Dawkins Delusion 2: Dick's off-the-cuff answers to famous arguments. (With visuals!)

[guacamole]

On to chapter 2:

After a gratuitous bit of poisoning the well:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can become desensitized to their horror.

he decides he really doesn't want to talk specifically about God, as depicted in the OT, after all:

I am not attacking the particular qualities of Yahweh, or Jesus, or Allah, or any other specific god such as Baal, Zeus or Wotan... Instead I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.

Or more accurately, he wants to deal with the God of philosophy and text-book theists--the God most of us want to believe in, in other words, because the personality of God, as revealed in various religious texts makes us uncomfortable with precisely the sort of well-poisoned attributes he lists above, rather than thinking about it in any depth. I know I am tempted frequently to make God after a sanitized, theoretical image, emasculated of emotional vibrancy, rather than the "primitive" deity of the ancient world--and it's then that I feel like I don't know or believe anything concrete about God. Ah well, that's my own error, I suppose.

Speaking of sanitized deities, Dawkins seems to anticipate the kind of "Unmoved-Mover" arguments of causation by making a parallel statement about the rise of intelligence:

...any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.

This seems to be an intended answer to the unmoved-mover, undesigned-designer, uncaused-first causer type of argument. I wasn't familiar with the idea until I read this book, so if there is a more serious treatment of it elsewhere, I'd appreciate someone pointing out where I could read about it--either the atheistic formulation of the argument, or a philosophical deconstruction of it. I will do my best, admittedly amateurish, job to express what I think about it.

I say it runs parallel to first-cause arguments because they seem similar in function--something like:

1. Every observable phenomenon has a cause.
2. The universe is an observable phenomenon.
3. Therefore the universe has a cause.

This is uncontroversial (though perhaps not my wording)--the problem is that it leads to a "turtles all the way down" type of infinite regress problem. Basically, in case you don't know, the idea is that whatever the cause of the universe is, then that must have a cause, and then that cause must have a cause, and then that cause must have a cause, ad infinitum.

River_terrapin.jpg

Theists stop the regression at God, atheists at the universe. Of the two positions, I find the Atheistic position to be the weaker because it seems to me to be a case of special pleading, the discussion of which is handled in a different thread.

Here, Dawkins gives an argument that is related as it gets rid of first cause altogether, and instead posits that first causes must be "simple" because creative intelligence is the product of evolution, which might be formulated like this (though I am willing to consider other formulations):

1. All creative intelligences are the result of evolution.
2. At the beginning of the universe, there is no time for evolution.
3. Therefore the first cause of the universe is not intelligent.

While that might leave room for Azazoth, it doesn't for the classical "God" of philosophers and theologians.

My own, off-the-cuff answer to this is that premise 1, expressed as an absolute, should not be. If we apply some philosophical and empirical humility to premise one--all observable creative intelligences are the result of evolution--which is more in line with reality, then the weakness of the argument becomes apparent.

1. All observable creative intelligences are the result of evolution.
2. At the beginning of the universe, there is not time for evolution.
3a. Therefore, the first cause is either a hither-to unobserved creative intelligence that does not rely on evolution
3b. The first cause is not intelligent.

This seems more logically sound; unfortunately, it doesn't say much of anything because it puts us back where we started. So let's see if we can get somewhere with it.

4. All observable symmetrical systems were caused by creative intelligence.
5. The universe is an observable symmetrical system.
6. Therefore, there first cause must be an unobserved creative intelligence.

fwiw,
guacamole

[Sparko]

His argument is like saying:

1. All cars I have observed are blue
2. Therefore all cars are blue.

[guacamole]

His argument is like saying:

1. All cars I have observed are blue
2. Therefore all cars are blue.

Exactly. My suspicion is that he's trying to use inductive reasoning, which is generally sound, to undercut the argument from first cause, because science, if I am not mistaken, relies more heavily on an inductive approach. I think his premise is foolish, hence why I added the necessary "observed" to clarify it, making it more deductive.

[Sparko]

Exactly. My suspicion is that he's trying to use inductive reasoning, which is generally sound, to undercut the argument from first cause, because science, if I am not mistaken, relies more heavily on an inductive approach. I think his premise is foolish, hence why I added the necessary "observed" to clarify it, making it more deductive.

He is basically begging the question. He assumes that creativity has to evolve and that a Creative God can't exist without evolving, so there is no God. He just assumes his own conclusion.

He is basically asking "who created God?" which is a nonsense question.

[guacamole]

He is basically begging the question. He assumes that creativity has to evolve and that a Creative God can't exist without evolving, so there is no God. He just assumes his own conclusion.

He is basically asking "who created God?" which is a nonsense question.

Yeah. I'm not too impressed with his reasoning. He uses various emotional appeals extensively, along with rehashed arguments, and appeals to scientific authority. If this book moves anyone, my suspicion is that it is people who are already skeptics or who have moved there already without realizing it.

[37818]

He is basically begging the question. He assumes that creativity has to evolve and that a Creative God can't exist without evolving, so there is no God. He just assumes his own conclusion.

He is basically asking "who created God?" which is a nonsense question.

Not even very original. In "Why I Am Not a Christian" an essay by Bertrand Russell, presented the same question.

[guacamole]

Not even very original. In "Why I Am Not a Christian" an essay by Bertrand Russell, presented the same question.

Yeah. He gives nods to Russell a couple of times. I blame Russell more for some of the worse arguments because Russell was a mathematician and philosopher and should have known better.

[shunyadragon]

Theists stop the regression at God, atheists at the universe. Of the two positions, I find the Atheistic position to be the weaker because it seems to me to be a case of special pleading, the discussion of which is handled in a different thread.

It seems to me . . . does not exclude the Theist that the regression stops with God as special pleading. Actually infinite regression is meaningless in consideration as to whether our physical existence is eternal or not. Both the Theist and the non-Theist must realize that there world view is based on certain presuppositions that justify their belief, and there is no objective evidence, nor logical argument, to conclusively demonstrate either world view.

[guacamole]

It seems to me . . . does not exclude the Theist that the regression stops with God as special pleading. Actually infinite regression is meaningless in consideration as to whether our physical existence is eternal or not.

Do you have some special critique to add to the first cause argument? I'm not sure how it would be the case that the Theistic position is special pleading since theism allows for things to have a divine cause.

As to infinite regression being non-problematic, I haven't seriously considered that idea yet, but it doesn't solve the causation problem for anyone--brane theory for atheists or God of God of God, what have you. It just pushes the origin back indefinitely.

Both the Theist and the non-Theist must realize that there world view is based on certain presuppositions that justify their belief, and there is no objective evidence, nor logical argument, to conclusively demonstrate either world view.

Of course. Dawkins is using scientific tools and lunacy. I am restricted merely to lunacy so that Dawkins has a fighting chance. There is objective evidence and logical argument, on both sides if I am being generous; however, I agree with Kierkegaard. At some point, if we find the available evidence one way or the other convincing, we make a leap of faith. Otherwise, it's an intellectually vigorous equivalent of a tug of war.

fwiw,
guacamole

[Starlight]

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can become desensitized to their horror.

A worthwhile and accurate observation. The OT God is pretty bad. Sam Harris rates the OT as worse than the Koran in terms of the above sort of things. And Dawkins is right that growing up Christian tends to school kids in a very sanitized version of the stories, and so as adults Christians tend to overlook just how bad much of the OT is and tend to give the excuse of "well that's the OT, we have the NT now". CS Lewis wryly noted that Anglican church officials had gone through the psalms and produced a list of psalms it was appropriate to read in church, and that that list included less than half the psalms... because the majority of the psalms contain the kinds of things Dawkins lists.

the God most of us want to believe in, in other words, because the personality of God, as revealed in various religious texts makes us uncomfortable with precisely the sort of well-poisoned attributes he lists above, rather than thinking about it in any depth. I know I am tempted frequently to make God after a sanitized, theoretical image, emasculated of emotional vibrancy, rather than the "primitive" deity of the ancient world--and it's then that I feel like I don't know or believe anything concrete about God. Ah well, that's my own error, I suppose.

I don't think your sarcasm is at all justified here. People do imagine the God they believe in to be a certain way, and their beliefs frequently have nothing to do whatsoever with the details of the Old Testament texts, and owe much more to 2000 years of sanitizing philosophical traditions, much more to what their own pastor happens to have said, and much more to their own ideas about how they think God probably is.

...any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.

This is a statement he returns to over and over throughout the book. He doesn't tease out the premises very well, because he considers the whole thing obvious. But this is basically what he's getting at:
1. Intelligence is a complex phenomena. It consists of multiple interacting parts which work together in complex ways.
2. Evolution is a process which explains how complex things develop over time from simple things, via a cumulative and gradual process.
3. An argument from 'design' which claims that our complex universe was designed has explained one complex thing (the universe) with another complex thing (an intelligent designer). The intelligent designer themselves is thus in need of an explanation as to their origin.
4. A 'first cause' for everything must be something simple and singular, it cannot be an arbitrarily complex entity. Therefore it cannot be an intelligent being.

Theists stop the regression at God, atheists at the universe.

Huh? Atheists don't stop at the universe, that's just a silly thing to claim.

You'll see later in the book that Dawkins prefers a multiverse hypothesis where a quantum universe generator generates an infinite number of universes. As I have discussed in another thread here, I myself am partial to the Computer Game hypothesis that we are players in a virtual reality computer game. Elon Musk is partial to the simulation hypothesis where aliens are running a simulation of a universe and we and our planet are creations within the computer simulation.

In my observation it's relatively rare to find an atheists who stops the causal regression "at the universe" per se, although it does seem reasonable to get very agnostic beyond that: If space and time began in the big bang, then any question of what was 'before' the big bang is a very weird question - in a sense that asking what happened before time began or what caused time is quite a different type of 'causation' to the usual time-based cause-and-effect we are familiar with in everyday life. I think B.P. in the other thread had a fair point in his arguments that trying to apply the type of time-based material-based cause and effect that we observe in everyday life in some sort of naive way to going beyond the big bang is potentially a misuse of terms and ideas. So I would be totally fine with a sort of suggestion that "the idea of 'causation' before the big bang gets very weird and quantumy and is governed by complex and unintuitive quantum mechanical and mathematical principles, which although they are indeed cause and effect, they are so different to any sort of causal process that we are familiar with in our usual material world that we experience in everyday life, that to us they are not cause and effect in any way we would be familiar with."

Of the two positions, I find the Atheistic position to be the weaker because it seems to me to be a case of special pleading, the discussion of which is handled in a different thread.

Um, okay, weird. Like Dawkins I find the standard theistic position flatly impossible - as I have discussed with Robrecht in another thread - because if God is defined to be an intelligent being then he can flatly absolutely not be a 'first cause' because intelligence is something that requires complexity (it is the dynamic association and evaluation of multiple distinct and connected concepts to create thoughts and ideas) and a 'first cause' is something that requires simplicity. I don't mind a theistic claim that says "God is not the 'first cause' and he evolved in some other universe, and then he decided to create this universe and do miracles in it and judge us etc", but that completely separates God from any sort of 'first cause'.

Here, Dawkins gives an argument that is related as it gets rid of first cause altogether, and instead posits that first causes must be "simple" because creative intelligence is the product of evolution, which might be formulated like this (though I am willing to consider other formulations):

1. All creative intelligences are the result of evolution.
2. At the beginning of the universe, there is no time for evolution.
3. Therefore the first cause of the universe is not intelligent.

I don't think (1) quite captures Dawkins' view. As he thinks it is possible for one intelligence to design another (e.g. if humans create AI). He has no problem with the concept that an intelligent deity might be able to create a world containing intelligent creatures like us. His point is simply that this throws the question back to "so what created that deity? Was that intelligent deity designed by another intelligent being, or did it evolve via evolutionary processes?"

3a. Therefore, the first cause is either a hither-to unobserved creative intelligence that does not rely on evolution

What you really need is for the first cause to be a hither-to unobserved intelligence that is simple rather than complex. That seems pretty contradictory, which is Dawkins' point.

Unfortunately he doesn't elaborate a lot in the book on why he believes intelligence to be necessarily a complex phenomena, and I think some people reading the book would wrongly say to themselves "well I think intelligence could be simple, so I don't think Dawkins' point is valid". Dawkins seems to take it for granted that because intelligence as we observe it in our world occurs in animals that have large and complex brains and because it is not found in animals or entities that have tiny or non-complex brains, that therefore intelligence is a complex phenomena. I think his own reasoning is thus somewhat open to the sort of challenge you're trying to give here along the lines of "you say all swans are white because you've only seen white swans, but perhaps some swans out there somewhere are black and you just haven't seen them yet?" What Dawkins needs to complete his argument is a philosophical and computer science based argument informed by modern research into A.I. and considering what it means to be 'intelligent' and what the definition of 'intelligence' actually is, and then he could argue that intelligence is necessarily complex and thus there cannot exist a 'simple intelligence' that we just haven't encountered yet. I have a background in philosophy and computer science and it is self-evident to me because of that that there can be no such thing as a 'simple intelligence' and that Dawkins' general point that an intelligent being cannot be the 'first cause' due to it lacking simplicity is absolutely correct. However as you point out, Dawkins' own reasoning in defense of this point is inductive rather than deductive.

[Boxing Pythagoras]

I think B.P. in the other thread had a fair point in his arguments that trying to apply the type of time-based material-based cause and effect that we observe in everyday life in some sort of naive way to going beyond the big bang is potentially a misuse of terms and ideas.

In fact, the very phrase "beyond the big bang" is potentially a misuse of terms and ideas.

[37818]

Yeah. He gives nods to Russell a couple of times. I blame Russell more for some of the worse arguments because Russell was a mathematician and philosopher and should have known better.

Russell as a mathematician thought it necessary to write a [about some 300 pages] definitive proof that 1 + 1 = 2.

[Boxing Pythagoras]

Russell as a mathematician thought it necessary to write a [about some 300 pages] definitive proof that 1 + 1 = 2.

Actually, Russell and Whitehead took around 700 pages to show that 1+1=2 in their wonderful Principia Mathematica. Here's the lovely point of culmination, with an editorial quip that I can only assume must have been Russell's contribution:
OnePlusOneEqualsTwo.jpg

[guacamole]

Russell as a mathematician thought it necessary to write a [about some 300 pages] definitive proof that 1 + 1 = 2.

TIL! I love it! This is why we sometimes use the "self-evident" short hand for things that we don't want to spend 300 pages proving.

[guacamole]

Starlight,

Thank you for the substantive reply. I will try to comment back as I have time.

A worthwhile and accurate observation. The OT God is pretty bad. Sam Harris rates the OT as worse than the Koran in terms of the above sort of things. And Dawkins is right that growing up Christian tends to school kids in a very sanitized version of the stories, and so as adults Christians tend to overlook just how bad much of the OT is and tend to give the excuse of "well that's the OT, we have the NT now".

That was part of the reason I offered my comment on how we like to pick and chose the attributes of God, often without being carefully thought out. It's probable that a very good thinker could give cogent reasoning as to why a given attribute of God is useful because some other attribute is contingent upon it. I only meant to point out that we pick and choose loosely at our (logical) peril.

CS Lewis wryly noted that Anglican church officials had gone through the psalms and produced a list of psalms it was appropriate to read in church, and that that list included less than half the psalms... because the majority of the psalms contain the kinds of things Dawkins lists.

Well, in the Anglican Church's defense, while all scripture is God-breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, etc.--not all of it lends itself to a worshipful attitude in service, which is the given end of service. To be fair, a lot of discussion about the other passages occurs informally and academically, they aren't exactly ignored. I find that the people who ignore a portion of the Bible in their spiritual walk tend to ignore rather most of it. Most people's Christianity is contingent upon a handful of New Testament passages, usually memorized outside of context.

I don't think your sarcasm is at all justified here. People do imagine the God they believe in to be a certain way, and their beliefs frequently have nothing to do whatsoever with the details of the Old Testament texts, and owe much more to 2000 years of sanitizing philosophical traditions, much more to what their own pastor happens to have said, and much more to their own ideas about how they think God probably is.

I didn't intend it as sarcasm at all! Though I have heard that I come across as sarcastic at times without trying. I agree with everything you've said here.

This is a statement he returns to over and over throughout the book. He doesn't tease out the premises very well, because he considers the whole thing obvious. But this is basically what he's getting at:
1. Intelligence is a complex phenomena. It consists of multiple interacting parts which work together in complex ways.
2. Evolution is a process which explains how complex things develop over time from simple things, via a cumulative and gradual process.
3. An argument from 'design' which claims that our complex universe was designed has explained one complex thing (the universe) with another complex thing (an intelligent designer). The intelligent designer themselves is thus in need of an explanation as to their origin.
4. A 'first cause' for everything must be something simple and singular, it cannot be an arbitrarily complex entity. Therefore it cannot be an intelligent being.

I disagree with 3 and I do not see how 4 follows necessarily. I don't think that inductive reasoning gives the waterproof case that atheists are hoping for, because essentially (and again, here I go back to necessary philosophical personal relativism) what he--and anyone else is actually asserting--is this:

--The only intelligences I have observed have arisen from evolutionary systems.

Or, perhaps in an attempt to be stronger:

--The only intelligences anyone has observed through the use of empirical practices have arisen from evolutionary systems.

That necessary qualification--the so-called philosophical humility--indicates precisely the weakness inherent in inductive or abductive logic. The problem that Dawkins is facing is that, because he is interested in writing his strongest case, he is eliding the qualifier, either because in his amateur's naivete, he doesn't realize the qualifier, or he is trying to cover it up. While he may want to assert that it is self-evident, that is an unjust appropriation of the term.

I'm not sure that I fully understand the reasoning behind claiming that the first cause must be simple, so I'll leave it for now. Feel free to try and explain or suggest other resources. Reading Dawkins has, if nothing else, led me to several other texts worth reading.

Huh? Atheists don't stop at the universe, that's just a silly thing to claim.

That's Russell's famous assertion that skeptics simply stop causation one step before theists--at the universe. Some Atheists clearly stop causation at the universe itself.

You'll see later in the book that Dawkins prefers a multiverse hypothesis where a quantum universe generator generates an infinite number of universes.

Then, Dawkins has to explain where this "quantum universe generator" comes from. Perhaps he attempts to do so. I haven't read that part--try not to give away too many spoilers Right now, it sounds as if it's simply another one of his unfalsifiable assertions.

As I have discussed in another thread here, I myself am partial to the Computer Game hypothesis that we are players in a virtual reality computer game. Elon Musk is partial to the simulation hypothesis where aliens are running a simulation of a universe and we and our planet are creations within the computer simulation.

I'm passingly familiar with it. However, you're simply pushing the causation back. Presumably even if we have a regression of simulations, at some point there is a "real" universe with a "real" first cause, so IMO, I don't think arguing Computer Game hypothesis solves anything.

In my observation it's relatively rare to find an atheists who stops the causal regression "at the universe" per se, although it does seem reasonable to get very agnostic beyond that: If space and time began in the big bang, then any question of what was 'before' the big bang is a very weird question - in a sense that asking what happened before time began or what caused time is quite a different type of 'causation' to the usual time-based cause-and-effect we are familiar with in everyday life. I think B.P. in the other thread had a fair point in his arguments that trying to apply the type of time-based material-based cause and effect that we observe in everyday life in some sort of naive way to going beyond the big bang is potentially a misuse of terms and ideas. So I would be totally fine with a sort of suggestion that "the idea of 'causation' before the big bang gets very weird and quantumy and is governed by complex and unintuitive quantum mechanical and mathematical principles, which although they are indeed cause and effect, they are so different to any sort of causal process that we are familiar with in our usual material world that we experience in everyday life, that to us they are not cause and effect in any way we would be familiar with."

I suppose that I should clarify that "at the universe," I mean including the big bang and the singularity as simply "the universe" in different states, but still the universe.

Um, okay, weird. Like Dawkins I find the standard theistic position flatly impossible - as I have discussed with Robrecht in another thread - because if God is defined to be an intelligent being then he can flatly absolutely not be a 'first cause' because intelligence is something that requires complexity (it is the dynamic association and evaluation of multiple distinct and connected concepts to create thoughts and ideas) and a 'first cause' is something that requires simplicity. I don't mind a theistic claim that says "God is not the 'first cause' and he evolved in some other universe, and then he decided to create this universe and do miracles in it and judge us etc", but that completely separates God from any sort of 'first cause'.

Agreed, and it simply pushes back ultimate causation. My original contention was that to assert that the universe (singularity, big bang, etc.) was uncaused is essentially a "supernatural" (in the most primitive sense--not bound by the laws of nature) claim. Every other body has a cause. To assert that the universe, a body, does not have a cause, is the very definition of special pleading--this institutes something unfortunately special--supernatural (according to the above definition)-- in the skeptics system. The theistic end run of distinguishing between "physical body" and "non-physical body" might seem unfair, and overly convenient, but it is sound. There is no reason to claim that "non-physical bodies" require causation. Indeed, most theists (who are not deists or pantheists) assert that not even all physical bodies need be caused.

I don't think (1) quite captures Dawkins' view. As he thinks it is possible for one intelligence to design another (e.g. if humans create AI). He has no problem with the concept that an intelligent deity might be able to create a world containing intelligent creatures like us. His point is simply that this throws the question back to "so what created that deity? Was that intelligent deity designed by another intelligent being, or did it evolve via evolutionary processes?"

I think ultimately though that the one intelligence creating another intelligence would still be subject to evolutionary processes, and the "upgrade" of the one intelligence to the next is simply a step in that evolution.

What you really need is for the first cause to be a hither-to unobserved intelligence that is simple rather than complex. That seems pretty contradictory, which is Dawkins' point.

As I noted, it seems I need to do more reading, as I still do not understand, other than inductive reasoning, why a first cause must be "simple." I'm not even sure what "simple" means in this context.

Unfortunately he doesn't elaborate a lot in the book on why he believes intelligence to be necessarily a complex phenomena, and I think some people reading the book would wrongly say to themselves "well I think intelligence could be simple, so I don't think Dawkins' point is valid". Dawkins seems to take it for granted that because intelligence as we observe it in our world occurs in animals that have large and complex brains and because it is not found in animals or entities that have tiny or non-complex brains, that therefore intelligence is a complex phenomena. I think his own reasoning is thus somewhat open to the sort of challenge you're trying to give here along the lines of "you say all swans are white because you've only seen white swans, but perhaps some swans out there somewhere are black and you just haven't seen them yet?" What Dawkins needs to complete his argument is a philosophical and computer science based argument informed by modern research into A.I. and considering what it means to be 'intelligent' and what the definition of 'intelligence' actually is, and then he could argue that intelligence is necessarily complex and thus there cannot exist a 'simple intelligence' that we just haven't encountered yet. I have a background in philosophy and computer science and it is self-evident to me because of that that there can be no such thing as a 'simple intelligence' and that Dawkins' general point that an intelligent being cannot be the 'first cause' due to it lacking simplicity is absolutely correct. However as you point out, Dawkins' own reasoning in defense of this point is inductive rather than deductive.

I think I am beginning to understand what he (and you) mean. I find the idea of AI interesting because it gives us an example of a (theoretical) intelligence that would not be biologically/carbon based, which is not "alive" according to commonly accepted definitions (i.e., metabolism, homeostasis, growth, reproduction, etc.), but which can pass the Turing Test. I suppose then part of my objection to intelligence as necessarily complex goes again to the idea of induction. Previously we would have thought that intelligence was purely a function of biology. But if we find out that it is not? What boundaries are there that might constrain us then?

fwiw,
guacamole