On Richard
Dawkins’ Atheism
and His Criticisms
of the Design Argument
Kai-man Kwan
[Published:
Kai-man Kwan, “On Richard Dawkins’ Atheism and His Criticisms of the Design
Argument.” CGST Journal 49 (July 2010), pp. 165-203.]
Introduction:
An Evolutionary Biologist Turned the High Priest of Atheism
Richard
Dawkins is Reader in Zoology in the University of Oxford. He has a good reputation
in his field of ethology. In particular, his books The Selfish Gene and The
Extended Phenotype have made significant contribution to evolutionary
biology, and won him a fame in the 1980s. He is now the Charles Simonyi
Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University who is
supposed to promote science to the general public. Dawkins is a good
communicator, and his books on popular science are rightly acclaimed.
Dawkins
has long expressed negative opinions about religion. The perceived threat of
creationism has provoked him to write a polemical work The Blind Watchmaker.
This work established his status as one of the most prominent contemporary
defenders of Darwinism. He not only tried to point out the weaknesses in the
arguments of the Creationists, but also heaped scorn on them. Gradually, he became
heavily involved in the contemporary science/religion debate. His attention was
no longer restricted to the issue of evolution. He also relentlessly advocated
the conflict thesis that science and religion were basically incompatible. In
recent years, he launched an all-out attack on religion, root and branch.
Dawkins has already uttered a number of antireligious statements during his Royal
Institution Christmas Lectures. In a two-part series The Root of All Evil?
on Channel 4, which was shown in Jan 2006, Dawkins argued that religion is not
only irrational, but also positively evil and harmful. In 2006 he published the
God Delusion, which summarized his case against religion, and for a kind
of in-your-face atheism. Since he is so passionate about his own atheistic
position and is so zealous to propagate it, he can be called the high priest of
atheism. In this paper, I will examine Dawkins’s atheistic naturalism with a
special focus on his criticisms of the design argument. His God Delusion will
be extensively quoted (with the book title abbreviated as GD).[1]
Exposition
of Dawkins’ Atheism
Dawkins’s
Position: Atheistic Scientific Naturalism
Dawkins
writes, “to be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid
one. You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually
fulfilled” (GD, p. 1). For him, religion
is basically a delusion, which is defined as “a persistent false belief held in
the face of strong contradictory evidence,
especially as a symptom of psychiatric disorder” (GD, p. 5). Dawkins
defines the God Hypothesis in this way: “there
exists a superhuman, supernatural
intelligence who deliberately designed and created
the universe and everything in it, including us” (GD, p. 31).
Dawkins’
atheism is radical: “I am attacking God, all
gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have
been or will be invented” (GD, p. 36). This
follows from his metaphysical position
of scientific naturalism: there is “only one kind of stuff in the
universe and it is physical, out of this stuff come minds, beauty, emotions,
moral values... 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 soul that outlasts the
body and no miracles” (GD, p. 14).
Although
Dawkins admits he cannot strictly disprove the existence of God, he believes that “we can say something pretty strong about the probability” (GD, p. 48), and
this is “very low” (although short of
zero). This already justifies Dawkins being a De facto atheist: “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” (GD, pp. 50-51).
Dawkins on the Complementarity of Science and
Religion
One common reply to Dawkins is that he is mistaken by confusing science
and religion: they in fact belong to different domains which do not overlap. It
means that we cannot use science to support religion but they cannot come into
conflict either. Even an atheist like Stephen Jay Gould is happy to espouse the
principle of NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria): “To say it for all my
colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time
(from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot
(by its legitimate methods) adjudicate
the issue of God's possible superintendence
of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists.” Dawkins strongly disagrees
with this kind of reconciliatory move: “Despite the confident, almost
bullying, tone of Gould's assertion, what, actually, is the justification for
it? Why shouldn't we comment on God, as scientists?” (GD, p. 55)
Martin Rees, a distinguished Cambridge
astronomer, is also taken to task by Dawkins because Rees raises two ultimate questions and then gives a NOMA-friendly answer: “The pre-eminent mystery is why
anything exists at all. What
breathes life into the equations, and actualized them in a real cosmos? Such questions lie beyond science,
however: they are the province of
philosophers and theologians.” Dawkins has only contempt for this kind of
attitude: “I would prefer to say that
if indeed they lie beyond science, they most certainly lie beyond the
province of theologians as well” (GD, pp. 55-56).
Dawkins explains, “What
on Earth is a why question? … Some questions
simply do not deserve an answer. … Nor,
even if the question is a real one,
does the fact that science cannot answer it imply that religion can” (GD, p.
56). Dawkins thinks that religion is
also a scientific theory (only a very bad one): “The presence or absence
of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question... So
also is the truth or falsehood of every one
of the miracle stories that religions rely upon to impress multitudes
of the faithful… The methods we should use to settle the matter, in the unlikely event that relevant evidence ever became
available, would be purely and entirely scientific methods” (GD, p. 59).
If so, then science and religion can indeed
come into conflict, e.g., the conflict of design and evolution: “the
hypothesis of ultimate design, and …: gradual evolution … are close to being irreconcilably different.
Like nothing else evolution really does provide an explanation for the
existence of entities whose improbability would otherwise, for practical
purposes, rule them out” (GD, p. 61).
So science
and religion are competitors. Indeed, they are gladiators who must fight to the
very end, and only one of them can leave alive. For Dawkins, rationally
speaking, the victor no doubt is science. Unfortunately, as a matter of fact, perhaps
due to misfiring of some Darwinian mechanisms, religion, like a mental virus,
not only persists, but also flourishes and proliferates. That is why Dawkins calls
religion an “unworthy but powerful opponent.” No wonder Dawkins also feels
angry about this terrible situation. This may explain his vehement attack on religion.
Dawkins’
Attack on Religion and Theology
For Dawkins, religion is just wasteful and extravagant: “Religion devours resources, sometimes on a
massive scale. A medieval cathedral could consume a hundred man-centuries in
its construction, yet was never used as a dwelling, or for any recognizably useful purpose” (GD, p.
164). For
religious studies and theology, he has nothing but contempt: “The notion that religion is a proper field, in which
one might claim expertise, is one that should not go unquestioned” (GD,
p. 16). In 1993, Cambridge University was planning to
establish the Starbridge Lectureship in Theology and Natural Science with the
endowment made by the author Susan Howatch. Dawkins protested in a letter to The
Independent (20 Mar 1993): "the achievements of theologians dont' do
anything, don't affect anything, don't achieve anything, don't even mean
anything. What makes you think that 'theology' is a subject at all?"[2]
Besides intellectually
vacuous, religion is also morally pernicious. For example, 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" (GD, p. 31). Since Yahweh
is such an evil monster, Dawkins is
surprised to see that people
today should base their lives on such an appalling role model (GD, p. 248).
Dawkins
on God, Evolution and Design
In
contrast with those atheists who dismiss the argument from design, Dawkins is
keenly aware of the immensity of the problem of explaining biological design.
He points out that there are “perhaps ten million species, each one of which
independently displays a powerful illusion of apparent
design” (GD, p. 139). He even concedes a certain degree of plausibility to Paley’s
argument from design: “Creationist
'logic' is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too
beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come
into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance...
Therefore a designer must have done it”
(GD, p. 121). In fact he agrees that “Chance is not a solution, given the high levels of improbability we see in
living organisms” (GD, p. 119). However, the argument from design still fails
due to two reasons. First, “the candidate solutions to the riddle of improbability are not, as is falsely implied,
design and chance. They are design and natural selection” (GD, p. 119). Since natural selection can
adequately explain all the apparent design in the biological world, the design
hypothesis is unnecessary. Second, the design “solution” is not a genuine
solution because it initiates a regress of solution. This point does not only
serve as a defeater of the design argument, but also provides an independent argument
against the existence of God.
Let us
examine Dawkins’s claims about natural selection first. “Unfortunately for
Paley, the mature Darwin blew it out of the water. There
has probably never been a more devastating rout of popular belief by clever
reasoning than Charles Darwin's destruction of the argument from design… it is
no longer true to say that nothing that we know looks designed unless it is
designed. Evolution by natural selection produces an excellent simulacrum of
design, mounting prodigious heights of
complexity and elegance” (GD, p.
79).
For Dawkins, natural selection is a
“blind, unconscious, automatic process”. It “has no purpose in mind. It has no
mind and no mind's eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no
foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in
nature, it is the blind watchmaker” (BWM, p. 5). Despite being blind, natural
selection can help us escape from
chance because “natural
selection is a cumulative process, which breaks the problem of improbability
up into small pieces. Each of the small
pieces is slightly improbable, but not prohibitively so. When large
numbers of these slightly improbable events
are stacked up in series, the end product of the accumulation is very
very improbable indeed” (GD, p. 121).
In Dawkins’
Climbing Mount Improbable, he “expressed the point in a parable. One side of the mountain is a sheer cliff, impossible to climb, but on the other side is a gentle slope to
the summit. On the summit sits a
complex device such as an eye or a bacterial flagellar motor. The absurd notion that such complexity
could spontaneously self-assemble is
symbolized by leaping from the foot of the cliff to the top in one
bound. Evolution, by contrast, goes around
the back of the mountain and creeps up the gentle slope to the summit:
easy!” (GD, pp. 121-122)
Dawkins also claims that “design is not a real alternative at all because it raises
an even bigger problem than it solves: who designed the designer?” (GD, p.
121). He argues that "any God capable of intelligently
designing something as complex as the DNA/protein machine must have been at
least as complex and organized as that machine itself... To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine
by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it
leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer" (BWM, p. 141). Then he
presses the above logic to an atheistic conclusion: “A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any
God capable of designing
anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right. God presents
an infinite regress from which he cannot
help us to escape. This argument … demonstrates that God … is very very improbable indeed” (GD, p. 109).
Dawkins does not only think that the problem lies with the idea of
design. In fact, when we unpack the God hypothesis, we can see that the
existence of God is improbable in its own right: A “God who is capable of sending
intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving
messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such bandwidth! God may not have a brain made of neurones, or a CPU made of
silicon, but if he has the powers attributed to him he must have something far
more elaborately and non-randomly constructed than the largest brain or the largest computer we know” (GD, p. 154).
Once
we postulate a God which has the capacity to control the material universe or
to hear prayers (capacities which no theist will deny to God), Dawkins will
immediately shout, “Very very improbable!” In fact, he argues that even our world
were the product of some kind of alien or even superhuman designers, his faith
in Darwinian naturalism will not be shaken one bit.
“Science-fiction authors… have even suggested (and I cannot
think how to disprove it) that we live in a computer simulation, set up by some
vastly superior civilization. But the simulators themselves would have to come
from somewhere. The laws of probability forbid all notions of their
spontaneously appearing without simpler antecedents. They probably owe their
existence to a (perhaps unfamiliar) version of Darwinian evolution” (GD, p. 73)
“It may even be a superhuman designer -but, if so, it will most certainly not be
a designer who just popped into existence, or who always existed. If (which I
don't believe for a moment) our
universe was designed, and a fortiori if the designer reads our thoughts and hands out omniscient
advice, forgiveness and redemption,
the designer himself must be the end product of some kind
of cumulative escalator or crane, perhaps a version of Darwinism in another universe” (GD, p. 156).
Note the use of “must be” above. So there seems to be a
kind of rational necessity to the Darwinian worldview: “Darwinian
natural selection is the only known
solution to the otherwise unanswerable riddle of where the information
comes from” (GD, p. 114). If Dawkins’ argument is correct, we have to believe
in the ultimacy of the Darwinian process as the source of information or design,
in this universe or another. This flatly contradicts and amounts to a disproof
of traditional theism.
Dawkins is aware of the fact
that natural selection cannot be used to explain the origin of life simply
because before the emergence of the first self-replicating system, the
mechanism of natural selection is not applicable. His solution is to appeal to
the anthropic principle and the magic of large numbers. He argues that since
the “origin of life only had to
happen once”, “we therefore can allow it to have been an extremely improbable
event” (GD, p. 135). Furthermore, the anthropic principle, which argues that
the world we inhabit has to be one conducive to the emergence of life: “It provides a rational, design-free explanation for the fact that we find ourselves in a
situation propitious to our existence” (GD, p. 136).
He
admits that “the spontaneous arising by chance of the
first hereditary molecule strikes many as improbable. Maybe it is - very very
improbable…however improbable the origin of life might be, we know it happened on Earth because we are here… Scientists
invoke the magic of large numbers… a billion billion is a conservative estimate
of the number of available planets
in the universe” (GD, p. 137). Suppose the spontaneous arising of
something equivalent to DNA occurs on only one in a billion planets: “even with such absurdly long odds, life will still
have arisen on a billion planets… the beauty of the anthropic principle is that it
tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that
life will arise on one planet
in a billion billion to give us a good and entirely satisfying
explanation for the presence of life here. I do not for a moment believe the origin of life was anywhere
near so improbable in practice” (GD, p. 138).
Of
course, in the history of evolution on earth, besides the origin of life, there
were also other similarly improbable events. For example, “Mark Ridley… has suggested that the origin of the eucaryotic cell (our kind of
cell, with a nucleus and various other
complicated features such as mitochondria, which are not present in bacteria)
was an even more momentous, difficult and statistically improbable step
than the origin of life. The origin of consciousness might be another major gap
whose bridging was of the same order of improbability.” However, Dawkins is
convinced that one-off events like this can also be explained by the anthropic
principle as above: “There are billions of
planets that have developed life at the level of bacteria, but only a
fraction of these life forms ever made it across the gap to something like the
eucaryotic cell. And of these, a yet smaller
fraction managed to cross the later Rubicon to consciousness… The
anthropic principle states that, since we are alive, eucaryotic and conscious,
our planet has to be one of
the intensely rare planets that has bridged all three gaps” (GD, p. 140-141).
Dawkins in fact has another way to deal with the difficulty
of chemical evolution. In his The Blind Watchmaker, he explains
various naturalistic theories of the origin of life. Then he asks, "Do you
find both Cairns-Smith's theory of origin of life, and the more orthodox
organic primeval- soup theory, wildly improbable?... Well, at times it does to me too" (BWM, p.
158). However, this apparent
improbability is a virtue of evolution: "we should... be worried if the
origin of life did not seem miraculous to our own human
consciousness. An apparently (to
ordinary human consciousness) miraculously theory is exactly the kind of
theory we should be looking for in this particular matter" (BWM, p.
159).
This surprising conclusion is supported
by the following argument. Firstly, our brains are evolved by natural selection
from our ancestors. "Presumably
there was no need for our ancestors to cope with sizes and times outside the
narrow range of everyday particularity, so our brains never evolved the
capacity to imagine them." So
"what we can imagine as plausible is a narrow band in the middle of a much
broader spectrum of what is actually possible" (BWM, p. 160). For similar reasons, our estimates of
improbability is only "suitable for creatures with a lifetime of less than
one century... Our subjective judgment
of what seems like a good bet is irrelevant to what is actually a good bet”
(BWM, p. 161). So it's not surprising
that we would regard theories about origin of life as improbable because this
event occurred only once in a billion years.
Secondly, "the subjective judgment
of an alien with a lifetime of a million centuries would be quite
different. He will judge as quite
plausible an event, such as the origin of the first replicating molecule as
postulated by some chemist's theory" (BWM, p.162), and this viewpoint is
the right one for looking at theories of origin of life. So if a theory is too "plausible"
to us, it's not the kind of theory we need.
"Seen in this light, both Cairns-Smith's theory and the
primeval-soup theory seem if anything in danger of erring on the side of being
too plausible!" (BWM, p. 165). The above explanation of the apparent
improbability of chemical evolution no longer features prominently in his God
Delusion. However, he stills maintains: “Of all the apparent gaps in the evolutionary story, the origin of life gap can seem unbridgeable to
brains calibrated to assess likelihood and risk on an everyday scale” (GD, p.
139).
Critique
of Dawkins’ Atheism
Dawkins’
moral attack on religion (theistic religions in particular) is a very old one, and
has occupied an important place in the Enlightenment critique of religion. However,
since a lot of people have already made an excellent reply to Dawkins on this
point (Poole 1994; Ward 2006), I want to focus in this paper on his
“scientific” criticisms of religion.
Has Dawkins Refuted the
Complementarity of Science and Religion?
British critics of Dawkins usually adopt a rather reconciliatory
approach. (Of course it still does not satisfy Dawkins who demands nothing other
than unconditional surrender.) For example, both Alister McGrath and Michael
Poole are contented to point out that the option of theistic evolution cannot
be ruled out. They do not dispute the whole Darwinian story, and even concede
methodological naturalism. They grant science full authority and autonomy in
its own sphere, and do not propose any God-of-the-gaps. They only contend that
God can make use of the mechanism of natural selection to create organisms-
this belief cannot be proved but no one has demonstrated its falsity either.
I
find Poole’s discussions quite lucid. I’ll examine his debate with Dawkins below.
First, in response to Dawkins’s insistent question 'But who designed the divine
creator?', Poole points out that “Dawkins' constant assumption … is that since
our common experience indicates that material objects have beginnings, God
would also have had to have had an originator. In that sense, the 'god' in whom
Dawkins disbelieves is a 'god' in whom the major world religions, Christianity,
Judaism and Islam do not believe either” (Poole 1994). This shows that Dawkins
has no proper understanding of religion.
Another
major mistake of Dawkins is his failure to appreciate the co-existence of
different levels of explanation: “The concept of explanation is more
multifaceted than Dawkins appears to recognise. To explain something is to make
it plain and there are various ways of doing this. … there is no logical conflict between reason -
giving explanations which concern mechanisms, and reason - giving explanations
which concern the plans and purposes of an agent, human or divine. … Dawkins …
fails to acknowledge that there is no logical contradiction between the claim
that living things are the outcome of evolution by natural selection and that
they could also be the outcome of the plan and purposes of an agent God” (Poole
1994).
Poole
is also clear that he rejects 'God - of - the - gaps' which accords 'god' the
status of being the same type of explanation as a scientific one, and accepts
methodological naturalism in science: “the scientific enterprise is based on a
belief that gaps can be filled - but with scientific explanations, not with
talk 'about' God. So there is a restricted sense in which it is true to say
that science has no need for God, that talk about God is unnecessary in
science. ... But that does not justify any scientist in claiming that the
methodological decision to be silent about God means that science has disproved
God!” (Poole 1994)
So
the “existence of evolutionary mechanisms modifies the form of Paley's claims,
but it does not eliminate all idea of design. For instance, one argument
favoured by Darwin was that the laws of nature were themselves designed. … What
is touched by this doctrine [of Evolution] is not the evidence of design but
the mode in which the design was executed.. . In the one case the Creator made
the animals at once such as they now are; in the other case He impressed on
certain particles of matter ... such inherent powers that in the ordinary course
of time living creatures such as the present were developed ... He did not make
the things, we may say; no, but He made them make themselves” (Poole 1994).
Poole
also points out Dawkins himself has talked about “design through natural
selection”: “in the second of the Christmas Lectures, … he referred en passant
to the work of 'Ingo Rechenberg from Germany ... [who] …. designs his windmills
by a kind of natural selection.' …
randomising certain key parameters and then selecting aerofoil sections according
to desired outcomes. This double process of chance + selection is
employed by a purposive, intelligent agent... So any claim that chance/random
variations + selection is necessarily incompatible with the actions of an
intelligent, purposive agent, human or divine, is falsified by exemplars like
these” (Poole 1994).
In
his reply to Poole, Dawkins has no specific arguments against
theistic evolution. In his latest book, he does have a short argument against it:
“I am continually astonished by those theists who … seem to rejoice
in natural selection as 'God's way of achieving his creation'. They note that evolution by natural selection
would be a very easy and neat way to achieve a world full of life. God wouldn't
need to do anything at all! Peter Atkins, in the book just mentioned, takes this
line of thought to a sensibly godless conclusion when he postulates a hypothetically lazy God who tries to
get away with as little as possible
in order to make a universe containing life... Step by step, Atkins succeeds
in reducing the amount of work the
lazy God has to do until he finally ends
up doing nothing at all: he might as well not bother to exist” (GD, p. 118).
To me, this hardly amounts to a refutation
of theistic evolution. For Dawkins, this God is “lazy” but for the theistic
evolutionists, God’s refraining from the use of a miraculous way to create life
just shows His patient love and respect for the integrity of creation. There is
also a case to say that God is even wiser for being able to make a universe
which can make wonderful things like life automatically.[3] As for
Atkins’ attempt to show that there is no useful work for God to do at all, I
cannot see how this serves as a rebuttal of theistic evolution. Theistic evolutionists
usually hold that they believe in God on faith, and not because God can be used
to explain this or that (not to mention the possible problems with Atkins, as
Ward has argued in his God, Chance and Necessity).
In a
debate with Francis Collins arranged by Time, Collins also articulates a
version of theistic evolution.[4]
Then Dawkins voices this objection: “I think that's a tremendous cop-out. If
God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slightly odd that he
should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion
years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years
until you got human beings.”
In
reply, Collins says, “Who are we to say that that was an odd way to do it? ...
If it suits him to be a deity that we must seek without being forced to, would
it not have been sensible for him to use the mechanism of evolution without
posting obvious road signs to reveal his role in creation?” The use of the
phrase “cop-out” or the allegation of oddity seem to express Dawkins’ personal
dissatisfaction rather than substantial objections. Waiting for billion years
may seem inordinately long for a human being which usually lives less than a
hundred years. However, does it really matter to an eternal God whether it
takes 7 days or 7 billion years to create the universe? Hong Kong people like to
walk very fast compared to people in a small town in Britain. We might as well
ask those people why they don’t walk as fast as they can. Of course, this silly
question only reflects our narrow perspective. Moreover, suppose God creates
the whole world in 7 days. We can still ask, “Since God is omnipotent, why
can’t He do a more efficient job and create the world in 7 seconds or
0.0000000000000007 second?”
Let
us come back to Dawkins’ more general arguments. In his reply to Poole, Dawkins
writes, “If God really has a more solid basis than fairies, then let us hear
it. ... Either admit that God is a scientific hypothesis and let him submit to
the same judgement as any other scientific hypothesis. Or admit that his status
is no higher than that of fairies and river sprites” (Dawkins 1995). Poole
replies in turn, “Dawkins' alternatives… both caricature a serious matter and
coerce into an unnecessary either/or. It is perfectly possible both to reject
the notion that 'God is a scientific hypothesis' and to reject the claim that
God's 'status is no higher than that of fairies and river sprites'” (Poole
1995). He then challenges Dawkins to spell out his criteria for differentiating
between science and non- science.
In God
Delusion, Dawkins continues to defend his understanding of religion as a scientific
theory. I think he has rightly pointed out that the existence of God and many
other claims by religion, especially an historical religion like Christianity
(for example, the resurrection of Jesus), are factual claims which in
principle admit of answers. I agree with him that an extreme version of NOMA is
indefensible. Science and religion do come into contact at some points.
However, it does not then follow that all religious claims belong to a scientific
theory, and that on all levels, science and religion are rival explanations of
our world. It is easy for Dawkins to make this illicit move only because he
assumes that all factual claims can in principle be determined by science.
Despite his protest, Dawkins is a proponent of scientism. For example, it is
mistaken to say that the 'hypothesis of God' as an explanatory hypothesis is in
competition with evolution by natural selection because “God and natural
selection are, after all, the only two workable theories we have of why we
exist” (EP, p. 181). Dawkins’s mistake derives mainly from his failure to understand
the God hypothesis can be spelt out in different ways: special creationism,
progressive creationism, and theistic evolution (or a mixture of these
options). There are not only two theories but in fact a multitude, and the
relationship among them is complicated. Dawkins’ simplistic analysis just won’t
do. While special creationism and progressive creationism (to a lesser extent)
are in competition with evolution by natural selection, theistic evolution is
not.
So
the existence of God, considered in itself, is a factual claim but it is not on
the same level as other scientific claims. It should be compared to scientific naturalism:
both are grand theories and worldviews which purport to provide a perspective from
which everything is to be explained and interpreted. Since this kind of factual
claim is so different from ordinary scientific claims, we cannot just assume,
as Dawkins does, the criteria for testing mundane or scientific truth-claims will
apply to them. Whether this kind of metaphysical claims can be rationally
assessed and, if possible, by what criteria, are hotly debated in philosophy.
For example, Poole himself suggests a kind of soft rationalism: “To say, 'If
God has a more solid basis than fairies, then let us hear it' conveys the
impression that nobody has yet thought or written about Christian evidences!
Dawkins has ready access to the whole theological collection of the University
of Oxford if he wishes to avail himself of its resources. But evidence for God
is not the same as watching intently at the bottom of the garden on a summer's
night! (Poole 1995). He also correctly points out that grand theories, be they
metaphysical ones like theism or atheism, or physical ones like stellar and
organic evolution, can be judged against such criteria as comprehensiveness, consistency,
coherence and congruence.
According
to this perspective, science and religion are both alike and different. Basil
Mitchell has argued that metaphysical or high-level religious claims can be
rationally assessed, and this process is akin to the assessment of grand
theories in science (Kuhnian paradigms). The argument and evidence considered
are necessarily cumulative. Along similar lines, philosophers like Richard
Swinburne, Peter Forrest or William Craig have worked out cumulative arguments
for the existence of God. Of course, this methodology is controversial but Dawkins
seems blissfully unaware of the whole debate. Unless Dawkins provides
successful arguments for his scientistic methodology and against the above
cumulative argument approach, we have to conclude that the case for the
complementarity of science and religion (as qualified above) still stands.
Has Dawkins
Disproved God?
For Dawkins,
Darwinism has achieved what centuries of atheists have failed to do: “Darwinism
not only renders God unnecessary as an explanatory device... God is also shown
to be very very improbable indeed, for exactly the same reason as the
spontaneous arising of the vertebrate eye is improbable” (Dawkins 1995). The argument
can be formulated this way:
(P1) There are only three ways for God to come into
being: chance, deliberate design, or evolution by gradual, cumulative degrees,
guided by natural selection of random variation.
(P2) Since God is by definition capable of
designing a universe (and incidentally capable of forgiving sins, impregnating
virgins etc.), He would have to be very complex.
(P3)
God coming into being by chance is very improbable because of His complexity.
(P4) If God comes into being by deliberate design,
the designer of God in turn needs to be designed, because that God-designer
would have to be at least as complex as God. The God-designer would in turn
requires another God-designer-designer, ad infinitum. This would
generate an infinite regress of God-designers.
(P5) Since an infinite regress of God-designers is
unacceptable, improbable or problematic, the design option is unacceptable.
(P6)
If God evolved to his awesome complexity by slow, gradual degrees, it needs
another universe in which to operate. Since this hypothesis is deeply unsatisfactory
for religious people, it is also unacceptable.
So
the conclusion is that:
(C) The
existence of God is either very very improbable or unacceptable.
This argument
is hardly convincing. The conclusion can be interpreted in two different ways.
Either the improbability is attributed to the “coming into being of God” or to
“an eternal God who has always existed.” Consider Dawkins’s saying: “God is
also shown to be very improbable indeed, for exactly the same reason as the spontaneous
arising of the vertebrate eye is improbable.” Elsewhere when he discusses
possible aliens of a “vastly superior civilization”,
he talks about the “laws of probability forbid all notions of their spontaneously
appearing without simpler antecedents” (GD, p. 73; italics mine).
So
it seems that Dawkins is having the “coming into being of God” in mind when he
asserts those improbability claims. On this interpretation the premises of the
above argument at least have some initial plausibility but then the conclusion
he can draw is only that the coming into being of God or the spontaneous
arising of God without simpler antecedents is
very very improbable or unacceptable. The problem is that religious people will
just shrug their shoulders and say, “Mr. Dawkins, I agree with your conclusion
but the God you disprove is not the God I am believing in. What I mean by God
is an immaterial mind who is self-existent, all-powerful, all-knowing and
all-good.” When Dawkins discusses the possibility of “a superhuman designer”, he just asserts without argument
that “it will most
certainly not be a designer who just popped into existence, or who
always existed” (GD,
p. 156; the second italics added by me). He seems to lump the two cases
together but in fact they are very different: while a God who just popped into existence is
indeed deeply puzzling and hardly a suitable object for worship, a God who has
always existed does not lead to similar problems.
Dawkins
anticipates such a reply: " You have to say something like 'God was always
there', and if you will allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as
well just say 'DNA was always there', or 'Life was always there', and be done
with it" (BWM, p.141). Well, postulation of eternal existence is not
exactly a lazy way out (it just shows that Dawkins has not really thought
through the issues), because both theists and naturalists (on the whole)
believe in something eternal: the former in a self-existent God and the latter
in the eternal universe.[5]
The idea that something just pops into existence out of absolute nothing is
abhorred by the rational mind. Nothing comes from nothing. That is why the Big
Bang has been embarrassing for many thoughtful naturalists. Where does all
those stuff and energy come from? Atheists like Fred Hoyle strenuously resisted
the Big Bang Theory and suggested the Steady State Theory to avoid this
problem. Stephen Hawking postulates a quantum gravity model to eliminate the
singularity. Other naturalists believe that an eternal series of universes have
existed before this Big Bang. Still other naturalists bite the bullet and say that
our universe really pops into existence from nowhere, for no reason at all, but
even they will always provide an explanation why it is not a problem in the
unique case of Big Bang, etc. I am not sure where Dawkins stands on this issue
but his suggestion that the postulation of eternal existence is not
intellectually respectable would not even be accepted by many of his fellow
naturalists.
Moreover,
his “eternal DNA” rebuttal cannot in fact save his disproof of God. Perhaps just
for the sake of the argument, let us grant that both the self-existence of God and
DNA (or life) are in principle acceptable. So Dawkins can believe in the
self-existent DNA and a theist can believe in a self-existent God. Neither side
can prove the other side wrong, but then it follows that Dawkins’ disproof of
God has failed. Moreover, the two sides are not really symmetric. While it is
natural for a theist to believe in a self-existent God, it would be odd for a
naturalist to believe in the self-existent DNA. Given our current understanding
of the cosmic process, it is rather impossible to believe some celestial DNA
can exist in the hot Big Bang, not to say it has always existed. I don't think Dawkins is really advocating
this thesis.
I am
not saying that we cannot argue about self-existent beings, and try to judge
what kinds of self-existent beings are worthy of believing in. In fact many
versions of cosmological argument are doing this. However, this would typically
involve principles of sufficient reason, judgements of prior probability in the
framework of Bayes’ Theorem, and principles of explanation which are all
controversial. I doubt that Dawkins can show on these grounds that the
existence of an eternal God is very improbable. In any case, Dawkins has not
provided such an argument.
In
fact my inclination is to think that once we allow these sorts of metaphysical
considerations, there is a good case for the self-existent and perfect God
being the natural terminus of explanation. As Ward argues, "The concept of
God is simple in this sense. It is the
idea of just one basis of all possible finite beings, which originates all
other realities for good reasons, and realises the highest compossible set of
values in itself. It is thus the
simplest possible and most all-inclusive integrating concept. If it is ... self-explanatory, then it will
answer the question 'Why does it exist?' in the most adequate possible way; by
showing that it is of supreme value, and that it is wholly intelligible. God is not, as Dawkins supposes, a complex
reality, as though God was rather like a human mind, made up of lots of
disconnected thoughts, plans, desires and feelings. God is simple in a very special sense, as
being the one self-explanatory and supremely integrating reality. God can explain why the laws of nature exist
as they do ... God is not just an
arbitrary additional entity, but the purest sort of unity, which includes and
unites all possible complexity within itself" (Ward 1996, p. 112).
Ward
is directly challenging Dawkins’s premise (P2) above. As I argue above, even if
we leave this premise unchallenged, Dawkins’s disproof will not succeed.
However, Dawkins can still argue that (P2) will help to demolish the design argument.
Let us now examine these issues.
Has Dawkins
Demolished the Design Argument?
Dawkins
claims that Darwin has dealt a fatal blow to Paley’s design argument which
begins with the quest for the explanation of organized complexity in life. His
exposition in different circumstances, while on the whole similar, are also
subject to different interpretations. I’ll explore these arguments and examine
critically their adequacy.
Dawkins
says, “To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a
supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing for it leaves unexplained
the origin of the Designer" (BWM, p. 141). These sentences express a very
common objection to the postulation of God but note that if it is Dawkins’
argument against God, whether God is as complex as life is in fact irrelevant.[6]
One possible reconstruction of this argument is as follows:
A) If
we use A to explain B, the purported explanation is legitimate only if A is not
in turn left unexplained.
B) If
we use God to explain life, the origin of God itself is left unexplained.
C)
Hence, the purported God-explanation of life is not legitimate.
This
sort of argument is popular among atheists but unfortunately it is only a crude
argument that can't withstand critical scrutiny. The reasons are legion:
First,
(A) entails that Dawkins’ favoured explanation of evolutionary naturalism is also
illegitimate because the ultimate natural facts are also left unexplained. As Thomas Nagel,
another passionate atheist, points out, “All explanations come to an end
somewhere. The real opposition between Dawkins’s physicalist naturalism and the
God hypothesis is a disagreement over whether this end point is physical,
extensional, and purposeless, or mental, intentional, and purposive. On either
view, the ultimate explanation is not itself explained. The God hypothesis does
not explain the existence of God, and naturalistic physicalism does not explain
the laws of physics” (Nagel 2006, p. 26).
As
Ratzsch pointedly says, if Dawkins is assuming (A), "that principle is
surely as dangerous for the naturalist as for the theist. To take the parallel case, one could claim
that to explain the origin of species by invoking natural processes is to
explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of natural
processes. Of course, attempts to explain
natural processes by invoking the big bang- or anything else- will generate an
exactly similar problem with anything appealed to in that explanation."
Then he judiciously concludes, "Any explanation has to begin somewhere, and
the principle that no explanation is legitimate unless anything referred to in
the explanation is itself explained immediately generates a regress that would
effectively destroy any possibility of any explanation for anything"
(Ratzsch, p.192).
The
above is a kind of Humean argument but interestingly Hume also puts this retort
in the mouth of Cleanthes: "Even in common life, if I assign a cause for
any event; is it any objection ... that I cannot assign a cause of that cause,
and answer every new question, which may incessantly be started?" (Hume,
p. 163). Swinburne also produces good counter-examples to (A). Suppose a person
leaves a casino with a large sum of money. The explanation given is that he has
placed a big bet on number 10 on the roulette, and the spinning of the roulette
did turn up the number 10. This fact can be used readily to explain the
person’s fortune despite we have no idea how to explain why the roulette turned
up the number 10 (Swinburne 1968).
So
how do we in fact proceed with our explanation? As Ferre suggests, we seek explanation
as far as it goes, and as long as each step is warranted by evidence and proper
inferential rules: "As long as an actual uniformity in experience
underlies the explanation and as long as this uniformity helps to bring the
sheer multiplicity of things to some kind of intelligible relation, the
Empiricist is content. Taking one step
rather than none, if adequately justified by the evidence, is not futile but
the only way that knowledge may be expected to advance." (Ferre, pp.
164-65). The plausibility of the design hypothesis lies in the fact that our
uniform experience provides some support for the connection of organized complexity
with an intelligent mind rather than blind matter. The fact that the explanation
postulates an as yet unexplained fact is just not relevant. Even if natural
selection were to provide a totally adequate alternative explanation, the legitimacy
of the design hypothesis still cannot be gainsaid. So Argument 1 does not
succeed.
This is another key passage from Dawkins: “A
designer God cannot be used to
explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex
enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own
right. God presents an infinite regress
from which he cannot help us to escape” (GD, p. 109). So
perhaps what troubles Dawkins is not the mere fact that God is unexplained but
the alleged fact that God has the same degree of complexity which is
unexplained. Let us formulate this argument
as below:
D) God
is supposed to design life and engineer all organized complexity in the world.
E) Any
being capable of doing this is at least as complex as life and the organized
complexity engineered.
F) Hence,
God is at least as complex as life.
G) It
is not legitimate to postulate A to explain B's organized complexity if A is at
least as complex as B.
H)
Hence, it is not legitimate to postulate God to explain life.
The premise
(D) will not be disputed. (F) follows logically from (D) and (E), and (H) from
(F) and (G). So only the premises (E) and (G) need to be critically assessed.
Consider
(E) first. Why should we think that God is at least as complex as life? In fact
it is not at all clear what are Dawkins’s arguments here. They mainly consist
of assertions. Usually Dawkins first depicts God’s capacity (as graphically as
possible), and then jumps to the conclusion that God must be complex. This
is one example: “A God capable of
continuously monitoring and controlling
the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple”
(GD, p. 149).
The transition from immense capacity or
power to immense complexity seems entirely obvious to Dawkins but I, for one,
do not think it is self-evident, and would like Dawkins to provide an argument
for this crucial step. The last sentence of the quote above may give us some
clues. Based on models of embodied minds, Dawkins conceives of God as a kind of
super-organism which has to have some kind of super-brain. However, this
conception has no logical necessity, and only reflects the firm grasp of naturalism
on Dawkins’ mind.
Nagel, although he is an atheist, grasps the
problem with Dawkins’ argument very clearly: this argument “depends … on a
misunderstanding of the conclusion of the argument from design... If the
argument is supposed to show that a supremely adept and intelligent natural
being, with a super-body and a super-brain, is responsible for the design and
the creation of life on earth, then of course this “explanation” is no advance
on the phenomenon to be explained… The
reason that we are led to the hypothesis of a designer by considering both the
watch and the eye is that these are complex physical structures that carry out
a complex function, and we cannot see how they could have come into existence
out of unorganized matter purely on the basis of the purposeless laws of
physics… But God, whatever he may be, is
not a complex physical inhabitant of the natural world. The explanation of his
existence as a chance concatenation of atoms is not a possibility for which we
must find an alternative, because that is not what anybody means by God. If the
God hypothesis makes sense at all, it offers a different kind of explanation
from those of physical science: purpose or intention of a mind without a body,
capable nevertheless of creating and forming the entire physical world. The point
of the hypothesis is to claim that not all explanation is physical, and that there
is a mental, purposive, or intentional explanation more fundamental than the
basic laws of physics, because it explains even them” (Nagel 2006, p. 26).
Basically,
Dawkins’ complaint is that God possesses the same kind of complexity as the
complexity of life which calls for explanation. This is the prerequisite for
the alleged generation of the vicious infinite regress. This prerequisite,
however, is called into question by Nagel. Dawkins says, “the
biologist Julian Huxley, in 1912,
defined complexity in terms of 'heterogeneity of parts', by which he
meant a particular kind of functional indivisibility” (GD, p. 150). Yes, the complexity
of life consists of the co-ordination of numerous physical parts in a
functioning whole. However, God is one immaterial substance which has no
physical parts. So the kind of complexity which calls for explanation in the
case of life simply does not exist in God.
Let
us now consider (G): “It is not legitimate to postulate A to explain B's
organized complexity if A is at least as complex as B.” As it stands, this
principle is contradicted by many explanations we deem acceptable. Prof.
Ratzsch has provided a good example: “one can properly explain automotive
complexity by reference to human beings, human needs, human economic systems and
so forth. And the fact that humans are
themselves complex does not in the least render such explanations circular,
devoid of explanatory content or anything else of the sort" (Ratzsch, p.
191). In fact, we often postulate more complex beings to explain less complex
beings. The application of (G) will simply debar many good mundane design explanations.
As a rule, a human being is more complex than an artifact but we often appeal
to the former to explain the latter. For example, archaeologists will not
hesitate to postulate an as yet unknown primitive tribe to explain the discovery
of a stone axe.
Interestingly,
Dawkins appears to recognize this kind of examples: “one of the oldest ideas we have: 'the idea that it takes
a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down
theory of creation. You'll never see a spear making a spear maker…horse shoe
making a blacksmith… pot making a potter” (GD, p. 117). Of course, Dawkins is against
this trickle-down theory of creation, and wants to defend a kind of
hierarchical reductionism. He will probably point out that in the end all those
spear makers, blacksmiths and potters have humble origins: they are all made from
simple things through a long process of gradual evolution. So ultimately the
reverse of trickle-down theory of creation is true: all big fancy smart things
are ultimately made from lesser things. However, even if people were ultimately
explained by evolution, it does not render the explanation of a pot by the
potter illegitimate. So the principle (G) is still not correct.
On
the other hand, I am not saying that less complex things cannot explain more complex
things. As Collins suggests, “If we gave some human being enough time, it seems
possible that she could create artifacts the sum of whose complexity eventually
surpassed the human brain itself” (Collins, p. 196). Summing up the above
discussions, my tentative suggestion is that when we consider the legitimacy of
an explanation of the complexity of B by A, the comparison of degrees of complexity
of A and B does not settle the question in either direction.
Although
Ratzsch is in general critical of Dawkins, he still concedes that "were
someone attempting to explain the ultimate origin of complexity, then obviously
appealing to a deity already possessing complexity would indeed be logically
corrupt " (Ratzsch, p. 191). I am not so sure about this. If Collins’
suggestion above is sound, “even if God’s mind requires an incredible amount of
complexity, its complexity could be far less than that of the universe. It is
still possible to think, therefore, that hypothesizing God reduces the total
amount of unexplained order” (Collins, p. 196).
Furthermore,
if God has the same degree of complexity as that of life, the advantage of
taking God as the ultimate origin of complexity may not be obvious, but it is
not necessarily “logically corrupt.” Can't we appeal to the existence of energy
in one form to explain the same amount of energy in another form, e.g.,
explaining an explosion by appealing to the latent energy of the
chemicals? Can’t we explain a son's
intelligence by his fathers' “intelligent” genes? Can’t we explain the goodness
of a daughter by the goodness of her parents? It seems that we often explain
the F in B by invoking the same degree of F in A.
Even
if God is as complex as life, we may still find the appeal to God’s design has
merits. First, it seems more intelligible and more coherent with our experience
of our own intellectual activity. The reason why minds can overcome
improbability is that “a mind has the ability to ‘search’ through the realm of
possibilities and then select that possibility that appears best to meet
its goal” (Collins, p. 192). From our own experience, we can see ideas spun out
of an intelligent mind can be exceedingly complex. Secondly, God may have other
attributes which help us explain other surprising things in the universe. For
example, if God exists necessarily, it does give a final answer to the question:
“Why is there something rather than nothing?” If God is morally perfect, His
nature may explain the origin of the moral imperative or our moral
consciousness, and so on.
I
conclude that the premises (E) and (G) are both mistaken. At least Dawkins has
not provided adequate support for them. His claim that the Darwinian theory has
decisively defeated the design argument is far from substantiated.
Has Dawkins
Successfully Explained the Origin of Life?
Due
to limitations of space, I will not comment on Dawkins’ treatment of natural
selection and intelligent design. Even granting the adequacy of natural
selection to explain all biological complexity, how to account for the origin
of life is still the weakest link in evolutionary naturalism. The reason is
simple: to account for biological complexity, natural selection is deemed
utterly necessary because even Dawkins admits chance is unable to do the job.
However, when naturalists come to explain the first life, he is again left only
with chance to work on.
Again
Nagel has an admirable discussion of this problem: “But each of the steps involves a
mutation in a carrier of genetic information—an enormously complex molecule
capable both of self-replication and of generating out of surrounding matter a
functioning organism that can house it… we have explained the complexity of
organic life in terms of something that is itself just as functionally complex
as what we originally set out to explain. So the problem is just pushed back
one step: how did such a thing come into existence?... Yet this time we cannot
replace chance with natural selection.”
He is also
dissatisfied with Dawkins’s solution: “Dawkins recognizes the problem, but his
response to it is pure hand-waving... no
one has a theory that would support anything remotely near such a high
probability as one in a billion billion. Naturally there is speculation about
possible non-biological chemical precursors of DNA or RNA. But at this point
the origin of life remains, in light of what is known about the huge size, the
extreme specificity, and the exquisite functional precision of the genetic
material, a mystery” (Nagel, pp. 27-28).
As
for Dawkins’ claim that our sense of improbability cannot be trusted, I have to
confess I find his argument totally unconvincing and perverse! True, an
apparently improbable theory may be really improbable or not really so. Grant Dawkins' claim that a true theory of origin
should be apparently improbable, it does not follow that this apparently
improbable theory is the true one! It
can simply be false!
His
statement that a long-lived alien will find Cairns-Smith's theory plausible is
a pure assertion (and wishful thinking).
How can he know the judgment of a brain which is so different from his
own? Is not Dawkins’ brain the same
product of natural selection as ours which, he says many times, cannot
judge competently the probability of such an event? How can he, having said that, then assume a
superhuman standpoint as if he is superior to all his opponents? Elsewhere he makes statements about
probability of evolution (BWM, p. 146; p.164), and not surprisingly he comes
down to its favor. If he is consistent, let he stick to the thesis that we,
including himself, can't judge any theory of origin. In that case he has to abandon any claim that
evolution is actually probable.
Dawkins
after all has to admit: "We still don't know exactly how natural selection
began on Earth" (BWM, p. 165). But he goes on to assert: "the present
lack of a definitely accepted account of origin of life should certainly not be
taken as a stumbling block for the whole Darwinian world view, as it
occasionally- probably with wishful thinking- is" (BWM, p. 166) I suggest
it's his wishful thinking which prevents him from seeing the fact that
absence of a decent account of origin of life definitely counts against the
Darwinian worldview.
Conclusion
Dawkins hopes his book will help convert believers to
atheism: “If this book works as I intend,
religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.
What presumptuous optimism! Of course, dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune
to argument, their resistance built up over years of childhood indoctrination using methods that took centuries to mature” (GD,
p.5). Indeed it is not only presumptuous but also condescending.
I am one of the religious readers who have finished his
book but remain as convinced a theist as before. Well, Dawkins’ arguments are
just not cogent enough. Dawkins’ self-confidence is amazing. But listen to the
verdict of his fellow atheist, an acute philosopher: “the book is a very uneven collection
of scriptural ridicule, amateur philosophy, historical and contemporary horror
stories, anthropological speculations, and cosmological scientific argument…
Dawkins is operating mostly outside the range of his scientific expertise …
Dawkins dismisses, with contemptuous flippancy the traditional a priori
arguments for the existence of God offered by Aquinas and Anselm. I found these
attempts at philosophy, along with those in a later chapter on religion and
ethics, particularly weak” (Nagel, p. 25).
Moreover,
Dawkins' theological discussion is as a rule primitive. Another fellow defender of evolution, Michael
Ruse, despite being “pretty much atheistic with respect to the main claims of
Christianity: Jesus as the son of God, resurrection, atonement…”, complains, “I
have long been irked by Dawkins — as well as philosopher Daniel Dennett,
evolutionary biologist William Provine and company — for not knowing the first
thing about Christian theology and for not making any effort to know about it…
For example, Dawkins has some pretty simplistic views on the problem of evil.
Christian theologians are aware of evil as a problem, and they speak to it.
Whole books, of which Dawkins seems unaware, have been written on this subject.”[7]
Unfortunately,
he has widespread influence and the chance to speak to the youth through mass
media. His weak arguments still carry weight for those who are impressed by his
authority as a scientist. Dawkins is in fact disseminating his personal
world-view of atheistic Darwinian naturalism in the name of science. Though I
have argued that his account of religion is one-sided and simplistic, his
warnings about the possible harm of religion should be heeded. However, his
conflict thesis should be resisted, and scientists and religious believers
should work together to bring out the best from both science and religion.
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[2]
Not all scientists agreed with Dawkins. For example, Max F. Perutz, Nobelist in
chemistry in 1962, responded: "Scientists may not believe in God, but they
should be taught why they ought to behave as if they did." He preferred a
chair in "science and ethics" but "science and theology"
was the next best thing to counter "the increasingly prevailing law of the
jungle in the scientific world." (The Independent, 22 Mar 1993)
[3] Personally I do not accept theistic
evolution. Here I am only trying to say Dawkins cannot rule out that
possibility rationally.
[5] Usually atheists argue that since the universe
is eternal, it does not need explanation- this usually occurs in the context of
the discussion of the cosmological argument.
[6] Perhaps these sentences are not supposed
to be taken alone because just preceding them is Dawkins’ complaint about the
complexity of God. If so, Dawkins is only advancing the second argument I will
discuss later. But it is also possible that Dawkins has both arguments in mind.
I hope he can clarify the matter in the future. In any case, the first argument
in itself is worth looking at because it is a kind of Humean objection which
looks plausible to many. Looking into this argument will help clarify some
questions about the criteria of legitimate explanation.
[7]Michael Ruse, “McGrath squares off against
‘Dawkins’ God’”, April 25, 2005, http://www.stnews.org/package-1-165.htm
