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improbable. Perhaps it isn’t; but that, so far, gives us no reason whatever to endorse it, and in fact doesn’t so much as make it sensible to endorse that claim.
    Have I perhaps misinterpreted Dawkins? Some with whom I have discussed his argument have thought that he couldn’t possibly have intended an argument as weak as the one I’ve attributed to him; he must have additional premises in mind. Perhaps they are right; of course it is difficult to consider an argument when one is obliged to guess at its premises. Still, what might be other possibilities? What might Dawkins be thinking? Yehuda Gellman and Dennis Monokroussos have suggested (in personal communication) that perhaps Dawkins intends an argument connected with his claim, made in
The Blind Watchmaker
, that an attempt to explain the stunning variety of life by a hypothesis involving design is misguided in that any being able to create life would itself have to be too complex:
Organized complexity is the thing that we are having difficulty in explaining. Once we are allowed simply to
postulate
organized complexity, if only the organized complexity of the DNA/protein replicating machine, it is relatively easy to invoke it as a generator of yet more organized complexity…. But of course any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machine itself… To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. 31
     
    Design doesn’t
explain
organized complexity (says Dawkins); it
presupposes
it, because the designer would have to be as complex as what it creates (designs). Perhaps, therefore, Dawkins means to argue along the following lines: there are really just two explanations of life: unguided Darwinism and an explanation,guided Darwinism, perhaps, that involves design. But the latter is really no explanation at all. Therefore the only candidate is the former.
    Here there are two problems. First, this argument doesn’t depend on the facts of biology; it is substantially independent of the latter. Is it likely that Dawkins would be offering an argument of that sort? If so, why would he claim that it is “the Evidence of Evolution” that “Reveals a World Without Design”?
    Set that problem aside for the moment; there is another and deeper problem with this argument. Suppose we land on an alien planet orbiting a distant star and discover some machine-like objects that look and work just like a 1941 Allis Chalmers tractor; our leader says “there must be intelligent beings on this planet—look at those tractors.” A sophomore philosophy student on the expedition objects: “Hey, hold on a minute! You have explained nothing at all! Any intelligent life that designed those tractors would have to be at least as complex as they are!” No doubt we’d tell him a little learning is a dangerous thing and advise him to take the next rocket ship home and enroll in another philosophy course or two. For of course it is perfectly sensible, in that context, to explain the existence of those tractors in terms of intelligent life, even though (as we can concede for present purposes) that intelligent life would have to be at least as complex as the tractors. The point is we aren’t trying to give an
ultimate
explanation of organized complexity, and we aren’t trying to explain organized complexity
in general
; we are only trying to explain one particular manifestation of it (those tractors). And (unless you are trying to give an ultimate explanation of organized complexity) it is perfectly proper to explain one manifestation of organized complexity in terms of another. Hence it is not the case, contra Dawkins, that an explanation in terms of divine design is a nonstarter. Such an explanation doesn’t constitute an ultimate explanation of organized