On The God Delusion
I do not know quite what to make of Richard Dawkins. He knows a lot about that field of science which explains how organisms develop over time, which was born with Darwin’s study and publication of On The Origin of Species. Dawkins has made it his life’s work to persuade people of the “facts” of science, not the “fiction” of faith. In so doing, he has strayed well into physics, psychology, astrology, philosophy, and, of course, theology. I do not know what to make of him, because I do not know quite what he wants to be. I do not criticise his field of work: to the contrary, as I hope to explain, it is extremely valuable for atheist, theist and agnostic alike. I am all in favour of a multi-disciplined approach to science, and am far more likely to read a science book that is about religion than one just about science – I am interested in religion over science. It is perhaps a surprise, then, that I have only just read a book by Richard Dawkins.
Good Writing, Poor Argument: Richard Dawkins
From the excerpts of this and other works, I had formed the opinion that Dawkins is a very good writer, but that his argument is flaky. I will admit to being wary of reading The God Delusion, especially because its aim is to “disprove” religion as a concept in a way that religion cannot “prove” itself. I know Christians who are divided on the issue of whether we should ignore the likes of Dawkins, or should fight fire with fire. My view has been that it is impossible to fight fire with fire, because religion is in a field of study so divorced from science that scientific process and argument cannot possibly be used to defend or promote it. In this, I think Dawkins and I agree – Christianity, or any of the other religions he despises, cannot advance a coherent scientific proof of the existance of God (or the resurrection of Christ, or the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, etc.) in the same way that Dawkins can prove the age of the universe and theorise on its conception. We agree, too, on the utter nonsence of the so-called “Intelligent Design” theories that attempt, by word games and feebly inaccurate logic puzzles that scientific evidence of a “creator” exists, and can be proven. I suspect that “Intelligent Design” theory is like a particularly good dream for Richard Dawkins, as Christians attempt with woefully misplaced confidence that they have found scientific proof of God. They try to fight fire with fire, and fail. They try to out-science the scientists, and fail. Quelle surprise.
On occasions where I have heard Christians discussing Richard Dawkins, I felt myself getting annoyed at their approach. He was a threat – the “militant atheist” monster trying to destroy religion. Why couldn’t he just understand faith? We must guard ourselves against him. If you read The God Delusion, make sure to take an antidote. (Several theologians and religious theorists have produced mass-market editions directly questioning The God Delusion.) These books are very useful entries to the debate*, but they have been poorly deployed by Christians. Church bookstalls and Christian bookshops proudly display multiple copies, but Dawkins’ original is conspicuously absent. It is not for me to suggest what people sell, but I would like to see The God Delusion met as a challenge of ideas, and a genuine debate to take place in the minds of the pew-fodder rolling through Churches each week. For anyone to take anything Dawkins writes at face value is a huge mistake, but it is equally stupid to foster prejudiced views of Richard Dawkins. Yes, Dawkins delights in the quasi-argument, the semi-assertion, and the half-truth, but there is no excuse for taking his rebutters at face value either! If Dawkins’ chief argument is that religion blinds by complacency in ignorance, one can only prove his point by harbouring false views about his books! I see “organised religion” as a necessary (and biblical) part of Christianity, but I firmly believe that nobody should ever take what is said from the pulpit at face value. We should all be theologians in our own ways, arriving at biblical interpretation or personal commitments because of an independent thought process that delivers that interpretation. In other words, fully-formed beliefs should not be parachuted into our minds by professional religious leaders: they should challlenge us and equip us to genuinely seek the answers for ourselves. In this, then, I think Christians should be encouraged to examine Richard Dawkins and his theory of delusion as well as being encouraged to read those who have challenged him in print.
It was impossible to begin reading The God Delusion without reminding myself of my faith. I did not read the book seeking conversion to atheism, and nor did I begin it determined to finish with my religion more firmly entrenched than before. I read it as a genuine attempt to understand why Richard Dawkins thinks relgion is bad – which is, after all, what the book is about. I am a firm believer that religious faith is meaningless if one is too scared to approach a book that seeks to undermine it, and also that religious people do the world a great disservice if they fail to engage in a genuine debate on such subjects as the psychology of religion. As I have tried to explain, I think fighting Dawkins-esque science with an embarrasingly childish pseudo-scientific response is a flawed plan. Dawkins loves to dwell on evidence, and a favourite maxim is that we should be taught how to think, not what to think. It is unclear whether he would have people taught the possibility of psychological or philisophical thought, but one can only speculate.
Given his love of fact and evidence, then, it is amazing to see the regularity with which Dawkins gives his reader semi-facts. It does not take an Oxford professor to see why courts of law ensure witnesses give “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”. Half-truths can be pursuasive, but they are no way to win an argument. Very rarely in The God Delusion does Dawkins outline differences in opinion in the theological field. He expects his readers to take his understanding of theology at face value: sure, some theologians would agree with him on each individual point, but it is no way to present an argument. One comical example is his argument that, to paraphrase, nobody understands the Trinity. Another, clearly inserted for laughs but actually revealing much about Dawkins’ attitude to the Bible, is that Adam and Eve were banished from Eden and mankind cursed for all subsequent generations because they were caught “scrumping”. In the same section, he elaborates that they had been told about the danger of eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, stating simply that the Knowledge turned out to be that they were naked. Such flagrant disregard of scholarly debate on theological matters is commonplace.
Where The God Delusion makes reference to theological debate, Dawkins tends to rubbish one position, then praise a “more sophisticated” or “more advanced” argument. It is Dawkins’ prerogative to decide what is more or less advanced, but I reason it intolerably arrogant to make such distinctions in what remains a thoroughly theoretical field. Dawkins bases his academic study on the fact that religion has no “evidence”, but deals with philosophy and theology as if it is transparent which side of each debate is reasonable. I wonder what a more “advanced” theory of theology actually is to Dawkins – is it one which is closer to his point of view, or one which has more theoretical evidence behind it, or one which more people agree with? I have come to conclusions on many theological issues, have decided to remain actively seized of other matters, and have yet to encounter more. In each case, I do not demean the opposing positions – they may turn out to be right after all. Dawkins cannot get over his belief that a scientific approach can be taken towards every academic field: theoretical fields simply cannot be ransacked with declarations of “more sophisticated” like that!
Many examples can also be cited where Dawkins deliberately reduces some Biblical issue to a comical nonsense, and then bats it aside with the reader in full agreement. When he portrays the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac, he conscieously turns the tale into parody in order to make moral judgements of God. Abraham was variously “cooking” and “barbequing” his son. From Dawkins’ point of view, a sacrifice has no significant difference in practice to a murder, but to the religious mind there is a very big difference. To Dawkins, God was engaging in some elaborate comic-book jape in asking for Isaac’s charcoaled flesh, and then turning around to say “only joking!”. If Dawkins’ interpretation of events was accurate, God is to be decried in sing-song playground tone as a great big meanie. If the story is taken seriously by someone of religious conviction (all three major monotheistic religious do, as Dawkins hurries to point out, take it seriously) then it is a thoroughly revealing test of faith. God, let’s not forget, never intended Abraham to butcher his own son, but did intend to have him believe that he would. Again, we can all sympathise with Dawkins if we take his worldview. He could sympathise with Abraham there if he wanted to, by taking a religious worldview. This divide between Dawkins’ mind and that of the religious reader is striking – and, I think, has nothing to do with science.
A chapter of The God Delusion claims that we do not get our morals from religious texts. Here, a two-fold process of argument is at work. First, that Yahweh, Jesus et al are evil and generally pretty poor moral teachers. Second, that the argument “yes, but we don’t think like that any more” is evidence that we have taken our morals from somewhere else. Atheists have moral codes too, don’t you know, but they are not grounded in the Bible. The trouble with the first part of the argument is that Dawkins is attempting to judge morality from his point of view, which is surely a mistake? A couple of tweaks to his thinking would fundamentally change his view of the relative morality of God. He decries God for being “jealous and proud of it”, but if Dawkins had made the world one might expect a touch of gloating! Here, morality is relativised because God’s jealousy is squared with his supremacy. To God, it is immoral to attribute glory to things which he made, not to the maker. As such, idols are prohibited and we should instead love the Lord our God with all of our hearts, minds, souls, etc. God’s violent jealosy is misplaced and immoral if he is not God, but is perfectly justified if he is. Thus Dawkins’ argument is redundant before he begins because he begins with the (I believe false) belief that God is not, in fact, God. If you judge God’s morality from a position which rejects God, you will find the character of the Bible unpleasant at times. If you see him as God, though, he is the purest picture of morality because, after all, he invented it. (For what it’s worth, Dawkins fails to understand that few people believe we should take God’s view of the world as our own: he is only moral because he is God, and we would be acting very immorally if we were to behave like God.) The second part of the argument – that the “we don’t think like that any more” argument is evidence that our morals come from elsewhere – is illogical in light of the dissection of the first. What Dawkins sees as the “picking and choosing” of what Biblical morals we now follow, another would see as distinguishing between the sort of thing God should be dealing with and the sort of thing we should be worried about.
The chapter of The God Delusion that I found most interesting dealt with the reasons why atheism does not automatically make amoral people. Hitler and Stalin are often cited as examples of atheism gone wrong, but as Dawkins rightly says their religious conviction is irrelevant to the deeds they committed. It matters not whether Stalin was an atheist – lots of Christians are bad people, too, and lots of atheists are good. Quite why, then, Dawkins felt the need to explain, in several pages, that Hitler was probably a confessing Catholic at least into the War is beyond me. This red-herring aside, Dawkins must be credited with providing a very good answer to the problem of religious belief in dictators. Many have professed their desire to do God’s will, but many have not. The common theme here is dictatorship, not religion or lack thereof. When Dawkins argues that a lack of faith does not lead people to do evil things, but greed might, he strikes gold. Morality in this sense is not the preserve of religion – right and wrong, on a sliding scale of evilness, is usually commonly accepted when we are looking at things from the same position. Thus we can call Hitler evil without expecting a huge backlash: evidence does rather support the assertion.
Antagonistic: The God Delusion
It becomes more difficult to reach agreement on relative morality when not looking at things from the same position. Dawkins uses the example of a survey of Israeli children, asking whether the actions of Joshua were justified. Overwhemingly, Joshua was vindicated in the eyes of the Israeli children. But if the passage of scripture is replaced with an identical story, just using a different name for the protagonist and cities ransacked, the actions are judged immoral. Dawkins argues that this is because Israeli children have been brainwashed into seeing Judaism and its teachings as perfect, while having an otherwise standard view of morality on examples outside the Bible. Once again, just one leap of faith separates this from being illogical nonsense to perfectly reasonable – if God exists. Dawkins says he doesn’t, so his argument holds. If one were to imagine God existing, the Israeli children have actually made the logical moral judgement. Everything Dawkins decries as nonsensical is, in fact, perfectly reasonable if only you believe in God. Asking “How can you believe in God when it is backed by this kind of broken thinking?” is a bit of a misnomer. If one believes in God, the thinking is very joined-up indeed.
The book, therefore, rests on the presumption that God is a false idea. If he is real, every argument advanced becomes redundant. Dawkins’ whole theory in dissecting the myth of God rests on the understanding that he does not exist. If one believes he does exist, none of Dawkins’ arguments stand. God is not lessened, the extent of his reach not truncated, by any of Dawkins’ theory because his theory presumes that God does not exist at all. Any religious person can condifently read The God Delusion and know that if they are right – that God does exist – then Dawkins has done nothing to limit his scope. The whole book does not prove God’s non-existance, but rather presumes it and then tries to explain why. The religious person’s argument that “God exists, therefore…” is an unconvincing start to evangelism. Dawkins is guilty of the same. There remains a fundamental difference of vision between the theist and the atheist, and Richard Dawkins fails to transcend that. In this, the evangelist has a harder job than Dawkins: the evangelist attempts to break across this boundry of belief/unbelief, as we are all born in unbelief. Dawkins hates that children are taught religion from a young age, but no mature Christian faith is based on indoctrination. Instead, the believing Christian or Jew or Muslim or Hindu has crossed from unbelief into belief in a way Dawkins fails to reverse. If Dawkins aims to pursuade the religious of the error of their ways, he needs to combat the problem that they have the very faith Dawkins’ arguments require to be absent in order to work.
For what it is worth, I feel the need to raise what I think is the most glaring problem in Dawkins’ theory. He sees religion as “filling a necessary gap” - a neat phrase, but, of course, meaninless – as a sort of response to some earlier human emotion. He thinks religious belief is a manifestation of an in-built need to have psychological reassurance, using the example of a child’s imaginary friend. This must have had some use in times gone by, but is now “misfiring” to cause religious conviction: blind faith. It is, therefore, seen as a wholly irrational figment of the imagination. If religious conviction is genetic, and is useless, why does it continue to perpetuate? More fundamentally, though, if religion is built into genetics, why should we fight it? To put things in Dawkins’ own terms, to argue vociferously against religion is like the giraffe stretching its neck – worthwhile perhaps for the individual, but of no use to its children. Dawkins sees the harm caused by religion as affecting only those alive today, so there is no genetic reason for this gene/meme to mutate into non-existance. Genetic theory might explain why religion came into being, but is unable to envisage a reason how or when it might dissipate in the future. For Dawkins, then, our brains tell us to be religious but it is an irrational desire that we should fight. Each generation is cursed with a genetic code leading us into the psychological safety-net that Dawkins argues is dangerous! Dawkins’ decision to use the phrase “fills a necessary gap” is possibly the most notable thing he got perfectly right – he argues that religion is invented by genetics to do good, but it actually does harm, but genetics will not rid us of the desire to follow religion, so each generation should actively fight against their subconscious desire to believe in the unbelievable, which their brain tells them is for their own good, for their own good! In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins believes he has found the source of religion, but cannot envisage a time where it will be no longer. We must, he effectively argues, fight against our own judgement to through out any faith that our brain might tell us is preferable because it is irrational. Our genetics are misleading us, pulling us into a cycle of religious nuttery. Dawkins believes that the Human brain has evolved to such a stage that it safeguards against psychological harm by causing it.
I’ll stick with God, thanks.
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*I own a couple of these books. I like to see a genuine debate on these issues, and it is refreshing to see some adequate attempts to challenge Dawkins on issues where some balance is required. I thoroughly recommend reading The God Delusion and an antidote or two, if only for the sake of educated balance.
“The book, therefore, rests on the presumption that God is a false idea.”
I don’t think it’s fair to claim that Dawkins merely asserts the non-existence of a deity. He puts forward numerous arguments against such a hypothesis - largely through attempted refutation of supposedly popular claims - and then attempts to show that there is ‘almost certainly is no God’ with his Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit.
There have, of course, been effective criticisms of these arguments - from scientists such as H Allen Orr and philosophers such as Michael Ruse - but it is disingenuous to claim that there is, in fact, no argument. Not so much a strawman fallacy as an invisible man fallacy.
The Ultimate 747 gambit essentially rests on the idea that God is in some way tangible or material in nature, which is an assumption few other than Dawkins make.
Theologians and philosophers such as Plantiga and Swinburne have indeed argued from divine simplicity, but the argument that a theistic deity would be empirically discernable is quite separate from the assumption that ‘God’ is a ‘false idea’.
Respectfully,
Ben
Theologians and philosophers such as Plantiga and Swinburne have indeed argued from divine simplicity, but the argument that a theistic deity would be empirically discernable is quite separate from the assumption that ‘God is a false idea’.
On the subject of ‘antidotes’, I went to hear Alistair McGrath speak in a chapel last year. He stood up to the platform and proclaimed “If we are to believe Richard Dawkins then God is a delusion”, prompting a very old and refined military gentleman on my row to mutter “Bollocks!”
Respectfully,
Ben
[...] born with Darwin??s study and publication of On The Origin of Species. Dawkins has made it his lifehttp://www.scriboergosum.org.uk/ali/970Holy Spirit Catholic Church - Holy Spirit Catholic ChurchHoly spirit catholic Church. Contents. [...]
2 Kings 2:23-24.
One of my favourites
More seriously, what’s all this nonsense with ASBOs? Surely the answer to rowdy youths is a good dose of she-bears!
Judges 11:29-40
You say that he assumes there is no God but, as has already been pointed out, this is, I think, more than a little unfair. “Dawkins loves to dwell on evidence” - isn’t that, like, the point? He states that the existence or otherwise of God is, in principle, a statement which can be tested by scientific method which he (I think) does as far as is possible. I think he’s right about this, and I think your claim that “religion is in a field of study so divorced from science that scientific process and argument cannot possibly be used to defend or promote it” is pretty much unsustainable. I think your claim of there being a God and there not being a God as equal conclusions given the available evidence (or equal Bayesian priors, if you prefer to look on them as assumptions) is incorrect for all the reasons Dawkins outlines in the book.
I don’t think his argument is that (from memory) nobody understands the Trinity, but rather that it is a simple absurdity. Similarly, wrt Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, it seems entirely reasonable to describe it as “scrumping”, and I do not really see what your objection is.
“From Dawkins’ point of view, a sacrifice has no significant difference in practice to a murder, but to the religious mind there is a very big difference” - sure, but that sort of relativism can be used to give any explanation/justification of anything. I think the same objection applies to “[h]e could sympathise with Abraham there if he wanted to, by taking a religious worldview”, and the argument re Joshua. If you assume, to take an extreme example, that non-believers are to be killed (as some religious texts state in places, even if they are, at times, internally contradictory on this) then it’s perfectly (tautologically) justifiable to kill non-believers.
I don’t really know why he bothers more than a few sentences re Stalin/Hitler, but I think it’s unfair to call it a “red herring” - the red herring is surely the contention in the first place that makes the link between Stalin and Hitler, and atheism and evilness.
“Dawkins hates that children are taught religion from a young age, but no mature Christian faith is based on indoctrination” - I’m not sure if it’s in the God Delusion or just in his Royal Institute lectures but, as Dawkins argues, how do you then explain the correlation between parents of a particular religion and children following that religion? Being brought up believing in a specific world view fosters such a belief.
I’m not going to defend the genes/memes thing, largely because either a) I don’t know enough about ev psych to do so or b) I know enough about it, but don’t realise it. If a) then my not commenting on it is correct, if b) I think it’s pretty poorly evidenced. I’m not a massive fan of Dawkins wrt religion (it’s often far too reductionist and usually ignores political/economic factors - even though he does concede that, wrt the Israel/Palestine conflict for example, that religion isn’t everything), but regard most of the God Delusion as very good.
It’s kind of hard to debate this without asking you *why* you believe in God yourself.
Dan, I’ll try to take your points one by one.
I have tried to explain why I don’t think God can be shoved into science. Not because he has no place in the physical world, but because he is beyond it as well as inside it. Science, let’s not forget, does not disprove God in any way. Even Dawkins, for all of his hyperbole, accepts, as a scientist, that the strongest title for a chapter he can honestly write is “Why God almost certainly does not exist”.
He does say that nobody understands the Trinity. People do. It probably doesn’t make sense to you, but I reckon that if it did you would be Christian.
Claiming that Adam and Eve’s sin was simply that of scrumping is equivalent to me pleading innocent to driving a car headlong into a crowd of people because I only veered three feet from the road. It simply doesn’t wash.
The odd Biblical verses referring to killing non-believers all have one thing in common: God is doing the killing. When Moses and Joshua led the army into battle, God made sure they were weak in number so he would be credited with the victory. When Israel went into battle without first seeking God’s guidance, they lost the battle. Each bit of heathen-bashing had direct divine orders. So the Bible gives nobody free license to kill non-believers.
The red-herring re Hitler and Stalin is an important one. He declares the matter irrelevant, and most rational people would agree for the reasons he states. It’s a stupid argument. But having called the unthinking theist out on this argument, he wastes time telling us that Hitler was possibly Catholic but we will never know. If it is irrelevant, all he needed to write is a brief rationale behind his omission of a full rebuttal. Instead he offers a scant rebuttal, then an apparent counter-argument that he has himself just called redundant! It is typical of his style, and deserves to be called out for what it is: a self-contradicting red-herring at best, and a deliberate attempt at deception at worst.
The argument about indoctrination of children is a childish one. Parents would be neglecting their children if they failed to teach them the Gospel that they believe means the difference between life and death. Moreover, Dawkins would be the first to crow: “they believe all of this nonsense about life after death but don’t want to share it with their children!” As a point of reference, I can point to more than enough people finding faith later in life to counter his loose generalisation.
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As to *why* I believe in God to begin with? Well, I look at the same world Dawkins does, but see it differently. I see the tiniest organisms and then the stars of a cloudless night and am not convinced that evolution alone delivered the universe as we know it. Fundamentally, though, I have to agree with CS Lewis in his fantastic remarks on this subject. If, as Dawkins argues, religion is built into our subconscious like the desires of hunger and tiredness, religion is proven genuine. Hunger, as Lewis argues, is a response to needing food. Tiredness to a need for sleep. Religious conviction, by the scientific default, is a response to a recognition of a creator. I believe, therefore, that Creation screams of the glory of God. I do not believe, as I argued in the original piece, that the human body can have evolved to such a degree that it has developed a psychological safety-net need for a belief in God which does us great harm.
May I suggest The Dawkins Letters, written by a Scottish minister, which politely but robustly challenge the “atheist myths” in The God Delusion? It ends with a ten-point justification of Christian faith. One argument that is well-dealt with is that a faithful reading of the Bible is the only philosophy which tries to explain morality, and offer a way out. It is the only worldview which preaches hope: an end-game is visible. Fundamentally, I cannot imagine that such complex life just came from nowhere and is heading nowhere: again, to use CS Lewis, we never feel at home here because this is not our home. Life on Earth is a bit like a hotel (except, of course, we can’t even take a couple of bottles of shampoo with us when we leave): we’re never really at home here. Christianity is the only religion to fully provide the end-game of life. And, of course, there is a huge amount of evidence to back up its literature and claims.
The beauty, of course, is that no two people would answer that question in the same way.
“The odd Biblical verses referring to killing non-believers all have one thing in common: God is doing the killing.”
That isn’t necessarily relevant. Those who are - at least in part - inspired by religion to commit violence would claim that their deity abets them in their acts. This is especially true of isolated groups such as (to use an example relevant to this website) the ‘Army of God’.
“Science, let’s not forget, does not disprove God in any way.”
I’d accept this, although Dawkins, it seems, is rather more interested in reducing the case for a deity. I have seen numerous attempts at logical ‘disproofs’, but - as with the amusing youtube ‘proofs’ - I find it very hard to believe that after centuries of debate one bold creature is going to shout “Aha!”
“If, as Dawkins argues, religion is built into our subconscious like the desires of hunger and tiredness, religion is proven genuine. Hunger, as Lewis argues, is a response to needing food. Tiredness to a need for sleep. Religious conviction, by the scientific default, is a response to a recognition of a creator. I believe, therefore, that Creation screams of the glory of God.”
I’m sceptical of the validity of equating hunger and fatigue with belief in religion. Unless, of course, theistic faith is controlled by the hypothalamus.
“It is the only worldview which preaches hope: an end-game is visible.”
That seems to be an argument from preference and, personally, I prefer the concept of mortality. Metaphysics, however, has sadly little respect for preference.
Respectfully,
Ben
Ben, I’ve got a quick comment on each of your points.
I have been on the receiving end of the Army of God. I suggested, in passing, that bombing abortion clinics was both ironic and ungodly. They send me some vitriol and a prayer for my salvation. I do not see how an unreasonable reading of the Bible should discredit a reasoned one.
Dawkins is indeed interested in trying to reduce the probability of God. He reads a wide range of science in order to do so. Having a conclusion before you consider the experiment remains poor science.
Metaphysics does not stand in the way of God. Indeed, the true religio-scientist might see in metaphysics the intricate detail of God’s work, and the finely-tuned “balance” which many attribute to a “balancer”, not chance.
“I do not see how an unreasonable reading of the Bible should discredit a reasoned one.”
Indeed. I’d misunderstood the context of Dan’s point, and can only offer my apologies for being a rather onerous obscurantist.
I am a little unsure as to whether your rebuttal - “God is doing the killing” - is entirely correct. As a counter-example there is Deuteronomy 13:5, where it is written “and that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death…shalt thou put the evil away from the midst of thee”. If theology serves, this would have been rendered invalid by Christ’s casting of stones, but the responsibility to kill was nonetheless put firmly into the hands of humans.
“Having a conclusion before you consider the experiment remains poor science.”
I can’t help but imagine that Karl Popper would be surprised to find that falsifiability is unscientific. Dawkins attempts to show that a ‘God’ hypothesis is falsifiable, and then subjects it to - in my opinion very insubstantial - analysis. Only then does he attempt to make a case against a possible deity.
“Metaphysics does not stand in the way of God.”
I made no claim to that. I was merely proposing that, as the ‘God’ hypothesis is a metaphysical one, my own and CS Lewis’s preference is irrelevant.
Respectfully,
Ben
Please don’t think I’m being unnecessarily confrontational, I find these debates pretty hard as - I really don’t mean this as patronising (you probably feel the same about me, though I think only I’m right to feel this way ;-)) but I genuinely find it near on impossible to get a handle on things like “[n]ot because he has no place in the physical world, but because he is beyond it as well as inside it.”. I’m really not being disingenuous, but I can’t for the life of me understand what that means and, more importantly (from my point of view), I don’t think I could understand why you think that even if I did.
“Science, let’s not forget, does not disprove God in any way.”
No, absolutely not, but Dawkins is at pains to point out that everything from the existence of the Christian God to that of the flying spaghetti monster cannot be falsified. There are *literally* an infinite number of things which cannot be disproved - God is merely one that (as far as I am concerned) history and culture forces us to confront.
“He does say that nobody understands the Trinity. People do. It probably doesn’t make sense to you, but I reckon that if it did you would be Christian.”
Well, some people *say* they do, I think that’s the best we can say on that one. Again, this could be said about quite literally anything (hereafter, ATCBSAQLA, I think I might be making more use of this one). It doesn’t make sense to me that
“Claiming that Adam and Eve’s sin was simply that of scrumping is equivalent to me pleading innocent to driving a car headlong into a crowd of people because I only veered three feet from the road. It simply doesn’t wash.”
Yes, it is, so long as you build the assumption that the scrumping itself was inherently sinful. It’s not only religion that plays this game (as I see it [can I drop that now? Let's just assume anything I say is "as I see it"]) and lots of disciplines have made this sort of leap, from the Chicago school of economics to pseudoscience like homeopathy. An incorrect assumption can logically entail a conclusion that is also false, even if internally logically sound. If you take the assumption that the scrumping inherently sinful then you can tautologically conclude that the scrumping was a sin, but then again if you assume that an infinite number of invisible winged pixies cause planes to fly then you can tautologically conclude that planes fly because they are supported by an infinite number of invisible winged pixies. ATCBSAQLA, I think. The huge difference between scrumping and veering three feet from the road is that the latter does not require any additional assumptions to establish the harm caused: the crowd of people are lying there, dead.
“The odd Biblical verses referring to killing non-believers all have one thing in common: God is doing the killing.”
Sure, but as far as I am concerned, it makes precisely no difference.
“So the Bible gives nobody free license to kill non-believers.”
On a point of order, I only mentioned the justice of killing non-believers as an example.
“But having called the unthinking theist out on this argument, he wastes time telling us that Hitler was possibly Catholic but we will never know. If it is irrelevant, all he needed to write is a brief rationale behind his omission of a full rebuttal. Instead he offers a scant rebuttal, then an apparent counter-argument that he has himself just called redundant! It is typical of his style, and deserves to be called out for what it is: a self-contradicting red-herring at best, and a deliberate attempt at deception at worst.”
As I said, I’m not really bothered about this passage, but I think that’s unfair. The point is that it’s irrelevant and, worse, it’s quite possibly not even true. I think that’s worth pointing out, at least.
“The argument about indoctrination of children is a childish one. Parents would be neglecting their children if they failed to teach them the Gospel that they believe means the difference between life and death. Moreover, Dawkins would be the first to crow: “they believe all of this nonsense about life after death but don’t want to share it with their children!” As a point of reference, I can point to more than enough people finding faith later in life to counter his loose generalisation.”
Again, I think that last bit in particular is pretty sloppy reasoning. No-one (not Dawkins, not anyone) would blithely ignore facts so much that they would argue that the only people who are religious are those who were exposed strongly to (a particular) religion in their childhood. Are you denying that such exposure affects whether one is religious or not? As a similar point of reference, I can point to more than enough smokers who don’t and never will suffer from lung cancer. I don’t think Dawkins would be the first to claim what you say he would, but I’m not really interested in speaking for Dawkins. I can speak for myself, however, and say that I wouldn’t.
“If, as Dawkins argues, religion is built into our subconscious like the desires of hunger and tiredness, religion is proven genuine. Hunger, as Lewis argues, is a response to needing food. Tiredness to a need for sleep. Religious conviction, by the scientific default, is a response to a recognition of a creator.”
That appears to me to be riddled with a terrific number of errors. For a start, from memory (I might dig out my copy of TGD later), Dawkins absolutely does not argue what you say he argues (I say again that much of evolutionary psychology appears to me - very possibly in my ignorance - to be little more than an elaborate collection of [perhaps plausible] Just-So stories, and I’m not necessarily endorsing what Dawkins says on this): he argues that natural selection may have caused a proliferation of gene(s) which make one susceptible to religious belief. He argues that - again, from memory, and from my layman’s understanding of this - natural selection in humans has been such that some, many or fewer people, for example, perceive intent in design where it does not exist, and are apt to swallow what they are told by parents/elders etc.
Anyway, the worse part of your argument is, I think, the, er, rest of it: your claim that “[i]f… religion is built into our subconscious like the desires of hunger and tiredness, religion is proven genuine. Hunger, as Lewis argues, is a response to needing food. Tiredness to a need for sleep. Religious conviction, by the scientific default, is a response to a recognition of a creator”. If religion is hardcoded into [some of] us (from my point of view, perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t), then it is not proven genuine at all. Hunger is a response to needing food - yes - tiredness is a response to needing to sleep - yes - but religious conviction is a response to, if you accept this line of argument and take the strongest possible reading of it, needing to believe in a creator, rather than proof of the existence of a creator. Religious conviction is no more a response to a recognition of a creator than - to take the example Dawkins gives - absolute obedience to parents is a response to the infallibility of those parents.
“I do not believe, as I argued in the original piece, that the human body can have evolved to such a degree that it has developed a psychological safety-net need for a belief in God which does us great harm.”
Again, I don’t think that’s what Dawkins argues. He argues (from memory, do correct me if I’m wrong) that religious belief is a byproduct of other things (examples above) which were to our evolutionary advantage. It is not religion per se which protects us from harm, but a tendency to protect us from harm creates the conditions in which we are open to religious belief. Again though, I’m not hugely interested in defending the evolutionary basis for religion. I might well be wrong on it, and It seems to me to be the weakest part of the book.
“As to *why* I believe in God to begin with? Well, I look at the same world Dawkins does, but see it differently. I see the tiniest organisms and then the stars of a cloudless night and am not convinced that evolution alone delivered the universe as we know it.”
But do you not think that is - and I really mean this with all the respect I can muster here - an argument from ignorance? Not merely your own ignorance, but much more of our own ignorance, as a species, of the world. Not only this, but it’s an argument which a lot of the IDers (who you reject) peddle because of a basic (deliberate, in the case of the IDers) misunderstanding of both Bayesian probability and the huge timeframes involved in the existence of the universe, which leads to the conclusion that the whole evolution thing is pretty unlikely when you look at it. I think Dawkins deals with this very well in TGD: it’s probably the strongest part of the book IMO.
“One argument that is well-dealt with is that a faithful reading of the Bible is the only philosophy which tries to explain morality, and offer a way out. It is the only worldview which preaches hope: an end-game is visible.”
To which my usual response would be something along the lines of “oh just fuck off”, but you’ve been affable about this from start to finish ;-). It’s not the only attempt to explain morality at all: for a start, there’s the Darwinian model that Dawkins outlines in the book (and which you touched upon yourself!) and, of course, the countless other religious texts other than the Bible. I’ve thought about this myself: there’s been times when, after the deaths of relatives etc, I’ve genuinely wished that I *could* believe that they had gone to a better place. Unfortunately, just wishing for something doesn’t make it true. It might offer you a way out (it’s far from the only one) but a) that doesn’t make it true and b) speaking for myself, I don’t *need* a way out for myself. The fact (as it is in my mind) that I’m so embarrassingly lucky to be alive and in one of the few parts of the world where life is, in relative terms, embarrassingly easy is enough to make me appreciate the life I have and, in my own pathetic and probably self-indulgent way, improve the lives of those I can. That’s enough of an end-game for me, and enough hope for me.
“And, of course, there is a huge amount of evidence to back up its literature and claims.”
My first response: oh, come off it. My second response: can I see it?
Just one more thing, looking back over:
“Fundamentally, I cannot imagine that such complex life just came from nowhere and is heading nowhere”
The problem is that your not accepting it does not make it untrue.
I’ve probably missed out addressing some of your points. Feel free to pick me up on it if I have.
Argh, I meant to say more than just “Sure, but as far as I am concerned, it makes precisely no difference” but I’m far too tired to go back just now. Maybe tomorrow…
When I read a line like this in your post, “More fundamentally, though, if religion is built into genetics, why should we fight it?” I just think to myself, really? So whatever we have a “natural” urge to do, we SHOULD do… that makes it “right”… oh, come on, that’s just silly!
I write about his in my blog (truthsisawoman.wordress.com), but in any case, what Dawkins is trying to do is (at least) figure it out… and if you can’t see that religious thinking causes a great deal of strife, then you must be somewhat and willfully blind…
Sorry for duplicate, but I posted my URL incorrectly… it’s http://truthisawoman.wordpress.com