A Reply to Sean McDowell's Review of The God Delusion

First off, I want to congratulate you on reading a big book o' atheism and then reviewing it (it's at Worldview Weekend).

Here's the problem. You say, in a jazzy font, apparently:

Dawkins says, �A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in its own right� (136).

This is not his tenet. The fundamental claim upon which the IDers' argument rests is that COMPLEXITY DOES NOT ARISE SPONTANEOUSLY FROM SIMPLICITY. Ergo, God must be at least as complex as his Creation. He can't be simple. But McDowell's rejoinder to this is:

The problem with this objection is that it simply ignores how science actually works. Scientists don�t accept explanations that themselves have been explained. It�s always possible to ask for further explanation. There comes a point when scientists recognize that they have made fruitful progress. Apologist Greg Koukl has observed �An explanation can be a good one even if you do not have an explanation for the explanation.

Except that the design hypothesis claims that there is an endpoint, one that has to be complex, and, simultaneously, can't be complex (because complexity does not arrive on its own). This is, as they say in Russia, wine-cooler drinking goofiness. It's incoherent. But then Sean gives another tired, tired, tired teleological example. This is Comfort's banana/Mona Lisa argument:

Consider an archaeologist who discovers an ancient object that appears to be either an arrowhead or a digging tool. Wouldn�t she be justified in concluding the object was designed, even if she couldn�t account for the designer? Of course she would! Even though she may have no idea as to who made the object or where it came from, certain patterns on the artifact would indicate design (as opposed to chance or some law of nature).

Not necessarily. 1) You say it "appears" to be designed, which is not the same thing as designed. Of course, this is a problem that appears throughout archeology, and the examples I can think of off hand have to do with the dating of supposedly pre-Clovis sites in the Americas. You don't get remains earlier than those of Clovis people in the Americas. But every so often, someone pops up and says, "Hey! Charcoal and sharp rocks! They carbon date before Clovis! Primitive settlements! Big discovery!" Well, not exactly. Sharp edges may look deliberately flaked off and "designed," but they can just be shattered rock, which happens sometimes. Charcoal does not have to come from campfires. Your imagined archeologist is jumping the gun. You just happened to pick the worst example possible (other than Ray Comfort, whose lack of understanding is boundless), because it is clear from the lit that such mistakes are often made.

Again, what you are doing is assuming that something is designed, as opposed to showing it is designed, which is begging the question. Your conclusion is built into your premise.

So, what I'm saying is, "Of course she would not!"

McDowell posits that if we need to find a designer of every designer, it will lead to an infinite digression. (Yes, and this is your hypothesis's great fault.) And that the lack of a starting point immobilizes the progress of science. Of course, this has science turned almost completely backwards. Science has plenty of starting points, confirmed observations, first principles expressed in physical laws that really seem to be true in all places in the universe at all times. It is not a starting point that is lacking so far, Sean, it is the endpoint that is elusive. What I'm saying is that so far, the explanatory power of science has remained unexhausted.

HJ