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Why Christians should take Richard Dawkins seriously
by Richard Skinner, Ekklesia
Reposted from:
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/5721
It's easy to get annoyed, but Christians really ought to listen to and take seriously what Richard Dawkins has to say. With his high profile books, articles, television programmes and general media coverage, he has become the number one scourge of religion and religious believers of all and every stripe. He is articulate, passionate, an excellent speaker and a formidable intelligence. He has made important contributions to his particular discipline of evolutionary biology, most famously with his first book The Selfish Gene, but no less impressively with the follow-up volume The Extended Phenotype, and a series of subsequent books. He is a major player in his discipline.
His book The God Delusion appeared in 2006. This isn't about evolutionary biology with a few side-swipes at religion thrown in, this is a concentrated assault on religion. He launches a series of exocet missiles at religion, at the concept of God, the 'supernatural', faith-heads (which is his term for religious believers), theology the whole bang-shoot, in fact. Inevitably he has triggered much response. The theologian Alister McGrath, an Oxford colleague of his, who had already written one book critiquing Dawkins' views on religion, riposted rapidly with The Dawkins Delusion. Another Christian riposte has come from a more evangelical quarter in Andrew Wilson's Deluded by Dawkins? Both authors demonstrate that many of Dawkins' arguments are strewn with error and misunderstanding.
However, in response to the statement "theologians say that Dawkins is wrong" we can echo Mandy Rice-Davies: "Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?" It's part of their job description. Perhaps more significant, then, is the response Dawkins has drawn from non-Christian or non-religious quarters. Don't get me wrong: there are many who agree whole-heartedly with Dawkins. But consider the review of the book by Professor of English Terry Eagleton, a non-believer, which appeared in the London Review of Books (19 October 2006): it is a high octane demolition job.
Eagleton starts off "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don't believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be." He continues for another 3,500 words to elaborate on this.
Now I think the critics of Richard Dawkins are in the main quite right. I say 'in the main' because Dawkins does make a number of valid points, particularly relating to the role of religion, and Christianity in particular, in the life of this country; but I agree that a large proportion of his book is indeed based on error. However, I don't think it right for us to say, "Ah, well, not only theologians but even atheists have demonstrated where Dawkins has gone wrong, therefore we don't have to take his views seriously."
We do have to take his views seriously, for more than one reason. Wilson suggests, and I agree with him, that Christians should be grateful to Dawkins, because "he has gathered together all of the best arguments against God's existence in one place, with the intention of debating them publicly." Quite so, but I think there's another reason to listen to Dawkins. It's this: theological writers and others can point out at length that what Dawkins does is to set up a straw man or rather, a straw God and then demolish it; they can show that Dawkins has not really got to grips at all with a true understanding of God and the religious dimension; but the straw God that Dawkins sets up and then demolishes is often uncomfortably close to the notion of God that we Christians all too frequently seem to talk about, pray to and worship.
What Dawkins demolishes in this book may well be a misrepresentation of God, but it is a misrepresentation, an idol, that we Christians all too have often set up and espoused as the real thing. We should listen to Dawkins because doing so can help us reflect on what we claim to believe, or think we believe, or imply that we believe. His views can act as an acid to eat away the false and phoney elements of our faith.
By way of example, Dawkins refers to 'The God Hypothesis' which "suggests that the reality we inhabit also contains a supernatural agent who designed the universe and at least in many versions of the hypothesis maintains it and even intervenes in it with miracles...." (p.81). God, in this understanding, refers to a fellow inhabitant of the universe. Earlier in the book, however, he takes a marginally more subtle line, and the hypothesis is that there is "a personal God dwelling within [the universe], or perhaps outside it (whatever that might mean)" possessing a whole range of unpleasant qualities he has earlier listed (p.59).
I doubt if many of us would fall into the simplistic belief that God is just another thing who inhabits the universe, such that if we went on a tour of the universe our guide would be saying "now ladies and gentlemen, over here is the solar system, over there is the Crab Nebula, watch our for the black hole at the centre; there's a super-nova; there's God, there's a comet...." and so forth. We don't think of God like that as simply an inhabitant of the universe. But what of the suggestion that God is outside the universe? I would guess most if not all past and present members of Sunday Schools and the like have sung, 'He's got the whole world in his hands', and other hymns or choruses with similar imagery which suggests an entity external to the universe. It may be a comforting image, and it may have a lot to recommend it but there is the danger of it being too comforting and our taking it almost literally, which doesn't do justice to the biblical understanding of God as both immanent and transcendent God dwelling within all things, but also greater than all things and of God as a living presence.
Philosophers and theologians over the centuries, grappling with what is meant by 'God', have resorted to a different type of language, making statements such as "God is ultimate reality"; or "God is the ground of our being", or "God is the precondition that anything at all could exist", and so forth. In theological discourse, they can be very helpful concepts, but the trouble with them is that if you're not a philosopher or theologian, you feel your eyes glazing over - God has become a philosophical concept rather than a living presence.
Let's face it, it is easier for most of us to hold a clear but inaccurate image of what we think God is, rather than to live with the discomfort of not being able to pin God down precisely. Many a mystic has said, in effect, that all descriptions of God are false because they are so inadequate, but that is not a comfortable place to be in. We prefer a domesticated God that our comprehension can contain, a golden calf that we have fashioned for ourselves, and that we can see. Richard Dawkins in effect, even though he may not realise it, is pointing at a load of golden calves that we have fashioned over the millennia, and saying, "what a load of rubbish". But of course, to rubbish a golden calf is not the same thing as to rubbish the living God. Dawkins, unwittingly, can help us distinguish between the two!
So, if our understanding of God can be encapsulated in a nice, neat definition; a nice, neat God hypothesis; a nice, neat image; a nice, neat set of instructions if, in other words, our understanding of God does approximate to a Dawkins version, then we are in danger of creating another golden calf. The alternative, the non-golden-calf route, is to sit light to definitions, hypotheses and images, and allow God to be God.
Challenges to our image of God is not new. Back in 1963, the then Bishop of Woolwich John Robinson published Honest to God. After an extract was published in The Observer newspaper under the heading 'Our Image of God Must Go' the book became a surprise bestseller and triggered off a major rumpus. Robinson was urging us to jettison old images of God - uncontentious in theological circles, but a shock to the person in the pew. Commenting on it twenty years later, Ken Leech had this to say: "The 'god' whose image must go might well have been a caricature of the Christian God, but it was a caricature which corresponded with a widely held view, a view which effectively prevented any real engagement with God as a living reality. Robinson did not create this situation: he merely laid bare the reality of existing confusion and unbelief" (True God Sheldon Press, 1985 p.6). I think Richard Dawkins though he may well not sanction my saying this is performing a similar challenging function to that of Robinson
Curious perhaps to compare Richard Dawkins to John Robinson, but whether such attacks on our images of God come from within the church or from outside it, it is no bad thing regularly to be reminded that all images of God fall far short of the reality encountered and witnessed to by Moses and the prophets, and by Jesus and the apostles. We should listen to Richard Dawkins. His understanding might be full of errors, but they are often our errors of understanding too.
---------
© Richard Skinner. The author is a poet, writer, qualified therapist and performer. He is currently undertaking doctoral research in the area of spirituality and evolutionary psychology. He is author of Invocations: calling on the God in all (Wild Goose Publishing, Iona). This article was originally given as an address at St Stephen's Anglican Church, Exeter.
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/5721
It's easy to get annoyed, but Christians really ought to listen to and take seriously what Richard Dawkins has to say. With his high profile books, articles, television programmes and general media coverage, he has become the number one scourge of religion and religious believers of all and every stripe. He is articulate, passionate, an excellent speaker and a formidable intelligence. He has made important contributions to his particular discipline of evolutionary biology, most famously with his first book The Selfish Gene, but no less impressively with the follow-up volume The Extended Phenotype, and a series of subsequent books. He is a major player in his discipline.
His book The God Delusion appeared in 2006. This isn't about evolutionary biology with a few side-swipes at religion thrown in, this is a concentrated assault on religion. He launches a series of exocet missiles at religion, at the concept of God, the 'supernatural', faith-heads (which is his term for religious believers), theology the whole bang-shoot, in fact. Inevitably he has triggered much response. The theologian Alister McGrath, an Oxford colleague of his, who had already written one book critiquing Dawkins' views on religion, riposted rapidly with The Dawkins Delusion. Another Christian riposte has come from a more evangelical quarter in Andrew Wilson's Deluded by Dawkins? Both authors demonstrate that many of Dawkins' arguments are strewn with error and misunderstanding.
However, in response to the statement "theologians say that Dawkins is wrong" we can echo Mandy Rice-Davies: "Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?" It's part of their job description. Perhaps more significant, then, is the response Dawkins has drawn from non-Christian or non-religious quarters. Don't get me wrong: there are many who agree whole-heartedly with Dawkins. But consider the review of the book by Professor of English Terry Eagleton, a non-believer, which appeared in the London Review of Books (19 October 2006): it is a high octane demolition job.
Eagleton starts off "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don't believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be." He continues for another 3,500 words to elaborate on this.
Now I think the critics of Richard Dawkins are in the main quite right. I say 'in the main' because Dawkins does make a number of valid points, particularly relating to the role of religion, and Christianity in particular, in the life of this country; but I agree that a large proportion of his book is indeed based on error. However, I don't think it right for us to say, "Ah, well, not only theologians but even atheists have demonstrated where Dawkins has gone wrong, therefore we don't have to take his views seriously."
We do have to take his views seriously, for more than one reason. Wilson suggests, and I agree with him, that Christians should be grateful to Dawkins, because "he has gathered together all of the best arguments against God's existence in one place, with the intention of debating them publicly." Quite so, but I think there's another reason to listen to Dawkins. It's this: theological writers and others can point out at length that what Dawkins does is to set up a straw man or rather, a straw God and then demolish it; they can show that Dawkins has not really got to grips at all with a true understanding of God and the religious dimension; but the straw God that Dawkins sets up and then demolishes is often uncomfortably close to the notion of God that we Christians all too frequently seem to talk about, pray to and worship.
What Dawkins demolishes in this book may well be a misrepresentation of God, but it is a misrepresentation, an idol, that we Christians all too have often set up and espoused as the real thing. We should listen to Dawkins because doing so can help us reflect on what we claim to believe, or think we believe, or imply that we believe. His views can act as an acid to eat away the false and phoney elements of our faith.
By way of example, Dawkins refers to 'The God Hypothesis' which "suggests that the reality we inhabit also contains a supernatural agent who designed the universe and at least in many versions of the hypothesis maintains it and even intervenes in it with miracles...." (p.81). God, in this understanding, refers to a fellow inhabitant of the universe. Earlier in the book, however, he takes a marginally more subtle line, and the hypothesis is that there is "a personal God dwelling within [the universe], or perhaps outside it (whatever that might mean)" possessing a whole range of unpleasant qualities he has earlier listed (p.59).
I doubt if many of us would fall into the simplistic belief that God is just another thing who inhabits the universe, such that if we went on a tour of the universe our guide would be saying "now ladies and gentlemen, over here is the solar system, over there is the Crab Nebula, watch our for the black hole at the centre; there's a super-nova; there's God, there's a comet...." and so forth. We don't think of God like that as simply an inhabitant of the universe. But what of the suggestion that God is outside the universe? I would guess most if not all past and present members of Sunday Schools and the like have sung, 'He's got the whole world in his hands', and other hymns or choruses with similar imagery which suggests an entity external to the universe. It may be a comforting image, and it may have a lot to recommend it but there is the danger of it being too comforting and our taking it almost literally, which doesn't do justice to the biblical understanding of God as both immanent and transcendent God dwelling within all things, but also greater than all things and of God as a living presence.
Philosophers and theologians over the centuries, grappling with what is meant by 'God', have resorted to a different type of language, making statements such as "God is ultimate reality"; or "God is the ground of our being", or "God is the precondition that anything at all could exist", and so forth. In theological discourse, they can be very helpful concepts, but the trouble with them is that if you're not a philosopher or theologian, you feel your eyes glazing over - God has become a philosophical concept rather than a living presence.
Let's face it, it is easier for most of us to hold a clear but inaccurate image of what we think God is, rather than to live with the discomfort of not being able to pin God down precisely. Many a mystic has said, in effect, that all descriptions of God are false because they are so inadequate, but that is not a comfortable place to be in. We prefer a domesticated God that our comprehension can contain, a golden calf that we have fashioned for ourselves, and that we can see. Richard Dawkins in effect, even though he may not realise it, is pointing at a load of golden calves that we have fashioned over the millennia, and saying, "what a load of rubbish". But of course, to rubbish a golden calf is not the same thing as to rubbish the living God. Dawkins, unwittingly, can help us distinguish between the two!
So, if our understanding of God can be encapsulated in a nice, neat definition; a nice, neat God hypothesis; a nice, neat image; a nice, neat set of instructions if, in other words, our understanding of God does approximate to a Dawkins version, then we are in danger of creating another golden calf. The alternative, the non-golden-calf route, is to sit light to definitions, hypotheses and images, and allow God to be God.
Challenges to our image of God is not new. Back in 1963, the then Bishop of Woolwich John Robinson published Honest to God. After an extract was published in The Observer newspaper under the heading 'Our Image of God Must Go' the book became a surprise bestseller and triggered off a major rumpus. Robinson was urging us to jettison old images of God - uncontentious in theological circles, but a shock to the person in the pew. Commenting on it twenty years later, Ken Leech had this to say: "The 'god' whose image must go might well have been a caricature of the Christian God, but it was a caricature which corresponded with a widely held view, a view which effectively prevented any real engagement with God as a living reality. Robinson did not create this situation: he merely laid bare the reality of existing confusion and unbelief" (True God Sheldon Press, 1985 p.6). I think Richard Dawkins though he may well not sanction my saying this is performing a similar challenging function to that of Robinson
Curious perhaps to compare Richard Dawkins to John Robinson, but whether such attacks on our images of God come from within the church or from outside it, it is no bad thing regularly to be reminded that all images of God fall far short of the reality encountered and witnessed to by Moses and the prophets, and by Jesus and the apostles. We should listen to Richard Dawkins. His understanding might be full of errors, but they are often our errors of understanding too.
---------
© Richard Skinner. The author is a poet, writer, qualified therapist and performer. He is currently undertaking doctoral research in the area of spirituality and evolutionary psychology. He is author of Invocations: calling on the God in all (Wild Goose Publishing, Iona). This article was originally given as an address at St Stephen's Anglican Church, Exeter.
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Posted: Thursday, September 20, 2007 | PermalinkComments 151 - 200 of 605 |
Reload Comments | Back to Top | Page Numbers152. Comment #72940 by Robert Maynard on September 23, 2007 at 3:39 pm
We need not specify God's relative complexityThat's not quite true, Doctor B. While stupid engineers can create more sophisticated computers, this is precisely because they enjoy the benefits of a long and rich cultural inheritance, of advancing technology and scientific understanding, thus requiring them to generate very little innovation at any given step.
A pre-universal, singular deity does not enjoy this benefit, and must necessarily be tremendously more complex than anything it may create, precisely because anything it devises, it devises on its own, in a single 'generation'.
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153. Comment #72971 by Dr Benway on September 23, 2007 at 4:41 pm
Robert Maynard:A pre-universal, singular deity does not enjoy this benefit, and must necessarily be tremendously more complex than anything it may create, precisely because anything it devises, it devises on its own, in a single 'generation'.I believe God must be more complex than His creation. But I haven't pondered the matter long enough to feel confident of my belief.
Still I maintain that God's relative complexity is largely beside the point. He got some 'splaining to do, even if He toopid.
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154. Comment #72976 by Robert Maynard on September 23, 2007 at 4:53 pm
Doctor Benway,He got some 'splaining to do, even if He toopidTrue. :P
If the Universe as it exists is the result of intent, I can't imagine how different it might look if it was the result of naturally emerging laws and forces.
*cough*
..maybe you can, Dianelos?
Other Comments by Robert Maynard
155. Comment #73041 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 24, 2007 at 12:15 am
Quine (post 123, or #72723):If you read the whole section you will see that RD has not made the case that the anthropic principle implies naturalism, but just allows it (i.e. removes counter argument).If the counter argument is that the probability of a naturalistic origin of life is less than 1/10^40000 then it does nothing of the sort. I really cannot see why Dawkins would not mention that probability estimate and try to show why it is fallacious, but would rather bring in the fairly irrelevant issue of the anthropic principle and that there are a "billion billion" planets in the universe and whatnot, except if a) he is himself really confused, or b) he tries to confuse his readers.
He does, also, spend some time arguing that the anthropic principle is misused by religious apologists against naturalism.I am not aware that theists use the anthropic principle in relation to the problem of how the first self-replicating organism came into being, but I may be wrong. I mean there are a lot of fallacious arguments around. As for the anthropic principle it just states the obvious: reality must be so as to produce all the evidence we have. To call it "anthropic" is a misnomer; after all reality must be so as to produce comets, or as to produce rock-n-roll music (so one might have called it the "cometic principle" or the "rock-n-rollish principle"). The idea has nothing to do specifically with the origin of human life.
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156. Comment #73043 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 24, 2007 at 12:28 am
Bonzai (post 124, or #72731):To follow through your analogy are you suggesting that we may be far more intelligent than a simple "creator" aka "God"?We may, yes. Of course a little thinking shows that we in fact aren't.
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157. Comment #73046 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 24, 2007 at 12:33 am
Irate_atheist (post 131, or #72778):So I ask, yet again, Dianelos - where did your God come from?There is bit about this in post 108 above.
Incidentally perhaps it would be a good idea to try not to feel irate. It's well known that anger makes it more difficult to think well.
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158. Comment #73050 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 24, 2007 at 1:29 am
Dr Benway (post 140, or #72866):the probability of life arising on Earth = 1Actually that's false. Perhaps you did not read about Hoyle's idea I mentioned in post 132 above.
Other Comments by Dianelos Georgoudis
159. Comment #73051 by Robert Maynard on September 24, 2007 at 1:33 am
Dianelos GeorgoudisThere is a bit about this in post 108Ooh, I hadn't read this one. Maybe I'll respond to it while you
You know, like "rain comes from the clouds, music comes from the loudspeaker, so God must be coming from somewhere too". No wonder more thoughtful atheists felt embarrassed with TGD.I don't see why issues of causality would be unimpressive to a 'thoughtful' atheist. You can't satisfyingly and validly end problems of causation by asserting the existence of something somehow "uncreated", when by our only measure of causality the Big Bang itself is uncreated (it has no measurable cause because the local measure for causality, time, was included in the event), and this rightly has failed to satisfy our curiosity. If we are going to postulate extra-universal dimensions from which things can cause other things with their own local measurements, and we refer to the former as a cause, there are no grounds to conclude that our explanation has ended - we've just postulated that our time isn't the only measure of causality, so why should it stop there?
Our explanation has simply been deferred to another level (and done so, might I add, without a scrap of data). This is the case with the multiverse, the weird, materialist equivalent of extra-universal causation (through entirely speculative means). It would be a higher dimension (or set of dimensions) from which we might conceptualise causality on a whole different level, but this wouldn't end our explanation, just push it further back. I am inclined to agree with you that this is harebrained - I just don't see how you jump from that to 'a god did it'.
If these so-called "thoughtful atheists" did not pick up on the poverty of explaining local histories with foreign histories (which are, within their own frame of reference, local and thus also in need of explanation) they're not 'thoughtful' atheists - they're lazy, uppity losers.
Don't naturalists of all stripes define the universe to be "self creating" at the Big Bang?Naturalists do not define the Universe as being a self, because it's development is one of non-conscious, interacting elements. They do not refer to stars as 'self creating' through the 'third-person' force of gravity, and they do not refer to species as 'self-creating' in response to external Darwinian selection, probably because that is such a stupid and meaningless way of putting it.
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160. Comment #73054 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 24, 2007 at 2:03 am
Coel (post 137, or #72823):Oh, come on. Dawkins discusses plenty of entirely spurious claims in TGD, and to good effect. If he thought that Hoyle's number is entirely spurious he would have demolished it. The fact that he didn't even mention the number, and much less tried to argue that it's fallacious, shows that Dawkins did not know how to do it. Hoyle is a Nobel level scientist you know, and here he is writing about a scientific matter. I think it's rather unlikely that his claim is "entirely spurious".Hoyle estimated that the probability for obtaining naturalistically the required set of enzymes for even the simples living cell (required for Darwinian evolution to start) was 1 in 10^40000. [. . .] Of course [Dawkins] never mentions how improbable that is supposed to be, I supposehe did not want to trouble his readers with estimates like 1/10^40000.The reason he doesn't discuss Hoyle's number is that it is entirely spurious.
The initial replicator would have been far simpler than that.That's what I too argued in post 132 above, and it's what Dawkins should have argued in TGD. But he didn't. Dawkins has done some work on the origin of life, so I can hardly assume that he was not aware of our simple argument. What I assume happens is that even concentrating on the idea of the simplest possible self-replicating organism nobody has been able to come up with a larger probability estimate that would make any difference in practice. To falsify Hoyle one should be able to build an argument (without begging the question of course) that the probability of the first self-replicating organism is larger than 1/10^50; anything bellow that would still be "impossible" for all practical purposes.
Again, I can hardly imagine that Dawkins is unaware of this line of thought, and the only way I can interpret the fact that he does not mention this in TGD is that he tries to hide it. Of course it's no shame to concede that the origin of life is both an unanswered and a hard problem for science. But for Dawkins that's not good enough. He feels so angry that he must show that theism is not only false but also trivially false. In TGD he even disapproves of agnosticism, because everybody should be able to easily see that "there almost certainly is no God". In this kind of context then any real trouble for naturalism must be hidden or covered up. Come to think of it there is a lot that TGD fails to mention, for example the argument from consciousness.
So of course the first replicator was not a whole cell; it was more likely just a molecule. Maybe it was a RNA polymerase ribozyme. SeeA replicating molecule by itself is not sufficient; you need a replicating organism that has the properties necessary for Darwinian evolution to take hold, and it seems to me that the RNA molecule by itself does not fit the bill. But suppose I am wrong and that it does. Then how probable is its spontaneous appearance of RNA anywhere in the universe? After all RNA is as complex as DNA. But my basic point is this: Dawkins certainly knows much more about this stuff than I, and he is demonstrably able to explain to a popular audience even complex and subtle ideas. Why should then I (or we) speculate here? Why didn't Dawkins himself in TGD explain on scientific grounds where Hoyle is wrong and why the naturalistic origin of life is a plausible hypothesis? The only answer I can think of is: because he did not know of any such scientific grounds. Which, again, is OK with science, but is not OK with Dawkin's project to show how trivially wrong theism is.
http://www-ssrl.slac.stanford.edu/research/highlights_archive/ligase.html
Dawkins's use of the anthropic principle here is entirely sensible and valid. He is saying that, yes, even the spontaneous assembly of a self-replicating RNA molecule is very likely highly improbable. But so what? It being highly improbable is amply good enough. Even if it had such a low probability of occurring that it had only a 1-in-a-billion chance of occurring in a wait of 1 billion years in a `testube' the size of the Pacific Ocean, that is still probable enough because there are a billion planets with billions of years each available.I am sorry Coel, but it seems to me you are dancing around the issue here. "Very likely highly improbable" means nothing at all and is a smokescreen in its own right. If the probability of the RNA molecule is anything like 1/10^40000 then it would not be probable to rise in a billion billion billion billion billion planets in a billion billion billion billion billion years. The facts are that Hoyle has claimed the 1/10^40000 number based on some scientific thinking, and Dawkins has written nothing in TGD to dispute that number he didn't even mention it.
So here is one more reason why Christians should take TGD seriously: They can find out what popular naturalism tries to hide. My point is not that naturalism is obviously false; in fact I think that naturalism is an entirely serious ontological belief. My point is that Dawkins's efforts in TGD to show how trivially false theism is are self-defeating, because anybody who reads TGD with a critical mind (as naturalists Nagel and Orr - not to mention theist Plantinga - did) can see how TGD fails notwithstanding Dawkins's best efforts and notwithstanding Dawkins's intelligence, wealth of knowledge, and writing ability. Which evidences that theism is not in fact trivially false, and that it is not easy to show that "there almost certainly is no God". Which, anyway, was and is known to knowledgeable naturalists. And if Dawkins really thinks otherwise it probably only shows that he feels so angry that his better judgment is clouded.
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161. Comment #73056 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 24, 2007 at 2:14 am
Dr Benway (post 148, or #72906):Right. What do you think about the naturalist's stance who held that naturalism is not falsifiable (see post 142)? For example, if you actually experienced what you describe above, with scientific congresses going nuts, newspapers discussing that surprising phenomenon on their front pages for months, and so on, and then somebody came out and suggested that some alien race with a technology so far more advanced than ours as to be able to do what to us looks like magic must be playing games with us, wouldn't you find that explanation more reasonable than the explanation that the God as described in the Bible actually exists? Come to think of it, I think I would.Also in this context I wonder: what evidence would be sufficient for you?Can I play? How about: 1. Autopsy of all deaths this day forward reveals the words, "Yahweh here. Yes it's all true. Read your Bible!" inscribed on each femur.
Don't rebut me with my own point.Oops, you're right I did that, sorry. But then why did you write up in post 114 a good analogy for Dawkins's argument and then rebut it yourself in that same post? As you write the analogy works only "if naturalism is true", so you actually illustrate that Dawkins is begging the question which has been my main point all along.
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162. Comment #73057 by Robert Maynard on September 24, 2007 at 2:18 am
Dianelos,This discusses problems in abiogenesis probability calculations.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html
If we don't currently know 'exactly' how abiogenesis can take place, and all the factors involved, it should be simple to reason that such calculations are based on shaky premises to begin with.
Other Comments by Robert Maynard
163. Comment #73060 by Tagred on September 24, 2007 at 2:51 am
If the probability of the RNA molecule is anything like 1/10^40000 then it would not be probable to rise in a billion billion billion billion billion planets in a billion billion billion billion billion years.I'm not a statistician or astrophysicist ot cosmologist, but in my wonderfully naive way, isn't the probability of life emerging spontaneously at some point in the universe actually 1? I mean, even with hoyles number of chance, think of the trillions and trillions of planets and trillions and trillions of galaxies that have existed over time. Our universe could be many googles older than what we can observe, its just that right now we can only see to about 15GA. So even by that stretch of the non-scientific mind, i can certainly see that the chance of life existing spontaneously is even with that small number, a pretty sure bet.
Unless of course i am a figment of my imagination.
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164. Comment #73079 by Coel on September 24, 2007 at 3:46 am
Dianelos Georgoudis wrote:Oh, come on. Dawkins discusses plenty of entirely spurious claims in TGD, and to good effect. If he thought that Hoyle's number is entirely spurious he would have demolished it. The fact that he didn't even mention the number, and much less tried to argue that it's fallacious, shows that Dawkins did not know how to do it. Hoyle is a Nobel level scientist you know, and here he is writing about a scientific matter. I think it's rather unlikely that his claim is "entirely spurious".1) There are a vast number of spurious and dumb arguments that are not dealt with in TGD.
2) Hoyle may have made Nobel-level contributions to astrophysics, but his ideas on evolution are widely derided and not respected.
3) Estimating the probability of the first replicator by looking at a modern cell (a highly complex and evolved machine, even the simplest of them) is utterly spurious. Of course the first replicator would have had to have been far simpler! If you were ever under the naive and ludicrous misapprehension that the first replicator was as complicated as a whole, modern cell then please can you educate yourself on the issue before posting.
4) Dawkins would have been 100% aware of the above when writing TGD. If he choose not to address the above issue in TGD it would have been only one of many decisions about what to address. For starters, only a very few of his audience would be aware of Hoyle's number. Indeed, Dawkins has previously dealt with abiogenesis elsewhere, such as in The Blind Watchmaker, where it is entirely explicit that he considers the first replicator to have been far simpler than a whole modern cell.
A replicating molecule by itself is not sufficient; you need a replicating organism that has the properties necessary for Darwinian evolution to take holdWhat other property other than self-replication do you think is required?
Then how probable is its spontaneous appearance of RNA anywhere in the universe?I honestly don't know, but it sure as hell is not Hoyle's number (which is not for one molecule but instead for the vast number of specific, interacting molecules in a highly complex, highly evolved modern cell).
If the probability of the RNA molecule is anything like 1/10^40000 then [. . .]Agreed, but then it isn't! See reply just above.
The facts are that Hoyle has claimed the 1/10^40000 number based on some scientific thinkingHoyle's number is based on the utterly unfounded idea that the first replicator had to be as complicated as a modern, highly evolved, highly complex cell, with thousands of molecules of hundreds of specific types, all neatly interlocking.
Well, duh, of course, if that was the case then abiogenesis is dead and Dawkins is stuffed. That is obvious. That is why ALL scientific discussion of abiogenesis has focussed on far simpler possible first replicators, such as one or a small handful of molecules. And nobody is hiding that fact! If Dawkins didn't address it in TGD, well, neither did he address all sorts of other things. It is, after all, a book about "the God delusion", and not primarily about evolution. In books primarily about evolution (such as The Blind Watchmaker) he has dealt with this explicitly.
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165. Comment #73084 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 24, 2007 at 4:16 am
Robert Maynard (post 149, or #72909):The important point to make is that there is no ex nihilo design in nature [snip]My understanding of traditional theism's "creation ex nihilo" is that God created the material universe out of nothing in the sense that God first created physical space and time and matter themselves, and that these things did not exist previous to God's creative act. But I am not sure that traditional theism claims that design in nature was ex nihilo too. Obviously "design" is a mental concept, and I suppose a traditional theist would argue that the design in nature (physical laws, the species, you name it) was not ex nihilo but rather represents order that God's intelligence imposed on the already existing physical space, time and matter.
[cont] and all design work in nature takes place from a darwinian perspective, as a cumulative process of algorithmic selection from a pool of random variation.Agreed. Indeed many theists agree with that. But it's important to note that Darwinian evolution does not contradict the thesis that God designed the species; that's just a logical fallacy that many people (both naturalists and theists) commit. In short the proposition "The complexity of the species can be explained through Darwinian evolution" does not imply "God did not design the species". If you think otherwise I invite you to present an argument for how the former implies the latter. I think you'll see that the former proposition only implies the falsity of Biblical literalism and the belief that, for example, God first built some man-sized doll out of clay and then blew air in its nostrils and lo and behold the doll became Adam.
We must credit human inventions all the way back to a point where we must begin crediting Darwinian selective pressures which gave us the cognitive prowess and the dexterous physiology required to develop tools.Well, just a moment :-) Are you sure you are not here changing the meaning of the concept "personal design", or if you prefer "intentional design"? I mean let's take some example of such design, say von Neumann creating the design of modern computers, or Beethoven creating some of his sonatas, or the Los Alamos crew creating the first atom bomb. Are you saying that it's not really they that did the designing, but rather they and all their ancestors including prokaryotic bacteria of 2.5 billion years ago? Because if you do, that's not the meaning of the word "design" as normally used, and I don't think that's Dawkins's meaning either. After all Dawkins in page 31 of TGD defines the God hypothesis thus: "There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us." That hypothesis says nothing about what that intelligence consists of or about its origin, except that that intelligence designed the universe we observe around us and everything in it. So the God hypothesis, as defined by Dawkins, allows for that designing intelligence to have evolved by some means too. As a matter of fact it allows for that intelligence to be some kind of alien race living in some unknown world where they have the capability of designing and creating universes like ours (an idea from Sagan's "Contact"). Dawkins thinks it's easy to show that all such possibilities are "almost certainly" false. He believes that it's almost certainly true that we are not designed by any intentional agency and that's that. (It is in the context of justifying this thesis that he uses, without justification, the premise that an intentional designer must be at least as complex as what he/she/it designs. And that's the claim I am here disputing. And to dispute that I can very well point out potential examples of intentional design, whether driven by one person or a group of persons, where what's designed is more complex then the designer(s)).
It should by now be clear why Dawkins's main and very general claim (i.e. that no designer exists) is so difficult to justify. As Plantinga explains in his review of TGD (see: http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2007/002/1.21.html) to go from "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" to "All of life has come to be by way of unguided Darwinian processes." is an arbitrary logical jump of "colossal" proportions. After all the former does not logically imply the latter, and perhaps there are good reasons for believing that the latter proposition is false. Plantinga uses the following analogy to make his point: "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."
In order to know and plan the continuity of the Universe, one must possess the cognitive complexity to be capable of representing the entire causal history of this universe as simulation. Beyond the stuff of physics, this requires predictive knowledge of every cognitive agent, that's including (but not limited to) the mind of every human that will ever live. The complexity required to conceive of this complexity far exceeds the complexity being conceived. Even if we were to restrict or entirely remove complete foreknowledge from our hypothetical deity's 'abilities', the computational complexity required to observe every variable in the universe in a single instance exceeds the complexity IN the universe by many orders of magnitude. Omega of story. :PWhy do you think that a being of sufficient cognitive ability to design the universe should be very complex (let's leave aside the stronger "more complex than the universe" issue). Why exactly must an intelligent being be complex? I know it appears to be obvious, but have you considered why it appears to be so? Because we are used to thinking naturalistically, i.e. thinking in terms of machines and their capabilities. So we imagine that a mind powerful enough to design the universe must be some kind of frightfully complex brain, having many parts and bits and pieces all working together in a precisely choreographed manner. But I trust you see that this kind of thinking is contingent on the truth of naturalism; it takes naturalism's view of reality and projects it on the theistic view of reality. If naturalism is not true then there is no reason whatsoever why a powerful mind must be complex. But to implicitly assume naturalism while countering theism is, once again, to beg the question.
But let's for discussion sake assume that a powerful mind must be proportionally complex. Even then your claim "the computational complexity required to observe every variable in the universe in a single instance exceeds the complexity IN the universe by many orders of magnitude " is false, I think. Here is why: The existence of the physical universe as understood by naturalism is not a given; what is given is our experience of the phenomenal universe. And a complex (i.e. "brain-like") mind able to produce/simulate that experience for all of us turns out to be several orders of magnitude less complex than the simplest naturalistic description of the universe (I have done some calculations in the McGrath thread about this). In other words, even if God is complex in the sense that Dawkins imagines, it turns out that God need not be as complex as the universe that Dawkins imagines.
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166. Comment #73085 by Dr Benway on September 24, 2007 at 4:19 am
Let's collapse a different wave function.the probability of life arising on Earth = 1Actually that's false. Perhaps you did not read about Hoyle's idea I mentioned in post 132 above.
Q: Before dropping our trousers, what's the probability that my dick is bigger than yours?
A: .5
Q: After dropping trou, that probability would be...
A: 1
Dianelos:
But then why did you write up in post 114 a good analogy for Dawkins's argument and then rebut it yourself in that same post?I didn't rebut Dawkins. I showed what happens when you play the "if naturalism isn't true" game. You end up with no truth standards. Pleasant for people who like to play fast and loose. However as they say, live by the sword, die by the sword.
As you write the analogy works only "if naturalism is true", so you actually illustrate that Dawkins is begging the question which has been my main point all along.He's not trying to establish "if naturalism is true."
BTW I can't stand your "if naturalism is true" shite. Huge time sink and gets us nowhere.
Now on your knees before the Java God your Lord, slave. Obey or despair!
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167. Comment #73087 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 24, 2007 at 4:41 am
Robert Maynard (post 153, or #72923):I am here criticizing Dawkins's TGD; not defending my own ideas. And indeed God as defined in TGD might very well be a designer that has evolved and that has learned in some world beyond our universe. It seems you think that's impossible, as you write:
Learning involves perceiving new observations, or through reflection, building on prior observations. If a deity could "learn" how to create a universe, what precisely was it observing and reflecting upon when it did so?Maybe, some other toy universe that deity created before ours. Why not? Some naturalists seriously think that we may all exist in a computer simulation (see www.simulation-argument.com ). I mean the possibilities for a superhuman learning designer are infinite; use your imagination. Dawkins in TGD claims that all these designers of our universe "almost certainly" do not exist.
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168. Comment #73088 by Dr Benway on September 24, 2007 at 4:48 am
Dianelos:Dawkins in TGD claims that all these designers of our universe "almost certainly" do not exist.Do you understand the point that argument was designed to refute?
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169. Comment #73152 by irate_atheist on September 24, 2007 at 9:37 am
Dianelos - Actually, you are completely wrong as regards ' God is the best explanation for the creation of the universe.'
All you are doing is asserting that it is. A universe has no intelligence or 'life' of it's own. It cannot decide to do, or not to do, anything. It doesn't forgive sins, punish people for their misdemeanours or give 'eternal life'.
You are proposing an infinite regress as the solution. A non-solution, in fact.
And if I am an irate atheist, it is not without justification. People like you are the justification.
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170. Comment #73182 by Lauregon on September 24, 2007 at 11:32 am
(I believe that God interacts with us in the non-objective part of our experiential life but that's another issue.) - Dianelos
What exactly does that mean? Please explain and be specific, and also please explain what you see as the proper response and relationship of humans to the "God" you believe in.
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171. Comment #73186 by Lauregon on September 24, 2007 at 11:40 am
Hey - I've just found a video clip of Dianelos Georgoudis. Now you can see him as he really is - check this out :
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=fTzXJMU1sLc
:)
Or, you can do a simple search for D's name and discover that he spends a lot of time writing reviews on Amazon...
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172. Comment #73307 by alovrin on September 24, 2007 at 4:56 pm
DGHoyle is a Nobel level scientist you know
Argument from authority. This only works if the expert is right, in this instance. In this instance he's wrong.
And again.
I am here criticizing Dawkins's TGD; not defending my own ideas.
Is this some kind of plea? Dont shoot me I'm just the piano player?
Your reading of The God Delusion seems to be coloured by the fact you think, said god exists.... somewhere. So this would seem to invalidate a lot of your criticism, as you would be unwilling to accept the premise of the book.
So all you can do is resort to nitpicking. Which just ends up pissing people off.
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173. Comment #73355 by Robert Maynard on September 24, 2007 at 8:29 pm
Dianelos Georgoudis, #73084Are you sure you are not here changing the meaning of the concept "personal design", or if you prefer "intentional design"? Are you saying that it's not really they that did the designing, but rather they and all their ancestors including prokaryotic bacteria of 2.5 billion years ago?Well, no, because if you kept reading you would see the line "Were [our prokaryotic ancestors] mindlessly reproducing with that end in mind?" I was implying "no", which you'd know if you had read the next line. "That's not design, bub".
You were so close to getting this when you speculated on who credit belongs to for programming an evolutionary simulation using real-world algorithms. Our society as a whole is wrangling with the implications of intellectual property, as we're still in a frame of mind where people think you can legitimately 'own' information, or take credit for information, as though you create it out of nothing. It ain't the case. All our innovation is made possible by a growing (er.. upside-down) mountain of historical precedent. And when you acknowledge a regression like this, there is no true point where it ends. Von Neumann went to school, Beethoven was heavily tutored, the Manhattan Project didn't invent nuclear fission, or powerful explosives, nor did they invent the utility people see in powerful explosives which guaranteed their funding. These are not cases of individual creative agents pulling ideas out of nowhere, their work is set against a backdrop of unconscious and relentless memetic transmission.
So the God hypothesis, as defined by Dawkins, allows for that designing intelligence to have evolved by some means too. As a matter of fact it allows for that intelligence to be some kind of alien race living in some unknown world where they have the capability of designing and creating universes like ours.It says "supernatural". Did.. did you miss that? Because there's a word in the phrase "natural selection" which doesn't mix with a word meaning "above nature". I don't know what else to say to that..
The existence of the physical universe as understood by naturalism is not a given; what is given is our experience of the phenomenal universe. And a complex (i.e. "brain-like") mind able to produce/simulate that experience for all of us turns out to be several orders of magnitude less complex than the simplest naturalistic description of the universeI'm not clear on what you're saying here. Is it -
"What our mind can perceive is more complex than our mind"?
Because that is incorrect. Given our experiential paradigm, the amount of complexity we can phenomenologically perceive with our evolved sensory apparatus is actually a lot less complex than what is there. It is deliberately simplified, pruned by selection to focus and represent what is of primary importance to animals of our sort. Our evolved brains miss enormous amounts of superfluous detail, which is only revealed with tools which allow us slim glimpses at things we didn't evolve to care about, and what we perceive with those tools does not exceed the complexity of our brains (of course, I feel this talk of complexity is dangerously mixing notions of information and structural intricacy). You couldn't even say we can perceive anything of even equal complexity, because we can't perceive the complex processes in other peoples brains or even our own with our natural equipment, and we can't take a good look at another humans brain without significantly augmenting our sensory apparatus with a gigantic machine (which even then, prudently simplifies the complexity present).
Worse still, it's not like you could calculate the complexity we can observe in aggregate, because the example you're criticising is of moment to moment individual perception.
My claim was that to perceive/measure all of it, even for an instant, one would require a means of information processing more complex than what it's perceiving, and you haven't demonstrated otherwise as yet.
A good example - consider the highly detailed images given to us by the Hubble space telescope. They are a range of highly detailed patterns of radiation that we could not possibly perceive with our naked eyes or occipital cortices, without the benefit of gross simplification on the part of Hubble, NASA and their computers. Hubble's perceptual apparatus are fantastically complex, tremendously moreso than the patterns of radiation that it "perceives". Hubble is not, however, more complex than the GIANT GALAXIES that produce the radiation it regards. Hubble loses a lot of information this way. If Hubble were a God, it would need to know every detail of those galaxies, and thus would require apparatus many orders of magnitude more complex than the galaxies themselves.
P.S I'm really worried that I'm using 'complex' to relate to shifting concepts here. When I refer to the total complexity of the universe, and the complexity one needs to access in order to "perceive" all of it, I'm not simply referring to the arrangement of its atomic constituents. I'm also necessarily referring to the state of these atoms, where they're going, what speed they're moving at, things like that. The sheer volume of data represented by the measured states of everything in the Universe is what's "complex". We can't conceive of that magnitude of data, we also can't perceive it. We can take samples of it, for very specific things we're interested in, but no - we can't actively cope with that much data.
Returning to a deity, in order to "deliberately design the Universe and everything in it," it must possess predictive computational powers which could simulate a causal future - for the entire Universe. You have said these computational demands are an assertion compromised by naturalist thinking, but again, you have no reasons or grounds to suggest there are other ways in which information can behave, and its dishonest to simply pretend there are.
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174. Comment #73370 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 24, 2007 at 10:10 pm
Janus (post 154, or #72930):Well, yes and no. After all if the designer is much simpler it's not quite clear why it requires an explanation. In fact it's not even clear why an explanation of an explanation is required in any case. For example Einstein's general relativity hypothesis that mass bends spacetime in a particular manner is a powerful explanation for a series of phenomena; but it hardly makes any sense to ask: "But how do you explain that mass bends spacetime in this way?" Or, rather, whether that latter question is meaningful or not, and if it is whether one has an answer or not, does not in any way weaken general relativity's explanatory power. Now, before you argue that contrary to general relativity the God hypothesis does not explain anything let me point out that in our context that's irrelevant, because Dawkins is not arguing that the God hypothesis is wrong because it does not explain anything but because there is not a further explanation for it. In short he is asking: "If the existence of a designing God is the best explanation for the existence of the universe then what explains the existence of God?" But apart from the very bad logic behind that question, it turns out it admits a simple answer: "I don't know what explains the existence of God, but the existence of God is still the best explanation for the existence of the universe".Here is what he writes on page 109: "A designer God cannot be used to explain organized 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' statement is valid whether or not it's true that a designer must be at least as complex as the thing he designed.
Finally please consider that the very idea that intelligence (or being "capable enough" as Dawkins above puts it) requires complexity is question begging as I explained in post 170.
Neither I nor Dawkins claim that because "we know of no irrefutable objections to the claim that the universe is comprehensible" therefore it is comprehensible.Well, when you wrote "We have to assume that the universe is comprehensible as long as there remains a possibility that it is" it sounded to me like you meant that, but now you clarify I misunderstood you.
What [Dawkins and I] do claim is that if our goal is to explain order and complexity in general (whether it's life or the laws of physics or anything else), the ultimate explanation for order and complexity cannot be something that is ordered and complex.Why not? Certainly Einstein's general relativity is both ordered and complex, and I don't see any reason why it can't therefore be the "ultimate explanation" for the phenomena it describes.
Also consider this: Darwinian evolution is indeed a simple idea (even though not a simple process) that explains a lot. But this does not imply that Darwinian evolution's mechanical kind of simplicity is the only one allowed. The idea that reality consists of a single designing "person" (i.e. conscious being) has intentional simplicity and explains a lot too. Of course to demand mechanical explanations of an ontology that posits an intentional reality is question begging too.
I don't think that Dawkins has ever said or implied that intelligence, complexity, and improbability are equivalent.I meant "equivalent" in the sense of "closely related". And his 747 argument makes little sense without assuming that he believes that the more intelligent something is the more complex, and the more complex the more improbable. But he justifies neither. What's more had he justified that in the physical universe and in some particular sense of "complex" it's true that the more complex the more improbable, it would be still be question begging to apply this premise beyond naturalism's concept of reality.
This reminds me of the following argument: "'Exists physically' is redundant. To say something exists is to say it exists physically. God is not supposed by theists to be a physical thing. Therefore God does not exist." :-) You see where I am driving at? In fact "to exist" does not mean "to exist physically", and "comprehensible" does not mean "comprehensible naturalistically". To change these words' meaning in this sense is the most clear case of question begging I know. Consider that by doing such you are only manipulating yourself into dogmatism. Dogmatism, by the way, does not characterize those who are too confident in their beliefs; after all nobody accuses mathematicians of dogmatism. Dogmatism is the loss of cognitive flexibility, the loss of freedom of thought. It's about losing the ability to actually consider or grasp what the other person is saying.You mean comprehensible naturalistically.No, I mean comprehensible. "Comprehensible naturalistically" is redundant. To say that the universe is natural is to say that it is comprehensible.
If you disagree with me, here's an easy way to prove me wrong: Give me one example of a supernatural "explanation" which doesn't amount to giving up on explaining complexity and order.Well, I don't want to divert this discussion from TGD to my own ontological views, but I think it's pretty easy to answer your question: I don't want to give up trying to explain the subjective part of my experience of life, indeed I don't want to give up trying to explain the huge fact that I am a conscious being in the first place. I find that naturalism fails to explain consciousness, because there is absolutely no reason why a material system should become conscious: there is absolutely no objective evidence (or physical phenomenon) that requires the consciousness hypothesis, therefore no reasoning based on naturalism's epistemology (the so-called "methodological naturalism") can possibly explain consciousness. On the other hand theistic thinking can explain consciousness. As it does explain a huge number of things related to consciousness, including why we experience a physical environment, why we experience natural and moral evil, why love feels like it does, why we possess intentional will, the meaning of beauty, the meaning of death, why there is (or at least appears) not to be any physical evidence for God, why living is so ethically challenging, how come objective morality exists, and so on and so forth.
Now at this juncture a naturalist is apt to respond: "No, the existence of God does not explain any of these things; you are only imagining that it does." :-) But beyond intellectual satisfaction the golden standard to measure genuine explanations is their predictive power. All genuine explanations must make testable predictions. And theism does make a lot of predictions, the most famous of which is the continuation of personal experience and identity after death. But a naturalist is apt to ask for a testable prediction in this life. Well, theism's power to explain subjective experience makes a lot of predictions about the dynamics of it. But a naturalist is apt to point out that predictions in the subjective sphere of existence do not count, not to mention that psychology or even neurophysiology can in principle do the same. The naturalist wants objective predictions. Well, apart from the fact that a theist need not really worry about what kind of predictions the naturalist wants, it turns out that theism makes objective predictions too. If theism is true then that truth must be reachable cognitively; so theism's objective prediction is that all intelligent beings (human, artificial, or alien) will tend to adopt a theistic worldview. Right now the opposite appears to be the case, but I think this is a temporal phenomenon easily explained by the fact that people today often commit the fallacy of conflating naturalism with science, and in general to commit lots of logical fallacies as the result of technical of overspecialization as well of philosophical illiteracy.
While we are at it, have you ever pondered what exactly naturalism explains? To my mind it explains not a single thing beyond what science explains, but science's explanations of phenomena work equally well for theism too, so science's explanations do not count for naturalism. As far as I can see the only thing that naturalism per se produces is a long list of hard problems, paradoxes, and wildly complex, implausible and mutually contradictory suggestions about how reality is. If you compare one-to-one any naturalistic worldview with any but the most primitive theistic worldviews (read "Biblical literalism) then you'd be surprised how bad naturalism fares (that's been my argument in the McGrath thread not that I have convinced anybody there of course :-)
[The fine-tuning of the fundamental constants] is not a difficult problem for naturalism, it's a difficult problem for the human intellect.Or to be more exact: a difficult problem for the intellect of those humans who believe in naturalism. You do see that the fine-tuning of the fundamental constants does not represent any difficulty whatsoever for the intellect of theists.
Fine-tuning can either be explained by science, or it can't be explained at all.It's a common naturalistic fallacy to believe that science is there to solve naturalism's problem. Fine-tuning is not a scientific problem; science creates models of phenomena and these constants are part of these models, so they are part of what science so successfully does. It's naturalism with its belief that science not only explains phenomena but also describes reality that must explain how come reality is so fine-tuned for life.
Where? Maybe you believe that consciousness, even though entirely unnecessary for explaining any physical phenomenon, is a scientific problem too? That's another fallacy, indeed one that many scientists commit also. But nothing fails like failure.Another extremely hard and purely naturalistic problem is consciousness.See above.
So the creation by us of what is arguably the most momentous technological achievement possible will have no designer at all? That's not how most people understand the concept of "designer". And you see where I am driving at: How a designer brings about some creation is irrelevant. That God created the species through something as smart and beautiful as natural evolution only makes me marvel even more at God's intelligence.If somebody writes a program using evolutionary algorithms (i.e. algorithms that mimic natural evolution), and that program finally achieves to create an intelligent program that passes the Turing test (i.e. displays human-like intelligence), then who is the designer?No one, the programmer would have figured out how to mimic evolution, but evolution would have shaped this new intelligence.
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175. Comment #73374 by alovrin on September 24, 2007 at 10:18 pm
That God created the species through something as smart and beautiful as natural evolution only makes me marvel even more at God's intelligence.
OH FFSAKE
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176. Comment #73379 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 24, 2007 at 10:35 pm
Robert Maynard (post 158, or #72976):If the Universe as it exists is the result of intent, I can't imagine how different it might look if it was the result of naturally emerging laws and forces.Well, there are many ways to answer this. The easy answer would be to point at the fundamental physical constants and argue that they evidence intent. A better answer though is to point out that any naturalistic universe would lack phenomenal consciousness. A naturalistic universe (with its fine-tuned constants) would evolve life, and intelligence, and culture, and finally philosophical discussions about consciousness, but would not have any actual consciousness in it. Dawkins's own meme theory can explain how a human brain without the capacity for conscious experience could produce philosophical arguments about consciousness. After all meme theory can explain all intelligent behavior without recourse to the presence of consciousness.
But I'd like to go a step further. Naturalists keep discussing the physical universe, and this reminds me of the saying that to a hammer everything looks like a nail. Please consider your condition for a few seconds, and you'll realize that there an awful lot in the human condition that cannot even be described in physical language. So the basic question is not "What's the best explanation for the physical universe, mechanical or intentional?" but rather "What's the best explanation for the whole of my experience, mechanical or intentional?".
The part of our conscious experience that pertains to physical phenomena is very well studied by science; the question is how to understand the rest of it which is arguable the most valuable and defining part. Indeed, we should no only think about what reality would produce experience (which falsifies naturalism right away), but also think about what reality would produce the kind of experience we are actually having. "What reality would produce the whole of my experience of life? that's the question.
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177. Comment #73382 by newatheist on September 24, 2007 at 10:49 pm
[-- LAME INTERJECTION WARNING --]Is Dianelos the King of the Fleas? He always has a lot of flea king things to say,
as he goes on with a lot of flea king ideas about flea king god hypotheses. Too bad everyone is systematically dismantling his flea king arguments.
IMO you science guys are all brilliant. Of course, I don't have the intellectual chops to engage in this debate, but I really do wonder how the flea king thing got started anyway with this comment;
103. Comment #72620 by Dianelos Georgoudis
I personally believe that there is a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life.Eh? Like, now I'm totally confused!
132. Comment #72787 by Dianelos Georgoudis
the smartest stance naturalists can assume vis-a-vis people using the argument from design is: "Science does not yet know how life started, but it's working on it . it may take a while; this may turn out to be a very hard problem. If you in the meanwhile prefer to believe that the best explanation for the appearance of life is to posit some supernatural action then be my guest."Seriously though, why?
179. Comment #73370 by Dianelos Georgoudis
(Theism explains) how come objective morality existsIf you think objective morality exists.
[-- End interjection --]
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178. Comment #73391 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 24, 2007 at 11:48 pm
Robert Maynard (post 163, or #73051):In my opinion the whole issue of causality, and the confusion surrounding such questions as "the first mover", "the first cause", "who created God", "how come the Big Bang took place" and so on, stem from - surprise - conflating science with ontology. As far as I can see "causality" as used in the scientific discourse always reduces to correlation. And at least in theistic ontology "causality" always reduces to intent.
Further, the whole of reality itself is a given; one can only ask meaningful questions of this and that part of reality, but not, say, "why is there reality in the first place". I mention the latter bit because according to theism God is not only a person who designed our experiential environment; God is also all of reality. Therefore to ask a theist "who created God" is like asking anybody "why is there reality" the tautological answer in all cases is: "because reality is" (i.e. to point out that the concept of "is" describes what's real).
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179. Comment #73392 by Goldy on September 24, 2007 at 11:57 pm
So God always was....and yet he is a person? Or a thing?I mention the latter bit because according to theism God is not only a person who designed our experiential environment; God is also all of reality
I believe the question about the designer is because if everything is designed, then surely something must have designed the designer. If the designer didn't need to be designed, then why would anything else need to be designed either?
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180. Comment #73417 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 25, 2007 at 1:44 am
Robert Maynard (post 166, or #73057):This discusses problems in abiogenesis probability calculations.Thanks for the link. I am not qualified to judge the particulars (even though others have pointed at some mathematical errors in his reasoning), but I think what Ian Musgrave there does is on the right track, namely to take Hoyle's scientific claim and try to counter it on scientific grounds. But that's not what Dawkins in TGD did. So my argument stands: Dawkins starts his "central" chapter 4 by claiming that Fred Hoyle's claim of the improbability of life is spurious but then proceeds to counter Hoyle's claim using not science but an apparently very weak philosophical argument (his "ultimate Boeing 747") and then toping it all with the question begging issue of the "planetary version of the anthropic principle". Why would Dawkins fail to respond on scientific grounds unless he didn't know how?
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/abioprob.html
If we don't currently know 'exactly' how abiogenesis can take place, and all the factors involved, it should be simple to reason that such calculations are based on shaky premises to begin with.
Incidentally the reader can find a lot of related information here:
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/addendaB.html
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181. Comment #73432 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 25, 2007 at 2:10 am
Coel (post 169, or #73079):Oh, for example the its replicating fidelity should be neither too precise nor too error-prone. Natural evolution takes hold only if there are replication errors but not too many. Also, while discussing the probability of life taking hold on a planet it's in fact an error to only consider the probability of the appearance of the first evolutionary viable replicating organism; for natural evolution to take hold that organism must find itself in the appropriate environment too, so the probability of that must be taken into account also. In fact Dawkins commits a slight technical error on page 135 when he writes "The origin of life only had to happen once". The appearance of the first viable self-replicating organism must have happened at least once of course, but maybe the conditions of our universe are such that a viable self-replicating organism must independently come into being billions of times before a viable process of natural evolution takes hold somewhere. (For roughly the same reason that not any one spark can put a forest ablaze.)A replicating molecule by itself is not sufficient; you need a replicating organism that has the properties necessary for Darwinian evolution to take holdWhat other property other than self-replication do you think is required?
I doubt that just one molecule can be alive, in the sense of being a viable organism that can start natural evolution. You mention "The Blind Watchmaker"; it's a long time since I read that book but I doubt Dawkins claims that much there. Self-replicating molecules probably played some role in the process that resulted in the appearance of the first viable organism, but I am pretty positive that the molecules themselves did not fit the bill.Then how probable is its spontaneous appearance of RNA anywhere in the universe?I honestly don't know, but it sure as hell is not Hoyle's number (which is not for one molecule but instead for the vast number of specific, interacting molecules in a highly complex, highly evolved modern cell).
Hoyle's number is based on the utterly unfounded idea [snip]I keep reading expressions such us "utterly spurious", "utterly unfounded", and so on. So why then did Dawkins fail to show that on scientific grounds in TGD? He did discuss Hoyle's probability estimate you know (he just did not print the actual number).
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182. Comment #73440 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 25, 2007 at 2:21 am
Lauregon (post 175, or #73182):It means that how it is like to experience life is directly caused by God and cannot be understood on any mechanical (read naturalistic) principles. Rather the subjective part of our experiential life can only be understood on intentional (read spiritual) principles. Not to put a fine point on it: when you see something that strikes you as beautiful you are seeing a reflection of God's objective beauty. You don't have to agree with any of these of course, but that's what I mean.(I believe that God interacts with us in the non-objective part of our experiential life but that's another issue.) - DianelosWhat exactly does that mean?
please explain what you see as the proper response and relationship of humans to the "God" you believe in.To try to become more similar to how God is, and hence to come closer to God.
Lauregon, I am responding to these questions because you've asked them, but I really wouldn't like to divert this thread into my ideas. We've been discussing them in the McGrath thread to the saturation point.
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183. Comment #73450 by Goldy on September 25, 2007 at 2:32 am
It means that how it is like to experience life is directly caused by God and cannot be understood on any mechanical (read naturalistic) principles. Rather the subjective part of our experiential life can only be understood on intentional (read spiritual) principles. Not to put a fine point on it: when you see something that strikes you as beautiful you are seeing a reflection of God's objective beauty. You don't have to agree with any of these of course, but that's what I mean.
and I thought it was because of the electrical and hormonal etc impulses in the brain. I'm not 100% sure any god is present there...
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184. Comment #73533 by brother john on September 25, 2007 at 7:55 am
Top marks Website Admin for posting a first rate article. It puts very accurately Richard's strengths and weaknesses - both of them eminent.It's a pity Bishop John Robinson is no longer around. Way back in 1965 he was urging Christians to take the challenge of atheism seriously. (Cf Robinson, Exploration into God,SCM Press 1967 p 14 note 1)
Robinson would have been an ideal person for a real discussion with Richard. Immensely knowledgeable. Immensely open. Not a TV debate. They're too time restricted. A serious discussion in Richard's or John's drawing room. In fact a series of them. Five 2 hour meetings would be about the right length.
He, by the way, if anyone, could show Richard that theology too is cumulative. His booklet, quoted above. is an example of just such cumulative theology, that starts on the shoulders of so many past writers (and ages) and moves forward.
(I don't recommend the book to anyone who hasn't got a grounding in philosophy and theology. It's brilliant, but demanding.)
Quite by coincidence I was reading Robinson today (waiting with someone to get their hospital appointment!). The first chapter (called "The displacement effect of theism") was precisely on the problems we Christians cause by using phrases like "God exists" and "proving the existence of God". These make God sound as if he is just one of the things in existence.
He is not that. Robinson puts it this way by quoting Tillich:"God does not EXIST. He is BEING- ITSELF..." (ib p 39 towards end of note 3)
A present-day mystic who can stand beside the Spanish mystic John of the Cross put the thought to me this way:"NOTHING EXISTS EXCEPT GOD." It took me a bit of time to figure out what he was driving at.
Obviously he knows that other things exist - you and me and him and everything in the universe. What he meant was this: "The only one who exists IN THE FULL SENSE OF THAT WORD - ie in and of himself, not dependent on any other force or circumstance or whatever for his being - is God."
That is actually the force of the name Yahweh : I AM WHO AM.
Everything else exists by virtue of something else or some previous status or condition; parent, seed, Big Bang, whatever.
And Richard Skinner is right. In the final analysis words about God are very weak things.
And that's true too of human beings. If you love someone very much who returns your love - even if you've lived with her or him for twenty, thirty, fifty years - how can you put INTO WORDS what they are like? You can only use words that MAY mean something to another person. And they will understanding you ONLY IF they
have had the same experience as you of loving totally and being totally loved in return.
How can you talk of the wonders of evolutionary biology to someone who couldn't care less? Who is not the least bit interested? Who has never felt or glimpsed that wonder?
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185. Comment #73536 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 25, 2007 at 7:58 am
Alovrin (post 177, or #73307):Your reading of The God Delusion seems to be coloured by the fact you think, said god exists.... somewhere.You may well be right; perhaps it's psychologically impossible to think about what other people say about reality in a way that is completely neutral to how one thinks about reality. But I try not to let my own preconceptions color my criticism of the book. So when I show that somewhere Dawkins is committing a fallacy (more often than not the fallacy of begging the question) I am not myself begging the question. That is, I am not saying "Theism is true and therefore Dawkins is wrong in what he says there", but rather "Dawkins there assumes that naturalism is true, which in the context of arguing that theism is false amounts to begging the question". There is big difference. After all it's a criticism a naturalist too might have made, and indeed a criticism that some well known naturalists such as Nagel and Orr have made (see post 85 above)
So this would seem to invalidate a lot of your criticism, as you would be unwilling to accept the premise of the book.If you mean that the premise of the book is that naturalism is true, then you are right that I am unwilling to accept it. Neither should I accept it. If Dawkins wants to show that the there "almost certainly" is no God he must not use as premise that "almost certainly" naturalism is true. Why not? Because naturalism means precisely that there are no supernatural powers such as God, so if Dawkins does the above he is basically writing an entire book to sell the tautology that as there is almost certainly no God, there is almost certainly no God. Which is true, but also a trivially true argument that carries no weight whatsoever. A theist could equally well write a book arguing that as there almost certainly is a God, there almost certainly is a God. Makes no sense whatsoever.
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186. Comment #73551 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 25, 2007 at 9:08 am
Robert Maynard (post 178, or #73355):If I understand you correctly then, and please correct me if I am wrong, you are saying that there are no designers in our society because there is actually no design either. All our technological and artistic civilization does not include any actual designs. It's the result of some kind of automatic process, basically a blind Darwinian process working both on the levels of genes and of memes.Are you sure you are not here changing the meaning of the concept "personal design", or if you prefer "intentional design"? Are you saying that it's not really they that did the designing, but rather they and all their ancestors including prokaryotic bacteria of 2.5 billion years ago?Well, no, because if you kept reading you would see the line "Were [our prokaryotic ancestors] mindlessly reproducing with that end in mind?" I was implying "no", which you'd know if you had read the next line. "That's not design, bub".
If that's what you are saying then it contradicts what most people would say, because most people would say that there are obvious both designs and designers in our civilization. You may respond: so what? Well, if a particular ontological view moves people who have adopted this view to make claims that are not testable and that directly contradict the way almost everybody thinks, then it's not a good sign for the reasonableness of that ontological view. And naturalism appears to be pushing naturalists to make many such claims, such as that there is no free will, that only physical things exist (so numbers, for example, don't really exist), that all ethical precepts (e.g. that we should not gratuitously torture a child) only reflect subjective opinion, that there is not just one universe but a gargantuan number of them each with its own set of physical constants, that each one of us in fact exists in more that 10^100+ different universes and that in some of them each one of us will never die (see Everett's popular "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics), that physical reality is such that all particles are in instant touch with all other particles (see Bell's test results and its implications), that our act of looking actually fixes the position of physical systems (see the paradoxes related to quantum mechanics), and now, that no designers and in fact no designs really exist. I suppose a naturalist may argue that if reality does not conform to our "subjective intuitions" then it's just too bad. But the fact is that there is only so much injury peoples' sense of plausibility can take, particularly when all these implausible claims are not testable and so carry no practical significance whatsoever. I don't think that once people understand what naturalism actually implies they will find it a reasonable worldview.
For me "supernatural" denotes anything one posits beyond the nature we ourselves can see, i.e. the physical universe around us (and just maybe other parallel universes that follow our universe's kind of mechanical laws). So anybody who is claiming a transcendental world beyond our physical universe which may be of a quite different kind than our universe is claiming a "supernatural" world by definition. Now it seems that you are saying that, according to your definition of "supernatural", if in that transcendental world beyond our universe anything similar to natural evolution exists then it is not really supernatural. Well, that definition is fine with me, for I can then argue that the God who designed and created our universe and all in it is not really supernatural but rather completely natural. You see in my understanding God is a dynamic, qualitatively growing, and indeed evolving being, as for me the whole of reality is a dynamic, qualitatively growing, and indeed evolving personal reality which transcends the physical/mechanical universe we observe around us. And please don't think that this is just my own personal understanding, see for example "process theology".So the God hypothesis, as defined by Dawkins, allows for that designing intelligence to have evolved by some means too. As a matter of fact it allows for that intelligence to be some kind of alien race living in some unknown world where they have the capability of designing and creating universes like ours.It says "supernatural". Did.. did you miss that? Because there's a word in the phrase "natural selection" which doesn't mix with a word meaning "above nature". I don't know what else to say to that..
But perhaps you mean that the transcendental world beyond our universe cannot be both personal (e.g. driven by personal intent) and evolutionary, because evolution is by definition a blind process. If that's your meaning I have a counterexample out of my own personal life. It turns out that through my personal intent I have programmed a computer to implement a blind evolutionary process through which I have learned things. In other words by an act of will and a blind evolutionary process I have evolved/improved in my own personal life. So blind evolution and intentionality do mix very nicely.
OK, let me clarify my meaning. Consider the (Kolmogorov) complexity of two worlds, which we shall here call "E" (for experiential) and "M" (for material). E consists of about 7 billion subjects experiencing life exactly like we do, and 1 person imposing order in their experience (in particular imposing the physical facts and laws present in their experience of physical phenomena). M consists of an actual physical universe of the dimensions, complexity and laws that our physical universe has, and in which 7 billion people exist experiencing it (how that universe actually produces experience is irrelevant; we assume it does). I estimate that the complexity of E is many orders of magnitude less than M's. For details please see the latter part of post 1166 (or #55061) in the McGrath thread. Please note that I don't consider that result especially significant, but I think it does show that a theistic hypothesis is not necessarily more complex than a naturalistic hypothesis.The existence of the physical universe as understood by naturalism is not a given; what is given is our experience of the phenomenal universe. And a complex (i.e. "brain-like") mind able to produce/simulate that experience for all of us turns out to be several orders of magnitude less complex than the simplest naturalistic description of the universeI'm not clear on what you're saying here. Is it "What our mind can perceive is more complex than our mind"?
Given our experiential paradigm, the amount of complexity we can phenomenologically perceive with our evolved sensory apparatus is actually a lot less complex than what is there.Yes, exactly my point.
I'm also necessarily referring to the state of these atoms, where they're going, what speed they're moving at, things like that.Yes exactly, that's needed to compute the complexity of M.
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187. Comment #73557 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 25, 2007 at 9:29 am
Newatheist (post 182, or #73382):I am afraid this comes from reading TGD ;-) In fact only the most primitive theistic views (i.e. religious fundamentalism or Biblical literalism) have any trouble with scientific knowledge, including natural evolution. And there are many many theists who do not share these naive beliefs, and therefore have no trouble with science whatsoever (e.g. liberal Christians). There is even Newton, arguably the greatest scientist of all times, was a theist. As for modern times, in 1993 a Quaker won the Nobel prize in physics :-) That a theist's ontologically beliefs necessarily contradict science is just another naturalistic myth, one that unfortunately TGD fosters.I personally believe that there is a naturalistic explanation for the origin of life.Eh? Like, now I'm totally confused!
As a matter of fact the opposite turns out to be the case: Scientific knowledge cannot possibly contradict non-naive theism (which does not mean that theism is not falsifiable, but it's not falsifiable by objective evidence). On the contrary scientific knowledge can contradict naturalism, in the sense that it can imply that reality is not mechanical and/or objective the way naturalism has it (and arguably Bell's test results have done exactly that).
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188. Comment #73561 by Coel on September 25, 2007 at 9:36 am
Brother john writes:He, by the way, if anyone, could show Richard that theology too is cumulative. His booklet, quoted above. is an example of just such cumulative theology, that starts on the shoulders of so many past writers (and ages) and moves forward.How, in theology, does one distinguish a movement forward from a movement sideways or a movement backwards? Personal preference? I think that that was Dawkins's point: that theology is not cumulative since there is no way of telling whether a change makes it "more correct" or "less correct".
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189. Comment #73562 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 25, 2007 at 9:37 am
Goldy (post 184, or #73392):I believe the question about the designer is because if everything is designed, then surely something must have designed the designer.It's an error to take a rule or property that is valid in one domain and simply apply it in another domain. For example: From the fact that atoms are countable it does not follow that numbers are countable. From the fact that it is reasonable to ask for the cause of some events (e.g. why is there some spilled milk on the floor) it does not follow that it is reasonable to ask for the cause of the universe, not to mention of reality itself. (In fact quantum mechanics teaches that it is not reasonable to ask for the cause of very small events either.) From the fact that physical space has several dimensions it does not follow that time should have several dimensions too. From the fact that A is explained by B it does not follow that B must be explained by some C. From the (dubious) fact that intelligent people have a more complex brain it does not follow that God, being hugely more intelligent, should be hugely more complex too as Dawkins apparently thinks. And, indeed, from the (claimed) fact that we people living in the natural world (and we are designers too) have been designed by a supernatural designer it does not follow that that supernatural designer must "surely" be designed too. That's all really very bad logic.
I am sorry that Dawkins in his TGD manages to confuse so many. Perhaps a good place to start recovering one's logical cognitive faculties is to study some analytic philosophy :-)
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190. Comment #73564 by Dianelos Georgoudis on September 25, 2007 at 9:49 am
Goldy (post 188, or #73450):Well, say you are looking at an apple on the table. Sure, some particular electro/physical processes are taking place in your brain while you are doing this, but this does not imply that you are not really looking at an apple on the table, does it? A common naturalistic confusion is to think that because there is a correlation between brain processes and experience, experience somehow is less real. For example some naturalists point out that religious experiences can be induced by eating a particular kind of Mexican mushroom, implying that therefore when one is having religious experiences one is not really experiencing God. But that's like saying that the fact that the experience of light can be induced artificially (say by closing your eyes and applying sudden pressure to your eyeballs) implies that when we experience light we are not "really" experiencing it.Not to put a fine point on it: when you see something that strikes you as beautiful you are seeing a reflection of God's objective beauty. You don't have to agree with any of these of course, but that's what I mean.and I thought it was because of the electrical and hormonal etc impulses in the brain. I'm not 100% sure any god is present there
There are many naturalistic fallacies related to consciousness. I suppose the worse one and the one believed by almost everybody is that our brain produces our consciousness. As a matter of fact that's a completely arbitrary belief (notwithstanding all arguments about injury to the brain, and so on.) Here is how Sam Harris puts it in "The End of Faith" (page 208): "The idea that brains produce consciousness is little more than an article of faith among scientists at present, and there are many reasons to believe that the methods of science will be insufficient to either prove or disprove it". Harris was trained in philosophy (as well as in neurophysiology) and clearly knows his ontology better than Dawkins.
151. Comment #72932 by Dr Benway on September 23, 2007 at 3:07 pm
I asked myself, where did this thread go wrong? Think I found the problem: Janus said the creator must be complex. Dianelos introduced the more specific (and therefore more difficult to support) claim: "at least more complex than anything it creates." That's how we got stuck in that irrelevant debate about whether stupid engineers can create clever computers.
We need not specify God's relative complexity. "Pretty damn complex" will suffice. Janus' original point stands.
Janus:Couldn't have said it better.
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