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 PrintableVersion The God delusionAtheism gets franticTHE GOD DELUSION This latest book by Oxford University’s Professor for the Public Understanding of Science is an aggressive atheistic polemic. Richard Dawkins throws considerable prestige, literary skill and anger into an all-out attack on God. Thomas Nagel, top philosopher and Fellow of the British Academy has described the book as ‘a very uneven collection of scriptural ridicule, amateur philosophy, historical and contemporary horror stories, anthropological speculations, and cosmological scientific arguments … Dawkins is operating mostly outside the range of his scientific expertise’ (The New Republic, October 23 2006). InsultsDawkins’s worst insults are aimed at Christianity and the God of the Bible. But these are so reliant on caricature and misquotation of Scripture that any well-taught Christian will see through them at once. At an academic level, Dawkins’s theological views were critiqued by Professor Alistair McGrath in 2004 (Dawkins’ God, Blackwell Publishers); work dismissed by Dawkins in two inadequate paragraphs. It is not surprising that Dawkins is unconvincing outside his academic field. What about his scientific case for atheism? These form the intellectual heart of his book, and focus on the argument from design. Dawkins has always held that the natural world has an appearance of design. He claims that this is an illusion, explained away by Darwin. This is why intellectually fulfilled atheism is possible. But 150 years after Darwin, evolutionary pathways for the origin of most natural phenomena are still unknown. This is an uncomfortable fact for Dawkins, and though he plays it down he cannot avoid it altogether. He has three main answers. (1) Wild Speculation, shown most vividly by the invocation of multiple, reproducing universes to explain the fine-tuning of physical constants. (2) Unbounded faith in the ability of future scientists to solve all mysteries within an atheistic worldview. (3) The negative argument against design, ‘Who designed the designer?’ Missing the pointSurprisingly, Dawkins seems to place most of his confidence in this third (philosophical) argument, repeating it 12 times in his chapter on science. ‘A designer God cannot be used to explain organised complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right’. Dawkins says this because the only God he will consider is a natural physical entity. But this is not what anybody means by God. God is by definition supernatural. He is the uncaused cause and philosophers and theologians have pointed out for centuries that he is the only way to avoid an infinite regress of causal explanation. Dawkins’s ‘Who designed the designer?’ argument simply missed the point. Many Christians are wary of making a positive case for God based on arguments from biological design. Theism does not depend on arcane arguments about how specific examples of biological complexity came into existence. But Dawkins’s atheism does. It depends upon everything in the natural world owing its origin to an undirected natural process. His failure to address this adequately suggests a weakness at the heart of his intellectual position. Only the gullibleIf everyone was well informed and clear thinking, Dawkins would convince no one. But in a culture where people find The Da Vinci Code credible, Dawkins’s ideas could flourish. Particularly worrying is his desire to restrict the religious education that parents can give their children, and particularly hurtful is his mockery of God. But don’t forget Psalm 2: ‘He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord holds them in derision.’ Dr. Richard Buggs, © Evangelicals Now - December 2006 |
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