In 2006 I read – most of – Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. I didn't read it all because I found it so
infuriating. Why? Broadly for three reasons. Firstly, I don’t think Dawkins knows enough
about theology to do a decent demolition job.
Secondly, for someone who sets himself up as a rationalist, Dawkins’ own
reasoning is often – and I'm being as charitable as I can – slipshod. Thirdly, Dawkins makes assumptions about the
value of scientific truth which don't seem to me to be warranted, and which he
doesn't question.
To get my own position out of the way, I am not a Christian. Or a Jew or a Muslim. But I am interested in these things, as I think everyone should be, and I hate the vanity and hypocrisy which The God Delusion exudes. The following is an extract from a long article I wrote at the time. In the coming weeks I'll post further parts of it.
In writing TGD Dawkins faced a mammoth task. It's notoriously difficult to prove a
negative - that God doesn't exist, for example - and moreover to take only the
three Abrahamic religions is to confront a
bewildering variety of doctrines and sub-doctrines even within one of
them. Many religious people, when asked
“Does God exist?” would reply, “It depends what you mean by ‘God’ and what you
mean by ‘exist’ “.
This is not
nitpicking - it goes to the heart of what religion is about, and has
preoccupied religious scholars for thousands of years. That so many different answers have been
given presents problems for Dawkins, who plainly dislikes religion thoroughly
and moreover has a day job as a teacher of science: the idea of spending so
much free time immersing himself in these ideologies must have seemed
anathema. Moreover the effort would
hardly seem worthwhile since the task of attacking each strand of religious
thought in detail would be a lifetime's work.
If the question “Does God exist?” were expanded thus – “To what
extent was God responsible for Creation?
To what extent does God intervene in our lives?” - the scale of the
ensuing theological complexities becomes all the more dauntingly apparent.
That Dawkins can't resist dipping his toe into theology
unfortunately leaves him open to the charge of ignorantly misrepresenting the
beliefs he is attacking, and, more seriously, attacking only those that are
easy to knock down. Terry Eagleton’s
notorious review of TGD in the London
Review of Books described the experience as rather like reading a book on
biology by someone whose knowledge of the subject is confined to having studied
the Book of British Birds. There's an
element of comic exaggeration about this, but a grain of truth too.
Perhaps recognizing that dealing with all these varied beliefs in
detail is not going to be possible, Dawkins spends a great deal of the early
part of the TGD explaining why it is very unlikely that God was
responsible for creation. After all, if
God can be shown not to have done the things religion seems to say He did, then
that in itself might be strong grounds for his non-existence.
Chapter 4 of the book, Why
There Almost Certainly Is No God, contains what Dawkins describes as its
“central argument”. He explains (p.141 of the hardback)
that physicists “have calculated that, if
the laws and constants of physics had been even slightly different, the
universe would have developed in such a way that life would have been
impossible”. How could it be that
the universe is fine-tuned to allow chemicals to form and life to
flourish?
Theists, Dawkins writes, say
that God tuned the fundamental constants of the universe so that each one lay
in the ideal range for the production of life.
But “As ever (p.143) the theist’s answer is deeply unsatisfying,
because it leaves the existence of God unexplained …. A God capable of (fine-tuning
the universe in this way) would have to
be at least as improbable as the finely tuned combination of numbers itself,
and that’s very improbable indeed… It follows
that the theist’s answer has utterly failed to make any headway towards solving
the problem at hand”.
This is an interesting paragraph.
One, it’s fairly typical of Dawkins’ rhetorical style. The theist’s answer is “deeply unsatisfying” and has “utterly
failed”. Apparently being unsatisfying and having failed alone would not have been
enough. On the following page Dawkins
describes the theistic response as not just an “evasion”, but an evasion “of
stupendous proportions”, and not just a restatement of the problem but a “grotesque” amplification of it. There are many other instances of this sort
of hyperbole, rather as if Dawkins felt he hadn't quite been persuasive enough and needed to stick in a few more adjectives.
Secondly, for Dawkins, the existence or otherwise of God is a “problem” which needs to be solved. Reading the book I found sometimes found
myself wondering, Could Dawkins not just relax a bit? On p.155 he writes, “To suggest that the first cause, the great unknown which is responsible
for something existing rather than nothing, is a being capable of designing the
universe and of talking to a million people simultaneously, is a total
abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation”. Responsibility? Really?
Why? And instead of finding an
explanation, couldn’t we just make one up?
I'll return to this idea of making things up later, because it has a bearing on what all of us, but particularly artists, do.
Thirdly and more pertinently, Dawkins seems to be suggesting that
there can be no God because “a God
capable of (fine-tuning the universe in this way) would have to be at least as improbable as the finely tuned
combination of numbers itself”.
But this is a shoddy argument. It doesn't follow that something even more improbable than the extraordinary
improbability of the universe must be impossible merely on the grounds of that extra bit of improbability. After all, if the extraordinarily improbable
universe exists, why should we baulk at the extra bit of improbability that God
– according to Dawkins – would require?
Fourthly, the universe is a physical phenomenon, and in these
pages Dawkins is assuming that religious people believe it was physically created
by a physically capable God. But whilst
some undoubtedly do, many religious people don’t believe in the designer
hypothesis at all (another example of the structural defect in the book I
referred to at the start). Even many
Church-going Bible-reading Christians don’t believe that God designed and
created the universe and everything in it.
But Dawkins makes an even more fundamental mistake. On p.158 he writes of the universe, “the designer hypothesis immediately raises
the larger problem of who designed the designer.” Well perhaps, but only if the designer were a
physical entity.
The universe and the
living creatures within it are physical things, and the processes of
coming-into-being Dawkins describes are physical processes. If the designer were not a physical entity
but instead a universal being as many religious people believe (whatever that might be), he (she/it) wouldn’t
have needed designing.
A universal being
doesn’t have a beginning or end.
He/she/it just is. Sure, most
Christians believe that God is capable of making himself flesh, and did so in
Jesus’ case; but they don’t believe God has breakfast. They believe instead that God is everywhere
and all around us, always has been, always will be. They believe God is in the room with
them.
This may be a laughably vague belief, but it isn't refuted by the
(mistaken) assumption Dawkins makes. If
you don't believe that God takes a physical form, a demonstration that God has
failed to accord with the laws concerning physical creation is irrelevant.
Thus far, Dawkins isn't coming across as the hot-shot ratiocinator. More on his failings later on in the Autumn.
