Who designed the designer?

The Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit

Richard Dawkins born 1941Natural selection explains apparent design; a creator God would be even more improbable than the world.

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What it claims

A designer God would be extremely improbable: he almost certainly does not exist. "God is the Ultimate Boeing 747."

Why

A designer of the whole universe would itself be very complex, hence very improbable, and positing it explains nothing.

The same idea through history

David Hume1779In the Dialogues (part IV), Philo already asks: if the order of the world needs an intelligence as its cause, what causes the order of that intelligence?

Fred Hoyle1981An image attributed to the astronomer (reported by the journal Nature in 1981): life arising by chance is as likely as a tornado assembling a Boeing 747 as it sweeps through a scrapyard. It is then used for the idea of an intelligence behind life.

Richard Dawkins2006Dawkins turns the image around: a designer powerful enough to make the universe would itself be the most improbable Boeing 747 of all.

In short

"Who designed the designer?" is an argument by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2006, ch. 4, 2006) on the question "Does God exist?" (answer: atheism). Its claim: A designer God would be extremely improbable: he almost certainly does not exist. "God is the Ultimate Boeing 747.". According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The God Delusion, 2006, ch. 4

Valid with an implicit premise

Believers often say: the world is too well made to have arisen by chance, so there must be a designer. Richard Dawkins, a biologist, turns the argument around. If complexity needs an explanation, then a God able to design everything, being even more complex, needs an even bigger one. He calls this the central argument of his book. Natural selection, by contrast, explains the complex from the simple, step by step: what he calls a "crane", as opposed to a "skyhook" hanging from nowhere.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a case where God is complex and first, improbable by the measure of material things, yet not improbable after all: for instance a necessary being, to whom that measure does not apply.

Valid with P4, which Dawkins does not state but assumes. Critics mainly target P2 (is God really complex?), P3 (must an explanation be explained before we accept it?) and P4 (can God's probability be reckoned like that of a material object?).

Analogy. A pupil asks where a very precise clock comes from. He is told: "from an even more sophisticated clockmaking robot that came from nowhere". He is right to feel that the question has only moved back, and grown.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Alvin Plantinga 2007 · attacks premise 2

According to classical theology (Aquinas), God is simple. And even by Dawkins' own definition, something is complex if it has parts arranged in an improbable way. But God is a spirit, not a material object: he has no parts. So he is not complex in Dawkins' sense.

Dawkins replies

Richard Dawkins 2006 · Dawkins' answer in advance (written earlier, against the thesis that God is simple)

A God who monitors and controls every particle of the universe at every moment, while hearing every human's prayers, cannot be simple. His existence needs a mammoth explanation in its own right.

William Lane Craig 2009

Dawkins conflates God with what God is thinking about. A thought about billions of things is not made of billions of pieces. A bodiless mind has no parts, even if it knows a great deal.

The debate goes on (our summary) The debate goes on over one point: does a mind that knows everything contain an enormous amount of information? Dawkins' defenders say yes, and that "without parts" does not mean "simple" in the sense in which scientists compare hypotheses. Theists answer that the complexity of knowledge is not the complexity of a mechanism.

Where the debate stands (our summary)The basic disagreement is about the meaning of "simple": without parts (the sense of classical theology) or a small amount of information (the sense of the sciences). The two sides do not agree on this point, and the discussion is not settled.

Richard Swinburne 2007 · attacks premise 2

Positing one single being, with unlimited qualities (all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly free), is a hypothesis simple in itself: scientists, other things being equal, prefer an infinite quantity to a very large finite one. Whether a hypothesis is simple is seen by examining it in itself, not by counting what it explains. And a mind is not a brain: I, a simple being, control a brain far more complicated than I am.

Dawkins replies

Richard Dawkins 2023

After a public debate with Swinburne at the Royal Institution (London, June 2023), Dawkins holds his ground: whatever theologians mean by "divine simplicity", Swinburne takes "simple" in the scientific sense, and that, he says, is what makes nonsense of his argument. In that sense, as he wrote back in 2006, a God who controls every particle cannot be simple.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Swinburne counts the simplicity of the hypothesis itself (few postulates, no arbitrary limit); Dawkins measures it by what God would have to accomplish. These two senses of "simple" have not been reconciled.

Alvin Plantinga 2007 · attacks premise 4

Why would a complex being be improbable? That holds if everything is made of particles (materialism); but assuming materialism to prove there is no God is assuming what one wants to prove. For classical theology, God is a necessary being: if he exists in all possible worlds, the probability that he exists is 1.

no reply

We have not yet found a direct reply by Dawkins in the texts.

The debate goes on (our summary) We found no direct answer from Dawkins on this point. His defenders reply that saying "God is necessary" settles nothing until one has shown that such a being is possible: otherwise anything could be declared necessary. The question then moves to the ontological argument.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point: we found no published reply by Dawkins on this point. The basic disagreement concerns the possibility of a necessary being; taking it for granted leads back to the ontological argument.

William Lane Craig 2009 · attacks premise 3

To recognise an explanation as the best, one does not need an explanation of the explanation. Archaeologists who find arrowheads rightly infer human makers, even if they do not know who those people were or where they came from. Otherwise no science could move forward: every explanation would demand another, without end.

no reply

We have not yet found a direct reply by Dawkins in the texts.

The debate goes on (our summary) Plantinga makes the same point in his review (the example of tractors found on another planet). Dawkins' defenders answer that in the archaeologists' case we already know that humans exist and how they make arrowheads; with God, one would posit a being known by no other means, more improbable than what it explains. The discussion then turns on how much weight the simplicity of an explanation should carry.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point: we found no published reply by Dawkins to this example. The basic disagreement concerns the role of simplicity: must one be able to explain an explanation in order to accept it?

What today's voices say

Defend it

Christopher HitchensIn the Craig debate he asks what existed before the cause and who designed the designer.

Richard DawkinsHis own argument: a God able to design life would be even more complex than life, so he needs an explanation too.

Criticize it