Dawkins' Ultimate Boeing 747 Argument Crashes and Burns

In his recent interview with Richard Dawkins, the BBC’s William Crawley raises the point that Dawkins’ “Ultimate Boeing 747” argument against the existence of God means that no amount of evidence for design in the universe could ever count for God’s existence. God (or a Designer), on Dawkins’ view, would always be at least as complex and in need of explanation as the things he designed; therefore, inferring such a God/Designer is futile. To Dawkins the only valid explanation is a reductionist one, in the highly peculiar sense of reducing the need for explanation. A designer is “as difficult” (Dawkins’ words) to explain as the appearance of design itself. Therefore inferring a designer is invalid.

Dawkins agreed with Crawley that this was his position. But note that in saying this he contradicts his famous statement that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. If no amount of apparent design can ever warrant the inference of a designer, then the advent of Darwin’s theory didn’t change anything. Inferring the existence of God was already invalid.

Further, look at how Dawkins’ argument would work when applied in other areas of science (Dawkins claims that the existence of God is a scientific question): whoever first posited the existence of atoms was being irrational—if atoms exist, then they must surely raise as many questions in need of explanation (“What are atoms made of?” “How do the parts of atoms behave?” etc.) as the questions they answered. On Dawkins’ view, atoms are not a valid explanation (i.e. one that reduces the number of questions needing explanation) at all. In fact, atomic theory ended up opening the whole Pandora’s box of quantum mechanics!

Even evolution itself fails Dawkins’ test. A bird is a complex creature, but the long lineage of posited ancestral species leading from primordial cell to bird, together with the processes causing that lineage to evolve, is vastly more complex. Not only do we now have each organism in that series to explain (what factors caused it to evolve, etc.), but we have the processes of evolution itself to explicate. Dawkins' criterion of explanation in fact excludes almost all of science.

Even if we change our definition of reductionism to a more reasonable one than the one Dawkins uses, there are problems. For example, we could stipulate that reductionism means not a reduced need for explanation, but simply the explaining of a complex entity in terms of entities that are each less complex (no matter how many are needed). But we could then ask, why is this reductionism the only kind of explanation that can ever be counted as explaining something? Sure, if we look at a field like chemistry, where we explain things by breaking them into constituent parts, of necessity the parts will always be less complex than the whole.

But in another field, where we are explaining things in terms of their historical causes (this is the type of endeavor evolution is involved in), it’s irrational to expect that a historical cause or antecedent must always be simpler than its effect. Is my father less complex in makeup than I am? No. Were the builders of the pyramids less complex than the pyramids? No.

Oops. I just mentioned an example of intelligent design. That’s the one kind of explanation that evolutionists want to exclude at all costs.