept anything as authentic. The separate,
individual creation of all species runs counter to the theory of evolution, as does the
simultaneous arrival of the beasts of the earth and man (all created on the sixth day).
Here the fossil record clearly shows that the beasts of the earth preceded man as we
know him by millions of years. Again allowing for the problem of origins as well as
for gaps in the fossil record, it is difficult for someone non-committed to subscribe to
the Genesis version with its truncated cosmology and history of life on Earth.
According to Hesiod's Theogony (8th century BC), creation started with Gaia
(Earth), who gave birth to Uranus (Heaven), and he was thoroughly nasty to his
children until one of them, Cronos, castrated him; Cronos in turn ate his own children,
but his wife Rhea gave him a stone to eat instead of Zeus; when Zeus grew up (on the
island of Crete), he forced his father to vomit up the rest of the family, and all of them
ganged up on Cronos and gave him a hammering. Is this version more or less credible
than Genesis? It has plenty of detail and action, and so why should Moses' version be
any more reliable than Hesiod's? Who actually established in the first place that the
Bible was the Word of God? Muhammad and Joseph Smith also claimed to have
experienced divine revelation. What grounds do Jews and Christians have for
rejecting their claims (even if they do not dispute the Genesis version of origins)?
Hesiod may only have been recounting a version passed down to him by earlier
generations that went all the way back to the beginning.
Immanuel Velikovsky, a figure much reviled by the scientific establishment,
ingeniously collated myths and legends from ancient cultures and literatures -
including the Bible - and related them to the geological and cosmological evidence of
past catastrophes such as the Flood and the parting of the Red Sea. He did this,
incidentally, at a time (the 1950s) when uniformitarianism (the theory that geological
processes have remained stable throughout history) was the order of the day, but
many of his findings have now been confirmed. The point I wish to make here is that
some stories In the Bible and some ancient myths may be based on history, and as
such they may well contain truths that we have come to regard as fairy tales. We
cannot dismiss them. Nor can we trust in them. Even authenticated history is open to
the subjective interpretations of the historians.
The North American Indians have a large variety of creation myths, one of them
centring on conflict between "hero twins" whose father is the sun-god. One twin is
helpful to mankind, and the other brings old age, disease and death. The concept of
twin gods provides a far less mystifying explanation of good and evil than that of a
single, all-good Creator who designs the Devil. In classical Indian mythology,
Brahma is the creator who forms a trinity with Vishnu and Shiva, respectively the
forces of light and dark, life and death etc. Brahma, as the balance between them,
represents existence originating from the union of opposites. Interestingly, Brahma no
longer figures as a major deity in Hinduism, perhaps reflecting increased concern with
human life rather than with creation - a little like the atheist focusing on natural
selection rather than on the origin of life.
But I do not belong to Hesiod's culture, or to Amerindian culture, or to Indian
culture, or to Dogon culture (Amma threw pellets of earth into space to make the
stars, and then made the Sun and Moon by using pottery), or to Chinese culture (Pan
Gu woke up inside a big black egg, smashed it, and the contents became the heavens
and the earth). Erich von Daniken tells us that visitors from outer space built many of
our monuments, and the Raelians assure us that life on Earth was created in the
laboratories of the Elohim - who also live in outer space, and are busily cloning Jesus
and Muhammad, among others. If you subscribe to these interpretations of origins, so
be it, but in my own quest for a believable truth, I find all these concepts as incredible
as that of chance-created life, heredity and adaptability, and that of a benign deity
who, in six days 6000 years ago, conjured up heaven and earth and every single form
of life, with not a single stage of progression from one to another. This is a subject we
shall return to under "Religion".
Despite my inability to take the necessary leap of faith, however, one of the above
explanations may be true, or some of them may contain some of the truth. The fact
remains that we are here, and so there must be a true explanation of how we got here.
Whatever it may be, it will seem fantastic. Science may be moving us towards new
discoveries about our planet and our cosmos, but time and our way of life are moving
us further and further away from our origins. Perhaps the ancients knew things that
we do not. We should therefore remain open-minded, which is the hallmark of
agnosticism, for the admission of ignorance is rarely as harmful as the assumption of knowledge.