Hawking on God

Following the media hype surrounding Professor Stephen Hawking’s new book, there seems to be two conclusions emerging:

1) If you want to call the laws of physics God, then go ahead.

2) We are never really going to know why the laws of physics are as they are.

The Dawkins Delusion

If you are looking for evidence of the existence of God, you won’t find it in Doctor Alister McGrath’s The Dawkins Delusion. You will need to look elsewhere for that. In fact, you would probably spend more time contemplating “the mind of God”, as Professor Stephen Hawking puts it, in A Brief History of Time.

The Dawkins Delusion… (I believe a question mark follows after “Delusion”, but because of the lopsided way it is plastered on the front cover, I am going to treat it as artistic licence. If McGrath intended "The Dawkins Delusion" to be a serious question, he would have put a question mark at the end of the word "Delusion" to avoid ambiguity, so I am going to leave it out in this post)…

…I’ll start again…

The Dawkins Delusion is an intellectual point scoring match played against The God Delusion. McGrath gives himself 65 pages to battle it out against The God Delusion’s 420 pages, and he isn’t going to waste an opportunity to imply that this leaves him with a disadvantage.

“Yet the fact that Dawkins has penned a 400-page book declaring that God is a delusion is itself highly significant,” McGrath writes on the first page of his introduction. “Why is such a book still necessary?” he screams in italics (pg vii). “Every one of Dawkins’ misrepresentations and overstatements can be challenged and corrected. Yet a book that merely offered such a litany of corrections would be catatonically boring,” he adds by way of a get out clause (pg xii). One of the first things Professor Steve Jones said at the mention of Richard Dawkins during the Theos “Did Darwin Kill God?” debate at Westminster Abbey in May was that Dawkins had sold over 1.5 million copies of The God Delusion. Jones admitted, humorously, a twinge of envy in the same breath as acknowledging Dawkins’ achievement. McGrath will do neither.

Instead, McGrath ends the introduction to his book by telling his readers why he thinks they have got round to reading it:

“This book, I suspect, will be read mainly by Christians who want to know what to say to their friends who have read The God Delusion, and are wondering if believers really are as perverted, degenerate and unthinking as the book makes them out to be.” (pg xiii)

If there was ever a sentence McGrath must regret having ever written, it is that one. WHY does he think that Christians will not read The God Delusion?! Does he think they are too lily-livered to make it through the 400 pages? Or does he think the majority of Christians do not have the intelligence to understand Dawkins’ arguments? I would like to ask him. As it is, McGrath begins his 65 pages by insulting the intelligence of his readers; a condescension that is difficult to shake off for the rest of his argument.

But that is not to say that McGrath doesn’t score any points. He does. This one is a classic example:

“I would place Dawkins (and Dennett) in the broad tradition of naturalist explanation of religion which includes Feuerbach, Marx and Freud. Whatever the benefits of religions might be, these writers believe that they arise entirely inside human minds. No spiritual realities exist outside us. Natural explanations may be given of the origins of belief in God. In the end, this is a circular argument, which presupposes its conclusions. It begins from the assumption that there is no God, and then proceeds to show that an explanation of God can be offered which is entirely consistent with this. In fact, it is basically an atheist reworking of Thomas Aquinas’ ‘Five Ways’, arguing that a consistent account of things may be offered without being obliged to propose the existence of God.” (pg 31)

Very good. A nice return, especially as McGrath takes on the mince meat that Dawkins makes of Thomas Aquinas’ ‘Five Ways’:

“For example, Dawkins takes issue with the approaches developed by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, traditionally known as the ‘Five Ways’. The general consensus among philosophers of religion is that, while such arguments cast interesting light on the questions, they settle nothing. Although traditionally referred to as ‘arguments for God’s existence’, this is not an accurate description. All they do is show the inner consistency of belief in God – in much the same way the classic arguments for atheism (such as Ludwig Feuerbach’s famous idea of the ‘projection’ of God: see pp.28-9) demonstrate its inner consistency, but not its evidential foundations.” (pg 7)

I would have liked to have read McGrath exploring the idea of the ‘projection’ of God much more than he does. At best, he offers an ontological response to the idea:

“There is no God.
But lots of people believe in God. Why?
Because they want consolation.
So they project or objectify their longings, and call this ‘God’.
So this non-existent ‘God’ is simply the projection of human longings.

It’s a fascinating argument, and has had a deep impact on western culture. It has problems, however. For a start, wanting something is no demonstration that it does not exist. Human thirst points to the need for water.” (pg 28)

Not so good. A poor return. The ontological argument really is pure armchair ratiocination, as Dawkins terms it, and it is a wonder that Camp Quest uses it to disprove God’s existence in the staple “Unicorn Game”(http://tinyurl.com/mus9l5). It’s fun, but that’s all.

A friend of mine recently tried to rib me by saying that I deify Dawkins. Me? Deify Dawkins?! I believe the misunderstanding occurred because I said that Dawkins had successfully challenged the existence of God. But “challenged” is not the same as “disproven”.

The last argument against the existence of God which I read (not from Dawkins) before writing this sentence was that "God cannot exist because He is a contradiction in terms". Right. And the only way to get out of double-think is to double-unthink it.



Note: page references to The Dawkins Delusion are from the 2007 paperback version.

The God Delusion

I want to start by saying I have not read Steve Grand’s Creation: Life and How to Make It from which Professor Richard Dawkins takes the paragraph I am about to share with you. I want to say that because I may be interpreting the paragraph, quoted in The God Delusion, in a way that I might not have if I had read the book. But given that I read this today, I wanted to share it now as it maybe of interest to anyone else thrilled by the possibilities of identity:

Steve Grand, Dawkins writes, invites readers to think:

“… of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you were really there at the time, weren’t you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren’t there. Not a single atom that is part of your body today was there when that event took place… Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that doesn’t make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.”*

*Here there is a footnote from Dawkins who adds: “Some might dispute the literal truth of Grand’s statement, for example in the case of bone molecules. But the spirit of it is surely valid. You are more like a wave than a static material ‘thing’.” (pg 416)

Isn’t that wonderful to think about?

The final section of the God Delusion, entitled Inspiration, reads almost like a poem to science and I am especially grateful to Dawkins’ for his perspective of quantum mechanics through his quoting on page 409 of Richard Feynman, “If you think you have understood quantum theory…you don’t understand quantum theory” and Niels Bohr, “Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.” (I am remembering a particularly frustrating conversation I had with a physicist a while back.) Less helpful, however, is the absence of Feynman and Bohr from Dawkins’ “Books Cited or Recommended” reading list at the end of The God Delusion. That does seem a rather negligent oversight, given the scientific thesis. But he does cite David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality in the list, which embraces the ‘many worlds’ theory of quantum mechanics.

Reading the God Delusion is a rich intellectual journey spanning a wave of emotions from amusement to rage. Particularly infuriating, for example, are his views on sexual abuse in chapter nine. Particularly funny, on the other hand, is his rebuttal of the ontological argument for God’s existence by imagining two kids arguing it out in the playground (pg 104). Illuminating was his inclusion (in a footnote, bizarrely) of A.N. Wilson’s claim in a biography of Jesus that the (particularly Catholic) understanding of Mary being a virgin came about via a mistranslation of the Hebrew word for young woman, “almah” into the Greek word for virgin, “parthenos”(pg 122). Baffling was his sci-fi digression at the end of chapter two (the tone here is earnest):

“Science-fiction authors, such as Daniel F. Galouye in Counterfeit World, have even suggested (and I cannot think how to disprove it) that we live in a computer simulation, set up by some vastly superior civilization. But the simulators themselves would have had to come from somewhere. The laws of probability forbid all notions of their spontaneously appearing without simpler antecedents. They probably owe their existence to a (perhaps unfamiliar) version of Darwinian evolution: some sort of cumulatively ratcheting ‘crane’ as opposed to ‘skyhook’, to use Daniel Dennett’s terminology.”
(pg 98)

But by the time we get to chapter four, the inverted commas around ‘crane’ have been dropped and there is no more mention of Daniel Dennett:

“I am not advocating some sort of narrowly scientistic way of thinking. But the very least that any honest quest for the truth must have in setting out to explain such monstrosities of impossibility as a rainforest, a coral reef, or a universe is a crane and not a skyhook. The crane doesn’t have to be natural selection. Admittedly, nobody has ever thought of a better one. But there could be others yet to be discovered. Maybe the ‘inflation’ that physicists postulate as occupying some fraction of the first yoctosecond of the universe’s existence will turn out, when it is better understood, to be a cosmological crane to stand alongside Darwin’s biological one.” (pg 185)

That, to me, is exciting, especially as love can act as a cosmic force. The idea of the multiverse and the anthropic principle excites as well.

I am also enlightened from having read sentences like these in The God Delusion:

“The late King of the Belgians is a candidate for sainthood, because of his stand on abortion. Earnest investigations are now going on to discover whether any miraculous cures can be attributed to prayers offered up to him since his death. I am not joking. That is the case, and it is typical of the saint stories. I imagine the whole business is an embarrassment to more sophisticated circles within the Church. Why any circles worthy of the name sophisticated remain in the Church is a mystery at least as deep as the ones theologians enjoy.” (pg 83/84)

And this:

“Time and time again my theologian friends returned to the point that there must be a reason why there is something rather than nothing. There must have been a first cause of everything, and we might as well give it the name God. Yes, I said, but it must have been simple and therefore, whatever else we call it, God is not an appropriate name (unless we very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers).” (pg 184/5)

I know people, theists and non-theists alike, who admit they haven't read The God Delusion because they fear they will not be able to stomach Dawkins' tone. Really, it is not so bad. I think he would only really upset a fundamentalist.

(Note: page references correspond to the 2007 paperback edition.)