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lukeprog comments on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship - Less Wrong
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IMO, it is perfectly reasonable to object with: "Who designed the Designer?".
The logic being objected to is: it takes a big complex thing to create another big complex thing. Observing that Darwinian evolution makes big complex things from scratch is the counter-example. The intuition that a complex thing (humans) requires another complex thing to create it (god) is wrong - and it does tend to lead towards an escalator of ever-more-complex creators.
Simplicity creating complexity needs to happen somewhere, to avoid an infinite regress - and if such a principle has to be invoked somewhere, then before the very first god is conjoured seems like a good place.
Checking with the "common sense atheism" link quite a few people are saying similar things in the comments.
timtyler,
Hitchens did not mention complexity or simplicity as you propose. And he did not mention evolution as you propose. If you read the Hitchens quote, you will see he only gave the why-regress objection, which is just as valid against any scientific hypothesis as it is against a theistic one.
There are ways to make the "Who designed the Designer?" objection stick, but Hitchens did not use one of them. If you read the Hitchens quote, you'll see that he explicitly gave the why-regress objection that could be just as accurately be given to any scientific hypothesis ever proposed.
Here, let's play Quick Word Substitution. Let's say a physicist gives a brilliant demonstration of why his theory of quarks does a great job explaining a wide variety of observed subatomic phenomena. Now, Hitchens objects:
"But what explains the quarks? Don’t you run the risk… of asking 'Well, where does that come from? And where does that come from?' and running into an infinite regress?"
Hitchens explicitly gave the why-regress objection that is just as potent against scientific explanations as it is against theistic explanations.
The regress down into smaller and smaller particles may be a special case. Can we throw out particle physics, and still say we have science? I think so.
PhilGoetz,
The why-regress is not concerned with ontological reduction into smaller and smaller bits. It is concerned with explanatory reduction into more and more fundamental explanations.
The why-regress is not limited to particle physics. It is just as present at higher-level sciences. When neuroscientists successfully explain certain types of pleasure in terms of the delivery of dopamine and endorphins to certain parts of the brain, it does not defeat this explanation to say, "But what explains this particular way of sending dopamine and endorphins to certain parts of the brain? Don't you run the risk of asking 'Well, where does that come from? And where does that come from?' and running into an infinite regress?"
The point is that all explanations are subject to the why-regress, whether they are theistic or scientific explanations.
Also, see the part of Yudkowsky's Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation that begins with "Beware of checklist thinking..."