You’d think he’d have a grasp on the word demonstrably.  Oh wait, he’s a philosopher not a scientist and therefore doesn’t actually do anything requiring anything close to demonstrable.  Unless you consider mental masturbation as demonstrable.

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I would expect to find the article here. It seems that the roll call of those that make the hall of shame here are by far better thinkers than those on the board of advisers for Reason Project.

Yes, it quite well know that Dawkins if a third rate thinker, but his fans will not want to here that, much like the ideaologs at Fox News, Creationists and the rest of the looneys of the world. His true believers will of course continue to spouts his foolishness, read PZ Myers and continue to buy the Harrison’s books of little merit. Maybe this should be rename the ego project or how could the Brights be so dull. The question really is how could Hitchens hitch his star to such mediocracy. I guess any quick browsing of the NY Time’s best seller list proves that shlock ideas sell, especially if they are demonize the other. Call it the limbaughization of intellectuals.

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re poet:
His fans will not want to *hear* that Dawkins is a third rate thinker, not “here.”

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Pdskep, I think that if you were to ask a philosopher to demonstrate to you the soundness and completeness of the first order predicate calculus, for example, or indeed, any number of things in set theory, symbolic logic, or any of the mathematics based on logic (ie, all of them), you’d find that philosophers have a very robust notion of what “demonstrably” means.

I say this coming from a background in philosophy, as you might expect (and I taught logic for 2 years during graduate school).

I agree that Dawkins’ arguments that God doesn’t exist are poor ones. It doesn’t matter, though… he doesn’t need any at all. The onus of proof is on the party making the positive claim, and as long as they don’t provide any good reasons for belief, then atheism (not claiming that god doesn’t exist, but simply NOT BELIEVING in god) is the only reasonable position. As so many others have (including Dawkins, I’m afraid), Gutting fails to grasp the distinction between atheism and agnosticism; they are not differences of degree on the same scale… they are similar positions on different scales; one a scale of belief, one a scale of epistemology.

But more importantly, I think, is the fact that Dawkins is not addressing anyone who is familiar with the philosophical arguments to which he refers. 99% of the religious people in America would be equally unfamiliar with them. The philosophers may have the best arguments on both sides, but it doesn’t matter… they are completely insignificant because NOBODY believes in god because of them. It would be useless for Dawkins to engage the philosophers for the same reason that Dawkins’ book was a bestseller, and nobody has ever heard of Gutting except other philosophers.

- Matthew

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Matthew,

Thank you for a thoughtful response. The last bit:
“But more importantly, I think, is the fact that

”....Dawkins is not addressing anyone who is familiar with the philosophical arguments to which he refers. 99% of the religious people in America would be equally unfamiliar with them. ”

But, 99% of believers would also not believe in the God that Dawkins is claiming to refute. Dawkins tries to refutes the God of medieval scholasticism, the god of philosophers. The fact that the religious experience is far more vast than the simplistic view that Dawkins takes makes no dent in his thinking. By making the choice a Manichean either/or, science(logic)/religion, Dawkins, dangerously, covers a willful ignorance of religion while reviving a Neo-Enlightenment fable of fading religion with advancing secularism. A fable that evidence from history, sociology, anthropology and science (Andrew Newberg anyone) has made untenable as rational proposition and more of a faith statement. In a world in which we need better understanding to live peacefully, Dawkins adds to fuel to the fires of ignorance, which is dangerous to intellectual work.

The danger can be seen best in the Francis Collins affair. Here is one of the best working scientist having to answer his for his faith. His accomplishments were downplayed, (only a good administrator), his sanity question (he must compartmentalized his science and faith) and thrown all sorts of insults from scientists who had a hundredth of his accomplishments and the never work with him. All because of being a Christian, (got love Coyne’s thought process on this one: it is not because Collins is a Christian, but because he believes like a Christian as if there is a distinction) Those who had worked with him, atheists and believers alike, had nothing except praise for him as a scientist and his scientific accomplishments. The dire predictions of Collins’s critics have not materialized and he has gotten rave reviews for his first year. Will he receive any apologies. No, because ideologues don’t apologize.

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Matthew, I’m quite aware what philosophers do.  As you pointed out these types of arguments are completely irrelevant to most everyone and are in my mind an exercise in futility.  In the end the arguments are useless.  Dawkins’ arguments are just as sound or I should say unsound as his adversaries.  Both sides have failed to prove anything.  Arguments for or against God are rarely as simple or straightforward as symbolic logic or set theory.

I wholeheartedly agree with your point about Dawkins’ and Gutting’s failure to define atheism and agnosticism adequately.  What I find interesting is how people who apparently hold reason in high regard can read someone like Swineburne and find something inspiring and yet I read it and I see nothing but complete drivel.  I suppose that goes towards your comment about epistemology.

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Poet: It may not make a difference, but let me clarify… I see that I wasn’t clear in a reference. When I said mentioned the “philosophical arguments to which he refers”, the HE in this case was referring to Gutting.

Gutting was referring to a relatively abstruse body of work which claims to support or prove the existence of a necessary, omnipotent, omnipresent, etc. “god of the philosophers”. And of course, nobody believes in that god… and if the majority of Americans believes in that god, I’d find it hard to object with any vigor, because the existence of such a god would have no practical effect on our daily lives [this isn’t to say that it wouldn’t still be worth discovering the truth of the matter]. It isn’t until we encounter the claims of specific religions that we begin to get statements of practical value that are worth objecting to.

You’re right, of course…. Dawkins’ argument to which Gutting objected might have been intended to be a purely philosophical argument, and if that’s the case, it wasn’t a very good one, which is why (on my first reading of the God Delusion), I found it so easily forgettable.

However, most of Dawkins’ arguments have been directly about evolution, creationism, intelligent design, Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions. When he addresses the claims of creationists, his arguments are just as robust as anyone’s, and they have much more pragmatic value than anything that Gutting deals with. 

The fact is that most Americans believe in a God that is even less abstract, more anthropomorphic, and less philosophically supported than that of the medieval scholars (I lived for 8 years in SE Ohio (nuff said?), and 6 more in Colorado, where I taught introductory human evolution in the Anthropology department. I polled my students on the first day of class, and in one of my sections, 60% believed that humans did not evolve from a more ape-like ancestor). And, unlike the past, the rate of religious belief in Europe, Japan, and among the most educated part of the world’s population is dramatically lower than it has ever been. I’d certainly never claim that we’re nearing the end, but it’s a very significant trend.

That is all just to say that Dawkins needn’t engage the philosophers or spend any more time arguing against the philosopher’s god… it was silly to do it to begin with, and I imagine that he did it more out of an attempt to offer a well-rounded set of arguments in the book than anything else. For years now, I’ve heard Christian Philosophy professors (yes you, Scott Carson) rail against his philosophical arguments the same way that Gutting has, essentially creating a straw man. When Gutting and others obsess over arguments such as these, they miss the point of the Dawkins’ work.

pdskep: I only meant to make the point that an argument’s structure can easily be shown (demonstrably) to be un-sound or un-cogent (more accurately, invalid or weak) without reference to scientific evidence. I don’t agree that both sides have failed to prove anything… but that’s another discussion altogether.

- Matthew

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Matthew,

Thank you for the response. I do enjoy your thoughts. Gutting in the this quoted Stone piece was answering the criticism of his previous Stone piece where he called on believers to think more rationally about their faith. He, in a throw away statement., claimed that most popular arguments for and against God including Dawkins’s were not very rational and well constructed. He got a lot of criticism saying that he did not know what he is talking about and that Dawkins’s arguments were logically sound. Hence, his title and the thrust of his second piece was directed at showing exactly what you found with Dawkins, weak argumentation. It is important to keep in mind that he does not make the claim that all Atheistic arguments are weak, only the ones he said were not very good. I think his main point about faith and non-belief is cogent, think beyond the slogans.

I am aware that most believers do not believe in the “God of the Philosophers,”(GP) but most do not believe in the “God that the New Atheists says they believe in.” (GNASB) The GNASB is thought of as the God of the Gaps, or the explanation when there is no other. I am troubled by polls about believe like the one you conducted in your class, because it does not measure the force of beliefs. The content of American evangelism can be better measure by looking at the Christian best sellers in the last 30 years. A look there shows a predominate interest with relationships with family, with neighbors, with God. There is also a major concern with politics, and while it mainly right, Jim Wallis and others had best sellers with “God’s politics” that have a strong left tilt. Most are like the run away best seller “The Purpose Driven Life,” were the question is how best to live life and experience God.  What is missing is silly creationists tracts. Most believers are so because of experiences they have of God, which, of course I am not claiming as proof of God, only, through the work of Dr. Newburg and others, a reality. Experience of the divine is hard wired in many people. Whether it is a side effect of brain construction or an experience of a reality, no one knows. 

The last question you raise is a very interesting one. Max Webber’s Secularization theory is currently being challenged. Secularizations by Richard John Neuhaus is a good overview about the state of the theory. It comes down to this, is America or Europe the exception. Europe has become more secular as it modernized, but America has not. Currently the country in the midst of modernizing, China, India, Brazil, are getting more religious not less. Europe may have gotten more secular more from state sponsored religion than a general trend of modernization. It is a very interesting question, and still very open.

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Poet, Matthew Gore, and pdskep:  I think your discussion is way too deep.  The point of the posting, I think, is that Gutting’s summary of Dawkin’s argument is not accurate.  In God Delusion, Dawkins does not in fact make that incorrect logical leap from step 6 to step 7 that Gutting accuses him of making!

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I think we can throw Gary a bone by acknowledging that a non-anthropomorphic more deistic god is perhaps not obviously ludicrous. There may be no evidence for it, but it is so vaguely defined that the concept subsumes such a wide scope of worldviews that it’s hard to discount it, let alone even know what it is you are talking about. But of course that renders his god rather impotent.

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“That is all just to say that Dawkins needn’t engage the philosophers or spend any more time arguing against the philosopher’s god… it was silly to do it to begin with, and I imagine that he did it more out of an attempt to offer a well-rounded set of arguments in the book than anything else. For years now, I’ve heard Christian Philosophy professors (yes you, Scott Carson) rail against his philosophical arguments the same way that Gutting has, essentially creating a straw man. When Gutting and others obsess over arguments such as these, they miss the point of the Dawkins’ work.”

I think most of the people discussing Gutting’s article are missing the point he was making, which is not directly a point about whether God exists or not. If you read his article carefully he clearly says that whether the notion of a necessary being exists, for example, is not obviously clear. And he also notes that the question of whether God is simple (in reference to the article on Divine Simplicity) is also something that’s not obviously clear. He does not anywhere in the article defend the view that God exists, or that one can know God through faith, or that God is in fact simple or a necessary existent. The real point he is making is something different, which has been entirely lost in the large discussion generated by his point in the NYTimes and the commentators.

Gutting’s major complaint is that Dawkins “has not made his case.” This is not to be taken as a defense of theism, but as an important observation about the arguments Dawkins was making. Gutting claims that Dawkins has failed to address the “best arguments and analysis” on the topic of theism, and so his arguments aren’t worth very much. This is related to the point in the above quotation that Gutting is focusing on the “god of the philosophers” and Dawkins is focusing on some more anthropocentric, commonly held view. But this observation (even if true) misses Gutting’s real point, which is in failing to engage with the best views about the topic Dawkins falls flat.

Suppose the reverse was the case. Suppose a creationist or whatnot wrote a book trying to refute the scientific view of the world, and focused on the theory of evolution and our understanding of biology. But they didn’t focus on the best version of this, only *what the common person understands by evolution and biology” (e.g., there’s a gene for every trait, evolution means “struggle for survival and hence capitalism is sanctioned by nature”, etc. etc.). Such creationists could surely make evolutionary theory look rather ridiculous in this light. In this case, biologists like Dawkins would (rightly) claim that such an approach is without merit since it fails to address the *expert view which represents the best account of evolutionary theory.”

This is what Gutting is claiming in his article. Dawkins case is problematic because he does to religious believers EXACTLY what he would never allow them to do to science. The claim that Dawkin’s is merely focusing on “what the average person believes” is itself the problem. The average person believes mostly ridiculous things about biology, physics, the environment, human behavior, the stars, etc. But we don’t somehow think this impunes the validity of science (we know there are experts to appeal to). So it seems to me that the point in the above paragraph I quoted concedes Guttings central point. Standards of fair criticism require an author to address the best version of the theory one is criticizing regardless of which side one is one.

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this is a typical religious defense mechanism. they strip their god down, denude him (or her or it) until it is essentially unknowable in any meaningful sense of the word, transform their god into such a vague and incomprehensible topic, then point to it and say, “how can you possibly object to THAT?”

and yet, why worship such a thing, as if it had any relevance whatsoever? so god’s not really in the bible, he’s just some mysterious immaterial force that couldn’t possibly be comprehended well enough to be argued against…therefore we should believe in… what, exactly? oh the bible, that’s right. or the koran, or whatever more specific doctrines men have made, all on the delicate predicate somewhere, a thing could be called “god” might somehow exist…as something.

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pdskep: Oh wait, he’s a philosopher not a scientist and therefore doesn’t actually do anything requiring anything close to demonstrable.

Edwin Jaynes, physicist and probabilist,
quoted a colleague:
*“Philosophers are free to do whatever they please, because they don’t have to do anything right.”*

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Having carefully read GARY GUTTING ‘s article in the Opinion section of The New York Times, and his response to readers reviews, which numbered 65 pages, I have concluded that we live in a generation that has been well and truly educated beyond its intelligence. 

Where to start?  Firstly, with foremost atheist Richard Dawkins. Richard cannot logically disprove God’s existence, thus asserting that God “probably” doesn’t exist, which makes him a self declared atheist, who is really an agnostic, believing that two different things are the same. Confused already? It gets worse!

Then comes the classic atheistic ‘logic’.  God is much more complex than the universe, which make’s God much more difficult to explain, so it is easier just to assume the universe created and designed itself. Thus,  we now have a “self-creating” pantheistic dying universe, that cannot prevent itself from running down towards heat death and maximum entropy (total disorder, & information loss).  At which point we have a ‘self-existing, self-created’ universe with no usable energy left to do anything.  Meaning, our ‘self-creating’ universe has truly died. Even more confused?  Wait! There’s more.

No scientist operates on the principle that we live in an “unintelligent” “irrational” universe. Nor does any scientist conduct science on the premise that there is no order, regularity, structure or design in nature. Scientists repeatedly study design of living creatures and use the same operational principles to construct endless devices, with the optical system of dung beetles now being utilized to design night driving technology.  This means that ALL of science functions on the foundational principle of Intelligent Design.  Thus, for atheists to argue that intelligent design has no place in science is to effectively saw off the limb ALL of science is sitting on. 

We now add Dawkins Darwinian utopia: An evolutionary Wonderland where the impossible happens all the time, and always in reverse. Where an effect is not only “opposite” to the cause, but “far greater” than the cause. For example, chaos turns itself into order; information comes from no information; life comes from non-life; consciousness from non-consciousness; mind from mindless matter; reason from non-reason, intelligence from non-intelligence, and morality from amorality. And they tell us that all these “naturalistic” miracles happened without a miracle worker, which one would have to concede is “really” miraculous. 

We are told that in this Darwinian Wonderland, humans have been around since 2.5 million years ago, plus or minus a million years. Yet after well over 15,000 - 37,000 generations of active copulation the human population only really got going over the last 6000 plus years. Which means that billions upon billions of sexual encounters over 37 000 generations, with no birth control pills, resulted in virtually zero population growth, which leaves all the other naturalistic miracles for dead. 

It’s not a matter of whether or not one believes in miracles, but rather at what point. While rejecting the historical report of God rising Christ from the dead, the atheists insists that goo brought “itself” to life, and eventually turned earth into Einstein. Atheists reject the Biblical report of God talking through Balaam’s ass, yet believe that “one day a monkey’s cousin started talking”. More amazing, they get something out at the end that wasn’t present in the process. For example, they combine violent ruthless “impersonal” cosmic events, and couple them with ‘ruthless, savage” natural selection, and, “presto”, out pops personal, caring, loving, altruistic human beings.  Thus, again we have an effect opposite to the cause, and far greater than the cause. Truly amazing!

It gets even better. According to Darwin, his theory of evolution worked on the principle that natural selection only “preserved” that which was useful. So why would natural selection inject, and preserve, within the human genome the need for the vast majority of humanity to be religious, and believe in transcendent phenomena that do not exist. And why would the vast majority of humans instinctively equate the amazing wonders of the world with a Creator.  As G K Chesterton stated, when you don’t believe in God you don’t believe nothing, you believe almost anything.

A word to the wise! If you have problems believing in God I suggest you do what most people do. Wake up, open your eyes, and really look around. You will see a superbly structured universe of finely tuned cosmological constants, mathematical regularity, natural laws, and precisely balanced sub atomic particles: Together with a remarkable solar system and a tailor made terrestrial planet. Earth, containing a vast array of fully functional life forms in finely balanced environments and superbly integrated eco-systems, which in turn comprise co-dependent and interdependent life forms and creatures. Now you can insist that, luck,  chance mutations, and blind natural selection did all this, but, please, don’t call it science.  Particularly, when natural selection has no overall perspective, and wouldn’t have the foggiest notion of where anything and everything was evolving to, or even why.  For a “blind evolutionary watchmaker”- having absolutely no broad perspective - to put all this together would be somewhat akin to a bunch of chimps in white coats designing and constructing the CERN particle research complex. Not likely! Not ever!

Naturalism is the metaphysical belief that “nature” is all there is and all basic truths are truths of nature. This in turn is grounded in the metaphysical claim of scientism: The precept that science is the foundation of ALL knowledge and that ALL truth can be arrived at by the empirical method and science alone. Such metaphysical naturalism rejects Intelligent Design and theism, leading to the claims of atheists Richard Dawkins and physicist Stephen W. Hawking – namely that “God is no longer necessary”.

God has nothing to do, says Hawking, as the universe emerged out of a vacuum.  Not quite! As pointed out by University of Western Australia physicist, Dr John Hartnett, “Matter and particles generated from the vacuum are NOT creation “ex nihilo”, something out of nothing, but “a conversion of one form of energy into another.” So Hawking does not start with “nothing”, but with “something”. He needs “preexisting” gravity. Where did the gravity come from? And the appeal to M-Theory also has its problems. Nobel Prize winning American Physicist, David Gross, one of the founders of String Theory, admitted to a conference of the best and brightest in physics, “We don’t know what we are talking about. String and M-Theory are based on little more than fancy maths, and a grab-bag of ideas.” (BBC Focus, 2006)

In reality, metaphysical naturalism turns science on its head.  The scientific method operates on the principle that everything in science is “tentative” and “not necessarily the final word”. This is because scientific understanding and insights will be forever finite and limited. Naturalism however asserts that science is not limited or tentative and is the final word, allowing no alternative, particularly God. Many scientists of today, like all the pioneers modern science such as Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Kepler, etc., rightly saw naturalism as an “unsustainable delusion”, having no sustainable basis in either science, or reality.
I remind Dawkins and co that we live in a contingent universe that is far to “unified” to have been organized by a committee, and far to complex to have happened by chance.  (the old cosmic “unity in diversity” issue, discussed by Plato and Aristotle - some what akin to a trinitatian deity, who is likewise a unity in diversity)  And then there is The Greatest Show on Earth, which, like any show, necessitates an even “grander conductor” - one with all the transcendent attributes and perspective of deity. 

Richard, we are “dependent” creatures in a “dependent” dying universe. A universe in which nothing ever observed is self explaining or self-existing, including existence itself.  And the Nobel Prize awaits anyone who discovers anything in the universe that is self creating and self-existing. Such a dependent dying universe could never bring itself into existence. Something that is naturally running down, cannot also at the same time have naturally wound itself up.

Which brings us to the issue of who made God. Here we have two ultimate options. Either an “infinite regress” of “dependent” causes where nothing is ever able to bring itself into; or a non-dependent self-existing “First cause”, namely God.  Such an entity would not be part of the space-time environment, and the cause effect infinite dependency regress would therefore not apply. Thus, the cause of the universe would of necessity be timeless, non-dependent and self-existing, which is precisely what the Bible defines God to be. This turns out to be the only viable philosophical and scientific option.  For the moment one asks the question “who made God” they again place God into the infinite cause-effect “dependent regress”, where nothing is ever capable of bringing itself into existence. In which case neither Richard, Harris, nor I would exist, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

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