We had quite a bit of fun some months ago (and also on my own blog) tracking the wacky hijinx of Daniel Dennet and his tirades on religion. Not to be outdone, the other pillar of popular scientism, Richard Dawkins, has come out with his book _The God Delusion_ (were there but world enough and time, I'd write a rejoinder called something like _The God Delugeian_ or rather something more clever based on that based on the flood of Christians into previously off-limits regions of academia).
Anyway, Ted sent me a link to a nice review in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. I think you can view it for free if you register. It is a self-professed attempt at "consciousness raising".
Like Leon Wieseltier's review of Dennet's _Breaking the Spell_, Jim Holt's review is full of wit and wisdom. The books are counterparts as are the reviews.
The wit is a bit acerbic at times (Dawkins can hardly complain about that), here's a sampler and then I'll get to serious comments below the fold.
*"Dawkins’s avowed hostility can make for scattershot reasoning as well as for rhetorical excess"
*"reading it can feel a little like watching a Michael Moore movie"
*"the tone is smug and the logic occasionally sloppy"
*"Shirking the intellectual hard work, Dawkins prefers to move on to parodic "proofs" that he has found on the Internet"
The nub of Dawkins’s consciousness-raising message is that to be an atheist is a “brave and splendid” aspiration. Belief in God is not only a delusion, he argues, but a “pernicious” one. On a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 is certitude that God exists and 7 is certitude that God does not exist, Dawkins rates himself a 6: “I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.” At least he admits that we can reason probabilistically about God. That admission might come back to bite him. Eliot Sober's strategy is much safer, even if charmingly quaint: deny that theism makes any predictions and so is not a testable hypothesis (though he also seems to me at times to claim that if theism were testable it would be falsified, a claim I find puzzling (even though I think there are substantively true counterpossibles)).
Indeed, Dawkins even avows that "any God capable of designing a universe, carefully and foresightfully tuned to lead to our evolution, must be a supremely complex and improbable entity who needs an even bigger explanation than the one he is supposed to provide.” Thus the God hypothesis is “very close to being ruled out by the laws of probability." If you're anything like me, you immediately thought of Swinburne's argument that theism is actually about as simple a hypothesis as there could be: one individual with one familiar kind of property (intentional power) held in the simplest way (without limit). But as Holt points out, Dawkins is no master at Swinburne exegesis: "In a particularly low blow, he accuses Richard Swinburne, a philosopher of religion and science at Oxford, of attempting to “justify the Holocaust,” when Swinburne was struggling to square such monumental evils with the existence of a loving God."
In connection with the posts Ted and I did on the Argument from Desire, I think it's interesting to note that when Dawkins attempts to "cast doubt on the transcendent origins of religion by showing that it has a purely natural explanation" Hold rightly comments "Perhaps one of these hypotheses is true. If so, what would that say about the truth of religious beliefs themselves?" Hurrah for Holt! Let's keep focused on truth of content not etiology of origin (they *can* be connected, of course, but the connection is not as straightforward as many seem to assume).
Holt is a paradigm of fair, informed religion reporting (a *very* rare thing today). As far as I can tell, he himself is an agnostic, but he does a nice job of summing things up: "If you are not religiously inclined, you might take these as brute facts and be done with the matter. But if you think that there must be some ultimate explanation for the improbable leaping-into-existence of the harmonious, biofriendly cosmos we find ourselves in, then the God hypothesis is at least rational to adhere to, isn’t it?"
Thomas Nagel’s got a great review of Dawkin’s book over at *The New Republic*: http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20061023&s=nagel102306&c=1 . Unfortunately, I believe you’ve got to be a subscriber to read it, so I post some blurbs here:
“Richard Dawkins, the most prominent and accomplished scientific writer of our time, is convinced that religion is the enemy of science. Not just fundamentalist or fanatical or extremist religion, but all religion that admits faith as a ground of belief and asserts the existence of God. In his new book, he attacks religion with all the weapons at his disposal, and as a result the book is a very uneven collection of scriptural ridicule, amateur philosophy, historical and contemporary horror stories, anthropological speculations, and cosmological scientific argument. Dawkins wants both to dissuade believers and to embolden atheists. “
“The fear of religion leads too many scientifically minded atheists to cling to a defensive, world-flattening reductionism. Dawkins, like many of his contemporaries, is hobbled by the assumption that the only alternative to religion is to insist that the ultimate explanation of everything must lie in particle physics, string theory, or whatever purely extensional laws govern the elements of which the material world is composed.”
There’s also an interesting review of Dawkins in the *London Review of Books* by a Manchester U English Prof., Terry Eagleton, who accuses Dawkins of setting up a straw man: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html. If you’re interested in how a non-analytic [as far as I can tell] theological liberal responds to a guy like Dawkins, check it out.
I thought Terry Eagleton's review in the LRB made some great points. It's hard to take Dawkins seriously when he says things like this. [ht Parableman]
The Nagel review only recently went behind the subscriber wall. If you're quick, quick, quick, you can still catch it in Google's cache. (That link goes to the first page; the second page is here.)
Brandon, your second link is just the first page again.
On Dawkins' claim that teaching Christianity in its traditional form is worse than sexual abuse, it might be worth reading the comments on my post (the one Matthew gave the tip of the hat to). Keith DeRose has been trying to defend Dawkins to some degree. I'm still convinced that Dawkins has some distorted moral views, but Keith is trying to motivate some of what is driving Dawkins' views, and I think it's worth considering what he says before rushing to judgment on Dawkins' statements on this.
Patrick - when I saw that there was a response to Dawkins' book by someone from 'Manchester U', I wondered which member of the world's greatest soccer club was taking an interest in philosophy. Then I looked more closely, and saw you were referring to the article by Terry Eagleton.
For the record, Eagleton once said that the advantage of a Catholic education was that it meant he could go from being Catholic to Marxist without ever having to be a liberal. His theological thinking is heavily influenced by the late Fr. Herbert McCabe (whom he mentions in the Dawkins review), and I suspect Fr. Herbert would also object to being called a 'liberal', seeing himself as a true Thomist. Thanks a lot for posting the extracts from Nagel's review, by the way.
Hi Ben, no problem re: Nagel. And I had a good laugh about the Man U reference! I thought that something about it sounded funny, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it when posting. And thanks for the clarification about Eagleton. From the article, it seemed to me that he wasn’t too concerned with defending either a robust version of the atonement (all he ever said, if I recall, was that Jesus died because the Romans killed him) or the resurrection; in fact, from his description of the resurrection, it was unclear that he thought that this was some real, historical event. Anyhow, in my (perhaps mistaken) theological book, calling oneself a Christian yet denying a bodily resurrection makes one a theological liberal. But since Eagleton didn’t do this outright, it probably wasn’t fair to call him one. There’s perhaps nothing “knock-down” in the essay that proves he’s a liberal; it was just my overall impression.
If there is no justification for the Holocaust, why did an all-powerful, all-loving God allow it?
Holt accuses Dawkins of not being au fait with the most modern, hard-to-refute ontological arguments.
Here is one. Very hard to refute.
1) God is a necessary being and exists in all logically possible worlds.
2) God is supposedly omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent
3) Therefore , suppose a omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being exists in all possible worlds
4) Many logically possible worlds contain large amounts of suffering with no redeeming features.
5) Therefore these logically possible worlds do not contain a being who would alleviate pointless suffering
6) Therefore there are logically possible worlds that do not contain an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being.
7) But this contradicts 3, showing that there is no necessary omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/10/08/bodaw01.xml
'The Holocaust, Swinburne suggested, had a positive element because it gave Jews an opportunity to be noble and courageous.'
Can anybody find similar statements in Dawkins' writings?
The second page of Nagel's review on google-cache is here:
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20061023&s=nagel102306&c=2
Oops. Try this:
http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:Tdt8eMLJa48J:www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi%3D20061023%26s%3Dnagel102306%26c%3D2+site:www.tnr.com+nagel+dawkins+%22new+republic%22&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=3
Steven, you forgot one crucial premise that many theists would deny: that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being eliminates all non-redemptive evil.
Of course, the real problem is 4. Once you assume the missing premise, then 4 will be false if you aren't equivocating in some way. If you insist on putting God in the possible world, the missing premise makes it very clear that 4 cannot be true. If you are convinced of 4, it's probably because you're not thinking of God as in the world as you are doing in the other premises. Stick to one system of modality. You can do it Lewis-style, in which case 4 is false, or you can do it Leibniz-style, in which case 1 and 3 are false. God isn't in worlds but just actualizes one of them after considering them. I prefer the latter way, but I'm happy to discuss the matter when doing it the other way. Either way your argument is unsound.
Thanks, Jeremy and Keith. Who knew it was so tricky to find the cache of a second page. Keith's second link works.
My argument was a parody of Plantinga's argument about a maximally great being in all logically possible worlds.
Apaprently, Holt thinks Dawkins would struggle with such sophisticated, hard-to-refute arguments.
But they are as unsound as my ontological logical problem of evil's disproof of God.
'Steven, you forgot one crucial premise that many theists would deny: that an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being eliminates all non-redemptive evil.'
An omni-benevolent being, by definition, does all possible acts of benevolence.
I think Dawkins would indeed struggle with arguments like the one you gave (or rather, he would not struggle with it and would probably just take it to be saying something obviously correct). I don't think the fallacies in the argument are all that easy to identify. It's just that well-trained theistic philosophers have done so long enough and repeatedly enough that it's easy for someone familiar with the literature to spot them. But Dawkins is not a philosopher, never mind a well-trained one, and what he says demonstrates that he is hardly familiar with the literature in philosophy of religion. He regularly commits easy-to-spot fallacies when it comes to religion.
An omni-benevolent being, by definition, does all possible acts of benevolence.
Some actions that remove evil are not benevolent. If removing all non-redemptive evil requires acts that an omnibenevolent being would not do, then an omnibenevolent being would not remove all non-redemptive evil.
Why bother with the reviews when you can watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA9EiSJaXww
Looks like there's a *Time* cover story on God/Science, and Dawkins' book is a big part of it. Pretty interesting.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/11/05/cover.story/
Unless I'm mistaken, Shawn's link above originally led to Dawkins' appearance on Comedy Central's 'Colbert Report'. But it's been taken off YouTube. Anyhow, I was clicking around and ran across a link to it here:
http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2006/10/colbert_dawkins.html
It's well worth it! Dawkins brings out the "who made God" line, and Colbert's response is priceless.