I’ve been reading reviews of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion over the last few days. There are a surprising number of them. Most of them, as is to be expected, no doubt, are written by religious believers, and are very negative, not to say contemptuous. Dawkins is called everything from lazy, to sloppy, poorly researched, sophomoric, careless, offensive and wrong. Quite astonishing is the vitriolic denunciation of a book that is accused, by so many who denounce it so vitriolically, of being itself vitriolic! Since I have decided to read the book once again, having read it only once when it first came out in 2006, I will consider, in a later post, whether The God Delusion is, as claimed, in poor taste, offensive, strident, or vitriolic. This book, after all, is the fons et origo of the New Atheist movement. Sam Harris’s book, The End of Faith, was the first major success of a book written from an atheist point of view and published by a mainstream publisher, but Richard Dawkins’ book provided the momentum for a movement which is now, because of its forthrightness, a major influence in the world. So important has the new atheism become that popes and archbishops are convinced that it is a danger to faith, and have established programmes to combat it. Despite the fact that many less bold and forthright atheists find the new atheism too confrontational and prefer to remain on friendly terms with religion, it is only since atheism hit the best seller lists that atheism itself has become almost a mainstream phenomenon. At the same time that Alister McGrath wrote and published his slight — and often inaccurate — study on what he thought was The Twilight of Atheism, the new atheism was already in gestation. Far from being in its death throes, as McGrath thought, atheism was preparing to become a major cultural phenomenon.
What I want to do, then, is to look more closely — possibly over a number of posts — at the book which lies at the heart of the new atheist phenomenon, The God Delusion. I will do this mainly by considering the book’s detractors, though, as I say, I am now in the process of reading it once again, and reading it, this time, more closely than I did before. But I want to look at it through the eyes of its critics, in the conviction that by the weaknesses or strengths of their arguments, we will be able best to judge what is most effective about the book itself. This may seem a strange way to go about it; however, it is important to see that the strength of the book — which was at the top of the best seller list for so long — does not lie primarily in whether or not Dawkins is a professional philosopher or theologian, or whether his research led him into the deepest and most arcane areas of either the philosophy of religion or Christian theology, but in the fact that it caught a cultural wave which drew a whole social-intellectual movement along in its train. So it will be important to note why, in fact, the criticisms of this book have not bit very deep into its continuing influence.
I am going to begin my survey of Dawkins’ critics by looking at Alvin Plantinga’s critique in the magazine Books and Culture: A Christian Review. It is entitled “The Dawkins Confusion.” The importance of this review lies in the reputation of its author. Although PZ Myers says that “Alvin Plantinga gives philosophy a bad name” — an assessment with which I agree, by the way — he is, perhaps, the foremost Christian philosopher writing in English, so, when he says that “one shouldn’t look to this book for evenhanded and thoughtful commentary,” we must take it that it comes from the best that Christian philosophy can provide. And when he goes on to say that “the proportion of insult, ridicule, spleen, and vitriol [in The God Delusion] is astounding,” we must take it that he has weighed his words carefully, and considers this judgement to be evenhanded and thoughtful.
Plantinga begins his review by quoting Dawkins’ description of the god of the Old Testament. It is worthwhile repeating those words here:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all 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, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. [32]
Plantinga comments: “Dawkins seems to have chosen God as his sworn enemy,” ignoring the fact that he has just quoted Dawkins to the effect that this nasty character is completely fictional. However, it is only fair to point out that biblical scholars and theologians are not ignorant of the problem that the character of Yahweh creates for them. William Lane Craig may accept with equanimity the fact that the Israelites, in conquering Canaan (a conquest which perhaps never took place), are commanded by this god to slaughter every living thing in their path, but the genocidal rage of the Hebrew god is not easily dismissed by those who have any concern for questions of peace and justice. Stories such as those in which the Hebrews are commanded by their god to consecrate to destruction every living thing that lies in their path, whether they are historically reliable or not, establish a pattern of destructive and violent behaviour, xenophobic and cruel, which still has the power to arouse the basest instincts of cruelty and violence in its devotees. Books such as Regina Schwartz’s The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism, or Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer’s Is Religion Killing Us: Violence in the Bible and the Quran, give ample evidence that the violence which runs like a trail of blood through the Christian as well as the Muslim holy books is a social problem of enormous proportions. I would go farther. I suggest that, so long as books such as the Bible and the Qu’ran are considered as sacred and apart, they will continue to have a baleful influence upon relations between nations and peoples. The nasty character of the biblical or qu’ranic god, fictional to its core as it might be, still has the power to arouse in people almost maniacally murderous passions which too often spill over into mayhem and murder. To anyone who has read these books, Dawkins’ description is not only accurate, but inadequate to capture the depths of evil which religion is often used to camouflage.
Plantinga goes on, after pointing out that Dawkins is not a philosopher, to suggest that “much of the philosophy that he purveys is at best jejune.”
You might say [he goes on] that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class.
That, it seems to me, qualifies as vitriolic criticism, which is curious coming from someone who criticises criticism of precisely this sort. He also accuses Dawkins of adopting an “arrogant, smarter-than-thou tone,” the precursor of so much of the tone-trolling in the blogosphere, taking new atheists to task for their tone, regardless of the reliability of their arguments or the justness of their concerns. You will not be surprised to find out that it is at this point that Plantinga begins his more substantive criticisms of Dawkins’ book.
The first argument that he addresses is Dawkins’ claim that, if god did exist, s/he/it would be enormously complex and therefore very improbable. Plantinga says, mistakenly, that the argument is in Chapter 3, but it is really in Chapter 4, “Why there is almost certainly no god”. The argument is summed up on page 114:
However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable.
The point of the argument is this. Those who use the argument from design to prove the existence of god (to wit, the designer), must explain why the existence of a designer is less improbable than what we start off with, namely, the thing that gives all the appearance of design. Take Paley’s watch found on the heath.
In crossing a heath, [the good archdeacon supposes] suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone? why is it not as admissible in the second case, as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, viz. that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose … [and after considering the watch in some detail] the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker …, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer: who comprehended its construction and designed its use. [Natural Theology, 12th edition, pp. 2-4]
Now, stop and think. Assuming there was a designer, would the designer of the watch not be assumed to be equally as complex as the watch? All the designed things that we know of have been designed by a designer much more complex than the designed things themselves. And the improbability of this very complex originating thing existing must be just as great, and presumably greater, than the probability of the thing itself.
With wide-eyed innocence Plantinga asks the question: “But why does Dawkins think that God is complex? And why does he think that the more complex something is, the less probable it is?” And then he immediately digresses to talk about Dawkins’ book The Blind Watchmaker. Let’s consider that for a moment. Here’s what he says:
[In The Blind Watchmaker Dawkins] argues that the scientific theory of evolution shows that our world has not been designed — by God or anyone else. This thought is trumpeted by the subtitle of the book: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design.
After delivering himself of that little bit of hyperbole, with the apparent innocence of a child Plantinga wonders why this should be so. How does evolution from simpler forms of life show that the universe was not designed? How does Dawkins conclude that “the evidence of evolution reveals that evolution is unplanned, unguided, unorchestrated by any intelligent being?”
Well, the simple reason is the same as Laplace’s response to Napoleon. “Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis,” that is, the hypothesis of God intervening to correct the paths of the planets. The evolutionary biologist need only point to the facts. The whole system works without assuming that there is a designing intelligence anywhere in the process. It is, as Dennett points out in great detail in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, an algorithmic process, acting quite mechanically and without forethought.
Now, here’s where Plantinga goes off course. He assumes that Dawkins’ argument is a philosophical one, and he sets out to show that the argument is invalid. Pay close attention. Dawkins starts of with a premise, says Plantinga, like this one: “We know of no irrefutable objections to its being biologically possible that all of life has come to be by way of unguided Darwinian processes.” And from this he concludes, without explaining the move, that “all of life has come to be by way of unguided Darwinian processes.” Plantinga comments on “the striking distance, here, between premise and conclusion,” and even goes on to ridicule Dawkins:
Philosophers sometimes propound invalid arguments (I’ve propounded a few myself [he admits gallantly]); few of those arguments display the truly colossal distance between premise and conclusion sported by this one.
Well, but that’s not the way that Dawkins argues. It’s not a matter of premises and conclusion; it’s simply a matter of scientific explanation. The processes of evolution need no designer to explain the evolution of organisms, just as the planets don’t need a god to intervene to make sure that they don’t spin out of their orbits.
So Plantinga entirely misunderstands how science works. He thinks he can reduce it to philosophical argumentation. He forgets that premises which are unnecessary in order to explain scientific phenomena do not form a part of scientific theories. All sorts of things might be thought to be happening in the background. Gremlins might cause breakdown in automobiles. But no one who took his car to a garage would be content with gremlins as an explanation. In the end, following this line of reasoning, Plantinga accuses Dawkins of begging the question. Here is Dawkins argument as Plantinga interprets it:
1. If theism is false, then evolution is unguided.
2. Theism is false.
3. Therefore, evolution is unguided (1 & 2 by modus ponens).
But the argument doesn’t work this way at all. It is not a logical or philosophical argument, but a scientific one. What Darwin’s idea of natural selection did was to dispense with the need for a creator to explain the existence of apparent design. This presupposition was simply no longer necessary. Does this say that there isn’t a designer? No, people like the pope and Plantinga are doubtless entitled to go on thinking that, despite everything, the process is attended by a designing intelligence, but the effects are just the same whether you assume this or not, and if you do assume it you’re no longer doing science. In other words, things will remain as they are; the religious believer simply adds an irrelevant explanatory hypothesis which is not a part of science.
So, what about the wild improbability of there being a creator, since the creator must be incredibly complex in order to create such complex things as a universe with all its varieties of stars and galaxies, as well as the complexity of life, wherever there is life in the universe? Here we come to the more airy-fairy point in Plantinga’s argument. He asks straightaway why we should think of god as complex. Classical theology assumes that god is a simple being in which essence and existence are identical, a being, as Plantinga says, in which “there is no distinction of thing and property, actuality and potentiality, essence and existence, and the like.” And since God is a spirit, Plantinga says, not material, it therefore “has no parts.” However, it needs to be asked at this point what a spirit is. Does Plantinga know what a spirit is? The Anglican 39 Articles defines god as a being “without body, parts or passions.” (Article 1) But does this really help? People like Plantinga speak about god as though there is no difficulty identifying god and speaking of god’s nature, but how does he know? What does it mean to speak of a being without body, parts or passions, a being in which actuality and potentiality, essence and existence are identical?
Plantinga admits, for the sake of argument, that god is complex, since being omniscient implies that god knows a great many things, and that that knowledge must itself be complex. Minds seem to be complex repositories of ideas, memories, plans, purposes, hopes, fears, and a great many other mental things. So, let’s accept for the time being, he says, that minds are complex, and that god is complex in this fashion. Still, Plantinga objects, this would not make god improbable, since the improbability that Dawkins is talking about is the improbability of complexly ordered physical things. Ordered material complexity — such as a universe — may be highly improbable, but why does it follow that the existence of god is improbable? In fact, Plantinga says, trundling out some theological presuppositions, god is maximally probable, and then he goes on:
So if Dawkins proposes that God’s existence is improbable, he owes us an argument for the conclusion that there is no necessary being with the attributes of God — an argument that doesn’t just start from the premise that materialism is true.
Now, this essay is already getting a bit too long, and we haven’t even touched on fine tuning yet! However, according to the modal arguments, god is either necessary or impossible. (See Michael Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification) Martin points out that “[t]he theistic proofs presume that the concept of God is coherent; they cannot demonstrate it.” (89) So Dawkins does not owe Plantinga an argument showing that there is no necessary being with the attributes of God. Indeed, it is very doubtful whether either the argument for the necessary being or the impossibility of god will really convince anyone, since gods are not used in this way. These are secondary accretions, and take their place as an additional dimension of religious life for those who are interested in analysing and describing the metaphysical background of everyday religious practices. And, in any event, as Plantinga already knows, an argument purporting to demonstrate the non-existence of something is bound to fail.
Plantinga goes on in his review to address a number of other issues, none of which seem very compelling to me. The fine tuning argument, I believe, is doomed to failure. And Plantinga’s argument that without theism there is no reason to believe that we can know anything is just silly.
From a theistic point of view, we’d expect [says Plantinga] that our cognitive abilities would be (for the most part, and given certain qualifications and caveats) reliable.
On the basis of materialism, we should, he suggests, think quite the opposite:
It’s as likely, given unguided evolution, that we live in a sort of dream world as that we actually know something about ourselves and our world.
But this is really quite silly, and Plantinga, one wants to say, must know this. The truth is that, without great discipline, and constant checking and rechecking, our cognitive abilities just are very fallible. The better they are, of course, the more successful we should be in staying alive. Living in a dream world where we knew nothing would not promote survivability, so evolution doesn’t imply what Plantinga thinks it does. Nevertheless, our cognitive abilities are limited and fallible. Why else, one wants to ask, does Plantinga believe so many weird things? In fact, it took many thousands of years before the scientific project really got off the ground. Now that it has, however, human knowledge is growing exponentially. The truth is that evolution provided us with a great many cognitive skills, all of which are very fallible, and have only been made a successful basis for continuing progress in knowledge in only one civilisation, which is now global. So Plantinga is both right and wrong. Our evolutionary origins should impress upon us the fallibility of our abilities, but if the acquiring of knowledge itself is an evolutionary phenomenon, as Susan Blackmore suggests in her book The Meme Machine, while we will not see a simple progression towards more and more reliable knowledge and understanding, we should see progress towards such knowledge, and this is, in fact, what we do see. I conclude that Plantinga’s attack on Dawkins largely fails. If there are serious weaknesses, Plantinga didn’t spot them.
Eric,
I like your approach. Your task does require much effort to be fair; I admire your first offering as it does seem to have succeeded.
Thank you.
Plantinga (sigh!). He is a creationist – truly believing the evidence for special creation trumps evolution – and his knowledge was seemingly picked up off the back of cereal boxes. Yet he claims Dawkins is lacking theologically and philosophically.
Here is Plantinga from a paper included in Robert Pennock’s Intelligent Design Creationism and its Critics:
The entire article is full of snide asides like calling those who accept evolution “properly acculturated and scientifically receptive sheep” or making fun of Dawkins “Let me recommend Dawkins’ book to you: it is brilliantly written, unfailingly fascinating, and utterly wrongheaded. It was second on the British best-seller list for some considerable time, second only to Mamie Jenkins’ Hip and Thigh Diet.” It is also very parochial as he sees a struggle between ancient naturalism, enlightenment humanism and Christian theism – European and Christian are the only views deemed important.
I picked up the book of a debate between Plantinga and Dennett. Never have I been so unimpressed by a philosopher (Plantinga).
Dennett wasn’t great either, but, to be fair, he was having to spend his time putting plantinga’s woolly and verbose BS into plain english before refuting it.
As for The God Delusion, I actually didn’t get around to reading it until last year, so it was largely preaching to the converted. Read in that light, having seen the arguments many times before, it was just a generally solid affirmation, I guess. I recall having minor issues with a couple of bits, areas where I would have liked more, areas where I’d heard better responses, but still, as a populist book, it does fine, surely?
And it does better every time the supposed “sophisticated theologians” weigh in.
I have quite fond memories of my deconversion process where I would drive my teenage son to the evening service at church & instead of joining him inside, spend the next hour and a half reading the “God Delusion” in the car. As I read, I felt a quiet thrill as I read this dangerous book and realized that I had never really properly considered the case for or against a god with anything approaching an open mind. Like Plantinga, my first response to Dawkins’ was that it was a rather hyperbolic polemic, but as I read further, I had to grudgingly admit that his seemingly superficial treatment of nuanced theological issues was reasonable. That is to say,that if there is no god, parsing subtle questions around the nature of this god was ultimately futile if the god in question was merely a cognitive construct and a fiction. As his arguments began to win me over, I realized that he did not need to be subtle. This Emperor had no clothes after all.
I do not have to be well versed in the subtleties that separate Shiites from Sunnis to recognize that whoever Muhammad might have been, as an epileptic warmonger with a personality disorder, he could not possibly have been talking to god in that cave. The resultant religion, Islam, does not hold any authority over my mind as it is clearly a man-made entity. A Muslim scholar might regard me as an ill-informed infidel, but how much deeper do I need to dig to be convinced that it is all a pious fiction?
The faith of my fathers & family may not be quite so easily dismissed because of the heavy indoctrination I had been a part of for so long, but a quick dismissal of its claims is just as valid. Christianity, like Islam fails on the basis of some very basic tests of veracity. Just because Dawkins does not have a lifetime of theological study behind him does not invalidate his very solid reasons for rejecting the god of the Bible.
Dawkins is irritating to the faithful, because he calls a spade a spade. I, for one am very grateful for his blunt but effective spade-work.
“Dawkins is irritating to the faithful, because he calls a spade a spade. I, for one am very grateful for his blunt but effective spade-work.”
Indeed!
I wasn’t impressed with the first half of TGD. I found the argument in chapter 4 kind of weak and chapter 5 unimaginative (too much focus on the individual). The second half, though, is impressive. Recognition that moral progress has paralleled the decline of religion, and that scriptural morality is, in fact, appalling, is commonplace today, but that’s partly due to the influence of Dawkins. Most persuasive to me, though, was chapter 9 (religion and childhood). I’d bet that many formerly faith-friendly atheists, most certainly including myself, were made very uncomfortable by the realization of their complicity in these lies.
When you see arguments like this:
says Plantinga: “We know of no irrefutable objections to its being biologically possible that all of life has come to be by way of unguided Darwinian processes.”
Then the conclusion must be that Plantiga is unwilling to properly justify his beliefs on the overall weight of the evidence. After all, the evidences favoring evolution by natural selection, which is an intrinsically unguided process, are very robust, very diverse, very frequent, very persistent, very widespread, very consistent, very one-sided, evidences, and therefore go beyond establishing merely what is “possible”. With just that one statement Plantiga loses his credibility as a philosopher who we should look to for guidence regarding what we should believe.
Another thing, Plantinga was named as one of those complaining to the Synthese editors about the unprofessional tone of Barbara Forrest’s paper on Francis Beckwith and ID. Really? – given what he writes about those with whom he disagrees.
Close the italics – sorry.
We should definitely use the Plantinga self-refutation more often.
If there were a god, Plantinga would be able to think straight,
He can’t.
Ergo there is no god
I read The God Delusion when it first came out and still have the book. Rereading it now after following atheist website and numerous articles would be an interesting exercise for me.
Indeed, why do Christian apologists not need a lifetime of study of the Norse pantheon, or the Greek, or the Hindi, in order to dismiss them as mythological?
Once you see the blindingly obvious fact — it’s all mythology from top to bottom — the thought of spending any time in “serious” study of theology and theologians is emetogenic.
Herein I commit a heresy:
I have to admit that I’m not a big fan of Dawkins’ writing style. I read a couple of his books (Blind Watchmaker and another whose name escapes me) and just wasn’t that impressed.
So, The God Delusion, coming out well after my deconversion, did not hold any interest for me.
Not that I don’t have the utmost respect for him as a scientist, an atheist, a rationalist, and a human being. I think he’s the Jackie Robinson of atheism. Almost perfectly deferential, soft-spoken and kindly in demeanor; but someone who ‘plays the game’ with a quiet ferocity.
To each his own, I guess. Would that I had one-tenth of his royalty checks.
Hm. I recall reading it when it first came out and being baffled by some of the main criticisms — that it’s vitriolic (seemed calmly reasoned to me) and poor philosophy (seemed somewhat critical thinking 101 to me but that’s not a bad thing, esp. from someone who’s not a philosopher, and certainly not out of place but downright valuable in the discussion).
Shall re-read it myself, now, and try to keep up with your commentary. Ecxellent first offering, by the way. I’ll perhaps have something more contentful to say after I’ve undertaken the first leg of the re-read.
Not just named – he confirmed it himself.
I’ve always found it odd that he is taken at all seriously as an epistemologist, when he thinks it’s reasonable to believe this junk… I’m suspicious of anyone who wants to claim any sort of authority or expertise whilst believing in the sort of crap this guy defends. Suggests to me a profound reasoning disability.
This review of The God Delusion, like most, appears to misunderstand its goals and its target audience. Complaining that The God Delusion doesn’t contain enough philosophy is like complaining that Hawking’s popular science books don’t contain enough equations.
Surely Plantinga knows that the link between complexity and probability is championed by his own side, not by Dawkins? If complexity weren’t improbable, why invoke a designer to begin with?
From everything I’ve read, my general impression of Plantinga is that he’s like a stage magician. He dazzles everyone with his modal logic and other high-level philosophy, distracting the audience from the fact that in reality he’s using circular reasoning, begging the question and special pleading. I mean, spiritual complexity is somehow different from material complexity? Come on.
I followed the link to Books and Culture and discovered that they wanted a membership or subscription to read the entire piece. Here is a repost of the Plantinga review as it appeared in Christianity Today, from the Richard Dawkins Foundation web site, no registration required.
Regarding The God Delusion, I thought it had its flaws. For example, the section on ethics had no mention of the Euthyphro dilemma. But most of the criticism directed at it seemed off target.
Why would that be a heresy? Dawkins isn’t our profet. I know you’re likely joking, but it’s amusing to see how apologetics often act as if he is.
If Dawkins had the intention of writing a book that would appeal to the masses, then he succeeded. A deeply scholarly and dry book is not likely to attract the kind of audience that Dawkins was seeking.
Dawkins is an excellent populariser, and that’s how his book should be judged. I think he wrote a clever book for engaging his audience personally, to people who are most likely atheists hiding behind belief. I think he takes them on a story like journey, knocking down untruths by pointing out truths.
But it’s not for me. I am not his target audience, and it doesn’t fulfil anything new to me. I consider Hitchens’ God Is Not Great as not only an atheistic political masterpiece but a literary masterpiece too, destined to endure.
Basically, the enemies of atheism are only doing what they’ve done for centuries: drowning out the voice of atheism by suppression or grabbing the stage instead. People who were perhaps attracted to the new voice of atheism, can now safely listen to his critics instead, bypassing the voice of atheism.
I do enjoy the review/debate around The God Delusion, but just as a side note, I saw in the news today that Dr. Kevorkian was hospitalized, and I realized I have never seen any mention of him in your writings. I would be curious to see your thoughts on his efforts.
Thanks.
“Likely joking”?
Really?
The difference between Plantinga and Dawkins, it seems to me, is that Dawkins makes progress: Plantinga doesn’t. As far as I can tell he is still trotting out the same tired old arguments which have been shot down many times before, without making any attempt to elaborate or defend them. As he is an intelligent man, it’s hard to believe that he doesn’t realise he has been rumbled.
It may be that criticising the work of others is the only original activity he is still capable of.
Just. Wow.
Which of these is the more probable, given the empirical evidence and the theistic context? I think the second, the special creation thesis, is somewhat more probable with respect to the evidence (given theism) than the first.
Given theism, it’s perhaps “somewhat more probable” that the planets are maintained in their orbits by nudging from God than that they do it merely by gravity and momentum.
I get the feeling that Plantinga isn’t likely to be used as an example of the compatibility of science & religion.
It may be true that he doesn’t mention Ethyphro, but if you look on page 57 you can find the dilemma expressed in simple English.
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As I see it, the difference is that Plantinga obfuscates, and Dawkins clarifies.
Plantinga is a sophist. He is not searching for truth, he has his conclusion pre-drawn, and arranges his rhetoric to support it. Same for William Lane Craig.
Considering Plantinga’s deep misunderstanding of evolution, it is ironic when he criticises someone else for venturing outside their sphere of expertise.
Yes, contrary to some, the fact that the world works in a teleonomical manner isn’t just a philosohical point [ Lamberth's teleonomic argument] but also proceeds from science itself.
As, Victor Stenger observes, had the world worked differently, then God would be employed, and I add were He not as a married bachelor or square circle, then we might employ Him.
Science adduces evidence against Virgin-borned, miracles, Resurrections and Assomptions. Yes, science contrary to that much vaunted dictum, does eviscerate His very existence!
Google the ignostic-Ockham, the presumption of naturalism and arguments about Him- that square circle to see why we fired Him!
Plantinga is just another theologian, a comedian.
Isn’t there an easier way to refute this argument than the tack you take?
Plantinga is proposing the necessity, he needs to demonstrate it.
Deen, you know quite well our Plantinga! His use of the argument from reason-the self-refutation reveals his misunderstanding of evolution! He gloats that he has eviscerated the logical problem of Heaven, but Fr. Meslier centuries ago, eviscerated Plantinga’s bonus argument. He prattles that omni-God can use flourishes in creation, but limited God has to be economical, so don’t blame Him for the imperfections with Hume’s dysteological argument. No, that’s stupid! And he finds the argument from physical mind trivial whilst it leads the naturalistic case against the very existence of God.
Plantinga loves, Deen, solecistic,sophisticated sophistry – ignorant, complicated, nonsense- of woeful, wily woo.
“Logic is the bane of theists.” Fr.Griggs
Good luck with this. I picked up a copy of TGD the moment it came out mainly for the pleasure of reading the reviews after reading the book. Just about every one contained an untruth. The only review I found that didn’t was by Marek Kohn, a science journalist. I not sure which was the dumbest – I think it may have been a tie between Terry Eagleton and Howard Jacobson.
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Very nice to read some good argumentation from someone well-versed in theology and philosophy (which I’m not). Still, one nitpicking: when you say “an argument purporting to demonstrate the non-existence of something is bound to fail” I think you are committing a logical fallacy that usually comes from theists. Here: there is no even prime number that is larger than 2. This here is very easy to prove and it’s an assertion of non-existence. It seems like you meant it for empirical truth, but even so, this is not self-evident. The difficulty usually is more in the rigorous definition of the entity whose existence is in question, in a manner that makes it falsifiable.
He dazzles everyone with his modal logic and other high-level philosophy, distracting the audience from the fact that in reality he’s using circular reasoning, begging the question and special pleading.
planting, v. To use twentieth-century fertilizer to encourage new shoots from eleventh -century ideas which everyone thought had gone to seed; hence, plantinger, n. one who plantings.
http://www.philosophicallexicon.com/
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You said it. Plantiga bases his “arguments” (if you want to call them that) on his premises/presuppositions, and assumes they are true. Why people take him (and Craig, etc) seriously is beyond me, unless it merely is the comfort factor – they sound like they know what they are talking about and they agree with the listener, so they must be good.
Plantinga writes:
[T]he special creation thesis, is somewhat more probable with respect to the evidence (given theism) than the first.
In other words, if God exists, then it’s quite probable that he did something. Of course, the same could be said of Zeus, Santa Claus, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Yes, Plantinga does indeed give philosophy a bad name. More significantly, he gives Christians a bad name. Whenever I read his writings, with their heavy load of smug, sneering self-righteousness, I wonder how many other readers are thinking “If this is what Christainity does to one, I’d sooner worship stuffed crocodiles.”
Heh, thanks, didn’t know about that one.
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So Eric, why do you say this?
” And, in any event, as Plantinga already knows, an argument purporting to demonstrate the non-existence of something is bound to fail.”
Sounds like the old “you can’t prove a negative” saw. Surely some negatives are provable. Here are some nifty negatives that are quite provable:
No finite sets of numbers that contain all the primes
No truth table valid sequent fails to have a proof in PL.
The first of these can be proven quite easily by a brief indirect proof and was documented in I think book seven of Euclid. The second is quite a bit more complicated and runs on for several pages. I am sure that you are familiar with metatheorems for basic systems of sentence logic. You know: Series, ennumeration, base case, “if n has P, n+1 has P”, and all that.
Maybe you were thinking of something like this. Saying that something doesn’t exist is like saying something like this:
~∃ xGx
Which is the same as
∀ x~Gx
Which we know is equivalent to an arbitrarily long (infinite?) conjunction about all things in the universe. Which is something we cannot know. I still wouldn’t give up hope. Maybe Gx “unpacks” to a conjunction of other predicates which are themselves contradictory. Bingo, we are done! Seems there are other options too. Maybe those unpacked properties are inconsistent with things we have observed to be true of the world. Looks like Gx has hit the end of the line.
I competely agree with you that in the section you are discussing here Dawkins is not trying to prove the nonexistence of something. He’s just trying to show that something is unnecessary and problematic. I agree that’s generally the best way to go. Still, I think we can at least sometimes establish that something does not exist.
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I was actually discussion TGD with a bunch of other atheists at the pub, discussing what the heck to do about religion (particularly in our own families). None of us were actually that philosophically impressed with TGD – it’s didactic, not particularly deep and, while enjoyable, appealed far too effectively to our own prejudices.
But the observable fact is: it’s effective! Theist rail against it. Here’s the key thing: they hand each other predigested refutations for people who haven’t read it to spout!
This last is particularly amusing. I have a (bootleg OCR) PDF of the book to hand; whenever a Christian starts going on about TGD, I ask if they’ve actually read it and can go into detail; they invariably never have; I forward them a copy. Shuts them up very effectively (which counts as a big win as far as I’m concerned) and gives them the actual big scary thing to sit and digest for a while.
(I hope Prof Dawkins can forgive me for using bootleg copies in a good cause.)
tl;dr: even as a fan I can see TGD is flawed. But it still works well enough to be very useful.
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It’s nice to see a logical and reasoned presentation about divine simplicity, without the usual deflections from the main subject. Thank you.