PERFECTION, FUNCTION, DESIGN AND CHANCE


January 15th 1999


The next issue, Number 32, will appear on February 15th 1999.





It is often claimed by conventional religious apologists that the functioning of the universe - including ourselves - could not be by chance and is therefore the result of Design .

It is claimed that the universe functions perfectly (except when we, by the abuse of our free will, introduce imperfection) and this very perfection entails Design; 'how could it all have happened by chance?' is the perceived trump card played by religious believers the world over.

The purpose of this essay is to question this complex of assumptions and to suggest that the edifice constructed on them is a 'house of cards'.



Perhaps the most flawed of all the assumptions under scrutiny is that that there is such a thing as perfection. When we say that anything, xyz say, is perfect we delude ourselves into thinking that we are simply recognising an attribute of xyz - that xyz is simply like that. I suggest that what we are actually doing is acknowledging that we cannot imagine how xyz could possibly be better; we are speaking not only of xyz but also of the limitations of our imagination.

It follows that any argument of the kind ..... 'the wing of a butterfly is perfectly adapted to its function ....... therefore the wing was designed by an omniscient Designer' ....... is simply a statement that we do not know how that wing might have been better. The opening premise is simply an assumption that we choose to make; it is not proved to be true merely because we choose to say it is.

What we can say, with assurance, of the wing (considering its success, biologically speaking) is that it is evidently good enough to meet the needs of the butterfly; the species is evidently not failing for want of adequate wings.

Design theorists (most notably, Paley) lay great stress upon the perceived perfection of the human eye, the perceived 100% correspondence of its structure to its function. The fact that we can be sure of (the observed functioning of the eye) is that, in many cases, it does function very well. As one of the millions of people with more or less severely impaired vision (since birth) I am not impressed with any statement grander than 'most people have eyes that are good enough'. If we feel we must postulate perfect design then we have to postulate imperfections somewhere in the production line! The alleged Creator's planning is, we might suppose, better than His performance. What this does to the reassurance aspect of religion is best discussed elsewhere. The principle here is that function (what actually happens) is observed while design (what might conceivably have been intended) is merely attributed - presumably by way of habit or cultural conditioning on our part.

Here is a favourite, rather homely, example of mine of how design can be inferred falsely (but coherently) from function.

It happens that some seventeen years ago I became, in my fifty-eighth year, a widower living alone in a climate that can sometimes be very cold. In the circumstances there had to be a significant risk of my eventually dying from hypothermia. But, some fifteen years ago I remarried - a healthy woman some twenty five years younger than I. At a stroke, the hypothermia risk was practically eliminated. That tale is simply a matter of function - a matter of the observable, describable, relevant phenomena.

But, would any reasonable person infer design from that true story of function? Would any reasonable person infer either that I married this lady, selfishly, to save myself from hypothermia or that she married me, altruistically, to achieve the same benefit for me? The fact that the design theory (the selfishness/and/or/altruism theory) is consistent with the selected facts does not in any way prove that theory to be true.' Another aspect of the "design is merely attributed' principle is a far more serious one - the fact that this earth is a very suitable place for human habitation. We are asked to believe that the earth was designed for us by the Creator but, considering that in the Creation Story, as well as in modern cosmology, the earth predates us by days, or by millions of years, respectively ...... considering that sequence of events ..... it seems more reasonable to suppose that we were designed to be capable of living on the, by then, given earth. 'We were made for the earth' is rather less flattering to us than that 'the earth was made for us'. It is obvious which we might prefer to believe but it is also obvious which is the one we may need to believe if the earth is not to be despoiled by our opportunist exploitation of it.

Another flaw in the conventional view is that chance and design are simple opposites ... a simple case of either/or polarisation. It is then argued that Darwinian natural selection is incompatible with the idea of a purposeful creator. It is easy to demonstrate that this view is nonsensical; the alleged incompatibility is simply not there.

We need go no further than any casino to show that purpose and design, on the one hand, and chance, on the other, are entirely compatible. Anyone can adopt, as his purpose, the setting up of a casino and anyone can see that , say, the roulette wheels have to be designed to operate in a fair manner. To set up any casino facility is to design a situation in which chance determines outcomes ; indeed, if the outcomes were determined otherwise, the punters would have just cause for complaint.

It is entirely coherent (although not merely on that account) to suppose that a creator might have set up a 'cosmic casino' in which natural selection could be, intentionally, allowed to operate. Einstein's famous remark - that ''God does not play dice" has no necessary foundation; it seems that He, in His Infinite Wisdom, does very little else but "play dice. That again has implications for the reassurance aspect of religious belief but, that again is not the main thrust of this essay.

My claims are, in short, that Perfection is a human illusion, that Cosmic Design is not a demonstrable fact; it is a human ideological/cultural construction and that, in any case, Design and Chance are entirely compatible one with the other.





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