Wondering Mind: Has Dawkins Never Read Any Philosophy?
By John Taylor; 2008 Feb 02, 15 Sultan, 164 BE
A friend sent me yesterday the following argument for positive action in response to climate destabilization on YouTube:
<http://ca.youtube.com/wonderingmind42>
I agree that everybody should watch this presentation. It was made by a science teacher using the handle "Wonderingmind" who argues that addressing climate change is the most urgent issue in the world today. Wonderingmind's video I had seen before and shown to the kids, but it was good to see it again now that I am immersed in the arguments for and against the existence of Deity. Wonderingmind makes his points at a lightning pace, but if you pay careful attention you will see flash by a reference to giant space hamsters attacking the earth. In other words, you can come up with an infinite number of dangers, real or imagined, so why pick out climate change? Why not prepare for attacks by giant space hamsters? Why not meteors wiping out all life on the planet, as has almost happened several times in earth's geological record?
The counter-argument that Wonderingmind gives in this video is long and elaborate, and in form is identical to the arguments theists make for the existence of God. First of all, let us look at the giant space hamsters that atheists use to try to nullify the grounds for believing in God. Clarence Darrow, for example, said:
"I do not believe in God because I do not believe in Mother Goose."
This is an attempted Reductio Ad Absurdam, a reduction to absurdity, a riposte which in some contexts is a clear refutation. Other doubters put forward other examples, each more absurd than the one before, including Greek gods like Zeus and Apollo, the tooth fairy, Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, and so forth. So effective is this tack that a group of atheists sarcastically invented and put forward a god of their own to worship, the Giant Flying Spaghetti Monster. The theology is mockingly self-proving: Every time non-believers in the Spaghetti Monster think that they have disproved the existence of this monster, it sends down one of its noodly appendages and changes the books of the world to allow for it to exist. Atheist novelist Douglas Adams even proposed a "worship robot" with a deluxe version that would, for an extra fee, believe the most absurd and contradictory falsities imaginable.
This is all based on a discovery made by David Hume in the 18th Century about the power of skepticism. Everything can be doubted; proving a negative is absolutely impossible. You cannot disprove the existence of anything, because a counter-example may turn up at any time proving that it really does exist.
To use one example that a YouTube atheist uses, scientists believe that the dodo bird is extinct, but it is easy to doubt them, no matter how conclusive the evidence they put forward. Have you checked behind this bush for dodos? Have you checked behind every bush in the world? Have you checked the earth's core, or on other planets? There may be thriving colonies of dodos there. Until we have complete, universal knowledge, we will never know for sure that the dodo is extinct. Thus, he admits that he will never be able to prove that God does not exist. God may well be out there somewhere, no matter how flimsy the evidence may be. But, he adds, how do atheists know that there are not two gods? Or three? Or four? Or an infinity of gods? A theist cannot disprove any of them either. No theist can prove that there is not another god, that there are not any number of gods other than God, unless and until they have checked behind every bush in the universe. Somewhere a second god may be hiding behind one such book, sitting quietly, and maybe even playing cards with the last dodo bird.
The author of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, uses this ploy with great effectiveness. In this book he tells with hand-wringing glee of his encounter with theologians at a conference designed to bring scientists and believers together. The theologians ask him why is there something rather than nothing? He replies that this is to argue from improbability; the first cause may have been the basis of a self-bootstrapping crane that raised existence, but what caused that crane to come into existence? Something had to have caused that, and it must have been much more complex and difficult to explain than the thing that it caused.
To introduce God as first cause is to build a sky hook or sky crane that is more unbelievable than the thing it tries to explain.
Yet, Dawkins argues, there are physical explanations of the universe that do not introduce such unbelievable elements, including string theory, and Dawkins even mentions here the theist-inspired anthropic principle, which may one day be proven by actual evidence. In biology, his area of expertise, there is instead of a big sky crane a gradualistic crane that explains huge leaps called evolution. A mountain may seem to have a huge cliff, but was possible for life to scale it without a sky crane by going around to other sides of the mountain and walking up in places where the slope is easy and gradual. To suggest, Dawkins says, that the first cause, the great unknown, which is responsible for something existing rather than nothing, is a being capable of designing the universe and of talking to a million people simultaneously, is a total abdication of the responsibility to find an explanation. It is a dreadful exhibition of self-indulgent, thought-denying skyhookery. (Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 155)
Dawkins then gloatingly declares himself the victor, while stooping low enough towards humility to acknowledge the source of his superior argumentation,
"I left the conference stimulated and invigorated, and reinforced in my conviction that the argument from improbability ... is a very serious argument against the existence of God, and one to which I have yet to hear a theologian give a convincing answer despite numerous opportunities and invitations to do so. Dan Dennet rightly describes it as `an unrebuttable refutation, as devastating today as when Philo used it to trounce Cleanthes in Hume's Dialogues two centuries earlier.' A skyhook would at best simply postpone the solution to the problem, but Hume could not think of any cranes, so he caved in.
The fact that anyone in this day and age would be persuaded by this argument -- irrefutable as it may seem at first blush -- is testament to a failure in basic training, and not just of religious understanding but most especially our philosophical education.
The problem with extreme skepticism is that everything can be doubted, including your own existence. This was the discovery of David Hume that Dawkins does not mention. I think that I exist, and it seems very real to me, but I may not. I may really be a dream that some caterpillar on the other side of the earth is having (to use an example from Chinese philosophy that may well be what inspired Hume in this direction). If I do not take probabilities into account, any number of other explanations could take the place of my belief that I exist. In terms of Adams' novels, I could buy a doubting robot rather than a believing one, and if I buy the deluxe model I can even use it to doubt that everything, life, the universe, everything, exists in the first place. Even causation and reason themselves are quickly annihilated under its powerfully destructive killer-laser beam.
I want to cite the refutation of Kieth Ward at length here. As both a theologian and a philosopher he is in a position to say things about his area of expertise that I, an amateur philosopher, cannot. His big question is: Has Dawkins read any philosophy at all? We have seen that Dawkins has read at least some of David Hume, but I suppose what Ward means is, "Has Dawkins read a substantial portion of Hume and reflected upon it?" Anyway, this is Ward's answer:
"To make matters worse, thinkers like Richard Dawkins hold that, while materialism is based on painstaking research and rational thought, religious views are based on 'blind faith', some sort of leap in the dark, and so are plainly irrational and unthinking. Since ignorance is morally reprehensible, religious belief is not only based on falsehood and deceit, it is morally wrong.
"What are we to say about this? Has Dawkins never read any philosophy? Is he not aware of the weaknesses of materialism? Is he not aware that the philosophy of common sense espoused by his favourite philosopher, David Hume, has been pretty comprehensively undermined by science? Or that Hume himself could never reconcile his commitment to sceptical reasoning, which undermined belief in causal laws and other persons as well as God, with his common sense beliefs? Does he really think that Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel were all unthinking simpletons? I believe that any reasonable person, faced with all the wide array of philosophical arguments throughout history and today, would be forced to admit that no worldview (no system of metaphysics) has gained universal consent among the informed peer group of professional philosophers." (Keith Ward, Is Religion Dangerous?, p. 90)
Here we see Ward offering the same diagnosis that 'Abdu'l-Baha did of Western atheism. What atheists are propounding is a form of materialism, the belief that matter suffices to explain the material world, not to mention many other non-material things, including the accomplishments of science itself. To put it in Dawkins' terms, there is no need for a "sky crane." Only scientific evidence based on matter can be admitted as reasonable, and only the reasonable is a valid basis of belief. Ward uses its own logic to demolish materialism in three short sentences,
"If only scientifically testable statements are reasonable, then this statement (that 'only scientifically testable statements are reasonable') is not reasonable. Conversely, if this statement is reasonable, then some statements are reasonable that are not scientifically testable. So the statement is either unreasonable or false." (Is Religion Dangerous? p. 86)
This statement, that `only scientifically testable statements are reasonable,' is not only either unreasonable or false, but it also contradicts itself, since much of science, notably mathematics, is entirely rooted in the imagination and will ever be utterly un-testable save by aesthetic judgments. Yet mathematics infuses modern science more pervasively than the idea of Spirit infuses monotheism. Worse, from the anti-theist point of view, Twentieth Century science made one discovery after another of one bound of uncertainty after the next, proofs that evidence not only does not suffice, but never can, and never will suffice, ever.
"As good basically Humean empiricists, they thought that all proper human knowledge had to be based on confined to objects of sense -- experience. This rules out God, and spiritual reality, by definition. Many of us think that it rules of mathematics, quantum physics, objective moral truths, and a great deal else too -- perhaps an even rules out other people, as subjects of consciousness. Anyway, these investigators, not because of science, but because of their basic philosophical outlook, regarded religion as based on an illusion, as a fantasy." (Ward, Is religion dangerous?, 16)
Yet such has been the failure of modern religions to cooperate that in spite of this vast body of evidence against it, materialists continue to trounce theologians, as Dawkins recounts in his "God Delusion." By some estimates atheism is the fastest growing "religion" in the world; in the
"Many of the most important beliefs we have in life are not scientifically testable, but we still live our whole lives by them. I have beliefs, about what happened in history, about whether my partner loves me or not, about what sorts of acts are morally right, about what sorts of music are of the greatest worth, about what political policies we should adopt, about whether I can trust my friends. There are thousands of things I believe that are not scientifically testable. Quite a lot of them, I hope, are reasonable - though some may be based on ignorance or prejudice.
"I cannot think of any general rule that would tell me just what makes a belief reasonable, or such that I can justifiably hold it. But I know that some of my beliefs are so basic to my life that they are the keystones of my whole outlook on life. If they collapsed, I would be a different person. I have no real evidence for them, but they are foundational to how I think and act. Examples would be: there is some explanation, whether scientific or not, for every event that happens (things do not happen for no reason). Human beings are basically good and well-meaning, but they are also subject to terrible corruptions of greed, hatred and ignorance. People ought to consider the welfare of others, and ideally of all other sentient beings, at least to some extent. And I would add: it is appropriate to feel awe and reverence at the beauty and complexity of nature, to feel gratitude for the fact of existence, and to sense the presence of some sort of transcendent power and value in moments of understanding truth, appreciating beauty and enjoying friendship. These are unevidenced basic beliefs, beliefs by which we live." (Is Religion Dangerous?, p. 86)
Ultimately, the real test of value in matters of faith, that is, what makes the One True God more worthy of belief in the eyes of “other minds” than, say, the Giant Spaghetti Monster, is indirect, but it is scientific nonetheless. It is what Hatcher called the science of religion, the ability of one group's God to prove more effective for the common good than that of another. The argument, then, is the same as that for addressing climate destabilization: which of several uncertainties is the least uncertain? As long as theologians cannot point to a world parliament of religions where people of faith agree upon common grounds for religious progress, the anti-theists will continue to trounce them.
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