Richard Dawkins at OU

Richard Dawkins demonstrates the proper approach to climbing

 'Mount Improbable' to a roomful of British youngsters.

Went to see Dr. Dawkins last night at OU, with a friend from Edmond.  The lecture was mostly about how genes have unconsciously engineered living beings to pursue purposes which are ultimately beneficial to the genes ancient 'purpose' which is of course to make more copies of themselves.  The lecture in and of itself was mostly straightforward mainstream biology, with a few especially interesting examples thrown in as slides.  Without knowing about the speakers' background as an outspoken proponent of freethinking as opposed to indoctrination, one would have had some trouble understanding why a biology professor, even one with such a mellifluous voice and well-prepared slides, could manage to pack out a fair-to-middling-sized athletic arena.  

Which brings me to the crowd.  Where exactly did these people come from and why do they seem so eager to clap whenever the speaker makes a witty jab at faith-based thinking?  Judging from the few with whom I spoke personally, they came from universities throughout Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, really just about everywhere within driving distance.

In his opening remarks, prior to the lecture proper, the good Dr. roundly ridiculed certain local politicians, while making it clear that he understood that quite a few of us are not reactionary regressionists, we just happen to live here.  The crowd went absolutely apeshit crazy, rock-and-roll arena style.  I've occasionally seen people get this excited in the context of a large field house, but never in the absence of some sort of playoffs.  Really, it felt a more like a mega-church in the middle of a revival sermon than a gathering of science-minded people for a lecture on purposiveness and intention as evolutionary adaptations.

In truth, the experience was a bit of both.  I got the feeling that most of the people there were at least passingly familiar with the details of evolutionary biology, even the gene-centered selective theories popularized by Dawkins, but they came mostly for the sense of solidarity engendered by filling a room entirely with people who prefer scientific free inquiry to faith-based indoctrination.  This was especially noticeable whenever Dawkins made his characteristically biting remarks condemning those who hope to inject religious dogma into science classrooms.  From the response, you'd expect the whole room was filled with frustrated young grad students, biology post-docs, and maybe a couple hundred of those scheming secular humanists that I keep hearing about on the John Birch website.

I still think Dawkins is a bit naive about the propriety of addressing metaphysical arguments with materialistic premises, but for all that, he proved a very persuasive and entertaining speaker.  Perhaps Matt Stone and Trey Parker were a little too hard on him, after all.

The Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit

I’ve been hearing much made of this Richard Dawkins fellow coming to speak at the University of Oklahoma, so I decided to have a look at his most recent book. I did not get far before becoming overwhelmed with the sense that he believes that his brilliance in some areas (e.g. biology, zoology) makes him perfectly qualified to argue about other areas entirely (e.g. philosophy of religion) in which he lacks any serious training or experience. This is a familiar feeling to anyone who indulges in reading the shockingly amateurish journals of high-IQ societies in their spare time.

Here is a telling example:

Creationist 'logic' is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine. Therefore a designer must have done it. And science's answer to this faulty logic is also always the same. Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative. Indeed, design is not a real alternative at all because it raises an even bigger problem than it solves: who designed the designer?

Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as a Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance.

These passages demonstrate the sort of metaphysical naiveté which philosophy profs usually try to beat out of their students in their first year.

Let’s unpack Dawkins’ (mis)characterization of creationist thinking here:

1. If something we observe is sufficiently improbable, complex, awe-inspiring, etc., then it must have been intelligently designed.
2. The cosmos as a whole meets the above criteria, because it is so improbably, complex, awe-inspiring, etc.
3. Accordingly, the cosmos as a whole must have been designed by an intelligent agent which cannot exist as part of the universe itself.
4. Anything sufficiently complex to design XYZ is at least as complex/improbable/awe-inspiring as XYZ itself
5. :. Said intelligent designer must also have been designed, per premises (1 & 3)

Never mind that Dawkins has written an entire book debunking premises (1 & 4) or that the amazing explanatory power of natural selection is impossible to apply at a cosmic level (e.g. various universes competing for the scarce resources of the metaverse). It is the attempted application of creationist premise (1) to a non-spatiotemporal cosmic übermind which one should find particularly troubling. Dawkins is actually arguing that if premise (1) holds true for the cosmos as a whole (or any constituent units thereof) then it also must hold true for anything outside of space and time as well. This fallacy of extrapolation makes the better-known fallacy of composition (of which Dawkins is certainly aware) seem like a cautious bit of standard logical induction by comparison.

People of every worldview must accept some aspects of the universe as brute facts which are fundamental and lack any possible explanation. For naturalists, it is nature itself, while for deists, it is the mind of god. One cannot expect either sort of person to seek a deeper explanation for that which they consider ultimately fundamental.

The Genius of Charles Darwin

Today I finally got a hold of a recording of The Genius of Charles Darwin from BBC 4.   Here is the most depressing segment of the show, although it is somewhat cheering to me personally to see that evidence-resistant religious indoctrination is a problem even in London.  Makes me feel a bit better about sending my children to the local public schools.

 

Money quote:

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Charles Darwin's Origin of Species is one of the most precious books in the entire library of our species.  This book made it possible no longer to feel the necessity to believe in anything supernatural.  It completely revolutionized the way we see ourselves, the world, and our origins.

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Sunday Sermon (2008-08-03)

"Queerer than we can suppose" with Richard Dawkins