Editor’s note: To mark the 20th anniversary of the publication of Richard Dawkins’s bestseller The God Delusion, Stephen Meyer took to the pages of The Telegraph. His essay prompted 2,000+ reader responses. A recurrent challenge was the “Who designed the designer?” objection. Writing in the comments section, Dr. Meyer offered three separate replies. Find the original article here.
First Reply
Many readers posed the “Who designed the designer?” objection to my design argument based on the digital code in DNA. As Dawkins says elsewhere, “a designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity [in life] because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation” which raises the “problem of who designed the designer.” As my op-ed noted, this argument misappropriates Ockham’s razor by claiming it prohibits invoking complex entities (such as minds), when instead it cautions against invoking complex hypotheses with a multiplicity of explanatory entities (as the multiverse does). If it did prohibit positing minds as explanations for, say, the origin of information, it would forbid recognizing Richard Dawkins’s mind as the explanation for the prose in The God Delusion.
But what about the problem of regress that concerns Dawkins? In fact, his claim that explanations only count as explanations if they foreclose the possibility of asking further causal questions is also problematic. To explain a particular event, historians and scientists often cite or infer past events as causes. But does the possibility of inquiring further about the cause of such events — the ones that explain other events — negate their original explanatory power? Surely not. One needn’t explain who designed the builders of Stonehenge, or how they evolved or came to settle there, to infer that the complex structures at Stonehenge were the work of intelligent agents. One need not explain why the fog descended at Dunkirk in order to cite the fog as part of the explanation for why so many British soldiers were rescued. One does not need to know the cause of a cause for the latter cause to function as an explanation of something else. More coming.
Second Reply
There’s another difficulty with the “Who designed the designer?” objection. It presupposes that causal explanations of specific events only count as explanations if they are part of a comprehensive causal narrative that explains how each cause cited in the explanation came to be — and only then if the narrative does not involve an infinite regress of past causes.
Yet Dawkins cannot apply that principle to the evolutionary explanations he favors. Evolutionary accounts of new forms of life from earlier forms invariably raise questions about how the first living cell evolved. They also, according to Dawkins, raise questions about how the first self-replicating molecule arose. Yet Dawkins acknowledges that neither he, nor anyone else, has an adequate chemical evolutionary explanation for the origin of the first life. Nor have origin-of-life researchers explained how a biologically relevant self-replicating molecule arose (at least, not without intelligent design) or how crucial information processing systems in the cell (such as the translation system) emerged from such a molecule.
By Dawkins’s logic, that should negate the entire edifice of Darwinian explanation because we can demand a causal explanation for the origin of the process of natural selection itself. Indeed, we can ask: What caused the evolutionary process to evolve? What evolved the evolver? The absence of a complete evolutionary narrative should — again, by Dawkins’s own criterion of explanatory adequacy — invalidate all Darwinian explanations for forms of life more complex than the first cell. Yet clearly it has not. It’s logically possible to explain the origin of new forms of life by reference to the neo-Darwinian mechanism, even if there is no plausible chemical evolutionary explanation for life’s origin.
Third Reply
There is a further problem with the “Who designed the designer?” objection. Suppose scientists did formulate a viable materialistic explanation for the origin of life. Couldn’t someone still ask for an account of the origin of matter itself? Wouldn’t any ensuing materialistic explanation have its own problems with infinite regress? No physical cosmology provides a causal explanation of how matter and energy came to be. But suppose one did. How would it do so without invoking a regress of prior material (or energetic) states? What then would become of Dawkins’s insistence that causal explanations fail unless all such regresses are eliminated?
Every philosophical system must posit something as the “prime reality” or “ground of all being” — the thing from which everything else comes. In Dawkins’s worldview, matter and energy stand as such uncaused entities. But must we all assume that?
Modern cosmology shows that as best we can tell, the material universe had a beginning. That implies matter and energy are not self-existent and, therefore, not good candidates to be the uncaused cause of everything. Conversely, our uniform experience shows that minds have the capacity to produce finely tuned and information-rich systems — whether engines, software, or French recipes. The presence of exquisite fine-tuning in the initial arrangement of matter and energy in the universe (its “initial entropy fine-tuning”) by itself, therefore, implies that a pre-existing mind is a better candidate than brute matter to be the “prime reality.” Likewise, the presence of digital information in the simplest living cells points to the activity of a designing mind in the origin of life long after the beginning of the universe, and, thus, to an active, as well as transcendent, designing intelligence.