A few days ago, Jonah Lehrer pointed to new research that suggests that the human brain is more energy efficient than previously believed. Jonah says:
This computational efficiency is the single most astonishing fact of the mammalian brain. Here you are, reading these words, daydreaming about lunch, processing the richness of reality, thinking about tomorrow, and your brain requires less energy than a low wattage lightbulb. Evolution is an impressive engineer.
While I, as an engineer, enjoy every time feats of wonder are piled at the feet of my vocational group, I must take a different stab at the source of the mammalian brain’s wondrous energy efficiency and calculating power: God.
Certainly I am not discounting evolution. I am, and always have been, a scientist at heart. I read Darwin in junior high, and found the compelling tomes of biology more riveting and believable at times than the Bible. In college I studied biochemistry, then bioengineering, then in graduate school biomechanical engineering. I found I could not stray for long from the bizarre and complex art and science of the human body. And as I learned more and more engineering, I came to grasp what a marvelously tuned machine the human body is.
Freeman Dyson once said “A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible.” This is true for the human body as well. As relatively late-comers to the family tree, most, if not all of our parts are borrowed from ancestral apes. We are not the only creature that stands on two legs. Many animals do so. We are not the only creature with long arms, sweat glands, an arched spine, a large brain, or a useless appendix. Most mammals have ten toes and ten fingers. Apes had been gripping things with their opposable thumbs for thousands of millenia before humans came along.
No, creativity was not the prime mover in the development of Man. We are really just an amalgam of tested, successful ideas organized into a new form to fill a new ecological niche. In our case the niche was “communal bipedal superpredator.”
But I digress. The point towards which I am driving is that any engineer will tell you that the design of a thing and the building of it are separate, though interlinked processes. To this I humbly submit: having every known tool in the world in your garage does not mean scrap metal will suddenly become a car out there while you read the newspaper in your kitchen. Or put another way: given enough monkeys, enough typewriters and enough time–and you still will not achieve the works of Shakespeare.
Intelligent Design has achieved a large (and justified amount) of stigmatization, mostly due to the fact that the term has been hijacked by Creationists as a cloak to their anti-Darwinian beliefs. Intelligent Design, in its purest form, argues that the Laws of Nature are immutable: gravity is and always has been gravity. Evolution is and always has been the method by which random mutations select for or against groups of creatures who survive or don’t based on changes in their immediate ecology. Water has always flowed downhill. But Intelligent Design also makes the following submission: things just seem to work–a little too well–to be completely unplanned.
Some argue that Intelligent Design advocates are the modern day Christian Apologists. Others argue that Intelligent Design is simply trying to cater to everyone in some sort of ludicrous and illogical happy medium. Evolutionists say that Intelligent Design is simply making an admission that allows a slippery slope: if some Intelligent Designer is pulling the strings, then even the most far-fetched Christian stories aren’t implausible. Conversely, Creationists ask how ID advocates can believe God is “out there, guiding evolution”…but not interacting in other ways.
To my own beliefs, I cannot say. There is a reason these arguments have been going on since the 13th Century and haven’t been resolved. But as an engineer, when I see the human body as a machine; a machine with over 3 trillion moving (semi-autonomous) parts, all working together; a machine that has been mass produced 12 billion times since the species first evolved; a machine capable of all the things of which humans are capable–as an engineer I have to believe (and I admit egotistically) that there is a Engineer, whose own brainpower trumps ours the way Lehrer says our brainpower trumps chess-playing supercomputers like Big Blue.
Perhaps I am wrong. But perhaps one day, after a long life, I will ascend to Heaven. Standing there before God, I feel compelled to ask: “God, did you create Humans or is Evolution the explanation?” God replies: “Yes.”
And then God turns away from me, back to His drafting table.
Certainly, when smug scientists scoff at ID and the anthropic principle, they are tettering on the slippery slope of their own wobbly paradigm, the one that says that 90% of the universe’s expansion is due to “dark energy” and “dark mass’ - neither of which has been detected or explained. I agree with you, Alex, that the coincidences required to place carbon-based life on this planet, then evolve it to its present status, are too great to attribute to chance alone. That doesn’t mean I think we’re a particularly wise or resilient species….
How is accepting prima facie evidence of dark energy smug, but accepting something utterly unknowable and completely unverifiable NOT smug?
Three thots:
First, most ID arguments rely on the following form.
1) X is incredibly complex or precise (DNA, the brain, the eye, the gravitational constant)
2) Complex things require a Creator
3) Therefore, X must have a Creator
(You can see some interesting ones here: http://www.cosmicfingerprints.com/)
The difficulty with this line of argument is that it begs the question in premise 2. Do complex things require a Creator? In one way or another, that is what scientists and philosophers are trying to answer. Using an unknown as a premise is not logically valid.
Secondly, I will acknowledge that most ID arguments show that a Creator is POSSIBLE. There are gaps in our knowledge of physics and biology. Perhaps, in those gaps, there is an unknown Entity.
What the arguments fail to show is that such an outside Entity is NECESSARY. That’s why premise 2 above is still the central question.
Third, there is no logical reason to suppose that the unknown possible Creator/ Entity is Yaweh/Jehovah/Allah. It could just as easily be the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or an alien child who uses the universe as its sandbox.
Jon,
First: I agree with you basically. The Flying Spaghetti Monster analogy proves to me that the central Christian figure of a God that is basically an extremely powerful human-shaped male being with a big white beard and a deep voice is a very sad and shallow attempt to visualize something that by its very nature cannot possibly be visualized.
Second: I do not think the Creator, whatever He/She/It may be, will be found in the “gaps in our knowledge of physics and biology.” To me, the Creator’s method for creation has already been found, in the current body of scientific knowledge, and our understanding of the Creator’s methods and tools will expand as our scientific knowledge expands.
Third: The three part argument of ID proponents you suggest above is mostly from the modern-creationists-hiding-behind-the-term-Intelligent-Design, not from the centuries old teleological source of Intelligent Design, which argues that a Creator must exist because Life has a purpose, not because Life is complex.
Alex,
I think that the modern conservative caricature of God as the Invisible Man in the Sky is what many atheists are reacting against. The Hindus sometimes describe God as ‘that which is beyond the pairs of opposites (as in good/evil, male/female, etc)’, which is a much more challenging notion (altho still not necessarily convincing).
The difficulty with finding a Creator in modern science is this: if we know all the tools of evolution, why do we need a Creator to intervene?
I don’t think the argument that because Life has a purpose, there must be a Creator is any help. First, there is the question of whether life has a purpose. Secondly, even if it does, why couldn’t that purpose be assigned by Man?
I find your formulation much more thotful than most of the religious rhetoric in our culture. Welcome to the site.