Complex life needs an explanation. (So far, complex life has only been observed on Earth, but a century from now this may not be the case.) Design by one or more intelligent minds has been proposed as an explanation for the complex life on Earth. Some people have posited intelligent extraterrestrials as the designers. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that this is not the case. However, if it were the case, it would leave our extraterrestrial designers in the same fix as the complex life on Earth: in order to design Earth’s biosphere, they would have to be pretty complex themselves. Where did that complexity come from?
We could say (in a hundred different possible ways) that the complexity of the extraterrestrial designers doesn’t need to be explained (or can’t be explained). That seems pretty absurd. But let’s go along with it, hypothetically. If we were to accept that the complex life on Earth is a product of those extraterrestrial minds and didn’t provide an explanation for the complexity of those extraterrestrial minds, we wouldn’t actually be explaining anything. We would be left with exactly the same problem as we started with: unexplained complexity. For all that huffing and puffing, we would have simply added a detail to the history of the planet Earth, a detail that would be ultimately insignificant to the puzzle of our biosphere’s complexity.
The only working explanation we could use for those extraterrestrial beings would be the one we already apply to life on our own planet: evolution by natural selection. Not only is Darwinian evolution the only known in principle explanation, the evidence overwhelmingly suggests that it is (in practice, in actuality, in reality) the source of terrestrial life’s complexity.
Replace “the extraterrestrial design hypothesis” with “the God Hypothesis” and you find yourself in exactly the same situation. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that life on Earth evolved through organic, Darwinian processes and there is no evidence at all of any intelligent interference. But, as with the example of extraterrestrial designers, let’s grant, hypothetically, that God is actually responsible for the complex life on Earth. In order to intelligently design complex objects, God would need, by definition, the cognitive architecture (concrete or not) necessary to create complexity. Where did that architecture come from? How did it come to be so complex? Until you can answer these questions, you have merely added a detail to your cosmogony; you haven’t actually made any headway in solving the puzzle of complexity. You can point out that Paley’s watch tumbled off of a rock to get onto the heath, but that’s just a incidental detail. You still haven’t started to explain where the watch’s complexity came from. For design to be an ultimate explanation, you need complex cognitive architecture before anything else. Not only does that hypothesis fly in the face of the evidence, it explains nothing.
And it may go further than that. At the most fundamental, abstract, mechanistic level, where does complexity come from? What processes allow it to exist? Humans are the only example of designing minds that anyone knows about. Darwinian evolution built the cognitive architecture that we needed to start designing things. Even though we can explain the origin of the cognitive architecture that allows human minds to produce complexity, the more fundamental question remains: at the most basic level, how does design work? Where does the complexity of a watch come from, ultimately? Maybe the dichotomy between Darwinism and design is a false one. What if design itself (by humans or any other minds) is, at bottom, a Darwinian process? This is not immediately relevant to the God Hypothesis, but it does make some tantalizing suggestions. We may come to discover that Paley’s watch, sitting on the heath, was evolved just as much as the grass around it. We may also learn that, if complex life were intelligently designed, the designer’s cognitive architecture would have been simply another environment for Darwinian evolution to occur, software on which to run a simulation of the very fundamental processes that we now know created life on Earth.
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I have stumbled upon a quote George H. Smith's book Atheism: Rhe Case Against God (which I have not read). Smith attacks a radical version of the argument of design that asserts everything in the universe from electrons to elephants must have been carefully, consciously designed:
"Consider the idea that nature itself is the product of design. How could this be demonstrated? Nature, as we have seen, provides the basis of comparison by which we distinguish between designed objects and natural objects. We are able to infer the presence of design only to the extent that the characteristics of an object differ from natural characteristics. Therefore, to claim that nature as a whole was designed is to destroy the basis by which we differentiate between artifacts and natural objects. Evidences of design are those characteristics not found in nature, so it is impossible to produce evidence of design within the context of nature itself. Only if we first step beyond nature, and establish the existence of a supernatural designer, can we conclude that nature is the result of conscious planning." (pg. 268)
I also want to post a quote from Judge John E. Jones III that I linked to in the post because I want to emphasize it. It's from page 82 of Judge Jones' Memorandum Opinion from the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial:
"For human artifacts, we know the designer’s identity, human, and the mechanism of design, as we have experience based upon empirical evidence that humans can make such things, as well as many other attributes including the designer’s abilities, needs, and desires. ... With ID, proponents assert that they refuse to propose hypotheses on the designer’s identity, do not propose a mechanism, and the designer, he/she/it/they, has never been seen. In that vein, defense expert Professor Minnich agreed that in the case of human artifacts and objects, we know the identity and capacities of the human designer, but we do not know any of those attributes for the designer of biological life. ... In addition, Professor Behe agreed that for the design of human artifacts, we know the designer and its attributes and we have a baseline for human design that does not exist for design of biological systems. ... Professor Behe’s only response to these seemingly insurmountable points of disanalogy was that the inference still works in science fiction movies.
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It is readily apparent to the Court that the only attribute of design that biological systems appear to share with human artifacts is their complex appearance, i.e. if it looks complex or designed, it must have been designed."
One more thought to append: I asked "At the most fundamental, abstract, mechanistic level, where does complexity come from?" I think the phrase I was looking for was "at the level of information" or perhaps "at the algorithmic level". My poorly articulated meaning might become clearer to you if you read Daniel Dennett's insightful essay on the topic. Paley said that we are faced with explaining the complexity of living things just as much as we are faced a pocket watch. I'd like to put a perverse spin on that: in a way I think we've done a better job explaining life than the pocket watch! Human artifacts call out to be explained scientifically just as much as birds' wings. We can superficially answer that these artifacts are products of human creativity, but what is that? How does it work? Experience, albeit indispensable for answering this investigation, will not provide us with a full answer. It will not help us when we ask how creativity works on the level of the brain or when we wonder whether the analogy between human artifacts and natural life forms suggest a parallel between human creativity and natural selection.
If someone knows of any interesting research or speculation on this topic, please let me know.
Having read this blog entry, and pondered the existence of the universe and its surroundings myself, I couldn't help avoiding an idea.
At the start of the entry you address the rarer idea that extra-terrestrials are the designers of human life as we know it, a possible explanation for our existence, and that the problem with this idea is that in order for there to be designing beings, they must be more complex than their designs, humans, which brings up the same inquiries about the origins of these designers as it originally did about us terrestrials. Then you explained how this exact same problem remains to apply to the hypothesis, even when we identify the designer as God instead of extra-terrestrials.
This provoked my mind prematurely to wonder if such a designer came to be through Darwinian processes, just as evidence shows terrestrial existence to have undertook. This I found you had also addressed in the entry as I read further.
I continued reading your entry to the end so that I wouldn't post a comment that turns out to be a lot of what you said later in your entry that I just didn't read, but I still couldn't get past the idea of a designer having been developped by Darwinian processes.
This raises a lot of questions: Is such a being constructed of any biological material or strictly of spirit?; If God is a biological being, does it mean that humans could eventually evolve to levels of Godliness?; Did such a designer evolve to be what they are now over the course of one being's existence?; If not, then what are the other such beings like?; Do these other beings design, as well, or is there only one designer who is the sole designer because he/she/it has evolved beyond the others to a point where it can design the complexities of terrestrial existence?; How may such a designer be similar and different in comparison to its designs, humans, in relativity to anatomy, emotion, intelligence, etc.?; If there are other beings along with our designer, how do the two parties (our designer as one party and its fellows as another) interact?; What purpose does the design's existence serve to the designer?; etc.
Of course it will be impossible to give a true answer to the question of initial creation because even with this idea as an explanation of God's creation, it still does not answer where its first intitial "cell" would have come from in order to evolve through Darwinian processes to reach the complexity it has now. The idea of a designer's evolution also leaves us with more pondering about God's history, current state, and what it will become, as well the past, present, and future of humanity in the chance of our existence and evolution being so relative to that of God's.
Hi Britt! Thanks for your thoughts!
I have thought of the idea of God being created through some sort of Darwinian process (although it would be tricky to think of a process that ultimately produces only one god), but there are two big problems with that idea. Firstly, it admits defeat for the Design Hypothesis. If God came about through Darwinism, that means God's existence was preceded an orderly universe. It also means that Darwinism, not design, is the ultimate source of organized complexity in the universe and therefore the ultimate explanation for life on Earth. This version of the Design Hypothesis also has pathetically limited explanatory power.
The second problem is that we have no reason to believe that a designer had a hand in designing life. The organisms we see are unfathomably intricate systems made of unfathomably intricate parts which in turn are made of unfathomably intricate parts, but, even so, organisms are designed in such a way that makes sense in light of evolution by natural selection, but is baffling if we think of them as being the product of an intelligent designer. Neil deGrasse Tyson talked about "stupid design" at the 2006 Beyond Belief conference: features that are inevitable given the evolutionary process that one would expect not to see if life were designed by a generally benevolent hyperintelligence with the desire and capacity for competent, complex design.
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