Was the origin of life so amazingly improbable only God could have done it? No.
Wasn't that a deliciously brief answer? Well, okay, first a quick recap, for those who don't like deliciously brief answers: I've argued this at dizzying length at the Secular Web in "Are the Odds Against the Origin of Life Too Great to Accept?" which led to a much briefer and considerably more rigorous paper, still my best known contribution to philosophy:
"The Argument from Biogenesis: Probabilities against a Natural Origin of Life," published under peer review in Biology & Philosophy (19.5, November 2004, pp. 739-64). In that article I catalogued and analyzed seven frequently-repeated errors or fallacies deployed by creationists who try to argue that the origin of life ("biogenesis") could not have happened naturally. I even took the trouble of explaining exactly what they could do to avoid all seven errors and make their argument work. Unfortunately for them, actually doing this requires knowledge we don't yet have, which is their most fundamental mistake: they are arguing from ignorance, and arguments from ignorance are, well, ignorant. We simply don't know enough to say whether natural biogenesis is improbable.
Oh, you want to know what those seven typical errors are? Okay. Just a quick list:
This article has been rewritten, updated, and superseded elsewhere as Epistemological Endgame. The following remains only for archival purposes.
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In September, Chris Hallquist raised an objection to my epistemology on his blog The Uncredible Hallq. For those not up on the jargon, an epistemology is your "theory of knowledge," it's what you believe about what it means to know something, how we know anything, and when it's right to believe or disbelieve one thing or another. I described my epistemology in my book Sense and Goodness without God (2005), especially on pages 49-62 (building on the necessary preliminaries on pages 27-48), although I add a great deal more in later sections of the book, especially where I discuss mind, reason, and science and the supernatural (pages 135-49, 177-92, and 213-52 respectively).
One of the big issues in epistemology is the problem of infinite regress. "I believe the sun will rise." "How do you know that?" "Because it always has." "How do you know that?" "Because my memory and human records confirm it has." "How do you know that?" "Because I've examined those memories and records." "How do you know that?" And so on. It looks like this could go on forever. It seems like any answer you give can be doubted. We can always keep asking "How do you know that?" And this isn't the only line of regress. "I believe the sun will rise." "How do you know that?" "Because it always has." "How do you know something that's always happened will continue to happen?" And so on.
The difference between these two lines of questioning is that the first is about the facts, while the second is about which rules are valid when interpreting those facts. Every rule is doubtable, because exceptions are always possible, and every fact is doubtable, because we could always be mistaken, someone could always have made an error, or lied, or our memories could be inaccurate or false, and so on. Thus, the problem of regress is just this: Where is it reasonable to stop doubting, to stop asking questions? When should we just shut up and believe?
Chris says "I do not think that Carrier has escaped the problem of regress" because "no line of reasoning can ever get us out of skepticism regarding memory, because in order to reason we must be able to remember the previous steps of the line of reasoning" and therefore, Chris concludes, "I think [Christian apologist Alvin] Plantinga has hit upon the only real solution to the problem of regress." Chris acknowledges but doesn't say enough about my refutation of Plantinga's proposed solution in Sense and Goodness without God (especially on pages 43-47 and 184-85).
What is Plantinga's "solution"? Simply to assume Christian Theism is true, and that we are fully justified in assuming this without needing any evidence Christian Theism is true. "I don't need a reason to believe it." Silly, you might say, but a number of Christians agree with him and are marching along to the same tune. In his own attempt at a solution (on a subsequent blog entry), Chris says "though one belief may be occasionally traced to another, there must always be givens, or else we fall back into the problem of regress," which I likewise argue. Yet I could not find any actual solution to this problem on his blog.
Chris seems to say that all we need do is just arbitrarily assume some things, but he never explains what things we are allowed to assume, or why it is okay to assume those things, and not others, or a smaller set of things to begin with. He recognizes this as a problem for Plantinga--as Chris says, if we get to assume Christian Theism is true, then we could just as easily assume Great Pumpkinism is true, so where does that get us? But if we can't just start with assumptions like those, because they are dangerously and irresponsibly arbitrary (and they are), then what assumptions can we start with? Chris doesn't say. That's not a solution.
In contrast, I did offer a solution. And it works. Chris thinks it doesn't, but he seems to have missed several elements of my epistemology, although not everything he missed is adequately explicit in my book. So here's a clearer exposition on the subject.
"The Argument from Biogenesis: Probabilities against a Natural Origin of Life," published under peer review in Biology & Philosophy (19.5, November 2004, pp. 739-64). In that article I catalogued and analyzed seven frequently-repeated errors or fallacies deployed by creationists who try to argue that the origin of life ("biogenesis") could not have happened naturally. I even took the trouble of explaining exactly what they could do to avoid all seven errors and make their argument work. Unfortunately for them, actually doing this requires knowledge we don't yet have, which is their most fundamental mistake: they are arguing from ignorance, and arguments from ignorance are, well, ignorant. We simply don't know enough to say whether natural biogenesis is improbable.
