Review of The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
*draft*
“Dawkins seems to have chosen God has his sworn enemy.
Let’s hope God doesn’t return the compliment.”
-Alvin Plantinga
Richard Dawkins is a distinguished scientist and a prolific writer. His previous books elucidate the complexities of evolutionary theory for a general, non-scientific audience. The accessibility of these books to the reading public has made him wildly popular. In his early books, Dawkins’ denial of God and suspicion of religion remained only implicit assumptions that took the backseat to biology. But in recent books, especially Climbing Mount Improbable, Dawkins brings his polemic against religion to the forefront, which culminates in his most recent book. The God Delusion is almost exclusively devoted to philosophy. In it, Dawkins intersperses his own disdain for religion with social commentary and fiery rhetoric. Nor does he limit his attack toward one religion in particular or religious fundamentalism. Lest his readers miss the point, he makes clear that his attack is against “God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented” (36).
Toward that end, Dawkins several themes emerge throughout the book, including fundamentalist Islam (especially the Danish cartoons), religious indoctrination as a form child abuse, morality from an evolutionary psychology perspective, patriarchal misinterpretation of scripture, and other topics, too numerous to deal with here. This paper will instead attempt to engage Dawkins in only three particular areas. First, it will discuss Dawkins accusation that religion constitutes a source of great evil in the world. This discussion of evil will not attempt to cover each aspect of the problem of evil. This will not be a discussion about the problem of evil, because Dawkins does not use the problem of evil in his case against religion. Instead, the paper will show that Dawkins wrongly concludes that religions are evil because he mistakenly quantifies evil. Second, the paper will attempt to show that the reasons Dawkins gives for God to be improbable are do not conform to good logic. Third, empiricism will be discussed to the extent that its shortcomings are apparent. This will show that Dawkins’ philosophy is not only ill-equipped to speak about God but also self-refuting. Last, the paper will reveal that Dawkins’ claims – indeed, his entire perception of reality – cannot be trusted because they rely solely on sensory input and are not external to a mind which cannot be trusted. Were Dawkins right, we would be forced to conclude that he was wrong. As we will see, no good reason exists to accept Dawkins’ claims, and there is excellent reason to reject them.
Richard Dawkins blames all of the world’s problems on religion. In fact, the Richard Dawkins Foundation uses for promotional material a poster with a picture of the New York City skyline with the twin towers present. The heading reads, “Imagine a world without religion.” This poster obviously communicates that the hijackers responsible for the destruction of the towers acted out of religious delusion, and that religion is the root cause. More than terrorism, however, genocide, massacres, and wars can all be blamed on religion. He notes contemporary conflicts, such as the tension in Northern Ireland, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, and the current civil war in Iraq. Only science, he says (defined here as the opposite of religion), can save us from the evils of religion.
At the same time, he makes these claims blindingly unaware that the horrors of the world have been made more easily possible because of advanced technology whose existence is owed to scientific progress. While he faults religion for causing the current tension in Iraq, he turns a blind eye toward the sophisticated technology used by both the Shia and the Sunnis for the sole purpose of destroying the other. This same somber connection was apparent to Alfred Nobel after he invented dynamite. Religious fanatics flew jetliners into skyscrapers, but Dawkins should be reminded of the countless physicists, engineers, chemists, and the rest of the scientific community who made the routine flying of jetliners routine (not to mention that the jet engine itself is a technological byproduct of World War II). Science cannot escape all of the blame that Richard Dawkins assigns to religion, because science provides the technology that allows us to destroy each other more easily now than ever. “Bad science,” says Marilyn Robinson “is still science just as surely as bad religion is still religion.”
Furthermore, Dawkins assumes that evil can be quantified. We have seen, for example, that he blames the evils of September 11, 2001 on religion, but how evil, exactly, is that? Perhaps evil could be measured by loss of life – nearly four thousand people in this case – yet more die of hunger every three hours. Were the lives lost in the World Trade Center worth more or less than the unnamed starving child in Kenya? Perhaps, for the sake of argument, the lives lost on September 11, 2001 constituted a greater loss because their end resulted from an act that was not only deadly in itself, but an outright symbolic attack on Western culture. But, again, how could this difference be measured? Or the more than the 3000 American soldiers who have lost their lives in Iraq? What is their sacrifice worth? These questions are impossible to answer, and that is exactly the point. (Especially by Congress, which, at its best, can barely muster a non-binding resolution. Rejecting funding for the war would be an attempt to measure the value of the sacrifice of an American soldier.) Perhaps science is more evil than religion, and perhaps it is not. But it can be agreed that terrible things have been done in the name of both and that neither kind of evil can be quantified. Indeed, when he draws comparisons between Hitler and Stalin, Dawkins himself says that “we are not in the business of counting evil heads and compiling two rival roll calls of iniquity” (273).
Most disheartening, however, is Dawkins’ atrocious rewriting of history. Dawkins hold a Hegelian, dialectical view of history, whose progress is driven by human achievement and scientific reasoning. Humanity moves up the ladder, and reason propels our ascent. Dawkins’ commitment to this ever-improving trajectory leaves him numb to individuals and events to the contrary, such as ruthless dictators and acts of genocide. They exist, he says, because history progresses “like a sawtooth and not a smooth improvement” (273). Marilyn Robinson writes, “If the only bad effect of the notion to yield a highly selective reading of the past by dismissing the modem horrors as anomaly, that in itself would he grounds for objection. But it enables a misreading of the history it chooses to acknowledge.” And Dawkins’ misreading is profound.
First, Dawkins dismisses Hitler and Stalin as “appalling reversals” in the trajectory of history. An understatement, indeed. Dawkins addresses these “appalling reversals” in order to show that, although appalling, these reversals do not compromise his view of history. He invites his readers to reach this conclusion by employing the same means that he has. Dawkins tells his readers to first ascertain whether or not Hitler and Stalin were, in fact, atheists. Next, Dawkins cautions his readers to exercise care in determining whether or non Hitler and Stalin committed their misdeeds because they were atheists. Would that Dawkins gave religiously-motivated evildoers the same hearing by first giving a clear account of religion and then going to great lengths to determine whether religion was truly the cause of the evil before assigning blame either way. If such protocol suffices for Hitler and Stalin, then certainly Dawkins can grant the same hearing to the average American Christian.
Second, Dawkins does not seem to realize that a vast majority (again, hard to quantify) of the world’s evils – including the acts committed by Hitler, Stalin, and others, regardless of their motives – have been done not in the name of a particular religion, but with the stated purpose of creating a religious vacuum that would be filled by a secular state. For example, the greatest areligious states, such as the former Soviet Union, the Eastern Europe bloc, and China, were established at the expense of tens of millions of lives and significant poverty and hardship for hundreds of millions more. Their leaders did not seek to indoctrinate children with religious belief; rather, they founded their states upon the premises of human reason and progress, free from the chains of religion. Dawkins should be reminded that countries such as the former Soviet Union were atheist in principle, but their technological progress languished during the Cold War.
Moreover, even religious extremists commit acts of violence with the intention of establishing the same kind of religious void. In other words, the Sunnis fight the Shias for the purposes of gaining a sympathic response were they to win. Instead, the Sunnis are fighting the Shias because they hate the Shia version of the Islamic faith and only want to eradicate it. Wars of this sort are almost never fought to spread belief but to a particular kind of belief. Even Dawkins asks, rhetorically, “Why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of belief?” (278). This is a fair question, but perhaps Dawkins should ask it of himself.
Dawkins seeks to eliminate religious belief of all sorts. He does not use roadside bombs, neighborhood raids, or rudimentary weapons like the Shia Muslims in Iraq in order to achieve his goals. Instead, he uses the best weapons available to him – his faculty of reason, an endowed professorship at Oxford University for the public understanding of science, a CV to expand, book publishers looking for best-selling science writing – in order to wage a war on God. And Dawkins’ war is more ignoble, because it is couched in deceptive rhetoric and sophomoric philosophy.
Even though Dawkins certainly claims no religious beliefs of the sort that he seeks to eradicate, he still remains an ardent believer in human reason and scientific progress. He believes that the world is materialistic. He also believes that any claim must be substantiated with evidence. Though not religious, Dawkins is an empiricist, but his own system of empiricism does not provide sufficient reason to claim God’s nonexistence. Indeed, it is more reasonable to believe in God than to subscribe to the absence propounded in The God Delusion.
DesCartes and not too few after him, including Richard Dawkins, have famously and succinctly placed epistemological truth before ontological truth: “I think, therefore I am.” Thinking precedes being, and truth is determined by its supporting evidence. Steven Pinker, an ardent supporter of Dawkins, recently wrote in Time, “As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious.” He then goes further than DesCartes by grounding this statement in materialism: “…once we realize that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people’s sentience becomes ludicrous.”
For Dawkins, nothing can escape this empiricism. “The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question, even if it is not in practice – or not yet – a decided one” (59). Dawkins elaborates:
“Did Jesus have a human father, or was his mother a virgin at the time of his birth? … Did Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead? Did he himself come alive again, three days after being crucified? There is an answer to every such question, whether or not we can discover it in practice, and it is a strictly scientific answer” (59).
Moreover, “that you cannot prove God’s nonexistence is accepted and trivial, if only in the sense that we never absolutely prove the non-existence of anything. What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn’t) but whether his existence is probable” (55). This, then, is Dawkins’ thesis: that God is so improbable – almost absolutely improbable, but not quite – that belief in God is not only wrong, but it indicates inferiority. Dawkins places God in the category of tooth fairies and unicorns, the discussion of which is both irrelevant and jocular.
In chapter four, after dozens of pages of religious commentary and inordinate praise for Bertrand Russell, Dawkins outlines his central argument for the improbability of God. First, he explains that “one of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.” Design theorists, for example, observe intricate design in the universe and attribute it to an intelligent designer. Dawkins then asserts that this kind of observation of the world results from “the natural tempation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself.” Dawkins presents the problem that would not occur to intelligent design theorists or theists: “the temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the problem of who designed the designer” (156-158). The problem would carry on ad infinitum. On a lecture tour of The God Delusion, Dawkins said that “God, if he exists, would have to be a very very complicated thing indeed, so to postulate a God is to shoot yourself in the conceptual foot, because you are postulating something that is far more complicated than you are trying to explain. If you have problem seeing how matter could just come into existence, try thinking about how complex intelligent entities could spring into existence. It’s many orders of magnitude harder to understand.”
Instead, says Dawkins, a solution to his problem (which really is not much of a problem for theists, who believe in God’s eternality) requires a “crane” – a legitimate, mechanized means of moving up, not a “skyhook” – a fictitious device that drops from the clouds to pull us upward, “for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity” (158).
Evolution, says Dawkins, is this crane. Evolution by natural selection does not happen by pure chance, but by “slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings.” Therefore, “the illusion of design in living creatures is just that – an illusion” (158). Natural selection, as Dawkins defines it, “not only explains the whole of life; it also raises our consciousness to the power of science to explain how organized complexity can emerge from simple beginnings without any deliberate guidance” (116).
Dawkins acknowledges and swiftly dismisses three objections to his theory. First, he acknowledges Michael Behe’s appeal to irreducible complexity, which describes certain aspects of the living world that could only exist had all parts emerged simultaneously and fully functional. There are several examples, such as the eye, cell structure, or the wing of a bird (what good is half a wing?). Dawkins, however, dismisses irreducible complexity on the grounds that its usually the result of someone’s inability to see that certain traits and characteristics are byproducts of evolution that emerge as useful in later generations. For example, fifty percent of a wing is better than no wing at all for an animal falling from a perch in a tree. Given enough time and the right proportions, it turns out that all modern birds emerged from ancestors such as these. Inferior wings – such as a quarter of a wing – were selected out.
Second, Dawkins acknowledges gaps in the fossil record, and creationists are quick to use these gaps to point out deficiencies in the theory of evolution. “If an apparent gap is found,” says Dawkins, they “assume that God, by default, must fill it.” But “gaps shrink as science advances, and God is threatened with eventually having nothing to do and nowhere to hid” (125). Dawkins notes in response, “It is an essential part of the scientific enterprise to admit ignorance, even to exult in ignorance as a challenge to future conquests” (125).
Finally, Dawkins discusses the anthropic principle. This approach appeals to the vastness of the universe and the near-infinite variables that need to be “just right” (Dawkins calls this the “Goldilocks approach”) in order for us to exist in our current form. Tilt the earth’s axis a couple degrees, add a bit of heat or carbon or gravity to the universe, or slightly tweak any one of innumerable variables, and our existence as humans would not only be compromised, but it would be improbable. Both theists and atheists apply the anthropic principle. Theists use it to claim a God who created an ideal universe for our existence in our present time and place. Atheists such as Dawkins, however, point out that our present existence is obvious. The argument usually ends there. Generally, the anthropic principle says little in the way of the existence of God.
Thus far, Dawkins has claimed that the theory of evolution provides an adequate explanation for origin of life and the nonexistence of God, and “he supports that premise by trying to refute objections to its being biologically possible that life has come to be that way.” Dawkins’ argument is summarized by Alvin Plantinga as following:
“We know of no irrefutable objections to its being biologically possible that all of life has come to be by way of unguided Darwinian process;
therefore
all of life has come to be by way of unguided Darwinian process.”
Or, put more simply:
“We know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that p;
therefore,
p is true.”
To borrow one final analogy from Plantinga:
“I come into the departmental office and announce to the chairman that the dean has just authorized a $50,000 raise for me; naturally he wants to know why I think so. I tell him that we know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that the dean has done that. My guess is he’d gently suggest that it is high time for me to retire.”
Plantinga also wonders why Dawkins thinks that God would need to be complex in the first place, and how the complexity of something renders it any more improbable. Why does God need to be more complex than Dawkins thinks creation is, and if God were, why would God feel the need to reveal that to his creation? Terry Eagleton might be right when he compares God’s creating act to that of “an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will impress his research grant body to no end.”
Additionally, there exist in historic Christianity perfectly acceptable and theologically coherent notions of God’s simplicity – the exact opposite kind of God that Dawkins believes should exist. In God, according to divine simplicity, “there is no distinction of thing and property, actuality and potentiality, essence and existence, and the like.” Would Richard Dawkins claim that this infinitely simple God (as God, according to Aquinas, is; he’s also simultaneously infinitely complex, which doesn’t bode well for empiricists) would create a universe that it is even more simple?
Moreover, for the sake of argument, were God complex in the way that Dawkins thinks he is, God would not be rendered any more or less improbable. This, more than anything, points out the deficiencies of Dawkins’ presumptions. Dawkins, as an empirical scientist, is a materialist. Plantinga explains that “given materialism and the idea that the ultimate objects in our universe are the elementary particles of physics, perhaps a being that knew a great deal would be improbable—how could those particles get arranged in such a way as to constitute a being with all that knowledge?” In other words, the problem is not with Dawkins’ logic – it is quite sound. As a materialist, Dawkins has arrived at the perfectly logical conclusion at which any empirically-minded materialist would arrive: an infinitely complex God is infinitely improbable. The problem, instead, is materialism itself.
Dawkins’ philosophical framework can be faulted in several respects. First, given that not everyone believes Dawkins’ dialectic view of history – i.e. that reason and progress put twenty-first century philosophers and scientists in a position better suited for finding truth – Dawkins owes his readers a defense of it. Dawkins also owes an explanation because empiricism is a relatively new and unproven development compared to other means of determining truth (and a very new development relative to the age of the earth).
Second, empiricism is self-referentially incoherent; the criteria to which science owes its ascendancy cannot itself be verified by science. Empirical truth also relies on scientific method, yet the scientific method cannot prove the truth of empiricism. No experiment can test the validity of the hypothesis that empirical knowledge is the best or only kind, because anything outside of empiricism is beyond the means by which empiricism is determined as true. Additionally, empirical knowledge must be verifiable or falsifiable, but “this principle itself is not verifiable or falsifiable. So if the principle is true, then it is not true.” Such is the philosophical framework that undergirds much of Dawkins’ thought.
Moreover, empiricism claims that the material world is the only means of determining the truth of reality. Dawkins seems to define it thus: “Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain. An atheist in this sense of philosophical naturalist is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no sould that outlasts the body and no miracles – except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don’t yet understand. If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world as it is now imperfectly understood, we hope eventually to understand it and embrace it within the natural” (14)
But materialism, so defined, cannot prove the truth of Dawkins’ statement. After a recent lecture, a member from the audience asked Dawkins to respond to the assertion made by theists that God is outside natural law and not subject to evidentialism, which presupposes materialism. Dawkins responded, “That’s too easy. You talk your way out of providing a rational argument by decreeing by fiat that God declares himself outside of matter and doesn’t need the same kind of argument as anything else.” As his response indicates, Dawkins is unable to use materialism to defend materialism; materialism simply does not provide the tools to do such a thing. Plantinga has noted that all “explanations come to an end; for theism they come to an end in God… The materialist or physicalist… doesn’t have an explanation for the existence of elementary particles: they just are.” Science, given its methods of inquiry, is simply not in a position to determine whether or not God can exist.
It is not so improbable, then, that God exists outside of the reach of empiricism. It’s not that the improbability of God’s existence is necessarily better or worse than Dawkins claims, it’s that it’s impossible for Dawkins to determine either way. Therefore, using Dawkins’ own criteria for determining truth, it as reasonable to believe that God exists as it is to believe that God does not exist.
This does not render empiricism utterly useless, however. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change determined in its latest report that human beings – not natural processes – are very likely causing global warming. This report makes its claim and defends it with a slew of legitimate evidence. If this report were as true as Dawkins claims that Christianity is false – in other words, a very high probability – it would be imprudent to reject on the same grounds that we reject Dawkins. Enough of the right kind of evidence about climate change can confirm the hypothesis that the world is warming. But evidence for or against God cannot make such definitive claims.
Dawkins most significant fallacy, however, is that he is self-defeating. The last chapter of The God Delusion is the most charitable because in it, Dawkins the angry philosopher departs and Dawkins the scientist emerges. In this chapter, Dawkins explains how religion seeks to provide inspiration, but science, all things considered, does a better job. Dawkins writes, “The evolution of complex life, indeed its very existence in a universe obeying physical laws, is wonderfully surprising – or would be but for the fact that surprise is an emotion that can exist only in a brain which is the product of a very surprising process” (366).
In other words, for Dawkins, surprise doesn’t exist abstractly, but only in our perception of it. Our perceptions, feelings, emotions, and even our faculty for reason all result from a complex firing of neurons: “…the way we see the world, and the reason why we find some things intuitively easy to grasp and others hard, is that our brains are themselves evolved organs…” (367). Dawkins strongly questions his own ability to make truth claims about the world: “What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished real world but a model of the real world, regulated and adjusted by sense data – a model that is constructed so that it is useful for dealing with the real world” (371).
This is an interesting lens through which to read the whole of Dawkins book. Essentially, we know Dawkins’ theory because our brains tell us, yet our brains are merely the end of a biological process, and as such, only work with sensory input, not objective reality. Plantinga notes that “from [Dawkins’] point of view, our beliefs would be dependent on neurophysiology, and (no doubt) a belief would just be a neurological structure of some complex kind. Now the neurophysiology on which our beliefs depend will doubtless be adaptive; but why think for a moment that the beliefs dependent on or caused by that neurophysiology will be mostly true? Why think our cognitive faculties are reliable?”
He continues, “From a naturalist point of view the thought that our cognitive faculties are reliable… would be at best a naïve hope. The naturalist can be reasonably sure that the neurophysiology underlying belief formation is adaptive: but nothing follows about the truth of the beliefs depending on that neurophysiology.”
We have excellent reason to discard all of the central claims and most of the secondary ones that Dawkins makes in The God Delusion. We have seen that, contrary to Dawkins, religion is not to be blamed for the evil of the world. Assigning blame on religion grossly overlooks the failings of technology and assumes that we can quantify evil in the first place. We have also seen that the logic by which Dawkins proves God’s improbability is fatally flawed. This paper has also demonstrated significant flaws with empiricism and its ability to make claims about the existence or nonexistence of God. And finally, Dawkins himself indicates that our faculty for reason lies within a brain designed to adapt. Following Dawkins, we can only know what we perceive, not objective reality. Dawkins is self-referentially incoherent: to accept Dawkins’ conclusion as true requires that we claim it as not true. Therefore, it is reasonable and rationally justified to reject Dawkins’ claims as much worse than claims about the existence of God.
One of my friends just published an article in the Journal of Religion and Communication about Dawkins that makes some similar arguments. Hers is about his use of religious telitic (that is, having telos) narrative.
Bethany
February 24, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Why are you so desperate to believe in fairies? Dawkins is a seriously intelligent human being, well educated and driven by science and evidence. You, on the other hand, just want to believe in something, and would continue to argue for the existence of fairies even if there was considerable evidence contrary that fact. I, as Dawkins and others, would immediately be inclined to `believe` in God and fairies and so forth if there was ANY tangible evidence, but there’s not, is there?
And that;s really all I have to say. I (as Dawkins) am not in s position of `having` to prove anything to your ilk. It is too late for you probably, your parents clearly did a mercilessly good job – I bet you cant wait to die!
Matthew Hale
August 8, 2007 at 12:29 pm
Also, please bear in mind – for all your airy-fairy words and meaningless, baseless arguments (which use a lot of words but say precisely nothing) were it not for `science` and evidence based thinking and rationality (for which you seem to carry some disdain) we would all be sitting in puddles of our own excrement, riddled with disease and with pretty much NONE of the medicines, transport or technology (including computers, networks or your beloved Blog in which you argue so passionately against science and rationalism) which we currently enjoy. See what a wonderful country Iraq is. Iran. India. Let’s all fester in ignorance. Ah yes, that’s the direction we want to be going in – fuck science, you just need faith man and some supernatural non-entity to look up to…. if you truly believe this bile then frankly there is no hope for you. You are like a child in need of a parent figure, except I suspect you are an adult, which makes it quite frightening. I can only assume you never actually read the book (TGD) or if you did, you didn’t understand it.
Matthew Hale
August 8, 2007 at 12:53 pm
Your refutation of Dawkins accusation that “religion constitutes a source of great evil in the world” appears to be “ah yes but how do you define evil?” What kind of an argument is that? The fact is, religion has caused, and continues to cause many bad things to happen.
Secondly you seem to believe that God could exist and not be infinitely complex. “Why does God need to be more complex than Dawkins thinks creation is”. I would have thought it obvious that any being with the intelligence to design all life on earth, design the physical laws of the universe, monitor the actives of all human beings simultaneously including their thoughts and prayers, understand every subject imaginable, and know everything there is to know about the universe, would be extremely complex!
Edward Griffin
August 24, 2007 at 9:58 pm
Michael Hale,
There’s no need to be coarse. If you’d like to have a discussion, fine. But please take your insults elsewhere. I normally wouldn’t respond, but doing so will be a good intellectual exercise, and, besides, it’s Saturday afternoon and I have nothing else to do.
You seem to deeply value “science and evidence-based thinking and rationality” (empiricism) and you’re not the first. So let me explain in a few paragraphs my difficulty with empiricism’s ability to determine certain truth.
John Locke, who provided the epistemological groundwork for the scientific revolution, said that we can have certain knowledge about things that are self-evident because we experience them, but these experiences still remain external to the mind. We know these experiences because they manifest themselves as ideas, and we can determine truth based on how our ideas agree or disagree with each other. For example, if we have an idea about blue-ness and encounter something in the world that is blue, our ideas agree with one another and we can make a truth claim: “That object is blue.” This experience, in turn, reinforces our idea of blueness, so that next time we encounter something that is blue, we can even more accurately make a truth claim about its blueness. Or if (based, again, on experience) we have an idea of triangularity, we can identify triangles in the world by determining the extent to which they agree with our idea of triangularity. This process, again, reinforces our idea of triangularity, so that next time we see a triangle, we are in a better position to determine that it is, in fact, a triangle.
We can apply this principle to more complex things. For example, if we learn by experience, evolution, or whatever that murder deserves death, then we are better able to determine that murder, in reality, deserves death when we are confronted with such a situation.
According to empiricism (Dawkins’ epistemology), in cases of blueness, triangles, and morality of this sort, these ideas are readily accessible to us and we have no problem making truth claims. But about more complex things, or newly encountered experiences, we may not have ideas. The truth of these particular ideas must be verified, because they are not self-evident. The way to resolve this is to perform a lot of experimentation, to check our hypotheses with the reality of our experiences, and tweak our hypotheses accordingly. The truth of a proposition, then, is true if it conforms to our knowledge, observation, and experience. The proportion to which our evidence corresponds to our proposition determines the probability of the truth of our proposition. Locke’s epistemology is the groundwork for empiricism, and it anticipated the scientific method and the technological innovation science would bring.
But empiricism – testing truths with evidence and applying the reasults, using reason, to reality – can only yield a probability, not an absolute. Based on experience, we may declare with a very high degree of probability that objects we drop will reach the ground, and we may even formulate their rate of speed and acceleration. But we cannot determine that this is absolutely true, because to do so would require an infinite amount of evidence and an infinite number of experiences. This obviously doesn’t mean that empiricism is useless: science has contributed enormously to the well-being of the world in the centuries since Locke wrote. But empiricism and evidentialism cannot determine absolute truth, only highly probable truth.
To sum up thus far, empirical (or evidential) knowledge cannot be empirically (or evidentially) shown to be absolutely true. The scientific method can only yield probabilities, not absolutes.
It follows, then, that Dawkins could produce all the evidence in the world and still not declare any absolute truth. Such claims are simply outside the bounds of empirical knowledge. Dawkins’ absolute claim is that God does not exist, but Dawkins’ epistemological framework simply does not allow him to make such a claim. (The inverse is also true, which is why I find the Intelligent Design movement to be lacking for the same reasons – both Dawkins and ID are too confident about empiricism’s ability to achieve certain knowledge.)
Dawkins hints at this in the last part of the book. Since Dawkins is a materialist and does not believe in a soul or any kind of non-physical entity that resides in the body, anything we think comes not as a result of an immaterial substance inside of us (a mind, soul, etc.), but as a result of the combined efforts of neurophysiological processes in our brains. Our beliefs, too, depend on our neurophysiology, and a belief, assertion, or claim to truth would be a neurophysiological process of some sort (I’m paraphrasing Alvin Plantinga here). But how can we be sure that such beliefs would be true, since the neurophysiological process that produced them have evolved only adaptive reasons? The point is that evolution is adaptive in a way that aids survival, not in such a way that allows cognitive function to be dependable regarding truth claims of any kind – absolute or probable. Dawkins “can be reasonably sure that the neurophysiology underlying belief formation is adaptive, but nothing follows about the truth of the beliefs depending on that neurophysiology. In fact he’d have to hold that it is unlikely, given unguided evolution, that our cognitive faculties are reliable. It’s as likely, given unguided evolution, that we live in a sort of dream world as that we actually know something about ourselves and our world.”
It follows that Dawkins cannot rationally claim that his propositions are no more or less absolutely true than any religious person’s propositions, since both come from a neurophysiology that evolved for adaptability and survival, not epistemology. Using Dawkins’ line of reasoning, it is just as reasonable to affirm Dawkins’ propositions as it is to affirm the propositions of Christianity. I happen to believe that it is more reasonable (even rational) to believe in the truth claims of Christianity because I believe that human beings are made in the image of God and thereby endowed with a faculty to determine truth.
Regarding evil, it’s true that religion has been the source of great evil in the world. None of Dawkins’ examples is incorrect. Perhaps the most poignant iteration of this was the poster distributed by Dawkins’ organization of the Twin Towers whose caption read, “Imagine a World Without Religion.” You’ve probably seen it, but in case not, the poster made a compelling link between the destruction on 9/11 with the religious fanatics who brought down the Twin Towers. Dawkins is right: fanatics brought down the towers for religious reasons. But it is also worth noting that the towers were also brought down by planes – a technological marvel for which we have chemistry and physics to thank.
My point is this: it is true that religion has been a source of great evil in the world, but science is not without blame, and Dawkins would do well to make a more accurate comparison of the two. Dawkins, for example, nowhere confesses that science has provided both the technology and rationale for racism, genocide, modern warfare, and a myriad of other atrocities, whether they have been carried out by religious fanatics, politicians, or neutral parties acting with good intentions. In other words, when comparing religion and science, “to set the declared hopes of one against the real-world record of the other is clearly not useful, no matter which of them is flattered by the comparison” (Robinson). So I suppose that it’s not that I question how one defines evil, but rather how one quantifies evil. And since quantifying evil is too subjective to be useful, accurately comparing the evils of religion with the evils of science simply isn’t possible. (Personally, I tend to think that evil is an inherent part of the human condition, whether those humans are religious, scientists, both, or neither.)
You also infer from my skepticism with Dawkins that I can’t wait to die. I assume that you mean that I can’t wait to get to heaven, to rid myself of my wretched earthly existence. You assume that my belief in the next life means that I assign no importance (or less importance) to this one. But this simply is not what many religious people in general and Christians in particular believe. For Christianity, the belief that this world will burn and that our predominant goal is to exit it are relatively recent and certainly not held by everyone. My own tradition believes that the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of earth do not possess clearly defined boundaries or are easily separated from one another, and that the latter inbreaks into the former. This is not a “get the hell out” theology, but one that embraces the physical and the material. We believe Christ became incarnate which, among other things, symbolizes God’s affirmation of the physical creation. Our mandate, then, is to explore, discover, learn about, and care for the physical world. We are called to engage the world in all its forms – scientifically, artistically, culturally, etc. In fact, I tend to think that the hope of Christian narrative provides better reasons to engage the world scientifically than the skepticism and nihilism so prevalent in the scientific community. And, to be clear, I have no disdain for science, only for scientific epistemology.
You conclude your comment with the accusation that I have not read The God Delusion, or, if I have, then I have not understood it. This accusation – the first part false (I’ve read several of Dawkins’ books), the second part likely so – does not even take into account Dawkins’ (and your, I assume) disastrous misreading of the Biblical narrative or the extent to which he takes out of context the excerpts from the writings of the Church Fathers. I suppose, then, I’ll accuse both you and Richard Dawkins of the same thing: that you have not “read” the Christian narrative, and if so, then you have not understood it. I would only ask that you try to understand it as hard as I’ve tried to understand Dawkins. Doing so would yield more fruitful conversation for both of us.
Kent
o1mnikent
August 26, 2007 at 12:32 am
Firstly Dawkins doesn’t make the claim that biblical God absolutely does not exist. He just equates its probability to that of Zeus, fairies, etc.
Consider the ramifications of your comparison of gravity with the existence of God. “Based on experience, we may declare with a very high degree of probability that objects we drop will reach the ground, and we may even formulate their rate of speed and acceleration. But we cannot determine that this is absolutely true” Yes it’s possible that gravity doesn’t exist at all if every scientific experiment that ever measured gravity was in error, and every person that ever observed it was mistaken. The probability of that is unbelievably small. Now you are saying that we should attribute to shear luck everything we’ve ever learned that suggests God doesn’t exist. But the probability of all this evidence being false, is equally tiny.
May I ask why you are not a materialist. What evidence do you have that there is anything non-physical like a soul? Surely by definition, there cannot be any physical evidence?
You believe that human beings are made in the image of God. This implies that God didn’t completely invent our design, but copied ideas from his own design. You also believe that God always existed. This raises the question, where did the design come from in the first place? We humans have a part to our design that wasn’t even designed by God. Doesn’t this raise the “who design the designer” question.
You make a point about science being responsible for the invention of the planes which brought down the twin towers. This to me is quite ridiculous. Nowhere is it written in scientific text that if we kill non-believers along with ourselves we will be rewarded for eternity in some paradise. This is what the Islamic fundamentalists believe. Their actions are not due to some inherent evil in the human condition, their actions are rational BUT ONLY IF you accept everything in the Koran as fact. It is clearly the religion that is the problem.
Your approach to the science vs religion debate is all wrong. You rely on science for your modern way of life. Even if you don’t realise it you yourself know far more more about science than someone living at the time the bible was written. You cannot dismiss science in favour of religion. If you’re ill, would you rely on faith alone to heal you, or would you accept treatment? The question is not “should we accept science OR religion”, it is “does religion stand up to scientific reason”. The answer is no! If the answer were yes, religion would *be* a science.
You seem to have a problem quantifying evil, as if you are saying there can be no absolute judge of good and bad, and no well-defined ordering that can say one thing is more or less good than another thing. But isn’t this exactly what God is supposed to be able to do. Doesn’t Christianity suppose that God is the absolutely perfect judge of morality?
Finally, you mention reading Christian narrative. Have you read the bible all the way through? What do you make of all the times when God ordered the murder of people, the threats made by God, the condoning of slavery, the contradictions, the incorrect or impossible or absurd scientific claims, the human and animal sacrifices, and the stoning to death of people?
Edward Griffin
August 26, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Edward,
First, thanks for your response. It’s good to encounter an intellectually-fulfilled atheist who is also polite and who is willing to have a good discussion. I appreciate that. You are giving atheism a good name.
You are right to point out that “Dawkins doesn’t make the claim that biblical God absolutely does not exist. He just equates its probability to that of Zeus, fairies, etc.” But I have trouble with that comparison, not only because it personally offends me, but because it assumes that Christians come to belief in God as if God were a scientific hypothesis of some kind to be verified by evidence. When God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, Moses didn’t say, “Hey, look at that weird bush! It’s on fire but isn’t burning up! And listen to those sounds coming out of it! What’s the best explanatory hypothesis I can think of? Perhaps there is an all-knowing, all-powerful wholly good being who created the world, and he is addressing me from that bush. Yes, that must be it, that’s a good explanation of the phenomena.” Christians do not reason as follows: “What is the best explanation for what we see about us? Well, let’s see, perhaps there is an omniscient, omnipotent, wholly good being who created the world. Yes that’s it; and perhaps this being is one of three persons, the other two being his divine son and a third person proceeding from the first two (yet there are not three Gods but one); the second person became incarnate, suffered, was crucified, and died, thus atoning for our sins and making it possible for us to have life and have it more abundantly. Right; that’s got to be it; that’s a dandy explanation of the facts.” What Christian would reason like that?
Hardly any. Rather, the traditional Christian thinks she knows these things by way of faith and its correlate, divine revelation through divinely inspired Scripture and/or the teaching of the church, the body of Christ. She doesn’t, of course, claim that these teachings constitute the best scientific explanation of some phenomena, anymore than we believe that there has been a past because we think this is a good scientific explanation of such present phenomena as wrinkled faces, dusty books, rusted automobiles and crumbling mountains. Or that I had cereal for breakfast this morning. (Of course once she knows, as she thinks, that God has created the heavens and the earth she can use that fact to explain what might otherwise be inexplicable.) Dawkins makes a wholly unjustified, unargued, and implausible assumption about Christian teachings: that they are really proposed and held as a sort of science, an effort to explain such things, e.g., as that there is a great deal of organized complexity and variety and apparent design in the world. Looked at as a scientific hypothesis designed to explain organized complexity, Christian doctrines are perhaps wanting–perhaps almost as wanting as science is, looked at as religion, as a way of coming to be in the right relationship with God.’
Regarding gravity, I disagree with you. We cannot make absolute claims about it, as history has taught us. Newton did it, and the scientific community unquestioningly followed him for three and a half centuries before Einstein’s theory of gravity proved him and everyone else wrong, and also introduced another set of questions that have yet to be answered. My point is not that we should stop asking questions (thank goodness Einstein didn’t), but that we should be wary of our ability to make certain claims with only evidence. We can’t interpret reality apart from human experience, and human is experience is too limited, too subjected, and based to a great extent on habits. If we were perfect beings with infinite knowledge, we would postulate certain truth based on evidence. But we can’t since we’re limited by the capacity of our perception.
All this is to say that there can be sources of knowledge in addition to reason (i.e., perception, memory, rational intuition…). Dawkins seems to think that if there were any sources of information and knowledge in addition to reason, the deliverances of those sources would necessarily go contrary to reason. But of course that’s just a confusion. Christians and other theists may think they know by faith that God created the world and in some way superintends or orchestrates or guides the process of evolution (perhaps by seeing to it that the right mutations arise at the right time, that certain bands of creatures don’t suffer untimely extinction, etc.); then they would be claiming to know something in addition to what reason delivers–but not, of course, something that goes contrary to reason. (There is nothing in current evolutionary science to show or even suggest that God did not superintend evolution.) It is no part of reason to insist that there can’t be any other source of truth; it is perfectly in accord with reason to suppose that there are sources of truth in addition to reason.
The assumption seems to be that if you can’t show by reason that a given proposed source of truth is in fact reliable, then it is improper to accept the deliverances of that source. This assumption goes back to the Enlightenment claim that, while there could indeed be such a thing as divine revelation, it would be irrational to accept any belief as divinely revealed unless we could give a good argument from reason that it was. But again, why think a thing like that? Take other sources of knowledge: rational intuition, memory, and perception, for example. Can we show by the first two that the third is in fact reliable–that is, without relying in anyway on the deliverances of the third? No, we can’t; nor can we show by the first and third that memory is reliable, nor (of course) by perception and memory that rational intuition is. Nor can we give a decent, non-question-begging rational argument that reason itself is indeed reliable. Does it follow that there is something irrational in trusting these alleged sources, in accepting their deliverances? Certainly not. So why insist that it is irrational to accept, say, the Internal Testimony of the Holy Spirit unless we can give a rationally conclusive argument for the conclusion that there is indeed such a thing, and that what it delivers is the truth? Why treat these alleged sources differently? Is there anything but arbitrariness in insisting that any alleged source of truth must justify itself at the bar of rational intuition, perception and memory? Perhaps God has given us several different sources of knowledge about the world, and none of them can be shown to be reliable using only the resources of the others.
You ask why I am not a materialist. As I’ve mentioned earlier, and as Dawkins believes, materialism assumes that what we know is only derived from a neurophysiology that has evolved for adaptivity; it has *not* evolved in a way that guarantees true belief. We survived because we, like all modern species, outran or outsmarted our competitors. But our traits, like the traits of all other species that exist today, were selected for skill and prowess, for survival and reproduction, *not* for making epistemological claims. If materialism were true, I would not be able to determine with any kind of certainty whether or not anything extra-material existed, nor could I form certain beliefs about the veracity of the claim that materialism is true. Perhaps materialism is true. But if you are a materialist, you simply have no way of knowing, or forming beliefs that you can be sure are certain, or making epistemological claims about materialism in general – even with infinite evidence – because your neurophysiology won’t permit it. If you are a materialist, it follows that you cannot know whether materialism is true or not, and that seems to me significantly more irrational than believing in something supernatural.*
You ask, “Where did the design come from in the first place? We humans have a part to our design that wasn’t even designed by God. Doesn’t this raise the ‘who design the designer’ question.” Every argument for existence comes to an end. In Greek mythology, it was a turtle that held up an infinite series of turtles which, in turn, held up the world. For you, it comes to an end in the Big Bang. For physicists, it comes to an end in elementary particles. For me, the argument comes to the end in God. All of these propositions are equally reasonable. If one holds (as I do) that reason is not the only source of truth, then it is more rational to place God at the end of the argument than the Big Bang.
You write: “You make a point about science being responsible for the invention of the planes which brought down the twin towers. This to me is quite ridiculous. Nowhere is it written in scientific text that if we kill non-believers along with ourselves we will be rewarded for eternity in some paradise. This is what the Islamic fundamentalists believe. Their actions are not due to some inherent evil in the human condition, their actions are rational BUT ONLY IF you accept everything in the Koran as fact. It is clearly the religion that is the problem.”
No. It is clearly Islamic fundamentalism that is the problem. It is less clear to me how religion in general is the problem. How might pacifists – also acting just as vehemently out of religious belief – be to blame?
Moreover, the example of the twin towers was not meant to blame science, but only point out its contribution and to undermine the claim that science is always a neutral third party that innocently follows pure reason and nothing else. The atomic bomb, the agents used in biological and chemical warfare, and other technological achievements have been used for evil by non-religious people. Why must science claim innocence any more than religious people claim innocence? Even the internet – for all its good – has made stalking, child pornography, gambling addiction, and other vices more easily accessible. We shouldn’t denounce religion on the grounds that fanatics destroyed the twin towers any more than we should denounce science because scientists developed the atomic bomb (or denounce the room I’m sitting in now because there’s a stain on the carpet). “It is child’s play to denounce a subject by pointing to the myriad ways in which it may be misapplied; misuse and misapplication are rife in all areas of human understanding: politics, science, education, medicine, religion. But it is faulty logic to conclude that this is necessarily the fault of the set of ideas being traduced” (Vickers). The point is this: evil exists not because religious people are evil but because *all humans* are evil, and all of their constructions – regardless of intent – are flawed in some way. Science doesn’t kill people; religion doesn’t kill people; *people* kill people.
You remind me that “Even if you don’t realise it you yourself know far more about science than someone living at the time the bible was written. You cannot dismiss science in favour of religion.” I don’t follow the logic of that statement. I enjoy the vast benefits of scientific inquiry, and (oddly) it is my belief in God that compels me to think this way. It’s not science I have anything against. On the contrary, I only have a problem with scientists who espouse vitriol against religion when they do not understand some of the shortcomings inherent in their own epistemology. The question is not “does religion stand up to scientific reason,” it is “does *science* stand up to scientific reason.” We have reached territory where science, using the tools of science, is ill-equipped to make these kinds of epistemological claims.
You wonder how I can maintain a skepticism about quantifying evil while simultaneously positing God as “the absolutely perfect judge of morality.” I don’t see this as a problem. My problem is not that absolute judgments can’t be made, it is that human beings, for a myriad of reasons, can’t make them.
Last, you ask what I make of the times when God ordered the murder of people, made threats, condoned slavery, demanded animal sacrifices, or ordered that individuals be stoned to death. You also express skepticism at the times the Bible contradicts itself and make absurd scientific claims. First, the Bible is not a book. It is a collection of mythology, letters, poetry, story-telling, moral code, proverbs, songs, and apocalypse. Dawkins fails to note the importance of genre in interpretation (for example, I doubt he would want me to read TGD allegorically). He also does not seem to understand the enormous importance of cultural understanding entailed in writing, editing, and reading a text.
Second, Dawkins assumes both modern science and a modern notion of historical understanding when reading the Bible. Dawkins anachronistically assumes that the Bible’s writers, editors, and redactors viewed history and science in the same way that he does. “Just as Jesus told stories to get across his points, the Gospellers told stories about him. It doesn’t follow that they are false because they are stories – any more than a history is true because it is a history” (Vickers). There was a time in human history when meaning was not derived from the scientific method. The people of Israel didn’t spend centuries believing the creation narrative because they believed the earth was created in seven days. I doubt they even cared.
Last, I might also point out that, if Richard Dawkins looked more closely, he might see that he has more in common than he thinks with the Christ whom he so deplores. He would see, for example, that he shares a common hate of religious dogmaticm: a kind of religion that is so unaccepting and exclusive that God himself had to intervene in his own creation to stop it – the kind that spawns all the evils of the Bible that are found in Dawkins’ litany of reasons for thinking the whole book is absurd. Dawkins would scoff at the preposterous idea of divine intervention, but he would do well to remember that thoughtful Christians are equally aghast. Dawkins might, in his comparison between himself and the Christ, also see a shared intolerance of hypocrisy, where religious people boast an exclusive claim to truth. Christ says: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” What he’s saying here, of course, is that the religion that both he and Dawkins despises needs prompt eradication. Both Dawkins and Jesus offer alternatives that are exclusive (“nobody comes to the Father except through me” / “nobody understands T/truth except through science and reason”), but I would argue for the superiority of Jesus’ alternative because it is inspired by love, truth, and a zeal for justice. Diana Eck has artfully noted that the verb ‘to believe’ is etymologically linked to ‘to love.’ Jesus – not Richard Dawkins – understands this. Dawkins’ path, on the other hand, is one of hate and virtiol, which he justifies with a vehement stamp of the foot and an “I have had enough!” He thinks he’s justified in this, but I think he’s acting like an immature two-year-old (who then has the nerve to call religious people childish, in need of better parenting!). Entertainment like this makes for bestselling books, but doesn’t make for great philosophy.
*portions of my comment thus far are quoted or paraphrased from articles by Alvin Plantinga.
Kent
September 7, 2007 at 6:11 pm
‘He continues, “From a naturalist point of view the thought that our cognitive faculties are reliable… would be at best a naïve hope.’
Every person who enters the lottery with odds of 14 million to one against has at best a naive hope of winning the lottery.
Therefore, nobody can win a lottery.
Steven Carr
September 9, 2007 at 1:24 pm