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The God Delusion by Dawkins

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  • The God Delusion by Dawkins

    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.
    "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
    "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
    "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

  • #2
    Originally posted by Starlight View Post
    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.
    We do not ascribe to God a "complex" intellect.

    We think God is the Intellect which is the most SIMPLE thing in the universe.

    AI can beat the world master in Gomoku, but AI cannot know it has done so. Intellect is not in complexity, it is a simple, a primary fact, not a composite.

    Apart from that, we do agree that the first cause has to be simple. It's just that Dawkins has a wrong view on what "simple" implies.
    http://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.fr/p/apologetics-section.html

    Thanks, Sparko, for telling how I add the link here!

    Comment


    • #3
      Originally posted by Starlight View Post
      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.
      First of all, the enumeration of these as different things from each other and from God, depends on our understanding which is complexified due to our intellect being mixed up with matter.

      Second, I suspect that Dawkins, very wrongly, holds that "consciousness" is a "complexification" of biology and thus of matter.

      We hold that conscious intellect is the primary and simplest fact about the world we live in.

      Even our own experience has our own consciousness as a very primary and simple fact which is so primary and simple we don't notice it because of all the other facts it allows us to access as facts we can understand and experience.
      http://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.fr/p/apologetics-section.html

      Thanks, Sparko, for telling how I add the link here!

      Comment


      • #4
        Originally posted by Starlight View Post
        ... 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.
        The thing is, there is no evidence the human designer was created by an evolutionary process.

        There is debatable arguments* the human body was, but there is no argument the human mind was. That area, Evolutionists are stumbling and fumbling in the dark, as with abiogenesis, if not more.

        * Which I reject as spurious. For instance, I reject the 1.9 million date of Homo Habilis or Rudolfensis as a spurious date, see this blog post in French, where I exhibit two molds of respectively KNM-ER 1470 and KNM-ER 1813. I consider these guys (or gals?) were pre-Flood, Adamite, human extinct race, individuals.
        Last edited by hansgeorg; 02-07-2017, 03:51 AM.
        http://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.fr/p/apologetics-section.html

        Thanks, Sparko, for telling how I add the link here!

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by hansgeorg View Post
          First of all, the enumeration of these as different things from each other and from God, depends on our understanding which is complexified due to our intellect being mixed up with matter.
          Please explain how intellect can exist without matter. Intellect is what the brain is doing; it cannot not exist separate from matter.
          “He felt that his whole life was a kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.” - Douglas Adams.

          Comment


          • #6
            Originally posted by Tassman View Post
            Please explain how intellect can exist without matter. Intellect is what the brain is doing; it cannot not exist separate from matter.
            You can have AI. Intellect is the complex organisation of dynamically weighted interacting logic paths - it doesn't matter whether those logic paths are biological matter (e.g. humans), silicon transistors (e.g. computer AI), or crystal pathways or energy flows (e.g. scifi alien beings). I don't mind the idea that God has an intellect that is not rooted in what we would call 'matter', though it certainly ought to be rooted in something - he could potentially be some sort of 'energy being' where his intellect is comprised of complex interacting pathways of energy flows.

            But the point remains that intellect is a complex construct, it's not "simple" in the theological sense of the word. And the various advances in the 20th century in science, computer science, and math made very clear that the idea of an intelligent God being "simple" is a contradiction.
            "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
            "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
            "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

            Comment


            • #7
              Originally posted by Tassman View Post
              Intellect is what the brain is doing; it cannot not exist separate from matter.
              No.
              http://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.fr/p/apologetics-section.html

              Thanks, Sparko, for telling how I add the link here!

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by Starlight View Post
                I don't mind the idea that God has an intellect that is not rooted in what we would call 'matter', though it certainly ought to be rooted in something - he could potentially be some sort of 'energy being' where his intellect is comprised of complex interacting pathways of energy flows.

                But the point remains that intellect is a complex construct, it's not "simple" in the theological sense of the word.
                That point is wrong.

                Originally posted by Starlight View Post
                And the various advances in the 20th century in science, computer science, and math made very clear that the idea of an intelligent God being "simple" is a contradiction.
                On the contrary. All these advances have only made it more clear that intellect as such is simple and AI is only able to mime its results, without its substance.
                http://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.fr/p/apologetics-section.html

                Thanks, Sparko, for telling how I add the link here!

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by Starlight View Post
                  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. ...
                  Thanks for the well written summary. I've never read Dawkins and will not have time to do so, at least not in the foreseeable future, 'though perhaps we will meet in the world to come and have interesting conversations. In the meantime, there are three ideas here that I think might be worth discussing, but since my time is limited I will only focus on one at the moment.

                  Originally posted by Starlight View Post
                  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. ...
                  Is Dawkins only speaking here of a 'first' cause in a temporal or chronological sense?
                  βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι δι᾿ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι, τότε δὲ πρόσωπον πρὸς πρόσωπον·
                  ἄρτι γινώσκω ἐκ μέρους, τότε δὲ ἐπιγνώσομαι καθὼς καὶ ἐπεγνώσθην.

                  אָכֵ֕ן אַתָּ֖ה אֵ֣ל מִסְתַּתֵּ֑ר אֱלֹהֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל מוֹשִֽׁיעַ׃

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    Originally posted by robrecht View Post
                    Is Dawkins only speaking here of a 'first' cause in a temporal or chronological sense?
                    No it's in a causal sense which is only temporal/chronological insofar as it's within our universe, but once we're talking about "before" the universe then time as we know it isn't really relevant. It's the standard 'first cause' argument of Aquinas, or William Lane Craig... that goes something vaguely along the line of "things have causes, so we can trace all the way back to the first cause, which we choose to label 'God'." The first cause of everything presumably exists outside of time as we know it, because it caused things that caused our universe (and within it, time as we know it) to exist.

                    I'm personally quite fine with the idea of there existing a first cause. I wouldn't want to argue for an infinite regress of causes as an alternative. But IMO the first cause could well be a mathematical truth - a theorem of quantum physics. Or perhaps "the ultimate answer to the question of "why" is "why not?"" and everything that is possible does indeed exist in some sort of multidimensional hyperspace because nothing prevents it doing so. Or perhaps even the first cause is a simple awareness - a single consciousness that is conscious only of its own existence... a being that lacks all the advanced mental functions that we have but has consciousness as the essence of its existence, and thus we would get a Buddhist-esque view where the sea of consciousness is the fundamental entity and we are drops of water that have split out of it and will merge back into it on death. But I fully agree with Dawkins, that the Christian God as depicted in the bible is vastly too complex a being to be the 'first cause' of everything, because he has too many attributes and too many of those attributes are complex in nature. The Christian God has a level of complexity that requires an origin story for him... did he evolve in some other universe, was he designed by another designer?
                    "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
                    "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
                    "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Originally posted by Starlight View Post
                      No it's in a causal sense which is only temporal/chronological insofar as it's within our universe, but once we're talking about "before" the universe then time as we know it isn't really relevant. It's the standard 'first cause' argument of Aquinas, or William Lane Craig... that goes something vaguely along the line of "things have causes, so we can trace all the way back to the first cause, which we choose to label 'God'." The first cause of everything presumably exists outside of time as we know it, because it caused things that caused our universe (and within it, time as we know it) to exist.

                      I'm personally quite fine with the idea of there existing a first cause. I wouldn't want to argue for an infinite regress of causes as an alternative. But IMO the first cause could well be a mathematical truth - a theorem of quantum physics. Or perhaps "the ultimate answer to the question of "why" is "why not?"" and everything that is possible does indeed exist in some sort of multidimensional hyperspace because nothing prevents it doing so. Or perhaps even the first cause is a simple awareness - a single consciousness that is conscious only of its own existence... a being that lacks all the advanced mental functions that we have but has consciousness as the essence of its existence, and thus we would get a Buddhist-esque view where the sea of consciousness is the fundamental entity and we are drops of water that have split out of it and will merge back into it on death. But I fully agree with Dawkins, that the Christian God as depicted in the bible is vastly too complex a being to be the 'first cause' of everything, because he has too many attributes and too many of those attributes are complex in nature. The Christian God has a level of complexity that requires an origin story for him... did he evolve in some other universe, was he designed by another designer?
                      So, if Dawkins is not limiting himself to a temporal first cause (ie, something existing before more developed evolutionary complexity), why does he (or you) think that a non-temporal 'first cause', in a more philosophical sense of a prime mover, cannot itself be a complex entity of any kind?
                      βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι δι᾿ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι, τότε δὲ πρόσωπον πρὸς πρόσωπον·
                      ἄρτι γινώσκω ἐκ μέρους, τότε δὲ ἐπιγνώσομαι καθὼς καὶ ἐπεγνώσθην.

                      אָכֵ֕ן אַתָּ֖ה אֵ֣ל מִסְתַּתֵּ֑ר אֱלֹהֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל מוֹשִֽׁיעַ׃

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Originally posted by Starlight View Post
                        Please explain how intellect can exist without matter. Intellect is what the brain is doing; it cannot not exist separate from matter.
                        You can have AI. Intellect is the complex organisation of dynamically weighted interacting logic paths - it doesn't matter whether those logic paths are biological matter (e.g. humans),
                        These include organic matter
                        ... silicon transistors (e.g. computer AI), or crystal pathways
                        These include matter also
                        or energy flows (e.g. scifi alien beings).
                        These do not necessarily include matter.

                        But while you personally may be convinced that intellect can exist without matter because you saw it on Star Trek, others have higher evidential standards.
                        Jorge: Functional Complex Information is INFORMATION that is complex and functional.

                        MM: First of all, the Bible is a fixed document.
                        MM on covid-19: We're talking about an illness with a better than 99.9% rate of survival.

                        seer: I believe that so called 'compassion' [for starving Palestinian kids] maybe a cover for anti Semitism, ...

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                        • #13
                          Star Trekkian Pure Energy®
                          βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι δι᾿ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι, τότε δὲ πρόσωπον πρὸς πρόσωπον·
                          ἄρτι γινώσκω ἐκ μέρους, τότε δὲ ἐπιγνώσομαι καθὼς καὶ ἐπεγνώσθην.

                          אָכֵ֕ן אַתָּ֖ה אֵ֣ל מִסְתַּתֵּ֑ר אֱלֹהֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל מוֹשִֽׁיעַ׃

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            I've had tons of atheist friends tell me that I should read The God Delusion, and that it's a fantastic book that really influenced them. I still haven't read it, and I have almost no desire to read it. The reason for this is pretty simple: Richard Dawkins is not a philosopher. I do not want to read a book on philosophy written by someone who has no training in philosophy any more than I want to read a book on biology written by someone with no training in biology. For example, if I want to learn about evolution by natural selection, I have no interest in reading a book written by William Dembski. In exactly the same way, if I want to learn about philosophy, why would I choose to read a book by Richard Dawkins?
                            "[Mathematics] is the revealer of every genuine truth, for it knows every hidden secret, and bears the key to every subtlety of letters; whoever, then, has the effrontery to pursue physics while neglecting mathematics should know from the start he will never make his entry through the portals of wisdom."
                            --Thomas Bradwardine, De Continuo (c. 1325)

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              I am not at all convinced by Dawkin's reasoning on this. It is special pleading that asserts that even though everything else material has a material cause, the Universe does not. Dawkin's point that you can simply draw the line at the "singularity" (whatever that actually was and is), one still must ask, then what caused the singularity, or was it, like a god or something supernatural, always existent?
                              "Down in the lowlands, where the water is deep,
                              Hear my cry, hear my shout,
                              Save me, save me"

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