Thoughts on Dawkins' "The God Delusion" 3

Carrying on my imaginary discussion with the well-known atheist Richard Dawkins (in which I get to say everything I like and he nods his head, scratches his beard and says “Hmm, I see that you are right, young Ben.”), we come to The Argument from Beauty. (Check the earlier posts if you want to see where we’ve been so far.)

Dawkins describes this one as: "God must exist because otherwise how would you account for the beauty of Michelangelo's art, Mozart's symphonies, Shakespeare's works?" Obviously it’s ridiculous if you put it in those terms. But again he's set the field in his favour by describing this argument only in terms of human artists.

I think the argument from beauty isn't so bad when you consider the beauty in the natural world. Sunsets didn't have to be beautiful, or flowers, or mountain ranges, or rainbows. The world could have been shades of brown. I don't think it's a knock-em-dead argument, and I can think of rebuttals to it even as I’m writing. But the argument from beauty is certainly not as crazy as Dawkins paints it.

He then generously gives a few pages to considering The Argument from Personal Experience, which is another one that isn't going to be particularly strong with a nonreligious person, though it might be the strongest of them all for the believer. The fact is, it's too difficult to prove, and most likely the listener wasn't there.

The Argument from Scripture is next: e.g. "Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, so therefore he's either 'Lord, Liar or Lunatic.'" I think the popular More than a Carpenter book from memory uses this logic. Dawkins points out that there's a fourth possibility, that Jesus might have been honestly mistaken. Fair point.

He then he goes on to point out some apparent contradictions and discrepancies in Scripture itself, which show his lack of knowledge in First Century and Jewish culture. I can see how this might be particularly persuasive to people who don’t know their Bible stuff though. He writes, "Ever since the nineteenth century, scholarly theologians have made an overwhelming case that the gospels are not reliable accounts of what happened in the history of the real world." Well that's just not true.

And further, "All [the gospels] were copied and recopied, through many different 'Chinese Whispers generations'..." That's a bit of a deceptive comment. It’s true that the New Testament writings were copied and recopied (as is every great work), but archaeology has over time uncovered earlier and earlier (and more and more) documents of the New Testament writings. So the fact is, our translations are getting more and more accurate, not less. And the sheer quantity of copies we have from the first centuries shows the amazing level of accuracy in the copying technique, which is quite phenomenal.

None of this is a secret. You can easily see the points where there are differences in the documents. Just pick up a Bible and check out the footnotes. There aren’t many at all, considering.

And that’s where I’ll sign off for this one.