Taking Dawkins down

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me introduce you to British biologist Richard Dawkins, the most famous, renowned and celebrated atheist on planet Earth.

Born in Nairobi (Kenya) back in 1941, Dawkins- alongside his scientific work- is best known for his belittling of religious faith, exemplified in his best-seller The God Delusion (2006). It was that book which gave birth to the New Atheism movement.

Why do I want to introduce you to the devil’s chaplain on this splendid day? For two reasons:

Reason 1: because the name of Dawkins is on the lips of more and more young university students. Many have read (or heard of) The God Delusion and they are convinced that contemporary atheism has put the final nail in God’s coffin once and for all.

Reason 2: because many believers are scared to death of Dawkins. It’s true! It’s as if Dawkins were the intellectual Goliath of the twenty-first century. If an atheist quotes us a passage from Dawkins, as a general rule we tend to sweat, shake and don’t know what to say except: “Deliver me, oh Lord!”

If we want to be relevant and more efficient in our evangelism (above all with young thinkers), it would be important to interact with Dawkins’ thought to take him down in the same way that the little shepherd boy called David did with Goliath.

On a personal level, I’ve seen time and time again how agnostics and atheists get surprised when they see how run of the mill believers are able to identify logical fallacies in Dawkins in particular (and in atheism in general). This gives the evangelist extra street-cred with his/ her interlocutor and therefore it is much easier to preach the Gospel.

Today, I want to hone in exclusively upon the most important chapter of The God Delusion, namely, chapter four, titled: ‘Why there is almost certainly no God’. Dawkins himself confessed that this chapter contains the “central argument” of his book.

What I’ll do, then, is quote the six steps of Dawkins’ anti-God argument from chapter four and then analyze each step slowly and carefully in the light of reason.

1.- Dawkins’ Six Steps

Here are his six steps. By the way, the third point is the most widely quoted and used by new atheists.

• Step # 1: One of the great challenges to the human intellect over the centuries has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
• Step # 2: The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.
• Step # 3: This temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. [...]
• Step # 4: The most ingenious and powerful [explanation] so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings.
• Step # 5: We don’t yet have an equivalent [explanation] for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. [...]
• Step # 6: We should not give up hope of a better [explanation] arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. [...]

With these six steps, the biologist concludes, “If the argument of this chapter is accepted, the factual premise- the God Hypothesis- is untenable. God almost certainly does not exist. This is the main conclusion of the book so far”.

2.- A Critical Analysis of Dawkins’ Six Steps

• Step # 1: We agree one hundred per cent with the Englishman’s first step. The intellectual tradition of humanity has indeed recognized a complex appearance of design. No one doubts that.
• Step # 2: Dawkins simply affirms that it is “tempting” to think the appearance of design implies actual design. He says nothing more. I’m not sure, however, if “tempting” is the right adjective. How about “natural”, “logical” or “reasonable”? Why “tempting”?
• Step # 3: It’s the old question: who designed the Designer? Who created the Creator? What caused the First Cause? How can a believer answer these objections? Here are four brief ideas:
  • The first idea is to realize that the hypothesis of a created ‘God’ is fuelled by an enormously unacceptable presupposition, that is, the thought that God is created. It’s like talking about a square circle, a married bachelor or a spider pig. They are two mutually exclusive concepts. An oxymoron if you will! The moment we start to talk about a ‘created God’, we are referring to a non-God, or in Christian terms, an idol. There is no such thing as a ‘created God’. God, by definition, is eternal and therefore not created. It should come as no surprise, then, that Dawkins doesn’t believe in God if the only God he doesn’t believe in is a created one. In fact, I don’t know any Christian who believes in a created God. I ask myself: why did Dawkins call his book The God Delusion? Would it not have been more intellectually honest to name it, The Created God(s) delusion? I suspect that in such a case his book wouldn’t have sold so well given that practically nobody with a half-a-noodle between their craniums believes in idols any more. So at a linguistic level, we must reject this argument as entirely deceitful. We don’t have to accept such tricky philosophy. It is a false objection.
  • The second idea is to take into account that, philosophically speaking, we don’t need an explanation of the explanation. Have I explained myself clearly? Here’s an example borrowed from William Lane Craig. Imagine that some archaeologists come across arrow heads, pottery and axe-heads in some desert place. Wouldn’t they be justified in inferring that such objects were not the product of rock sedimentation or metamorphosis, but rather they stemmed from some unknown group of people even though they didn’t know where those people had come from or who they were? The idea is that we don’t need an explanation of the existence of the tribe (or the unknown group of people) in order to admit that they created the excavated artefacts. In the same way, we don’t need an explanation of the Creator’s existence to see that He created all that exists under the heavens. God is the universe’s explanation; but we don’t need an explanation of God’s existence to realize that He made everything. At any rate, if we needed an explanation of the explanation, sooner or later we’d need an explanation of the explanation of the explanation and ad infinitum (that would entail an infinite regress of explanations). Such a state of affairs would never be able to explain anything at all! Science would no longer be possible and therefore, Richard Dawkins couldn’t write any more books explaining the non-existence of God because it wouldn’t be scientifically possible to explain anything.
  • The third idea is to understand the reason why Dawkins rejects the concept of a designer God. Since Dawkins is a Darwinian, he believes that the complex always stems from the simple. There are two ways to face this argument (depending upon the context of the debate)
    • Firstly, we could say that God is a lot simpler than the universe because He is a spiritual being (that is, immaterial). He doesn’t have physical parts. In this sense, the God Hypothesis fits in perfectly with the evolutionary idea that the complex comes from the simple.
    • Secondly, we could reject this evolutionary idea altogether and offer numerous examples of where something complex can create something simple. A good example would be The God Delusion. What are books but paper and ink? Is not The God Delusion’s author- Richard Dawkins- infinitely more complex than the book he produced? Of course he is! Therefore, it’s very probable that the Creator of the universe is infinitely more complex than the cosmos He created. 
  • The fourth idea is to ask Dawkins why does he have such a problem with the God Hypothesis? After all, Dawkins has recently stated that he believes in some kind of eternal material that existed even before the Big Bang. So if he believes in something eternal, why couldn’t there be an eternal God as well? 

These four ideas- the linguistic response, the explanation of the explanation response, the complex from the simple response, and the ‘eternal’ response- help us to contradict the idea of a designed Designer.

• Step  # 4: Here Dawkins appeals to his scientific hero Charles Darwin (1809-82) to discredit the idea of biological design. How strange! Don’t you think? It’s as if Dawkins didn’t realize that Darwin believed in a creator God who put the whole evolutionary process into motion. In Darwin’s magnum opus ‘On the Origin of Species’ he penned, “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that [...] from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved”.
  We must make it clear that the Theory of Evolution in no way implies the non-existence of a Designer. To this day, leading Protestants such as the American geneticist Francis Collins (1950-) or the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann (1926-) combine their faith in Christ with an evolutionary worldview (I suppose I should just clarify that I, personally, do not share the macro-evolutionist perspective for various reasons). Evolution can explain what happens once life is in the universe; but it is unable to explain the origin of life itself. As Wayne Grudem put it, “Probably the greatest difficulty of all for evolutionary theory is explaining how any life could have begun in the first place. The spontaneous generation of even the simplest living organism capable of independent life (the prokaryote bacterial cell) from inorganic materials on the earth could not happen by a random mixing of chemicals. It requires intelligent design so complex that no advanced scientific laboratory in the world has been able to do it”. Dawkins’ fourth step, then, doesn’t advance the message of atheism. Evolution doesn’t contradict theism.
• Step # 5: In the fifth step, somewhat sadly, the same things happens as in the fourth step. The only difference is that this time we’re in the sphere of physics (whereas point four was biology). So instead of quoting Darwin again, Dawkins evokes the multiverse (the belief that there are an incredible amount of universes like ours in existence).
  But once again, it’s just the same old strategy. Appealing to the multiverse does nothing. As well as being a speculative, ludicrous and philosophically empty line of reasoning (as Anthony Flew, Richard Swinburne and Paul Davies have pointed out) that one simply has to believe on blind faith- what an irony!- the multiverse, even if it did exist, would still need an explanation. Where did it come from? How did it come into being? How can its laws be explained? “So, whether or not there is a multiverse, we still need to face the fact of the origin of the laws of nature. And the only satisfactory explanation is a divine Mind” (Anthony Flew).
  Dawkins’s fifth step doesn’t advance the message of atheism either. If the multiverse did exist, it would be perfectly compatible with the existence of God. In no way would it imply His non-existence. It’s just another cheap argument that offers a false alternative between God and physics (just like the false alternative between God and Darwin).
• Step # 6: The sixth step isn’t an argument. It’s simply a profession of faith and atheistic hope that one day there will be a materialist explanation for everything that will solve the complex appearance of design that we witness in the universe. In a sense, I’ve got to confess I almost admire Dawkins. I’d love to have as much faith as he does.

3.- Conclusion

Everything we’ve studied today serves to show that Dawkins’ conclusion that there is “almost certainly no God” is not logically coherent with the six steps of his flimsy argument. At a logical level, his conclusion is undeniably false (and you don’t need to be a theist to acknowledge so).

Evidently the third, fourth and fifth steps represent the peak of Dawkins’ book The God Delusion; but we have seen that these trio of points do nothing to proving God’s non-existence.

At most, Dawkins could argue that the argument from design for the God Hypothesis is not a good one (although I wouldn’t concede that point for a moment); but the Englishman forgets that there are many other rich arguments that point towards God’s existence: the cosmological argument, the teleological argument, the moral argument, the argument from personal experience or the evidence with regards to the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth (amongst others).

So let’s not fear Goliath! It’s time to take him down in our streets and universities. God certainly exists. God is. And it is on a happy note that I tell you that Goliath and Dawkins can do nothing about that whatsoever! Hallelujah!