Posted by Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Marilynne Robinson wrote this lengthy review of The God Delusion for Harpers Magazine. She was unimpressed.
The review weighs in at 4599 words, but you’ll find yourself almost a thousand words in before hitting anything substantive about Dawkins’ book. Prior to that it’s just a lot of snideness about how seriously Dawkins takes himself, about how he’s preaching to the choir, and about what a crazed Darwinian fundamentalist he is. In this portion of the review, Robinson seems more interested in showing off how well she writes than in making actual points. For example, here’s her opening paragraph:
Richard Dawkins is an Oxford professor and the author of a series of best-selling books that popularize a version of evolutionary theory. According to Dawkins, evolution is driven by “replicators”–genes, and also “memes,” viruses of the mind that spread and persist in human populations. Those genes and memes that replicate most effectively become dominant, with every consequence for the natural world and for civilization and history. The usefulness of this notion, which does have the virtue of simplicity, is a question obscured by the demands Dawkins has placed on it. By his lights this is the universal etiology, a fully sufficient refutation of religion in every form and the basis for a new view of humankind. Under the name of Darwinism it has been thrown into the rhetorical wars that seem, to the combatants, to pit science against religion. As argument it has taken on the character of this environment, getting lost in the miasma of its own supposed implications.
Dawkins, of course, has written several books establishing the usefulness of his view of evolution. That notwithstanding, Robinson tells us that the demands Dawkins has placed on his ideas have somehow obscured the question of their usefulness. What does that mean? How could expecting your view of evolution to explain many things make it unclear whether that view is useful? And I can’t make heads or tails out of that last sentence. “…lost in the miasma of its own supposed implications”? Whatever.
Dawkins, incidentally, obviously does not believe that Darwinian evolution is a fully sufficient refutation of religion in every form. If he did, there would have been no reason for him to write this book. Most of The God Delusion does not deal with evolution, after all.
Robinson natters on like this for a while, interrupting her admiration of her own prose just long enough to exaggerate Dawkins views. She then launches into a discussion of how it is poor form for Dawkins to discuss all of the evil done in the name of religion without also discussing evil done in the name of science. In the interest of keeping this entry to a reasonable length, I will not discuss this part of Robinson’s review. She makes some reasonable points, but many more unreasonable ones.
Instead, let us fast forward to the 2700 word mark. That is where we find this:
Evolution is the creature of time. And, as Dawkins notes, modern cosmologies generally suggest that time and the universe as a whole came into being together. So a creator cannot very well be thought of as having attained complexity through a process of evolution. That is to say, theists need find no anomaly in a divine “complexity” over against the “simplicity” that is presumed to characterize the universe at its origin. (I use these terms not because I find them appropriate to the question but because Dawkins uses them, and my point is to demonstrate the flaws in his reasoning.) In this context, Dawkins cannot concede, even hypothetically, a reality that is not time-bound, that does not conform to Darwinism as he understands it. Yet in an earlier book, Unweaving the Rainbow, Dawkins remarks that “further developments of the [big bang] theory, supported by all available evidence, suggest that time itself began in this mother of all cataclysms. You probably don’t understand, and I certainly don’t, what it can possibly mean to say that time itself began at a particular moment. But once again that is a limitation of our minds.. . .”
That God exists outside time as its creator is an ancient given of theology. The faithful are accustomed to expressions like “from everlasting to everlasting” in reference to God, language that the positivists would surely have considered nonsense but that does indeed express the intuition that time is an aspect of the created order. Again, I do not wish to abuse either theology or scientific theory by implying that either can be used as evidence in support of the other; I mean only that the big bang in fact provides a metaphor that might help Dawkins understand why his grand assault on the “God Hypothesis” has failed to impress the theists.
This refers to Dawkins “Ultimate 747” argument, and is the main point I wish to discuss. A lot of people have criticized this argument, but I believe nearly all of them are misconstruing Dawkins’ intention. Not because Dawkins was unclear, mind you, but rather because it is easier to refute a caricature than to discuss the real thing.
Let us begin with the observation that this argument appears in a chapter entitled “Why There Almost Certainly is No God.” So whatever Dawkins is about to argue, it is not that it is logically certain that God does not exist. Next, this comes after a chapter in which Dawkins considers, and refutes, most of the major arguments for God’s existence that have been offered over the years. The one he left out is the argument from design, and that is the subject of the present chapter.
So what is Dawkins’ argument? We needn’t guess, since he was kind enough to lay it out in a series of numbered points at the end of the chapter. He begins by pointing out that superficially one of the most compelling reasons for believing in God is the complexity of the universe as a whole, and also of its component parts (like living organisms). In everyday life, a purposeful arrangement of parts strongly suggests an intelligent designer. So when we see a purposeful arrangement of parts in living organisms, it is natural to think it a straightforward extrapolation to infer a designer for them as well. And that brings us to point number three, which I now reproduce:
The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a ‘crane’ not a ‘skyhook’, for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.
The point is that every intelligent agent we know about is highly complex. Yet, the designer of the universe is being imbued with powers that are orders of magnitude greater than anything known intelligent agents are capable of. If we were simply drawing an inference from the intelligent agents we know about, we would have to conclude that such an entity is itself highly complex. But if it is the complexity of the universe that led us to hypothesize such an entity in the first place, than the greater complexity of the designer likewise needs to be explained. This leads to an infinite regress of desginers, each one invoked to explain the one before it.
And this is where many of the critics go wrong. They think they have refuted Dawkins by pointing to logically possible scenarios in which God does not himself require an explanation. We can follow Robinson by declaring God to be eternal, for example. Or we can follow the example of one of my fellow Panda’s Thumbers, who recently suggested to me that God could be the creator of the universe, but nonetheless be very simple.
Indeed we can. But in each case we are simply imbuing God with precisely the properties He needs to have to be sheilded from rational inquiry. What we manifestly are not doing is making a simple extrapolation from the existence and actions of known intelligent agents, to the existence and actions of a designer for the universe. By conceding that the only way to avoid an infinite regress of designers is by assuming that God is not just different from known intelligent agents, but has properties that flatly contradict everything we know about intelligence, we are robbing the design argument of all its force. What started as a perfectly rational explanation for the complexity of nature, ends up being something that can only be propped up via hand waving and special pleading.
But that is not the end of the argument. Dawkins would agree that despite the huge conceptual problems inherent in invoking a supernatural agent as an explanation for the universe, we might nonetheless be driven to that conlcusion by the facts of nature. That is, nature might present us with phenomena that stand in such stark defiance of what natural causes can explain, that we would be stuck with the design hypothesis despite the even greater mysteries that hypothesis presents.
Actually, though, nature doesn’t do that. Darwinian evoution shows how the complexity of living organisms can be explained without reference to a designer. Cosmology, meanwhile, has not yet reached a definitive conclusion on questions like “fine-tuning,” but even what we know at this point is enough to make a naturalistic explanation seem far more plausible than a supernaturalistic one.
And that brings us back to Robinson. Dawkins would agree completely that no principle of logic is violated by observing the complexity of nature and concluding that it was created by an eternally existing supernatural entity of unfathomable power who inhabits a realm where our Earth logic does not apply. Just don’t claim that you have explained anything in this way, because all you have really done is create mysteries far greater than what we started with. And don’t claim that your conclusion is based on a rational contemplation of the facts of nature, because it is not.
To put it another way, you don’t have to be a positivist to find Robinson’s explanation nonsensical. Despite her protestations about human intuition, she can’t really imagine what it means to say that God exists in a realm outside time. No one can really imagine an entity that on the one hand is capable of first conceptualizing and then creating the universe, but on the other hand is so simple that we do not legitimately wonder where He came from. Arguing in this way is a concession of Dawkins’ point, not a refutation of it.
The remainder of Robinson’s review does manage to make a few good points (though her 500 word digression meant to show that T. H. Huxley was a moral cretin is a bit bizarre). She is right when she argues that Dawkins is a bit selective in the ways he quotes the Bible. She is also right in challenging Dawkins’ assertions about whether atheism can lead to violence in much the same way that religion does. This is one place where I think Dawkins genuinely dropped the ball. He does tend to lapse into an overly simplistic “Atheism good; Religion bad,” sort of mentality.
But that’s not really the correct dichotomy. Really it’s “Critical thinking, evidence based arguments good; Allegiance to a holy book, supreme confidence about the fate of unbelievers in the afterlife, bad.” The former tends to lead to atheism, while the latter is more associated with theism. I think Sam Harris makes this point very well in Letter to a Christian Nation:
Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia are not examples of what happens to people when they become too reasonable. To the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of political or racial dogmatism. It is time that Christians like yourself stop pretending that a rational rejection of your faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. One need not accept anything on insufficient evidence to find the virign birth of Jesus to be a preposterous idea. The problem with religion – as with Nazism, Stalinism, or any other totalitarian mythology – is the problem of dogma itself. I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs. (pp. 42-43)
So it is comforting that in a 4500+ word essay Robinson did manage to make a few good points. She does, at least, show evidence of having read the book. But it’s not much of a defense of religion to argue that if we scour history we can find some bad atheists, or that science can be directed towards evil ends just as surely as religion. And on the central question of the book, namely whether relgiious belief is something that can be defended rationally, Robinson misses the point completely.
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