The Teleology Challenge

Since its publication in June this year, not a single intelligible rebuttal has been offered to the general thesis presented in The Owner of All Infernal Names: An Introductory Treatise on the Existence, Nature & Government of Our Omnimalevolent Creator.

In its most trimmed down presentation, that thesis presents a diverse library of evidences which support the conclusion that this world was brought into existence by what a human mind would call a perfectly wicked, malevolent Creator; a maximally powerful being whose arousal and stimulatory needs are satisfied best by the suffering which pervades all of Creation, and whose single-minded objective is to amplify His pleasure-taking over time. To these ends, the Creator has (demonstrably) structured His most notable of creations, the universe itself, to perform as a monumental pleasure-generating mechanism: an intelligently designed, deceptively natural, appallingly efficient complexity machine where the naturally unravelling consequences of its single instruction—to diversify and specialise—parents an increasingly complex variety of potential, physiological, and psychological suffering there to be experienced by those increasingly complex contingent things whose participation in existence was never solicited.

Now, some (Insanitybytes, Colourstorm, Citizen Tom, Praetorius, Madblog, Theancients, Tricia, James at the Isaiah 53:5 Project, Caroline, at and Brian Balke, to name just a few) have attempted to present something which might be confused for a rebuttal, but disappointingly, the sum total of these rather pedestrian efforts can be summarised as simply: “I don’t like this idea, therefore it is wrong.” I say disappointingly because emotional opinions about something do not, in any way, affect that thing’s veracity in the real world. One may rage all they like against gravity, but the truth of gravity cares not for even the most heartfelt protest. It simply is; measurable, demonstrable, but open to being falsified if the right evidence is presented. In the same way, the thesis of the Omnimalevolent Creator simply is; supported by hard observational data taken from Creation’s 13.8 billion year history. It draws its conclusions from physics, cosmology, astronomy, biology, geology, meteorology, genetics, chemistry, ethology, ecology, palaeontology, immunology, neurology, physiology, sociology, economics, and even traditional theology, and cites over 170 published papers to support its central arguments, which makes a recent post by the evangelical blogger, Insanitybytes, all the more disappointing. In this supposed rebuttal, Insanitybytes claims that one cannot look at the physical design of God’s Creation because the teleological facts of this world so clearly disprove her particular god, Yhwh. It is a hilarious, albeit baffling admission, but it effectively highlights the jejune attempts made (to date) to refute the proposition.

In the hope, therefore, of lifting the calibre of rebuttals, I think it’s necessary to formalise and structure the challenge presented by the thesis. Given past mistakes and misdirected attention, some things must however first be made perfectly clear. In approaching this challenge, we are assuming (via a host of traditional evidences) the existence of a Creator, but we are not, and never were, talking about the Middle Eastern god of Jews, Christians and Muslims, Yhwh. We are not prosecuting Zoroastrianism’s Ahura-Mazda, or accusing the Yoruba people’s Olódùmarè of being evil. We are not, in any way, dealing here with the Problem of Evil, nor are we litigating creative theodicies invented by human minds to explain the prevalence of evil in this world. In this exercise, we are not entertaining those excuses for why things are not as they should be if matter had been persuaded to behave by a benevolent creator who has (for one imaginative reason or another) lost total control of his creation, rather presenting a coherent explanation for why things are as they are in the unignorable presence of a Creator… a Creator who, for reasons not immediately obvious, so clearly cherishes His anonymity. God, by definition, is maximally competent, and to propose anything less is simply preposterous. God, by definition, is maximally efficient. There are no mistakes. There can be no mistakes, no missteps, no lapses or miscalculations. What exists, exists because it was envisaged by the Catalogue of Catalogues that is the mind of God. We are not, therefore, starting from a position that claims the machine—Creation—is broken. We must assume the apparatus has not malfunctioned, and Creation is unfurling exactly as designed by the mistake-free Creator.

Now, for the sake of directedness, I will limit this challenge to the most noticeable and opinion-neutral of all proofs for the existence of the Creator: Creation itself, and to begin, we must consider this dangerously astute statement delivered by one of the greatest ever champions for the strength of the teleological argument, William Paley:

“Contrivance proves design, and the predominant tendency of the contrivance indicates the disposition of the designer.”[1]

Know then the disposition, revealed as it must be through design, through the architecture, and one may know the designer.

These are the facts of this world.

Creation—this particular universe with a fixed serviceable life—is a vast entanglement apparatus, a complexity machine stitched along a few fiercely indifferent, ferociously faithful rules that set the stage for affinities that govern all things without sentiment or bias. Cooled gases become liquids, cooled liquids become solids, and solids arrange themselves into increasingly complex, ultimately self-replicating patterns, no driver required. Hydrogen fuses into the heavier and more complex helium, which in turn fuses into the heavier and more complex carbon. These are positive movements, and they are predominantly in one direction: towards greater and greater complexity. Single compounds bind to create molecules, molecules bind to create single-celled life, and single-celled life leaps naturally to multicellular activity… a transition witnessed on no less than 24 separate occasions on this planet[2]. Over hundreds of millions of years, antique action potentials (nerve cells so beautifully designed to be layered with more and more sensory tissue) become primitive nerve nets, which then further specialise into bilateral nervous systems that, in their turn, cannot resist the urge to then self-complicate into simple vertebrates with brains to register, sort, compile, remember, and anticipate (fear) pain over longer and longer periods as vast neuron fields are stacked one on top of the other. A mind is born… obsessed with a trillion fears, both large and small, real and imagined.

“As soon as it became cool enough for oxygen and hydrogen to unite into a stable compound, they did unite to form vapour of water. As soon as it became cool enough for double salts to exist, then the mutual affinities of simple binary compounds and single salts, variously brought into juxtaposition sufficed to produce double salts. And so on throughout the inorganic world … Here we obtain a hint as to the origin of organic life upon the earth’s surface. In accordance with the modern dynamic theory of life, we are bound to admit that the higher and less stable aggregations of molecules which constitute protoplasm were built up in just the same way in which the lower and more stable aggregations of molecules which constitute a single or a double salt were built up. Dynamically, the only difference between carbonate of ammonia and protoplasm which can be called fundamental is the greater molecular complexity and consequent instability of the latter.”[3]

From every vantage, and from every survey thereafter, one fact rings true: Creation flows from a state of ancestral simplicity to contemporary complexity, where complexity parents a wretched and forever diversifying family of more devoted fears and faithful anxieties, more pervasive ailments and skilful parasites, more virulent toxins, more capable diseases, and more affectionate expressions of pain, ruin, psychosis and loss. Although not cognitively aware of the sensation of pain, protozoa, can skirmish with that which threatens it, resisting organised and not-so organised assaults launched against its existence[4]. By this fact alone—by this animated attitude towards a menacing world—the observer of this world sees that this primordial expression of life knows it is suffering, yet it is simply incapable of any reaction that may be mistaken for love or altruism. Climb then above this first chorus of pain-aware life[5] and the experience of physical and emotional torment only deepens with each ascending rung. In matters of potential suffering and a preferentially scored portfolio of pain, a single 200,000 years old, 100 billion neuron human being stood against a 550 million years old, 800 neuron Narcomedusae jellyfish is the structural equivalent of comparing the convoluted majesty of the International Space Station to a child’s paper and stick kite, and to then stand the Narcomedusae against the far more ancient 1.5 billion years old protozoa is to weigh the complexity of the kite to a dust mote caught up in a lazy afternoon breeze.

Put simply, since the first protean cycles of this universe were spun up and let loose, the urge of all that which moves and interacts has consulted the future with a stubborn enthusiasm, cascading naturally forward, spilling out from the simplest and lightest towards the heaviest and most complicated, birthing planets, weather, life, action potentials, predictive and abstract thought, societies, technology, culture, tangible and, more recently, intangible economic markets. It is a contract to which all contingent things—whether they know it and like it or not—are hopelessly but faithfully dedicated; contrivances on an assembly line devoted to producing new contrivances (or variations on an existing contrivances) that are more adept, more skilled and more talented than the last generation at experiencing and distributing suffering, and by doing so, increasing the quantity and/or quality of the Creator’s harvests over time.

“The large scale history of the universe strongly suggests a trend of increasing complexity: disordered energy states produce atoms and molecules, which combine to form suns and associated planets, on which life evolves. Life then seems to exhibit its own pattern of increasing complexity, with simple organisms getting more complex over evolutionary time until they eventually develop rationality and complex culture. And recent theoretical developments in Biology and complex systems theory suggest this trend may be real, arising from the basic structure of the universe in a predictable fashion … If this is right, you can look at the universe as a kind of ‘complexity machine’”[6]

Given 1) the naturally self-complicating nature of this universe, and given that 2) complexity births a broader and deeper variety of accessible (quantifiable) suffering, the Challenge standing before anyone wishing to counter this most basic of proofs for the existence of the Omnimalevolent Creator is to present hard observational data detailing impressive, unambiguous, and irresistible movements towards less complexity over time, not more. The challenge, therefore, is to present real-world examples (taken over Creation’s 13.8 billion year history) demonstrating these paradigmatic shifts that, in-turn, illustrate a clear and unmistakable reduction over time in the diversity and potency of suffering available to all contingent things.

If this cannot be done, if the evidence cannot be assembled in a meaningful and persuasive manner to prove otherwise, then regardless of how unpalatable it might be, one must conclude that this Creation is the work of a maximally powerful, malevolent being who has structured and instructed Creation to perform as an immense pleasure-generating mechanism. Some have named a lesser species of this being the Devil, others The Deceiver, Ahriman, Abaddon, Mara, Baphomet, Apollyon, Iblis, Beast, Angra Mainyu, Yama, Moloch, The Father of Lies, The Author of Sin, Druj, Samnu, Mammon, and The Great Spoiler, yet these characters of human literature and tradition do not begin to approach the nature and scope of this entity who may be identified as simply, The Owner of All Infernal Names: a being who does not share His creation with any other comparable spirit, does not seek to be known to or worshipped by that which He has created (or has allowed to be created), and whose greatest proof of existence is that there is no conspicuous proof of His existence—just teleological birthmarks that can be isolated and examined as testimony—for He understands that the trinkets of His greatest amusement, arousal and stimulatory satisfaction must be blind to the nature of the world they inhabit so they may act freely, and suffer genuinely.

[1] Paley, William, Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, 1802, pp. 258

[2] [2] See M. Srivastava et al., 2010, The Amphimedon queenslandica genome and the evolution of animal complexity, Nature, 466:720-26

[3] Fiske, John, 1902, Miscellaneous Writings, Vol 2, pp. 364—365

[4] Lian-Yong Gao and Yousef Abu Kwaik, 2000, ‘The mechanism of killing and exiting the protozoan host Acanthamoeba polyphaga by Legionella pneumophila,’ Environmental Microbiology, Volume 2, Issue 1, pp. 79–90

[5] The Cambridge Declaration, 7^th of July, 2012, written by Philip Low and edited by Jaak Panksepp, Diana Reiss, David Edelman, Bruno Van Swinderen, Philip Low and Christof Koch. University of Cambridge.

[6] Smith, Kelly C., 2014, ‘Manifest complexity: A foundational ethic for astrobiology?,’ Science Direct, Volume 30, Issue 4, November, pp. 209—214