THE ULTIMATE BOEING 747
The argument from improbability is the big one. In the traditional
guise of the argument from design, it is easily today's most popular
argument offered in favour of the existence of God and it is seen,
by an amazingly large number of theists, as completely and utterly
convincing. It is indeed a very strong and, I suspect, unanswerable
argument - but in precisely the opposite direction from the theist's
intention. The argument from improbability, properly deployed,
comes close to proving that God does not exist. My name for the
statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is
the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit.
The name comes from Fred Hoyle's amusing image of the Boeing
747 and the scrapyard. I am not sure whether Hoyle ever wrote it
down himself, but it was attributed to him by his close colleague
Chandra Wickramasinghe and is presumably authentic.58 Hoyle
said that the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater
than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard,
would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747. Others have
borrowed the metaphor to refer to the later evolution of complex
living bodies, where it has a spurious plausibility. The odds against
assembling a fully functioning horse, beetle or ostrich by randomly
shuffling its parts are up there in 747 territory. This, in a nutshell,
is the creationist's favourite argument - an argument that could be
made only by somebody who doesn't understand the first thing
about natural selection: somebody who thinks natural selection is a
theory of chance whereas - in the relevant sense of chance - it is the
opposite.
The creationist misappropriation of the argument from improbability
always takes the same general form, and it doesn't make
any difference if the creationist chooses to masquerade in the
politically expedient fancy dress of 'intelligent design' (ID).* Some
observed phenomenon - often a living creature or one of its more
complex organs, but it could be anything from a molecule up to the
universe itself - is correctly extolled as statistically improbable.
Sometimes the language of information theory is used: the
Darwinian is challenged to explain the source of all the information
Intelligent design has been unkindly described as creationism in a cheap tuxedo.
114 THE G O D D E L U S I O N
in living matter, in the technical sense of information content as a
measure of improbability or 'surprise value'. Or the argument may
invoke the economist's hackneyed motto: there's no such thing as a
free lunch - and Darwinism is accused of trying to get something
for nothing. In fact, as I shall show in this chapter, Darwinian
natural selection is the only known solution to the otherwise unanswerable
riddle of where the information comes from. It turns
out to be the God Hypothesis that tries to get something for
nothing. God tries to have his free lunch and be it too. However
statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking
a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable.
God is the Ultimate Boeing 747.
The argument from improbability states that complex things
could not have come about by chance. But many people define
'come about by chance' as a synonym for 'come about in the
absence of deliberate design'. Not surprisingly, therefore, they think
improbability is evidence of design. Darwinian natural selection
shows how wrong this is with respect to biological improbability.
And although Darwinism may not be directly relevant to the
inanimate world - cosmology, for example - it raises our
consciousness in areas outside its original territory of biology.
A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the
easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance, and
teaches us to seek out graded ramps of slowly increasing
complexity. Before Darwin, philosophers such as Hume understood
that the improbability of life did not mean it had to be designed,
but they couldn't imagine the alternative. After Darwin, we all
should feel, deep in our bones, suspicious of the very idea of design.
The illusion of design is a trap that has caught us before, and
Darwin should have immunized us by raising our consciousness.
Would that he had succeeded with all of us.