Thanks, Hotshoe, though I'd use this image:


If God could evolve, he wouldn't be God. You are saying it is 'stupidity' that something complex can arise from something simple, but that is exactly what Dawkins said in his Ultimate 747 Gambit when he said the multiverse is simple. So... Anyway, it's about as stupid as a unified theory, I guess. IOW--not stupid. But, that's why Dawkins' use of the gambit doesn't knock down the Cosmological Argument like he thought it did. You apparently didn't let the argument digest before replying to it--s'okay.

Having read the book, twice, and having argued the 747 gambit over the past few years - I assure you I have digested the argument. Perhaps you have been led by your christian sources to misunderstand it yourself.

There is nothing to the christian side of the argument other than magical thinking. If you claim there is something other than magical thinking, please demonstrate it here.

It bears repeating that Dawkins "747 Gambit" appears halfway through his reasoned book "The God Delusion" and is summarized at the end of a tightly-written chapter of supporting argument. Even when quoted in full, Dawkins' summary of his argument is difficult without the supporting pages. Here is his summary:

Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion p. 157-8 wrote:1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.
3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a "crane" not a "skyhook," for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.
4. The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that – an illusion.
5. We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with.
6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.

wikipedia wrote:Dawkins' name for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. This is an allusion to Hoyle's fallacy. Fred Hoyle reportedly stated 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." The basic argument against empirical theism dates back at least to David Hume, whose objection can be popularly stated as "Who designed the designer?", but according to Daniel Dennett the innovation of Dawkins' argument is, first, to show that where design fails to explain complexity, evolution by natural selection succeeds and is the only workable solution, and, second, to argue how this should illuminate the confusion surrounding the anthropic principle.

And further:

Dawkins writes about his attendance at a conference in Cambridge sponsored by the Templeton Foundation,[6] where he challenged the theologians present to respond to the argument that a creator of a universe with such complexity would have to be complex and improbable.[15] According to Dawkins, the strongest response was the objection that he was imposing a scientific epistemology on a question that lies beyond the realm of science. When theologians hold God to be simple, who is a scientist like Dawkins "to dictate to theologians that their God had to be complex?" Dawkins writes that he didn't get the impression that those employing this "evasive" defence were being "wilfully dishonest," but were "defining themselves into an epistemological Safe Zone where rational argument could not reach them because they had declared by fiat that it could not."
The theologians, he writes, demanded that there must be a first cause, which can be given the name God. Dawkins responds that it must have been a simple cause, and he contends that God is not an appropriate name for it, unless God is divested of its normal associations. Dawkins wants the first cause to be a "self-bootstrapping crane" that slowly lifts the world to its current complexity. Postulating a prime mover that is capable of indulging in intelligent design is in Dawkins' opinion "a total abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation." He says that he doesn't require a narrowly scientific explanation, but what any honest theory that accounts for the complex phenomena of the natural world requires is a crane and not a skyhook.

(emphasis mine)


read more

Ichthus77 wrote:
If God could evolve, he wouldn't be God.

Why not? Can you provide any sort of logical reasoning or evidence that this assertion is true?

If god could evolve then he wouldn't be the god as described in Abrahamic religions because that entity is described solely in absolute superlatives. He is described as omniscient, omnipotent and all loving - even though such concepts are mutually contradictory. He is described as perfect in every respect even though such a concept makes no logical sense.

Instead, an entity that could pretend to have all of those characteristics could indeed evolve. Omnipotence is a matter of scale. An entity that could ignite stellar fusion, accrete planets and seed them with life may appear omnipotent to our senses. Omniscience again, is a matter of scale. All loving is merely a confidence game.

You are saying it is 'stupidity' that something complex can arise from something simple, but that is exactly what Dawkins said in his Ultimate 747 Gambit when he said the multiverse is simple.

You have failed to understand the argument. Of course complexity can arise from simpler components. However, that can only occur via the action of an iterative process rather than a designer lest the explanation be more complex than the system created. The reason is because the iterative process needs no foreknowledge of the result while a designer must have it in order to begin - in fact, such foreknowledge is precisely attributed to god.

I dealt with this in my post about Shannon information above, didn't you read it?

So... Anyway, it's about as stupid as a unified theory, I guess. IOW--not stupid. But, that's why Dawkins' use of the gambit doesn't knock down the Cosmological Argument like he thought it did. You apparently didn't let the argument digest before replying to it--s'okay.

I think this a blatant case of projection.

Just A Theory wrote:

Ichthus77 wrote:
If God could evolve, he wouldn't be God.

Why not? Can you provide any sort of logical reasoning or evidence that this assertion is true?

If god could evolve then he wouldn't be the god as described in Abrahamic religions because that entity is described solely in absolute superlatives. He is described as omniscient, omnipotent and all loving - even though such concepts are mutually contradictory. He is described as perfect in every respect even though such a concept makes no logical sense.

Instead, an entity that could pretend to have all of those characteristics could indeed evolve. Omnipotence is a matter of scale. An entity that could ignite stellar fusion, accrete planets and seed them with life may appear omnipotent to our senses. Omniscience again, is a matter of scale. All loving is merely a confidence game.

You are saying it is 'stupidity' that something complex can arise from something simple, but that is exactly what Dawkins said in his Ultimate 747 Gambit when he said the multiverse is simple.

You have failed to understand the argument. Of course complexity can arise from simpler components. However, that can only occur via the action of an iterative process rather than a designer lest the explanation be more complex than the system created. The reason is because the iterative process needs no foreknowledge of the result while a designer must have it in order to begin - in fact, such foreknowledge is precisely attributed to god.

I dealt with this in my post about Shannon information above, didn't you read it?

So... Anyway, it's about as stupid as a unified theory, I guess. IOW--not stupid. But, that's why Dawkins' use of the gambit doesn't knock down the Cosmological Argument like he thought it did. You apparently didn't let the argument digest before replying to it--s'okay.

I think this a blatant case of projection.

Ichthus77 wrote:
Grounding Dawkins 747:
http://www.examiner.com/x-26772-San-Fra ... e-and-well

Is it a coincidence that the picture at HuffPost of member Ichthus77 is the same picture as that of the author of the above linked article?

Also is it a coincidence that at RDF a first time poster began this thread: http://richarddawkins.net/discussions/4 ... ent_478723

with the same OP and Ichthus77 made this post there:

Grounding Dawkins' 747:
http://www.examiner.com/x-26772-San-Fra ... e-and-well

First post here first post there.

Ichthus77, are you Maryann Spikes? And if so are you using this forum and others to generate hits for you column? That’s what it looks like to me.

Maryann Spikes wrote:San Francisco's atheist blogger Greta Christian retorts, in her May 4 Atheist Meme of the Day,

"'Everything has to have a cause, therefore there must be a God' is a terrible argument for religion. If everything has to have a cause -- what caused God? And if God either always existed or came into being out of nothing -- why can't that be true for the universe?"

In short, "everything" refers to "everything which needs a cause". The "uncaused cause" is not physical, therefore needing no cause. Daniel Dennett in "Breaking the Spell" conjures the straw man reply that God is self-caused. God cannot "come into being" or he is not God, leaving the alternative that he always existed and is the necessary being from which all contingent being derives its being.

Do people really take this sort of stuff seriously? What dreck.

So "everything" needs a cause. God is not part of everything, because everything needs a cause, and if God needed a cause, then he wouldn't be God. So God is not part of everything. But "everything" is, well, everything. If something is not part of "everything", then it's "nothing"; it doesn't exist. So either God doesn't need a cause. but is part of everything, and therefore the axiom "everything needs cause" is no longer true. Or God needs a cause, by virtue of being part of "everything", and therefore isn't God. Or God simply doesn't exist.

How's that for some high school stoner philosophy?

BTW, isn't Dawkins' "Ultimate 747" meant as a counter argument, rather than as an argument?

Shrunk wrote:BTW, isn't Dawkins' "Ultimate 747" meant as a counter argument, rather than as an argument?

Yes, a counter argument to Fred Hoyle's 747 fallacy.

Shrunk wrote:

Maryann Spikes wrote:San Francisco's atheist blogger Greta Christian retorts, in her May 4 Atheist Meme of the Day,

"'Everything has to have a cause, therefore there must be a God' is a terrible argument for religion. If everything has to have a cause -- what caused God? And if God either always existed or came into being out of nothing -- why can't that be true for the universe?"

In short, "everything" refers to "everything which needs a cause". The "uncaused cause" is not physical, therefore needing no cause. Daniel Dennett in "Breaking the Spell" conjures the straw man reply that God is self-caused. God cannot "come into being" or he is not God, leaving the alternative that he always existed and is the necessary being from which all contingent being derives its being.

Do people really take this sort of stuff seriously? What dreck.

So "everything" needs a cause. God is not part of everything, because everything needs a cause, and if God needed a cause, then he wouldn't be God. So God is not part of everything. But "everything" is, well, everything. If something is not part of "everything", then it's "nothing"; it doesn't exist. So either God doesn't need a cause. but is part of everything, and therefore the axiom "everything needs cause" is no longer true. Or God needs a cause, by virtue of being part of "everything", and therefore isn't God. Or God simply doesn't exist.

How's that for some high school stoner philosophy?

Better than Maryann's philosophy.

DaveD wrote:

Shrunk wrote:BTW, isn't Dawkins' "Ultimate 747" meant as a counter argument, rather than as an argument?

Yes, a counter argument to Fred Hoyle's 747 fallacy.

From reading The God Delusion, that's not really how I take it. True, the name is a retort to Fred Hoyle's fallacy. But the so-called Ultimate 747 Gambit is a central part of the book in supporting that the points that god - as usually imagined - is 1) unlikely to the point of impossibility, and 2) unnecessary in any case re the "design" issue for which christians credit their god.

And therefore, we (Dawkins and other atheists) are justified in suggesting that followers of Abrahamic religions drop their delusion ...

In my opinion, the 747 summary is one of the worst extracts of Dawkins' writing. He either says too much, or not nearly enough -- I think not enough. I read and re-read the whole chapter to get a better comprehension of the argument but could not figure out a competent way to summarize it myself. And I'm not a person who is usually shy about putting words in other person's mouths

Dawkin's "Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit" is a response to the theistic argument from design that asserts life/the universe is too complex to have arisen without a designer. Dawkins response basically boils down to:

a) if we need a designer to explain the complexity than God must be at least as complex as creation. But if complexity must be created by greater complexity than God must have been created by an even more complex God, which leads us into an infinite regress.

b) if complexity can arise out of something simple than God is superfluous, and the argument from design fails.

The typical theistic rejoinder is to simply assert that God is simple. How a personal being can conceive of, create, track and choose to intervene with every single sub-atomic particle and all possible states and combinations of these, not to mention all conceivable "spiritual" equivalents, throughout all possible universes, but still be described as simple, is far from clear.

Almost the whole relevant chapter of The God Delusion appears to be available in googlebooks; it's long and worth a read (There are two pages missing from the beginning of the chapter.) http://books.google.com/books?id=yq1xDpicghkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+god+delusion&hl=en&ei=CLo_TMCWIpGesQPdyL2HBw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

Basically, the argument opens with:

Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, page 114 wrote:... 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 absense 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 of 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. ... "

And 43 pages later, the argument concludes with:

Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, page 157 wrote:"... my conviction that the argument from improbability - the 'Ultimate 747' gambit - is a very serious argument against the existence of God, and one to which I have yet to hear a theologian give a convincing answer despite numerous opportunities and invitations to do so. Dan Dennett rightly describes it as 'an unrebuttable refutation, as devastating today as when Philo used it to trounce Cleanthes in Hume's Dialogues two centuries earlier. A sky-hook would at best simply postpone the solution to the problem, but Hume couldn't think of any cranes, so he caved in. Darwin, of course, supplied the vital crane. How Hume would have loved it.
This chapter has contained the central argument of my book, and so, at the risk of sounding repetitive, I shall summarize it as a series of six numbered points.

[see post above for the six points]

page 158 wrote:If the argument of this chapter is accepted, the factual premise of religion - the God Hypothesis - is untenable. God almost certainly does not exist. This is the main conclusion of the book so far. Various questions now follow. Even if we accept that God doesn't exist, doesn't religion still have a lot going for it? Isn't it consoling? "

That was certainly not my first post at richarddawkins.net--though it was my first post since the new user agreement. I was part of the now dead forum before it died, btw.

I googled for Dawkins 747 and picked a couple places so as to spread my memes.

I've read the God Delusion (own it--as well as books by the other three horsemen), and have not read Christian counter-arguments besides my own. Perhaps I should? Once I googled for Dawkins 747 after publishing my article, I saw that there were counter-arguments--mostly from atheists. I found that to be intellectually honest, and encouraging.

Ichthus77 wrote:That was certainly not my first post at richarddawkins.net--though it was my first post since the new user agreement. I was part of the now dead forum before it died, btw.

I googled for Dawkins 747 and picked a couple places so as to spread my memes.

I've read the God Delusion (own it--as well as books by the other three horsemen), and have not read Christian counter-arguments besides my own. Perhaps I should? Once I googled for Dawkins 747 after publishing my article, I saw that there were counter-arguments--mostly from atheists. I found that to be intellectually honest, and encouraging.

Which article of your own ? Maryann Spikes' article ?

Yeah. This one:

Ichthus77 wrote:Grounding Dawkins 747:
http://www.examiner.com/x-26772-San-Francisco-Apologetics-Examiner~y2010m7d15-Reasons-for-faith-101--The-cosmological-argument-alive-and-well

Okay then.

Ichthus77 wrote:Grounding Dawkins 747:
http://www.examiner.com/x-26772-San-Francisco-Apologetics-Examiner~y2010m7d15-Reasons-for-faith-101--The-cosmological-argument-alive-and-well

So you are Maryann Spikes, then? Nice to have you on the board. However, don't you think it's just a bit dishonest to come on here with no introduction, and in effect say, "Hey, guys! I've just found this super amazing article that refutes that atheist Richard Dawkins' book. Check it out. Brilliant, huh?" without bothering to tell us you are the author of said super amazing article?

That aside, would you care to respond to my counterargument above? Put a bit more formally, if someone starts an argument that begins:

Everything that is A is also B.

and then concludes:

C is A but not B.

then your conclusion contradicts your opening axiom, and you must have committed a logical error somewhere along the way.

In your case you start with:

Everything that exists must have a cause.

but end with

God exists, but does not have a cause.

That doesn't work.

Here's how logic actually works:

Everything that exists has a cause.

God does not have a cause.

Therefore, God does not exist.



(This leaves aside the validity of the axiom "Everything that exists has a cause", which is a whole other issue. However, since your argument is unsound to begin with, we don't even have to debate that.)

Well I've read several of Maryann Spikes' columns and they are IMHO quite good. Her bio indicates she's still an undergraduate student who works with autistic children; and I'd say for an undergrad she's assimilated all the basic arguments (and she's better read in the the "four horsemen" than I am). Also as the only person on this thread who's using his real name -- Shrunk, hotshoe, et al -- attached to his posts I'll cut Ms. Spikes a little slack; I hope she keeps posting, don't chase her away.

The essential problem with Dawkins' argument is that he insists that the universe (which, viewed as mere accident, is increasingly understood to be colossally improbable), if it be a product of intelligent design, a designer would then have to be even more improbable. But by acknowledging the achievement of blind evolution Dawkins already has conceded the possibility, indeed the probability, that an agency less than an omnipotent God and in fact as lowly as prokaryotes are in fact capable of generating all of terrestrial biological creation. Dawkins goes on to insinuate that some form of cosmic Darwinian selection among the multi-verses is at work without benefit of any empirical evidence. How are physical constants supposed to mutate? What would be the selective pressure? Intelligence? That would be Dawkins' ultimate downfall vis a vis intelligent design!

Hoyles' original tornadic 747 argument I believe applied to the first self-replicating biological assemblage, not the process of evolution in its full historical sweep. Thus far even modern technology (which has been assembling 747s for some 40 years now) has yet to scratch-build a cell -- Venter's recent creation simply involved injecting synthetic DNA into a pre-existing cell with all its organelles already in place. Hoyle was an interesting guy. In later life a champion of nuclear energy, he was the first to use the anthropic principal to predict the triple-alpha process of carbon synthesis in stars; and I believe he went to his grave in the early 2000s still defending the steady state cosmological model which had been the prior establishment position of the agnostic scientific community -- the "big bang" origin was too Christian with its implication of origins and it was, after all, first thought up by Monsignor Lemaître.

Could we have some agency at work between God and prokaryote? Here's a scenario I'll posit (I'm not sure if it's original): separate "big bangs" would arise out of disjointed regions of space-time -- there need be no causal paradox -- each being the mutual complementary products of universe simulations of separate advanced civilizations . . . .

It has long been recognised that technical civilisations, only a little more advanced than ourselves, will have the capability to simulate universes in which self-conscious entities can emerge and communicate with one another -- Living in a Simulated Universe John D. Barrow

Naturally there would be a pre-disposition to universes intelligently designed for the emergence of intelligent life to emerge and re-capitulate the process by creating additional universes. Nick Bostrom argues that intelligence is more likely to be the product of simulation -- intelligent design -- than not (some astronomically improbable random accident).

N. Bostrom, Are you living in a computer simulation?, Philosophical Quarterly 57(211): 243-255 (2003),