Have you ever got into one of those conversations where people start getting confused over the question of intelligent design? No? Is it just me who gets irritated by those people who insist that it’s impossible to explain how things have come to be exactly the way they are, so perfectly suited to our needs and so on? I’m sure you must have read somewhere about this issue at least, maybe even heard that there have been some scientists that have become so perplexed by this question that they ended up turning to God. Here I’d like to offer the reader a way out of this debate (and potential life-changing, hair-tearing turn to a faith in the God guarantee) before it even starts.
Let’s consider the options if you don’t. The person assuming the position of arguing for intelligent design will ask a question like, ‘what are the chances that things have turned out to be exactly the way they are, so perfectly suited to our needs?’ Some people even go as far as seeking evidence of God’s design in fruit – asking how it came to be that bananas fit so perfectly in a human hand. The answer to this one is short – pineapples don’t. But the wider question is more difficult, and only a naive evolutionist dogmatist would deny that this is the case. There is absolutely no guarantee within evolutionary theory that things had to come to be exactly the way that they are. Environmental and sexual selection over time are said to produce the results we see, but it is randomness that is at the base of this creative process; mutation itself is not guided by any principle, only the enormity of time is seen to permit randomness to happen upon a selectable benefit.
In fact, it is this very concept of blind randomness that begs the ‘what are the chances?’ question (one potentially fertile route is to question randomness of mutation by denying the complete blindness of the process without conceding the plan of a mind, but this is for another day). Evolution itself contains no proof of necessity, but some scientists have sought it elsewhere, attempting to account for the stability of things being the way they are amidst all the possible other ways they might have been. The insane-sounding conclusion of those that take the ‘what are the chances?’ question seriously is that all the other possibilities are played out in other universes, and ours is just one among an infinite number of permutations. The probability of things being this way despite all the other ways they could have turned out is so inconceivably astronomical that the scientist who wishes to hold onto the necessity of things must speculate multiple universes. So we are left with two completely unsatisfactory positions – either God guarantees the necessity of things or all other possibilities are in fact realised in an infinite number of universes so that the necessity of this one could be mathematically accounted for. What went wrong?
The problem was that we didn’t identify the original question as false, cutting it off at its source. Both answers seem to start backwards, assuming necessity and then proceeding. There is a curious parallel here between an assumption of science and the thought of God. Of course many are aware that the notion of God provides a kind of comfort, an underlying guarantee of a fixed value and direction. Science also seeks this guarantee, for it is not initially conceivable as a pursuit without the notion that nature contains a set structure, that there is an Order of Things; why bother trying to identify laws if they are not part of a necessary Order? (We will write more later on the notion that science may in a way take over the baton of the comforting guarantee of Order that God once provided) However, it is precisely the focus upon the necessity of this Order that leads us to this bizarre conclusion of a multiplicity of universes, and so the real riposte to intelligent design theory is not to try to prove necessity by other means, but simply to assert that it could have been otherwise.
This is precisely what Quentin Meillassoux does in his book After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, where he argues that it is utterly contingent that things are the way they are. Once we drop the condition of necessity, we will find that the world is a little easier to swallow – one does not have to account for the probability of all this happening amongst all other possibilities, all this is no more necessary than any other course; we have to accept the dumb fact that it just is. Meillassoux helps us avoid the impossible complication of accounting for astronomical probabilities by discrediting the ‘what are the chances?’ question before it is even asked. Let’s take a look how.
The usual suggestion is that what is must be necessary, because if it were contingent then the probability of it remaining the way it is would be inexplicable. Throw a die one hundred times, and if it gives six every time then one must begin to think it weighted in such a way to produce that result – other possibilities were already precluded; so it is with nature, again and again we see the same. And so we end up in the strange position of trying to account for the way things are by imagining some super-force throwing the universe-die an infinite number of times to produce the necessity of our world (multiple universe thesis). Meillassoux’s point against this view is that ‘the use of probabilistic reasoning in such a context is meaningless.’ To say that this world is improbable is to rely on the notion that one can totalise the set of probabilities from the beginning – such a thing one can do with dice, but this is not justified in regard to the universe. A die has six faces and so the probability of throwing a six is 1/6, because the total set of possible outcomes is six. If I throw the die twice then the possible set of outcomes is multiplied by six, and so the chances of throwing two sixes in a row is 1/36, and so on. At each stage one can legitimately totalise the set of probabilities, and it is the set itself that accounts for the proper use of the concept of probability. Meillassoux is saying that probability means nothing when applied to the universe because there is no possible calculable set. Rolling six sixes in a row is highly improbable, that makes sense, we can conceive of the other eventualities. Considering the fact that the universe is ‘exactly this way’ as being highly improbable does not. It just is this way and could have been other (a later post on Bergson’s view of the retroactivity of necessity will help clear this up too).
We can add to Meillassoux’s point – surely those that say that the conditions in the universe for our existence are so finely tuned that they could only have been designed are looking at things backwards, as if the conclusion has already been made that all was made to fit us. Surely the whole point of evolutionary theory is that we have adapted to the way things are, and not vice versa? This will be no argument for the creationists, but it ought to be one for those that call themselves scientists and are then confounded by the improbability of it all. Furthermore, there is a further confusion that we pointed towards earlier – evolutionary theory and the concept of necessity simply do not fit together. There is no necessity to the evolutionary process, it is only mutation – it is at this point that naive evolutionism talks about adaptation, saying that it is adaptation to an environment that ensures that mutations are selected as necessity requires. But here they’ve only brought necessity through the back door, saying that it is something we adapt to. What necessity? Adapting to what? God’s plan?
One of the key things to remember in remaining a material indeterminist is that necessity itself has no proof, it is an assumption. We see future potential always by looking to the contingency of the past, the way things could have been other. Many are familiar with the notion that science brings a kind of humility and de-centring that religion does not. The idea is that science is continually taking man away from the centre of the universe, that it is enacting a series of painful, ego-damaging, Copernican revolutions. But doesn’t the assumption of necessity somehow act as just another comfort blanket? There is more humility in saying, as Roy Bhaskar does in his Realist Theory of Science, that the world was not made for us and it is utterly contingent that we are here. Seeing this contingency allows us to avoid the impossible choice between intelligent design and multiple universes.
Referenced Texts
Bhaskar, R. (1998), A Realist Theory of Science, (London: Verso)
Meillassoux, Q. (2008), After Finitude: An Essay On the Necessity of Contingency, (London: Continuum)
Material Indeterminism 