PERCHANCE TO PURR?
17th October 2004
For thousands of years people have pondered the 'problem of existence' - why is there anything at all, why is there not an infinity of nothing whatever?
The usual answer has been that "There is, or may be was, a Creator who made it all out of nothing." This answer has satisfied people but it is unsatisfactory in my opinion. The creator idea raises immediately the question "Who or what created the Creator?" If you answer that a creator-creator did it then you are locked into an infinite regress; you have to postulate a creator-creator-creator ad infinitum. That is futile.
Moreover, the creator theory does not address the problem of Cosmic Purpose - what is in it for Him? is a question we may well ask about the supposed Creator.
Of course there might be The Eternal Supernatural Creator who had no need of origin and who has inscrutable purpose. You might as well suppose that the universe is, in some sense, eternal and has needed no creator - it is naturally there in some (admittedly changing) form and that it has no purpose other than that we may choose to attribute to it.
There really is no third way. You may either be happier with the idea of a supernatural creator or you may be happier with the notion that the universe is self-sufficient natural entity. Happy you may be but the Ôproblem of existenceÕ remains an enigma either way. As JBS Haldane wrote, "Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose ..... I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy".
Archdeacon William Paley was convinced, and has convinced many people since his time, that the creator idea is the winner. Paley does this by analogy - which can be a very facile weapon.
Suppose, he says, that you found a watch by the wayside. You would soon see that it must have been designed for, surely, its perfectly harmonised parts could not have aggregated themselves in such an orderly way merely by chance. Design implies a Designer and it is God the Creator who has designed and made the universe - as the ordered entity it is.
But two can play the analogy game. Perhaps the watch had been thrown away because it did not work and its designer had got fed up with it. This is, sure enough, a design theory of sorts but one which offers none of the comfort people expect to derive from religion. The idea that we are creatures of a second-rate designer is worse than no idea at all how the 'problem of existence' might be clarified satisfactorily. At least the purely naturalist theory of existence leaves open a door of hope for those willing to embrace it. A defective creator is nobody's comforting idea.
In passing, it must be emphasised that design and chance are perfectly compatible. Indeed in the case of, say, the roulette wheel, there is an overriding design problem - the problem of how to make it come up with numbers by chance. If this problem is not solved then the casino operator will be in trouble with the law. By analogy (and Paley loves analogy) The Great Gambler in the Sky might have designed the universe to deliver results by chance.
When we come to look at our own bodies - never mind anything less familiar to us - we find many design faults (if design there be) in normally healthy people and many system failures of supposed design leading to significant impairments in individual lives.
Here are some general design faults - bad posture, no earlids, no noselids, general non-ambidextrousness.
Our bipedal posture generates back problems. It is a poor excuse that this posture frees our hands for minutely precise activities such as executing works of craft and art. If we had six limbs (and why not - quoting Haldane again, "The Creator, if He exists, has a special preference for beetles". And a biologist friend of mine says that he has not seen God but, had he seen Him, he would not be surprised if He had six legs because among the most numerous of animals are the six-legged ones).
We are, they tell us, "created in His image". Four of our limbs could be legs for locomotion while two could be fully functional hands. Six-limbed, we could easily have been both manually dextrous and quadrupeds too.
Again, it is an obvious convenience for us to be able to close our eyes, partly or wholly, at will. Would it not be better 'design' if we could close our ears similarly or to deactivate our sense of smell? We can deal with light that is too bright much more neatly than we can guard against sounds that are too loud and smells that are too overpowering.
Here are some common individual impairments (I mention my own solely because I know them well at first hand).
When I hear learned persons speaking of the perfection of the designed human eye (Paley was very emphatic about this) I emit a wry laugh. I have had seriously defective sight since birth. Fortunately spectacles and magnifiers of various sorts have enabled me to do much more than would have possible for a similar person living before the invention and manufacture of precision lenses.
The wonders of design of the human heart - really? Mine ceased to beat properly when I was in my late forties and I have survived to almost eighty, with the prospect of living quite a few more years yet, simply because of a human invention - the cardiac pacemaker.
Theologians, if pressed, might say that God gave us the ability to make lenses and pacemakers but it is from theologians that we get the most telling evidence of the bad design - if design it be - of the human race. Theologians tell us that we have freewill but are essentially sinful and therefore unable, freely, to use that will rightly. Paley and others argue by analogy - so can you and I. The freewill/sin model is analogous to a car with a powerful engine, dodgy steering and feeble brakes - a badly designed car that would not be allowed on our roads.
The design theory seems to entail the prior existence of a designer not really up to the job. At least we can hope that unaided nature, including human nature, can do a bit better than that.
But just supposing that we are the work of a designer/creator ........ could He not have endowed us, perhaps by 'chance' mutation, with a ready means of expressing pleasure in the company of others whom we care about? I enjoy, and depend upon, much support from family and friends; I do not wish, endlessly, to tell them this. That would be a terrible bore for them. But I would, if I could, resemble a contented cat and purr in their company.
Perhaps we humans can ponder a soliloquy - "perchance to purr".
E.S..
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