A Review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion Part XI
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Nov 9, 2007, Wausau, Wi — Last time in my review of Richard Dawkins’, “The God Delusion” I looked at the flaws in the first three point of what Dawkins calls “the central argument of my book.” Again, he summarizes this argument in the following six points:
1 – The appearance of design is one of the greatest challenges to the human intellect.
2 – The temptation is to attribute design to a designer.
3 – The designer hypothesis is false because it does not explain who designed the designer.
4 – Evolution, the best explanation so far, shows that design at least for biology is an illusion.
5 – Since in evolution, apparent design is an illusion, it could be an illusion in other areas such as physics.
6 – We should not give up hope of finding better explanations elsewhere and the weak explanations we do have are better than the explanations that rely on God.
When we come to point four, that evolution shows that design in biology is an illusion; this of course assumes that not only is evolution a valid theory for the origin of new life forms and biological structures, but that it is a completely explanation.
Space here does not permit a discussion of all the problems with evolutionary theory, and in any event, these are well discussed elsewhere. So I will just mention two points that cast serious doubt on Dawkins argument. The first is that the problems with evolutionary theory have not decreased over the years, as our understanding has grown, but rather have increased to the point that, as I discuss in my book Evidence for the Bible, even the definition of evolution itself is now unclear, as supporters keep shifting the definition to avoid these problems, frequently in contradictory ways.
The second is that, contrary to the claims of evolutionists like Dawkins, evolution is not questioned simply for theological reasons, and not are all of those who question it are even theists. In fact, evolutionists have increasingly had to resort to the suppression of differing views, in order to maintain their dominance, as the evidence contrary to evolution and in support of intelligent design has grown. In short, the claim that evolution has shown design to be false is simply untrue despite how much evolutionist like Dawkins might want to believe in it.
Point five, which claims that the apparent design in areas other than biology might also be an illusion, correspondingly falls apart. Yet even if this was not the case, point 5 would still have a huge problem as it is fallacious. It simply does not follow that even if evolution shows design to be an illusion in biology, that it was therefore an illusion elsewhere. This would be like claiming that just because some apparent suicides turn out to be murder, all apparent suicides could be murder, and therefore we can reject the concept of suicide itself.
This brings us to last point. It can hardly be called a conclusion. Rather it is a plea to “not give up hope.”(158) I must commend Dawkins for his honesty. Most atheists strongly deny that hope, and it counterpart faith, play any role in their thinking, and in fact are highly critical of theists when they express hope or faith. But at least theists do not confuse expressions of hope, with logical arguments that make opposing views untenable.
Dawkins’ does acknowledges that there are problems in the view he defends, but see hope in an old argument frequently employed by atheists. Chance + enough tries = certainty. Such reasoning has another name: The Gambler’s fallacy, and the error of such reasoning can be clearly seen in the lavish displays of wealth in such places as Las Vegas.
Based on Dawkins estimates, where concerning the number of planets he even knocks off a few zeros “for reasons of ordinary prudence”, and where he assumes that life is a one in a billion chance, there would still be billion planet with life, and ours would only be one of them.
This is at least better that Carl Sagan’s famous estimate of billons and billons of planets. Yet like Sagan’s it is seriously flawed. Sagan only considered a few of the factors needed for life. Far more rigorous looks at these numbers have shown that if all of them are considered the chance of having even one planet in the entire universe that would support life, are less than 1 in 100, odds that even Dawkins says are to be laughed at. And this is just for a planet that could support life. It does not begin explain how life itself could start. The odds against life starting by chance are so incredibly huge that they are truly beyond comprehension, odds so large that even other atheists have compared them to a miracle. (For a more complete discussion of these odds, see chapter four in Evidence for the Bible)
So Dawkins’ hope is based on an off the cuff estimate that are not even close. Where he estimate billions of planets with life, serious estimates of all the relevant factors show that there should not even be one planet that could support life, much less actually have life.
So Dawkins argument has serious problems with each of his six points. It ends with a hope that could only reasonably be called misplaced. Rather than showing that God is untenable, the evidence points to the existence of God, and this conclusion as grown stronger over the years, not weaker, as we have learned more about life.
This is Elgin Hushbeck, asking you to Consider Christianity: a Faith Based on Fact.
Isn’t cleaner better II
Last time I looked at some of the problems with Bill O’Reilly’s fallback argument that fighting Global warming would at least make the world cleaner, and isn’t cleaning up the world a good thing? In addition to the problems that CO2 is not really a dirty pollutant that needs to be cleaned up, and all the ambiguities in the science concerning whether the earth has warmed, will it continue to warm, how much humans are affecting any warming, and whether there is anything we could realistically do about it, it is not at all clear whether global warming is even a bad thing.
For example, one of the bad effects cited by Al Gore is the number of people who will die as the result of increasing temperatures. But what Gore ignores is that far more people die each year as a result of cold, than heat. Thus, any warming of the earth should result in a net saving of life. In addition, most of the land mass of the earth is concentrated in the northern latitudes. This means that while warming might result in the loss of some costal lands due to increased sea levels, and some farm lands due to drought, we will gain far more land that is currently uninhabitable due to cold. Nor is this unprecedented in human history, for example, during the time of Rome, England was warm enough to be a producer of wine, while today it is too cold. So while some decry the coming of Global warming, it is just as likely, if not more so, that we should be celebrating the ending of Global cooling, assuming of course that it is really ending.
Still, there is even a more troubling problem with O’Reilly’s argument. His isn’t-cleaner-good argument ignores the costs other than his caveat of not destroying the economy. A common problem that affects a lot of arguments on all sides of many debates is Utopianism. Utopianism is presenting your side in a perfect world context of only positives while ignoring or downplaying the costs and downside. If this was a perfect world and there were no cost or downsides, then clearly cleaner would be better. Sadly such perfection is still a ways off, and here in the real world to make things cleaner, will not only have some benefits, it will also have costs and downsides. There are pros and cons to everything. So while, in a perfect world, cleaner is better, in this world it all depends on whether the benefits of being cleaner, outweigh the costs to be cleaner, and we could cause an awful lot of suffering, without destroying the economy.
When we look at the proposals made to fight Global warming, even the drastic proposals such as the Kyoto treaty, would have at best minimal effect on Global warming. Yet the cost would devastate our economy, and lower living standards worldwide. More minimal proposals such as increasing the CAFE Standards to force more fuel efficient cars would have almost no effect at all on Global warming, though it would reduce our dependence on foreign oil, at a cost of increased deaths and injury from car accidents, for more fuel efficient cars mean smaller and lighter cars, and smaller lighter cars are more dangerous cars. Yes in a perfect would, you could have smaller, lighter and safer cars, but again this is not a perfect world.
A clear example of the dangers of being “cleaner” is DDT. In the 1960s the big environmental scare was DDT and unfortunately the environmentalist got their way and DDT was banned. Like so many environmental claims, those that resulted in the ban on DDT, have also turned out to be false. DDT is safe, except of course to the insects it kills. But the costs of the ban are not speculation, and in fact were known before the ban and used as arguments against it. But the environmentalist ignored the costs, for them the danger was too great. As a result diseases like malaria, which in many areas had been wiped out, have since returned, and now kill between 1-2 million people a year. In the nearly 40 years since the ban that is over 40 million people who died as a result of environments scares, and this is for malaria alone. And yet even today despite the fact that millions have died and continue to die, many environmentalists are still more worried about theoretical risks lifting the ban on DDT might have, despite all the evidence against it, rather than the actual deaths the ban is currently causing.
The changes demanded by the global warming activists are far more sweeping and invasive than just a ban on a pesticide. The changes would devastate the world economy, entail a huge loss of freedom in order to enforce, remove any hope for those in poverty of ever getting out, throw many more into poverty, and lower standards of living worldwide. It should not be forgotten that one of the effects of a lower standard of living and increased poverty is not just increased suffering, but also more deaths.
So the real question is not isn’t cleaner better, but rather is how many people must looses their jobs, how many people must be thrown or locked into poverty, how many people must die, for how much cleanness and all to fix something that we may not have any control over, may not even be happening, and even if it is, it may not even be a bad thing? Environmentalist like Gore may have good intentions but that does not change the fact that people with good intentions can still do a lot of harm. Just ask the relatives of all those who have died from Malaria or West Nile virus.
A Review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion Part X
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Nov 2, 2007, Wausau, Wi—In this installment of my review of Richard Dawkins’, “The God Delusion” I come to what Dawkins calls “the central argument” of his book. About this argument he claims that if it “is accepted, the factual premise of religion – the God Hypothesis – is untenable. God almost certainly does not exist.” (pp 157, 8) This central argument centers around the apparent design we see in the natural world around us. He summarizes his argument in the following six points:
1 – The appearance of design is one of the greatest challenged to the human intellect.
2 – The “temptation” is to attribute design to a designer.
3 – The designer hypothesis is false because it does not explain who designed the designer.
4 – Evolution, the best explanation so far, shows that design at least for biology is an illusion.
5 – Since in evolution, apparent design is an illusion, it could be an illusion in other areas such as physics.
6 – We should not give up hope of finding better explanations elsewhere and the weak explanations we do have are better than explanations that rely on God.
I have to admit that when it became clear to me what his actual argument was, I was both shocked and disappointed. I was disappointed because, despite his simplistic approach to the whole subject of religion up to this point, I was still expecting something a little more substantial. This was particularly the case when, in a section on Irreducible Complexity, he spends several pages refuting the claims made in a Jehovah Witness’s track.
This again reveals a major flaw in Dawkins thinking and his approach, though in his defense, it is one common to all groups. All groups of any size, be they political, religious, or whatever, have those who are on the fringe. By their very nature of being on the fringe they often make arguments that are not representative of the whole, but despite this, opponents often see refuting the fringe to be the same as refuting the whole.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are a small group that are not orthodox Christians and thus not even representative of Christianity, much less theism in general. They are also marked by strong tendency towards anti-intellectualism. Yet Dawkins still spends several pages on one of their tracts, refuting a source that even most theists would not take seriously.
Not only was I disappointed, I was shocked as to just how bad his argument actually was. In fact, given point six, it is more an expression of hope than an actual rational argument.
If taken as an argument, there are problems with each of his six points. At first blush, point one may seem reasonable, particularly since it claims the problem of apparent design is only “one of the greatest challenges.” Yet it has a hidden assumption that is very much a problem. In short, apparent design would only be a problem if there wasn’t a designer.
To be clear, it may be a very great challenge to discover the identity of the designer and perhaps how they executed their design, but the design itself would not be. To see this, imagine that that the first explorers to Mars were to find a watch laying on the ground. While it might be a very difficult problem to discover how the watch came to be there, the fact that the watch had been designed would probably not be an issue at all. As such, apparent design in the natural world around us is only a great problem if design is something that needs to be explained away without resorting to a designer. Thus Dawkins argument falls victim to circular reasoning right off the bat, as his initial premise assumes his conclusion.
This circular reasoning probably underlies the slanting found in point two when Dawkins talks about the “temptation” to attribute apparent design to a designer as if it this were somehow inherently a false choice to be resisted. While no doubt this is Dawkins’ view, to build it into his argument in this fashion is illegitimate and perhaps shows that even he sees the weakness of his argument and feels a need to push the reader with his choice of words, rather than relying on the strength of his reasoning.
The problem in point three, who designed the designer, again results from Dawkins’ simplistic approach to the entire subject. The key problem for Dawkins is that whether something was designed or not designed, only comes into play for things that had a beginning. The issue of design is inherently linked with the question of how something came into existence. It is therefore meaningless when discussing things that have always existed. By definition design must precede existence. As such, when talking about an eternal God, the question of who designed God is an irrational question, akin to asking ‘What is the difference between a duck?’ It may at first sounds like a question, but the more you think about it the less sense it makes.
So, Dawkins third points, is simply false, at least if one is referring to a God such as the eternal God of the Bible. I will look at the problems in the remaining points next time, but it is important to remember that if the premises of an argument are flawed, the argument itself is unsound. Based on the first three points, Dawkins argument already fails.
This is Elgin Hushbeck, asking you to Consider Christianity: a Faith Based on Fact.
Isn’t Cleaner Better?
Many people have fallback arguments. Fallback arguments are those argument people resort to when their normal arguments fail. These arguments attempt to shift the framework of a debate to such an extent that an opponent is caught off guard and unable to respond, usually with some vague statement of good that is hard to oppose. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor clearly has such a fall back argument when it comes to global warming. In fact, given the problems that have become apparent with the theory of man-made global warming and Al Gore’s movie on the subject, O’Reilly has used it frequently of late: that fighting Global warming would at least make the world cleaner, and isn’t cleaning up the world a good thing?
I have seen O’Reilly use this fallback argument on several occasions, and so far, at least in the limited time constraints of TV, it has worked well for him. After all how can one argue against a cleaner environment, particularly when O’Reilly adds the caveat, as he sometimes does, as long as it does not destroy the economy? The problem is that we are not having a general discussion on what measures we could take to clean up the environment without destroying the economy. The debate is about human caused Global warming and specific measures being proposed to correct it.
In addition, O’Reilly argument is a based on a false premise which is that the main effort to stop global warming, the reduction of CO2, would make the environment cleaner. This is false because CO2 is not really a pollutant. CO2 released into the atmosphere is not like an oil spill in the ocean that needs to be cleaned up. CO2 is a naturally occurring substance, and is a vital one at that. “Clean up” all the CO2 and you doom all life on earth, for plants need CO2 to live. Plants take CO2 and release Oxygen as a waste material. Animals take oxygen and release CO2 as a waste material. You release CO2 into the atmosphere, every time you exhale. Calling CO2 a pollutant, strains the concept of what is a pollutant. In fact, calling CO2 a pollutant is really little more than a public relation ploy because most people (and O’Reilly includes himself in this group) have no idea of what CO2 is or the important role it plays, but they know that pollutants are bad things and to be opposed. So calling CO2 a pollutant and then claiming it needs to be cleaned up automatically puts the public, and O’Reilly, on the environmentalist side, and casts opponents in a bad light by making them defend a “polluted world.” On the other hand, if you see CO2 as a natural and vital part of the environment, O’Reilly’s fall back argument falls apart. Why waste a lot of money to clean up something that is not dirty?
This is especially true given the huge ambiguities surrounding the entire issue. While the earth has probably warmed in recent years, even that is not completely certain, as the increase has been very small and there are a lot of factors that must be estimated to arrive at the final result. But even if we assume that all these estimates are correct, and that the earth has indeed warmed, it is not at all certain it will continue to do so. Based on solar cycles, there are some scientists who say that we are about to enter a period of cooling. But again if we assume that the global warming activists are correct and that we will continue to warm, it is even less certain that human activity is having any significant effect. The word ‘significant’ is key, as it would be virtually impossible not to have some effect. If the human race consisted of only a single small tribe, who had a campfire every night that would have “some effect”, even if a completely insignificant one. So when supporters of Global warming ask if human being are having any effect on Global warming, the answer is of course yes, but the real question how much are we affecting Global warming?
It is pretty clear that much of the recent warming is not the result of human activity. After all, scientist have not only found that the earth is warming, but have found that other planets in the solar system have also warmed, which is to be expected if cycles in the Sun are responsible for the warming, but completely unexplainable if humans were the cause. But even if human activity is responsible for 10% of the warming, which would be a large amount given the amount of CO2, which is released naturally versus the amount released by human activity, and we were to cut the effect we had in half, which would be a huge reduction with major social upheavals and negative effects on people lives, that would only be a 5% reduction and would leave 95% of the warming. In short, not only is there doubt about whether we are a significant part of the cause, even if we are, there is doubt about our ability to do anything significant about it.
In short, we might waste a lot of money, for a problem that might not exist, and even if it does, our effort would have minimal effect, except that in the process we would cause a lot of suffering. More next time.
A Review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion Part IX
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Oct 26, 2007, Wausau, Wi — In the last installment of my review of Richard Dawkins’, “The God Delusion” I looked at Dawkins’ attempted refutation of Aquinas arguments for the existence of God how some of the recent discoveries in science have put atheists like Dawkins in paradox when it comes to the definition of natural and supernatural. But there are even more problems with Dawkins’ attempted refutation of Aquinas arguments.
To summarize (and simplify), Aquinas had argued that an infinite sequence of linked events such as cause and effects was impossible and since the natural world is based on such linked events, there must have been something such as a first cause, to have starting the whole process going in the first place.
In many respects the theory of the Big Bang confirms Aquinas as it shows that there was in fact a beginning to the universe, that the chain of sequences we see all around us did have a beginning. This is perhaps why Dawkins does not try, as some have to avoid this argument by claiming that infinite regression is in fact possible.
Instead, as we cited last time, Dawkins uses the example of cutting gold in half, again and again. Eventually you reach a single atom. If you cut the atom into pieces you no longer have gold. Thus the atom is a natural terminator to the sequence, and since this sequence has a natural terminator, Aquinas’ regression might also have a natural terminator.
Again, there are many problems with Dawkins’ argument. Perhaps the most surprising is that this argument actually parallels Aquinas’, as key for Aquinas is that infinite regression is impossible, and to refute it Dawkins cites a regression that does not go on forever.
While Dawkins does this to claim that Aquinas’ first cause might be natural, there is a major problem. Aquinas’ arguments are based on things that are inherently linked, such as cause and effect where one is depended in some fashion on the other. A chicken comes from an egg. No egg, No chicken. The egg came from an earlier chicken, no earlier chicken no egg. And so on and so on.
Yet the sequence that Dawkins cites has no such link. If you have a piece of gold there is no way to tell if it was cut from a large piece or made by combining smaller pieces. In short, there is no inherent link between a piece of gold and cutting, in the way that there is between chicken and an egg.
Thus the sequence that Dawkins cites to try and refute Aquinas is a completely different type of sequence than Aquinas was referring to. Another way to look at this is to see that that a block of gold is made up of smaller pieces of down to a single atom of gold. While it may be divided in a series of cuts, down to a single atom, even as a block of gold, it still exists as group of atoms. Any sequence of dividing the block happens only as we may choose to cut it.
The sequences that Aquinas was referring to were truly sequential, with each step depending on the ones before it. A chicken cannot be fully grown and still in its egg at the same time. It is in its egg before it can hatch, it must hatch before it can grow to maturity, it must grow to maturity before it can lay other eggs. If this was the same type of sequence as Dawkins, then the all could and would exist simultaneously. So Dawkins supposed refutation seem to have completely missed its mark, and actually provides some support for Aquinas.
Much the same can be said for many of the other arguments in this chapter. While Dawkins does ok on some of the weaker less convincing arguments for God’s existence, on the stronger arguments, it is hard to take Dawkins’ refutation seriously, for his simplistic approach to the subject means that he does not take these arguments seriously and therefore, as with these arguments from Aquinas, fails to really address them.
However, this may not be totally his fault. After the philosophers of the 17th and 18th century, these arguments were considered to have little more than historical importance and were not taken seriously, and this is probably what Dawkins was taught in school. As a scientist, he may not be up to date with current philosophical discussions. But over the latter part of the 20th century, philosophers began to realize that the finding of science had undermined the earlier rejection of these arguments. As such they are once again being seriously considered.
So we are still left with the regression of sequences like cause and effect. These cannot go on forever, but must have a beginning, a first cause. This first cause cannot itself be caused, for if it were, it would not be the first. It cannot be part of the natural universe, because if it were it could not then have caused the natural universe. Since time is part of the natural universe, and was created when the universe was created, this first cause must be eternal. And it must be powerful enough to have caused the universe.
Thus Aquinas’ argument still leaves us with an eternal supernatural first cause, powerful enough to have created the entire universe. While not a complete description of God, it is a good start.
This is Elgin Hushbeck, asking you to Consider Christianity: a Faith Based on Fact.
