richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

W H Y T II E R E A L M O S T C E R T A I N L Y I S N O G O D 113
THE ULTIMATE BOEING 747
The argument from improbability is the big one. In the traditional
guise of the argument from design, it is easily today's most popular
argument offered in favour of the existence of God and it is seen,
by an amazingly large number of theists, as completely and utterly
convincing. It is indeed a very strong and, I suspect, unanswerable
argument - but in precisely the opposite direction from the theist's
intention. The argument from improbability, properly deployed,
comes close to proving that God does not exist. My name for the
statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is
the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit.
The name comes from Fred Hoyle's amusing image of the Boeing
747 and the scrapyard. I am not sure whether Hoyle ever wrote it
down himself, but it was attributed to him by his close colleague
Chandra Wickramasinghe and is presumably authentic. 58 Hoyle
said that the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater
than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard,
would have the luck to assemble a Boeing 747. Others have
borrowed the metaphor to refer to the later evolution of complex
living bodies, where it has a spurious plausibility. The odds against
assembling a fully functioning horse, beetle or ostrich by randomly
shuffling its parts are up there in 747 territory. This, in a nutshell,
is the creationist's favourite argument - an argument that could be
made only by somebody who doesn't understand the first thing
about natural selection: somebody who thinks natural selection is a
theory of chance whereas - in the relevant sense of chance - it is the
opposite.
The creationist misappropriation of the argument from improbability
always takes the same general form, and it doesn't make
any difference if the creationist chooses to masquerade in the
politically expedient fancy dress of 'intelligent design' (ID).* Some
observed phenomenon - often a living creature or one of its more
complex organs, but it could be anything from a molecule up to the
universe itself - is correctly extolled as statistically improbable.
Sometimes the language of information theory is used: the
Darwinian is challenged to explain the source of all the information
Intelligent design has been unkindly described as creationism in a cheap tuxedo.