Difference between revisions of "Monotheism"

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Monotheism is the belief in only one god. Monotheistic religions include Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Bahai. Monotheism has been gradually replacing polytheism over the last two millennia.

Difference between revisions of "Monotheism"

Revision as of 17:13, May 17, 2008

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-'''Monotheism'''
+'''Monotheism''' is the belief in only one [[god]]. Monotheistic religions include [[Christianity]], [[Judaism]], [[Islam]] and [[Bahai]].  Monotheism has been gradually replacing [[polytheism]] over the last two millennia.
-It is impossible to exaggerate the magnitude of the problem that
-Darwin and Wallace solved. I could mention the anatomy, cellular
-structure, biochemistry and behaviour of literally any living
-organism by example. But the most striking feats of apparent
-design are those picked out - for obvious reasons - by creationist
-authors, and it is with gentle irony that I derive mine from a
-creationist book. Life - How Did It Get Here?, with no named
-author but published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society in
-sixteen languages and eleven million copies, is obviously a firm
-favourite because no fewer than six of those eleven million copies
-have been sent to me as unsolicited gifts by well-wishers from
-around the world.
-Picking a page at random from this anonymous and lavishly distributed
-work, we find the sponge known as Venus' Flower Basket
-(Euplectella), accompanied by a quotation from Sir David
-Attenborough, no less: 'When you look at a complex sponge
-skeleton such as that made of silica spicules which is known as
-Venus' Flower Basket, the imagination is baffled. How could quasiindependent
-microscopic cells collaborate to secrete a million glassy
-splinters and construct such an intricate and beautiful lattice? We
-do not know.' The Watchtower authors lose no time in adding their
-own punchline: 'But one thing we do know: Chance is not the likely
-designer.' No indeed, chance is not the likely designer. That is one
-thing on which we can all agree. The statistical improbability of
-phenomena such as Euplectella's skeleton is the central problem
-that any theory of life must solve. The greater the statistical
-improbability, the less plausible is chance as a solution: that is
-what improbable means. But the candidate solutions to the riddle
-of improbability are not, as is falsely implied, design and chance.
-They are design and natural selection. Chance is not a solution,
-given the high levels of improbability we see in living organisms,
-T H K G O D I) E I, V S I O N
-and no sane biologist ever suggested that it was. Design is not a real
-solution either, as we shall see later; but for the moment I want to
-continue demonstrating the problem that any theory of life must
-solve: the problem of how to escape from chance.
-Turning Watchtower's page, we find the wonderful plant known
-as Dutchman's Pipe (Aristolochia trilobata), all of whose parts seem
-elegantly designed to trap insects, cover them with pollen and send
-them on their way to another Dutchman's Pipe. The intricate
-elegance of the flower moves Watchtower to ask: 'Did all of this
-happen by chance? Or did it happen by intelligent design?' Once
-again, no of course it didn't happen by chance. Once again, intelligent
-design is not the proper alternative to chance. Natural
-selection is not only a parsimonious, plausible and elegant solution;
-it is the only workable alternative to chance that has ever been
-suggested. Intelligent design suffers from exactly the same objection
-as chance. It is simply not a plausible solution to the riddle of
-statistical improbability. And the higher the improbability, the more
-implausible intelligent design becomes. Seen clearly, intelligent
-design will turn out to be a redoubling of the problem. Once again,
-this is because the designer himself (/herself/itself) immediately
-raises the bigger problem of his own origin. Any entity capable of
-intelligently designing something as improbable as a Dutchman's
-Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a
-Dutchman's Pipe. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God
-aggravates it with a vengeance.
-Turn another Watchtower page for an eloquent account of the
-giant redwood (Sequoiadendron giganteum), a tree for which I
-have a special affection because I have one in my garden - a mere
-baby, scarcely more than a century old, but still the tallest tree in
-the neighbourhood. 'A puny man, standing at a sequoia's base, can
-only gaze upward in silent awe at its massive grandeur. Does it
-make sense to believe that the shaping of this majestic giant and
-of the tiny seed that packages it was not by design?' Yet again, if
-you think the only alternative to design is chance then, no, it does
-not make sense. But again the authors omit all mention of the real
-alternative, natural selection, either because they genuinely don't
-understand it or because they don't want to.
-The process by which plants, whether tiny pimpernels or
-W H Y T l i l - I U ; A L M O S T C F R T A I X L Y I S N O G O D 121
-massive wellingtonias, acquire the energy to build themselves is
-photosynthesis. Watchtower again: ' "There are about seventy
-separate chemical reactions involved in photosynthesis," one
-biologist said. "It is truly a miraculous event." Green plants have
-been called nature's "factories" - beautiful, quiet, nonpolluting,
-producing oxygen, recycling water and feeding the world. Did they
-just happen by chance? Is that truly believable?' No, it is not believable;
-but the repetition of example after example gets us nowhere.
-Creationist 'logic' is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is
-too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too aweinspiring
-to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only
-alternative to chance that the authors can imagine. Therefore a
-designer must have done it. And science's answer to this faulty logic
-is also always the same. Design is not the only alternative to chance.
-Natural selection is a better alternative. Indeed, design is not a real
-alternative at all because it raises an even bigger problem than it
-solves: who designed the designer? Chance and design both fail as
-solutions to the problem of statistical improbability, because one of
-them is the problem, and the other one regresses to it. Natural
-selection is a real solution. It is the only workable solution that has
-ever been suggested. And it is not only a workable solution, it is a
-solution of stunning elegance and power.
-What is it that makes natural selection succeed as a solution to
-the problem of improbability, where chance and design both fail at
-the starting gate? The answer is that natural selection is a cumulative
-process, which breaks the problem of improbability up into
-small pieces. Each of the small pieces is slightly improbable, but not
-prohibitively so. When large numbers of these slightly improbable
-events are stacked up in series, the end product of the accumulation
-is very very improbable indeed, improbable enough to be far
-beyond the reach of chance. It is these end products that form the
-subjects of the creationist's wearisomely recycled argument. The
-creationist completely misses the point, because he (women should
-for once not mind being excluded by the pronoun) insists on treating
-the genesis of statistical improbability as a single, one-off event.
-He doesn't understand the power of accumulation.
-In Climbing Mount Improbable, I expressed the point in a
-parable. One side of the mountain is a sheer cliff, impossible to
-2 2 • •! • ; . . ; • ) > ! » r i s ; s i o
-climb, but on the other side is a gentle slope to the summit. On the
-summit sits a complex device such as an eye or a bacterial flagellar
-motor. The absurd notion that such complexity could
-spontaneously self-assemble is symbolized by leaping from the foot
-of the cliff to the top in one bound. Evolution, by contrast, goes
-around the back of the mountain and creeps up the gentle slope to
-the summit: easy! The principle of climbing the gentle slope as
-opposed to leaping up the precipice is so simple, one is tempted to
-marvel that it took so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene and
-discover it. By the time he did, nearly three centuries had elapsed
-since Newton's annus mirabilis, although his achievement seems,
-on the face of it, harder than Darwin's.
-Another favourite metaphor for extreme improbability is the
-combination lock on a bank vault. Theoretically, a bank robber
-could get lucky and hit upon the right combination of numbers by
-chance. In practice, the bank's combination lock is designed with
-enough improbability to make this tantamount to impossible -
-almost as unlikely as Fred Hoyle's Boeing 747. But imagine a badly
-designed combination lock that gave out little hints progressivelythe
-equivalent of the 'getting warmer' of children playing Hunt the
-Slipper. Suppose that when each one of the dials approaches its
-correct setting, the vault door opens another chink, and a dribble
-of money trickles out. The burglar would home in on the jackpot
-in no time.
-Creationists who attempt to deploy the argument from improbability
-in their favour always assume that biological
-adaptation is a question of the jackpot or nothing. Another name
-for the 'jackpot or nothing' fallacy is 'irreducible complexity' (IC).
-Either the eye sees or it doesn't. Either the wing flies or it doesn't.
-There are assumed to be no useful intermediates. But this is simply
-wrong. Such intermediates abound in practice - which is exactly
-what we should expect in theory. The combination lock of life is a
-'getting warmer, getting cooler, getting warmer' Hunt the Slipper
-device. Real life seeks the gentle slopes at the back of Mount
-Improbable, while creationists are blind to all but the daunting
-precipice at the front.
-Darwin devoted an entire chapter of the Origin of Species to
-'Difficulties on the theory of descent with modification', and it is
-W H Y r i-i r R r A I M O S T C t R T A I N I Y IS NO <> o D 123
-fair to say that this brief chapter anticipated and disposed of every
-single one of the alleged difficulties that have since been proposed,
-right up to the present day. The most formidable difficulties are
-Darwin's 'organs of extreme perfection and complication', sometimes
-erroneously described as 'irreducibly complex'. Darwin
-singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: 'To
-suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting
-the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts
-of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic
-aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I
-freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.' Creationists gleefully
-quote this sentence again and again. Needless to say, they never
-quote what follows. Darwin's fulsomely free confession turned out
-to be a rhetorical device. He was drawing his opponents towards
-him so that his punch, when it came, struck the harder. The punch,
-of course, was Darwin's effortless explanation of exactly how the
-eye evolved by gradual degrees. Darwin may not have used the
-phrase 'irreducible complexity', or 'the smooth gradient up Mount
-Improbable', but he clearly understood the principle of both.
-'What is the use of half an eye?' and 'What is the use of half a
-wing?' are both instances of the argument from 'irreducible complexity'.
-A functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the
-removal of one of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning.
-This has been assumed to be self-evident for both eyes and wings.
-But as soon as we give these assumptions a moment's thought, we
-immediately see the fallacy. A cataract patient with the lens of her
-eye surgically removed can't see clear images without glasses, but
-can see enough not to bump into a tree or fall over a cliff. Half a
-wing is indeed not as good as a whole wing, but it is certainly better
-than no wing at all. Half a wing could save your life by easing your
-fall from a tree of a certain height. And 51 per cent of a wing could
-save you if you fall from a slightly taller tree. Whatever fraction of
-a wing you have, there is a fall from which it will save your life
-where a slightly smaller winglet would not. The thought experiment
-of trees of different height, from which one might fall, is just
-one way to see, in theory, that there must be a smooth gradient
-of advantage all the way from 1 per cent of a wing to 100 per
-cent. The forests are replete with gliding or parachuting animals
-T H E G O D 1> E I U S I O N
-illustrating, in practice, every step of the way up that particular
-slope of Mount Improbable.
-By analogy with the trees of different height, it is easy to imagine
-situations in which half an eye would save the life of an animal
-where 49 per cent of an eye would not. Smooth gradients are provided
-by variations in lighting conditions, variations in the distance
-at which you catch sight of your prey - or your predators. And, as
-with wings and flight surfaces, plausible intermediates are not only
-easy to imagine: they are abundant all around the animal kingdom.
-A flatworm has an eye that, by any sensible measure, is less than
-half a human eye. Nautilus (and perhaps its extinct ammonite
-cousins who dominated Paleozoic and Mesozoic seas) has an eye
-that is intermediate in quality between flatworm and human.
-Unlike the flatworm eye, which can detect light and shade but see
-no image, the Nautilus 'pinhole camera' eye makes a real image;
-but it is a blurred and dim image compared to ours. It would be
-spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody
-could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes, and many others, are
-all better than no eye at all, and all lie on a continuous and shallow
-slope up Mount Improbable, with our eyes near a peak - not the
-highest peak but a high one. In Climbing Mount Improbable, I
-devoted a whole chapter each to the eye and the wing, demonstrating
-how easy it was for them to evolve by slow (or even, maybe, not
-all that slow) gradual degrees, and I will leave the subject here.
-So, we have seen that eyes and wings are certainly not irreducibly
-complex; but what is more interesting than these particular
-examples is the general lesson we should draw. The fact that so
-many people have been dead wrong over these obvious cases should
-serve to warn us of other examples that are less obvious, such as the
-cellular and biochemical cases now being touted by those
-creationists who shelter under the politically expedient euphemism
-of 'intelligent design theorists'.
-We have a cautionary tale here, and it is telling us this: do not
-just declare things to be irreducibly complex; the chances are that
-you haven't looked carefully enough at the details, or thought carefully
-enough about them. On the other hand, we on the science side
-must not be too dogmatically confident. Maybe there is something
-out there in nature that really does preclude, by its genuinely
-W H Y ' 1 1 I K R K A L M O S T (.: F R T A 1 N [. Y 15 NO (, O I) 125
-irreducible complexity, the smooth gradient of Mount Improbable.
-The creationists are right that, if genuinely irreducible complexity
-could be properly demonstrated, it would wreck Darwin's theory.
-Darwin himself said as much: 'If it could be demonstrated that any
-complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed
-by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would
-absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.' Darwin could
-find no such case, and nor has anybody since Darwin's time, despite
-strenuous, indeed desperate, efforts. Many candidates for this holy
-grail of creationism have been proposed. None has stood up to
-analysis.
-In any case, even though genuinely irreducible complexity would
-wreck Darwin's theory if it were ever found, who is to say that it
-wouldn't wreck the intelligent design theory as well? Indeed, it
-already has wrecked the intelligent design theory, for, as I keep saying
-and will say again, however little we know about God, the one
-thing we can be sure of is that he would have to be very very
-complex and presumably irreducibly so!
 ==See also==
 * [[Atheism]] - the lack of belief in gods.