While reflecting on an earlier post (see Dawkins' Non-Answer) one of my students, a fellow named Quinn, suggested I watch a video of particle physicist Brian Cox explaining the purpose of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The lecture really is very good - simple and easy to understand (as long as you've had high school level physics). Cox gives us a good primer on what particle physics is all about and the significance of the Higgs Boson which is the quarry the LHC folks are seeking.
Quinn also makes a good point about the end of the video, but watch it first and then read his comment below. Cox's lecture is worth the fifteen minutes it takes to watch. Better yet, read Dawkins' Non-Answer then watch the video, and then read Quinn's thoughts.
Quinn writes:
Cox makes a startling claim: Using Newton's Standard Model, physicists can calculate "everything other than gravity that happens in the universe," even the shape of DNA, and although the equation does not work because particles required for the equation to be useful have not been discovered, he provides commentary on the "beauty" of physics. In essence, he describes the forces of physics as Dawkins' "blind watch maker." He discusses how any change in the weak force would prevent the stability of elements necessary to life.
I find it interesting that Dawkins', Cox, and other naturalists who describe the power of the "natural order" to produce things as complex as DNA and the human eye fail to understand the implications of such orderly processes. What Cox fails to note in his discussion on particle physics is why the forces of physics are the way they are. Why should the weak force not be any different than it is? It seems like the complexity of particles and orderliness of forces would point to a divine "watchmaker" just as much as the complexity of the eye itself.
On top of all this, I would suggest that the forces of nature, natural selection, etc. working as a "blind watchmaker" take much more faith to accept than a God. The odds of dust particles combining in such a way to form living matter, living matter evolving in such a way to form thinking beings with complex organs like eyes, and those thinking beings having the ability to look back on the process that created them seems a lot less likely than a God.
And so we come to Freud's idea of wish fulfillment that accurately (I think) reflects the fact that what individuals claim to take based on fact they really take based on preference. Dawkins, because he wishes for there to be no God, in fact turns himself into his own "blind watchmaker" as he ignores his own faith and theorizes a system so improbable and complex that Brian Cox describes it, rather ironically, as a "creation narrative in its own right."
