The If I Were God Fallacy & Evolution

The If I Were God Fallacy runs like this:

If I were God, here is how the world would work;
The world does not work like that;
Therefore, God does not exist.

Only rarely do people start the fallacy with the words “If I were God,” you understand, but those words are always there, spoken or unspoken, as you’ll see. And stated so clearly it would seem no one would make such an obvious blunder. Alas, many do; indeed the error is common in one particular area of science, “evolution”.

The scare quotes are necessary on “evolution” because of great confusion in the word. Many who use it, supporters and detractors, use it as if it were a thing, a force in itself, like how people view gravity. They will say “evolution caused this” or “the pressure of evolution” or even worse “during evolution” or the like. Doubtless some of these uses are figurative, but many are meant literally.

Whatever the truth about the Reality of biological change, there is no force of “evolution” causing it. If and when change happens, it is for reasons and causes other than “evolution”-as-power; for instance, reverse transcription leading to modifications of DNA. Regardless, we do have to work with writings in which this evolutionary power is claimed. So we will, today, accept that “evolution” might be a force in the manner of gravity or electromagnestism.

I do not here want to argue about the various theories of evolution (dropping the tedious scare quotes), as it does not matter to us in the If I Were God Fallacy whether any of these theories are true or false. (And we shall very soon discuss the replacement for Neo-Darwinism as advocated by such people as Denis Noble.)

Here is a popular argument, given implicitly in the peer-reviewed paper “No Homo: Why Theistic Evolution Fails” by someone enjoying the name of Tiddy Smith, in BioCosmos: New perspectives on the origin and evolution of life:

Evolution created and is responsible for the life forms we see;
Therefore, God does not exist.

As bad as this is, the Evolution Argument is entirely convincing to many. Why? Our culture (especially in English-speaking countries) is mainly derived from Protesting Christianity, which did its best to remove traditional influences, which in turn led to embracing forms of literalism in scripture. Eventually this process led to two main divisions in Protesting Christian thought: believers and atheists—a cultural ex-Protesting Christian is not the same as a cultural never-Christian. And even those in other religions raised in Protesting Christian cultures are greatly influenced by those cultures.

Now one camp fears and the other cheers the Evolution Argument. For both, everything hinges on that first premise. This explains the ardency of believers to disprove any kind of evolutionary theory. It also explains the equal mania in atheists to defend every theory of and claim made, no matter how preposterous, in the name of evolution.

There is no reason for fear or cheer, because the Evolution Argument is atrocious. If you can’t see its flaws, maybe you can in this equivalent one:

Gravity caused my coffee cup to fall to the floor and break;
Therefore, God does not exist.

Both this and the Evolution Argument have the implicit premise the world can work without God, thus God is not necessary—He certainly wasn’t necessary to explain a physical change in position of a cup, it is thought, or a physical change in a genome. And if He is not necessary, then He does not exist.

This might appear circular, but that flaw can be fixed and the Evolution Argument made into something more universal:

I cannot see how the world needs God to function, and I posit these forces and laws do all the work;
The world does work and I do see change;
The forces and laws I posit are functioning as I suggest;
Therefore God does not exist.

The similarity to the If I Were God is obvious, but this one is better classes as the Big Muscles Fallacy (If I can’t see any other explanation, then there is no other explanation). The problem with this is not that the posited forces or laws might be wrong, though that happens frequently, because the argument can be patched by adding that the posited forces and laws will someday be known. The problem is that this argument shows a complete historical illiteracy. This argument is purely Protesting Christian (atheist), and is not how other traditions—Orthodox, Catholic, Classical—view how the world works.

That tradition, which is mostly forgotten in Protesting Christian cultures, insists God is the First Cause, or Prime Mover. All other causes operating in the world are secondary causes. Which themselves could not operate were God not at the base, proving the original and continuing impetus, as it were. God is necessary to hold the world in existence. Not at some distant point in the past, but right now. Every now. There is no science, which is the study of change in the world, without God, because there is no change possible without God.

Secondary causes reflect the nature or essences of things operating with the powers they have, given by their essences or forms, which forms are non-material. Forms originate in the mind of God. God explains why things are The Way Things Are—something must exist to explain the world—and why there is something rather than Nothing. All things must have a reason for their existence, and as that logic is traced backward, it must be that God exists, a necessary omniscient omnipotent being.

Point is, in this tradition there is no difficulty with any secondary cause identified in the world. Saying symbiogensis caused certain biological change is no more an argument that God does not exist than that it is found hydrogen plus oxygen combined do not behave anything like hydrogen or oxygen alone therefore God does not exist. Indeed, it sounds silly to say so in the second case, and should in the first, but we are are too used to mis-arguing the first.

In both cases we have new substances arising from causes, matter expressing new forms, emerging from “lower” forms. Since effects cannot be greater than their causes, and the creation of new forms would seem to be just that, it must be that these new forms must already exist, waiting to be filled, as it were, and since forms are non-material they must exist in a non-material being, i.e. God.

I do not mean these three paragraphs as a complete philosophy. Read this or this article or this book etc. for more. My point is simple: the Evolution Argument, held by believer and atheist, is wrong not because evolution is wrong (though I believe Neo-Darwinism is faulty) but because it fails to distinguish primary from secondary causes, that it ignores why things are The Way Things Are, and so on.

Traditional Christians are obliged only to believe that at some point God gave rationality to one man (and, as is plain to see, rationality is unlike any other power in the world). How He gave it is up for dispute (see below). We note this, because Tiddy’s form of If I Were God Fallacy. Which goes like this:

If I were God, and loved rational creatures, I would make myriad rational species;
There is only one known rational species, and a handful of other possible ones, now extinct;
Incidentally, there are stars galore and some 300,000 species of beetles;
Therefore, God does not exist.

Tiddy makes his argument at much greater length, but this distillation is accurate. You may recognize its similarly to this chestnut:

If I were God, and loved man, I would make man large;
Elephants and galaxies are larger than man;
And just think of all that empty space in the universe which could be filled with man;
Therefore, God does not exist.

As goofy as this is, it too is convincing to some. Odd you never hear its opposite, which is that because man is larger than, say, electrons or bacteria, God therefore exists.

That the size of anything has anything do with whether God exists is a mistake that can only be made in the grip of the If I Were God Fallacy. Size can be stretched to quantity, which is Tiddy’s mistake. There are more, say, hydrogen atoms, even those free of entanglement with molecules, than there are men, yet why should that be proof God does not exist? That claim, too, can only be the result of the fallacy that if I were God, then I, Tiddy, would have built the world different. And anyway, what kind of dull world would it be if man were not only the largest but also the most plentiful among all other substances? The idea is risible.

Tiddy makes not just one, but two, count ’em, two If I Were God arguments. Here in essence is the second:

If I were God, and loved rational species, I would never allow a rational race or people to go extinct;
There have been Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensians (sp?), and other archaic hominins we call ghosts, all of which are now extinct;
(Some or all of these groups have interbed with man;)
Therefore, God does not exist.

This is his main argument put in shortest form. Here it is in his own words:

If God were especially concerned to maximise production Homo sapiens, then subspecies of Homo sapiens would not be made extinct

At least two subspecies of Homo sapiens (and probably three) have been made extinct within recent prehistory.

Therefore, God is not concerned with the production and preservation of Homo sapiens.

And, later in his paper, this:

As already stated, it seems that what underpins the anthropocentric assumption is the idea that God specially prizes intelligence, creativity, rationality, and all the other hallmarks of the Species Homo. It is these qualities that mark our species as standing in the image of God. Since numerous subspecies perished, and since these subspecies had the qualities of the imago Dei, there is no reason to expect their extinction.

No reason? Tiddy evidently never came across this passage, in which Jesus, who Christians claim is God, said:

Now therefore go, and smite Amalec, and utterly destroy all that he hath: spare him not, nor covet any thing that is his: but slay both man and woman, child and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

Nor hast he seeneth this one in which Jesus, who is God, bombed a certain long-running Pride parade.

The sun was risen upon the earth, and Lot entered into Segor. And the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrha brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven. And he destroyed these cities, and all the country about, all the inhabitants of the cities, and all things that spring from the earth. And his wife looking behind her, was turned into a statue of salt.

These examples can be multiplied, and by some billions. Not in scripture, but in life. Because each of us dies, and if I were God, and loved rational creatures, I wouldn’t let any of them die. But they do die. None of their deaths—not ours, the Sodomites’, or the Amalekites’—are in any way proof against God’s existence. Nor are they proof or refutation of “evolution” (again as a force). They are only proof that I am not God—nor you nor Tiddy.

Given Tiddy’s scriptural lacunae, it’s likely he is also unaware he has gone some way toward proving an account of man which is in accord with religious doctrine. This is the seeming difficulty that if the Adam was real, and had issue with Eve, with whom did Cain (their surviving child) breed? Adam and Eve had Cain and Abel, and Cain murdered Able, then this:

And Cain knew his wife, and she conceived, and brought forth Henoch: and he built a city, and called the name thereof by the name of his son Henoch. And Henoch begot Irad, and Irad begot Maviael, and Maviael begot Mathusael, and Mathusael begot Lamech.

And so on and so forth. Where did these other people come from? Speciation demands they could not have come from the rational being Adam. The answer is simple: they were already there. Perhaps Neanderthals or Denisovans. Or whatever. This is the position of the Church; see for instance Humani Generis from Pope Pius XII. The details are explained beautifully by our late friend Mike Flynn.

Before you sneer and dismiss and flee from such madness, answer this: how does speciation occur? No guesses, now. Proof. Well, there isn’t any. So this story is not as far-fetched as you might have hoped. From Flynn, first noting that “evolutionist” (Tiddy’s word) Coyne’s post-Resurrection Judaism is well aligned with the atheist branch of Protesting Christianity:

Dr. [Jerry] Coyne’s primary error seems to be a quantifier shift.  He and his fundamentalist bedfellows appear to hold that the statement:

A: “There is one man from whom all humans are descended”

is equivalent to the statement:

B: “All humans are descended from [only] one man.” 

But this logical fallacy hinges on an equivocation of “one,” failing to distinguish “one [out of many]” from “[only] one.”  Traditional doctrine requires only A, not B: That all humans share a common ancestor, not that they have no other ancestors…

Darwin tells us that at some point an ape that was not quite a man gave birth to a man that was no longer quite an ape.  Commenters of a decade ago missed that ‘not quite’ part and assumed TOF [Flynn’s nickname for himself] meant that an ape gave birth to a human, which is absurd. In a supposedly continuous series, it is more like an inflection point or a ‘tipping point.’…

How long after the red-clay men [Adam means red clay] were formed by evolution was a rational soul breathed in [Adam]?  The texts do not say.  It may have been tens or hundreds of thousands of years, at least according to one Eastern Orthodox theologian.  If there is a God and he did such things, he was not punching a time-clock.  

Hence, Adam as first man, and not simply first man-like hominid…

Modern genetics finds that genetic change may be specific, sudden, and massive due to various biochemical “machines” within the gene.  The ability to abstract universal concepts from particular sensory percepts is an either-or thing, no matter how much better developed it might grow over time.  You either can do it even a little bit or you can’t do it at all.  So, Adam may be considered the first man no matter how many physically man-like apes there were on his family tree.

And that includes those among his 9,999 companions [Jerry Coyne insists on 10,000 in a population to successfully breed].  It is not clear how Dr. Coyne envisions the same sapient ‘mutation’ arising simultaneously in 10,000 ape-men.  It is not impossible, TOF supposes; but it does seem unlikely.  So let us default to the sapiens/loquens ‘mutation’ appearing first in one man and then gradually spreading through a population.  Following tradition, let’s call him Adam.  This in no way contradicts the existence of 9,999 other ape-men with whom Adam is interfertile [not infertile!].  They may have been necessary to comprise a sufficient breeding population insofar as the body is concerned, but they need not have been sapient…

…For that matter, what Eve was up to doesn’t matter much, either!  The anathemas of the Council of Trent mention only Adam.  They require belief in original sin and related doctrines; they do not require belief in a factual Genesis myth beyond the simple existence of a common ancestor.  (Which is why the church consistently taught that mankind was all one species and all material beings with intellect and will, including hypothetical blemyae and sciopods, were “men.”) 

That means if Neanderthals and so forth were rational, then they were men (and descended from Adam), albeit of a now-extinct race (and there are many races). Or they need not have been rational, but could have bred with those who were.

There is much more to Flynn’s explanation—including original sin and the dangers of literalism—which I beg you will read for yourself. Point is, there is nothing in this Catholic/Orthodox doctrine which in any way conflicts with whatever theory of biological change one holds. Though, of course, there may be lots with any theory of change that conflicts with Reality.

Back to Tiddy, who does love him some If I Were God Fallacies.

Both of the above [rebuttals to Tiddy’s arguments] seem to take it that God used archaic humans as a means of injecting certain desirable genes into modern human populations. But why would a god, who could arrange or intervene in the evolutionary process, choose to inject genes by this method? Such a method is entirely inconsistent with the anthropocentric assumption, since it requires the extinction of some species of Homo.

If I Were God, I would inject genes in the following way, but, etc. He also carries the first bad argument with him everywhere, that if change in biology occurs, then it must be that God does not exist. Tiddy also later has a whack at God’s omnibenevolence, suggesting that because people die, God is not good. I have much more to say along those general lines later, but here we can say that as a proof of God’s non-existence, it is terrible. Indeed, the so-called problem of evil is yet another If I Were God.

If I Were God, and as God omnibenevolent, then there would be no evil in the world;
There is evil in the world;
Therefore, God does not exist.

In fact, without God, there is no evil. It is the second premise which fails.

Being God is a tough job, and, in spite of all boasts, none of us are up to it.

Because of the length of this post, no post for tomorrow (Wednesday).

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