You can scroll down to find analysis of chapters 1 through 3.
Dawkins' argument amounts to this:
Creationists (for Dawkins this seems to be anyone who believes in God) hold that the world and life are astronomically improbable and therefore could not have come about on their own. Thus, the creationists believe, there must be an intelligence which lies behind it all, i.e. God.
However, anything intelligent enough to create the world must itself be highly complex and therefore at least as improbable as the world it creates. Thus, if the improbability of the universe is so great as to render it inexplicable apart from a designer, then that designer, being even more comnplex and thus more improbable, must itself require an explanation.
This leads to an infinite regress of "designers" which is an absurdity. Therefore, the simplest, most reasonable alternative to believing an absurdity is to believe that the universe is all there is.
Dawkins gives this reader the impression that he thinks this is a knock down argument against the rationality of believing in God's existence, but it fails for at least four reasons:
- The assumption that the source of complexity must itself be complex is false.
- His use of improbability as it relates to God seems misconstrued.
- The argument is based on the assumption that the theist is forced to accept an infinite regress of causes.
- The argument seems to claim that if there's no good reason to think an event didn't happen that it therefore almost certainly did happen.
Dawkins argues that if life is designed the designer must be at least as complex as what he designed and therefore at least as improbable and therefore at least as much in need of an explanation for his complexity.
Yet Dawkins believes that the ultimate source of the universe and all the complexity it contains was a simple, homogenous point (a singularity) which, in the Big Bang, ultimately produced the present world. He also believes that the first cell to appear in the long chain of living things was far less complex than the myriad life forms into which it has evolved.
He also believes, I assume, that the zygote which gives rise to an adult human is much less complex than the adult it gradually forms itself into. So, it's not clear to me, in light of these examples, why he would stake his argument on the claim that complexity can only be generated by even greater complexity. The assertion seems to just be false.
If God is a simple, undivided substance like mind, as many theologians and philosophers believe, then Dawkins' claim that the existence of God is even less probable than the existence of the universe comes to nothing.
The second problem with this part of Dawkins' argument is that it uses the idea of improbability improperly.
When we say that the complexity of the living world is improbable we mean that it is unlikely that it could have arisen solely by unguided processes. We mean that it is astonishing that it would have just happened by coincidence, without any purposeful input. It's highly improbable, for instance, that a flint would appear to be whittled to a sharp, triangular point like an arrowhead if only mechanical forces ever acted upon it, but it's not at all improbable that the flint takes on this appearance given the existence of a man with a hammer and chisel.
In other words, complex universes containing complex living things are improbable only on the assumption that they originated by sheer chance. They're not at all improbable if there's an intelligent agent involved in their origin.
Moreover, although it's indeed highly improbable that complex things like biological cells and universes could be produced solely by mechanical processes, God, unlike the man with the chisel, is not something which is produced or has an origin. God has for centuries been thought of by philosophers as a necessary being, one which does not depend on anything else for his existence and thus to talk in terms of the origin of God is to commit a category error.
The universe is comprised of contingent entities, things whose existence is caused by something else. All contingent entities require as their ultimate cause a necessary entity - something which is not contingent and does not depend upon anything else for its existence. This ultimate cause of the constituents of the universe cannot itself be dependent upon anything else or it would itself be contingent and could not be the ultimate cause of all contingent things.
Thus, the ultimate cause must be something which does not "come to be," which has no origin, and which exists entirely independently of any contingent entity. It must have necessary existence.
It's therefore a mistake to talk about the improbability of God existing in the same way we can talk of the improbability of the highly complex universe existing. It's the origin of the universe and the origin of life in the universe that beg for a causal explanation, but God is not the sort of being which depends upon some causal explanation outside himself, he's not the sort of being which has an origin and therefore to speak of the improbability of the origin of God is a confusion.
Dawkins doesn't seem to understand the distinction between necessary and contingent being. If he did he wouldn't conflate God with contingent entities like the universe. When the difference is understood, the argument from improbability, in which he invests so much, collapses.
More on Dawkins' argument in chapter 4 on the next post.
