In tonight's post I would like to talk about evolution again, entropy briefly, and then move onto discussing the ontological argument for the existence of God. To lay my cards on the table right at the outset, I do not find any of the ontological arguments persuasive, but my reasons for finding these arguments unconvincing may be of interest to readers. The ontological argument has troubled philosophers for nearly a thousand years – many, particularly atheists but also religious people, have sensed that there must be a problem with it and yet have had difficulty finding the precise flaw. The reason it is so difficult to refute the ontological argument is that to do so one needs to reconsider one's understanding of language, truth, consciousness, and existence. I shall sketch out my critique of the ontological argument later in this post.
I wish however to start with evolution. In some of my posts, I have tentatively raised some objections to the Darwinian account of evolution that has been strongly promoted by people like Richard Dawkins and the many other evolutionary biologists who subscribe to the neo-Darwinian synthesis and who can be found holding court on Youtube to admiring throngs. It may seem to readers that this must make me a Christian apologist because it tends to be fundamentalist Christians who most want to attack Darwin, people who believe the world was created six thousand years ago by God over seven days, and who believe as well either that fossils are hoaxes planted in the ground by Satan or that cavemen coexisted with dinosaurs. But, despite some possibly misleading figurative language I have used, I am not a Christian. In fact I believed whole-heartedly in Darwin until around February or March 2013. In the film script I wrote in 2012, I included a character who had been converted to the notion of Intelligent Design but I included him ironically – I expected that any viewers the film would have would realise that he was spouting forth conspiratorial bullshit. In early 2013, however, an argument against Darwin occurred to me that shook me up so thoroughly it caused me to doubt my atheism.
I set out this argument a number of years ago in a post titled "On Evolution" but it was a badly written essay and so I will summarise the argument again now. It runs as follows. For two organisms to successfully breed with each other, they must be genetically very similar. Occasionally, a mutation must occur that is very significant. Such a mutation is highly improbable. Furthermore, an individual born with a really large mutation would be unable to reproduce because, if it mated with a member of the unmutated population, it would be unable to produce viable offspring. Therefore, when a significant mutation occurs, it must occur to a number of individuals in the population at the same time and in the same vicinity. This makes it even more vastly improbable. Now, readers who are versed in Evolutionary Biology may say that evolution occurs through tiny incremental changes rather than discontinuous jumps and may challenge me to provide proof that really large mutations sometimes occur. The example I would give, and gave in the post "On Evolution", is chromosome number. A horse has 64 chromosomes; a donkey has 62; a mule (the offspring of a horse and a donkey) has 63 and is therefore sterile. Presumably horses and donkeys have a common ancestor that, from an evolutionary point of view, lived in the not too distant past, and so at some point either an animal like a donkey with 62 chromosomes gave birth to an animal like a horse with 64 chromosomes, or vice versa. We could also consider chimpanzees and humans. Chimps have 48 chromosomes and humans 46. And yet we all descend from a common ancestor. So at some point either chimps gained two chromosomes or humans lost two chromosomes. Such mutations must occur because different species have different numbers of chromosomes, and yet such mutations are really significant genetic departures from the norm. Note that I am not saying that evolution didn't happen; rather I am saying that the standard dogma that evolution proceeds simply as a result of a simple interplay between chance mutations and natural selection must be false or incomplete.
I have touched on evolution in other posts, such as "Evolutionary Psychology and the Gay Gene" and "Evolution and Chance". In recent days I have been thinking about the argument Dawkins presented in Climbing Mount Improbable and have been wondering if he got his math wrong. As yet, however, I haven't thought through it enough to know if there is a mistake in his reasoning. Something I feel sure about, however, is that the current fashion known as evolutionary psychology is a dead end. Evolutionary psychologists presuppose that all aspects of human nature, human mores and behaviours, can ultimately be explained as adaptations intended to promote survival and reproduction in the distant past. As I have argued in previous posts, evolutionary psychology cannot adequately explain homosexuality (if we define homosexuality in the facile, superficial way most people do). Something else evolutionary psychology cannot explain is music. I want now to set out a second objection to Darwinian evolution.
Music is something truly magical. If we know only a smattering of music theory, we come to realise that music is all about mathematical patterns, relations between frequencies, timbres, and rhythms, that are all highly abstract but affect listeners viscerally, bypassing the rational mind. A simple melody, for instance, might begin with the tonic, move to the subdominant, then to the dominant, and then back home to the tonic. A major chord, a chord in the Ionian scale, sounds happy; a minor chord sounds sad. I have long pondered the question of whether the capacity to understand and appreciate music is learned or innate. Does a minor chord sound sad because the sad songs we were exposed to as children employ the Aeolian mode? Or are we born with a predisposition to interpret major chords as happy and minor chords as sad? I think I believe now that the ability to appreciate and create music is inborn. But this raises a problem for evolutionary psychology. How could an ability to appreciate and sometimes create music be an adaptive advantage? We could invent a Just So story to explain it. Maybe, a million years ago, humans communicated through song, using Ionian melodies to express happiness and Aeolian melodies to express sadness. Then, as language fully developed, people stopped communicating through song, and the ability to unconsciously understand and appreciate music became a kind of vestigial trait. Perhaps, alternatively, sexual selection was at work. Perhaps musicality is a display of cerebral competence purposed to attract mates, a little like a peacock's tail. Certainly the musical instinct must have arisen long before humans were capable of inventing musical instruments like lyres. We simply don't know. Yet we know enough, or I know enough, to suspect that the Darwinian idea that the meaning of life is solely survival and reproduction is inadequate to explain the appreciation of music and, by extension, human nature.
Something I am endeavouring to communicate in this blog is how ignorant people, even experts, are of fundamental aspects of human life. We don't understand music, or dreams, or love, or memory. We don't really understand evolution. Even though almost every educated person believes Darwin to have found the key to the meaning of life, I do not believe he did. It is our ignorance I am trying to display to the world. I wish now to move away from evolution and discuss entropy and time, another fascination of mine.
Almost all the laws of physics are time-reversible. An apparent exception seems to be the second law of thermodynamics, the rule that in an isolated system, entropy, disorder, tends to increase. The second law of thermodynamics provides us with some sense of time's arrow – the future is different from the past because there is more entropy in the future than the past. However, something people often don't realise about the second law is that it is probabilistic, that it simply states that entropy is far more likely to increase than decrease but does not state that entropy necessarily increases. An example that illustrates this point is as follows. Suppose we have a box divided into two regions by a thin partition or membrane and that all the gaseous molecules in the left side are red and all the molecules in the right side are blue. If we break the membrane or remove the partition, the two different coloured gases will almost certainly mix to form a more or less uniform colour. If however we start with a mixture of blue and red molecules in a box, a possibility that all the red molecules will randomly congregate on the left hand side and all the blue molecules will congregate on the right hand side exists that is small but non-zero. If there are n red molecules and n blue molecules the probability is 1/2 to the power of n, if the molecules are distributed evenly throughout the space. For any macroscopic situation, if the box is say one metre cubed and at sea level, there are so many molecules involved that this possibility is so small as to be almost impossible. Almost impossible but not quite totally impossible. So there is no necessary reason to think that time might not sometimes run backwards.
I don't feel equipped right at this moment to expatiate on time and entropy, because my brain is all foggy because of the medication I am forced to take. I will say that I sometimes speculate that, if all the laws of physics are time reversible, as they are, it might perhaps be possible to remember the future as well as the past. I could give examples from my own life to support this speculation but to do so would be to stray too far from the topics I wish to cover in this post. Before I finish with entropy, though, I wish to relate it back to evolution. Some religious critics of Darwinism say that the ever increasing complexity of life on Earth violates the second law of thermodynamics. This is not a good argument. The Earth is not a closed system. If we take into account that all the energy stored and expended by Terran organisms originally comes from the Sun, we need to include the Sun in the system. If we do so, we are forced to conclude only that entropy increases more slowly as a result of living systems than if there wasn't life on Earth.
At this point I wish to turn at last to the ontological argument for the existence of God.
The first Christian formulation of the ontological argument was by Anselm of Canterbury in 1078. I shall quote his argument as it is summarised in Wikipedia. "Anselm defined God as "a being than which no greater can be conceived", and argued that this being must exist in the mind, even in the mind of the person who denies the existence of God. He suggested that, if the greatest possible being exists in the mind, it must also exist in reality. If it exists only in the mind, then an even greater being must be possible—one which exists both in the mind and in reality. Therefore, this greatest possible being must exist in reality." Anselm's argument is not the only kind of ontological argument – Graham Oppy proposed that there are eight different types of ontological argument. But I shall be focussing primarily on this one. We can summarise it still further. "We can conceive of a perfect being (i.e. God); to be perfect it must exist; therefore God exists."
Obviously, the ontological argument turns on the twin issues of 'perfection' and 'existence''; even in Anselm's day, critics realised that there must be a flaw in it. Gaunilo of Marmoutiers parodied the argument in the following way – we can conceive of a perfect island; to be perfect it must exist; therefore a perfect island exists. Gaunilo contended that Anselm's argument could be used to prove the existence of literally anything. For instance, we could mount the following arguments: We can conceive of a perfect unicorn; to be perfect it must exist; therefore at least one unicorn exists. We can conceive of the perfect detective (i.e. Sherlock Holmes); to be perfect he must exist; therefore Sherlock Holmes exists. We can conceive of a being who is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly evil (i.e. the demiurge); to be perfect it must exist; therefore the demiurge exists. These parodies do not refute Anselm's argument in and of themselves, but they indicate that Anselm must somehow, in some way, be committing some kind of logical error.
Over the last thousand years, many philosophers have attempted to refute Anselm's argument in various ways. One method is to say that the conception of 'perfection' does not logically entail 'existence'. I believe this was Kant's position – he argued that existence isn't a predicate. In this blog, specifically in the post "Fictional Objects", I took a kind of Meinongian position, claiming that existence is indeed either a property or predicate, and so Kant's exit out of the problem is not available to me. We can say however that one possible flaw is that the notion of 'perfection' is incoherent. How do we know that an existing being is more perfect than a non-existing one? If we provisionally subscribe to a kind of Platonic worldview, we could say that all existing objects are imperfect copies of perfect archetypes that inhere in a transcendental realm – this would mean that if something is perfect, by definition, it doesn't exist, or at least cannot be included in the inventory of objects constituting the material world. For me, certainly, I have difficulty conceiving of a perfect anything.
Although it may be fruitful to explore the notion of 'perfection' further in an effort to vanquish Anselm, it seems more interesting to me to focus on the notion of 'existence'. Anselm argues that because he can conceive of a perfect being, this being must exist, claiming that even atheists possess a conception of a perfect being. Later, Descartes argued that because he had a "clear and distinct" idea of God, God must exist. To quote Wikipedia quoting Descartes, "the mere fact that I exist and have within me an idea of a most perfect being, that is, God, provides a very clear proof that God indeed exists.” Descartes goes on to say, “It is no surprise that God, in creating me, should have placed this idea in me to be, as it were, the mark of the craftsman stamped on his work.” The problem for both Anselm and Descartes is that there are many people who do not have a clear and distinct idea of God – I include myself among that large group of people, those who cannot conceive of a God and may be damned to perdition as a consequence. In the posts "The Analytic Synthetic Distinction" and "Fictional Objects" I proposed that all objects exist in the minds or worlds of conscious beings. My friend Sally believes in Bigfoot – he is a real object in her world. I do not believe in Bigfoot, and so he is not an object in my world. God is an object in the worlds of, respectively, Anselm and Descartes, but He is not an object in mine. For those who believe in God He is real, while for those who do not believe in God, He is not.
The answer I am sketching out is complex but is of a piece with the last several posts I have written. I have not expressed myself as clearly as I would like, but I hope that in future posts I may express myself better. I'll finish this discussion by making the following point. The argument "I can conceive of a perfect being (i.e. God); perfection entails existence; therefore God exists" is only a step away from the argument "I can conceive of an existent being; therefore this being must exist." Does thinking something exists mean it must exist? Does thinking something true make it so?
In this blog I have often discussed my life but I haven't done so for a while. I don't know whether readers prefer discussions of my life or my philosophy. I should say that, ironically, even though I have been presenting a view of the world over the last six months in which truth is relative and subjective, I have come to a much clearer and truer understanding of my own life. This seems to me characteristic of many postmodernists, from Nietzsche to Foucault. People who say there is no truth are more honest than those who say there is. Foucault, for instance, who has been accused of moral relativism, was, in reality, a truly good, honest man who fought on behalf of the oppressed and marginalised – madmen, homosexuals, and criminals. The irony of postmodernism is that its denial of objective truth is a route to something beatific, something like salvation. In my next post, I will make the effort to again talk about my life.
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