The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins remains the number one best seller under the atheism section on Amazon, some 10 years after its publication. I have mentioned it here occasionally in passing that it is one of the few books I have ever read where I agreed with all the author's views expressed in the book. But when I mentioned it on this forum, I got some strong reactions including (I paraphrase) "I can find some people in the world who didn't like it - even some atheists!" (as if I cared), to "give me his strongest argument, I bet I could attack it!"
With a view to addressing that "strongest argument" challenge, I have reread the book and taken 7 pages of notes on it. But firstly I want to address here why wanting to know the book's "strongest argument" is a misunderstanding. The book is not a collection of arguments against the existence of God. It doesn't lay them out from #1 to #5 as an Aquinas-like list of arguments-against-God. What Dawkins is trying to do with the book isn't to prove to the reader that God doesn't exist.
Instead what Dawkins is trying to do is deal with common objections to atheism. Just as a religious apologist might painstakingly go through 8 reasons that people commonly feel they just can't take the step of becoming a Christian, so Dawkins goes though the various common reasons why people feel they just can't be an atheist, and those are as much psychological as philosophical. He wants to show the reader that they could be "happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled" as an atheist. As a result a lot of the time Dawkins is discussing human psychology, and how different people understand the world and think about the world. He isn't constructing philosophical arguments to disprove God. So asking for "the strongest argument" against God is getting the book's genre wrong. That's not to say he doesn't discuss philosophical arguments - he discusses common Christian 'proofs' of God and looks at why they fail. And at times he gives long lists of reasons to think Christianity is false - lists of biblical contradictions, lists of weird theological claims etc.
As far as philosophical arguments go, he does briefly deal with the 'first cause' argument, by noting that whatever it is that was the 'first cause' of everything cannot itself be a complex entity of any kind. So it cannot have the kind of complex intellect that theists ascribe to God, and thus cannot be the Christian God. But the philosophical discussion that Dawkins spends the most time on in the book is the topic of a designer. Dawkins argues that to claim our world or our universe was designed by a highly intelligent entity is not a particularly helpful type of explanation because it simply pushes the question back to "so who designed the designer?" He argues that evolution is a highly useful sort of explanation because it explains the development of complex entities (like intelligent beings) by a long process of cumulative changes, by which simple things gradually become more complicated through a process of imperfect reproduction and selection. Evolutionary theory thus explains how simple forces can give rise to complex entities like intelligent beings... whereas the design hypothesis simply posits that complex entities like intelligent beings can create other complex entities like intelligent beings which simply gives a regress. Thus if we posit that some sort of intelligent being created our universe the question then becomes "how did that being evolve?"
As I have discussed in other threads in this forum, intelligent entities that could have created our universe range from a computer game maker, to scientists in a lab, to a person running a computer simulation, to a kid at a science fair with a 'universe in a jar'. In all such cases, those intelligent beings themselves have their own origin stories - perhaps they evolved or perhaps they were designed by some other intelligent being.
Dawkins, IMO, rightly rolls his eyes at the traditional theological claim of "God is 'simple'", which blithely asserts in the face of all evidence and reason that God is a non-complex being and does not have any parts... yet who somehow nonetheless has immense intelligence, thoughts, desires, will, emotions, knowledge, etc. Dawkins notes that here the theologians are essentially saying "God is 'simple' because theologians said so, so there. So your scientific ideas that an intelligent being is a complex entity are irrelevant." They are essentially declaring this by fiat and thus admitting that no rational argument could ever convince them.
I personally do not have a problem with the idea that the universe was designed, and I would view the computer game theory as the most probable of the many possible explanations for the universe (I would rate it at about 20-40% probability). But I fully agree with Dawkins that the existence of a designer doesn't mean that the designer is God (as understood in a traditional sense of being all-knowing all-powerful and wanting to judge your life), and it simply pushes the question back to "did the designer evolve or were they designed themselves?" (I am quite happy with the possibility that we are multiple layers deep in computer games, for example). The designer need not be particularly 'intelligent', particularly skilled, particularly knowledgeable, nor particularly interested in humanity in general, nor at all interested in the details of our individual lives.
Dawkins notes that in general most philosophical arguments for God seem to be arguments for a designer in some sense or other (either specifically the creation of humans, or generally the fine-tuning of the universe). His observes that positing a designer doesn't really give an ultimate explanation because it just pushes the explanation back to "so what evolutionary or design processes created the designer?" In Dawkins' view then, instead of going down a garden path of designers who design designers we should just cut the whole regress off at the start and say that this universe wasn't designed and was the product of some sort of mathematical quantum process that is generating lots of universes, and life evolved in our one.
With a view to addressing that "strongest argument" challenge, I have reread the book and taken 7 pages of notes on it. But firstly I want to address here why wanting to know the book's "strongest argument" is a misunderstanding. The book is not a collection of arguments against the existence of God. It doesn't lay them out from #1 to #5 as an Aquinas-like list of arguments-against-God. What Dawkins is trying to do with the book isn't to prove to the reader that God doesn't exist.
Instead what Dawkins is trying to do is deal with common objections to atheism. Just as a religious apologist might painstakingly go through 8 reasons that people commonly feel they just can't take the step of becoming a Christian, so Dawkins goes though the various common reasons why people feel they just can't be an atheist, and those are as much psychological as philosophical. He wants to show the reader that they could be "happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled" as an atheist. As a result a lot of the time Dawkins is discussing human psychology, and how different people understand the world and think about the world. He isn't constructing philosophical arguments to disprove God. So asking for "the strongest argument" against God is getting the book's genre wrong. That's not to say he doesn't discuss philosophical arguments - he discusses common Christian 'proofs' of God and looks at why they fail. And at times he gives long lists of reasons to think Christianity is false - lists of biblical contradictions, lists of weird theological claims etc.
As far as philosophical arguments go, he does briefly deal with the 'first cause' argument, by noting that whatever it is that was the 'first cause' of everything cannot itself be a complex entity of any kind. So it cannot have the kind of complex intellect that theists ascribe to God, and thus cannot be the Christian God. But the philosophical discussion that Dawkins spends the most time on in the book is the topic of a designer. Dawkins argues that to claim our world or our universe was designed by a highly intelligent entity is not a particularly helpful type of explanation because it simply pushes the question back to "so who designed the designer?" He argues that evolution is a highly useful sort of explanation because it explains the development of complex entities (like intelligent beings) by a long process of cumulative changes, by which simple things gradually become more complicated through a process of imperfect reproduction and selection. Evolutionary theory thus explains how simple forces can give rise to complex entities like intelligent beings... whereas the design hypothesis simply posits that complex entities like intelligent beings can create other complex entities like intelligent beings which simply gives a regress. Thus if we posit that some sort of intelligent being created our universe the question then becomes "how did that being evolve?"
As I have discussed in other threads in this forum, intelligent entities that could have created our universe range from a computer game maker, to scientists in a lab, to a person running a computer simulation, to a kid at a science fair with a 'universe in a jar'. In all such cases, those intelligent beings themselves have their own origin stories - perhaps they evolved or perhaps they were designed by some other intelligent being.
Dawkins, IMO, rightly rolls his eyes at the traditional theological claim of "God is 'simple'", which blithely asserts in the face of all evidence and reason that God is a non-complex being and does not have any parts... yet who somehow nonetheless has immense intelligence, thoughts, desires, will, emotions, knowledge, etc. Dawkins notes that here the theologians are essentially saying "God is 'simple' because theologians said so, so there. So your scientific ideas that an intelligent being is a complex entity are irrelevant." They are essentially declaring this by fiat and thus admitting that no rational argument could ever convince them.
I personally do not have a problem with the idea that the universe was designed, and I would view the computer game theory as the most probable of the many possible explanations for the universe (I would rate it at about 20-40% probability). But I fully agree with Dawkins that the existence of a designer doesn't mean that the designer is God (as understood in a traditional sense of being all-knowing all-powerful and wanting to judge your life), and it simply pushes the question back to "did the designer evolve or were they designed themselves?" (I am quite happy with the possibility that we are multiple layers deep in computer games, for example). The designer need not be particularly 'intelligent', particularly skilled, particularly knowledgeable, nor particularly interested in humanity in general, nor at all interested in the details of our individual lives.
Dawkins notes that in general most philosophical arguments for God seem to be arguments for a designer in some sense or other (either specifically the creation of humans, or generally the fine-tuning of the universe). His observes that positing a designer doesn't really give an ultimate explanation because it just pushes the explanation back to "so what evolutionary or design processes created the designer?" In Dawkins' view then, instead of going down a garden path of designers who design designers we should just cut the whole regress off at the start and say that this universe wasn't designed and was the product of some sort of mathematical quantum process that is generating lots of universes, and life evolved in our one.
Comment