An extract from the 2008 God Confusion Mission Handbook

Dear Friends

Welcome to ‘The God Confusion’ mission handbook! We hope that you find it useful. It’s a collection of news, reviews, resources and articles to help us get involved in the range of events that we’ve planned. As you’ll have worked out by now, the mission is named after Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. We’re aiming to interact with some of the material in that book and especially the case for atheism.

According to Wikipedia, as of November 2007, the English version of The God Delusion had sold over 1.5 million copies and been translated into 31 languages. It’s a popular book. And the passage of time has not lessened its influence. If anything this book has led to an avalanche of impassioned hostile attacks, on Christianity in particular. It’s been in the Sunday Times best selling list for hardback non fiction and paperback non fiction for as long as I can remember. It’s fiction. But that’s a rant for another time! And even if people haven’t read it, many are proud to own a copy. It’s their atheistic Bible. They assume that because it’s a big book written by a clever man it contains all the reasons they need to justify their godless lifestyle. David Robertson in The Dawkins Letters, his collection of letters written in response to The God Delusion, accuses Dawkins of colluding with an anti-God addiction when he writes, ‘when someone like you comes along and provides what seems to be a cast-iron intellectual justification they seize it like an alcoholic seizes the bottle’.

Richard Dawkins’ own web site says of his book,

‘A pre-eminent scientist – and the world’s most prominent atheist – asserts the irrationality of belief in God and the grievous harm religion has inflicted on society, from the Crusades to 9/11. With rigour and wit, Richard Dawkins examines God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favoured by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, forments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. The God Delusion makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just wrong, but potentially deadly. It also offers exhilarating insight into the advantages of atheism to the individual and society, not the least of which is a clearer, truer appreciation of the universe’s wonders than any faith could ever muster’.

Heady stuff. And it’s possible that in the face of such vitriol many of us just want to run for cover, curl up into the foetal position and wait for it all to go away. Just me then! But we can’t. We have an obligation to our friends to tell the truth and to Christ to defend His honour. Wonderfully we don’t have to do that alone. Ultimately the Lord stands with us and we’ll know His presence as we ‘speak up for Him’. But He’s also raised up a horde of able writers and apologists to help us out. We’ve been able to recruit some of them for ‘The God Confusion’. One of the resources that will help is the little book by David Robertson. If you read nothing else in preparation, read that. Throughout his book Robertson provides a rationale for response. His major contention is that Dawkins appeals not to people’s intelligence but to their ignorance. Most people do not understand the case for God. And so when someone like Dawkins tells them it’s a delusion they assume its non existent. But that’s where we come in.

The sixth letter can be found online here.

‘Why there almost certainly is no God’. That’s the title of Dawkins’ fourth chapter. We’re getting to the heart of the matter. If the rhetoric is to be believed then Theism ought to be in for a rough ride. In fact Dawkins writes, ‘If the argument of this chapter is accepted, the factual premise of religion – the God Hypothesis – is untenable’ p189 TGD. If he gets this right then we can close down the churches, free up our Sundays and I’m seeking alternative employment! There are bigger casualties. But that’s for another post.

Let me summarise Robertson’s critique of this material with the following four headings.

1. Dawkins expects us to be convinced by one killer argument

Dawkins does not engage in a systematic cumulative dismantling of the case for theism. He thinks that’s unnecessary because he’s found the silver bullet. To add another metaphor, Dawkins thinks that he’s found theism’s Achilles heel. Theism stands or falls on the truth of this argument. Robertson summarises the killer argument like this, ‘Evolution is true. Evolution explains the illusion of design. The design argument is the main argument for God. Therefore there is no God’. It’s an argument. But is it a good one? We need to know why Dawkins thinks that the argument from design is so shabby. There’s no design he says, because there’s no designer. And why’s there no designer? Because there’s no one who designed the designer. No really, that’s it. According to Dawkins, there can be no God because we can’t think of anyone who created Him. Robertson is scathing in his assessment of Dawkins’ case. He writes, ‘When I read it [your argument] I was genuinely shocked. Not because of its originality, killer force or overwhelming logic, but rather because of its banality’. And this is the intellectual foundation for Dawkins’ atheism. Consequently, if we can show that this foundation is shaky then the house of atheism as propounded by Dawkins ought to come tumbling down.

2. Dawkins exercises incredible faith in evolutionary theory

On the back of his unwavering faith in evolutionary theory Dawkins dismisses the case for a created God and He dismisses the case for an uncreated God. Anyone would think that he has it in for God! He dismisses the theistic case for God because he puts all his eggs in the neo-Darwinian basket. Because he’s absolutely convinced that evolutionary theory by natural selection accounts for life he must assert that things evolve from the simple to the complex. Complex comes at the end. Simple comes at the beginning. But the notion of a theistic God requires complexity to come at the beginning; to make the simple. And that he can’t or won’t accept. At a very superficial level we can grant that this is the case in biology. But it’s a massive leap into the dark world of scientific speculation to take a principle from biological science and assert its universal applicability. And then, Dawkins just asserts that God cannot be uncreated. But that’s a presupposition that he brings to the table. And so he ends up in a circular argument. There is no God because there can never be anything uncreated and so God can’t be uncreated and so there is no God. Neat, but circular. And it doesn’t prove anything except that circular arguments leave you going round in circles.

3. Dawkins evades the persuasive theistic case for human existence

Dawkins fails to account for two things. First, he cannot explain the origin of matter. Secondly, he cannot account for the conditions of life. For atheism to be persuasive we need to know why there is something and not nothing. There are only three alternative explanations for the origin of matter. Either something came from nothing, or something was eternal, or something was created. There’s no other alternative. If something came from nothing, then as Robertson puts it, ‘At one point there was no universe, no matter, no time, no space. And out of that big nothing there came the Big Bang and our vast universe, tiny planet, evolution and the human species’. But that makes no sense at all. If something was eternal then as Robertson puts it, ‘There is a lump of rock, or a mass of gas or some kind of matter which had no beginning and will probably have no end. And at some point that matter exploded and we ended up with the finely tuned and wonderful universe we now inhabit’. Or we say that something was created out of nothing. But to do that you need an incredibly powerful and intelligent uncreated being. Whether we believe this God exists or not is dependent on which one of the alternatives we find most convincing. Secondly, he cannot account for the conditions of life. We live in a finely tuned universe. Apparently if the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by been one part in ten thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present state. And if it had been greater by one part in a million then the stars and planets would not have been able to form. There are fifteen such constants without which the conditions for life would not be possible. It all begs the question how someone who so prizes intellectual logic can be an atheist. And so we end up with the illogicality of unbelief. As Robertson observes in his concluding paragraph, ‘In bringing up the argument of the origin of matter abd of the universe you have in fact scored an enormous own goal. Instead of proving that there almost certainly is no God, you have demonstrated that there almost certainly is’.

4. Dawkins engages in fantastical speculation rather than accept the evidence 

Somehow Dawkins has to explain the origin of matter and the conditions for life. To do this he must explain how we get the conditions for evolution. Mathematically the probability that there’s life is infinitesimally small. The fine tuning of the universe is utterly improbable. The suggestion that we just got lucky doesn’t exactly satisfy the criterion of rationality! But then I suppose it’s possible to postulate the multiverse; the notion that there are billions of universes and the odds are that one of them will have the conditions for life. Robertson smells blood and goes for the jugular, ‘You keep telling us that science is about what we can observe, that it is about fact and empirical evidence. The multiverse notion is a ‘sci-fi’ nonsense for which there is no evidence whatsoever. One almost gets the impression that you would accept any theory as long as it did not involve the possibility of there being a God!’ But Dawkins’ speculative theorising reaches its climax with his approval of Deutsch’s proposal that there are a vast number of rapidly growing universes that exist in parallel in which we live different lives!

Conclusion

Robertson brings his letter to a close with two justified observations

a. Dawkins cannot claim to be acting scientifically when he propounds atheism since he has offered no substantive scientific reasons as to why we ought not to believe in God.

b. Dawkins ought to stop misrepresenting his dissenters as those who have settled for a God of the gaps; filling in until science makes the discovery.

He summarises his issue with Dawkins in these words, ‘You like to suggest that your position is a logical one caused by the fact that Darwin has raised your own consciousness and you seem to think that those who do not agree with you are not so highly evolved (at least in consciousness). Your position is the scientific one and you set up the debate so that it is always the forces of reason and science against the blind irrationality of faith. I’m afraid that that just does not square with the facts’.