Thoughts on Dawkins' "The God Delusion" 1

A friend has given me Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion to have a read of. I'm finding it very interesting actually. It’s great to be able to see things from his perspective for a bit. I've only ever read Dawkins' stuff as quoted (and misquoted) by Christians in apologetic books – most of which I wasn’t too impressed with anyway. I have to say I respect the guy a lot more now.

The aim of the book is to prove that belief in God is unnecessary and deluded. He goes about it in a few different ways, one of which is to offer rebuttals of the arguments for the existence of God. Some of his rebuttals are right on the money. That is, some of the arguments Christians have used to “prove” God’s existence really are not brilliant arguments (I’m sorry to say that some of them I’ve used before, thinking they were awesome).

However I do want to go through them in these next few posts, because I see some holes in Dawkins’ thinking. Most of these are from Chapter Three in the book, “Arguments for God’s existence.” I’ll briefly summarize the Christian argument and then his response, and give my own thoughts. Let me know if I’m missing anything. Read the chapter yourself if you can, to make sure I’m not misrepresenting Richard Dawkins.

Thomas Aquinas' 5 "Proofs"

The Unmoved Mover, The Uncaused Cause, The Cosmological Argument. Dawkins puts the first three together, which I think makes sense. Basically it's the argument of first causes: something must have kicked it all off. Dawkins’ response is (in my non-academic paraphrase), "Well, who caused God then?" and then he diverts the discussion into a conversation about the incongruities with the terms omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience etc.

My response to that is: God by definition is not characterized or limited by the way the universe works, so why does God need a first cause? It seems to me that Dawkins has first defined God as needing a first cause, and then gone on to ask, "Well, what caused him then?" I've noticed this happening a bit in his book. He defines God within the laws of this universe (e.g. science and physics) and then denounces the result.

Having said that, I do understand how my response looks to an atheist. Unhelpful at best. Frustrating and immature probably. It looks like I’ve pushed the discussion beyond the realms of what we can test and see - the physical, material, natural universe - which in many ways shuts down the conversation if you're talking to an atheist. Or at least removes the conversation from their field of expertise.

And that’s exactly what I’ve done. My view is that you can’t prove OR disprove God using science. There are incredibly intelligent people on both sides of the discussion. Neither side is stupid. It’s the wrong field altogether when we’re talking about God.

To me the First Cause argument makes sense, as it did to Aquinas, because I’m open to the possibility of a God. But to an atheist who is by definition not open to this possibility, it’s a ridiculous argument.

Dawkins goes on later in the book to offer alternative explanations to the First Cause problem. E.g. There might be billions of other universes, and this just happens to be the one where everything works – which I think is entirely valid, but obviously untestable (like God?). Or, the universe might be continually expanding and contracting (the term used by physicists is “bouncing”), producing many big bang singularities in a long chain of universes – and this universe just happened to work perfectly. Probability-wise, this also makes sense, although I think it’s a little more difficult physics-wise.

At first glance, with both of these it might seem too good to be true that we just happen to be in the one-in-a-billion universe that worked. But if you think about it that makes sense too. Obviously this would be the one that works, because otherwise we wouldn’t be here. If that still doesn’t make sense I’m not explaining it well enough. Keep thinking and you’ll get it!

So there are viable alternatives. It really just comes down to belief again. I’m open to the possibility of God, so it makes more sense for me to say God designed it all perfectly and kicked it off. Dawkins is not, so that perspective makes no sense at all to him. It makes more sense to Dawkins to believe that it was something other than God.

On another important note: the fact that there are other possibilities doesn’t disprove God. It just means we’ve thought of other solutions, which humans are notorious for being able to do. That’s intelligence. It’s not intelligent to think: “I’ve proven God is unnecessary, so therefore God doesn’t exist.” You have to go further than that, which Dawkins attempts to do in later chapters.

But that’s more than enough for now. Let me know what you think if you’ve read this far!