What the Dawkins?

Could this have been randomly generated?

I've been reading an article by Richard Dawkins titled “The Improbability of God.” I presume it is an essential statement of his case for atheism. If so, there is nothing new there, and nothing very thought-provoking.

He begins, predictably, with the standard “religion causes wars” opening everyone must by now be familiar with: “Much of what people do is done in the name of God. Irishmen blow each other up in his name. Arabs blow themselves up in his name.”

Okay--Arabs, perhaps. Any member of the IRA is blowing people up in the name of Marx and scientific socialism. Still, so what; if someone tries to pass a cheque in my name, am I responsible? And consider, for balance, what has been done in the name of science: science was the stated justification for Hitler's holocaust, Stalin's holocaust, Mao's holocaust, Pol Pot's holocaust, Kim Il-Sung's and Kim Jong-Il's holocaust. When Turkey went from religion to science as the justification for its existence, in the early years of the 20th century, the immediate result was a holocaust of Armenians and Greeks. Science—eugenics, environmentalism, demographics—has been used to sanction abortion. Religion could not. If the existence of Al Qaeda is an argument against religion, that it can be misused to justify killing people, Dawkins must accept that there is a far stronger argument of this sort against science.

In his listing of the evils done in God's name, Dawkins goes on to make one surprising specific claim: “Jewish shohets cut live animals' throats in his name.”

This alone rather discredits Dawkins as a serious thinker. The man has no sense of irony—even if the point of what the shohets do were to kill more animals, just how many lab animals have been sacrificed for science? And the point of the shohet's work is not to kill an animal, but to ensure that it be killed humanely. The same animal would have died, at the same time, with or without the shohet. It is killed for food, not religion. Not so for lab animals.

All of this, though, is mere poisoning of the wells, mere ad hominem. Even if Dawkins' points were legitimate, they would not be arguments against the existence of God, only against the moral character of his opponents, or perhaps an argument that God's existence is unfortunate or inconvenient. So might mine be, but I still exist.

On this, the supposed “improbability of God,” Dawkins seems to have only one bullet in his magazine, and it is a very old, worn one. He addresses only the “watchmaker analogy” of William Paley, a now relatively obscure 19th century Anglican cleric. Obviously, even if Dawkins manages to effectively disprove Paley's argument, he has done nothing at all to disprove God's existence, only to disprove the proof—absence of proof is not proof of absence. And, of course, there are dozens or even hundreds of other well-known proofs of the existence of God that Dawkins does not even address, by such rather better-known thinkers as Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Aquinas, Anselm, Pascal, and so forth. If, after all, monotheists believed in God solely because of this analogy proposed in the early 19th century, what kept them going over the three millenia or so before Paley evolved; let alone the century and three quarters since Darwin?

Rev. William Paley

Yet Dawkins actually asserts that there is no other known argument for God's existence, except for the claim of personal revelation. This is either deceit on his part, or a shocking and almost necessarily wilful ignorance of the entire history of Western thought. It is also a straw-man argument, as no prominent theist has ever proposed personal revelation as proof to anyone but themselves.

This itself is ad hominem, and entirely aside from the present argument, but I cannot help but think: if this is the best and the brightest that contemporary Oxford has to offer, it is strong evidence that the entire academic edifice in the Western world has become a house of cards.

To summarize Paley's teleological argument: Paley argued that, if one came across a pocket watch lying in a field, even if one had never seen a pocket watch before, one would easily be able to deduce, from its complexity and its orderliness, that the watch was not something that happened spontaneously, but was deliberately designed by some intelligence. Just so, if we look at things in nature, and find them on inspection to be equally orderly and complex, we can reasonably deduce from this that they, too, must have been deliberately designed by some intelligence. He cites biological organisms as the obvious example—any one of them is more complex and well-ordered in its parts than a pocket watch.

Dawkins then asserts that this proof of God's existence is rendered “superfluous” by Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Not disproven, actually—only that there is a possible alternative explanation.

And that's it? That's all he has to back his own faith? That it is a possible explanation? That it _could_ be true? Yep—that's it. He then simply appeals to Occam's Razor, saying that Darwin's concept is a simpler one than positing a God, and the simpler explanation is generally to be preferred.

But he merely asserts it to be simpler; this does not make it so. In fact, to either the average person or the average great philosopher, certainly including William of Occam himself, Darwin's theory is a good deal more complex, and requires a good many more assumptions, than Paley's alternative. Berkeley demonstrated that the entire material world need not be assumed to exist, so long as God does.

What is worse, Dawkins is wasting our time. There is nothing here that has been news for the past century and a half. Paley invented his analogy of the watch in 1802; Darwin's counterargument appeared in 1838. The matter was all debated out in public by Huxley and others at the time—at the Oxford Union, in the newspapers, in many books, all now in the public domain.

Perhaps, nevertheless, it is interesting to look at Paley's theory in light of Darwin for ourselves. Does Darwin's theory really disprove Paley's theory? Only if one assumes that the process Darwin describes is purely random, and not itself guided or originally crafted by some higher intelligence. On this assumption, most Christians have never been particularly troubled by Darwinism, and Dawkins, if he were both knowledgeable on the subject and honest, would have needed to address this possibility.

Indeed, the elegance of the process described by Darwin, and what it has managed to produce, if the theory is true, in itself could just as easily be seen to argue for a designer behind it. Darwin, if right, simply came across one more beautiful pocket watch. To show that this is not so, Dawkins would have to be able to prove that the process was genuinely “random,” in an absolute sense. This is well beyond anything that science can do, and is counter to the entire thrust of scientific enquiry. The fundamental assumption on which science is based is that matters are never random, but can be discovered to follow regular, comprehensible laws. Every time science succeeds, it reinforces Paley's claim.

One can, on the other hand, see other, philosophical, objections, to Paley; objections that Dawkins does not seem to be aware of. The fundamental problem with Paley's analogy would seem to be that we have no basis for comparison. If there is a God after all, everything that exists is designed, the wildflowers of the field as much as the pocket watch. This being so, and we having no experience of an absence of design, how can we make any distinction, between the pocket watch and the blades of grass or stones among which it fell?

But then, by the same token, if there is no God, nothing can really have been designed, including the pocket watch; because the human intelligence behind it, must itself be purely random. There can then be no purpose or orderliness to anything; if there seems to be, this is an illusion.

And here, I think, the human mind must rise in revolt, and side with Paley. To suppose that human thought, human consciousness, and the laws of nature, mathematics and logic are themselves perfectly random, and could as easily have been something else, is literally inconceivable. What could be more obviously nonsensical than, for example, saying that 2+2 could just as easily equal any given random number? But that is what such a claim must assume. It makes nonsense of the process of human thought itself, and therefore of itself as a thoughtful assertion. It is, accordingly, that grail of philosophy, an a priori, to assert that consciousness, thought, order, and logic, really do exist. If they do not, we cannot think in the first place.

And this in itself proves the existence of God, though it is a different proof from Paley's; it is the “proof from universals.” It also, I think, makes any naturalistic understanding of Darwin, a Darwinism without God controlling the process, a genuinely “random” evolution, pretty much nonsensical—as Darwin's co-discoverer, Wallace, himself pointed out. Because if it really is random, Darwin's theory itself must be random, itself being the ultimate product of such a process, and so cannot really explain anything. The Origin of Species might as well have been produced by an infinite number of monkeys sitting at typewriters over an infinite length of time. Its relationship with any reality outside itself can be nothing more than random.

So the assumption that God does not exist and that even the pocket watch is random is simply not tenable. On the other hand, there is indeed a possible explanation for why some things seem to be profoundly ordered and complex, and others simpler and less organized, on the premise of theism. It could well be so, if there is a God, and he has created the physical universe more or less as a language through which he is communicating with us. If so, he is drawing our attention to things with displays of profound order or beauty. These are the words in which he speaks to us. The less-ordered elements are the silences between the words, making them audible.

A very Christian conception, by the way: the order of the universe is the Logos, the Word of God, who became flesh as Jesus of Nazareth.

No; it all works only if, when we become aware of some order underlying the visible phenomena of the universe, as scientists do, or some great beauty underlying it, as artists do, we understand this as a deliberate communication of mind to mind, a dialogue between soul and God.

In defense of his Darwinian/scientistic faith, Dawkins surprisingly goes on to assert, on a rather lower plane of debate, that “Not a single fossil has ever been found in any place where the evolution theory would not have expected it, although this could very easily have happened: a fossil mammal in rocks so old that fishes have not yet arrived, for instance, would be enough to disprove the evolution theory.”

This is a powerful claim; and one heard from Darwinians many times before. Unfortunately, it is not true. There have been hundreds of fossils found in places where they should not be; a quick search on the Internet can turn up many such claims. A variety of explanations have of course been used to reconcile these with Darwinian assumptions; and this is a trivially easy thing to do. If nothing else, one can simply revise one's estimates of when the given species first appeared, or when it became extinct. The core assertions of Darwinism are actually invulnerable to such evidence.

Accordingly, while these explanations for “misplaced” fossils may be true, Dawkins cannot rely on the fossil record to prove Darwin. Perhaps there is some other way to prove or disprove Darwin; but Dawkins does not offer it. The Creationists have been saying for over a century that the essential claims of Darwinian evolution do not really seem to be vulnerable to falsification by evidence in any way. If so, this means it is not a scientific theory, but a philosophical position; or perhaps an article of faith.

In fact, as one would expect of a religious person, Dawkins wants to extend the workings of Darwinian evolution beyond the bounds of biology, to cover all existence—to explain life, the universe, and everything. He claims the same random evolutionary process in the Big Bang and the subsequent history of all matter and energy. “There must have been some earlier hereditary system,” he says; an “original kind of natural selection.”

He does not explain, at least in the present article, how this can be so—how, for example, non-living things can reproduce, let alone mutate, let alone grow systematically more complex as a result. It is all covered by that one word, “must.” My guess is that he cannot; he is simply expressing a kind of emotional conviction—a statement of faith. Does it seem impossible by the known laws of physics? That is not, it seems, to Dawkins a concern.

Whatever forms the basis of his beliefs, it is not philosophy, and it is not science.