Dawkins, Functional Complexity & Divine Ideas

I just returned from a great little talk at the Oxford Graduate Christian Union, being held at the Mitre Pub on High Street, where a Reverend Dr. Patrick Richmond gave a talk entitled "Swinburne vs. Dawkins: Is God Simple or Complex?" The talk was quite fascinating, as it covered Dawkins' argument against the probability of there being a God of any sort. The basic argument is this: any mind that could create the immense complexity in the world must itself be immensely complex. And we know from the world that any immensely complex thing cries out for an explanation as to how it was constructed, due to the fact that the more complex something is, the more improbable is its existence. Compare: the probability of complex molecules being created is quite low, due to the fact that millions and billions of elementary causal interactions between more fundamental particles could occur without such molecules being created.

In short, the argument is pretty bad. As Swinburne points out, God is not complex at all - He is actually infinitely ontologically simple. Not only this, but Dawkins' argument only extends to the statistical improbability of various material things coming together to create some materially complex thing. Any attempt to extend this to some sort of complexity in the Divine Mind (think: God's infinite knowledge of all possible worlds) yet seems rather ad hoc. As Richmond nicely pointed out in his talk, God's accumulated mass of ideas isn't a kind of complexity that seems to cry out for analysis - not, at least, by Dawkins' standards. According to Dawkins, only 'functional complexity' is in desperate need of explanation - things like watches and the human eye - but things that are complex but nevertheless functionally inert do not. Richmond's insight was to hold that the Divine Ideas are complex, but not for all of that forming a kind of system that cries out for explanation of their design; although, calling them 'non-functional' is probably quite the misnomer.

But I did ask a question of Richmond that I thought to be particularly sanguine to the discussion, one that may put the leverage back on the Dawkins side of things. To be clear, the original argument that Dawkins proposes is ghastly unacceptable. But if we explain things in the manner that Richmond and Swinburne opt for, we may yet be in a position that is open to more "But who designed that!?"-type criticisms. Consider, for example, the account that the Theist needs to give of God's knowledge of the possibilities of things. Presumably, this will come about in the classical form of God's knowledge of the essences of things - that is, God knows all of the possibilities of things in virtue of having a perfect knowledge of the essences of all things.

But although this is a seemingly acceptable answer, consider what kinds of things essences must be. They must be the objects of Divine Thoughts - or, alternatively, just the Divine Thoughts themselves. They must be simple things. But they must also somehow contain an exhaustive list of the entirety of the possible properties of the thing whose essence they are. For instance, God peers into the essence of me and notices that I could have been a fisherman or could have died in my infancy and the rest of the lot of potential world-careers I might have pursued or not pursued. Now all of this is fine, theologically speaking.

But there may yet be the further worry that although we have posited a simple object of Divine Knowledge, we have yet introduced another kind of complexity that itself cries out for explanation. For the essences of things are not only infinitely complex, but they also involve certain limits for possible values. Consider the essence of Adam - that is, the first man. Is it not part of the essence of Adam to eat of the fruit of the tree? Perhaps someone will deny this. But then, why do they deny it? It can only be denied on pain of a certain criteria for the essence of Adam. But then, we are still at the same problem - namely, the essences of things have certain innumerable facts about them that are somehow considered primitive; not just facts about possible futures, but also potential futures, possible pasts and -importantly - the limitations of all of these.

Essences, as objects of Divine Thought, on the face of it, seem to be both complex and functional in an attenuated sense - for they contain all kinds of specifications on which values are acceptable, which are not and which values will produce which values in which situation (cf. Molinistic 'Middle Knowledge'). But that kind of functionality is certainly functionality enough for the inquisitive atheist to question further: "What then, explains this precise (functional) complexity?"

An obvious move - and the one I eventually favour - is to opt for Primitivism. To ask why an essence is as it is is to ask a fundamentally misguided question - essences are themselves the things which explain why any contingent state of affairs is as it is, but they are no such state of affairs in need of explanation. However, there is the further nagging worry that this explanation is worth all the weight of Anslem offering the Fool the Dictionary entry for "God"; ie. arguing that "It's just in the very Definition of 'God' that He necessarily exists" is just not a very good argument for God's necessary existence. And if that's the best the Theist can do, he isn't doing very well at all.

But, as Quine once remarked, "there are primitives, and then there are primitives". Ontology must bottom-out in primitives, to be sure. But it's well to remember that the Theist still has the problem of arguing for primitives. Maybe he has argued away the primitiveness of Design in physical systems, but he hasn't, for all of that, done away with his need to find a better, more suitable primitive.

Dispositional InEssentialism's Implausibility

Given dispositional realism, there are two main positions taken in the debate on whether or not dispositions are essential to their bearers*:

Dispositional Essentialism: Dispositions are the 'what it is to be' for the objects that have them and the existence of these objects is conditional upon their having these dispositions. An object having different dispositions than the ones it does is therefore impossible. Thus, different laws of nature, different objects. (Bird, Ellis & Lierse, Marcus)

Dispositional InEssentialism: Dispositions are contingent aspects of the objects that have them and the existence of these objects is not conditional upon their having these dispositions. An object having different dispositions than the ones it does is possible. Thus, different laws of nature do not imply different objects. (Armstrong, Lewis)

Now, importantly, the debate about dispositional essentialism is a debate about so-called fundamental entities; those 'natural' objects of scientific enquiry - quarks, leptons and electrons. The exemplar question is something like 'Is it possible for an electron to attract another electron'? - ie. could the dispositional nature of an electron have been different?

For the dispositional inessentialist, an electron possibly attracting another electron is accounted for by the fact that the laws of nature are contingent - the 'Contingency Thesis'. And since different laws of nature holding amounts to there being different ways things must act, it is possible that things have different constraints on the way they interact with one another and hence, different dispositional natures.

The problem with this view, I think, have been laid-out fairly successfully by Bird in his Nature's Metaphysics. For one, laws of nature understood as either regularities or nomic-necessitation generalizations both seem untenable; I won't go in to the intricacies here - suffice it to say that regularities supervene, not impose themselves on objects and nomic-necessitiation is seemingly ad hoc logic-chopping. And since an account of dispositional inessentialism entails that the laws of nature are extra-objectual and no such account of laws is plausible, neither is dispositional inessentialism.

Secondly though, and more importantly, is the charge that if the laws of nature are understood as extra-objectual (as I claimed that dispositional inessentialism presupposes), then one must be a quidditivist about properties. That is, one must hold that the dispositional nature of any property is not essential to it. Why is the dispositional inessentialist committed to property quidditivism? Firstly, she is an extra-objectual law theorist - so the laws of nature must determine dispositions, not vice-versa. Secondly, she must accept the following proposition:

(ep) An electron could be a positron.

Now, the dispositional inessentialist will protest: I would not dare say that an electron could be a positron! Rather than accepting (ep), I am making the weaker claim that an electron might have had the disposition to attract other electrons - ie. it could have been positively charged. I am not then, as you are claiming, attempting to make the claim that one kind of entity might have been another fundamentally different kind of entity - surely this is absurd.

But what does the acceptance of (ep) entail? Consider that an electron and positron share all of their structural properties and differ only in the value of their charge. The claim made by (ep) is then not simply that an electron could have had a positive charge. This is because, ex hypothesi, a positron just is an object having all of the structural properties an electron has and being positively charged. So the dispositional inessentialist is committed to (ep) afterall.

You might wonder what accepting (ep) has to do with property quidditivism, since the former concerns entities, the latter properties. But I suggest that the claim that the property 'being negatively charged' might have had the role of attracting negative charges is precisely the mistake that the dispositional inessentialist makes. Why? Because 'repelling negative charges' simply is what it is to be a negative charge. Similarly, 'being negatively charged' simply is what it is to be an electron. So, being a dispositional inessentialist entails the acceptance of (ep). And since (ep) is absurd, so is dispositional inessentialism; and, for that matter, property quidditivism.



*There is another, somewhat middle position that Mumford takes, which I call 'soft dispositional essentialism', according to which objects have their dispositions essentially, but their dispositions are relative to a world. Under soft dispositional essentialism, it is possible for an object to have different dispositions, but not different world-indexed dispositions. This account preserves the Contingency Thesis and dispositional essentialism, but is ultimately unacceptable. In short, it can't be claimed that an object such as an electron has different world-indexed dispositions since, as I suggest, what it is to be an electron is to have a particular dispositional nature. Therefore, any object with a different dispositional nature is conceptually barred from being an electron and so no electron could have different dispositions than the ones it does.

The Plague of Predicative Essentialism

I can't accept any theory that posits the essence of an object to be comprised of, or reducible to a set of properties.

The essence of an object is that from which all the properties of an object flow.

The following is an appropriate picture: An infinite amount of essences exist, none differing solo numero and all being in the company of one another. Their being present to one another results in each of them contributing to a relational situs wherein each of the essences exhibit some set of characteristics resulting from the relationship of it to every other essence in its presence. Each essence is, in virtue of its particular relationship to every other object, clothed in a certain quiddity comprised of a total set of properties. Objects are hylomorphic - equally essence and properties, haecceity and suchness, non-qualitative and qualitative, individual and communal, non-relational and relational.

Any account wherein properties are considered primitive must view the essence of an object as ineffectually inactive or else a derivative entity. But such an account cannot explain how these properties can be their own de re foundation or how they can set a non-trivial limit to and specification of the property possession of an object. In short, the effects of primitivising properties is that all investigation of the nature of objects must be left to logical analysis. Possibility will be nothing more than non-contradiction between the predicates of an object and the predicates comprising some conceptual context. Necessity will be merely the impossibility of non-contradiction between the predicates of an object and the predicates comprising some conceptual context. But diamonds and boxes are only conceptual aids.

Real possibility flows from the essence of an object - it declares a property possible just in case the property is compossible with every other property in some conceptual context and there is some property that the object has from which, if it were to be included in this context,it would follow that the property in question would be exemplified. This is the real character of Leibnizian worlds - one which respects the pregnancy of properties with determinate properties founded in the relationship of the 'concept' of the object in respect to every other object.