In the concluding chapter of The God Delusion Richard Dawkins ventures an explanation for how religions came to be. The short of it is that he thinks they may be an outgrowth of the childhood trait of having an invisible friend.
He has no evidence to offer us, of course, so he moves on to other matters on which to speculate.
For example he castigates people who believe in eternal life for what he sees as the inconsistency of grieving at the death of a loved one. If religious people really believed in heaven why shouldn't they rejoice at the loved one's good fortune, he asks?
Aside from the fact that grief is an emotion we feel because we are suffering a loss, not because our loved one is experiencing gain, Dawkins doesn't seem to realize that he has just spent pages deploring Islamists for acting completely consistently with their belief in eternal life when they sacrifice themselves in their suicide bombings.
He's appalled that people believe in an eternal reward and act in accord with that belief and then we turn the page to find him scoffing at people who believe in an eternal reward and act in ways he thinks to be at odds with that belief.
Dawkins' greatest consistency in TGD is his inconsistency.
He rules out miracles because they are so highly improbable, and then in the very next paragraph he tells us that evolution, which also seems highly improbable, is almost inevitable, given the vastness of time.
But if time and the existence of an infinite number of worlds make the improbable inevitable why doesn't that work for miracles as well?
To apply Dawkinsian reasoning, in all the zillions of universes of the Many Worlds landscape there has to be at least one in which a man capable of working miracles is born and himself rises from the dead. We just happen to be in the world in which it happens.
Why should the Many Worlds (or Multiverse) Hypothesis be able to explain the fine-tuning of the cosmos and the origin of life, both of which are astronomically improbable, but not a man rising from the dead?
He argues that the fact that there is no afterlife should make this life all the more precious, but what it really does is make this life utterly meaningless. Death is the big eraser. It negates everything most of us have ever done. It renders everything pointless and absurd.
Dawkins avers that his life is meaningful because he fills it with a "systematic endeavor to find out the truth about the real world," but for what end? When he dies whatever knowledge he has acquired will do him no good.
He's like a man on his death bed trying to master a new language. It gives him something to do, like working crossword puzzles, but what does it really matter?
The Christian, on the other hand, views death from this side of it as a tragedy, a terrible evil, but from the other side as little more than an unpleasant interruption of one's ongoing life. All that we do in this life matters forever.
There's a purpose in learning a language, even late in one's life, because it'll be something useful and give one pleasure on the other side of death. There's also a purpose in scientific study because what we learn here and now will be useful in eternity.
But if death is the end then there's no purpose in anything and all that matters now is avoiding pain and perhaps experiencing pleasure.
The terrible irony is that Dawkins could be doing the science he loves and to which he is devoted, or something like it, forever. Tragically, though, he chooses to empty his love of real significance by despising the God who is the only ground of the truth and knowledge he longs to attain.
The God Delusion was acclaimed by atheists around the world, but in fact they should've been hoping to see the book pass quickly into oblivion. Its sloppy reasoning did more to set back their cause among intelligent readers than almost anything Christians could do.
If this is the best that can be mustered as an argument against God, an undecided seeker might rightly think, then perhaps the case against God is not nearly as strong as one might've assumed. Indeed, TGD is a book which should be read and discussed by everyone, theist or non-theist, who wrestles with doubt.
A thoughtful, informed reading will allay the doubts and persuade the doubter that the case against God must, at bottom, be pretty anemic.
Wednesday, February 15, 2023
Tuesday, February 14, 2023
The God Delusion (Ch. 9)
To fully appreciate the ironies of chapter 9 of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion one has to understand that Dawkins apparently has to reach all the way back to 1858 to find a story of how Church authorities in Italy seized an 8 year-old child, Edgardo Mortara, from his Jewish parents and raised him as a Roman Catholic.
The boy had been baptized by an illiterate house girl when he was gravely ill and for the Italian Inquisition that was good enough to make him a Catholic.
It's a very sad story, but Dawkins concludes, bizarrely, that such tragedies could easily happen in today's religious climate. In a sense he's right, but not in the way he intends. Moreover, if this tragedy could be so easily repeated today why did he have to go back 150 years to find an example of it?
But never mind. He's trying to discredit the Church by showing how it perpetrated terrible injustices on families in the 19th century. He neglects to tell his readers that the state atheisms of the 20th century did far, far worse and inflicted their horrors on millions of families throughout the world.
There've been myriad tragic accounts of Communist authorities in the 20th century taking children from "unfit" parents, particularly Christian parents, and raising them in state schools, but Dawkins is blind to the crimes committed in the name of atheism.
Or maybe he doesn't think taking children from Christian parents is all that bad an idea.
What I mean is, he calls such abductions as happened to the Jewish boy in 19th century Italy a form of child abuse and deplores it, but then he likens that abduction to teaching children about God and instilling in them the precepts of the parents' Christianity. He writes:
In other words, the logic of Dawkins' belief that religious instruction is a form of child abuse puts him squarely in the company of the Italian Inquisition of the 19th century. Oddly, Dawkins fails to see the irony.
I said above that Dawkins was right that children today could easily be taken from their parents, but not by Church authorities. The contemporary fascists who seek to control what children are taught are the intellectual compatriots of Mr. Dawkins.
Consider these words of a colleague of Dawkins which Dawkins quotes with approval:
We should ask who decides what constitutes "nonsense"? No doubt this will be the task of the secular, liberal Darwinians in the academy. Who better qualified to recognize nonsense than people who write books like The God Delusion and who implicitly endorse inflicting the same cruelties on families for which they had just condemned the Italian Church?
We might also ask where Dawkins' kind of thinking ends? If parents are to be prohibited from passing on religious beliefs to their children what about moral beliefs which the cogniscenti deem substandard?
Or what about political beliefs, or any metaphysical beliefs - such as opposition to Darwinism - that offend the refined intellects of our contemporary arbiters of truth and reason? And who would be charged with enforcing these contemptible rules in Dawkins' Brave New World?
The God Delusion, amongst its many shortcomings, has this singular virtue: It gives the reader a pellucid glimpse into the workings and aspirations of the progessive mind. Their dream is to have total control over all that people think and do.
People like Richard Dawkins are a genuine threat to human freedom. In Jonah Goldberg's felicitous image, they constitute smiley face fascism.
There's also this bit of silliness:
It says nothing about whether that child has actually made a conscious decision to be a Christian, but even if it did, so what? Most people reassess their religious beliefs as they mature and decide whether they want to retain them or not.
Dawkins himself did this, rejecting the baptism of his infancy, and it's hard to understand why he gets himself in such a swivet over the possibility that others might not make the same choice he made.
By the way, he wants parents to refrain from exerting any religious influence on a child, but I wonder if he was punctilious in not allowing his materialist beliefs to influence his own daughter. I doubt it.
I also wonder what he would have done had his daughter one day told him that she wanted to be baptized and that she thought her old man's Darwinism was as daft as his atheism. I wouldn't be surprised if Dawkins "raised the roof" but not for the reason he urges others to do it.
There is one more chapter to The God Delusion. We'll examine it tomorrow. Meanwhile, don't let your children out of your sight around these people. They are very, very dangerous.
The boy had been baptized by an illiterate house girl when he was gravely ill and for the Italian Inquisition that was good enough to make him a Catholic.
It's a very sad story, but Dawkins concludes, bizarrely, that such tragedies could easily happen in today's religious climate. In a sense he's right, but not in the way he intends. Moreover, if this tragedy could be so easily repeated today why did he have to go back 150 years to find an example of it?
But never mind. He's trying to discredit the Church by showing how it perpetrated terrible injustices on families in the 19th century. He neglects to tell his readers that the state atheisms of the 20th century did far, far worse and inflicted their horrors on millions of families throughout the world.
There've been myriad tragic accounts of Communist authorities in the 20th century taking children from "unfit" parents, particularly Christian parents, and raising them in state schools, but Dawkins is blind to the crimes committed in the name of atheism.
Or maybe he doesn't think taking children from Christian parents is all that bad an idea.
What I mean is, he calls such abductions as happened to the Jewish boy in 19th century Italy a form of child abuse and deplores it, but then he likens that abduction to teaching children about God and instilling in them the precepts of the parents' Christianity. He writes:
I am persuaded that the phrase 'child abuse' is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage them to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell.So, teaching children a traditional Christian doctrine is a form of child abuse, and what do humane societies do to parents who are abusing their children? They take them from them, of course, just like Edgardo Mortara was taken away from his parents by the Church.
In other words, the logic of Dawkins' belief that religious instruction is a form of child abuse puts him squarely in the company of the Italian Inquisition of the 19th century. Oddly, Dawkins fails to see the irony.
I said above that Dawkins was right that children today could easily be taken from their parents, but not by Church authorities. The contemporary fascists who seek to control what children are taught are the intellectual compatriots of Mr. Dawkins.
Consider these words of a colleague of Dawkins which Dawkins quotes with approval:
Children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it.Yes, this is a revolting passage, redolent of the totalitarian mindset of the Nazi and Communist fascisms of the 1930s. If you teach your children that Jesus loves them you are just as cruel as if you knocked their teeth out. Both the man who wrote this and Dawkins who quotes it are beyond parody.
So we should no more allow parents to teach their children to believe, for example in the literal truth of the Bible or that the planets rule their lives, than we should allow parents to knock their children's teeth out or lock them in a dungeon.
We should ask who decides what constitutes "nonsense"? No doubt this will be the task of the secular, liberal Darwinians in the academy. Who better qualified to recognize nonsense than people who write books like The God Delusion and who implicitly endorse inflicting the same cruelties on families for which they had just condemned the Italian Church?
We might also ask where Dawkins' kind of thinking ends? If parents are to be prohibited from passing on religious beliefs to their children what about moral beliefs which the cogniscenti deem substandard?
Or what about political beliefs, or any metaphysical beliefs - such as opposition to Darwinism - that offend the refined intellects of our contemporary arbiters of truth and reason? And who would be charged with enforcing these contemptible rules in Dawkins' Brave New World?
The God Delusion, amongst its many shortcomings, has this singular virtue: It gives the reader a pellucid glimpse into the workings and aspirations of the progessive mind. Their dream is to have total control over all that people think and do.
People like Richard Dawkins are a genuine threat to human freedom. In Jonah Goldberg's felicitous image, they constitute smiley face fascism.
There's also this bit of silliness:
Our society ... has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them [like "Christian child"] ....Please, please raise your consciousness about this and raise the roof whenever you hear it happening....Richard needs to stay on his meds when he writes his books. To call a young child a "Christian" child is simply an economical way of saying that the child is born to Christian parents and has been baptized in a Christian church.
It says nothing about whether that child has actually made a conscious decision to be a Christian, but even if it did, so what? Most people reassess their religious beliefs as they mature and decide whether they want to retain them or not.
Dawkins himself did this, rejecting the baptism of his infancy, and it's hard to understand why he gets himself in such a swivet over the possibility that others might not make the same choice he made.
By the way, he wants parents to refrain from exerting any religious influence on a child, but I wonder if he was punctilious in not allowing his materialist beliefs to influence his own daughter. I doubt it.
I also wonder what he would have done had his daughter one day told him that she wanted to be baptized and that she thought her old man's Darwinism was as daft as his atheism. I wouldn't be surprised if Dawkins "raised the roof" but not for the reason he urges others to do it.
There is one more chapter to The God Delusion. We'll examine it tomorrow. Meanwhile, don't let your children out of your sight around these people. They are very, very dangerous.
Monday, February 13, 2023
The God Delusion (Ch. 8)
In chapter 8 of The God Delusion Richard Dawkins continues to pile implausible assertions on top of very dubious arguments. He delivers himself of the claim, for instance, that evolutionists believe in evolution because the evidence supports it and would abandon their theory overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it.
Now that may be true of him personally, though I very much doubt it, but it's certainly not true of evolutionists as a whole. Consider the famous admission of evolutionist Richard Lewontin who doubtless speaks for many in his camp:
The unmistakable trademark of the faith-based moralizer, Dawkins goes on to assure us, is to care passionately about what other people do (or think) in private. This reprehensible behavior is typical, he asserts, of religious people, especially those who condemn homosexuality and other forms of sexual libertinism.
Whether many Christians really care what others think and do in private I cannot say, but it certainly is typical of many of Dawkins' friends, if not he himself, to care about other people's private thoughts. If, for example, a student or faculty member of a high school or college knows all the facts of evolutionary theory but personally disbelieves their truth, many atheistic materialists have publicly admitted that they would, were it in their power, deny them a degree or a tenured faculty position.
We've noted on VP several examples of Darwinists who care very passionately indeed about what people think in private about evolution. Why is it despicable to concern oneself with what others think in their hearts about sex but not despicable when it is private doubts about an academic topic like Darwinism that must be purged root and branch from peoples' hearts and minds?
Moreover, Professor Dawkins is at pains in chapter 8 to defend abortion on demand and along the way ridicule religious believers for their opposition to it. He observes that Paul Hill, a Pensacola man who killed an abortionist and his bodyguard in 1994, was driven to his crime by his religious beliefs.
By the lights of his religious faith, Dawkins states, Hill was entirely right and moral to shoot the abortionist.
Be that as it may, the irony of Dawkins' complaint here against religion is that by Dawkins' own lights he cannot say, though he does anyway, that Hill was wrong or immoral to shoot the abortionist.
Dawkins must piggy-back on a theistic understanding and foundation of morality in order to make his case that Hill's act was contemptible because on atheistic grounds there simply is no justification for using the term "morally wrong" and no reason to think that murder is anything more than an offense against one's own subjective moral preferences.
Dawkins' main justification for killing the unborn, surprisingly enough, is not that they're not human but that, regardless of their humanity, they don't really suffer from being aborted.
This is an astonishing argument. If we were to adopt it how could we avoid taking the further short step to agreeing that no killing would be immoral as long as the victim didn't suffer? Where would this stop? Infants and the elderly could be put to death so long as it was done painlessly, but there'd be no reason to stop there.
Everyone who couldn't defend themselves in a Dawkinsian world would be fair game for those who are stronger provided the killers did their deed without inflicting pain. Children, the weak and infirm, the poor, all would be vulnerable to Dawkins' enlightened thinking.
Dawkins, though he apparently doesn't foresee it, would have us living in a Hobbesian world of war of every man against every man. To follow his logic would be to travel straight into a nightmarish dystopia.
At any rate, having served up the stunning thesis that what essentially makes killing humans wrong is not that it takes a human life but rather that it inflicts pain, our author passes on to chapter 9 where he'll make the case, or at least attempt to make a case, that teaching children to be religious is a form of child abuse.
Now that may be true of him personally, though I very much doubt it, but it's certainly not true of evolutionists as a whole. Consider the famous admission of evolutionist Richard Lewontin who doubtless speaks for many in his camp:
We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.That doesn't sound to me like a man particularly open to evidence. When Dawkins insists that absolutist belief systems are a source of evil in the world and that religion is absolutist, he should be reminded of the above very absolutist passage from Professor Lewontin.
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.
Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
The unmistakable trademark of the faith-based moralizer, Dawkins goes on to assure us, is to care passionately about what other people do (or think) in private. This reprehensible behavior is typical, he asserts, of religious people, especially those who condemn homosexuality and other forms of sexual libertinism.
Whether many Christians really care what others think and do in private I cannot say, but it certainly is typical of many of Dawkins' friends, if not he himself, to care about other people's private thoughts. If, for example, a student or faculty member of a high school or college knows all the facts of evolutionary theory but personally disbelieves their truth, many atheistic materialists have publicly admitted that they would, were it in their power, deny them a degree or a tenured faculty position.
We've noted on VP several examples of Darwinists who care very passionately indeed about what people think in private about evolution. Why is it despicable to concern oneself with what others think in their hearts about sex but not despicable when it is private doubts about an academic topic like Darwinism that must be purged root and branch from peoples' hearts and minds?
Moreover, Professor Dawkins is at pains in chapter 8 to defend abortion on demand and along the way ridicule religious believers for their opposition to it. He observes that Paul Hill, a Pensacola man who killed an abortionist and his bodyguard in 1994, was driven to his crime by his religious beliefs.
By the lights of his religious faith, Dawkins states, Hill was entirely right and moral to shoot the abortionist.
Be that as it may, the irony of Dawkins' complaint here against religion is that by Dawkins' own lights he cannot say, though he does anyway, that Hill was wrong or immoral to shoot the abortionist.
Dawkins must piggy-back on a theistic understanding and foundation of morality in order to make his case that Hill's act was contemptible because on atheistic grounds there simply is no justification for using the term "morally wrong" and no reason to think that murder is anything more than an offense against one's own subjective moral preferences.
Dawkins' main justification for killing the unborn, surprisingly enough, is not that they're not human but that, regardless of their humanity, they don't really suffer from being aborted.
This is an astonishing argument. If we were to adopt it how could we avoid taking the further short step to agreeing that no killing would be immoral as long as the victim didn't suffer? Where would this stop? Infants and the elderly could be put to death so long as it was done painlessly, but there'd be no reason to stop there.
Everyone who couldn't defend themselves in a Dawkinsian world would be fair game for those who are stronger provided the killers did their deed without inflicting pain. Children, the weak and infirm, the poor, all would be vulnerable to Dawkins' enlightened thinking.
Dawkins, though he apparently doesn't foresee it, would have us living in a Hobbesian world of war of every man against every man. To follow his logic would be to travel straight into a nightmarish dystopia.
At any rate, having served up the stunning thesis that what essentially makes killing humans wrong is not that it takes a human life but rather that it inflicts pain, our author passes on to chapter 9 where he'll make the case, or at least attempt to make a case, that teaching children to be religious is a form of child abuse.
Saturday, February 11, 2023
The God Delusion (Ch. 7b)
Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion is a rambling, weakly argued polemic against God and religion in which no canard is considered too lame to be trotted out in service to the cause. In the second half of chapter 7, for instance, Dawkins reconstructs the obligatory sad history of religious oppression, conflict and bloodshed. He strongly implies that but for the baleful influence of religion all would be peace and light in the world.
As so often in his book, though, Professor Dawkins tells us only part of the tale, and a small part at that. Let's talk a little bit about what he leaves out, starting in 1915: First there was the Russian revolution (9 million dead), then the Ukrainian famine (15 million dead), the Nazi holocaust (6 million dead), the rape of Nanking (300,000 dead) the war in Korea (2.8 million dead), the cultural revolution in China (40 million dead), post-war Vietnam (430,000 dead), the Cambodian killing fields (1.6 million dead), the Rwandan genocide (750,000 dead).
These slaughters accounted for the deaths of about 80 million people, none of them had anything to do with theistic religion, but most of them were perpetrated by devotees of an ideology that was explicitly or implicitly atheistic. In other words, the record of slaughter in the name of atheism and by atheists dwarfs any of the murders committed in the name of God.
Moreover, if we consider not religion in general but only the Christian church the bloodshed which can be laid to the account of Christianity over the last four centuries is vanishingly small, especially compared to the crimes of state atheism.
Even the Spanish Inquisition, a church-sponsored attempt to eradicate heresy in the 15th through the early 19th centuries, was only responsible for the deaths of the relatively small number of about 3000 people or roughly 11 people per year.
Dawkins maintains that religion is a significant force for evil because religion, being a human enterprise, is subject to many of the flaws that humans possess, but he fails to recognize that it is the human element of religion that is the problem, not religion itself.
Because, he argues, there is a widespread consensus about what's right and what's wrong, and this consensus has nothing to do with religion, religion is unnecessary for morality. As an alternative to the Biblical commandments he offers a list of ethical rules that reflect what he calls the "moral zeitgeist." Some of the platitudes he serves up are: Always seek to learn something new; live life with joy and wonder; in all things strive to cause no harm.
To each of these, however, the question needs to be put: "Why?" What obligates anyone to observe Dawkins' rules? They're nothing more than banal expressions of his own preferences about how he'd like to see people live. Observing them or flouting them is neither right nor wrong.
Dawkins naively believes that the moral zeitgeist (i.e. the spirit of the age) is moving us forward and that we're making moral progress. Notwithstanding the absurdity of such a claim in light of the statistics given above for the 20th century (which represent, by the way, only a fraction of that century's horrors), it is remarkable for what it reveals about his utter obliviousness to the fact that he has no grounds for calling an evolving moral consensus either progress or regress. It just is.
He assures us that the "zeitgeist," pushed along as it is by people like ethicist Peter Singer, is moving us toward a post-specieist condition where animals will have rights similar to those of human persons. This, Dawkins' enthuses, would be a "natural extrapolation of earlier reforms like the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women."
What Dawkins chooses not to tell his readers is that Singer is the world's most outspoken proponent of legalizing infanticide, which may certainly be seen as a "natural extrapolation" from a Darwinian worldview and an example of the progressive direction in which the zeitgeist is moving.
"The manifest progression of the zeitgeist is more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good," Dawkins proclaims. In other words, as long as we can agree to follow certain precepts and platitudes who needs God?
This is so naive that it seems almost an indignity to respond to it. One of his ethical rules is "Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or species" (Interestingly, he does not prohibit discrimination based upon religion). But why should we not discriminate on the basis of sex or race? Why is such behavior wrong? Why is it wrong to harm another person? Dawkins doesn't tell us because he can't tell us.
The Darwinian ethic is might makes right and survival of the fittest and under such a principle prohibitions against discrimination are ludicrous. Discrimination, or anything else, can only be wrong if we are somehow obligated to treat others with dignity and respect and we can only be so obligated if there is a God. Nothing else has the moral authority to impose moral duties or the power to hold us accountable to them.
Certainly, a long chain of blind, impersonal, purposeless accidental mutations in our genes has no authority to impose duties nor the power to hold us accountable.
A big problem for anyone seeking to show that atheists are good folk is the record of oppressors like Hitler and Stalin so Dawkins devotes several pages to explaining how these men and others like them were not really influenced to do what they did by their atheism. Their atheism was one thing, he avers, their deeds were another.
This is a laughable defense given that he was loath to make the same concession to the historical crimes committed by Christians. But even if we allow him the point it's still irrelevant. The question is not whether these men were consciously acting on their atheistic beliefs when they committed their crimes, but rather whether what these men did was in any way inconsistent with an atheistic worldview.
The answer to that is no. If atheism is true nothing Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Mao did as they slaughtered millions in the 20th century was morally wrong. Tragic? Yes. Unfortunate? Yes. Evil? No, for on atheism there is no such thing as moral evil.
Dawkins is offended that anyone would think that an atheist, qua atheist, would commit such atrocities as were recorded by Stalin and Hitler. "Why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of a belief?" he asks.
But this question is a diversion. Dawkins needs rather to answer the deeper question of why atheistic Marxists felt impelled to slay hundreds of thousands of Christian clergy and laypersons and to attempt to wipe out Christianity in almost every country in which they seized power in the 20th century.
If atheism is merely the absence of a belief, as Dawkins insists, why is it so hostile to believers? Why is it not simply indifferent? The reason is because for the Marxists atheism is indeed an absolutist belief system, and it sees Christianity as its most vigorous rival.
Richard Dawkins does not believe in miracles, but he should. The fact that a book as poorly argued as The God Delusion became a best-seller and made him wealthy is perhaps the most amazing miracle thus far in this century.
As so often in his book, though, Professor Dawkins tells us only part of the tale, and a small part at that. Let's talk a little bit about what he leaves out, starting in 1915: First there was the Russian revolution (9 million dead), then the Ukrainian famine (15 million dead), the Nazi holocaust (6 million dead), the rape of Nanking (300,000 dead) the war in Korea (2.8 million dead), the cultural revolution in China (40 million dead), post-war Vietnam (430,000 dead), the Cambodian killing fields (1.6 million dead), the Rwandan genocide (750,000 dead).
These slaughters accounted for the deaths of about 80 million people, none of them had anything to do with theistic religion, but most of them were perpetrated by devotees of an ideology that was explicitly or implicitly atheistic. In other words, the record of slaughter in the name of atheism and by atheists dwarfs any of the murders committed in the name of God.
Moreover, if we consider not religion in general but only the Christian church the bloodshed which can be laid to the account of Christianity over the last four centuries is vanishingly small, especially compared to the crimes of state atheism.
Even the Spanish Inquisition, a church-sponsored attempt to eradicate heresy in the 15th through the early 19th centuries, was only responsible for the deaths of the relatively small number of about 3000 people or roughly 11 people per year.
Dawkins maintains that religion is a significant force for evil because religion, being a human enterprise, is subject to many of the flaws that humans possess, but he fails to recognize that it is the human element of religion that is the problem, not religion itself.
Because, he argues, there is a widespread consensus about what's right and what's wrong, and this consensus has nothing to do with religion, religion is unnecessary for morality. As an alternative to the Biblical commandments he offers a list of ethical rules that reflect what he calls the "moral zeitgeist." Some of the platitudes he serves up are: Always seek to learn something new; live life with joy and wonder; in all things strive to cause no harm.
To each of these, however, the question needs to be put: "Why?" What obligates anyone to observe Dawkins' rules? They're nothing more than banal expressions of his own preferences about how he'd like to see people live. Observing them or flouting them is neither right nor wrong.
Dawkins naively believes that the moral zeitgeist (i.e. the spirit of the age) is moving us forward and that we're making moral progress. Notwithstanding the absurdity of such a claim in light of the statistics given above for the 20th century (which represent, by the way, only a fraction of that century's horrors), it is remarkable for what it reveals about his utter obliviousness to the fact that he has no grounds for calling an evolving moral consensus either progress or regress. It just is.
He assures us that the "zeitgeist," pushed along as it is by people like ethicist Peter Singer, is moving us toward a post-specieist condition where animals will have rights similar to those of human persons. This, Dawkins' enthuses, would be a "natural extrapolation of earlier reforms like the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women."
What Dawkins chooses not to tell his readers is that Singer is the world's most outspoken proponent of legalizing infanticide, which may certainly be seen as a "natural extrapolation" from a Darwinian worldview and an example of the progressive direction in which the zeitgeist is moving.
"The manifest progression of the zeitgeist is more than enough to undermine the claim that we need God in order to be good," Dawkins proclaims. In other words, as long as we can agree to follow certain precepts and platitudes who needs God?
This is so naive that it seems almost an indignity to respond to it. One of his ethical rules is "Do not discriminate or oppress on the basis of sex, race or species" (Interestingly, he does not prohibit discrimination based upon religion). But why should we not discriminate on the basis of sex or race? Why is such behavior wrong? Why is it wrong to harm another person? Dawkins doesn't tell us because he can't tell us.
The Darwinian ethic is might makes right and survival of the fittest and under such a principle prohibitions against discrimination are ludicrous. Discrimination, or anything else, can only be wrong if we are somehow obligated to treat others with dignity and respect and we can only be so obligated if there is a God. Nothing else has the moral authority to impose moral duties or the power to hold us accountable to them.
Certainly, a long chain of blind, impersonal, purposeless accidental mutations in our genes has no authority to impose duties nor the power to hold us accountable.
A big problem for anyone seeking to show that atheists are good folk is the record of oppressors like Hitler and Stalin so Dawkins devotes several pages to explaining how these men and others like them were not really influenced to do what they did by their atheism. Their atheism was one thing, he avers, their deeds were another.
This is a laughable defense given that he was loath to make the same concession to the historical crimes committed by Christians. But even if we allow him the point it's still irrelevant. The question is not whether these men were consciously acting on their atheistic beliefs when they committed their crimes, but rather whether what these men did was in any way inconsistent with an atheistic worldview.
The answer to that is no. If atheism is true nothing Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, or Mao did as they slaughtered millions in the 20th century was morally wrong. Tragic? Yes. Unfortunate? Yes. Evil? No, for on atheism there is no such thing as moral evil.
Dawkins is offended that anyone would think that an atheist, qua atheist, would commit such atrocities as were recorded by Stalin and Hitler. "Why would anyone go to war for the sake of an absence of a belief?" he asks.
But this question is a diversion. Dawkins needs rather to answer the deeper question of why atheistic Marxists felt impelled to slay hundreds of thousands of Christian clergy and laypersons and to attempt to wipe out Christianity in almost every country in which they seized power in the 20th century.
If atheism is merely the absence of a belief, as Dawkins insists, why is it so hostile to believers? Why is it not simply indifferent? The reason is because for the Marxists atheism is indeed an absolutist belief system, and it sees Christianity as its most vigorous rival.
Richard Dawkins does not believe in miracles, but he should. The fact that a book as poorly argued as The God Delusion became a best-seller and made him wealthy is perhaps the most amazing miracle thus far in this century.
Friday, February 10, 2023
The God Delusion (Ch. 7a)
We continue our critical journey through Richard Dawkins' best-selling case for atheism, The God Delusion, with a look today at chapter 7. Here Dawkins sets two tasks for himself. The first is to discredit the Bible, particularly the Old Testament (O.T.), and the second is to offer an alternative ethical narrative, what he calls the "moral zeitgeist," to that of the Bible.
None of what he says in this chapter has anything to do with the question of God's existence, but it may nevertheless be of interest to theists.
It has to be understood that Dawkins' arguments are often logically flimsy, and his facts and interpretations are often suspect at best. The God Delusion is, in fact, so poorly argued that it would hardly be worth the time it takes to read it were it not that it has sold so many copies and had such a powerful impact on audiences around the world.
One part of Professor Dawkins' argument in chapter 7 seems to be that it is inconceivable that any God as great as theists imagine him to be would care about the paltry sins of tiny human beings on our speck of a planet. "We humans," he writes, "give ourselves such airs, even aggrandizing our pokey little 'sins' to the level of cosmic significance."
But of course our sins are of cosmic significance, and so are we, if it's true that the creator of the cosmos created humanity for the express purpose of living in a reciprocal love relationship with them. Dawkins, almost child-like, seems to equate significance with relative size. Since we're so tiny compared to the universe, he reasons, it's absurd to think that a creator God would care about us.
His reasoning reminds me of a scene in the classic film The Third Man where a criminal named Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, takes his antagonist to the top of a Ferris wheel. From that vantage the people all look so small and their lives seem so insignificant. From that perspective it was easy for Lime to justify the crimes he committed against them. His victims were little more than ants.
Dawkins apparently holds the Harry Lime view of humanity. We're so small that a God, if He existed, couldn't possibly care about us, but this is a fallacy. There's no logical connection between the size of something and its significance. Our universe, after all, is immense and yet cosmologists tell us it began as an infinitely tiny point. Surely that initial point, what cosmologists call a "singularity," was incomprehensibly significant despite its miniscule size.
Perhaps humanity is itself a kind of cosmic or spiritual singularity.
In any case, the Oxford don goes on to examine some Old Testament (O.T.) stories and wonders why Christians would think that the people who are featured in them, people like Abraham, are moral exemplars. I know of no one, though, who has ever said that they were.
The stories we read in the O.T. are instructive precisely because they teach us about the failings and faults common to humanity and how we are lost without God, not because they hold up the often sordid behavior of the characters as a model for the rest of us to emulate.
His basic point in the chapter (p.279) is that because the O.T. characters are so depraved we can conclude that wherever modern moral ideas come from they don't come from the Bible, which is yet another piece of silliness. How does it follow from the fact that the Bible tells us about human sinfulness that therefore there are no moral principles to be found within its pages? Here are three principles that leap off almost every page of the Old Testament: Love God, do justice, and show compassion to the weak and poor.
Dawkins apparently thinks that because these principles are often not followed in the O.T. that therefore they're not there.
Not only does Dawkins actually make the startling assertion that the Bible is a poor source of moral principles, he also says that he doesn't think there's an atheist in the world who would do the sort of thing that religious people (Taliban Muslims) did in Afghanistan when they destroyed ancient Buddhist shrines and other sites of historical and religious value. Only religious people would be so philistine as to commit such an atrocity, he avers.
Perhaps he was suffering a brain-freeze when he wrote this and had simply forgotten the crimes of the communists, committed in the name of state atheism, against Christian churches and clergy all through the twentieth century. In the name of state atheism Joseph Stalin had some 40,000 churches destroyed, many of which were relatively ancient, and 50,000 clergy murdered, many by scalping, crucifixion or other forms of torture. The number of murdered laity, moreover, stretched into the hundreds of thousands.
Is Mr. Dawkins unaware of all these historical facts that he could've learned from a quick Google search?
He wonders, too, who God was trying to impress by allegedly dying on the cross. Presumably, Dawkins sneers, God was trying to impress himself. This puerile comment reveals the distressing shallowness of Dawkins' theological thought.
If the crucifixion was intended to impress anyone it was intended to impress us. If the New Testament accounts of it are true it was the greatest demonstration of love in the history of the world. The creator of the universe became one of us, not only to atone for our sin, but to give us a glimpse of how deeply he cherishes us.
It'd be wonderful enough that a man would die for those whom he loves, but, Christians believe, God died as well for those who, like Richard Dawkins, despise him. He wanted, among other things, to impress his beloved with the immensity of His love and what better way to do it than through such an unimaginable act of self-abnegation and sacrifice?
Dawkins might've better understood this concept had he ever read Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities which dramatically illustrates how love can motivate such deeds.
Again Professor Dawkins errs when he vouchsafes to us the further revelation that Jesus never intended for his teaching to be given to anyone other than the Jews (p.292) and that it was Paul who thought up the innovation of taking the gospel to the gentiles. He quotes with approval another writer who asserts that Jesus would be spinning in his grave if he knew that Paul had taken his message of love and forgiveness to the "pigs" (gentiles).
Regrettably, Dawkins doesn't try to explain how this speculation squares with the last couple of verses in Matthew's gospel where Jesus directs his disciples to take the gospel to the whole world, baptizing them and teaching them all that he has commanded. Nor is this claim easily reconciled with the parable of the Good Samaritan, the point of which is that we are enjoined to show compassion to everyone with whom we come in contact.
There is so much in chapter 7, as in the book as a whole, of which to be critical that it's difficult to limit oneself to spotlighting these few samples of Dawkinsian logic.
Moreover, his reasoning is often so bad and his understanding of that which he's at such pains to tear down is so thin, that one feels it almost unsporting to deconstruct it. Even so, we'll plod on and look at some more of chapter 7 next time.
None of what he says in this chapter has anything to do with the question of God's existence, but it may nevertheless be of interest to theists.
It has to be understood that Dawkins' arguments are often logically flimsy, and his facts and interpretations are often suspect at best. The God Delusion is, in fact, so poorly argued that it would hardly be worth the time it takes to read it were it not that it has sold so many copies and had such a powerful impact on audiences around the world.
One part of Professor Dawkins' argument in chapter 7 seems to be that it is inconceivable that any God as great as theists imagine him to be would care about the paltry sins of tiny human beings on our speck of a planet. "We humans," he writes, "give ourselves such airs, even aggrandizing our pokey little 'sins' to the level of cosmic significance."
But of course our sins are of cosmic significance, and so are we, if it's true that the creator of the cosmos created humanity for the express purpose of living in a reciprocal love relationship with them. Dawkins, almost child-like, seems to equate significance with relative size. Since we're so tiny compared to the universe, he reasons, it's absurd to think that a creator God would care about us.
His reasoning reminds me of a scene in the classic film The Third Man where a criminal named Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, takes his antagonist to the top of a Ferris wheel. From that vantage the people all look so small and their lives seem so insignificant. From that perspective it was easy for Lime to justify the crimes he committed against them. His victims were little more than ants.
Dawkins apparently holds the Harry Lime view of humanity. We're so small that a God, if He existed, couldn't possibly care about us, but this is a fallacy. There's no logical connection between the size of something and its significance. Our universe, after all, is immense and yet cosmologists tell us it began as an infinitely tiny point. Surely that initial point, what cosmologists call a "singularity," was incomprehensibly significant despite its miniscule size.
Perhaps humanity is itself a kind of cosmic or spiritual singularity.
In any case, the Oxford don goes on to examine some Old Testament (O.T.) stories and wonders why Christians would think that the people who are featured in them, people like Abraham, are moral exemplars. I know of no one, though, who has ever said that they were.
The stories we read in the O.T. are instructive precisely because they teach us about the failings and faults common to humanity and how we are lost without God, not because they hold up the often sordid behavior of the characters as a model for the rest of us to emulate.
His basic point in the chapter (p.279) is that because the O.T. characters are so depraved we can conclude that wherever modern moral ideas come from they don't come from the Bible, which is yet another piece of silliness. How does it follow from the fact that the Bible tells us about human sinfulness that therefore there are no moral principles to be found within its pages? Here are three principles that leap off almost every page of the Old Testament: Love God, do justice, and show compassion to the weak and poor.
Dawkins apparently thinks that because these principles are often not followed in the O.T. that therefore they're not there.
Not only does Dawkins actually make the startling assertion that the Bible is a poor source of moral principles, he also says that he doesn't think there's an atheist in the world who would do the sort of thing that religious people (Taliban Muslims) did in Afghanistan when they destroyed ancient Buddhist shrines and other sites of historical and religious value. Only religious people would be so philistine as to commit such an atrocity, he avers.
Perhaps he was suffering a brain-freeze when he wrote this and had simply forgotten the crimes of the communists, committed in the name of state atheism, against Christian churches and clergy all through the twentieth century. In the name of state atheism Joseph Stalin had some 40,000 churches destroyed, many of which were relatively ancient, and 50,000 clergy murdered, many by scalping, crucifixion or other forms of torture. The number of murdered laity, moreover, stretched into the hundreds of thousands.
Is Mr. Dawkins unaware of all these historical facts that he could've learned from a quick Google search?
He wonders, too, who God was trying to impress by allegedly dying on the cross. Presumably, Dawkins sneers, God was trying to impress himself. This puerile comment reveals the distressing shallowness of Dawkins' theological thought.
If the crucifixion was intended to impress anyone it was intended to impress us. If the New Testament accounts of it are true it was the greatest demonstration of love in the history of the world. The creator of the universe became one of us, not only to atone for our sin, but to give us a glimpse of how deeply he cherishes us.
It'd be wonderful enough that a man would die for those whom he loves, but, Christians believe, God died as well for those who, like Richard Dawkins, despise him. He wanted, among other things, to impress his beloved with the immensity of His love and what better way to do it than through such an unimaginable act of self-abnegation and sacrifice?
Dawkins might've better understood this concept had he ever read Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities which dramatically illustrates how love can motivate such deeds.
Again Professor Dawkins errs when he vouchsafes to us the further revelation that Jesus never intended for his teaching to be given to anyone other than the Jews (p.292) and that it was Paul who thought up the innovation of taking the gospel to the gentiles. He quotes with approval another writer who asserts that Jesus would be spinning in his grave if he knew that Paul had taken his message of love and forgiveness to the "pigs" (gentiles).
Regrettably, Dawkins doesn't try to explain how this speculation squares with the last couple of verses in Matthew's gospel where Jesus directs his disciples to take the gospel to the whole world, baptizing them and teaching them all that he has commanded. Nor is this claim easily reconciled with the parable of the Good Samaritan, the point of which is that we are enjoined to show compassion to everyone with whom we come in contact.
There is so much in chapter 7, as in the book as a whole, of which to be critical that it's difficult to limit oneself to spotlighting these few samples of Dawkinsian logic.
Moreover, his reasoning is often so bad and his understanding of that which he's at such pains to tear down is so thin, that one feels it almost unsporting to deconstruct it. Even so, we'll plod on and look at some more of chapter 7 next time.
Thursday, February 9, 2023
The God Delusion (Ch. 6)
Biologist Richard Dawkins concerns himself in chapter 6 of The God Delusion with an attempt to explain the relationship between God and morality and to argue that God is not necessary for good behavior.
Dawkins claims that evolution gives a much better explanation for morality than does the God Hypothesis.
Before we consider his argument we might pause for a moment to note something he says which I find intriguing. He argues that acts of altruism in animals are demonstrations of one individual's superiority over another:
Perhaps the ingratitude is due to the fact that at some subliminal level the beneficiary of the favor realizes that he is being implicitly put in a position of inferiority relative to the benefactor, and no one likes that.
Anyway, Dawkins' point in chapter 6 is that we don't need God to be moral. The urge to be kind, for instance, is a product of our evolutionary history, and we'd have that inclination whether God told us to be kind or not. There's much in his reasoning on this matter of which we can be critical.
The problem is not how to explain "moral" behavior. People can certainly do "good" things whether God exists or not. The problem is trying to account for moral obligation.
How are we obligated to do something just because evolution has inclined us to do it? Why should we be kind if there's no advantage in it for us or if cruelty will benefit us in some way? Why is it wrong to be cruel? What does it mean to say that something is "wrong" anyway? How do we justify the belief that moral good and bad have any non-arbitrary meaning apart from an objective transcendent moral authority?
Evolution has bestowed upon us other tendencies besides an inclination to kindness (which, by the way, not all humans appear to possess) which we do not consider good. How do we decide which of these tendencies are good and which are bad? Evolution has given us a tendency to be aggressive and violent, to be racially biased, to be selfish toward non-kin, to be sexually promiscuous, etc.
Is yielding to these inclinations morally wrong? If so, why? Dawkins comes very close here to committing the genetic fallacy, the error that says that because humans have evolved to be a certain way that therefore we should be that way. Indeed, that we have a moral duty to be that way.
He also informs us that he is himself a moral consequentialist - i.e. one who bases moral rightness on the results of the act - but who do those results have to benefit in order to be right? Other people? Himself? How does he decide which it is to be, and why would it be wrong to just care about the benefits of one's actions for oneself?
Dawkins cites studies which show that there's little difference in the way atheists and believers make moral judgments and concludes from this that "we do not need God in order to be good."
This is quite an unusual conclusion to draw from these studies. All they show, if they show anything at all, is that atheists have moral convictions that are completely unsupported by their deepest beliefs. Their atheism gives them no basis for thinking anything is right or wrong, but they believe there is right and wrong anyway.
What the studies Dawkins cites suggest is that most atheists are inconsistent, since every atheist who makes a moral judgment of others is acting as if her atheism were not true.
Dawkins goes on to allege that the Christian tries to be good only to seek God's favor. He concurs with Michael Shermer that "If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder,' you reveal yourself to be an immoral person."
Well, no. In the absence of God there just is no morality or immorality, only amorality, but set that aside. Dawkins misunderstands the Christian motivation for the moral life. It's not fear of punishment and hope of reward that motivates Christians to do good deeds, when they do them, but rather love and gratitude to the God who has done so much for them.
Believers do not seek to win God's love by being good. They try to live the way God wishes them to live, to the extent they do, because God loves them and they love Him.
To say that anyone who rapes or murders is immoral, as Shermer and Dawkins do, begs the question. It assumes that the word "immorality" actually can mean something significant even though there's no ground for any objective moral value.
For Dawkins an immoral act is nothing more than an act which he doesn't like. If there is no God it simply can't be any more than this. To say that something is immoral is to say no more than that he wishes people wouldn't do it. Notwithstanding his wishes, the person who does do such things is, assuming the truth of atheism, no more "wrong" than a cat is wrong to torment a mouse.
In a classic illustration of the fallacy called Division* Dawkins makes the ridiculous claim that rioters in Montreal during a police strike in the 1960s were mostly religious people because most Canadians are religious people. Perhaps we can forgive Dawkins this bit of logical asininity if it weren't that he comes right back on the next page and makes the same sophomoric argument again, this time by quoting a section from a book by fellow atheist Sam Harris.
In that book Harris seeks to disprove the belief that religion leads to better behavior by observing that most of the crime in the U.S. occurs in our cities and most of the cities with the highest crime rates are in states which tend to vote Republican and are therefore most likely to be populated by Christian conservatives. I am not making this up. This is Harris' argument, and Dawkins signs on to it.
Overlook the fact that most of the cities with the highest crime rates (Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore) are actually in Blue states, what Harris and Dawkins are apparently unaware of is that even in cities in Republican states the populations of these municipalities are overwhelmingly Democratic and secular.
Instead of employing such a juvenile argument perhaps Harris should have just visited a prison and taken a poll of the inmates and asked them how many were devout, church-going believers who prayed daily up to the time they committed their crimes. I think there'd be little wonder as to what the results would show.
It's hard to believe that otherwise intelligent people would make such embarrassing arguments, but when your task is to try to give a defense of morality without God there just aren't any compelling polemical resources laying about. Thus, Dawkins and Harris find themselves taking a chance on an argument that would be laughed at by middle-schoolers.
The fundamental moral problem for the atheist, a problem which Dawkins never really addresses, is this: What is there which obligates us to behave in one way rather than another? What makes kindness better than cruelty? Why should I not just live for myself? Why should I care about others? What's wrong with selfishness?
It's really no surprise that Dawkins doesn't address these questions. Indeed, the surprise would have been if he had, because for the atheist there just is no good answer to them.
It's perhaps fitting to close with a quote from Dawkins' hero, Charles Darwin. Darwin writes in his Autobiography these words:
Ironically, the fact that for the atheist one's own subjective feelings are no more morally superior than anyone else's doesn't prevent Mr. Dawkins from repeatedly making moral judgments of religious believers throughout his book and especially in the next chapter.
* The fallacy of division occurs when someone concludes that because a thing possesses a particular trait or property that every part of the thing must possess that same trait or property. For example, it would be the fallacy of division to conclude that because the United States has a large population that therefore every state in the U.S. has a large population.
Dawkins claims that evolution gives a much better explanation for morality than does the God Hypothesis.
Before we consider his argument we might pause for a moment to note something he says which I find intriguing. He argues that acts of altruism in animals are demonstrations of one individual's superiority over another:
The dominant bird is saying the equivalent of, "Look how superior I am to you, I can afford to give you food." Or "Look how superior I am, I can afford to make myself vulnerable to hawks by sitting on a high branch, acting as a sentinel to warn the rest of the flock feeding on the ground." ....And when a subordinate [bird] attempts to offer food to a dominant individual, the apparent generosity is violently rebuffed.This makes sense to me. I've long thought it an interesting quirk of human nature that many people actually resent favors done them by others. Rather than see the favor as a kindness, people sometimes react to it as though it were a personal affront.
Perhaps the ingratitude is due to the fact that at some subliminal level the beneficiary of the favor realizes that he is being implicitly put in a position of inferiority relative to the benefactor, and no one likes that.
Anyway, Dawkins' point in chapter 6 is that we don't need God to be moral. The urge to be kind, for instance, is a product of our evolutionary history, and we'd have that inclination whether God told us to be kind or not. There's much in his reasoning on this matter of which we can be critical.
The problem is not how to explain "moral" behavior. People can certainly do "good" things whether God exists or not. The problem is trying to account for moral obligation.
How are we obligated to do something just because evolution has inclined us to do it? Why should we be kind if there's no advantage in it for us or if cruelty will benefit us in some way? Why is it wrong to be cruel? What does it mean to say that something is "wrong" anyway? How do we justify the belief that moral good and bad have any non-arbitrary meaning apart from an objective transcendent moral authority?
Evolution has bestowed upon us other tendencies besides an inclination to kindness (which, by the way, not all humans appear to possess) which we do not consider good. How do we decide which of these tendencies are good and which are bad? Evolution has given us a tendency to be aggressive and violent, to be racially biased, to be selfish toward non-kin, to be sexually promiscuous, etc.
Is yielding to these inclinations morally wrong? If so, why? Dawkins comes very close here to committing the genetic fallacy, the error that says that because humans have evolved to be a certain way that therefore we should be that way. Indeed, that we have a moral duty to be that way.
He also informs us that he is himself a moral consequentialist - i.e. one who bases moral rightness on the results of the act - but who do those results have to benefit in order to be right? Other people? Himself? How does he decide which it is to be, and why would it be wrong to just care about the benefits of one's actions for oneself?
Dawkins cites studies which show that there's little difference in the way atheists and believers make moral judgments and concludes from this that "we do not need God in order to be good."
This is quite an unusual conclusion to draw from these studies. All they show, if they show anything at all, is that atheists have moral convictions that are completely unsupported by their deepest beliefs. Their atheism gives them no basis for thinking anything is right or wrong, but they believe there is right and wrong anyway.
What the studies Dawkins cites suggest is that most atheists are inconsistent, since every atheist who makes a moral judgment of others is acting as if her atheism were not true.
Dawkins goes on to allege that the Christian tries to be good only to seek God's favor. He concurs with Michael Shermer that "If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder,' you reveal yourself to be an immoral person."
Well, no. In the absence of God there just is no morality or immorality, only amorality, but set that aside. Dawkins misunderstands the Christian motivation for the moral life. It's not fear of punishment and hope of reward that motivates Christians to do good deeds, when they do them, but rather love and gratitude to the God who has done so much for them.
Believers do not seek to win God's love by being good. They try to live the way God wishes them to live, to the extent they do, because God loves them and they love Him.
To say that anyone who rapes or murders is immoral, as Shermer and Dawkins do, begs the question. It assumes that the word "immorality" actually can mean something significant even though there's no ground for any objective moral value.
For Dawkins an immoral act is nothing more than an act which he doesn't like. If there is no God it simply can't be any more than this. To say that something is immoral is to say no more than that he wishes people wouldn't do it. Notwithstanding his wishes, the person who does do such things is, assuming the truth of atheism, no more "wrong" than a cat is wrong to torment a mouse.
In a classic illustration of the fallacy called Division* Dawkins makes the ridiculous claim that rioters in Montreal during a police strike in the 1960s were mostly religious people because most Canadians are religious people. Perhaps we can forgive Dawkins this bit of logical asininity if it weren't that he comes right back on the next page and makes the same sophomoric argument again, this time by quoting a section from a book by fellow atheist Sam Harris.
In that book Harris seeks to disprove the belief that religion leads to better behavior by observing that most of the crime in the U.S. occurs in our cities and most of the cities with the highest crime rates are in states which tend to vote Republican and are therefore most likely to be populated by Christian conservatives. I am not making this up. This is Harris' argument, and Dawkins signs on to it.
Overlook the fact that most of the cities with the highest crime rates (Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore) are actually in Blue states, what Harris and Dawkins are apparently unaware of is that even in cities in Republican states the populations of these municipalities are overwhelmingly Democratic and secular.
Instead of employing such a juvenile argument perhaps Harris should have just visited a prison and taken a poll of the inmates and asked them how many were devout, church-going believers who prayed daily up to the time they committed their crimes. I think there'd be little wonder as to what the results would show.
It's hard to believe that otherwise intelligent people would make such embarrassing arguments, but when your task is to try to give a defense of morality without God there just aren't any compelling polemical resources laying about. Thus, Dawkins and Harris find themselves taking a chance on an argument that would be laughed at by middle-schoolers.
The fundamental moral problem for the atheist, a problem which Dawkins never really addresses, is this: What is there which obligates us to behave in one way rather than another? What makes kindness better than cruelty? Why should I not just live for myself? Why should I care about others? What's wrong with selfishness?
It's really no surprise that Dawkins doesn't address these questions. Indeed, the surprise would have been if he had, because for the atheist there just is no good answer to them.
It's perhaps fitting to close with a quote from Dawkins' hero, Charles Darwin. Darwin writes in his Autobiography these words:
One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life...only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best.In the absence of God, all we have to guide us are our "impulses and instincts," and no one's impulses and instincts are any more morally authoritative than anyone else's.
Ironically, the fact that for the atheist one's own subjective feelings are no more morally superior than anyone else's doesn't prevent Mr. Dawkins from repeatedly making moral judgments of religious believers throughout his book and especially in the next chapter.
* The fallacy of division occurs when someone concludes that because a thing possesses a particular trait or property that every part of the thing must possess that same trait or property. For example, it would be the fallacy of division to conclude that because the United States has a large population that therefore every state in the U.S. has a large population.
Wednesday, February 8, 2023
The God Delusion (Ch. 5)
Having shown to his own satisfaction, if not to that of many professional philosophers and scientists, that there's almost certainly no Deity, Professor Dawkins next assays to consider where the whole business of religion came from anyway.
He asserts in chapter 5 that religion is an evolutionary misfiring, or by-product, of something else that evolution has produced.
By way of explanation he invites us to consider the self-destructive behavior of moths which spiral into a flame. Why do they do this? Well, over the eons they have evolved light sensors that enable them to navigate by the moon and the stars.
These luminous objects are very far away and to the moths are like stationary beacons in the night sky, but when artificial light was introduced into the moths' environment the lights were so close that they appear to shift as the moth moves, requiring any moth that's fixing on them to also deviate from a straight-line path to keep the light at a fixed point.
The result was that the confused moth takes a spiral path toward the light, or something like that.
Professor Dawkins doesn't trouble himself to explain why moths need to navigate by celestial objects in the first place since they don't migrate and spend much of their adult lives confined to a localized area. When they do travel it's along chemical trails of pheromones produced by females. So why would they have evolved these light sensors?
But this is a digression. His point is that the spiraling behavior of moths is really a by-product of something else and that likewise religious behavior in humans is a by-product of some other behavior which evolved because it conferred a selective advantage.
Dawkins avoids the simpler explanation that religion itself confers a selective advantage and thus humans evolved it.
This is an unacceptable explanation, even if it has the merit of being less cumbersome, because if it were the case that religion is a beneficial adaptation Dawkins would have to admit that atheism is a maladaptive mutation, and he certainly doesn't want to have to make the case that atheists are genetic mutants.
So what is religion a by-product of? It turns out that all we have are guesses, but one guess is that natural selection produced in children the tendency to believe whatever their parents and other elders tell them, a bit of news that'll surprise most parents. Listening to parents aids the child's survival, parents tell the child about God so the child grows up believing in God.
It's not clear whether children lose this gullibility as adults, but if they do why do they retain belief in God when they don't retain other childhood beliefs like belief in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy? Why, too, do so many people come to belief in God as adults? Why isn't Dawkins himself religious since he received a lot of exposure to it when he was a child?
If one's belief about God is a result of psychological misfires in the brain then isn't atheism also a result of such a misfire and thus can't we conclude that atheists don't believe in God not because of evidence or arguments against God but rather because of some psychological quirk?
Professor Dawkins doesn't help us with these questions. He's in too much of a hurry to rush on to his next grievance against the religious - their irritating tendency to be substance dualists* - which he also sees as a holdover from childhood.
There are other guesses as to what religion is a by-product of, of course, - love, projection, wishful thinking - but the general idea Dawkins wants to advance is that it's a by-product of something advantageous for survival.
Another reason why religion has survived and diversified, he suggests, has to do with memes. A meme is not an online cartoon or joke, it's more like a mental gene. It embodies an idea or set of ideas (called a memeplex) that spreads through a culture. For example, the belief in human rights is a meme, as is any belief.
Natural selection acts to weed out unsatisafactory memes in the same way it culls unfit genes. Religious beliefs are also memes which have spread, not because they are true, but because they afforded those who held them some survival advantage.
Dawkins is obviously pleased with this explanation for the widespread occurrence of religion even though the theory is completely speculative and even self-defeating. After all, if all our beliefs are merely memes then so is atheism a meme, so is Darwinian evolution a meme, and, indeed, so is belief in memes a meme.
He closes the chapter with a rambling discussion of cargo cults, religions that spring up among primitive people when they encounter for the first time the "magic" of modern technological society. He notes that ignorant people often regard the radios and machines of visiting Europeans as being supernaturally produced because they never see them being made or repaired.
None of this, like much else in the remainder of the book, has anything at all to do with the question of whether God exists.
Dawkins seems convinced that the existence of God and the manner in which some people express their homage to God are one and the same thing. He seems to think that if he can discredit odd or outré religious practices and beliefs then he can discredit belief in God, but it hardly follows that because people are mistaken about how they should worship God that therefore God must not exist.
To believe otherwise is perhaps the strangest "God delusion" of all.
*Substance dualism holds that there are two (at least) fundamental substances that comprise human beings and perhaps much else - matter and mind. Matter is material, physical. Mind is immaterial and non-physical. Dawkins is a materialist who believes that only matter exists and that everything else, including energy as well as our mental processes like ideas, is reducible to it.
He asserts in chapter 5 that religion is an evolutionary misfiring, or by-product, of something else that evolution has produced.
By way of explanation he invites us to consider the self-destructive behavior of moths which spiral into a flame. Why do they do this? Well, over the eons they have evolved light sensors that enable them to navigate by the moon and the stars.
These luminous objects are very far away and to the moths are like stationary beacons in the night sky, but when artificial light was introduced into the moths' environment the lights were so close that they appear to shift as the moth moves, requiring any moth that's fixing on them to also deviate from a straight-line path to keep the light at a fixed point.
The result was that the confused moth takes a spiral path toward the light, or something like that.
Professor Dawkins doesn't trouble himself to explain why moths need to navigate by celestial objects in the first place since they don't migrate and spend much of their adult lives confined to a localized area. When they do travel it's along chemical trails of pheromones produced by females. So why would they have evolved these light sensors?
But this is a digression. His point is that the spiraling behavior of moths is really a by-product of something else and that likewise religious behavior in humans is a by-product of some other behavior which evolved because it conferred a selective advantage.
Dawkins avoids the simpler explanation that religion itself confers a selective advantage and thus humans evolved it.
This is an unacceptable explanation, even if it has the merit of being less cumbersome, because if it were the case that religion is a beneficial adaptation Dawkins would have to admit that atheism is a maladaptive mutation, and he certainly doesn't want to have to make the case that atheists are genetic mutants.
So what is religion a by-product of? It turns out that all we have are guesses, but one guess is that natural selection produced in children the tendency to believe whatever their parents and other elders tell them, a bit of news that'll surprise most parents. Listening to parents aids the child's survival, parents tell the child about God so the child grows up believing in God.
It's not clear whether children lose this gullibility as adults, but if they do why do they retain belief in God when they don't retain other childhood beliefs like belief in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy? Why, too, do so many people come to belief in God as adults? Why isn't Dawkins himself religious since he received a lot of exposure to it when he was a child?
If one's belief about God is a result of psychological misfires in the brain then isn't atheism also a result of such a misfire and thus can't we conclude that atheists don't believe in God not because of evidence or arguments against God but rather because of some psychological quirk?
Professor Dawkins doesn't help us with these questions. He's in too much of a hurry to rush on to his next grievance against the religious - their irritating tendency to be substance dualists* - which he also sees as a holdover from childhood.
There are other guesses as to what religion is a by-product of, of course, - love, projection, wishful thinking - but the general idea Dawkins wants to advance is that it's a by-product of something advantageous for survival.
Another reason why religion has survived and diversified, he suggests, has to do with memes. A meme is not an online cartoon or joke, it's more like a mental gene. It embodies an idea or set of ideas (called a memeplex) that spreads through a culture. For example, the belief in human rights is a meme, as is any belief.
Natural selection acts to weed out unsatisafactory memes in the same way it culls unfit genes. Religious beliefs are also memes which have spread, not because they are true, but because they afforded those who held them some survival advantage.
Dawkins is obviously pleased with this explanation for the widespread occurrence of religion even though the theory is completely speculative and even self-defeating. After all, if all our beliefs are merely memes then so is atheism a meme, so is Darwinian evolution a meme, and, indeed, so is belief in memes a meme.
He closes the chapter with a rambling discussion of cargo cults, religions that spring up among primitive people when they encounter for the first time the "magic" of modern technological society. He notes that ignorant people often regard the radios and machines of visiting Europeans as being supernaturally produced because they never see them being made or repaired.
None of this, like much else in the remainder of the book, has anything at all to do with the question of whether God exists.
Dawkins seems convinced that the existence of God and the manner in which some people express their homage to God are one and the same thing. He seems to think that if he can discredit odd or outré religious practices and beliefs then he can discredit belief in God, but it hardly follows that because people are mistaken about how they should worship God that therefore God must not exist.
To believe otherwise is perhaps the strangest "God delusion" of all.
*Substance dualism holds that there are two (at least) fundamental substances that comprise human beings and perhaps much else - matter and mind. Matter is material, physical. Mind is immaterial and non-physical. Dawkins is a materialist who believes that only matter exists and that everything else, including energy as well as our mental processes like ideas, is reducible to it.
Tuesday, February 7, 2023
The God Delusion (Ch. 4c)
Although confident that he's just demolished any rationale for believing in God with his argument based on God's alleged improbability, professor Dawkins loads another round into the chamber just in case theism is still twitching.
Recall that his argument is a reply to the theist's claim that the complexity of the universe, its finely-tuned forces and parameters, are so extraordinarily improbable as to make an intelligent cause the most plausible explanation for them.
Dawkins has argued, incorrectly, that this cause would itself have to be even more complex than the universe and thus even more improbable and therefore not a plausible explanation at all.
Now he administers the coup de grace to theism by presenting what he fancies to be a more plausible explanation for the universe's existence. Since we should always believe that which is more plausible instead of that which is less plausible he thinks we should accept his explanation he's about to offer rather than the God Hypothesis.
His argument combines what has come to be called the Anthropic Principle (actually Dawkins employs what is called the Weak Anthropic Principle, WAP) with the Multiverse Hypothesis MH).
Suppose you purchase a lottery ticket and learn that you are the only person who did so. Nevertheless, on the day of the drawing your five-digit ticket number, as highly improbable as it may be, comes up. You've won. The odds against it are extraordinary, but there's no point in wondering at the almost impossible chance that your number could have been randomly drawn since it obviously was.
The universe is something like that. It's admittedly incredible that the forces and structural parameters are what they are, but we shouldn't be too surprised, the argument goes, since if they weren't exactly as they we wouldn't be here to notice the fact. Thus, the universe has to be the way it is for us to be here at all.
That's the WAP and, Dawkins believes, it's all the explanation that's needed or which can be given for how the world happens to be so exquisitely calibrated for life.
This, of course, sounds like sophistry to most people who don't think like Professor Dawkins. Consider a prisoner placed in a room with a dozen card tables each of which has on it ten complete packs of thoroughly shuffled playing cards. The prisoner is told that from each of the decks on each of the tables he is to draw four cards at random. The first time he draws something other than an ace a poison gas will be released and he will die instantly.
The man begins his task, despairing of making it past even the first card. Yet to his astonishment he completes the first table having drawn all aces, then the second, and finally the last. Unable to comprehend his good fortune, he wonders aloud how it could possibly have happened that he drew all aces, purely by chance, and is still alive.
He's convinced, quite reasonably, that someone must have tinkered with the cards. A voice comes over the intercom, the voice of Richard Dawkins, say, and intones that he shouldn't conclude that there was any tinkering. After all, would it not be even more astonishing that an invisible man of some sort had somehow influenced the card selection?
No, it was all just coincidence, and the prisoner shouldn't marvel that he drew 120 aces because if it had been otherwise he wouldn't be alive to notice. That's essentially Dawkins' explanation for the way the world is.
Needless to say, many people find the WAP less than persuasive, so Dawkins imports another idea to buttress it. This is the theory that our universe or at least our region of the universe is just one of a near infinite number of such regions (called domains) all having different physical properties.
Dawkins seizes upon this idea, called the Multiverse Hypothesis, and argues that given so many possibilities it's highly likely that there's at least one domain which has the particular set of properties necessary to sustain advanced life forms, and it just happens that we're in it. In other words, if enough lottery tickets are sold one of them just has to have the winning number.
The MH serves as a deus ex machina for Dawkins and by combining it with the argument from God's improbability Dawkins had atheist hearts palpitating the world over. You, however, may be asking yourself several questions:
We have evidence that minds can create beauty, elegance, harmony, etc. but we have no evidence that chance can.
Yet Dawkins is prepared to believe, despite the lack of any empirical evidence, that there's an infinity of universes before he'll believe that there's a mind behind it all. It reminds me of something I read somewhere about another prominent atheist who was alleged to have said that even if we were to discover a planet with the words "Yahweh Made Me" inscribed in letters so large as to be visible from a vast distance he'd still believe that it was an amazing accident.
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga observes that Dawkins seems to be arguing that because it is possible that life arose without God, therefore life must have arisen without God. Plantinga writes:
Perhaps aware of the logical muck into which he has stepped, he subtly changes the subject, diverting our attention from his attack on God to an attack on creationism, organized religion, and anything else religious that crosses his field of vision.
Whatever may be the merits of these criticisms, they're irrelevant to the question of the existence of God. Indeed, belief in God is left completely unscathed by The God Delusion.
We'll continue tomorrow.
Recall that his argument is a reply to the theist's claim that the complexity of the universe, its finely-tuned forces and parameters, are so extraordinarily improbable as to make an intelligent cause the most plausible explanation for them.
Dawkins has argued, incorrectly, that this cause would itself have to be even more complex than the universe and thus even more improbable and therefore not a plausible explanation at all.
Now he administers the coup de grace to theism by presenting what he fancies to be a more plausible explanation for the universe's existence. Since we should always believe that which is more plausible instead of that which is less plausible he thinks we should accept his explanation he's about to offer rather than the God Hypothesis.
His argument combines what has come to be called the Anthropic Principle (actually Dawkins employs what is called the Weak Anthropic Principle, WAP) with the Multiverse Hypothesis MH).
Suppose you purchase a lottery ticket and learn that you are the only person who did so. Nevertheless, on the day of the drawing your five-digit ticket number, as highly improbable as it may be, comes up. You've won. The odds against it are extraordinary, but there's no point in wondering at the almost impossible chance that your number could have been randomly drawn since it obviously was.
The universe is something like that. It's admittedly incredible that the forces and structural parameters are what they are, but we shouldn't be too surprised, the argument goes, since if they weren't exactly as they we wouldn't be here to notice the fact. Thus, the universe has to be the way it is for us to be here at all.
That's the WAP and, Dawkins believes, it's all the explanation that's needed or which can be given for how the world happens to be so exquisitely calibrated for life.
This, of course, sounds like sophistry to most people who don't think like Professor Dawkins. Consider a prisoner placed in a room with a dozen card tables each of which has on it ten complete packs of thoroughly shuffled playing cards. The prisoner is told that from each of the decks on each of the tables he is to draw four cards at random. The first time he draws something other than an ace a poison gas will be released and he will die instantly.
The man begins his task, despairing of making it past even the first card. Yet to his astonishment he completes the first table having drawn all aces, then the second, and finally the last. Unable to comprehend his good fortune, he wonders aloud how it could possibly have happened that he drew all aces, purely by chance, and is still alive.
He's convinced, quite reasonably, that someone must have tinkered with the cards. A voice comes over the intercom, the voice of Richard Dawkins, say, and intones that he shouldn't conclude that there was any tinkering. After all, would it not be even more astonishing that an invisible man of some sort had somehow influenced the card selection?
No, it was all just coincidence, and the prisoner shouldn't marvel that he drew 120 aces because if it had been otherwise he wouldn't be alive to notice. That's essentially Dawkins' explanation for the way the world is.
Needless to say, many people find the WAP less than persuasive, so Dawkins imports another idea to buttress it. This is the theory that our universe or at least our region of the universe is just one of a near infinite number of such regions (called domains) all having different physical properties.
Dawkins seizes upon this idea, called the Multiverse Hypothesis, and argues that given so many possibilities it's highly likely that there's at least one domain which has the particular set of properties necessary to sustain advanced life forms, and it just happens that we're in it. In other words, if enough lottery tickets are sold one of them just has to have the winning number.
The MH serves as a deus ex machina for Dawkins and by combining it with the argument from God's improbability Dawkins had atheist hearts palpitating the world over. You, however, may be asking yourself several questions:
- Is a near infinite number of worlds likely to exist? Dawkins replies that no, it's very unlikely, but it's even less likely that God exists so it makes more sense to believe the MH than to believe in God.
- You may also wonder where all those universes came from and how they came to have the properties they do. If you do you're wondering about more than Dawkins does. There's no conceivable mechanism for generating these universes, nor for producing the laws which would govern them. How do physical laws get created anyway?
- You may also be asking whether this has anything to do with science. After all, Dawkins tells us several times in the book that he bases his beliefs on evidence. What's the evidence for other worlds? There is none.
We have evidence that minds can create beauty, elegance, harmony, etc. but we have no evidence that chance can.
Yet Dawkins is prepared to believe, despite the lack of any empirical evidence, that there's an infinity of universes before he'll believe that there's a mind behind it all. It reminds me of something I read somewhere about another prominent atheist who was alleged to have said that even if we were to discover a planet with the words "Yahweh Made Me" inscribed in letters so large as to be visible from a vast distance he'd still believe that it was an amazing accident.
Philosopher Alvin Plantinga observes that Dawkins seems to be arguing that because it is possible that life arose without God, therefore life must have arisen without God. Plantinga writes:
It's worth meditating, if only for a moment, on the striking distance, here, between premise and conclusion. The premise tells us, substantially, that there are no irrefutable objections to its being possible that unguided evolution has produced all of the wonders of the living world; the conclusion is that it is true that unguided evolution has indeed produced all of those wonders.Dawkins rests his entire case on the arguments of chapter 4, but those arguments come nowhere near demonstrating what he thinks they do. Indeed, they're an exceedingly flimsy platform upon which to rest a conclusion so weighty as that God does not exist.
The argument form seems to be something like: We know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that p; Therefore, p is true.
Philosophers sometimes propound invalid arguments (I've propounded a few myself); few of those arguments display the truly colossal distance between premise and conclusion sported by this one.
I come into the departmental office and announce to the chairman that the dean has just authorized a $50,000 raise for me; naturally he wants to know why I think so. I tell him that we know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that the dean has done that. My guess is he'd gently suggest that it is high time for me to retire.
Perhaps aware of the logical muck into which he has stepped, he subtly changes the subject, diverting our attention from his attack on God to an attack on creationism, organized religion, and anything else religious that crosses his field of vision.
Whatever may be the merits of these criticisms, they're irrelevant to the question of the existence of God. Indeed, belief in God is left completely unscathed by The God Delusion.
We'll continue tomorrow.
Monday, February 6, 2023
The God Delusion (Ch. 4b)
Last week we began a critique of the crucial chapter 4 in Richard Dawkins' atheistic best-seller The God Delusion. Chapter 4 contains the argument that the author believes establishes his claim that God "almost certainly does not exist."
Dawkins takes the theist's argument that the complexity of the world and of living things makes it highly improbable that they are accidental products of impersonal forces and seeks to turn that assertion back against the theist.
His argument distills to the following steps:
But there's more that's wrong with chapter 4 than what we discussed last time.
Dawkins argues that God is an unnecessary hypothesis, that the universe and living things could have easily come about without any divine intervention. In support of this claim he cites the marvels posited by evolutionary theory.
Does life's complexity, he asks, lead you to believe that there must be something supernatural behind it? Then you are too naive, or unobservant, or unimaginative to see that the appearance of design is just an illusion.
Dawkins quite astonishingly compares the illusion of design to a magic trick performed by Penn and Teller. Just as there is a perfectly natural explanation for the magic trick, he insists, there's a perfectly natural explanation for the illusion of design in living things.
I say that this is an astonishing comparison because it doesn't seem to occur to him that his comparison actually defeats his own case.
The magic trick is performed by intelligent agents, it would not happen without intelligent purpose and skill. If the "design" of living things really is analogous to a magician's trick then that design should be recognized as the result of intelligent agency, just as the trick is.
Dawkins confounds himself again when he says that the complexity of living things, though seemingly beyond the ability of chance and chemistry to accomplish, can nevertheless be built up by natural processes much like a stone arch is built by craftsmen. The arch cannot function or stand by itself until the keystone is finally added, so in order to support it while it's under construction a scaffolding is erected to hold the stones in place until the arch is completed.
The scaffolding is then removed and the arch has the appearance of having been erected without it.
This, Dawkins believes, is analogous to how irreducibly complex structures in cells, structures like the famed bacterial flagellum, are put together by evolution. Molecular scaffolding holds the components in place until the whole structure is complete and functioning and then the scaffolding disappears.
The problem with his analogy, though, is that the arch's scaffolding doesn't, and indeed couldn't, come about through the action of random, undirected processes. Rather, it's intentionally erected by intelligent artisans with a specific end in mind.
A scaffolding erected for the purpose of holding up stone arches is much more closely analogous to intentional design than it is to blind, purposeless evolution.
Finally, it's unfortunate that almost every line in chapter 4 drips with an unseemly disdain for scientists like Michael Behe, an evolutionist who nevertheless thinks that intelligence has somehow played a role in the creation and diversification of life.
Dawkins' contempt for this view leads him to say the most regrettable things. For example he caricatures scientists like Behe in these words:
He's dismissive of those men and women who labor everyday in their labs to unlock the mysteries of nature despite the fact that he himself hasn't done any real scientific research since his doctoral work. He simply writes books about the work of others.
It ill-becomes him, then, to speak so disparagingly of the science being done by others just because he despises their metaphysical commitments.
In any event, not having yet satisfied his penchant for intellectual self-immolation Professor Dawkins concludes the chapter by insisting that if it's possible for something to happen, like the origin of life from non-life, then it's almost certain that it did happen.
We'll address this remarkable assertion next time.
Dawkins takes the theist's argument that the complexity of the world and of living things makes it highly improbable that they are accidental products of impersonal forces and seeks to turn that assertion back against the theist.
His argument distills to the following steps:
- The universe and life are very complex and therefore their existence is highly improbable.
- Whatever creates the complex world must itself be even more complex than what he creates and his existence is therefore even more improbable than that of the world.
- Thus, whatever creates the world must itself be explained in terms of another creator, and so on, in an infinite regress of creators.
- It's absurd to posit an infinite regress. It's more parsimonious to conclude that the world is just a brute fact and that there is no creator.
But there's more that's wrong with chapter 4 than what we discussed last time.
Dawkins argues that God is an unnecessary hypothesis, that the universe and living things could have easily come about without any divine intervention. In support of this claim he cites the marvels posited by evolutionary theory.
Does life's complexity, he asks, lead you to believe that there must be something supernatural behind it? Then you are too naive, or unobservant, or unimaginative to see that the appearance of design is just an illusion.
Dawkins quite astonishingly compares the illusion of design to a magic trick performed by Penn and Teller. Just as there is a perfectly natural explanation for the magic trick, he insists, there's a perfectly natural explanation for the illusion of design in living things.
I say that this is an astonishing comparison because it doesn't seem to occur to him that his comparison actually defeats his own case.
The magic trick is performed by intelligent agents, it would not happen without intelligent purpose and skill. If the "design" of living things really is analogous to a magician's trick then that design should be recognized as the result of intelligent agency, just as the trick is.
Dawkins confounds himself again when he says that the complexity of living things, though seemingly beyond the ability of chance and chemistry to accomplish, can nevertheless be built up by natural processes much like a stone arch is built by craftsmen. The arch cannot function or stand by itself until the keystone is finally added, so in order to support it while it's under construction a scaffolding is erected to hold the stones in place until the arch is completed.
The scaffolding is then removed and the arch has the appearance of having been erected without it.
This, Dawkins believes, is analogous to how irreducibly complex structures in cells, structures like the famed bacterial flagellum, are put together by evolution. Molecular scaffolding holds the components in place until the whole structure is complete and functioning and then the scaffolding disappears.
The problem with his analogy, though, is that the arch's scaffolding doesn't, and indeed couldn't, come about through the action of random, undirected processes. Rather, it's intentionally erected by intelligent artisans with a specific end in mind.
A scaffolding erected for the purpose of holding up stone arches is much more closely analogous to intentional design than it is to blind, purposeless evolution.
Finally, it's unfortunate that almost every line in chapter 4 drips with an unseemly disdain for scientists like Michael Behe, an evolutionist who nevertheless thinks that intelligence has somehow played a role in the creation and diversification of life.
Dawkins' contempt for this view leads him to say the most regrettable things. For example he caricatures scientists like Behe in these words:
Here is the message that an imaginary 'intelligent design theorist' might broadcast to scientists [note that for Dawkins ID theorists are in a separate class than scientists - RLC]: 'If you don't understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it.'Notwithstanding the fact that many of the greatest minds in the history of science have held to ID in some form, or the fact that many scientists today are theists and believe that God is somehow behind the phenomena they study, or the fact that there is no example of such reasoning as Dawkins invents ever having been offered by anyone in the ID camp - blithely indifferent to all of this Dawkins claims that belief in God is a "science stopper."
He's dismissive of those men and women who labor everyday in their labs to unlock the mysteries of nature despite the fact that he himself hasn't done any real scientific research since his doctoral work. He simply writes books about the work of others.
It ill-becomes him, then, to speak so disparagingly of the science being done by others just because he despises their metaphysical commitments.
In any event, not having yet satisfied his penchant for intellectual self-immolation Professor Dawkins concludes the chapter by insisting that if it's possible for something to happen, like the origin of life from non-life, then it's almost certain that it did happen.
We'll address this remarkable assertion next time.
Saturday, February 4, 2023
The God Delusion (Ch. 4a)
We're continuing our examination of Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion with a look today at the first part of Chapter 4. This chapter is really the crux of the book since it's here that Professor Dawkins sets out to demonstrate "why there almost certainly is no God."
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:
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.
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.
Friday, February 3, 2023
The God Delusion (Ch. 3)
We continue our walk through Richard Dawkins' best-selling attack on belief in God (though he calls it, rather pretentiously (p.57), an "attack on God himself") with a look at chapter 3.
This chapter is ostensibly given to a sketch of some of the arguments in favor of God's existence, although Dawkins can't resist the temptation to scoff at their alleged inadequacies as he summarizes them. Some of these inadequacies are genuine and some are due to Dawkins' tendentious presentation of the arguments.
As an example of the latter, he offers the long-discredited observation that omniscience and omnipotence are logically incompatible since God must know today what he will do tomorrow, but if he knows today what he will do tomorrow then he can't change his mind tomorrow, which means there's something he can't do. Therefore, he's not omnipotent.
This is like the old paradox that asks whether God can create a stone so heavy that he can't lift it. Whether the theist answers yes or no he is tacitly agreeing that there's something beyond God's power to accomplish.
One of several problems with this paradox is that it's incoherent. It suggests that there's something that can't be done by a being which can do anything. In other words, it seeks to show that God's inability to bring about a logically impossible state of affairs means he must not exist. This, as every freshman philosophy student learns, misconstrues God's omnipotence.
To say that God is omnipotent is to say that he can do anything it is logically possible to do. Philosophers at least since Aquinas have recognized that God cannot do anything which establishes a contradiction of some sort. He cannot, for instance, cause it to happen that he never existed, nor can he create a world in which it would be true to say that he did not create it.
If it's logically possible to know the future then God can know what will happen tomorrow. All that follows from Dawkins' argument is that God's freedom to change his mind is constrained by his foreknowledge, just as his actions are constrained by his goodness. He has the freedom to change his mind, but if he knows that he won't, then he won't.
Dawkins spends a little time in this chapter deriding the ontological argument, calling it infantile just before acknowledging that philosophers have been of two minds about it's validity. The world has had to wait for Richard Dawkins to arrive to settle the matter, and he does so by seemingly confusing Anselm's version of the argument with Descartes'version. Conflating the two, he defeats Descartes, whose argument almost no one accepts anyway, and claims to have thus defeated Anselm.
Moreover, he never mentions the more formidable versions of the ontological argument presented by contemporary philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and Norman Malcolm, but perhaps he's not aware of them.
Another of the arguments he selects for ridicule in this chapter is what he calls the Argument From Admired Religious Scientists. This is the claim that since certain scientists believe in God and since scientists are intelligent, therefore belief in God is an intelligent option. This is indeed a bad argument, and I know of no educated person who would ever use it as a justification for belief, but equally as bad is Dawkins' response to it.
With a certain glee he points out that the more educated people are and the more intelligent they are, the less likely they are to be religious, but of course this argument by correlation is fraught with dangers. If we're going to argue that intelligent people are usually atheists we can also argue that the longer a person's criminal record the more likely he is to be an atheist, or that, at least in the non-Islamic world, the more blood-thirsty a tyrant the more likely he is to be an atheist.
So, I don't know what we should make of the fact, if it even is a fact, that unbelief correlates to intelligence except to say that highly intelligent tyrants and criminals are even more likely to be atheists than are more modestly endowed thugs.
In any event, the argument from the correlation of atheism to intelligence is not very impressive. Intelligence is not wisdom. Intelligence is an ability, and ability in one sphere of life does not entail ability in other spheres. A man brilliant in his field is often an incompetent outside of it. Literary geniuses are often mathematical clods, and vice-versa.
Indeed, the most striking examples of this are idiot-savants (Think of the movie Rain Man or even A Beautiful Mind). College professors are a close second. That a man is a brilliant organic chemist tells us nothing about his ability to discern the fingerprint of God in the world or in his personal life.
More tomorrow.
This chapter is ostensibly given to a sketch of some of the arguments in favor of God's existence, although Dawkins can't resist the temptation to scoff at their alleged inadequacies as he summarizes them. Some of these inadequacies are genuine and some are due to Dawkins' tendentious presentation of the arguments.
As an example of the latter, he offers the long-discredited observation that omniscience and omnipotence are logically incompatible since God must know today what he will do tomorrow, but if he knows today what he will do tomorrow then he can't change his mind tomorrow, which means there's something he can't do. Therefore, he's not omnipotent.
This is like the old paradox that asks whether God can create a stone so heavy that he can't lift it. Whether the theist answers yes or no he is tacitly agreeing that there's something beyond God's power to accomplish.
One of several problems with this paradox is that it's incoherent. It suggests that there's something that can't be done by a being which can do anything. In other words, it seeks to show that God's inability to bring about a logically impossible state of affairs means he must not exist. This, as every freshman philosophy student learns, misconstrues God's omnipotence.
To say that God is omnipotent is to say that he can do anything it is logically possible to do. Philosophers at least since Aquinas have recognized that God cannot do anything which establishes a contradiction of some sort. He cannot, for instance, cause it to happen that he never existed, nor can he create a world in which it would be true to say that he did not create it.
If it's logically possible to know the future then God can know what will happen tomorrow. All that follows from Dawkins' argument is that God's freedom to change his mind is constrained by his foreknowledge, just as his actions are constrained by his goodness. He has the freedom to change his mind, but if he knows that he won't, then he won't.
Dawkins spends a little time in this chapter deriding the ontological argument, calling it infantile just before acknowledging that philosophers have been of two minds about it's validity. The world has had to wait for Richard Dawkins to arrive to settle the matter, and he does so by seemingly confusing Anselm's version of the argument with Descartes'version. Conflating the two, he defeats Descartes, whose argument almost no one accepts anyway, and claims to have thus defeated Anselm.
Moreover, he never mentions the more formidable versions of the ontological argument presented by contemporary philosophers like Alvin Plantinga and Norman Malcolm, but perhaps he's not aware of them.
Another of the arguments he selects for ridicule in this chapter is what he calls the Argument From Admired Religious Scientists. This is the claim that since certain scientists believe in God and since scientists are intelligent, therefore belief in God is an intelligent option. This is indeed a bad argument, and I know of no educated person who would ever use it as a justification for belief, but equally as bad is Dawkins' response to it.
With a certain glee he points out that the more educated people are and the more intelligent they are, the less likely they are to be religious, but of course this argument by correlation is fraught with dangers. If we're going to argue that intelligent people are usually atheists we can also argue that the longer a person's criminal record the more likely he is to be an atheist, or that, at least in the non-Islamic world, the more blood-thirsty a tyrant the more likely he is to be an atheist.
So, I don't know what we should make of the fact, if it even is a fact, that unbelief correlates to intelligence except to say that highly intelligent tyrants and criminals are even more likely to be atheists than are more modestly endowed thugs.
In any event, the argument from the correlation of atheism to intelligence is not very impressive. Intelligence is not wisdom. Intelligence is an ability, and ability in one sphere of life does not entail ability in other spheres. A man brilliant in his field is often an incompetent outside of it. Literary geniuses are often mathematical clods, and vice-versa.
Indeed, the most striking examples of this are idiot-savants (Think of the movie Rain Man or even A Beautiful Mind). College professors are a close second. That a man is a brilliant organic chemist tells us nothing about his ability to discern the fingerprint of God in the world or in his personal life.
More tomorrow.
Thursday, February 2, 2023
The God Delusion (Ch. 2)
Yesterday I began to rerun an old series of posts on Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion and discussed chapter one of his very influential extended complaint against religion in general and Christianity in particular.
Today I'd like to repost what I wrote about chapter two:
Richard Dawkins doesn't like God. He makes that quite clear in the opening lines of chapter 2 where he famously asserts that,
He recognizes, of course, that he has just created a straw man and that it's possible some believers do not see God quite the way Dawkins portrays him. Thus, he defines the God whose existence he hopes to disprove by laying out for us what he calls The God Hypothesis. He defines it as the claim that:
But Dawkins is undaunted. He believes he's in possession of a knockdown argument that he's eventually going to present to us, but first he wants to take a few more swipes at religion.
Confusing the question of the existence of God with popular religious expressions of belief, a confusion he indulges throughout the book, Dawkins launches into a rambling catalogue of complaints about tax exemptions, trinitarian theologizing, and the religious views of the American Founding Fathers.
He claims to be attacking God simpliciter ("I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural..."), but busies himself in chapter two with peripheral concerns that have little to do with the question of the truth of "The God Hypothesis."
For instance, at pains to show that the Founders were not Christians, he adduces a document drafted by George Washington and signed by John Adams as giving the lie to the belief that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation. He cites Washington's statement in a treaty with Tripoli that "[T]he government of the United States of America is not in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
This may be true enough as far as it goes, but what it elides is that the U.S. was founded on the principles of equality, liberty, and human rights which arguably could not have been derived from any worldview other than the Christian worldview. There may be no mention of Christianity in the Constitution, but the principles the Constitution embodies were found nowhere else but in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
In other words, the Founders imported into our nascent government ideas which were rooted uniquely in their Christian heritage while at the same time keeping the government neutral with respect to matters of religion. This distinction, however, escapes Dawkins' notice.
Dawkins repeatedly quotes Thomas Jefferson's hostile comments about the Christianity of his experience and deduces from these quotes that ... Jefferson didn't much like Christianity. This rather banal conclusion is hardly a surprise nor is it much to the purpose of demonstrating that God doesn't exist.
Dawkins is contemptuous not only of Christian believers but also of those timorous agnostics who hide behind their ignorance and refuse to take a stand against belief in God. In the course of chastising them for their pusillanimous fence-sitting he makes an astonishing claim, one that he insists upon several times throughout the chapter: He asserts that the question of God's existence "is a scientific question."
In one single sentence the dean of contemporary Darwinism has undone all the arguments that have ever been mustered against teaching intelligent design in public schools. Those arguments have been based on two premises: Intelligent design entails the existence of a Designer, i.e. God, and, second, God doesn't belong in the science classroom.
But now Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has assured us that indeed God does belong in the science classroom!
Lest you think maybe I'm misreading him, here he is again on pages 72 and 73: "I shall suggest that the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other...it belongs in the same...box as the controversies over the Permian and Cretaceous extinctions. God's existence or non-existence is a scientific fact about the universe..."
And again on p. 82: The presence or absence of a super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question....So also is the truth or falsehood of every one of the miracle stories...."
As more than one commenter on the book has observed, one can almost hear Dawkins' Darwinian comrades yelling at him: "Richard, please shut up! You're giving away the game!"
The rest of chapter 2 is given to scoffing at such things as prayer experiments and deriding some of his fellow evolutionists who deny that evolution leads to atheism. Dawkins is convinced that it does. He writes:
If we're going to allow our children to be taught the one, why not the other?
I'll repost a discussion of chapter 3 tomorrow.
Today I'd like to repost what I wrote about chapter two:
Richard Dawkins doesn't like God. He makes that quite clear in the opening lines of chapter 2 where he famously asserts that,
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of 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, megalomaniac, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.Having exhausted his thesaurus' pejoratives, Dawkins mercifully jogs to a panting halt and gives us a preview of his main argument against the existence of the monster he has just described.
He recognizes, of course, that he has just created a straw man and that it's possible some believers do not see God quite the way Dawkins portrays him. Thus, he defines the God whose existence he hopes to disprove by laying out for us what he calls The God Hypothesis. He defines it as the claim that:
There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.One might think that it'd be very difficult to find empirical or even philosophical evidence to refute the existence of such a being and that the best Dawkins could do would be to argue that there's no reason to believe such a being exists. After all, it's very difficult to prove that something - UFOs, for example - doesn't exist and a lot easier to argue that there's no good reason to believe that it does.
But Dawkins is undaunted. He believes he's in possession of a knockdown argument that he's eventually going to present to us, but first he wants to take a few more swipes at religion.
Confusing the question of the existence of God with popular religious expressions of belief, a confusion he indulges throughout the book, Dawkins launches into a rambling catalogue of complaints about tax exemptions, trinitarian theologizing, and the religious views of the American Founding Fathers.
He claims to be attacking God simpliciter ("I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural..."), but busies himself in chapter two with peripheral concerns that have little to do with the question of the truth of "The God Hypothesis."
For instance, at pains to show that the Founders were not Christians, he adduces a document drafted by George Washington and signed by John Adams as giving the lie to the belief that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation. He cites Washington's statement in a treaty with Tripoli that "[T]he government of the United States of America is not in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."
This may be true enough as far as it goes, but what it elides is that the U.S. was founded on the principles of equality, liberty, and human rights which arguably could not have been derived from any worldview other than the Christian worldview. There may be no mention of Christianity in the Constitution, but the principles the Constitution embodies were found nowhere else but in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
In other words, the Founders imported into our nascent government ideas which were rooted uniquely in their Christian heritage while at the same time keeping the government neutral with respect to matters of religion. This distinction, however, escapes Dawkins' notice.
Dawkins repeatedly quotes Thomas Jefferson's hostile comments about the Christianity of his experience and deduces from these quotes that ... Jefferson didn't much like Christianity. This rather banal conclusion is hardly a surprise nor is it much to the purpose of demonstrating that God doesn't exist.
Dawkins is contemptuous not only of Christian believers but also of those timorous agnostics who hide behind their ignorance and refuse to take a stand against belief in God. In the course of chastising them for their pusillanimous fence-sitting he makes an astonishing claim, one that he insists upon several times throughout the chapter: He asserts that the question of God's existence "is a scientific question."
In one single sentence the dean of contemporary Darwinism has undone all the arguments that have ever been mustered against teaching intelligent design in public schools. Those arguments have been based on two premises: Intelligent design entails the existence of a Designer, i.e. God, and, second, God doesn't belong in the science classroom.
But now Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has assured us that indeed God does belong in the science classroom!
Lest you think maybe I'm misreading him, here he is again on pages 72 and 73: "I shall suggest that the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other...it belongs in the same...box as the controversies over the Permian and Cretaceous extinctions. God's existence or non-existence is a scientific fact about the universe..."
And again on p. 82: The presence or absence of a super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientific question....So also is the truth or falsehood of every one of the miracle stories...."
As more than one commenter on the book has observed, one can almost hear Dawkins' Darwinian comrades yelling at him: "Richard, please shut up! You're giving away the game!"
The rest of chapter 2 is given to scoffing at such things as prayer experiments and deriding some of his fellow evolutionists who deny that evolution leads to atheism. Dawkins is convinced that it does. He writes:
Any creationist lawyer who got me on the stand could instantly win over the jury simply by asking me: "Has your knowledge of evolution influenced you in the direction of becoming an atheist?" I would have to answer yes and, at one stroke, I would have lost the jury.Yes, and he's also blown the case for keeping intelligent design out of our science classes. If ID is forbidden because it may point to God, why should not evolution be forbidden because it points away from God? Isn't it equally as "religious" to teach a theory that entails atheism as it is to teach a theory that entails a cosmic designer?
If we're going to allow our children to be taught the one, why not the other?
I'll repost a discussion of chapter 3 tomorrow.
Wednesday, February 1, 2023
The God Delusion (Ch.1)
Almost twenty years ago I did a series of posts for VP in which I wrote down my thoughts on Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion (henceforth, TGD). Back then I went through the book chapter by chapter, and I thought it might be worthwhile to reprise that series today since the book was so influential in shaping the beliefs of so many students and to some extent continues to be so today.
With that introduction here are some thoughts on chapter one of TGD:
The God Delusion Chapter 1:
Dawkins says in the preface that "If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down."
I don't know how successful he's been in achieving that goal - although I've heard more than one person say that the book really shook them - but the effectiveness of Dawkins' polemic, in my opinion, is due more to the emotional impact of his jackhammer indictments of religion than to the rigor of his arguments against the existence of God.
In chapter one he sets out to dispel the myth that Einstein and others were religious believers. In this he is, of course, correct. Einstein used the word "God" as a shorthand for the mysteriousness of the cosmos. He did not believe in a transcendent, personal creator. Dawkins' project in TGD is to destroy the basis for belief in the latter. He's indifferent about conceptions of God which immanentize him.
He then proceeds to argue that religion and religious belief do not deserve any more respect than any other beliefs one holds.
Religious beliefs should not be deemed immune to challenge and, he argues, we should not hesitate to press people on their religious beliefs even if this causes them to be offended. I happen to agree with him on this point as well.
A man's belief in God should not be treated with the deference that we treat his belief, for example, that his wife is beautiful. In fact, I think the reason we often do treat a person's religious beliefs respectfully and deferentially is out of a certain politeness.
We have learned through long experience that most people cannot give a coherent defense of their beliefs and that to press them to defend them would only embarrass them, like pressing a man to defend his conviction of his wife's beauty. Not wishing to embarrass people, and not seeing the matter as particularly significant, we generally don't pursue such questions.
This is fine if we are inclined not to create hard feelings, but I see nothing wrong with someone like Dawkins laying down the gauntlet to religious believers, especially if those believers are themselves evangelical and concerned to encourage others to accept their faith. Christians believe, after all, that they should always be prepared to give an account for the hope that is within them.
I disagree with him, though, when soon after he tells us that "the right to be Christian seems ... to mean the right to poke your nose into other people's private lives." He has in mind here Christian opposition to the LGBTQ+ political agenda, and Dawkins thinks it's simply intolerable that Christians would publicly declare the embrace of any sexual lifestyle to be morally wrong.
This is rather an odd objection coming from the man who thinks it's just fine to poke his own nose into people's private lives and tell Christians that they're morally wrong to embrace religious faith and to raise their children in it.
In any event, the claim that any behavior is morally wrong is an odd one coming from a man who is promoting in his book the idea that there is no God and thus no basis for anything being right or wrong in a moral sense. It was Dawkins, after all, who once asked, "How can we say that Hitler was wrong? I mean that's a very difficult question."
But this discussion will have to wait until chapter 6 and 7.
With that introduction here are some thoughts on chapter one of TGD:
The God Delusion Chapter 1:
Dawkins says in the preface that "If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down."
I don't know how successful he's been in achieving that goal - although I've heard more than one person say that the book really shook them - but the effectiveness of Dawkins' polemic, in my opinion, is due more to the emotional impact of his jackhammer indictments of religion than to the rigor of his arguments against the existence of God.
In chapter one he sets out to dispel the myth that Einstein and others were religious believers. In this he is, of course, correct. Einstein used the word "God" as a shorthand for the mysteriousness of the cosmos. He did not believe in a transcendent, personal creator. Dawkins' project in TGD is to destroy the basis for belief in the latter. He's indifferent about conceptions of God which immanentize him.
He then proceeds to argue that religion and religious belief do not deserve any more respect than any other beliefs one holds.
Religious beliefs should not be deemed immune to challenge and, he argues, we should not hesitate to press people on their religious beliefs even if this causes them to be offended. I happen to agree with him on this point as well.
A man's belief in God should not be treated with the deference that we treat his belief, for example, that his wife is beautiful. In fact, I think the reason we often do treat a person's religious beliefs respectfully and deferentially is out of a certain politeness.
We have learned through long experience that most people cannot give a coherent defense of their beliefs and that to press them to defend them would only embarrass them, like pressing a man to defend his conviction of his wife's beauty. Not wishing to embarrass people, and not seeing the matter as particularly significant, we generally don't pursue such questions.
This is fine if we are inclined not to create hard feelings, but I see nothing wrong with someone like Dawkins laying down the gauntlet to religious believers, especially if those believers are themselves evangelical and concerned to encourage others to accept their faith. Christians believe, after all, that they should always be prepared to give an account for the hope that is within them.
I disagree with him, though, when soon after he tells us that "the right to be Christian seems ... to mean the right to poke your nose into other people's private lives." He has in mind here Christian opposition to the LGBTQ+ political agenda, and Dawkins thinks it's simply intolerable that Christians would publicly declare the embrace of any sexual lifestyle to be morally wrong.
This is rather an odd objection coming from the man who thinks it's just fine to poke his own nose into people's private lives and tell Christians that they're morally wrong to embrace religious faith and to raise their children in it.
In any event, the claim that any behavior is morally wrong is an odd one coming from a man who is promoting in his book the idea that there is no God and thus no basis for anything being right or wrong in a moral sense. It was Dawkins, after all, who once asked, "How can we say that Hitler was wrong? I mean that's a very difficult question."
But this discussion will have to wait until chapter 6 and 7.
Tuesday, January 31, 2023
Is Everything One Thing?
Physicist Heinrich Päs has a book out in which he explains the thinking of a lot of contemporary physicists that some ancient philosophers were correct in thinking that everything that exists is actually a diverse manifestation of one thing.
The book is titled The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, and in it Päs argues that quantum entanglement, the phenomenon in which sub-atomic particles are somehow connected even when they're light years apart, applies not only to very tiny particles but to everything in the universe. Everything is somehow "entangled" with everything else in such a fashion that at bottom there's really only one fundamental substance or being.
Separateness, according to the theory, is an illusion, and the illusion extends to everything, including space and time.
Here are a few excerpts from an article by Päs at Yahoo.com in which he gives some insight into his thesis:
If it's not matter, space or time could it be mind? If it is mind then the fundamental reality would seem to be an intelligence which creates the world by thinking it into being. That sounds a lot like the God of Genesis 1.
The book is titled The One: How an Ancient Idea Holds the Future of Physics, and in it Päs argues that quantum entanglement, the phenomenon in which sub-atomic particles are somehow connected even when they're light years apart, applies not only to very tiny particles but to everything in the universe. Everything is somehow "entangled" with everything else in such a fashion that at bottom there's really only one fundamental substance or being.
Separateness, according to the theory, is an illusion, and the illusion extends to everything, including space and time.
Here are a few excerpts from an article by Päs at Yahoo.com in which he gives some insight into his thesis:
[E]ntanglement implies that the universe is “monistic”, as philosophers call it, that on the most fundamental level, everything in the universe is part of a single, unified whole.A reviewer of the book at Amazon observes that,
{I]n a quantum universe, there are no individual objects. All that exists is merged into a single “One.”
Nathan Seiberg, a leading string theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, is not alone in his sentiment when he states, “I’m almost certain that space and time are illusions. These are primitive notions that will be replaced by something more sophisticated.” Moreover, in most scenarios proposing emergent space-times, entanglement plays the fundamental role.
As philosopher of science Rasmus Jaksland points out, this eventually implies that there are no individual objects in the universe anymore; that everything is connected with everything else: “Adopting entanglement as the world-making relation comes at the price of giving up separability. But those who are ready to take this step should perhaps look to entanglement for the fundamental relation with which to constitute this world (and perhaps all the other possible ones).”
Thus, when space and time disappear, a unified One emerges.
Päs explains the relation between the quantum world and our classical world by using the illustration of the film projector: is reality the film seen on the screen or is this simply derived from the roll of film in the projector? Even further: is reality the One undifferentiated white light of the projector's lamp that the film roll partially transmits (as a lens) to the screen and partially absorbs?The idea that everything in the universe reduces to one fundamental entity raises the question of what that fundamental entity is.
Are the multiplicity of things that comprise our classical world (matter, space, time, etc...) fundamental or are they derived from our partial knowledge of the One quantum cosmos (the white light in the above analogy)?
If it's not matter, space or time could it be mind? If it is mind then the fundamental reality would seem to be an intelligence which creates the world by thinking it into being. That sounds a lot like the God of Genesis 1.
Monday, January 30, 2023
Seven Myths
In his book Unbelievable: 7 Myths about the History and Future of Science and Religion historian of science Michael Keas discusses seven myths that have seeped into our popular culture concerning the alleged conflict between science and religion, particularly Christianity, and shows that each of the first six is historically false and that the seventh is theologically false.
Here's a thumbnail outline of the thesis of his book excerpted from the Introduction:
Myth #1: Premodern scholars in the Western tradition thought the universe was small—a cozy little place just for human benefit. Modern science displaced this Church-sanctioned belief with a vast cosmos that revealed humans to be insignificant.
The truth: Even ancient thinkers recognized that the earth was tiny in relation to the immense cosmos. In any case, size doesn’t necessarily mean significance, as many theologians and philosophers recognized.
Myth #2: The medieval Catholic Church suppressed the growth of science, causing Europe to descend into the “Dark Ages.”
The truth: The medieval Catholic Church positively influenced science and other intellectual pursuits. There were no “Dark Ages.”
Myth #3: Because of Church-induced ignorance, European intellectuals believed in a flat earth until Columbus proved earth’s roundness in 1492.
The truth: Ancient and medieval intellectuals in the Western tradition had many evidence-based reasons for belief in earth’s roundness.
Myth #4: Giordano Bruno became a martyr for science when the Catholic Church burned him at the stake because he supported Nicolaus Copernicus’s contention that the sun, not the earth, occupied the center of the universe, and because he believed in extraterrestrial life.
The truth: Bruno’s execution occurred almost entirely for theological reasons, not scientific ones.
Myth #5: The Church jailed Galileo Galilei because it rejected his telescopic observations and rational arguments that had proved the Copernican system.
The truth: Most early modern astronomers up through the mid-seventeenth century resisted a moving earth primarily for scientific, not theological, reasons. Galileo failed to prove that earth orbited the sun (that came later).
Myth #6: Copernicus demoted humans from the privileged “center of the universe” and thereby challenged religious doctrines about human importance.
The truth: Copernicus and most of his scientific successors up through the nineteenth century considered his sun-centered astronomy to be compatible with Christianity and human exceptionalism. In fact, early Copernicans viewed earth’s new location not as a demotion for humanity but rather as a promotion, out of the bottom of the universe.
Myth #7: If and when we encounter extraterrestrial life, it will deal the death blow to certain religions, especially Christianity, with its doctrine of the uniqueness of man and the incarnation and redemptive work of God on earth. Any ET capable of traveling a vast distance to earth would have superintelligence, technology indistinguishable from magic, and moral-spiritual insights that would trigger global religious reorientation.
The truth: Many Christian thinkers have been open to the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and neither a single pope nor a major church council ever declared these ideas heretical. Alien life and Christianity are potentially compatible.
Despite the efforts of people like Bill Nye "The Science Guy" and Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of the PBS science series Cosmos, the idea that science and religion are incompatible, though popular in the 19th and 20th centuries, has long since exceeded its intellectual shelf-life. Very few reputable scholars hold to it today because the historical evidence against it is overwhelming.
Keas does a good job of explaining that evidence in his book.
Here's a thumbnail outline of the thesis of his book excerpted from the Introduction:
Myth #1: Premodern scholars in the Western tradition thought the universe was small—a cozy little place just for human benefit. Modern science displaced this Church-sanctioned belief with a vast cosmos that revealed humans to be insignificant.
The truth: Even ancient thinkers recognized that the earth was tiny in relation to the immense cosmos. In any case, size doesn’t necessarily mean significance, as many theologians and philosophers recognized.
Myth #2: The medieval Catholic Church suppressed the growth of science, causing Europe to descend into the “Dark Ages.”
The truth: The medieval Catholic Church positively influenced science and other intellectual pursuits. There were no “Dark Ages.”
Myth #3: Because of Church-induced ignorance, European intellectuals believed in a flat earth until Columbus proved earth’s roundness in 1492.
The truth: Ancient and medieval intellectuals in the Western tradition had many evidence-based reasons for belief in earth’s roundness.
Myth #4: Giordano Bruno became a martyr for science when the Catholic Church burned him at the stake because he supported Nicolaus Copernicus’s contention that the sun, not the earth, occupied the center of the universe, and because he believed in extraterrestrial life.
The truth: Bruno’s execution occurred almost entirely for theological reasons, not scientific ones.
Myth #5: The Church jailed Galileo Galilei because it rejected his telescopic observations and rational arguments that had proved the Copernican system.
The truth: Most early modern astronomers up through the mid-seventeenth century resisted a moving earth primarily for scientific, not theological, reasons. Galileo failed to prove that earth orbited the sun (that came later).
Myth #6: Copernicus demoted humans from the privileged “center of the universe” and thereby challenged religious doctrines about human importance.
The truth: Copernicus and most of his scientific successors up through the nineteenth century considered his sun-centered astronomy to be compatible with Christianity and human exceptionalism. In fact, early Copernicans viewed earth’s new location not as a demotion for humanity but rather as a promotion, out of the bottom of the universe.
Myth #7: If and when we encounter extraterrestrial life, it will deal the death blow to certain religions, especially Christianity, with its doctrine of the uniqueness of man and the incarnation and redemptive work of God on earth. Any ET capable of traveling a vast distance to earth would have superintelligence, technology indistinguishable from magic, and moral-spiritual insights that would trigger global religious reorientation.
The truth: Many Christian thinkers have been open to the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and neither a single pope nor a major church council ever declared these ideas heretical. Alien life and Christianity are potentially compatible.
Despite the efforts of people like Bill Nye "The Science Guy" and Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of the PBS science series Cosmos, the idea that science and religion are incompatible, though popular in the 19th and 20th centuries, has long since exceeded its intellectual shelf-life. Very few reputable scholars hold to it today because the historical evidence against it is overwhelming.
Keas does a good job of explaining that evidence in his book.
Saturday, January 28, 2023
Trump Resurgent?
Horror movie plots sometimes feature a fearsome antagonist who seems unkillable. We may be seeing something similar in our nation's political life. Just when everyone thought Donald Trump's star was fading and that it was time to write his political obituary he may well be surging back to terrorize Republicans and Democrats alike.
Matthew Continetti at The Washington Free Beacon explains that after watching Trump suffer wounds that would've been fatal to mortal politicians his enemies in both parties are making the same mistakes they made in 2016.
He writes:
Continetti closes with this:
Matthew Continetti at The Washington Free Beacon explains that after watching Trump suffer wounds that would've been fatal to mortal politicians his enemies in both parties are making the same mistakes they made in 2016.
He writes:
Donald Trump spent the final months of 2022 reeling from electoral setbacks and media disasters. Many of his high-profile endorsements in the midterm elections flopped. His attacks on popular GOP governors in Florida, Virginia, Ohio, and Georgia did little damage to their reputations.Continetti goes on to explain why Trump has begun to rebound from his disastrous 2022, and his essay is a very interesting piece of political analysis. Even so, whether Trump can come all the way back from his nadir of two years ago to regain the White House is still uncertain.
His 2024 campaign launch was a snooze. His infamous and inexcusable dinner at Mar-a-Lago with high-profile anti-Semites put him on the political fringe. By the end of last year, Trump appeared to be fading from the national conversation. His chances of winning the Republican nomination seemed to dim.
Now those chances are brightening. Trump continues to dominate in polls of Republicans. He's drawn even with President Biden in head-to-head matchups. He lobbied successfully for Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) to become speaker of the House of Representatives.
His loyalists on the House Judiciary, Oversight, and Weaponization of the Federal Government committees will be sure to advance his interests. He's plotting his return to Facebook, Instagram, and possibly Twitter, and his connection with the Republican base remains strong.
Most important of all, Trump's rivals in both the Democratic and Republican parties are repeating the mistakes they made in the run-up to the 2016 election. The Democrats assume that there is no way for Trump to become president, while Republicans believe he will fade from the scene.
Their failure to learn from history has made it possible not only for Trump to win the GOP nomination for the third straight time, but to pull another inside straight in the Electoral College and return to the White House. For decades, Trump has said that the political class is corrupt, insular, and incompetent, and that Republican leaders lack guts. Washington is doing its best to prove him right.
Continetti closes with this:
The presidential campaign is just beginning. No one knows what lies ahead. The Trump rebound may soon pass and won't come again. There's a sleeper candidate or two out there who will make this race interesting.One thing, at least, is reasonably certain: For those who pay at least a bit of attention to politics the next twenty two months will be fascinating.
For now, though, Democrats and Republicans are gambling that they can behave in 2024 just like they did in 2016, but produce a different result.
Friday, January 27, 2023
Who's Irrational?
People who believe that the physical world is not all there is, who believe instead that the world is the product of a transcendent Mind which is involved in world history are sometimes called “irrational” by secular folk who believe that the physical world is indeed all there is.
Dennis Prager has a piece at PJ Media in which he asks who is it, really, who’s irrational. He writes that examples can be found in every area of life of the non-religious actually believing what's irrational if believing what's irrational is defined as believing something that's contrary to common sense or lacking in any scientific justification.
For instance, it's mostly non-religious - or secular - people who believe that men can give birth; that males — providing they identify as females — should be allowed to compete against girls in women’s sports; that children conflicted about their identity should be given puberty-blocking hormones; and that young girls who think they're boys should have their healthy breasts surgically removed.
Prager believes that it's mostly non-religious folks who believe that it's okay for men in drag to dance in sexually suggestive ways in front of children; that it's racist to emulate Martin Luther King's aspiration to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin; and that fewer police, fewer prosecutions and lower prison sentences (or no prison time at all) lead to less crime.
One could add to Prager's list that it's mostly secular folks who believe that there are a near infinity of other universes, all different, which lie beyond our own universe. They believe this despite the complete lack of empirical evidence for any universe but our own.
Furthermore, it's mostly secular people who believe that our universe sprang into being out of essentially nothing, and it's mostly secular people who believe that the equivalent of an entire library of information needed to create the first living cell somehow self-assembled by accident into a metabolizing, reproducing unit of life.
Again, thery believe this despite the utter dearth of evidence that it's even possible let alone that it happened.
Prager also touches on a few social and moral issues that are not actually related to the main topic of rationality, but since he brought them up I'll add one to his list:
We've seen dozens of mass murders over the last few decades, some of which seem to be completely unmotivated by anything other than the killer's desire to kill other human beings.
How many of these murderers are deeply religious Christians and how many of them have no belief in a God? I have no data to support my suspicion, but I'll go out on a limb and speculate that almost everyone, excluding Islamic terrorists, who has committed these horrific crimes has no significant belief in God at all.
I'd be willing to bet, too, that the same applies to those who commit almost all the other crimes afflicting our society - all of those, for instance, responsible for the fentanyl epidemic, all those who steal other people's property, and all those who engage in sex-trafficking.
The non-religious can claim that religious believers are irrational, but when it comes to matters of simple science and/or common morality, irrationality is often, and moral evil is almost always, found among the non-religious.
Dennis Prager has a piece at PJ Media in which he asks who is it, really, who’s irrational. He writes that examples can be found in every area of life of the non-religious actually believing what's irrational if believing what's irrational is defined as believing something that's contrary to common sense or lacking in any scientific justification.
For instance, it's mostly non-religious - or secular - people who believe that men can give birth; that males — providing they identify as females — should be allowed to compete against girls in women’s sports; that children conflicted about their identity should be given puberty-blocking hormones; and that young girls who think they're boys should have their healthy breasts surgically removed.
Prager believes that it's mostly non-religious folks who believe that it's okay for men in drag to dance in sexually suggestive ways in front of children; that it's racist to emulate Martin Luther King's aspiration to judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin; and that fewer police, fewer prosecutions and lower prison sentences (or no prison time at all) lead to less crime.
One could add to Prager's list that it's mostly secular folks who believe that there are a near infinity of other universes, all different, which lie beyond our own universe. They believe this despite the complete lack of empirical evidence for any universe but our own.
Furthermore, it's mostly secular people who believe that our universe sprang into being out of essentially nothing, and it's mostly secular people who believe that the equivalent of an entire library of information needed to create the first living cell somehow self-assembled by accident into a metabolizing, reproducing unit of life.
Again, thery believe this despite the utter dearth of evidence that it's even possible let alone that it happened.
Prager also touches on a few social and moral issues that are not actually related to the main topic of rationality, but since he brought them up I'll add one to his list:
We've seen dozens of mass murders over the last few decades, some of which seem to be completely unmotivated by anything other than the killer's desire to kill other human beings.
How many of these murderers are deeply religious Christians and how many of them have no belief in a God? I have no data to support my suspicion, but I'll go out on a limb and speculate that almost everyone, excluding Islamic terrorists, who has committed these horrific crimes has no significant belief in God at all.
I'd be willing to bet, too, that the same applies to those who commit almost all the other crimes afflicting our society - all of those, for instance, responsible for the fentanyl epidemic, all those who steal other people's property, and all those who engage in sex-trafficking.
The non-religious can claim that religious believers are irrational, but when it comes to matters of simple science and/or common morality, irrationality is often, and moral evil is almost always, found among the non-religious.
Thursday, January 26, 2023
The Moral Emptiness of Naturalism (Pt. III)
This is the third and final part of our look at an essay by Richard Weikart, a professor of modern European history at California State University, in which he addresses the inability of naturalism to provide a coherent basis for ethics. Scroll down for the first two installments.
In today's post we'll look at Weikert's critique of the attempt by biologist Jerry Coyne to derive ethics from biological and cultural evolution. He notes that Coyne's writing on this topic presupposes an objective moral standard, the existence of which he nevertheless denies:
The only way we can make that judgment is if we compare the two behaviors to some objective standard to see which one conforms best to that standard. Yet Coyne's philosophy doesn't allow for the existence of such a standard so his judgments of good and bad are completely arbitrary.
Weikert continues:
Weikert goes on to discuss a study done by John Evans, a sociology professor at the University of California, that shows a correlation between one's worldview and one's view of human rights:
For Evans to believe in objective human rights requires a non-rational leap of faith out of his naturalistic worldview and into the worldview of the theist. He must piggy-back, as it were, on theism to get him to objective human rights while all the while rejecting the theistic assumptions that allow for those rights to exist in the first place.
Secularists like Evans want a kind of Christianity without God, but a Christianity without God provides no more solid foundation for ethics than any other worldview, and is just as nonsensical as every other system of thought that tries to hold on to beliefs about right and wrong in the absence of any objective standard for them.
In today's post we'll look at Weikert's critique of the attempt by biologist Jerry Coyne to derive ethics from biological and cultural evolution. He notes that Coyne's writing on this topic presupposes an objective moral standard, the existence of which he nevertheless denies:
Coyne is an emeritus professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago and a prominent atheist. In his 2015 book, Faith Versus Fact, Coyne argues that morality is the product of both evolutionary and cultural processes. He vigorously denies that there is anything fixed or objective about morality.In other words, if human beings are the product of evolution then all of our behaviors are also the product of our evolutionary development. How then do we determine that charity is good and selfishness is bad if they're both the residue of the evolutionary process?
However, despite his moral relativism, later in his book Coyne inexplicably states, “Indeed, secular morality, which is not twisted by adherence to the supposed commands of a god, is superior to most ‘religious’ morality.”
It escapes Coyne’s notice, apparently, that for one kind of morality to be superior to another, there has to be some yardstick outside both moral systems to measure them by.
The only way we can make that judgment is if we compare the two behaviors to some objective standard to see which one conforms best to that standard. Yet Coyne's philosophy doesn't allow for the existence of such a standard so his judgments of good and bad are completely arbitrary.
Weikert continues:
When Coyne confronts specific moral precepts, he falls into the same contradiction. In a 2017 blog he argues that infanticide and assisted suicide should be permitted, and he insists that the increasing acceptance of them in our society is a sign of moral progress. He proclaims, “This change in views about euthanasia and assisted suicide [i.e., its legalization in some states and countries] are the result of a tide of increasing morality in our world.”Unless there is an objective moral standard how does Coyne know that any behavior represents moral progress? All that he actually seems to be saying is that a behavior represents moral progress if it's a behavior that he likes.
Now, some commentators (such as myself) would argue the exact opposite: that the increasing acceptance of euthanasia and assisted suicide is evidence of our moral decline. But laying aside whether I am right or Coyne is right on this specific moral issue, both of our moral claims — that there is moral progress or moral decline — imply that we are moving toward (or away from) some objective moral goal.
Weikert goes on to discuss a study done by John Evans, a sociology professor at the University of California, that shows a correlation between one's worldview and one's view of human rights:
[Evans] divided people’s views of humanity into three broad categories: theistic, biological, and philosophical. The theistic view of humanity is characterized by the view that humans are created in the image of God. The biological view of humanity sees humans as the product of evolutionary processes and as exclusively physical beings. The philosophical view understands humans to be defined by their having certain traits, such as consciousness, the ability to plan their future, and so forth.This result should not be surprising since only the theist who believes that all human beings are created by God in His image and loved by Him have any basis for thinking that objective human rights could even exist. In any other worldview human rights are simply an arbitrary fiction men fabricate to make it easier to live together in society.
What Evans discovered was that people embracing the theistic view of humans have greater respect for human rights than those espousing the two secularist views. Evans, as a secularist who nonetheless believes in human rights, is clearly uncomfortable with his discovery.
For Evans to believe in objective human rights requires a non-rational leap of faith out of his naturalistic worldview and into the worldview of the theist. He must piggy-back, as it were, on theism to get him to objective human rights while all the while rejecting the theistic assumptions that allow for those rights to exist in the first place.
Secularists like Evans want a kind of Christianity without God, but a Christianity without God provides no more solid foundation for ethics than any other worldview, and is just as nonsensical as every other system of thought that tries to hold on to beliefs about right and wrong in the absence of any objective standard for them.
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