
Sentilong Ozukum
Richard Dawkins appears to be the new messiah of our generation. When he talks, people listen. He is articulate, bold and charismatic. He is regularly invited to various television talk shows and when he speaks, he sounds so intelligent (must be a British accent thing). His 2006 bestseller The God Delusion is still flying off the bookshelves and he has emerged as the primary spokesperson for the New Atheist movement. His writings have instilled doubts into thinking of many young unsophisticated Christian minds in our own society and we can see them in various social networking sites openly debunking the idea of God. My aim in this article is to show (in a language as simple as possible) that Dawkins’ arguments are incoherent, outdated and embarrassingly invalid.
Alvin Plantinga (considered as the greatest Christian philosopher currently living) agrees. According to him, Dawkins’ arguments are so bad that they would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class. Even his fellow atheists are not convinced. Atheistic philosopher of science, Michael Ruse comments, “Unlike the new atheists, I take scholarship very seriously… The God delusion has made me ashamed to be an atheist.” So, what are these arguments that Dawkins presents in his book that have even embarrassed his colleagues? Let’s examine them in brief.
At the end of the fourth chapter of The God Delusion, Dawkins presents a six- step summary of what he calls ‘the central argument of my book’ with the conclusion, ‘God almost certainly doesn’t exist’. Here is a very brief summary of his central argument.
1. One of the greatest challenges of human beings is to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
2. There is a natural temptation to attribute appearance of design to a designer.
3. The designer hypothesis is a false one because it immediately raises the question, ‘Who designed the designer?”
4. The most ingenious and powerful explanation of the appearance of design is Darwinian Evolution by natural selection.
5. We don’t yet have a powerful theory in physics.
6. We should not lose hope for a better explanation arising in physics something as powerful as Darwinism, in biology.
Therefore, God almost certainly doesn’t exist.
Like a skilled magician, Dawkins produces the conclusion ‘God almost certainly doesn’t exist’out of the thin air. It is a logically invalid argument and the conclusion doesn’t follow even if we accept all the premises as true. The premises aren’t true. Dawkins says that we cannot infer a designer of the universe based on the complexity of the universe because that would lead to a further question, “Who designed the designer?” This is a text book error in logic. Philosophers of science recognize that in order to recognize an explanation as the best explanation, you don’t have to have an explanation of the explanation. This is not mere semantic wordplay. Let me explain. Suppose I accompany the archaeology team of the Nagaland University to a digging site in a remote place and we discover stone tools and pottery shards and arrow heads and the head of the digging team declares, “Wow! We have just discovered the site of an ancient tribe.” Now imagine their reaction I were to raise my hand and say, “Hey folks, give me a break! You have not explained anything. Any intelligent life that would have designed those stone tools would have to be as complex as they are.” They would all murmur in unison that a little knowledge is indeed a dangerous thing and ask me to book the next flight back to my university and re-enroll myself in some basic logic class. Similarly, if astronauts were to discover a pile of machinery on the back side of the moon, they would be logically justified in inferring that these products were the result of intelligent design even if they had no idea of where those machines came from or who made them. In the same way, in order to explain that intelligent design is the best explanation of biological necessity, we don’t need to explain the designer. That is a different question altogether.
Moreover, even if we grant Dawkins’ the idea that in order to recognize an explanation as the best explanation you have to have an explanation of the explanation, it leads to infinite regress. In that case, we would need an explanation of the explanation of the explanation and so on to infinity and we would never have any explanation in the end. This would destroy the very foundation of science.Michael Ruse further comments, “…Trying to understand how God could need no cause, Christians claim that God exists necessarily. I have made an effort to try to understand what that means. Dawkins and company are ignorant of such claims and positively contemptuous of those who even try to understand them, let alone believe them. Thus, like a first-year undergraduate, he can happily go around asking loudly, ‘What caused God?” as though he had made some momentous philosophical discovery.’”
Dawkins goes on to say that the probability of the existence of God is less than the probability of Boeing 747 assembled by a raging tornado roaring through a junkyard. According to him, if there were such a being as God, he would have to be enormously complex and the more complex a something is, the less probable it is. An explanation has to be simpler than the phenomenon you are trying to explain and God is more complex than the complexities of the biological world. Dawkins is simply mistaken here. First of all,God is not complex. He is an immaterial mind without a body. He is a spirit. He has no parts. An un-embodied mind is an entity that is simple in its nature. I think Dawkins is confused by man’s ideas which maybe complex with a mind itself which is a simple entity. Moreover, by Dawkins’ own definition of complexity (a thing is complex if it has parts that are arranged in a way unlikely to have arisen by chance, The Blind Watchmaker), God is not complex since he has not parts arranged in any way to have arisen by chance.
A quick note on physics. Dawkins says that since there is a naturalistic explanation for the apparent design in species but we don’t have a similar explanation yet in physics and that we should wait for better days to come in the future. This is just blind faith. Dawkins is assuming that we should believe only that which can be proven scientifically (which is called scientism) or else why would he want to sit and wait for a naturalistic explanation? Scientism is not the only way to establish truth claims because of three reasons. First, it is self-defeating. Scientism claims that a proposition is not true if it cannot be proven scientifically. Well, that very proposition itself cannot be proven scientifically and hence should be rejected. It is akin to saying, “I cannot speak a word in English.” Secondly, scientism cannot prove necessary truths like mathematical truths and logical truths. Thirdly scientism cannot address moral and political realities.
Dawkins is a biologist and a terrific science writer. Nobody explains evolutionary biology with rich symbolism like he does. His other books like The Blind Watchmaker and An Ancestor’s Tale are simply brilliant and highly rated. The God Delusion sadly contains very little of science and more of bad philosophy and evolutionary psychology. In fact, the latter half of the book is a rant against religion, Christianity in particular.Consider the words he has meted out to an entity he doesn’t even believe exist. “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Let’s all hope for Dawkins’ sake that God doesn’t return the compliment.
Sentilong Ozukum is a research scholar in the
Department of Philosophy, at the University of Hyderabad.