the delusion of a tea pot

Here I discuss a point raised on Page 74 of the book “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. He says, “

The fact that I cannot know whether your red is the same as my green doesn’t make the probability 50 percent.  The proposition on offer is too meaningless to be dignified with a probability.”

Dawkins makes two points:

1)      It is not for atheists to establish that there is no God, but for theists that there is

2)      There may not be enough evidence to establish the non-existence of God, yet since He most likely doesn’t exist, we can confidently feel that He doesn’t.

I’ll take up point 2) first.

Dawkins quotes Betrand Russell where Russell narrates, how ought we react, if he claimed that there is a tea pot orbiting around the Sun somewhere between the Earth and Mars. The tea pot, is too small to be detected by a telescope. Russell goes so far as to say that we ought to be able to doubt the existence of such a phenomena. However Dawkins says “… if pressed, we would not hesitate to declare our strong belief that there is positively no orbiting tea pot. Yet strictly we should all be teapot agnostics:  we cannot prove for sure, that there is no celestial teapot.”  The point Dawkins is trying to make is as follows:

It is very unlikely that there is an orbiting tea pot, although it cannot be proven to be definitely so.  Thus although we cannot really establish that there is no orbiting tea pot, the probability of such an event taking place is so low, that we can more or less claim the orbiting tea pot to be another delusion.  This is similar to the theist’s claim that there is a God.  Although it cannot be definitely proven that there is no God, the existence of God (like the orbiting tea pot) is very unlikely.

So what? So, a lesson in epistemology; how could the teapot have gotten where it had? How indeed.

I would like to ask Mr Dawkins that do we all have to believe that reality can only consist of what  we can easily perceive it to consist of? Can reality not consist of events beyond our experience? Hasn’t science again and again established that reality can be very different than what we originally thought it to be?  For example Newton said space and time were two different entities and so it was thus proven to be again and again by empirical evidence for about two hundred years. However Einstein proposed that space and time are just different threads of the same fabric, known as space-time, which moved and morphed unlike the space of Newton, which was static and absolute. Sometimes reality could consist of experiences which need us to stretch our imagination, possibly because He who begot reality is far more imaginative than us. Why is Dawkins upset about the orbiting tea pot; because it becomes difficult to account for how the tea pot got there in the first place. Or is it so; lets just stretch our imagination a little bit; what if there is a civilization more ancient than ours, who sent a rocket into space. What if the rocket met with an accident and the wreckage started orbiting the sun. What if the wreckage included a tea pot? Is this scenario that difficult to conceive.  Just because everything that God does isn’t understood by us need He cease to exist?

Now I’ll consider case 1)

On who’s shoulder is the responsibility of establishing the truth? This is just a commonsense question. If a theist was trying to convince an atheist that there is God the onus might be on the former to establish his claim. If the situation was the other way round, then maybe it would be the responsibility of the atheist to establish, that there is no God. Since Dawkins is the author, it seems to be that it is his responsibility to establish his case. But then he prefers to be humorous and shirks his responsibility.

The very fact that he does so indicates that he does not have much genuine evidence about the non – existence of a Creator.

When Stephen Hawking asked Mr. Dawkins why he is so concerned about God, he answered it was because it is the responsibility of science to provide answers to various questions. Men of science should not say “because God so desired” in reply to every question. This seems an attractive reply but if you investigate further, you will realize how shallow this approach is. It is a bit like, just because the obedient sons depend on the father much to the dissatisfaction of the disobedient ones, the latter simply claim that the father is dead and can never intervene in the fortunes of anyone.  Many men of science (like Newton, Maxwell, Pasteur) pursued scientific careers with great zeal just to understand the glories of their Maker.  Thus this claim is unscientific that a theist doesn’t make a good scientist.  

The baby talk of Richard Dawkins

Here I contest the seemingly plausible argument that by taking small probable (baby) steps we can understand how a single celled primeval organism changed into a tyrannosaurus rex, by the process of evolution. I debate Richard Dawkins’ arguments as put forward in “The God Delusion”. If you get the book, you will notice how two NOBEL LAUREATES (Steven Weinberg and James D. Watson), have found the above-mentioned book quite charming. What I have to say will thus contest their praise of “the God Delusion”. Of course, Richard Dawkins is very famous on a personal level also. Thus you might just want to go through what I have to say, in case you are curious whether atheistic propaganda can be contested. So here goes.

One intelligently designed wall that Darwinists have a very difficult time breaking down is the extremely low probability of complex organs ( like the eye) being arrived at, by the process of evolution. However, the prophets of atheistic device don’t rest on their laurels too easy. Enter Richard Dawkins and how he attempts to describe breaking down this wall as climbing a mountain (Mount Improbable ), with a benign and gentle slope.

As Dawkins puts it, climbing Mount Improbable becomes probable because he chooses to break up the evolution of the eye into minute steps,... each very probable. So step one is highly probable, step two is highly probable, … step one billionth is very probable. So step one to step one billion......, how improbable can the entire process be? The gentleman seems to want to compare the process to climbing a huge mountain, which might be difficult to climb if we try to do so too hastily, but which can be done if we try in small but assuredly safe steps.

Take any event with a mathematically established probability which is quite low. Did you know that you could do a Dawkins division of the event into smaller events, and lo and behold you could establish that, that very event which is having a very low probability of happening, now has a very appreciable probability of happening. In other words, the mathematically calculated improbability has changed to probability by the simple technique of divide and fool.

If I am not making sense then that is precisely what my unkempt self is trying to establish. Look hard into the world of events. Take any event with any calculated probability of it happening. Whatever technique you may wish to use to calculate the probability, you can try and use, (provided its mathematically tenable). Once the probability is calculated using reliable mathematical techniques, then that is the mathematically established probability that you have. It is a mathematically established fact. A fact which Mr. Dawkins feels ought to change if you decide to approach the calculation in a different way.... namely by dividing the process of evolution, which is evidently a huge transformation, into small steps which took place over a huge span of time. 

My thesis is that, that just doesn’t happen. Once I calculate the probability of an event occuring, using reliable mathematical techniques..., you can repeat a similar calculation by making as many divisions of the same event as you may like, but the previous  mathematically arrived at figure, is still valid because I evaluated it using rules of mathematics. Believe you me, you can take any improbable event, break it up into as many pieces as you would like to and then re-calculate the probability of the same event occuring. The calculated figure will still be the same, because..., if the figure you have arrived at is using reliable mathematical techniques, the prior process has the same claim to fame.

How is that? First of all it has to be so. Otherwise, any event which is calculated to be having a low probability of occurring will suddenly have a different probability of occurring simply because my technique of evaluation has changed. 

If Dawkins feels that the creationists have come up with a nasty or incorrect way of evaluating the probability of an event then he should be able to find a flaw with the technique of evaluation. He can’t say that the technique is quite correct and so is the evaluation and yet the answer is incorrect. If he would like to say that the understanding of the event is incorrect then where the mistake was made in the understanding should be pointed out. Point is that, however probable your infinitesimal step may be, if my technique of evaluating the overall probability of the event has been correct, in the end you will end up with the same unfortunate probability as me, provided we both are obeying the laws of mathematics and applying them.

Lets take a case. Say lets toss a coin. Whats the probability that it will be ‘heads’? Easy - 50 per cent. Lets now allow Mr Dawkins the opportunity to break up the event into minute steps. If I toss the coin eight feet into the air then lets break the ascent of the coin into a billion steps. Then lets divide the descent of the coin into another billion steps and assure Mr Dawkins that he ought to be happy with two billion steps. Now if I calculate the probability of the final event by calculating the individual probabilities of each step will I arrive at a different answer? Will my mathematically evaluated answer of 50 per cent have the probability of changing because I took a history course and tried to accompany the coin during its rise and decline? The answer will be a simple NO. Here is a very good example of the overall probability of an event remaining unchanged despite the division of the one single event into two billion steps.

Somewhere I read on the internet that the low probability calculated, of the evolution of complex organs such as the eye is found to be so wanting in attitude, is because the calculators have done the calculation for a one step phenomena ......i.e. the probability that the eye evolved in a single moment and in a single step from the primordial soup has been unfortunately calculated to be very low. Let me assure you that if a mathematician tried to find out how improbable the event would have been that the eye just popped out of the primordial soup he wouldn’t have arrived at a very low value......, he would have simply arrived at no value at all......., in other words zero probability would have been the answer and no credible scientist ever strained his brains to evaluate that probability. Then what does the evaluated probability represent?

Let’s say I toss a coin and someone asks what is the probability of ‘heads’, I’ll easily reply 50 percent.

Now let’s suppose that someone really high up in space drops a coin and it takes 20 years for the coin to land on the surface of the earth. When the coin was being released if someone asked, what’s the probability of ‘heads’, one could still do a simple probabilistic calculation and say 50 percent. Now the coin doesn’t land for 20 years. The value 50 percent doesn’t represent the probability of a momentary or one step phenomena taking place. As the coin zips through the stratosphere it endures so many trials for so many years ....... and the final state when it finally lands isn’t arrived at in ‘one step’ or in a moment. Yet we can calculate the probability of the end state of a lengthy process by a simple one step calculation.

As Roger Penrose mentions in Pg 762 of “The Road to Reality”:

“Let us return to extraordinary degree of precision (or fine – tuning) that seems to be required for a big bang of the nature that we appear to observe. As was argued in 27.13 the required precision… is one part in (10^(10^123))at least. ". 

That means one divided by (10 to the power of (1 followed by 123 zeroes)). Pretty tough odds isn't it?

This tiny figure is arrived at by Mr Penrose not because he felt that the universe evolved in one step or in a moment to its present day state. The universe took its natural time scale to evolve, just as the coin took 20 years to fall on the ground, just as the eye would have evolved over the eons of time (ie if it did at all) that it did. The calculation being questioned does not represent what is the probability of an event taking place in one step or one mutation (if that is what it means). The low probability is arrived at, because the eye is so complex, the information content is so great both in terms of content and arrangement, that the probability that this highly complex structure came about by a random, un-directed process is very low. It's a bit like finding a very elaborate piece of architecture and thinking that it came about by the random action of thunderstorms acting on cliffs. 

Finally some mathematics.

Let’s consider the evolution of the eye . Let’s assume, that the probability that any infinitesimal step will take place, will range from 85 percent to 95 percent. For ease of calculation we can consider 90 percent as the approximate probability in each case. In other words we can assume that the probability of each individual small step actually occurring is around 0.9. In the world of probability, it is said that the probability that an event will happen, ranges from zero to one. The probability is one when the event is definitely going to take place and the probability is zero when the event is not possible at all. So 0.9 can be called a high probability (of the event happening). So we now have that each small step involved in the evolution of the eye is quite probable, approximating to 0.9.

When Mr. Dawkins talks of small steps then lets give him a billion small steps. Because there is a series of events happening and they are all necessary to occur, then by the laws of probability, we have to use the law of multiplication. In other words if A is an event and B is another event then let p(A) and p(B) be the respective probabilities of A and B happening. According to laws of probabilities the probability that event A and event B happened is obtained by multiplying the respective probabilities.In other words , p(A and B happens) is = p(A) * p(B). The probability that p(A and B and C happen) = p(A)*p(B) *p(C). The probability that p(A and B and C and D happen) = p(A) * p(B) *p(C) * p(D). So getting back to Mr. Dawkins we can see that if we want to calculate the probability of all those billion steps happening then we have to multiply the probabilities of all the billion steps. That is 0.9 * 0.9 *0.9 *… a billion times. Notice that 0.9*0.9 = 0.81. 0.9*0.9*0.9= 0.729. 0.9*0.9*0.9*0.9 = 0.6561. If you notice carefully you will see that as 0.9 gets mulitplied to itself over and over, the product obtained reduces (0.6561<0.729<0.81). As 0.9 is multiplied to itself more and more the product obtained begins to get closer and closer to zero. So when 0.9 is multiplied to itself a billion times we get the following expression: (( 0.9) to the power( 1000000000)). Which is quite close to zero. This value which is very close to zero is the net probability that the eye evolved in a billion steps. In other words, the mathematical probability that the event under consideration ( the evolution of the eye) will actually occur is still quite low, even if I grant that each individual small step had a high probability of happening.

Of course a billion steps was being very kind to Mr Dawkins. If each reproductory move is considered to be a step then the number of steps the eye took to become what it now has come to be is far larger. And since the number of steps are larger, the final probability comes even closer to zero (the decimal point keeps shifting to the left as the value of the exponent becomes larger) . Another point to consider is that Mr Dawkins hasn’t established that each mutation is very likely to have a high probability of aiding survival, or in other words 0.9 may well be a very exaggerated value.

A mountain with a benign structure may be easy to climb. But that does not mean that the eye evolving gradually has the same gentle slope to cope with.

Thy will be done

Hello. My name is Jashodev. I have something to say. There could be a Creator and it might just be worth your while (and wile) to check Him out. If you are already a theist, my site will bolster your faith, and give you fresh ammo to spread the word. If you are not, I will try to request you, to at least lend me an ear and see whether what I have to say makes any sense. If I do not, you can always choose to go away and never come back.

I have just started blogging. Thus I am just feeling my way around. I will try to deliver as I have promised above, as soon as I can.