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

[Adrift]

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.

There are tons of critiques of Dawkins' methodology out there already, but you might find philosopher at Notre Dame, Gary Gutting's op-ed piece in the NY Times interesting. He offers more resources on God's simplicity, and leans in the direction of the rebuttals already mentioned. Here's a snippet.

1. If God exists, he must be both the intelligent designer of the universe and a being that explains the universe but is not itself in need of explanation.

2. An intelligent designer of the universe would be a highly complex being.

3. A highly complex being would itself require explanation.

4. Therefore, God cannot be both the intelligent designer of the universe and the ultimate explanation of the universe.

5. Therefore, God does not exist.

Here the premises do support the conclusion, but premise 2, at least, is problematic. In what sense does Dawkins think God is complex and why does this complexity require an explanation? He does not discuss this in any detail, but his basic idea seems to be that the enormous knowledge and power God would have to possess would require a very complex being and such complexity of itself requires explanation. He says for example: “A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple” (p. 178). And, a bit more fully, “a God who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be . . . simple. Such bandwidth! . . . If [God] has the powers attributed to him he must have something far more elaborately and randomly constructed than the largest brain or the largest computer we know” (p. 184).

Here Dawkins ignores the possibility that God is a very different sort of being than brains and computers. His argument for God’s complexity either assumes that God is material or, at least, that God is complex in the same general way that material things are (having many parts related in complicated ways to one another). The traditional religious view, however, is that God is neither material nor composed of immaterial parts (whatever that might mean). Rather, he is said to be simple, a unity of attributes that we may have to think of as separate but that in God are united in a single reality of pure perfection.

Obviously, there are great difficulties in understanding how God could be simple in this way. But philosophers from Thomas Aquinas through contemporary thinkers have offered detailed discussions of the question that provide intelligent suggestions about how to think coherently about a simple substance that has the power and knowledge attributed to God. Apart from a few superficial swipes at Richard Swinburne’s treatment in “Is There a God?”, Dawkins ignores these discussions. (see Swinburne’s response to Dawkins, paragraph 3.) Making Dawkins’ case in any convincing way would require detailed engagement not only with Swinburne but also with other treatments by recent philosophers such as Christopher Hughes’ “A Complex Theory of a Simple God.” (For a survey of recent work on the topic, see William Vallicella’s article, “Divine Simplicity,” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

Further, Dawkins’ argument ignores the possibility that God is a necessary being (that is, a being that, by its very nature, must exist, no matter what). On this traditional view, God’s existence would be, so to speak, self-explanatory and so need no explanation, contrary to Dawkins’ premise 3. His ignoring this point also undermines his effort at a quick refutation of the cosmological argument for God as the cause of the existence of all contingent beings (that is, all beings that, given different conditions, would not have existed). Dawkins might, like some philosophers, argue that the idea of a necessary being is incoherent, but to make this case, he would have to engage with the formidable complexities of recent philosophical treatments of the question (see, for example, Timothy O’Connor’s “Theism and Ultimate Explanation” and Bruce Reichenbach’s article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Alvin Plantinga also discusses this in his article The Dawkins Confusion Naturalism ad absurdum.

Now suppose we return to Dawkins' argument for the claim that theism is monumentally improbable. As you recall, the reason Dawkins gives is that God would have to be enormously complex, and hence enormously improbable ("God, or any intelligent, decision-making calculating agent, is complex, which is another way of saying improbable"). What can be said for this argument?

Not much. First, is God complex? According to much classical theology (Thomas Aquinas, for example) God is simple, and simple in a very strong sense, so that in him there is no distinction of thing and property, actuality and potentiality, essence and existence, and the like. Some of the discussions of divine simplicity get pretty complicated, not to say arcane.3 (It isn't only Catholic theology that declares God simple; according to the Belgic Confession, a splendid expression of Reformed Christianity, God is "a single and simple spiritual being.") So first, according to classical theology, God is simple, not complex.4 More remarkable, perhaps, is that according to Dawkins' own definition of complexity, God is not complex. According to his definition (set out in The Blind Watchmaker), something is complex if it has parts that are "arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone." But of course God is a spirit, not a material object at all, and hence has no parts.5 A fortiori (as philosophers like to say) God doesn't have parts arranged in ways unlikely to have arisen by chance. Therefore, given the definition of complexity Dawkins himself proposes, God is not complex.

So first, it is far from obvious that God is complex. But second, suppose we concede, at least for purposes of argument, that God is complex. Perhaps we think the more a being knows, the more complex it is; God, being omniscient, would then be highly complex. Perhaps so; still, why does Dawkins think it follows that God would be improbable? Given materialism and the idea that the ultimate objects in our universe are the elementary particles of physics, perhaps a being that knew a great deal would be improbable—how could those particles get arranged in such a way as to constitute a being with all that knowledge? Of course we aren't given materialism. Dawkins is arguing that theism is improbable; it would be dialectically deficient in excelsis to argue this by appealing to materialism as a premise. Of course it is unlikely that there is such a person as God if materialism is true; in fact materialism logically entails that there is no such person as God; but it would be obviously question-begging to argue that theism is improbable because materialism is true.

So why think God must be improbable? According to classical theism, God is a necessary being; it is not so much as possible that there should be no such person as God; he exists in all possible worlds. But if God is a necessary being, if he exists in all possible worlds, then the probability that he exists, of course, is 1, and the probability that he does not exist is 0. Far from its being improbable that he exists, his existence is maximally probable. So if Dawkins proposes that God's existence is improbable, he owes us an argument for the conclusion that there is no necessary being with the attributes of God—an argument that doesn't just start from the premise that materialism is true. Neither he nor anyone else has provided even a decent argument along these lines; Dawkins doesn't even seem to be aware that he needs an argument of that sort.

Finally, if you're interested, Alister McGrath discusses Dawkins' issue with divine simplicity in a number of places in great detail. Rev Dr Patrick H. Richmond from the Faraday Institute brings it all together neatly here.

Hopefully that helps a bit.

[guacamole]

Adrift,

Thanks. That's a lot to digest over the short term. I will get to it.


fwiw,
guacamole

[Boxing Pythagoras]

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.

I am an example of an atheist who finds no good reason to presume that there exists an ontological cause for the universe outside of itself.

[Psychic Missile]

What is a symmetrical system?

[Starlight]

Thanks. That's a lot to digest over the short term.

It largely boils down to lots of theologians have asserted a lot of stuff that seems totally impossible and self-contradictory at face value and runs directly counter to observed evidence and known science, but they said it in a lot of words and in a complicated way, so you can totally trust them because it stops being BS once they trick you into thinking they know what they're talking about.

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

I agree that Dawkins' reasons for thinking that intelligence is complex do seem to be empirical.

However I think that once a person who is familiar with developments in computer A.I. etc sits down and reflects on the question "so what is 'intelligence' really, anyway, when it comes down to it?" they will realize that intelligence by its definition requires a complex implementation. Intelligence is a really complex and sophisticated thing because it involves representing and linking multiple concepts together in arbitrary but schematic ways. With our absolute best and most complex modern computer algorithms we are beginning to be able to mimic some of the absolute basics of intelligence, but we haven't created anything approaching a perfect A.I. yet because it's just so complicated. The human brain has 100 million neurons, and what is crucial is how they are interconnected (so the complexity is on the order of the number of neurons squared, once we are analyzing their connections), so we're looking at approximately a million billion interactions just to get to human level intelligence, and we've seen in computers when we try and simulate intelligence that yes that sort of level of complexity is absolutely necessary because for an intelligence you have to represent concepts and link them together in appropriate ways.

So not only does everything we know from evolution show us that intelligence has to be complex, everything we know from creating intelligences ourselves in A.I. shows us that intelligence has to be complex, and simply sitting and thinking about what intelligence is makes us realize that it is a complicated thing that consists of an incredible number of linked pieces.

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.

A computer game hypothesis solves a number of things like "why are the physical constants of this universe 'fine tuned' for life to exist?" etc. But yes, it absolutely pushes the regress back further, and I absolutely think there is still a first cause somewhere. I expect it is fairly mathematical and quantumy and I am not sure I or anyone else would really understand it even after we discovered it. But possibly all universes that could have existed do exist because nothing was sufficiently preventing them from existing and so perhaps the answer to the ultimate question of "why?" is essentially "why not?" and so perhaps all possible universes exist. But I would more expect that the first cause turns out to be a mathematical quantum theorem of some kind, that results in the quantum foam existing at some sort of sub-atomic level and it starting to randomly spit particles or universes into existence according to quantum probabilities.

What I don't like is when people start assigning completely arbitrary things as a 'first cause'. If someone said to me "oh yeah, there's a first cause and it's a grapefruit tree. You see, there was this tree and it bore fruit, and the fruit fell off and the seeds grew and created new worlds..." I would face-palm and say "um, why a grapefruit tree rather than something else? You can't have a totally arbitrary thing as first cause! You would need to explain the existence of the grapefruit tree itself!" I feel exactly that way when someone tries to tell me that the Christian God is the first cause. If they're going to posit a really arbitrary and complex being like the Christian God as the cause of the universe, then Dawkins' is absolutely right IMO - they need to explain the origin of the designer himself, just as someone would need to explain the grapefruit tree. And theologians doing a slight of hand of "ah, but you see our grapefruit tree (Christian God) is actually not a complex or arbitrary entity, and if you read 1000 pages of us telling you BS about it you won't know up from down or left from right and you'll think that the grapefruit tree was the only possible first cause and that orange trees were in no way eligible" gives me a bad case of eye-rolling.

[Adrift]

It largely boils down to lots of theologians have asserted a lot of stuff that seems totally impossible and self-contradictory at face value and runs directly counter to observed evidence and known science, but they said it in a lot of words and in a complicated way, so you can totally trust them because it stops being BS once they trick you into thinking they know what they're talking about.

One of your goofier hand waves. These aren't just theologians (some of them aren't even that), but some of the most distinguished philosophers working in this area in the Western world. Swinburne and McGrath from Oxford, Plantinga and Gutting from Notre Dame, and O’Connor, and Reichenbach, fine philosophers in their own right. All dealing with the relatively naive philosophical arguments of a biologist who is well out of his league. Even atheist philosophers have noted this, for example, the prominent Thomas Nagel of NY University,

Source: Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002-2008 by Thomas Nagel

Dawkins's reply to the argument [from design] has two parts, one positive and one negative. The positive part consists in describing a third alternative, different from both chance and design, as the explanation of biological complexity. He agrees that the eye, for example, could not have come into existence by chance, but the theory of evolution by natural selection is capable of explaining its existence as due neither to chance nor to design. The negative part of the argument asserts that the hypothesis of design by God is useless as an alternative to the hypothesis of chance, because it just pushes the problem back one step. In other words: who made God? "A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right."

Let me first say something about this negative argument. It depends, I believe, on a misunderstanding of the conclusion of the argument from design, in its traditional sense as an argument for the existence of God. If the argument is supposed to show that a supremely adept and intelligent natural being, with a super-body and a super-brain, is responsible for the design and the creation of life on earth, then of course this "explanation" is no advance on the phenomenon to be explained: if the existence of plants, animals, and people requires explanation, then the existence of such a super-being would require explanation for exactly the same reason. But if we consider what that reason is, we will see that it does not apply to the God hypothesis.

The reason that we are led to the hypothesis of a designer by considering both the watch and the eye is that these are complex physical structures that carry out a complex function, and we cannot see how they could have come into existence out of unorganized matter purely on the basis of the purposeless laws of physics. For the elements of which they are composed to have come together in just this finely tuned way purely as a result of physical and chemical laws would have been such an improbable fluke that we can regard it in effect as impossible: the hypothesis of chance can be ruled out. But God, whatever he may be, is not a complex physical inhabitant of the natural world. The explanation of his existence as a chance concatenation of atoms is not a possibility for which we must find an alternative, because that is not what anybody means by God. If the God hypothesis makes sense at all, it offers a different kind of explanation from those of physical science: purpose or intention of a mind without a body, capable nevertheless of creating and forming the entire physical world. The point of the hypothesis is to claim that not all explanation is physical, and that there is a mental, purposive, or intentional explanation more fundamental than the basic laws of physics, because it explains even them.

All explanations come to an end somewhere. The real opposition between Dawkins's physicalist naturalism and the God hypothesis is a disagreement over whether this end point is physical, extensional, and purposeless, or mental, intentional, and purposive. On either view, the ultimate explanation is not itself explained. The God hypothesis does not explain the existence of God, and naturalistic physicalism does not explain the laws of physics.

. . .

I agree with Dawkins that the issue of design versus purely physical causation is a scientific question. He is correct to dismiss Stephen Jay Gould's position that science and religion are "non-overlapping magisteria." The conflict is real. But although I am as much of an outsider to religion as he is, I believe it is much more difficult to settle the question than he thinks. I also suspect there are other possibilities besides these two that have not even been thought of yet. The fear of religion leads too many scientifically minded atheists to cling to a defensive, world-flattening reductionism. Dawkins, like many of his contemporaries, is hobbled by the assumption that the only alternative to religion is to insist that the ultimate explanation of everything must lie in particle physics, string theory, or whatever purely extensional laws govern the elements of which the material world is composed.

This reductionist dream is nourished by the extraordinary success of the physical sciences in our time, not least in their recent application to the understanding of life through molecular biology. It is natural to try to take any successful intellectual method as far as it will go. Yet the impulse to find an explanation of everything in physics has over the last fifty years gotten out of control. The concepts of physical science provide a very special, and partial, description of the world that experience reveals to us. It is the world with all subjective consciousness, sensory appearances, thought, value, purpose, and will left out. What remains is the mathematically describable order of things and events in space and time.

© Copyright Original Source

[shunyadragon]

One of your goofier hand waves. These aren't just theologians (some of them aren't even that), but some of the most distinguished philosophers working in this area in the Western world. Swinburne and McGrath from Oxford, Plantinga and Gutting from Notre Dame, and O’Connor, and Reichenbach, fine philosophers in their own right. All dealing with the relatively naive philosophical arguments of a biologist who is well out of his league. Even atheist philosophers have noted this, for example, the prominent Thomas Nagel of NY University,

Source: Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002-2008 by Thomas Nagel

Dawkins's reply to the argument [from design] has two parts, one positive and one negative. The positive part consists in describing a third alternative, different from both chance and design, as the explanation of biological complexity. He agrees that the eye, for example, could not have come into existence by chance, but the theory of evolution by natural selection is capable of explaining its existence as due neither to chance nor to design. The negative part of the argument asserts that the hypothesis of design by God is useless as an alternative to the hypothesis of chance, because it just pushes the problem back one step. In other words: who made God? "A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right."

Let me first say something about this negative argument. It depends, I believe, on a misunderstanding of the conclusion of the argument from design, in its traditional sense as an argument for the existence of God. If the argument is supposed to show that a supremely adept and intelligent natural being, with a super-body and a super-brain, is responsible for the design and the creation of life on earth, then of course this "explanation" is no advance on the phenomenon to be explained: if the existence of plants, animals, and people requires explanation, then the existence of such a super-being would require explanation for exactly the same reason. But if we consider what that reason is, we will see that it does not apply to the God hypothesis.

The reason that we are led to the hypothesis of a designer by considering both the watch and the eye is that these are complex physical structures that carry out a complex function, and we cannot see how they could have come into existence out of unorganized matter purely on the basis of the purposeless laws of physics. For the elements of which they are composed to have come together in just this finely tuned way purely as a result of physical and chemical laws would have been such an improbable fluke that we can regard it in effect as impossible: the hypothesis of chance can be ruled out. But God, whatever he may be, is not a complex physical inhabitant of the natural world. The explanation of his existence as a chance concatenation of atoms is not a possibility for which we must find an alternative, because that is not what anybody means by God. If the God hypothesis makes sense at all, it offers a different kind of explanation from those of physical science: purpose or intention of a mind without a body, capable nevertheless of creating and forming the entire physical world. The point of the hypothesis is to claim that not all explanation is physical, and that there is a mental, purposive, or intentional explanation more fundamental than the basic laws of physics, because it explains even them.

All explanations come to an end somewhere. The real opposition between Dawkins's physicalist naturalism and the God hypothesis is a disagreement over whether this end point is physical, extensional, and purposeless, or mental, intentional, and purposive. On either view, the ultimate explanation is not itself explained. The God hypothesis does not explain the existence of God, and naturalistic physicalism does not explain the laws of physics.

. . .

I agree with Dawkins that the issue of design versus purely physical causation is a scientific question. He is correct to dismiss Stephen Jay Gould's position that science and religion are "non-overlapping magisteria." The conflict is real. But although I am as much of an outsider to religion as he is, I believe it is much more difficult to settle the question than he thinks. I also suspect there are other possibilities besides these two that have not even been thought of yet. The fear of religion leads too many scientifically minded atheists to cling to a defensive, world-flattening reductionism. Dawkins, like many of his contemporaries, is hobbled by the assumption that the only alternative to religion is to insist that the ultimate explanation of everything must lie in particle physics, string theory, or whatever purely extensional laws govern the elements of which the material world is composed.

This reductionist dream is nourished by the extraordinary success of the physical sciences in our time, not least in their recent application to the understanding of life through molecular biology. It is natural to try to take any successful intellectual method as far as it will go. Yet the impulse to find an explanation of everything in physics has over the last fifty years gotten out of control. The concepts of physical science provide a very special, and partial, description of the world that experience reveals to us. It is the world with all subjective consciousness, sensory appearances, thought, value, purpose, and will left out. What remains is the mathematically describable order of things and events in space and time.

© Copyright Original Source

Careful selectively quoting Thomas Negal to support your Theist perspective against a reductionalist materialist perspective. He does have objections to many materialist views of evolution and materialism. but in fact presents alternative views within a Philosophical Naturalist paradigm for a natural teleological laws to explain the existence of life, consciousness, and not a Theist nor Deist teleological perspective.

[Adrift]

Careful selectively quoting Thomas Negal to support your Theist perspective against a reductionalist materialist perspective. He does have objections to many materialist views of evolution and materialism. but in fact presents alternative views within a Philosophical Naturalist paradigm for a natural teleological laws to explain the existence of life, consciousness, and not a Theist nor Deist teleological perspective.

It's sad that you can't see the irony of you telling others to be careful. You are by a wide margin the most careless poster on this forum. Your reading comprehension is an absolute mess by anyone's standards. Something that even the other skeptics on this forum have picked up on. All of your sources are nothing but quickly Googled webpages that inevitably end up biting you in the butt by saying the exact opposite of what you assumed they did, and you barely understand your own arguments, nevermind the nuance arguments of your interlocutors.

I did not quote Nagel (not Negal as you incorrectly spelled it) to support my "Theist perspective against a reductionalist materialist perspective". I quoted him to demonstrate that philosophers of all stripes (and not just Christian ones) take issue with Dawkins' argument on this particular subject (the subject concerning a complex designer).

[guacamole]

What is a symmetrical system?

No idea. A bit of crap because I'm putting down thoughts off the top of my head. I'm open to improvements.

[shunyadragon]

It's sad that you can't see the irony of you telling others to be careful. You are by a wide margin the most careless poster on this forum. Your reading comprehension is an absolute mess by anyone's standards. Something that even the other skeptics on this forum have picked up on. All of your sources are nothing but quickly Googled webpages that inevitably end up biting you in the butt by saying the exact opposite of what you assumed they did, and you barely understand your own arguments, nevermind the nuance arguments of your interlocutors.

I did not quote Nagel (not Negal as you incorrectly spelled it) to support my "Theist perspective against a reductionalist materialist perspective". I quoted him to demonstrate that philosophers of all stripes (and not just Christian ones) take issue with Dawkins' argument on this particular subject (the subject concerning a complex designer).

I believe you are over stating Negal's objections. He represents only a somewhat different view to Dawkins in the same Philosophical Naturalism argument.

To argue your point you need to more fully cite NEgal's view and not a second hand source with a selective citation.

[Adrift]

I believe you are over stating Negal's objections. He represents only a somewhat different view to Dawkins in the same Philosophical Naturalism argument.

To argue your point you need to more fully cite NEgal's view and not a second hand source with a selective citation.

I haven't overstated Nagel's objection. In fact, I haven't said anything about the objection at all except that he has one.

Nagel's own collection of essays compiled by him is not "a second hand source with a selective citation". And again, it's Nagel, not Negal.

I know you're bored shunya, but find something else to do.

[Psychic Missile]

No idea. A bit of crap because I'm putting down thoughts off the top of my head. I'm open to improvements.

I don't understand your answer to the argument. All premises have an implied postscript of "as far as we know". Hypothetically, a pigeon could have created the universe. That doesn't mean that a premise that involves the creative capabilities of Columba livia should allow for the possibility of universe conception. A premise should be based on what we know to be true, not on what we don't know to might be true.

[guacamole]

I don't understand your answer to the argument. All premises have an implied postscript of "as far as we know".

In induction or abduction, yes. Deduction, no. I'm trying to be deductive.

Hypothetically, a pigeon could have created the universe. That doesn't mean that a premise that involves the creative capabilities of Columba livia should allow for the possibility of universe conception. A premise should be based on what we know to be true, not on what we don't know to might be true.

Sometimes we argue from 'what might be true' or 'what we don't know for certain to be true' to determine if other statements would be hypothetically true.

[Psychic Missile]

In induction or abduction, yes. Deduction, no. I'm trying to be deductive.

Okay, I guess it makes sense for deductive arguments to allow for exceptions we have no evidence for depending upon the situation. I admit to being a novice in these matters.

Sometimes we argue from 'what might be true' or 'what we don't know for certain to be true' to determine if other statements would be hypothetically true.

I don't think that's appropriate. Quite a bit of chapter two is comprised of Dawkins arguing against the idea of non-overlapping magisteria. He thinks that religious questions should be solved with scientific answers. So why should his argument against the first cause be responded to with a scientifically dubious conclusion?

[guacamole]

I'm slowly working my way through the material Adrift posted before I post more from chapter 2, though at this point, the reactions then will not be "off the cuff." Ah, well; I will clearly incorporate some fuzziness and sloppiness anyway, because it is my habit.

Here is the type of information though, that I think is very useful in this discussion, and which I was trying to get at before, when I was talking about different types of "brains/minds" (in this case, simply referring to the 'thing' that generates thought, etc.--sloppiness engaged!)

Here Dawkins ignores the possibility that God is a very different sort of being than brains and computers. His argument for God’s complexity either assumes that God is material or, at least, that God is complex in the same general way that material things are (having many parts related in complicated ways to one another). The traditional religious view, however, is that God is neither material nor composed of immaterial parts (whatever that might mean). Rather, he is said to be simple, a unity of attributes that we may have to think of as separate but that in God are united in a single reality of pure perfection.

I suppose an atheist might quibble here the classical assertion that the "unity of attributes...that we may have to think of as separate...are united in a single reality of pure [and I suppose one would add, simplistic] perfection." But I think his main point in this paragraph is unassailable. God is, almost by definition, "other." There's no reason, ala Dawkins 'bandwidth' quip, to assert that what generates creativity and thought at the point of origin must be like what generates 'thought' in humans, animals, and machines.

Further along in the article, past the section that Adrift cited, is a useful point that I'm starting to see about Dawkins more and more often:

Religious believers often accuse argumentative atheists such as Dawkins of being excessively rationalistic, demanding standards of logical and evidential rigor that aren’t appropriate in matters of faith. My criticism is just the opposite. Dawkins does not meet the standards of rationality that a topic as important as religion requires.

Which is because Dawkins does not see religion as 'important' in the sense that it is worth careful consideration; However, I find that this generally weakens his points as he discusses things where he might not be as informed or well prepared as he might be were to have even a slightly more charitable point of view on the strengths of his opponents.

My last comment here, before I teach again next period, is that it appears, after my reading of Swineburne's response to the God delusion, that Dawkins treatment of Swineburne is wretched and beneath dignity and respect. It almost borders on malicious, purposeful out-of-context citation, which outrages Dawkins when applied to him. The hypocrisy on this is staggering. This is not a strictly logical critique of Dawkins, but a moral one--and the seriousness of the offense, imo, makes me respect Dawkins less and less each time I see it happening.

fwiw,
guacamole