The Vastness of Space

Last month, the Pentagon released its report on UFOs. Since then, I've been musing a bit on whether or not extraterrestrial life could exist. In itself, this is probably a pointless excursion, given that God can do whatever He wants and He may or may not have made other life out there somewhere without telling us. But something struck me as I thought about the various arguments put forth.

One argument is that there surely must be life out there since there are so many trillions of stars that there must be countless planets just like ours in solar systems far away, and if evolution can have life form here then surely life can form in these other planets too. Setting aside the fact that evolution already presupposes the existence of life in the first place and therefore can't create it, this argument seems to fly in the face of the “anthropic principal” presented by secularists. That is, the anthropic principal is the claim that the necessary fine tuning of all the variables needed in our local solar system for life to exist on Earth is not evidence of design, but rather is simply the result of the vastness of space. Given how big the universe is and how many “rolls of the dice” individual locations were enabled to have, some place had to have the ideal conditions which resulted in our existence.

The reason these two explanations run counter to each other is easily displayed by a simple question. Which is it? Is life so easy to form that the vastness of the universe is why aliens are probably out there, or is life so difficult to form because it needs such precise values that the vastness of the universe is needed for us to exist in our seemingly designed location?

The sad thing is, I don't think most secularists even realize these two views are at odds with each other.

Apollo and Daphne

Suppose you discovered Bernini's Apollo and Daphne on a desert island. The island has no human inhabitants. And there's no other evidence that it ever had human inhabitants. Still, you conclude that the statue is an artifact. It didn't pop into existence uncaused. It did not and could not have a natural cause. 

That's analogous to the cosmological argument. But that's very coarse-grained. A more fine-grained argument is the teleological argument. That's more powerful, runs much deeper.

The original slab of marble didn't select for that particular sculpture. There are so many different sculptures that might be made from the same block of marble. And they're mutually exclusive. If a sculptor carves it one way, he can't carve it another way. He has to make a choice.

Possibilities greatly outnumber actualities. Although the size, shape, and texture of the material impose built-in limitations on the number of potential sculptures in that block of marble, yet for every sculpture, there's ever so many alternate sculptures. So it's not just a question of why there's something rather than nothing, but why there's this particular something rather than another something.

The block of marble doesn't really contain the sculpture. Rather, the sculpture began as an idea. The sculpture represents the union of something conceptual with something concrete. A relation between the block of marble and something outside the marble. The sculptor has a mental image which he instantiates in the physical medium of the marble. 

It would be absurd to say time and chance can produce the sculpture. Rather, it takes intelligence to make a selection from the panoply of abstract possibilities and actualize that one possibility to the exclusion of all other candidates. In a sense, intelligence is a simplifying device. 

What I cannot create, I do not understand

Near the end of his life, Richard Feymann left a terse statement on the blackboard: "What I cannot create, I do not understand."

What he meant, apparently, is that unless you can reconstruct every step, you don't really understand it. Understanding is a form of reverse engineering. Working back from the end-product to how everything functions. 

Unbelievers often make glib remarks about "design flaws" in nature. To which I always say, "Let's see you construct a better alternative." 

Cyclists and anteaters

Atheists often point to alleged design flaws in nature to disprove a divine Creator, or Intelligent Design theory. In the past I've discussed the inevitable tradeoffs in engineering. Now I'll cite an example.

A potential hazard in cycling is that your foot can slip off the pedal. And even if it doesn't, you don't have consistent pressure on the pedal.

One solution is pedal straps. However, some cyclists are very serious. Not only do they have skintight uniforms, but special footwear. They have magnetic pedals with matching footwear. Apparently, that's more efficient than pedal straps. 

When they dismount, I see them hobble about. Cycling shoes aren't walking shoes. Having that magnet embedded in the sole impedes walking. 

Which represents optimal design? Which represents suboptimal design?

Well, if you're just cycling, I guess the more specialized solution is optimal. More efficient than pedal straps.

But what if your bike breaks down miles from home? Miles from the nearest bike shop? What if you have to walk for miles with that magnet jammed up against the arch of your foot? With your full body weight bearing down on that little square, rather than the weight evenly distributed from heel to toe? I imagine your next visit wouldn't be to the bike shop, but the podiatrist. 

If I were a cyclist, I'd go for the pedal straps. They may be suboptimal for cycling, but they're far better for walking–if it comes to that. 

By comparison, it's like asking which is a better designed animal: an anteater or a raccoon? The advantage of an anteater is that it can monopolize on a particular food source. Far less competion for its food source. The disadvantage is that if there's a shortage of ants and termites, it will starve.

By contrast, the raccoon has an all-purpose design. It has far more food sources to choose from. The downside is that it has more competition for the same sources of food. 

The anteater has an optimal design for a diet of termites and ants. But that specialization carries a cost. 

The invisible navigator

But how do we know that evolution is nonteleological or that any teleology in it must be scientifically unascertainable. Imagine you are on an ancient ship and observe a steersman at the helm. The ship traverses difficult waters and reaches port. You conclude that the vessel’s trajectory at sea was teleological. Why? Two things: you see a steersman controlling the ship’s rudder who, on independent grounds, you know to be a teleological agent; also, you witness the goal-directed behavior of the ship in finding its way home. 

Now imagine a variation on this story. An ancient sailor comes on board a twenty-first century ship that is completely automated so that a computer directly controls the rudder and guides the vessel to port. No humans are on board other than this sailor. Being technologically challenged, he will have no direct evidence of a teleological agent guiding the ship—no steersman of the sort that he is used to will be evident. And yet, by seeing the ship traverse difficult channels and find its way home by exactly the same routes he took with ancient ships guided by human steersmen, he will be in his rights to conclude that a purpose is guiding the ship even if he cannot uncover direct empirical evidence of an embodied teleological agent at the helm. 

http://evoinfo.org/papers/ConsInfo_NoN.pdf

Stonehenge just happened!

In light of all the unknowns in these theistic “explanations,” one can hardly be blamed for concluding that “creation” and “design” are simply explanation names, not actual explanations. Compare to a naturalist saying, “X is the result an unknown, naturalistic (undirected) mechanism operating without a purpose.” It’s unclear why any of these unknown theistic explanations are supposed to be better than their unknown naturalistic counterparts. 

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2013/09/03/science-reply-to-wk/

Let's apply Lowder's reasoning to Stonehenge:

For his part, Wainwright believes that no theory will ever be fully accepted, no matter how convincing the evidence. “I think what most people like about Stonehenge is that nobody really knows why it was built, and I think that’s probably always going to be the case,” he says. “It’s a bloody great mystery.” 

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/light-on-stonehenge.html?c=y&story=fullstory

By Lowder's logic, since we don't know how or why Stonehenge was built, appealing to human agency is not a better explanation–indeed, not a real explanation at all–than appealing to natural inanimate processes. 

The inscrutable designer

One objection that's been raised to the design inference is the claim that if the designer is inscrutable, then that invalidates a design inference.

The strength of that objection depends, in part, on the identity of the designer. If the designer is the God of Christian theism, then to some extent he has disclosed his intentions. 

But let's play along with the inscrutability objection for the sake of argument. Suppose (ex hypothesi) that the designer is inscrutable. Would that invalidate the design inference?

i) One stock counterexample would be discovering an alien spaceship. The technology would be too advanced for us to figure out what the gizmos were for. Yet it would be absurd to deny that they were designed, just because the gadgetry is inscrutable to human engineers.

ii) Here's another counterexample. A common theme of SF stories is the intelligent supercomputer that takes over the world. As I kid I saw Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970). It's about a military supercomputer. Shortly after it goes online, it discovers a Russian counterpart. The two systems devise a code language to communicate with each other. They do so by inventing a whole new branch of mathematics. Their code language is unintelligible to humans. 

The challenge is how to outwit a computer that's far smarter than its inventor. It has adaptive intelligence. It becomes exponentially more intelligent every minute. The smarter it becomes, the less analogous it is to human reasoning. Ever further removed from the originating source. Incommensurable. They lose any standard of comparison, for it's increasingly unlike human intelligence. Truly alien. 

In effect, the computer is inscrutable. Its superior intelligence renders it inscrutable to the intellectually inferior human (Dr. Charles Forbin) who designed it. They can't anticipate its next move. And they have to second guess themselves. 

Yet just because the AI machine is inscrutable, it would be absurd to say its actions don't reflect intelligence. To the contrary, it's the computer's daunting (artificial) intelligence that makes it inscrutable to less intelligent human observers. 

The caponological argument

This will be included in the second edition of The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology.

(Source)