Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (16 page)

The teleological argument:
The universe is so complex and purposeful that it must have been designed by an intelligence. That’s God. Now there’s a problem worth thinking about, a genuine challenge that can’t be dismissed out of hand. It’s the kind of head-scratcher I’d hoped for when I started thinking about God. I’m not at all surprised that so many people find the seeming design or “purpose” in the universe convincing, especially when the alternative seems (incorrectly) to be blind assembly by random chance.

If I were born just two centuries ago, I’m pretty sure I’d have been a believer of some sort — perhaps a Deist. The reason would have been the seeming design and complexity of the universe. Though “God did it” has some serious problems of its own (check the second bullet, “cosmological argument”), no better explanation had yet been advanced at that point.

That changed, suddenly and decisively, in 1859.

Solving the complexity problem

Have you ever wondered why evolution in particular is such a hot-button issue in the culture war? I wondered that for years. Sure, it contradicts the creation story in Genesis, but so do a lot of other modern discoveries. Why does this one in particular inspire so much heat? The answer is found in the problem of complexity, especially the complexity of life on Earth — a problem that evolution solves very well.

Evolution by natural selection doesn’t just uproot one branch of religious belief. Challenging the idea that humans are special and separate from animals uproots the whole tree, mills it into lumber, and builds a very nice house out of it. And not a house of God, let me tell you.

Still, most people don’t decide what to believe by looking at abstractions like these. Darwin or no, the complexity of the universe, and especially of life on Earth, seems to make a designer a sure thing for most people. “I may not know what this God looks like or thinks or wants,” they say, “but come
on!
I can’t believe that this tree, or that moose, or the human body . . . I can’t believe these things just knitted themselves together by random chance!”

You know what? They’re right. If there’s anything less likely than a supernatural God, it’s the idea that all of this happened by random chance. Somebody once compared that idea to a whirlwind passing through a junkyard and assembling a 747.

For most of human history, those were the two apparent choices, God or random chance. Given those choices, I’m not surprised most people opted to believe in a designer. But in 1859, British naturalist Charles Darwin published the theory of evolution by natural selection. Suddenly people had
three
choices — and Darwin’s theory, properly understood, finally provides a credible fit for the evidence.

Understanding evolution

An intelligence doesn’t guide evolution; evolution also isn’t a process of random choice. In a nutshell, here’s how it works:

All organisms include differences among individuals — bigger or smaller hands or feet or eyes, a tendency to react a certain way to loud noises, different coloration, and so on.

Some of these differences don’t matter. Some have a negative effect, making it harder to survive or to have as many babies. But some differences are actually helpful. They make it a little easier for the individual to live longer or have more babies.

If the difference — say a slightly longer beak — gives even a tiny advantage, the lucky organism will have slightly more offspring and pass the same feature to them. The advantage will have been naturally selected. It’s not magic, just math.

The kids will tend to have the same long beak, passing it on to their own slightly greater number of kids, and so on. And if one of them has an even longer beak, the selective process continues. Eventually, if the longer beak keeps giving an advantage, it becomes the norm.

Fast-forward millions of years, and millions of selected traits produce the incredible diversity and complexity of life.

The variation is random, but the selection is anything
but
random.

Keeping God in the process?

Many religious believers have tried to reconcile evolution and religion, saying God uses evolution to create, but honestly, there’s really not much for him to do. Natural selection works just fine without a guiding hand. In fact, after a person understands the theory, it’s clear that it works
inevitably
without that guiding hand. Thomas Henry Huxley captured this idea when he hit his forehead and said, after first reading Darwin’s theory, “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!”

Not all scientists in the 1860s felt the same. They weren’t sure for some time whether such a process could really account for
all
the variations people see. So for 70 years after Darwin’s theory was published, they did what scientists do — they squabbled and argued and challenged the details. Not until the 1930s and 1940s did a “synthesis” of genetics and biology solve the legitimate problems that had kept many scientists from accepting the idea up to that point. But after that powerful synthesis happened, an overwhelming majority of the scientific community accepted the theory.

Despite claims to the contrary by those driven by their own confirmation bias, evolution by natural selection is now as solidly established as the orbit of the Earth around the sun.

Accepting a better solution

Evolution uprooted the tree of traditional religion in several ways. But perhaps the strongest blow was to the argument from design. For thousands of years, everyone from theologians to the person in the street found the complexity of life to be the strongest argument for the existence of God. Now a powerful, simple, natural explanation was available, one that presented fewer problems than an uncreated Creator.

In
The Blind Watchmaker,
Richard Dawkins described the importance of evolution to atheism. Before Darwin, an atheist may have said, “God’s a poor explanation for complex biology, but I don’t have a better one.” That’s a pretty unsatisfying position to be in. But Darwin’s theory made it possible to be what Dawkins called “an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” The single most compelling reason to believe in God could finally be set aside with confidence.

Noticing the steady retreat of religious answers

Religions haven’t been shy about offering explanations for the universe — how Earth was formed and how old it is, what causes weather, how humans and animals are related, how life on Earth came to include such incredible variety, why bad things happen, and what happens after death, to name a few. The original purpose of religion was to provide these answers before other methods were available.