Some of you may be wondering: “Does God exist?” Fortunately, Richard Dawkins has written a new book, The God Delusion, that addresses precisely this question. As it turns out, the answer is: “No, God does not exist.” (Admittedly, Dawkins reached his conclusion before the Cards won the World Series.)
Nevertheless, there remains a spot of controversy — it would appear that Dawkins’s rhetorical force is insufficient to persuade some theists. One example is provided by literary critic Terry Eagleton, who reviewed The God Delusion for the London Review of Books. Eagleton’s review has already been discussed among some of my favorite blogs: 3 Quarks Daily, Pharyngula, Uncertain Principles, and the Valve (twice), to name a few. But it provides a good jumping-off point for an examination of one of the common arguments used against scientifically-minded atheists: “You’re setting up a straw man by arguing against a naive and anthropomorphic view of `God’; if only you engaged with more sophisticated theology, you’d see that things are not so cut-and-dried.”
Before jumping in, I should mention that I have somewhat mixed feelings about Dawkins’s book myself. I haven’t read it very thoroughly, not because it’s not good, but for the same reason that I rarely read popular cosmology books from cover to cover: I’ve mostly seen this stuff before, and already agree with the conclusions. But Dawkins has a strategy that is very common among atheist polemicists, and with which I tend to disagree. That’s to simultaneously tackle three very different issues:
- Does God exist? Are the claims of religion true, as statements about the fundamental nature of the universe?
- Is religious belief helpful or harmful? Does it do more bad than good, or vice-versa?
- Why are people religious? Is there some evolutionary-psychological or neurological basis for why religion is so prevalent?
All of these questions are interesting. But, from where I am sitting, the last two are incredibly complicated issues about which it is very difficult to say anything definitive, at least at this point in our intellectual history. Whereas the first one is relatively simple. By mixing them up, the controversial accounts of history and psychology tend to dilute the straightforward claim that there’s every reason to disbelieve in the existence of God. When Dawkins suggests that the Troubles in Northern Ireland should be understood primarily as a religious schism between Catholics and Protestants, he sacrifices some of the credibility he may have had if he had stuck to the more straightforward issue of whether or not religion is true.
Right out of the gate, Eagleton bashes Dawkins for dabbling in things he doesn’t understand.
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology…
What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them?
These questions, of course, have absolutely no relevance to the matter at hand; they are just an excuse for Eagleton to show off a bit of erudition. If Dawkins is right, and religion is simply a “delusion,” a baroque edifice built upon a foundation of mistakes and wishful thinking, then the views of Eriugena on subjectivity are completely beside the point. Not all of theology directly concerns the question of whether or not God exists; much of it accepts the truth of that proposition, and goes from there. The question is whether that’s a good starting point. If an architect shows you a grand design for a new high-rise building, you don’t have to worry about the floor plan for the penthouse apartment if you notice that the foundation is completely unstable.
But underneath Eagleton’s bluster lies a potentially-relevant critique. After all, some sophisticated theology is about whether or not God exists, and more importantly about the nature of God. Eagleton understands this, and gamely tries to explain how the concept of God is different from other things in the world:
For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or “existent”: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.
Okay, very good. God, in this conception, is not some thing out there in the world (or even outside the world), available to be poked and prodded and have his beard tugged upon. Eagleton rightly emphasizes that ordinary-language concepts such as “existence” might not quite be up to the task of dealing with God, at least not in the same way that they deal with Al Gore. A precisely similar analysis holds for less controversial ideas, such as the Schrödinger equation. There is a sense in which the Schrödinger equation “exists”; after all, wavefunctions seem to be constantly obeying it. But, whatever it may mean to say “the Schrödinger equation exists,” it certainly doesn’t mean the same kind of thing as to say “Al Gore exists.” We’re borrowing a term that makes perfect sense in one context and stretching its meaning to cover a rather different context, and emphasizing that distinction is a philosophically honorable move.
But then we run somewhat off the rails.
This, not some super-manufacturing, is what is traditionally meant by the claim that God is Creator. He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning. To say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than need. The world was not the consequence of an inexorable chain of cause and effect. Like a Modernist work of art, there is no necessity about it at all, and God might well have come to regret his handiwork some aeons ago. The Creation is the original acte gratuit. God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will impress his research grant body no end.
The previous excerpt, which defined God as “the condition of possibility,” seemed to be warning against the dangers of anthropomorphizing the deity, ascribing to it features that we would normally associate with conscious individual beings such as ourselves. A question like “Does `the condition of possibility’ exist?” would never set off innumerable overheated arguments, even in a notoriously contentious blogosphere. If that were really what people meant by “God,” nobody would much care. It doesn’t really mean anything — like Spinoza’s pantheism, identifying God with the natural world, it’s just a set of words designed to give people a warm and fuzzy feeling. As a pragmatist, I might quibble that such a formulation has no operational consequences, as it doesn’t affect anything relevant about how we think about the world or act within it; but if you would like to posit the existence of a category called “the condition of possibility,” knock yourself out.
But — inevitably — Eagleton does go ahead and burden this innocent-seeming concept with all sorts of anthropomorphic baggage. God created the universe “out of love,” is capable of “regret,” and “is an artist.” That’s crazy talk. What could it possibly mean to say that “The condition of possibility is an artist, capable of regret”? Nothing at all. Certainly not anything better-defined than “My envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.” And once you start attributing to God the possibility of being interested in some way about the world and the people in it, you open the door to all of the nonsensical rules and regulations governing real human behavior that tend to accompany any particular manifestation of religious belief, from criminalizing abortion to hiding women’s faces to closing down the liquor stores on Sunday.
The problematic nature of this transition — from God as ineffable, essentially static and completely harmless abstract concept, to God as a kind of being that, in some sense that is perpetually up for grabs, cares about us down here on Earth — is not just a minor bump in the otherwise smooth road to a fully plausible conception of the divine. It is the profound unsolvable dilemma of “sophisticated theology.” It’s a millenia-old problem, inherited from the very earliest attempts to reconcile two fundamentally distinct notions of monotheism: the Unmoved Mover of ancient Greek philosophy, and the personal/tribal God of Biblical Judaism. Attempts to fit this square peg into a manifestly round hole lead us smack into all of the classical theological dilemmas: “Can God microwave a burrito so hot that He Himself cannot eat it?” The reason why problems such as this are so vexing is not because our limited human capacities fail to measure up when confronted with the divine; it’s because they are legitimately unanswerable questions, arising from a set of mutually inconsistent assumptions.
It’s worth the effort to dig into the origin of these two foundational notions of God, in order to get straight just how incompatible they really are. Until the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, Israelite religion was straightforwardly polytheistic, as much as the Greeks or Romans or Norse ever were. Originally, the Canaanite High God El (often translated simply as “God” in modern Bibles) was a completely distinct creature from Yahweh (often translated as “the Lord”). It’s not until Exodus 3:6 that Yahweh asserts to Moses that he should be identified with El, the God of Abraham. (Why do you think that Yahweh’s very First Commandment insists on not having any other gods before him?) Remnants of Judaism’s polytheistic origins linger on throughout the Scriptures, which are an intricately-edited pastiche of various earlier sources. Psalm 82, for example, describes Yahweh making a power play at a meeting of the various gods (the “Council of El”):
1 God presides in the great assembly;
he gives judgment among the “gods”:
and show partiality to the wicked?
Selah 3 Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless;
maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed. 4 Rescue the weak and needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked. 5 “They know nothing, they understand nothing.
They walk about in darkness;
all the foundations of the earth are shaken. 6 “I said, ‘You are “gods”;
you are all sons of the Most High.’ 7 But you will die like mere men;
you will fall like every other ruler.” 8 Rise up, O God, judge the earth,
for all the nations are your inheritance.
The quotes around “gods,” of course, are nowhere in the original Hebrew; they were inserted by the translators (this is the New International Version), who were understandably squeamish about all this talk concerning “gods” in the plural.
The development of Hebrew monotheism from its polytheistic beginnings is a long and complicated story that contemporary historians only incompletely understand; see this review of a book by Mark Smith of NYU to get some flavor of current thinking. But the crucial point is that the emergence of One God was an essentially political transformation. The ancient Hebrews, surrounded by other unfriendly nations, promoted their tribal deity Yahweh to the position of the most powerful god, promising dire consequences for any backsliders who would choose to worship Ba’al or Asherah or other pretenders (as Ahab and Jezebel learned the hard way). From there, it was a short doctrinal leap (requiring only the imaginative re-interpretation of a few Scriptural passages) to declare that Yahweh was the only God out there — the well-known others weren’t merely subordinate, they were imaginary. Even in its own right, this claim was somewhat problematic, as Yahweh had to serve double duty as the God of the Hebrews and also the only god in existence. But the conception of God as some sort of being who cared about the fate of the people of Israel was relatively sustainable; none of the Prophets went around defining Yahweh as “the condition of possibility,” or even ascribing characteristics of omniscience and omnipotence to the deity.
Meanwhile, the ancient Greeks were developing monotheism for their own purposes — essentially philosophical rather than political. They had quite the robust pantheon of individual gods, but it was clear to most careful thinkers that these were closer to amusingly anthropomorphic fairy tales than to deep truths about the structure of the universe. Unsurprisingly, the monotheistic conception reached its pinnacle in the work of Aristotle. In the Metaphysics, he presented a version of what we now know as the cosmological argument for the existence of God, which (in Wikipedia’s rendering) goes something like this:
- Every effect has a cause.
- Nothing can cause itself.
- A causal chain cannot be of infinite length.
- Therefore, there must be a first cause; or, there must be something which is not an effect.
Admittedly, this is merely an informal paraphrase of the argument. But the more careful versions don’t change the essential fact that these days, the cosmological proof is completely anachronistic. Right after step one — “Every effect has a cause” — the only sensible response is “No it doesn’t.” Or at least, “What is that supposed to mean”?
To make sense of the cosmological argument, it’s important to realize that Aristotle’s metaphysics was predicated to an important extent on his physics. (Later variations by theologians from Aquinas to Leibniz don’t alter the essence of the argument.) To the ancient Greeks, the behavior of matter was teleological; earth wanted to fall down, fire wanted to rise toward the heavens. And once it reached its desired destination, it just sat there. According to Aristotle, if we want to keep an object moving we have to keep pushing it. And he’s right, of course, if we are thinking about the vast majority of macroscopic objects in our everyday world — which seems like a perfectly reasonable set of objects to think about. If you push a book along a table, and then stop pushing it, it will come to rest. If you want it to keep moving, you have to keep pushing it. That “effect” — the motion of the book — without a doubt requires a “cause” — you pushing it. It doesn’t seem like much of a leap to extend such an analysis to the entire universe, implying the existence of an ineffable, perfectly static First Cause, or Unmoved Mover.
But the God of the Judeo-Christian Bible is very far from being “Unmoved.” He’s quite the mover, actually — smiting people here, raising the dead there. All very befitting, considering his origin as a local tribal deity. But utterly incompatible with the perfect and unchanging Aristotelian notion of God.
For the past two thousand years, theology has struggled to reconcile these two apparently-conflicting conceptions of the divine, without much success. We are left with fundamentally incoherent descriptions of what God is, which deny that he “exists” in the same sense that hummingbirds and saxophones do, but nevertheless attribute to him qualities of “love” and “creativity” that conventionally belong to conscious individual beings. One might argue that it’s simply a hard problem, and our understanding is incomplete; after all, we haven’t come up with a fully satisfactory way to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics, either. But there is a more likely possibility: there simply is no reconciliation to be had. The reason why it’s difficult to imagine how God can be eternally perfect and also occasionally wistful is that God doesn’t exist.
In fact, in this day and age the flaws in Aristotle’s cosmological proof (just to pick one) are perfectly clear. Our understanding of the inner workings of the physical world has advanced quite a bit since the ancient Greeks. Long ago, Galileo figured out that the correct way to think about motion was to abstract from messy real-world situations to idealized circumstances in which dissipative effects such as friction and air resistance could be ignored. (They can always be restored later as perturbations.) Only then do we realize that what matter really wants to do is to maintain its motion at a constant speed, until it is explicitly acted upon by some external force. Except that, once we have made this breakthrough, we realize that the matter doesn’t want to do anything — it just does it. Modern physics doesn’t describe the world in terms of “causes” and “effects.” It simply posits that matter (in the form of quantum fields, or strings, or what have you) acts in accordance with certain dynamical laws, known as “equations of motion.” The notion of “causality” is downgraded from “when I see B happening, I know it must be because of A” to “given some well-defined and suitably complete set of information about the initial state of a system, I can use the equations of motion to determine its subsequent evolution.” But a concept like “cause” doesn’t appear anywhere in the equations of motion themselves, nor in the specification of the type of matter being described; it is only an occasionally-appropriate approximation, useful to us humans in narrating the behavior of some macroscopic configuration of equation-obeying matter.
In other words, the universe runs all by itself. The planets orbit the Sun, not because anything is “causing” them to do so, but because that’s the kind of behavior that obeys Newton’s (or Einstein’s) equations governing motion in the presence of gravity. Deeply embedded as we are in this Galilean/Newtonian framework, statements like “every effect has a cause” become simply meaningless. (We won’t even bother with “A causal chain cannot be of infinite length,” which completely begs the question.) Conservation of momentum completely undermines any force the cosmological argument might ever have had. The universe, like everything in it, can very well just be, as long as its pieces continue to obey the relevant equations of motion.
Special pleading that the universe is essentially different from its constituents, and (by nature of its unique status as all that there is to the physical world) that it could not have either (1) just existed forever, nor (2) come spontaneously into existence all by itself, is groundless. The only sensible response such skepticism is “Why not?” It’s certainly true that we don’t yet know whether the universe is eternal or whether it had a beginning, and we certainly don’t understand the details of its origin. But there is absolutely no obstacle to our eventually figuring those things out, given what we already understand about physics. General relativity asserts that spacetime itself is dynamical; it can change with time, and potentially even be created from nothing, in a way that is fundamentally different from the Newtonian conception (much less the Aristotelian). And quantum mechanics describes the universe in terms of a wavefunction that assigns amplitudes to any of an infinite number of possibilities, including — crucially — spontaneous transitions, unforced by any cause. We don’t yet know how to describe the origin of the universe in purely physical terms, but someday we will — physicists are working on the problem every day.
The analogy to a penthouse apartment atop a high-rise building is quite apt. Much of the intricate architecture of modern theology is built on a foundation that conceives of God as both creator and sustainer of the world and as a friendly and loving being. But these days we know better. The Clockwork Universe of Galileo and Newton has once and for all removed the need for anything to “sustain” the universe, and the “creation” bit is something on which we are presently closing in.
In fact, although it is rarely discussed in history books, the influence of the conservation of momentum on theological practice is fairly evident. One response was a revival of Pyrrhonian skepticism, which claimed that it was simply wrong even to attempt to apply logic and rationality to questions of religion — claiming that you had “proven” the existence of God could get you accused of atheism. The other, more robust response, was a turn to natural theology and the argument from design. Even if the universe could keep going all by itself, surely its unguided meanderings would never produce something as wonderfully intricate as (for example) the human eye? The argument doesn’t hold up very well even under purely philosophical scrutiny — David Hume’s devastating take-down in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, interestingly, actually pre-dates William Paley’s classic statement of the argument (1779 vs. 1802). Hume, for example, points out that, even if the argument from design works, it allows us to conclude next to nothing about the nature of the Designer. Maybe it was a team? Maybe our universe is a rough first draft for a much better later universe? Or even just a mistake? (Okay, that has something going for it.)
But then, of course, Darwin’s theory of natural selection undercut the justification for the design argument just as thoroughly as classical mechanics undercut the justification for the cosmological argument. Indeed, the unpurposeful meanderings of matter in the universe can produce the wonderful intricacies of the human eye, and much else besides. Believers haven’t given up entirely; you’ll now more commonly find the argument from design placed in a cosmological context, where it is even less convincing. But for the most part, theologians have basically abandoned the project of “proving” God’s existence, which is probably a good move.
But they haven’t given up on believing in God’s existence (suitably defined), which is what drives atheists like Dawkins (and me) a little crazy. Two thousand years ago, believing in God made perfect sense; there was so much that we didn’t understand about the world, and an appeal to the divine seemed to help explain the otherwise inexplicable. Those original motivations have long since evaporated. In response, theologians have continued to alter what they mean by “God,” and struggled to reconcile the notion’s apparent internal contradictions — unwilling to take those contradictions as a signal of the fundamental incoherence of the idea.
To be fair, much of Dawkins’s book does indeed take aim at a rather unsophisticated form of belief, one that holds a much more literal (and wholly implausible, not to mention deeply distasteful) notion of what God means. That’s not a completely unwarranted focus, even if it does annoy the well-educated Terry Eagletons of the world; after all, that kind of naive theology is a guiding force among a very large and demonstrably influential fraction of the population. The reality of a religion is manifested in the actions of its adherents. But even an appeal to more nuanced thinking doesn’t save God from the dustbin of intellectual history. The universe is going to keep existing without any help, peacefully solving its equations of motion along the way; if we want to find meaning through compassion and love, we have to create it ourselves.
Spock: Captain, my tricorder readings show… nothing.
Kirk: Then it must be… HIM!
Bones: I’ll bet that pointy-eared Vulcan is behind this!
God: Prepare to beam… “up”.
Amazing review. The best I’ve seen so far on TGD and on Eagleton’s silly putdown of it.
In other words, “The Rapture!” (Now, don’t start giving these people any ideas!)
Island:
That the universe appears to be designed is not new to Dawkins’ views or any evolutionary biologists’, including Darwin. It was precisely the appearance of design that Darwinian biology has set up to explain since the 19th century. I think you are probably misinterpreting Dawkins’ occasional use of rhetoric that might appeal to creationists in order to drive his point home more forcefully (which he admits to in TGD).
Yeah, Jose’, I was very specific about what I was talking about, and it wasn’t about Richard’s admission that the ‘blind forces are, as he used to say, “deployed in a very special way”… and just what gives you the crazy idea that evidence that this appearance can be for “design”, in lieu of any other form of natural bias? You add the extra entitiy of “intelligent intent” without proof that this is what is behind the apparent purpose.
You found blueprints?… or maybe some other form of direct proof for your otherwise unfounded leap of faith beyond nature?… or does your “free-thinking” world-view enable you to detatch yourself from the natural process of the ecosystem from which we arrose and **BELONG TOO**… especially given that it is a hard known fact that ecobalances are as **self-regulating** as the coincidence that holds the universe flat.
Speaking of arrogance, me thinks that if I ask you to use the term, “arrogance” in context with the term, “anthropic principle”… then this will reveal a non-scientific predispositioning to evidence that we’re not here by accident that necessarily adversely affects interpretation.
I used to be an atheist. Something happened to me that I can not explain to someone who does not believe. I could not foresee it happening to me. God is an experience, an encounter that happens when you least expect it. Debates and arguments and conjecture are irrelevant. It only obscures your mind and hardens your heart. I understand wanting to tear down archaic structures that seem to plod along indifferent to what goes on in the world today, but they are no more God than you.
To Kristine (#30) “I have come to see the unthinking process of matter as a wonder in itself, even a comfort—isn’t it more optimistic to realize that unthinking processes have their end in thinking beings who can create their own purpose (should we choose to), instead of having an alien “purpose” imposed upon us from outside of ourselves? I had almost two decades of Bible study, and all it taught me was that I hate being told what my “purpose” is.”
Your astute comment caught my attention because it echoed words my dear departed ex-dad-in-law said about 30 years ago–almost verbatim–that whenever he looked at a rock (he was a geologist) or a mountain, or a nautilous, he saw that unthinking process as a wonder in itself.
That is the way I still see it at age 69. As a child I was shuttled around to about 25 foster homes and each family made me attend a different church, each of which unfailingly condemned the other, and all were Christian. I asked too many questions amd got into trouble because I dared question a god who had a son who preached hell and sin and redemption. It all made no sense even as a kid. I enjoyed the Bible, but also decided it was no more true than the Iliad. In the 40s and 50s somehow I had discovered we created this god in our own image, not vice versa. I was further encouraged by one very caring free-thinking foster family with an extensive library, to read Bertrand Russell and Darwin among others and make my own decisions. I applaud Richard Dawkins and Sean who reviewed the book.
ronan quotes Dawkins as saying “I think the issue of whether God exists is strictly a scientific question …. What I think we can do, using the methods of science and logic, is … to answer the question, ‘What is the probability; what is the likelihood, that there’s a God’ “, and Donald Flood says “modern Science can make probabilistic (albeit, subjective) estimates about God’s existence.” I am truly amazed. Please guide me to the *scientific* literature that shows how to make such estimates. What are the *experiments* to be used to establish these probabilities? What are the observational methods to be used? And will Dawkins believe in God if a 2-sigma result is achieved, or will he demand better?
I don’t believe a word of it. In my view these statements show a major misunderstanding of the limits of science, and an ignorance inter alia of the writings of Immanuel Kant and David Hume. If science is to attempt such things, it will be transgressing the boundaries of what it has been up to now and abandoning the methods that have led to its extraordinary success.
Donald Flood writes `Atheism’s response is that we, at a minimum, should “suspend judgment” to such propositions’. That is not the atheist position, that is the agnostic position – which has a lot to recommend it. It is not Dawkin’s position. He has publicly stated that people who believe in religion such as Keith Ward, the recent Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University, must be stupid – he stated that Keith must have suffered oxygen deprivation to lead to such a sorry result. Dawkins must be pretty desparate in order to have to resort to this kind of insulting personal attack on a highly intelligent and well informed academic. Keith may be mistaken, but he is not stupid.
What are the observational methods to be used?
Look in the 747 and see if there’s a junkyard dog in it.
And will Dawkins believe in God if a 2-sigma result is achieved, or will he demand better?
He’s in the same boat with Lenny now. If the landscape fails, then they’ve both found god… 😉
That is not the atheist position, that is the agnostic position…
Um… I’m a default agnostic atheist until I have personal experience with god, like “Bob”… that I can’t chalk-up to thermodynamics.
Professor Ellis,
Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, admits that he is an agnostic, in the “absolute” sense. George H. Smith, in his book Atheism: The Case Against God defines atheism more precisely, IMHO, than does Professor Dawkins, but the latter’s work is a polemic against religion and religious faith more than it is a treatise on atheism. I am an atheist, but I am also an agnostic. I am an agnostic in that I recognize that Science cannot prove or disprove a proposition which can never be tested or observed or one that cannot, in principle or theory, ever be verified or falsified. Since there are demonstrably an infinite number of such propositions that cannot ever be verified or falsified, I am an atheist in that I believe that the burden of proof is on the “believer” and not on the skeptic. In short, I do not believe in “God” in the same sense that I do not believe in Unicorns, visible or invisible; however, fundamentally, I am an agnostic with respect to both.
Regards,
Donald Flood
island and bob,
Just because you may experience(d) a natural neuro-chemical mind rush, you automatically equate that with a god/mystical/spiritual experience? It is definitely not “god”! What “god”? You have had a natural experience all within your mind as a brain process.
Study Neurological Science.
There isn’t any god.
Just because you may experience(d) a natural neuro-chemical mind rush, you automatically equate that with a god/mystical/spiritual experience?
eh, NO!… I could’a sworn that I was more clear.
Regarding Aristotle’s “infinite causal chain” argument, my memory is hazy but I suspect that this involves his distinction between “infinite in extension” and “infinite in division”. The latter he allows while the former he argues against. Someone mentioned the calculus and Zeno in this context as demonstrating that Aristotle was wrong. But that’s not the case if Aristotle’s objection to an infinite chain of causes was his specific objection to the infinity of extension.
Also, I’d like to support George Ellis’s argument in his reminder that Eagleton is objecting to Dawkins’s academic incompetency in the subject. Sean does allow this to some extent, noting that a portion of theology is concerned with the existence problem itself. But what I also notice in these comments, especially because George Ellis is a rare exceptions, is that philosophy has, I think, a stronger tradition in this area and it is inexcusable to risregard it if one is making a contemporary academically-centric argument, as I feel certain Dawkins is. As someone (not an academic myself) with a strong background in both science and philosophy, I notice in many scientists an arrogant disregard for philosophy even when they are marching resolutely across philosophical terrain. This is deeply related, in my opinion, to the common ahistoricism in contemporary science.
I certainly don’t mean to overstate my argument: I find myself often agreeing with Nietschze that science largely made philosophy obsolete. If I had to assess my own intellectual affiliations, “scientism” casts a large shadow. Even so, it’s emphatically the case that there is an indistinct boundary where metaphysics becomes physics and science is not sufficiently equipped on its own to make enquiries on the metaphysics side of that boundary. That is a competency argument in the larger sense of the word “competency”.
But the more limited sense of “competency” applies, as well. And is very important. Thinking back to the days when I used to often read sci.physics.relativity and in general my view of cranks and how to deal with them, I’m reminded that a signal characteristic of cranks is their willful lack of academic competency in the fields and theories they aim to “revolutionize”. There is an ethos in science and academia that requires competence before criticism, and rightly so. But that cranks are willfully ignorant is psychologically revealing, as well. They don’t want to have the expertise they lack because in some deep sense, they fear it. Everyone, artist or scientist or philosopher, who has a sufficient ego to believe themselves capable of playing a radical role at the center of their interests rather than the margins fears a true credentialed competency within that mileau because partly and ostensible, they fear co-option, and partly and more deeply, fear being educated out of their arrogance. All great intellectuals are arrogant and all those who are revolutionary face this challenge and rise to it. You believe you have a revolutionary insight into cosmology? You nevertheless suffer under those mandarins who control access not only because of some arbitrary ethos of “paying your dues”, but also because one’s ability to survive that test bears a direct relationship to the virtue of one’s theories. Dawkins is nothing if not arrogant. And he’s been disciplined enough to achieve a very high level of professional esteem in his field of ecology and evolutionary biology. Nevertheless, he pursues his claims about religion in the popular, not academic, sphere and he is willfully uncredentialed as he does so. As much as I respect the man in other ways, and as much as I agree with him in his essential judgement on the matter of God, I think it’s not at all unimportant that from an contemporary academic and professional point of view he appears much more the crank on this subject than he does the revolutionary and important expert.
When should one demand that an author has qualifications in the subject area they talk about?
One place where it’s useful is popular physics writing. In that case, readers are presented with scientific results, but usually only with heuristic explanations for why they are true, rather than the detailed mathematical arguments that lead to them. So one has to believe the conclusions for some reason other than the correct argument for them – and trust that the writer understands or perhaps has performed the calculations themselves. Appropriate qualifications are then an good way to decide how much trust to place in the author.
I’m not saying that every popular science writer should be so qualified – Bill Bryson seems to have done an excellent job by consulting scientists. But in general someone with qualifications should be involved.
How does ‘The God Delusion’ fit into this. As far as I can see, it doesn’t, because it is not a work of popular science. What I mean by that is that readers are not asked to trust Dawkins in his conclusions about the existence of God or the relationship between religion and ethics. Rather they are asked to assess his arguments about those matters. And those arguments are fully laid bare in the book – not in say mathematical journal articles.
Attacking Dawkins’ qualifications in theology is therefore absurd and mischevous – one should attack his arguments directly if one finds fault with them. If on the other hand one does not find fault with the arguments, then it cannot be because (as in popular science writing) the real arguments are elsewhere. What Dawkins wants to say about religion (though not evolutionary biology obviously) is all in the book. In this situation, attacking Dawkins’ qualifications is tactic used only by those who are unable to attack his arguments rationally.
“In this situation, attacking Dawkins’ qualifications is tactic used only by those who are unable to attack his arguments rationally.”
There’s a bunch of malicious bad-faith built into that accusation. Ironic, really.
At any rate, no, your conclusion about when credentials are important and when they are not is false. It implies, for example, that the author of a crank argument on a matter of physics should not be criticized for a lack of credentials just so long as the math of his/her argument is presented within the argument. Your argument also privileges mathematics in some absurd way, assuming that all non-mathematical arguments can be similarly self-contained (by your definition of “self-contained”) and thus the credentialed expertise (or lack thereof) of those making such arguments is irrelevant. What an astonishingly wide-ranging example of know-nothingness. And how provincial is the exception made for popular books on mathematically-based sciences. One might wonder if you were someone with some expertise, though limited, in a mathematically-based science and not, on the other hand, an historian or physiologist or anthropologist. You’re in luck, though, if you have anything you want to say authoritatively about those subjects yet lack credentials—by your sights, your argument will stand on their own.
“At any rate, no, your conclusion about when credentials are important and when they are not is false. It implies, for example, that the author of a crank argument on a matter of physics should not be criticized for a lack of credentials just so long as the math of his/her argument is presented within the argument.”
Indeed – that is what I think. The author of a crank arument on a matter of physics should not be criticized for a lack of credentials. Their argument should be criticized for its flaws.
“Your argument also privileges mathematics in some absurd way, assuming that all non-mathematical arguments can be similarly self-contained (by your definition of “self-contained”) and thus the credentialed expertise (or lack thereof) of those making such arguments is irrelevant.”
No – I don’t need to assume that. My only claim was that Dawkins’ arguments are, as a matter of fact, self contained. I don’t think that all nonmathematical arguments are, or have to be self-contained. Rather I was saying that it’s very hard to be self-contained in math-intensive subjects.
“You’re in luck, though, if you have anything you want to say authoritatively about those subjects yet lack credentials—by your sights, your argument will stand on their own.”
I agree. I think that when people present arguments honestly they should be criticized or praised on the basis of those arguments – and not on their `qualifications’. If someone is not ‘qualified’ (whatever that may precisely mean) it does not follow that what they are saying is incorrect. It may make it more likely that they are wrong – but that is something you check by examining their arguments – not their qualifications.
The chapter of Dawkins’ book entitled: ‘Why There Almost Certainly is no God’ presents an interesting (though not necessarily original or correct) argument. Why don’t we discuss that, instead of whether Dawkins is qualified to present it? Perhaps those who contest Dawkins’ credentials can point to the paragraphs and pages in that chapter where he errs? That is, if they’ve read the book …
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Talk of “qualifications” and “credentials” is somewhat beside the point; the issue is competency. Eagleton claims that Dawkins demonstrates a lack of competency (a lack of knowledge) and doesn’t engage with the arguments of sophisticated theology. “If they [people like Dawkins] were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster.” So Eagleton claims that Dawkins hasn’t done the necessary boning-up.
Of course, there’s very little doubt that South Asia, for example, actually exists, and that it has geopolitics; Dawkins might object that he’s being asked to bone up on the geopolitics of Middle Earth or Never Never Land.
The ironic thing is that Eagleton concedes most of the argument to Dawkins; he doesn’t really want to address the issue of whether or not God “exists,” because that is apparently, according to Eagleton, a fundamentally naive question and not something a (sophisticated) religious person worries about. In a sense, Eagleton is just as contemptuous and dismissive of much of popular, living religion as Dawkins is (“As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.”).
Galactic Chet,
I understand what you are saying. I know it has been said that a lack of oxygen to the brain gives one the euphoria of endorphins rushing to the frontal lobe or whatever.
Well, what I experienced was external, meaning it happened to me, not inside me.
I believe because I know, and that is not easy to explain to someone who has no faith to begin with. So you will always think I’m full of shit.
“If someone is not ‘qualified’ (whatever that may precisely mean) it does not follow that what they are saying is incorrect. It may make it more likely that they are wrong – but that is something you check by examining their arguments – not their qualifications.”
I don’t have time to check the arguments of all those who make assertions about that which they’ve earned no credentials. Ignoring books on physics written by non-physicists is a good practice for exactly the same reason it’s good practice to ignore books on any technical subject written by someone without credentials in that subject. If you disagree, I expect you to shortly be reading those many creationist texts rather than ignoring them.
Dawkins shouldn’t get a free pass on this just because you and I agree with his conclusions. It’s really sort of remarkable how, in pursuing your argument in Dawkins’s defense, you’ve come to sound exactly like and say exactly the same things I see the cranks say who whine about science’s supposed fetish with credentialism. “How can you crititize this book on creationism without reading it?”, they ask, smugly. “The only people who would criticize this author for having no credentials are those who are afraid to criticize his argument on its own merits”.
In my experience, scientists are more aware than almost any other class just how important credentials are when engaging in technical subjects. True, there is a tendency in some of them to do as you are doing and to make special-pleading arguments such that credentialism matters in the fields in which they have credentials and doesn’t matter in the fields they do not. But there is a cultural distaste for those who move beyond the boundaries of the expertise signaled by their credentials. This is part of the reason there is almost always backlash against scientists who become active in the popular sphere. Such scientists almost always speak authoritatively beyond their own credentialed expertise. Sagan wrote about exobiology and climate change. Dawkins about religion. Hell, most everyone already was uncomfortable with Dawkins from the day he first uttered the word “meme”. There are damn good reasons for this discomfort. If Dawkins wants to write a book on religion that he wants people like me to read and take seriously—and note that I’m an atheist—then he’d best demonstrate some credibility on the topic. Prima facie he has not for the reasons I describe, and, furthermore, while not having read this book, I have read others of his popular works and he hasn’t struck me as very credible beyond his particular field of expertise in the past.
Yours was the first ad hominem in this arguement and, of course, often it’s the case that such things are in fact relevant though Internet discourse likes to claim otherwise. But you might note that I have zero self-interest in attacking Dawkins’s book. I agree with his conclusions. I’m an atheist. I think religious faith is false and harmful (though I think its harm is often overstated while its possible benefits are often understated). I’d prefer a world without it. I have no ulterior motive in being critical of Dawkins. On the other hand, your agreement with Dawkins is a potential motive for defending him from all criticism. Your rhetorical style, which was extremely quick on the draw to accuse my argument as really being a cover designed to hide the fact that I’m unable to otherwise criticize Dawkins indicates a greater investment in rhetorical stance than in substance. That may not be the case, of course. But my point is that I’m criticizing a particular characteristic of an author with whom I agree while you are, in contrast, acting like a partisan. There’s an invitation to you in there, somewhere, for a bit of self-analysis.
As a matter of fact – nothing I’ve said implies that I agree with any of Dawkins’ arguments – or his conclusions. I was careful to say that the interesting argument in the chapter I mentioned is not necessarily either original or correct. All I’ve said is that there if one wants to come to a judgement on it – one should read it and evaluate it.
I’m actually somewhat undecided about the merits of the particular argument against the existence of God that Dawkins promotes – and I would find it interesting to have a discussion about it – if anyone here is interested.
It is true of course that we don’t have time to read everything written by everyone – and judging their qualifications (or competency) is a useful way to decide what to read. And I guess this is what you are doing with Dawkins and ‘The God Delusion’. But there are lots of us who have read the book – and evaluated the arguments contained therein – and why on earth should they care about Dawkins’ qualifications? The qualifications are at best an indicator for how good the content is. But once the content has actually been examined directly, we don’t need the indicator any more. It’s like choosing whether to carry an umbrella based on yesterday’s weather forecast for today – instead of just checking to see whether it’s raining outside.
Sean,
Is that right? Doesn’t the Big Bang Theory say that the universe has a beginning? Ignoring the the pop interpretation of the Big Bang to that is used to uphold certain myths; what really does the theory say? Beginning or no?
shiva — The Big Bang theory says that the universe was extremely hot and dense in the past. If classical general relativity is to be believed, there was a singularity. But of course classical general relativity is not to be believed at that point; quantum effects are surely important. The truth is, we just don’t know. I’m guessing eternal, but we just don’t know.
To Keith and Simon:
I believe I am correct in saying that Eagleton also is not a Christian, indeed he is a well known Marxist. He did not write the review the way he did because he agrees with Christianity. He was concerned with academic integrity.
To Sean:
You say “I’m guessing eternal, but we just don’t know”. Why don’t you start a new thread expanding on that? – especially in the light of the claims by Guth et al that they have theorems showing there must be a start to the universe, whereas loop quantum gravity suggests no singularity.
Hi George — That’s a good idea, I’ll try to do it some time when I’m less busy. I’ve described my favorite model before, e.g. here. I should also mention that the Borde/Guth/Vilenkin theorem is (1) completely classical, not quantum, of course, and (2) a little less definitive than you make it sound, as they assume an “averaged expansion condition” which certainly may be violated along some geodesics. But it’s a good theorem, no question.