This is the third in a series on Plantinga's new book. Here is the first, and here is the second. These posts are collected under the rubric Science and Religion besides being classified under other heads. This third post will examine just one argument of Dawkins' and Plantinga's response to it, pp. 26-28. Here is Plantinga in Chapter One of Where the Conflict Really Lies quoting from Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker, p. 141. (The ellipses are Plantinga's; the emphasis is Dawkins'; I have added a sentence from Dawkins that Plantinga did not quote; and I should note that Plantinga gives the wrong page reference. The passage is on 141, not 140.)
Organized complexity is the thing we are having difficulty in explaining. Once we are allowed simply to postulate organized complexity, if only the organized complexity of the DNA/protein replicating engine, it is relatively easy to invoke it as a generator of yet more organized complexity. . . . But of course any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machine itself. .... To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like "God was always there", and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say "DNA was always there", or "Life was always there", and be done with it. (1986, p. 141)
Dawkins seems to me to be arguing as follows.
1. What is needed is an explanation of organized complexity as such.
2. God is an instance of organized complexity.
3. If God is invoked as that whose existence and operation explains organized complexity as such, then the explanation is manifestly circular: the explanandum has been imported into the explanans.
4. Circular explanations are worthless: they explain nothing.
Therefore
5. To posit God as cosmic designer fails as an explanation of organized complexity as such.
The argument on my reconstruction is unexceptionable, but how is it relevant? if the task is to explain organized complexity as such, this cannot be done via an instance of it. No doubt. But the argument misses the point. The point is not to explain organized complexity as such, or even the organized complexity of all actual or possible life, but to explain the organized complexity of terrestrial life. More precisely, the point is to show that this cannot be done by invoking God in one's explanation. Obviously the argument as reconstructed does not succeed in showing that.
Note that there is no mention of any facts of biology in the above argument. Now Plantinga doesn't say the following, but I will: the argument is purely a priori. It is a proof, from concepts alone and without recourse to empirical facts, that an explanation of organized complexity as such cannot be had if the explanans mentions an instance of organized complexity. How then, Plantinga asks, does the (empirical) evidence of evolution reveal a world without design? (p. 27)
Now suppose we substitute the following proposition for (1):
1* What is needed is an explanation of the organized complexity of terrestrial life.
But if we plug (1*) into the original argument, and modify (3) accordingly, then (3) is false and the argument is unsound. If we are not trying to explain organized complexity in general, but only the organized complexity of terrestrial life, then there is nothing fallacious about invoking an explainer that is an instance of organized complexity.
The Dawkins passage suggests another sort of argument, oft-heard: If there is a supernatural designer, what explains his existence? If you say that God always existed, then you may as well say that life always existed.
This puerile argument is based on a failure to understand that explanations, of necessity, must come to an end.
Why did that tree in my backyard die? Because subterranean beetles attacked its roots. If the explanation is correct, it is correct whether or not I can explain how the subterranean beetles got into the soil, or which other beetles were their parents, and grandparents, etc. Explanations come to an end, and an explanation of a given phenomenon in terms of its proximate cause can be perfectly adequate even in the absence of explanations of other events in the explanandum's causal ancestry.
It is the puerile atheist who demands to know what caused God. As Plantinga remarks, "Explanations come to an end; for theism they come to an end in God." (p. 28) I would add that this is obvious if God is an necessary being: such a being is in no need of explanation. But it holds also if God is a contingent being. For again, not everything can be explained.
But if God was "always there" as Dawkins puts it, why not say that life was "always there"? Because life wasn't always there!
Ultimately, the theist explains everything in terms of the divine mind. Since explanations must come to an end, the theist has no explanation of the existence or complexity of the divine mind. But, as Plantinga remarks, p. 28, the materalist or physicalist is in the same position. He cannot explain everything. He "doesn't have an explanation of the existence of elementary particles or, more generally, contingent physical or material beings . . . ." (28) I would also ask whether the materialist can explain why there are natural laws at all, why the universe is intelligible in terms of them, and why there are these laws and constants rather than some other possible set.
There is one point that ought to be conceded to Dawkins, however. It certainly would be a "lazy way out" to invoke divine intervention in cases where a naturalistic explanation is at hand.
So far, then, Plantinga 1, Dawkins 0.
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