Introduction: The Illusion of Design [Richard Dawkins]

Natural History Magazine ^ | November 2005 | Richard Dawkins

[snarks_when_bored]

Introduction: The Illusion of Design

By Richard Dawkins

The world is divided into things that look as though somebody designed them (wings and wagon-wheels, hearts and televisions), and things that just happened through the unintended workings of physics (mountains and rivers, sand dunes, and solar systems).

Mount Rushmore belonged firmly in the second category until the sculptor Gutzon Borglum carved it into the first. Charles Darwin moved in the other direction. He discovered a way in which the unaided laws of physics—the laws according to which things “just happen”—could, in the fullness of geologic time, come to mimic deliberate design. The illusion of design is so successful that to this day most Americans (including, significantly, many influential and rich Americans) stubbornly refuse to believe it is an illusion. To such people, if a heart (or an eye or a bacterial flagellum) looks designed, that’s proof enough that it is designed.

No wonder Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s bulldog,” was moved to chide himself on reading the Origin of Species: “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that.” And Huxley was the least stupid of men.

Charles Darwin discovered a way in which the unaided laws of physics could, in the fullness of geologic time, come to mimic deliberate design.

The breathtaking power and reach of Darwin’s idea—extensively documented in the field, as Jonathan Weiner reports in “Evolution in Action”—is matched by its audacious simplicity. You can write it out in a phrase: nonrandom survival of randomly varying hereditary instructions for building embryos. Yet, given the opportunities afforded by deep time, this simple little algorithm generates prodigies of complexity, elegance, and diversity of apparent design. True design, the kind we see in a knapped flint, a jet plane, or a personal computer, turns out to be a manifestation of an entity—the human brain—that itself was never designed, but is an evolved product of Darwin’s mill.

Paradoxically, the extreme simplicity of what the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett called Darwin’s dangerous idea may be its greatest barrier to acceptance. People have a hard time believing that so simple a mechanism could deliver such powerful results.

The arguments of creationists, including those creationists who cloak their pretensions under the politically devious phrase “intelligent-design theory,” repeatedly return to the same big fallacy. Such-and-such looks designed. Therefore it was designed.

Many people cannot bear to think that they are cousins not just of chimpanzees and monkeys, but of tapeworms, spiders, and bacteria. The unpalatability of a proposition, however, has no bearing on its truth.

To pursue my paradox, there is a sense in which the skepticism that often greets Darwin’s idea is a measure of its greatness. Paraphrasing the twentieth-century population geneticist Ronald A. Fisher, natural selection is a mechanism for generating improbability on an enormous scale. Improbable is pretty much a synonym for unbelievable. Any theory that explains the highly improbable is asking to be disbelieved by those who don’t understand it.

Yet the highly improbable does exist in the real world, and it must be explained. Adaptive improbability—complexity—is precisely the problem that any theory of life must solve and that natural selection, uniquely as far as science knows, does solve. In truth, it is intelligent design that is the biggest victim of the argument from improbability. Any entity capable of deliberately designing a living creature, to say nothing of a universe, would have to be hugely complex in its own right.

If, as the maverick astronomer Fred Hoyle mistakenly thought, the spontaneous origin of life is as improbable as a hurricane blowing through a junkyard and having the luck to assemble a Boeing 747, then a divine designer is the ultimate Boeing 747. The designer’s spontaneous origin ex nihilo would have to be even more improbable than the most complex of his alleged creations. Unless, of course, he relied on natural selection to do his work for him! And in that case, one might pardonably wonder (though this is not the place to pursue the question), does he need to exist at all?

The achievement of nonrandom natural selection is to tame chance. By smearing out the luck, breaking down the improbability into a large number of small steps—each one somewhat improbable but not ridiculously so—natural selection ratchets up the improbability.

Darwin himself expressed dismay at the callousness of natural selection: “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!”

As the generations unfold, ratcheting takes the cumulative improbability up to levels that—in the absence of the ratcheting—would exceed all sensible credence.

Many people don’t understand such nonrandom cumulative ratcheting. They think natural selection is a theory of chance, so no wonder they don’t believe it! The battle that we biologists face, in our struggle to convince the public and their elected representatives that evolution is a fact, amounts to the battle to convey to them the power of Darwin’s ratchet—the blind watchmaker—to propel lineages up the gentle slopes of Mount Improbable.

The misapplied argument from improbability is not the only one deployed by creationists. They are quite fond of gaps, both literal gaps in the fossil record and gaps in their understanding of what Darwinism is all about. In both cases the (lack of) logic in the argument is the same. They allege a gap or deficiency in the Darwinian account. Then, without even inquiring whether intelligent design suffers from the same deficiency, they award victory to the rival “theory” by default. Such reasoning is no way to do science. But science is precisely not what creation “scientists,” despite the ambitions of their intelligent-design bullyboys, are doing.

In the case of fossils, as Donald R. Prothero documents in “The Fossils Say Yes” [see the print issue], today’s biologists are more fortunate than Darwin was in having access to beautiful series of transitional stages: almost cinematic records of evolutionary changes in action. Not all transitions are so attested, of course—hence the vaunted gaps. Some small animals just don’t fossilize; their phyla are known only from modern specimens: their history is one big gap. The equivalent gaps for any creationist or intelligent-design theory would be the absence of a cinematic record of God’s every move on the morning that he created, for example, the bacterial flagellar motor. Not only is there no such divine videotape: there is a complete absence of evidence of any kind for intelligent design.

Absence of evidence for is not positive evidence against, of course. Positive evidence against evolution could easily be found—if it exists. Fisher’s contemporary and rival J.B.S. Haldane was asked by a Popperian zealot what would falsify evolution. Haldane quipped, “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.” No such fossil has ever been found, of course, despite numerous searches for anachronistic species.

There are other barriers to accepting the truth of Darwinism. Many people cannot bear to think that they are cousins not just of chimpanzees and monkeys, but of tapeworms, spiders, and bacteria. The unpalatability of a proposition, however, has no bearing on its truth. I personally find the idea of cousinship to all living species positively agreeable, but neither my warmth toward it, nor the cringing of a creationist, has the slightest bearing on its truth.

Even without his major theoretical achievements, Darwin would have won lasting recognition as an experimenter.

The same could be said of political or moral objections to Darwinism. “Tell children they are nothing more than animals and they will behave like animals.” I do not for a moment accept that the conclusion follows from the premise. But even if it did, once again, a disagreeable consequence cannot undermine the truth of a premise. Some have said that Hitler founded his political philosophy on Darwinism. This is nonsense: doctrines of racial superiority in no way follow from natural selection, properly understood. Nevertheless, a good case can be made that a society run on Darwinian lines would be a very disagreeable society in which to live. But, yet again, the unpleasantness of a proposition has no bearing on its truth.

Huxley, George C. Williams, and other evolutionists have opposed Darwinism as a political and moral doctrine just as passionately as they have advocated its scientific truth. I count myself in that company. Science needs to understand natural selection as a force in nature, the better to oppose it as a normative force in politics. Darwin himself expressed dismay at the callousness of natural selection: “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of nature!”

In spite of the success and admiration that he earned, and despite his large and loving family, Darwin’s life was not an especially happy one. Troubled about genetic deterioration in general and the possible effects of inbreeding closer to home, as James Moore documents in “Good Breeding,” [see print issue], and tormented by illness and bereavement, as Richard Milner’s interview with the psychiatrist Ralph Colp Jr. shows in “Darwin’s Shrink,” Darwin’s achievements seem all the more. He even found the time to excel as an experimenter, particularly with plants. David Kohn’s and Sheila Ann Dean’s essays (“The Miraculous Season” and “Bee Lines and Worm Burrows” [see print issue]) lead me to think that, even without his major theoretical achievements, Darwin would have won lasting recognition as an experimenter, albeit an experimenter with the style of a gentlemanly amateur, which might not find favor with modern journal referees.

As for his major theoretical achievements, of course, the details of our understanding have moved on since Darwin’s time. That was particularly the case during the synthesis of Darwinism with Mendelian digital genetics. And beyond the synthesis, as Douglas J. Futuyma explains in “On Darwin’s Shoulders,” [see print issue] and Sean B. Carroll details further for the exciting new field of “evo-devo” in “The Origins of Form,” Darwinism proves to be a flourishing population of theories, itself undergoing rapid evolutionary change.

In any developing science there are disagreements. But scientists—and here is what separates real scientists from the pseudoscientists of the school of intelligent design—always know what evidence it would take to change their minds. One thing all real scientists agree upon is the fact of evolution itself. It is a fact that we are cousins of gorillas, kangaroos, starfish, and bacteria. Evolution is as much a fact as the heat of the sun. It is not a theory, and for pity’s sake, let’s stop confusing the philosophically naive by calling it so. Evolution is a fact.

Richard Dawkins, a world-renowned explicator of Darwinian evolution, is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, where he was educated. Dawkins’s popular books about evolution and science include The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, 1976), The Blind Watchmaker (W.W. Norton, 1986), Climbing Mount Improbable (W.W. Norton, 1996), and most recently, The Ancestor’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), which retells the saga of evolution in a Chaucerian mode.

[chronic_loser]

I don't see any connection between a deity and the uniformity of matter.

Affirming that there is no NECESSARY connection is one thing (a "deity" may be arbitrary) What I am saying is that the philosophical worldview provided to reformation Europe provided the substrate of science, and quite a number of non-religious scientists and philosophers of science have affirmed this.

The revealed God of the Christian religion is stated to be a deity of consistency and uniformity, caterwauls about the "arbitrary vengeful" stuff notwithstanding, and philosophical/theological onanisms re: the nature of evil likewise. If I may turn the tables on a fave argument by the naturalists, the fact that there are some areas of revelation that are not complete is not the same as refuting them (that sound familiar?). Christian theology provides a view of the universe which assumes that there are solid, universal laws of physics, because God is a God of consistency.

Empirical naturalism assumes consistency because that is all we have "seen" ( really loaded word). Empiricism sits on the shoulders of the substrate which birthed it, while doing its dead level best to stab it to death.

Contending that science demands empirical philosophical presuppositions is one thing. Contending that you don't like the theistic system that provided the philosophical system from which science sprang forth is quite another.

I did not ask you if you LIKED the history of science, nor if you thought it logically consistent that a Christian worldview affirms a uniformity of cause and effect. You may think it absurd, and that is your right. However, it IS the way mama has arranged the furniture and you can't say there has never been a sofa by the window. Move the sofa if you like, but you can't say it was never there.

[Aquinasfan]

Who designed the Designer's "spontaneous origin"? -- Consider that it is unanswerable..

Because the question is nonsensical.

The Uncaused Cause has no cause, so the question "who caused the uncaused Cause?" or "who caused the Designer?" is nonsensical.

We know that the Uncaused Cause must exist, since otherwise there would be no cause for all intermediate causes leading up to the present.

[MeanWestTexan]

Terrible.

Anyway, its only Texarkana Texans who know about poultry breeding habits --- and only b/c they're so close to Arkansas.

[chronic_loser]

It is really just the old old answer to the "unmoved mover." People get confused about the "proofs" for God as though they were invalid because they are not "absolute" proofs (sorry, better words escape me).

Another way to criticize the criticism of the cosmological argument (which is what this is), is to state that we perceive cause and effect, and the chain of cause and effect "has to" stop somewhere. The answer to that is simply that if it has to stop, then the principle of cause and effect is not universal, and therefore "proves" nothing. The theisitic response is to affirm that there "must be" something outside the system, as it is an absurdity to claim that things cause themselves. The response is that this is all well and good, but what has happened to the concept of "proof."

I think the cosmological argument (which is what Dawkins is thrashing here, with the kind of blind stupid hatred that a camel attacks the cloak of its driver, btw) should never be presented as a "proof," for the simple reason that an infinite being could not submit to a "proof" to a finite being in any meaningful way in the first place. There are EVIDENCES for God that shout loudly and clearly for his existence. Cosmology, morals, the concept of the infinite, the person of Jesus and his (well rooted in history) resurrection....., all combine to sing to anyone who likes the music and wants to listen.

[betty boop]

I do find it ironic in the extreme that advocates of Empiricism (not you) would put an Idealist like Plato on a pedestal.

What's in a name? Actually I think Plato was a pretty good empiricist. Certainly he recognized that reality includes both phenomenal and nonphenomenal aspects. Aristotle did too, of course. It seems the chief difference between them is that for Aristotle, "form" (an example of nonphenomenal reality) is immanent in things (examples of phenomenal reality), where for Plato, "form" has a transcendent source. I note that a good many empiricists reject anything that is transcendent in principle. But that strategy excludes a whole lot of human experienced reality....

Anyhoot, I'm just more "sympatico" with Plato than I am with Aristotle; but the latter's exposition of causes is indispensable.

But if you prefer Aristotle, hey -- you still have great taste. To say I like Plato better doesn't mean I think Aristotle was not a first-rate, world-class philosopher. Thanks so much or writing, Aquinasfan!

[Right Wing Professor]

Affirming that there is no NECESSARY connection is one thing (a "deity" may be arbitrary) What I am saying is that the philosophical worldview provided to reformation Europe provided the substrate of science, and quite a number of non-religious scientists and philosophers of science have affirmed this.

That's merely a historical detail. The notion of the ether was useful to the development of wave dynamics, but it was wrong.

The revealed God of the Christian religion is stated to be a deity of consistency and uniformity, caterwauls about the "arbitrary vengeful" stuff notwithstanding, and philosophical/theological onanisms re: the nature of evil likewise. If I may turn the tables on a fave argument by the naturalists, the fact that there are some areas of revelation that are not complete is not the same as refuting them (that sound familiar?). Christian theology provides a view of the universe which assumes that there are solid, universal laws of physics, because God is a God of consistency.

You can try to deride it all you want. The proposition that the god of the Bible is consistent is simply absurd to anyone with the slightest familiarity with that book. Proof by derision or repeated assertion simply won't work.

If there is a underlying single principle of nature, it's a dualistic opposition between a symmetric field and local asymmetric fluctuations. We see that again and again; in particle physics; in the Jahn-Teller distortion of molecules; in the sharp distinction in Chemistry between kinetics and thermodynamics; in the spontaneity of phase transitions; in evolution, driven by random short time scale mutations in the presence of a long term selection pressure. Some people have even posited the Big Bang was spontaneous symmetry breaking, from a maximally symmetric void into asymmetric reality.

So the idea of a single creator god isn't even a good analogy for the universe; nor is the orthodox Christian dualism between pure good and pure evil. Gnostic Christianity, with its opposition between a serene, harmonious but distant God and a local, personal and quixotic Old Testament demigod is far better - the field and the fluctuations - though I'd hope we were by now beyond having to personalize abstract ideas.

Empirical naturalism assumes consistency because that is all we have "seen" ( really loaded word). Empiricism sits on the shoulders of the substrate which birthed it, while doing its dead level best to stab it to death.

The violent metaphor notwithstanding, science has often progressed by adopting ideas that ultimately proved wrong, incomplete or obsolete. You seem to advocating we cling on to such ideas past their obsolescence.

[Aquinasfan]

Consider that in everything we observe, what a thing is is different from whether that thing exists. These are two real questions which refer two two separate realities. In God, what he is and that he is are one and the same thing. This is not true for all other created things. God's nature is to exist. He is eternal, without beginning or end.

What stops me from inserting the universe in place of God in that paragraph?

The term, "the universe," is simply an abstraction meaning the collection of all things that exist.

Moreover, there is scientific evidence that the collection of all things that exist does not exist necessarily, since it seems not to have existed at one time.

Additionally, we know from the Argument from Perfection that the Perfect Being must be a simple substance and must possess the fullness of Being. The Perfect Being cannot be the universe, since it is composed and divisible.

[The argument from degrees of perfection]

The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But "more" and "less" are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaph. ii. Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.

Whether God is altogether simple?

I answer that, The absolute simplicity of God may be shown in many ways.

First, from the previous articles of this question. For there is neither composition of quantitative parts in God, since He is not a body; nor composition of matter and form; nor does His nature differ from His "suppositum"; nor His essence from His existence; neither is there in Him composition of genus and difference, nor of subject and accident. Therefore, it is clear that God is nowise composite, but is altogether simple.

Secondly, because every composite is posterior to its component parts, and is dependent on them; but God is the first being, as shown above (2, 3).

Thirdly, because every composite has a cause, for things in themselves different cannot unite unless something causes them to unite. But God is uncaused, as shown above (2, 3), since He is the first efficient cause.

Fourthly, because in every composite there must be potentiality and actuality; but this does not apply to God; for either one of the parts actuates another, or at least all the parts are potential to the whole.

Fifthly, because nothing composite can be predicated of any single one of its parts. And this is evident in a whole made up of dissimilar parts; for no part of a man is a man, nor any of the parts of the foot, a foot. But in wholes made up of similar parts, although something which is predicated of the whole may be predicated of a part (as a part of the air is air, and a part of water, water), nevertheless certain things are predicable of the whole which cannot be predicated of any of the parts; for instance, if the whole volume of water is two cubits, no part of it can be two cubits. Thus in every composite there is something which is not it itself. But, even if this could be said of whatever has a form, viz. that it has something which is not it itself, as in a white object there is something which does not belong to the essence of white; nevertheless in the form itself, there is nothing besides itself. And so, since God is absolute form, or rather absolute being, He can be in no way composite. Hilary implies this argument, when he says (De Trin. vii): "God, Who is strength, is not made up of things that are weak; nor is He Who is light, composed of things that are dim."

[Alamo-Girl]

I'm thrilled to see your sidebar with Right Wing Professor!

WRT the above: the symmetry of what, to what? How is there symmetry in the universe to begin with -- especially if we assume a chaotic initial state? How does one get from chaos to symmetry?

The word symmetry has Greek roots: syn (according to) + metron (measure). We are speaking of the beauty of form arising from balanced proportions. How can this sort of thing be an accidental production? What is the "measure," and where does it come from?

Indeed! One way to look at the issue is that all cosmologies - whether big bang, multiverse, multi-world, cyclic, ekpyrotic, imaginary time, hesitating, etc. - require geometry for physical causation. Time is geometric. It is a dimension. Were it not for space/time, events (including physical causation) would not be.

The measure of cosmic microwave background radiation in the 60's established that there was a real beginning of space/time in this universe. Prior big bang cosmologies deal with the geometry of expanding space/time which can have no past infinity thus the prior to prior big bang cosmologies must always regress to the void of "no thing".

In the void of the beginning there is no space, no time, no energy/matter, no physical laws, no physical constants, no mathematics, no logic, no universals, no forms, no autonomy, no qualia, no physical causation. There is no physical causation in the void - the first cause must be uncaused and the only candidate for uncaused cause is God.

Chaos theory applied to physical systems presumes pre-existence of physical causation and geometry. IOW, even origins of physical laws and constants cannot avoid the fact that without space/time, they could not be.

Symmetry (or order) cannot rise from the void (or chaos) without a guide to system. That the physical universe is intelligible at all is also evidence of a guide. Moreover, that the physical universe is unreasonably mathematical (Wigner, Vafa) is evidence of a guide.

That is the underlying theme of Genesis 1: chaos to cosmos.

Nachmanides says the text uses the words "Vayehi Erev" - but it doesn't mean "there was evening." He explains that the Hebrew letters Ayin, Resh, Bet - the root of "erev" - is chaos. Mixture, disorder. That's why evening is called "erev", because when the sun goes down, vision becomes blurry. The literal meaning is "there was disorder." The Torah's word for "morning" - "boker" - is the absolute opposite. When the sun rises, the world becomes "bikoret", orderly, able to be discerned. That's why the sun needn't be mentioned until Day Four. Because from erev to boker is a flow from disorder to order, from chaos to cosmos. That's something any scientist will testify never happens in an unguided system. Order never arises from disorder spontaneously. There must be a guide to the system. That's an unequivocal statement.

Age of the Universe

[Right Wing Professor]

WRT the above: the symmetry of what, to what? How is there symmetry in the universe to begin with -- especially if we assume a chaotic initial state? How does one get from chaos to symmetry?

You have it backwards. Everywhere in nature we start with symmetry, and move towards asymmetry. See my 326.

The word symmetry has Greek roots: syn (according to) + metron (measure). We are speaking of the beauty of form arising from balanced proportions. How can this sort of thing be an accidental production? What is the "measure," and where does it come from?

The measure of symmetry is group theory. The most symmetric possible 'thing' is the void; it looks the same irrespective of how we move it in any direction or rotate it. A point is less symmetric than the void; a sphere less symmetric than a point; and so on. There is nothing more symmetric than nothing, if you get my drift. So 'where does it come from' is the wrong question.

[Aquinasfan]

I think the cosmological argument (which is what Dawkins is thrashing here, with the kind of blind stupid hatred that a camel attacks the cloak of its driver, btw) should never be presented as a "proof," for the simple reason that an infinite being could not submit to a "proof" to a finite being in any meaningful way in the first place.

I disagree there. We can draw certain conclusions about God from his effects, just as my dog may draw certain conclusions about me (that I exist) without understanding my nature fully. Of course, the "distance" between us and God is almost infinitely greater than the "distance" between me and my dog.

[Right Wing Professor]

What is the argument from motion?

You should read what you post, in this case, number 309.

[PatrickHenry]

I can't resist these discussions.

Were it not for space/time, events (including physical causation) would not be.

It's tricky, A-Girl. One could just as easily reverse your statement -- were it not for the existence of things and the occurrence of events, there wouldn't be any space-time. (I don't know if I have a point to make; I'm just chiming in.)

[marron]

my conjecture is that something like an "algorithm in the beginning," as my dear friend Alamo-Girl puts it, "loaded in" that which conduces to design in the beginning.

I see two levels, for what its worth.

The first is precisely as you say, the algorithm in the beginning. Throw a rock in the water, and the ripples follow a predictable pattern; set off hand-grenades in the muck and the splatter follows predictable patterns, which owe their predictability to the algorithm in the beginning.

The universe is a giant debris field, but it is rendered beautiful and in its chaos takes on a kind of order due precisely to this algorithm that governs its "splatter".

The second level you see when these materials begin to actually communicate and cooperate with one another, and to form themselves into structures that communicate and cooperate. "Life", in other words. Even the most basic single cell life is a step-change beyond the basic algorithm that governs the splatter; the "life" algorithm allows the splatter to reverse itself in a sense.

At its most advanced stage, these structures become self-aware, and capable of analysis, and reflection, and fairly complete autonomy.

The key to harnessing the rules of splatter, and using them to direct the splatter into an orderly structure which is capable of communication both within itself and with other orderly structures (as do, for example, cells in a multi-cell structure) is "intelligence". Intelligence, and a means of communicating intelligence. Absent intelligence, matter falls into patterns that reflect that basic underlying algorithm. With intelligence and the ability to transfer it, you get organic life. You get you.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Darwin accepted the 39 dogmas before he observed the real world and doubted some of the after doing field work.

[Doctor Stochastic]

It's harder nowdays for the independent entrepreneurial preacher to survive in the highly profitable world of corporate mega-churches.

[js1138]

Zing!

[Aquinasfan]

You should read what you post, in this case, number 309.

I thought you would be able to explain the argument since you knew that the argument could be easily refuted.

In fact, your "refutation" has nothing to do with the argument, since "motion" in St. Thomas' argument refers to the "movement" from potency to actuality. It's an Aristotelian term, and has nothing to do with the movement of physical bodies.

Aristotle on Change

Puzzles about Change

We know this was a topic that puzzled Aristotle’s predecessors. Plato said that real things (Forms) don’t change, and restricted change to the realm of appearances—the physical world. Parmenides went farther still, denying the existence of change altogether.

Change is often described (both by Aristotle and his predecessors) as coming-to-be (genesis), and Aristotle gives an example of an argument against coming-to-be that sounds typically Parmenidean (191a28-29):

What is cannot come to be (since it already is), while nothing can come to be from what is not.

The argument is basically that there are only two ways that something can come to be: either from what is, or from what is not. But neither is possible. Therefore, nothing can come to be.

Aristotle wants to give an analysis of coming-to-be, i.e., change, that will enable him to avoid this dilemma. His account is designed to explain both how change in general is possible, and how coming into existence is possible. We will first look at Aristotle’s account, and then see how it manages to evade the Parmenidean dilemma.

Aristotle’s Account

Aristotle’s account is contained in Physics I.7. He insists that there must be three basic ingredients in every case of change. (Plato’s treatment only mentions two: a pair of opposites). In addition to a pair of opposites, there must be an underlying subject of change.

The basic case of change involves a pair of opposed or contrary properties and a subject that loses one of them and gains the other. But Aristotle does not even insist that there be an opposed pair of properties (191a6-7):

In another way, however, there need not be two [contraries]; for just one of the contraries is enough, by its absence or presence, to produce the thing.

So the ingredients Aristotle insists on are: an underlying subject, a form (i.e., a positive property) and a lack (or privation) of that form. Aristotle’s examples illustrate these ingredients:

A man who was unmusical becomes musical.
Some bronze (which was shapeless) becomes a statue.

In case (a), the subject is man, the form is musical and the privation is unmusical. In case (b), the subject is bronze, the form is statue and the privation is shapeless. The subject—the man, or the bronze—persists through the change. Of the other terms involved, the earlier ones (unmusicality, shapelessness) cease to exist, while the later ones (musicality, the statue) come into existence.

These were cases of coming into being (generation), since lacks or privations were replaced by forms. Ceasing to be (destruction) occurs when a form is replaced by a privation—when matter is deprived of form. This would happen, for example, when a statue is melted down into a shapeless pool of bronze. The bronze persists, but the statue has ceased to exist.

Response to Parmenides

Aristotle gives his response to Parmenides in chapter 8. He begins (191a28-29) by summarizing the Parmenidean argument against coming to be that we mentioned above:

What is cannot come to be (since it already is), while nothing can come to be from what is not.

The idea of this argument seems to be this: in a case of coming to be, the resulting object is clearly a being, something that is. From what initial object does it come to be? Parmenides offers us only two choices: either what is or what is not. But if the initial object is what is, and the resultant object is also what is, we don’t really have a case of coming to be-there is no change. And if the initial object is what is not, we have another kind of impossibility, for nothing can come to be from what is not (ex nihilo nihil fit).

Aristotle’s response is to reject the Parmenidean dilemma “that something comes to be from what is or from what is not” (191a30). He does so, characteristically, by drawing a distinction where his opponents did not. At 191b4 he says:

… we speak in two ways when we say that something is or comes to be something from what is …

Is the initial object a being or a not-being, Parmenides asks? Aristotle’s answer is: in a way it’s a being, and in a way it’s a not-being. And in a way, it’s not a being, and in a way it’s not a not-being.

In effect, the trouble with the Parmenidean argument is that it treats the initial and resultant objects as if they were simples: not being and being. But, as Aristotle has shown, both are compounds. The initial object, for example, might be an unmusical man. And this is both in one way a being and in another way a not being: the initial object is something that is (for it is a man) and something that is not (for it is not musical).

As for Parmenides’ claim that nothing can come to be from what is not, Aristotle agrees that, on one reading, this is perfectly correct (191b14):

We agree with them in saying that nothing comes to be without qualification from what is not …

That is, the musician does not come into existence out of thin air, out of sheer nothingness. (We should probably take “without qualification” here to modify “what is not” rather than “comes to be”—“comes to be from what is unqualifiedly not” or “comes to be from what is simply a not-being.”) But this leaves room, Aristotle says, for the musician to come to be from what in a way is not (191b15).

… but we say that things come to be in a way—for instance, coincidentally—from what is not. For something comes to be from the privation, which in itself is not and does not belong to the thing [when it has come to be].

(Similarly, we should take “in a way” to modify “what is not” rather than “comes to be.”) In other words, since the musician comes to be from the compound unmusical man, what he comes to be from is in one way a not-being, since he comes to be from a privation-the unmusical. But in a way, what he comes to be from is a being, as well, for the initial object is something that exists, a man. Parmenides, in other words, offers us a false dilemma: that the initial object is either being or not being. But since the initial object is a compound, in a way it is both.

[Alamo-Girl]

Hi there PatrickHenry! I'm so glad you cannot resist these threads!

One could just as easily reverse your statement -- were it not for the existence of things and the occurrence of events, there wouldn't be any space-time.

There are two aspects I'd like to raise.

On the one hand, space/time is created as the universe expands and therefore one can either see energy/matter creating space/time or space/time expansion creating energy/matter. I'm of the latter persuasion, but it doesn't matter to the "core" point which I was addressing in my post and which follows here:

At bottom – the beginning does indeed require an existence for first cause. But that existence must be comprised of “no thing” – it cannot be physical, i.e. it cannot be spatial or temporal or have energy/matter. There is no autonomy in the void, so the existence also must be transcendent, i.e. comprise the void. The Hebrew word for God as the Creator is Ayn Sof which literally means “no-thing” — One without end from which all being emerges and into which all being dissolves.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

However, after a few years on FR and witnessing the outright brazen and shameless dishonesty of so many creationists and their presumptous arrogance in absolutely refusing to accept that they might possibly be mistaken (even in the face of outright proof that they are wrong on any particular issue, going so far as to deny making statements that it can be proven that they made after their statements are shown to be in error) I've come to realise that many of them are completely and totally wicked.

They can't afford to concede any point because their incomes are derived from selling their twaddle to people who don't know any better.

Makes me wonder what will happen to the Discovery Institute's donations after Behe's comments in the Dover trial.

[Doctor Stochastic]

There is another possibility: the designer is malignant.

A malevolent designer would be more nearly in agreement with the evidence than a malignant one; a malignant one would probably be dead by now.