Evolutionary biologist H. Allen Orr has this lengthy essay in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. Officially it's a review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Joan Roughgarden's Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist, and Lewis Wolpert's Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origin of Belief. Actually, though, Orr says almost nothing about those latter two books.
Orr begins by describing his admiration for much of Dawkins' previous work. (He describes The Selfish Gene as the best work of popular science ever written). This is meant as a prelude to what Orr fancies to be a devastating smackdown of The God Delusion. So before explaining why many of his criticism's are wide of the mark, let me first express my own admiration for Orr's writing. His own essays on evolution and creationism are always insightful, and his book Speciation, coauthored with Jerry Coyne, is a must read for anyone seriously interested in evolutionary biology.
Now let's see what Orr has to say about Dawkins.
After summarzing the contents of Dawkins' book, Orr repeats the standard complaint that Dawkins does not deal seriously with the subtleties of religious thought. Orr writes:
The result is The God Delusion, a book that never squarely faces its opponents. You will find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology in Dawkins's book (does he know Augustine rejected biblical literalism in the early fifth century?), no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions (are they like ordinary claims about everyday matters?), no effort to appreciate the complex history of interaction between the Church and science (does he know the Church had an important part in the rise of non-Aristotelian science?), and no attempt to understand even the simplest of religious attitudes (does Dawkins really believe, as he says, that Christians should be thrilled to learn they're terminally ill?).Instead, Dawkins has written a book that's distinctly, even defiantly, middlebrow. Dawkins's intellectual universe appears populated by the likes of Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Carl Sagan, the science popularizer,[3] both of whom he cites repeatedly. This is a different group from thinkers like William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein--both of whom lived after Darwin, both of whom struggled with the question of belief, and both of whom had more to say about religion than Adams and Sagan. Dawkins spends much time on what can only be described as intellectual banalities: “Did Jesus have a human father, or was his mother a virgin at the time of his birth? Whether or not there is enough surviving evidence to decide it, this is still a strictly scientific question.”[4]
Let's take it from the top. Orr accuses Dawkins of not squarely facing his opponents, and then rattles off a list of examples meant to establish that point. In reality he only establishes that he has not apprehended Dawkins' targets.
Dawkins provides no serious discussion of Jewish or Christian theology? Of course not, because such theology is mostly irrelevant to how religion is actually practiced. Theology is an academic pursuit, and like many such pursuits it concerns itself primarily with esoterica far removed from people's actual lives. Much Christian theology in particular tends to take the form of viewing the Bible as a complex cipher, one that requires years of training to understand properly.
And since Orr is criticizing Dawkins' superficiality, it is a bit rich for him to reduce Augustine's views to the slogan that he rejected biblical literalism. Augustine did take the view that the Bible should be interpreted in as literal a way as possible, and in some of his writing he even endorsed a young-Earth position. He was willing to countenance a somewhat allegorical interpretation of Genesis, but that was only because he felt the Bible should not be read in a way that contradicts what clear scientific evidence is telling us. A worthy sentiment, certainly, but not one that finds much theological justification.
At any rate, Dawkins is perfectly aware that many serious Christians do not accept Biblical literalism. So what? Dawkins' book is primarilty about the reasonableness of believing in a creator God, and on the social impact of widespread religious belief. The minutiae of different schools of Christian thought just isn't the concern of this book.
Next up is Dawkins' failure to wade into the internecine disputes about the status of religious propositions. That is because for most believers there is no such dispute. For them religious propositions have precisely the same meaning as every other sort of proposition. When they discuss God they are talking about a real entity, with real motivations and desires, who really cares about the people he literally created from nothing. It is these people, not some small cadre of academic navel-gazers, Dawkins means to address.
I'm going to gamble and say that Dawkins is familiar with the role of the church in the rise of modern science. This is a common talking point among those who wish to argue that science and religion are not necessarily hostile to one another. It is unclear to me why anyone thinks it is relevant to modern discussions of theism and atheism. The church funded scientific investigation as a way of further understanding God's glory. The idea was that nature and its workings were themselves a sort of divine revelation, meant to conpliment the revelation found in Scripture. It's a lovely notion, and science should be grateful that at least some Chrstians of the Middle Ages felt that way. But the fact remains that as soon as scientists started turning up bits of data that contradicted Scripture, the relationship between science and religion got distinctly chilly.
Dawkins doesn't try to understand the attitudes of religious people? Well, score one for Orr.
Orr sums up all of this intellecutalizing by protesting that Dawkins' book is too middlebrow. Of course it's middlebrow! It was intended as a popular-level book published by a mainstream outfit that people are actually intended to read. Dawkins frequently refers people to other books that give more detailed coverage of the topics he was discussing. One example is J.L. Mackie's The Miracle of Theism. Many critics have cited this book as one people should read if they want, you know, a serious treatment of arguments for the existence of God. Now don't misunderstand me: Mackie is brilliant, his arguments are spot-on, and the world is a better place because he wrote that book. But, I'm sorry, his book is incredibly dense, difficult to read, and frankly, incredibly boring. And I say that as someone who finds this subject fascinating. Dawkins meant for his book to be read, you see, and that sometime means giving short shrift to the views of Wittgenstein and James.
Orr eventually turns away from listing things he wishes Dawkins had discussed to replying to the things Dawkins really does discuss. And this is where Orr really steps in it. Try to believe that a smart guy like Orr actually wrote the following paragraph:
The reason seems clear. The first argument leads to a conclusion Dawkins despises, while the second leads to one he loves. Dawkins, so far as I can tell, is unconcerned that the central argument of his book bears more than a passing resemblance to those clever philosophical proofs for the existence of God that he dismisses. This is unfortunate. He could have used a healthy dose of his usual skepticism when deciding how much to invest in his own Ultimate Boeing 747 argument. Indeed, one needn't be a creationist to note that Dawkins's argument suffers at least two potential problems. First, as others have pointed out, if he is right, the design hypothesis essentially must be wrong and the alternative naturalistic hypothesis essentially must be right. But since when is a scientific hypothesis confirmed by philosophical gymnastics, not data? Second, the fact that we as scientists find a hypothesis question-begging--as when Dawkins asks “who designed the designer?”-- cannot, in itself, settle its truth value. It could, after all, be a brute fact of the universe that it derives from some transcendent mind, however question-begging this may seem. What explanations we find satisfying might say more about us than about the explanations. Why, for example, is Dawkins so untroubled by his own (large) assumption that both matter and the laws of nature can be viewed as given? Why isn't that question-begging?
Orr is right that others have made his first point, but he does not bathe himself in glory by following their bad example. There is nothing in Dawkins' argument that tries to rule out design by philosophical gymnastics. He is merely pointing out that invoking design as the explanation for the universe leads to profound conceptual difficulties. Explaining the universe by concocting an entity that is even harder to explain is about as fruitful as saying the Earth rests on the back of a giant tortoise. It just raises more questions then it solves.
These difficulties are sufficiently severe, in his view, to make us very skeptical of design explanations. The situation is all the worse for people who argue that it is the very complexity of the universe that triggers a design inference. In that case, the very same logic that led us to hypothesize God in the first place is what requires that we provide an explanation for God.
In replying to this argument you can try arguing that God is actually very simple, or that he is not the sort of entity that requires an explanation, or that it is reasonable to assume God is eternal but that we know from the Big Bang that the universe had a beginning. These replies are inadequate, but they at least meet Dawkins' argument head-on. What you don't get to do is argue that Dawkins' argument makes design seem very unlikely, so clearly he must be wrong. That is all Orr has done here.
The second point is even sillier. Yes, of course, God's existence might be a brute fact of the universe. We might be stuck with it in spite of the conceptual issues it raises. Dawkins would say (as would Orr, I suspect) that if you are going to go the design route, you had better have an awfully good argument for doing so. At present there is no such argument. But the bare possibility that God exists despite the lack of a good argument, and despite the conceptual difficulties it raises, is the reason Dawkins entitled this chapter of his book, “Why There Almost Certainly is No God.”
Having done silly and sillier, let's move on to silliest. That's Orr's closing remark about Dawkins' own assumptions being question-begging. Why can the laws of nature be taken as given? Because they are given! We know the laws of nature exist. We're stuck with them. The fact is that when you are reasoning about the origin of the universe, you have to start with something. That is unfortunate, but that's the way it is. So Dawkins' takes the attitude that at least by going his route we explain the universe in terms of the simplest things that are known to exist. Orr can call this a large assumption if he wishes, but surely it is smaller than the assumption made in creating, from whole cloth, an entity with mind-numbing supernatural powers, and arguing that that is the thing that has always existed.
Moving on, we should also comment on the following bizarre paragraph:
The reason Dawkins thinks he has something to say about God is, of course, clear: he is an evolutionary biologist. And as we all know, Darwinism had an early and noisy run-in with religion. What Dawkins never seems to consider is that this incident might have been, in an important way, local and contingent. It might, in other words, have turned out differently, at least in principle. Believers could, for instance, have uttered a collective “So what?” to evolution. Indeed some did. The angry reaction of many religious leaders to Darwinism had complex causes, involving equal parts ignorance, fear, politics, and the sheer shock of the new. The point is that it's far from certain that there is an ineluctable conflict between the acceptance of evolutionary mechanism and the belief that, as William James put it, “the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe.” Instead, we and Dawkins might simply be living through the reverberations of an interesting, but not especially fundamental, bit of Victorian history. If so, evolutionary biology would enjoy no particularly exalted pulpit from which to preach about religion.
Let us begin with the obvious: The reason Orr was asked to review this book is that he is an evolutionary biologist. If biologists have no particular qualifications for discussing this topic, one wonders why he didn't tell the editor of the NYRB to find a theologian instead.
And I suspect that Dawkins' intention in writing this book had little to do with a desire to put shiny new ideas down on paper for the first time. Probably his reasons were more prosaic: He has a view of this subject that is not well-represented in mass-market literature, especially in this country, and he has the clout and the recognizability to actually get such a book published.
But it's the rest of this paragraph that gets really weird. Religious hostility to evolution was born out of ignorance, fear, politics and sheer shock of the new? Maybe. But a better explanation is that religious hostility was born out of the entirely correct realization that Darwin's work posed a genuine threat to their beliefs. Many believers responded to Darwin with a “So what?” Show me a believer who had that reaction and I'll show you someone who either didn't understand Darwin's work, or made a point of not thinking carefully about it. You might be able to reconcile traditional Christian belief with evolution, but it requires some serious mental engagement to do so. Orr admits as much in his next paragraph:
None of this is to say that evolutionary biology cannot inform our view of religion. It can and does. At the very least it insists that the Lord works in mysterious ways. More generally, it demands rejection of anything approaching biblical literalism. There are facts of nature--including that human beings evolved on the African savanna several million years ago--and these facts are not subject to negotiation.So apparently a thorough understanding of evolution does enhance your qualifications for discussing evolution. This admission pretty seriously undercuts the point, such as it is, of the previous paragraph.
After all this Orr bashing, let me close with one place where I think he gets it right. As much as I liked Dawkins' book, and as much as I think in nearly all cases his arguments are better than those of his critics, there are some places where I think Dawkins gets it wrong. Orr nails one of them:
Part of Dawkins's difficulty is that his worldview is thoroughly Victorian. He is, as many have noted, a kind of latter-day T.H. Huxley. The problem is that these latter days have witnessed blood-curdling experiments in institutional atheism. Dawkins tends to wave away the resulting crimes. It is, he insists, unclear if they were actually inspired by atheism. He emphasizes, for example, that Stalin's brutality may not have been motivated by his atheism. While this is surely partly true, it's a tricky issue, especially as one would need to allow for the same kind of distinction when considering religious institutions. (Does anyone really believe that the Church's dreadful dealings with the Nazis were motivated by its theism?)In any case, it's hard to believe that Stalin's wholesale torture and murder of priests and nuns (including crucifixions) and Mao's persecution of Catholics and extermination of nearly every remnant of Buddhism were unconnected to their atheism. Neither the institutions of Christianity nor those of communism are, of course, innocent. But Dawkins's inability to see the difference in the severity of their sins-- one of orders of magnitude--suggests an ideological commitment of the sort that usually reflects devotion to a creed.
This, alas, is correct, One of the weaknesses of Dawkins' book is that he frequently writes as if the really important distinction in forging a civil, livable society is theism vs. atheism. It isn't. The important distinctions are secular society vs. government involvement in religion, and rational thought and evidence vs. irrational faith and revelation. You can reasonably say that theism is more closely associated with the bad parts of those last two dichotomies, and atheism is more closely associated with the good parts. But atheism good / theism bad is not born out by the evidence.
Anyway, go read the rest of Orr's essay. I think most of his major points are wrong, but he is an engaging and interesting writer nonetheless.
Comments
Of course not, because such theology is mostly irrelevant to how religion is actually practiced. Theology is an academic pursuit, and like many such pursuits it concerns itself primarily with esoterica far removed from people's actual lives. Much Christian theology in particular tends to take the form of viewing the Bible as a complex cipher, one that requires years of training to understand properly.
this is a cogent point. i fail to see how clear-headed scientists can heap contempt upon the obscurantism of post-modernism, and yet contend that there is a necessity in rebutting the angel-on-a-pinhead counting which passes for theology.
you sir shall go down in history as dawkins bulldog!
bravo!
Posted by: chet snicker | December 22, 2006 10:55 PM
"evolutionary biology would enjoy no particularly exalted pulpit from which to preach about religion"
I think his point is that *evolutionary biology* doesn't have much to say about religion. An *evolutionary biologist* like Dawkins may have something to say. While he may be very smart and articulate, he doesn't have any special knowledge on the topic as far as being a biologist is concerned.
Dawkins as evolutionary biologist is dragged into a conflict between religion and science because of the history of the conflict itself. There's no particular reason why evolution as a scientific theory should be seen to conflict with religion. Evolution explains one thing. Religion explains something else entirely.
Posted by: Will | December 23, 2006 1:43 AM
Great review, Jason! I have my own take on a bit of Orr's unfortunate nonsense:
It could, after all, be a brute fact of the universe that it derives from some transcendent mind, however question-begging this may seem. What explanations we find satisfying might say more about us than about the explanations. Why, for example, is Dawkins so untroubled by his own (large) assumption that both matter and the laws of nature can be viewed as given? Why isn't that question-begging?
It is writing like this that reinforces my idea that philosophical arguments are most often only operational forms of base intuitions. Contrary to Orr's claim, taking the laws of nature as a given isn't question-begging, the opposite proposition is. Teleological arguments spring from the notion among humans that all proximate causes have to eventually sum to a global cause, but there is absolutely nothing that justifies such a deduction. On the contrary, asserting such a cause is unparsimonious at best.
Now don't misunderstand me: Mackie is brilliant, his arguments are spot-on, and the world is a better place because he wrote that book. But, I'm sorry, his book is incredibly dense, difficult to read, and frankly, incredibly boring.
I concur, as I felt the same way about Michael Martin's indulgently written Atheism: A Philosophical Justification: great treatise filled with highly cogent argumentation, but ungodly (pardon the pun) boring. And this is coming from a guy who enjoyed reading Li and Vitanyi's An Introduction to Kolmogorov Complexity and it's Applications.
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | December 23, 2006 3:15 AM
Will,
Evolution explains one thing. Religion explains something else entirely.
I am curious about what you have in mind that religion is capable of "explaining". If when you use the term "explain" to simply mean the advancement of a whimsical, unfounded conjecture, your statement above is at least somewhat plausible. But in my mind an "explanation" entails something a bit more factual and objective. Religion obsesses over nonsensical philosophizing in ancient scribblings for which it has no method for discerning truth or falsehood, which to me does not so much amount to "explanation" as flapdoodle, much like the hallucinatory rants of Terence McKenna.
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | December 23, 2006 4:49 AM
Tyler-
I agree. Religion is "advancement of a whimsical, unfounded conjecture."
The important point is that you and I require more to our "explanations" like objective facts, but religion does not. Their method for discerning truth is "faith". Something which I have a hard time understanding.
I also have a hard time with stochastic dynamic general equilibrium models some times, but that doesn't mean there's not something to it. I have more incentive to learn those models though because I just have more faith in science to give me answers (to questions I'm interested in) than in religion.
Posted by: Will | December 23, 2006 5:52 AM
"It could, after all, be a brute fact of the universe that it derives from some transcendent mind"
Tyler, this isn't nonsense. "God says so" implies all the facts of nature. Why DNA? God says so. Why the planets and stars? God says so. Why does demand decrease in price? God says so.
Natural laws are brute facts or ultimate causes in the same way. I just happen to be of the opinion that these laws tell better stories than the ones with Gods.
Teleological explanations may not be necessary, but that doesn't imply they aren't the truth.
Posted by: Will | December 23, 2006 6:07 AM
Teleological explanations may not be necessary, but that doesn't imply they aren't the truth.
Yes, but the burden of proof resides with those would assert teleological explanations. As Dawkins points out in his book, believers often behave as though the burden of proof lies with atheists. That has been my experience as well. I cannot count the number of times that I've heard people say something to the effect of, prove that God doesn't exist. The point is that the burden of proof lies with the person who asserts the existence of a phenomenon.
Posted by: ChuckO | December 23, 2006 6:48 AM
Will,
Thank you for replying:
...this isn't nonsense. "God says so" implies all the facts of nature. Why DNA? God says so. Why the planets and stars? God says so. Why does demand decrease in price? God says so.
This is in essence why we use the principle of parsimony (Occam's Razor) in science. "God says so" is just an unnecessary, ad hoc qualification on something we already know. You can, in principle, add infinitely many such qualifications. For instance, we can know that a physically reversible computation must have a completely one-to-one transition function without invoking supernatural involvement, or purple elephant involvement, or fairy dust involvement, etc. If the explanation conforms to prediction, there is no need to go any further.
Natural laws are brute facts or ultimate causes in the same way. I just happen to be of the opinion that these laws tell better stories than the ones with Gods.
Well, to be clear in my terminology, I use "ultimate cause" and "global cause" interchangeably to mean the teleological idea of a raison d`etre. As I said above, if you have a predictive model that accurately maps reality, you don't need to go any further. That is distinguished from "GODDIDIT" in that the latter is completely unjustified conjecture. When we discover the elusive ToE in physics, there will be no need to invoke a deity as an ad hoc justification, despite the instincts of many.
Teleological explanations may not be necessary, but that doesn't imply they aren't the truth.
But this is a useless observation. Just as there are infinitely many ad hoc qualifications upon established theories that could make room for the supernatural, so there are many that could invalidate established theories. Creationists often argue that all the evidence that the universe is approximately 13 billion years old is invalid because God made it look that way on purpose (the light from stars was already on it's way here, etc.). How can one, given the criterion you imply, logically rule out such explanations. I personally prefer Occam.
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | December 23, 2006 7:12 AM
Correction:
If the explanation conforms to prediction, there is no need to go any further.
What I really meant to say was "If the explanation yields accurate predictions, there is no need to go any further."
Sorry for the mental mix-up.
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | December 23, 2006 7:20 AM
"the burden of proof resides with those would assert teleological explanations"
ChuckO, you can never 'prove' an axiom. You can, as Tyler says, show that observation is inconsistent with the predictions of the axiom. I claim you can never find an observation which is inconsistent with the axiom "God said so."
Occam might have a thing or two to say about this, but that is either here nor there in this argument between science and religion. Occam's razor is science's work horse. Faith is religion's. Saying the faithful violate Occam's razor (or that they get cut by it, hah) isn't saying much given they don't find that rule of thumb appropriate.
Again, it comes down to an aesthetic opinion. I feel serious or good or beautiful inquiry into nature requires the use of the tools of science. They don't. Who am I to say I'm right and they're wrong?
Posted by: Will | December 23, 2006 11:46 AM
I think it's a mistake to treat Orr's review as an attempt at rebuttal to Dawkins. Orr's review is … a review. He finds Dawkins' book as sloppily written and sloppily argued. So did I, so did Lawrence Krauss, so did many other ScienceBloggers. This is not to say that Dawkins is wrong, indeed Orr writes: "I don't pretend to know whether there's more to the world than meets the eye and, for all I know, Dawkins's general conclusion is right. But his book makes a far from convincing case."
Similar sentences and sentiments occur in each of the negative reviews you've addressed here.
It isn't that the reviews necessarily disagree with Dawkins. It's that they (we?) think that he made his arguments in a particularly bad way. He expressed thoughts that we might agree with in ways worse than we might have expressed them.
And while it's true that Dawkins cites a small number of academic sources, my sense in reading the book was that he did most of his research using Google. I've never seen a book with more references to websites (including respectable ones like Pharyngula, and utterly random ones, too). While Mackie may have some good insights into the argumentation of theology, a reader of Dawkins is honestly more likely to come away thinking that Douglas Adams was trained in theology. And while I think of the Hitchhikers' trilogy as my personal Bible, I think even DNA would have objected to being treated as a prophet.
In short, the negative reception to Dawkins' book is not a reflection of negative opinions of the point he's making, but a sign that he made those points with poor arguments and mediocre writing.
Posted by: Josh | December 23, 2006 12:20 PM
Agreed. It's not that Dawkins is wrong (he may be, or he may not) but that he fails to convince those that don't already share his viewpoint (and rhetorical strategy).
Posted by: John Lynch | December 23, 2006 2:35 PM
No one has any 'special' knowledge of the topic and Dawkins is as learned as any theologian on the topic of religion.
They don't get to decide that their assertions are shielded from the same levels of inquiry that anything else is, they don't get special treatment.
I find this rather silly. Dawkins writing is intended to be easily understood by the layman. This comment shows you miss the point. His arguments are not poor. This is exactly the kind of thinking he would disagree with, exactly what does one have to do to make a 'good' argument against religious thought? He attacks the base levels of belief and does a pretty good job of dismantling them.
He doesn't need to go to deep into the philosophical arguments simply because their underpinnings are what he is attacking and without those all the hand waving doesn't need to be addressed. In short I don't see how josh and his comments 1. understand his goals or 2. know the audience he was targeting. It seems to me your not be critical of what he did but rather what you wish he had done.
Posted by: GH | December 23, 2006 3:02 PM
Almost forgot this one. Did you honestly think he was going to get positive reviews from this work? He took a book, anda powerful book at that, to the masses on a level they can understand. He took it to the people on a taboo subject. It takes a brave reviewer to stand up and be counted and some have. The rest write reviews like Orr above or worse.
Secondly I wouldn't say his book has had a negative reception at all. The proof is in the pudding and his book is selling very, very well. The majority of people know their religious beliefs don't add up but they go along to get along. Reading Dawkins lets them know it's ok and their thoughts and doubts have real purchase and they are not at all odd for realizing it.
Posted by: GH | December 23, 2006 3:18 PM
Josh-
I am aware of the distinction you are making (between the possible correctness of Dawkins' conlcusions and the strength of the arguments he used to back them up), but the fact remains that most of the specific criticisms people are levelling at Dawkins are unfair or incorrect, in my opinion. Orr, for example, makes several points that are meant to show us how shallow and superficial Dawkins' arguments are. In most of those cases, as I have shown (to my satisfaction at least :) ), Orr's points are irrelevant or very weak.
And flipping through Dawkins' eight-page bibliography, it looks to me like it's a nice mix of popular level and scholarly sources. That seems perfectly appropriate for the sort of book he was writing. Douglas Adams is mentioned four times in the book. In every case Dawkins was merely using Adams to illustrate a point he (Dawkins) was trying to make. Nowhere is Adams described as a scholar or a great theologian.
John-
Do you have any basis for saying that Dawkins fails to convince people who don't already share his viewpoint? Or did you just make that up?
Both of You-
The reason I get so bent out of shape about this is that I think most of the critics who are going after Dawkins (and Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, for that matter) are people who decided well before the book was published that this was something they had to review negatively. For all their talk about how Dawkins doesn't take religion seriously, I find it's the critics who don't take Dawkins seriously. That explains their almost comical inability to make any cogent points against what Dawkins actually wrote. Instead they complain about his tone, or point to some obscure theologian he was supposed to discuss, or make knee-jerk simple-minded replies to his Ultimate 747 argument.
Dawkins' book is not a masterpiece. He gets some of the small stuff wrong. But he gets all of the big things right, and I've seen nothing from the critics to suggest otherwise.
Posted by: Jason Rosenhouse | December 23, 2006 3:47 PM
Will,
Who am I to say I'm right and they're wrong?
There are some theological propositions that I would agree cannot be, at this point, definitively shown to be wrong. The totally non-anthropomorphic god that some deistic thinkers imagine certainly falls into this category. But for the majority of religious beliefs (i.e., the ones believed by the vast majority of those practitioners of faith), science as we understand it certainly does have something to say about their rightness of wrongness. Everything we know about physiology, developmental biology, etc., shows that virgin birth is not possible. The same, with a healthy helping of thermodynamics, shows that a resurrection is at best extremely unlikely.
But even given that, one of Dawkins' (and mine and presumably Jason's) major gripes with the enterprise of religion is not so much the truth or falsehood of certain beliefs but how such beliefs are formulated. Religion is the only area of our discourse where it is acceptable to formulate ones beliefs in such a way that they are almost guaranteed to be false. In other areas we consider belief with the utter lack of supporting evidence, persistence in the face of contrary evidence, and acceptance for purely emotive reasons, etc. to be intellectually irresponsible. Why not in religion?
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | December 23, 2006 3:48 PM
If the following is an accurate quote from The God Delusion (and I should warn that I have to say "if" since I haven't had a chance to read it yet),
then it would seem incorrect to say, "There is nothing in Dawkins' argument that tries to rule out design by philosophical gymnastics." He appears to be saying not that "if you are going to go the design route, you had better have an awfully good argument for doing so," but rather that there is no way to go the design route. Offhand, I don't see how Orr's objection is materially different than that of Taner Edis:
Posted by: J. J. Ramsey | December 23, 2006 5:05 PM
J.J. Ramsey,
He appears to be saying not that "if you are going to go the design route, you had better have an awfully good argument for doing so," but rather that there is no way to go the design route.
I don't have the book on hand at the moment (it's buried somewhere in the deep abyss that is my closet), but as far as I can recall Dawkins is refuting the specific argument on the part of theism: that things (biological specimens, specifically) are so complex that they need a hyper-complex creator God to explain that. The passage details why the argument is a case of logical special pleading.
And in the end, we know that this is false. There are countless examples of simple processes producing complex things. Ant-algorithm optimization is my friend.
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | December 23, 2006 5:14 PM
Ant-algorithm optimization is my friend.
Erm, that's supposed to be "my favorite."
It's only 5:18 up here, am I already losing it?
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | December 23, 2006 5:19 PM
J.J. Ramsey-
In the quote you provided Dawkins is saying that invoking design to explain the universe is unsatisfactory because it raises more questions than it solves. That's precisely what I described in my opening post. In which part of that is he trying to rule out design by philosophical gymnastics?
On pages 157-158 Dawkins sums up his argument in a series of numbered points. He makes it very clear in these points that he is not ruling out the possibility of design, he merely thinks it is an inadequate explanation for the complexity of the universe and that the relentless march of scientific progress has made it unreasonable to go that route. Again, exactly as I described.
Posted by: Jason Rosenhouse | December 23, 2006 5:27 PM
Tyler DiPietro: "as far as I can recall Dawkins is refuting the specific argument on the part of theism: that things (biological specimens, specifically) are so complex that they need a hyper-complex creator God to explain that. The passage details why the argument is a case of logical special pleading."
But the problem is that it isn't necessarily logical special pleading. Whether Dawkins' argument works depends on the details of the argument from design being made. Say that the particular argument from design in question claims that blind, natural processes are insufficient to create the functional complexity we see in nature, and that therefore something non-blind and supernatural must have made them. Note that this is not saying that all functional complexity implies a designer, only the functional complexity that gets manifested as plants, animals, etc. This is pretty much ID in a nutshell, and it is quite compatible with the notion of an undesigned designer that has functional complexity. The undesigned designer in question then simply would not be producible by blind, natural processes, and most IDers already have a candidate in mind for such an undesigned designer. In short, the claim that the functional complexity seen in nature requires a designer does not imply the claim that that supernatural functional complexity requires a designer. Of course, this particular argument from design fails on the grounds that the premise that "blind, natural processes are insufficient to create the functional complexity we see in nature" is false. However, that is only, as Taner Edis put it, a failure to describe the world as we find it, not a question of logic.
Posted by: J. J. Ramsey | December 23, 2006 5:35 PM
Where's the beef? Show me the money! Is any of this "meticulous reasoning of theologians" actually rationally sound and convincing? If Dawkins is missing something important, why can no one tell us what it is?
John Lynch made the same claims on his blog, and I offered the same criticisms, which went unanswered. When I criticised his failure to back up his claims, he censored me.
Sean Carroll did a nice job of making the same point over on Cosmic Variance some time ago.
Posted by: Friend Fruit | December 23, 2006 6:05 PM
Rosenhouse: "In the quote you provided Dawkins is saying that invoking design to explain the universe is unsatisfactory because it raises more questions than it solves.... In which part of that is he trying to rule out design by philosophical gymnastics?"
To put it bluntly, all of the quote. Dawkins writes,
"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."
This is an attempt to attack the internal logic of the arguments from design, which is the "philosophical gymnastics" that Orr describes, rather than attack the failure of arguments from design to fit the data. In this case, the attempt to attack the internal logic is the part where Dawkins writes, "because any God capable of designing anything would have to be complex enough to demand the same kind of explanation in his own right."
There is nothing necessarily wrong, of course, with attempting to attack the internal logic of an argument, provided that the attempt is successful. Unfortunately, Dawkins' attempt happens to have several problems. Actually, your attempt to liken the explanation of a designer God to saying the Earth rests on the back of a giant tortoise highlights one of the problems. If the evidence did clearly point to the Earth being supported by a giant tortoise, then the fact that a giant tortoise raises more questions than it answers would be irrelevant to the finding that the giant tortoise did exist. Similarly, if the evidence did clearly point to a designer God as the best explanation for biological complexity, then problems like "who designed the designer," while interesting in their own right, would be irrelevant to the finding that the designer God did exist.
Rosenhouse: "On pages 157-158 Dawkins sums up his argument in a series of numbered points. He makes it very clear in these points that he is not ruling out the possibility of design."
Yet saying outright, "A designer God cannot be used to explain organized complexity," does rule out the possibility of design. Offhand, that at least appears to indicate that Dawkins is contradicting himself, though not having his book, I can't be too sure of that.
Posted by: J. J. Ramsey | December 23, 2006 6:44 PM
JJ Ramsey-
I see what your saying but don't see it as making a difference in Dawkins or anyones view.
This simply doesn't make any sense. It really doesn't. You simply can't get around the fact that the designer had to come from somewhere and no matter how many word games you place some process had to occur to bring the being into, well, being.
Well no, nor does it say that invisible teapots in space are impossible just not rational.
Posted by: GH | December 23, 2006 7:04 PM
GH: "You simply can't get around the fact that the designer had to come from somewhere"
Not really. Not everything has to come from somewhere. One or more things can just be, and the argument is phrased such that whatever complexity the designer has is no impediment to it always having been there.
Posted by: J. J. Ramsey | December 23, 2006 7:19 PM
J. J. Ramsey wrote:
Offhand, that at least appears to indicate that Dawkins is contradicting himself, though not having his book, I can't be too sure of that.
It's silly to try to discuss the book without having read it. I suggest you read the book, then come back.
Posted by: tomh | December 23, 2006 7:30 PM
I should add ...
I should add that the ones arguing (badly) that the evidence indicates that "blind, natural processes are insufficient to create the functional complexity we see in nature" would also argue that the functional complexity we see in nature had not always been there, and would likely point to the fossil record, etc., as evidence of this. Heck, even young-earth creationists could appeal to the fossil record for that; witness the blecherous flood geologists.
Posted by: J. J. Ramsey | December 23, 2006 7:31 PM
J.J. Ramsey-
Saying that design is not useful as an explanation is not the same as saying that the design hypothesis is necessarily wrong. Dawkins would agree that in principle it is possible to have so much evidence pointing to a supernatural designer that we would be stuck with that conclusion, in spite of all the conceptual issues it raises. That is why his "Ultimate 747" argument is more than just, “Who designed the designer?” Rather he is saying, design hypotheses raise mysteries far more formidable than the ones they solve, and they happen to be unnecessary given everything science is telling us. This adds up to a good case that God is unlikely.
Dawkins harps on this because the whole point of the argument from design, either as Paley frist expressed it or as the modern ID folks express it, is that it is a simple extrapolation from the sorts of things human designers do. Dawkins is showing that this is wrong. By invoking divine design you are actually only replacing one mystery with a far greater mystery.
Posted by: Jason Rosenhouse | December 23, 2006 7:33 PM
tomh: "It's silly to try to discuss the book without having read it."
It's not that silly. I can limp along by gleaning from reviews, quotes, and other statements of Dawkins. Not the best way to do things, but it's enough of a stopgap until I have access to library copies of Dawkins' book (which are all either checked out or on order :-(). It's not as if the "who designed the designer" argument is something that Dawkins hasn't said many times before.
Posted by: J. J. Ramsey | December 23, 2006 7:41 PM
If Dawkins is simply using "who designed the designer" as a way to indicate the weight of evidence that would be needed in order to justify accepting the problems implied by design arguments, that would be fair. The quote from Dawkins, plus the reactions of Edis and Orr, would suggest that he is trying to do more than that with the "who designed the designer" argument.
Posted by: J. J. Ramsey | December 23, 2006 7:52 PM
Hmmm, how can anyone not enjoy Michael Martin's clear, no-nonsense prose? And why talk about people who try to nail down questions about religious language as navel-gazers? Come on, folks, there seems to be a certain resistance to good, rigorous philosophy in some of what I read above. Mackie, Martin, etc., were writing for academic audiences, but their work is pretty lively by those standards. Compare it to the average impenetrable bit of academic writing in almost any field. Obviously, it does not read like the latest Michael Crichton thriller, but neither do the pages of Nature or Science - much less what emerges from English departments these days. Mackie and Martin use no more jargon, etc., than the topic demands when it is given academic treatment.
I also don't think that it helps to call Orr "silly", etc. While I don't agree with much of what he says, he is not putting some thoughtless or irrational viewpoint. Admittedly, he does look snobbish in a rather ... er, I agree ... silly way in his complaint about references to Douglas Adams.
Be all that as it may, the beauty of The God Delusion is that Dawkins is such a superb communicator, as he always has been - he has written a book that really is almost as readable as a Michael Crichton thriller (Crichton's pacing and clarity entertain me, even as many of his apparent views on science annoy me). There was a need for someone to write a book like this that would command a popular audience, and Dawkins has delivered it superbly.
I'm dismayed that so many reviewers don't get it, and seem to be taking the opportunity to show off their own supposedly superior erudition and/or to demonstrate their politically-correct, soft-on-religion credentials. I'd like to see some reviewers simply enjoying the book for what it is - and conveying that enjoyment - even if they feel the need to make a snippy point or two. (I've tried to do just that in a review that I've submitted to Cosmos magazine, but I don't get as many words as some of these other people seem to have had.)
Posted by: Russell Blackford | December 23, 2006 7:53 PM
J. J. Ramsey-
You wrote: “If Dawkins is simply using “who designed the designer” as a way to indicate the weight of evidence that would be needed in order to justify accepting the problems implied by design arguments, that would be fair.”
I think this is a very good summary of Dawkins' intention, an intention stated very clearly in his book. As I indicated in my opening post, I think Orr misunderstood the argument, which is why he replied in so ineffective a matter. I have not previously addressed Edis' quote, but I think he too has missed the point. As for the Dawkins quote you provided, I think it's very clear even taken by itself. I don't see how anyone could read it and think Dawkins is claiming that design is logically impossible.
Posted by: Jason Rosenhouse | December 23, 2006 7:57 PM
J.J. Ramsey
But the problem is that it isn't necessarily logical special pleading. Whether Dawkins' argument works depends on the details of the argument from design being made.
Okay then, let's see it.
Say that the particular argument from design in question claims that blind, natural processes are insufficient to create the functional complexity we see in nature, and that therefore something non-blind and supernatural must have made them.
Okay, you are partially correct then. This isn't logical special pleading as much as it is question begging. This argument does nothing more than assume what it is trying to prove.
Note that this is not saying that all functional complexity implies a designer, only the functional complexity that gets manifested as plants, animals, etc. This is pretty much ID in a nutshell, and it is quite compatible with the notion of an undesigned designer that has functional complexity.
Granted, but the latter part is true for no other reason than the fact it is in principle impossible to completely rule out such a notion. You can always render a scientific theory invalid if you make a certain number of auxiliary qualifications. "X looks designed to me, therefore no natural process can produce it" is one such qualification.
The undesigned designer in question then simply would not be producible by blind, natural processes, and most IDers already have a candidate in mind for such an undesigned designer.
But here we get back to special pleading. The IDCist's argument in syllogistic form goes a bit like this: 1.) functional complexity in X cannot be produced by unguided processes, 2.) therefore an intelligent agent is required to produce X. Since any operational definition of "intelligent agent" involves functional complexity, the arguments own reasoning must be applied, by definition, to the designer, thus the argument recursively contains it's own refutation.
In short, the claim that the functional complexity seen in nature requires a designer does not imply the claim that that supernatural functional complexity requires a designer.
This only returns to question begging, and completes the difecta of logical fallacy contained in IDC. The supernatural is either arbitrarily exempted from the IDCist's own criteria by definition or one turns to basic special pleading.
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | December 23, 2006 7:58 PM
Hmmm, how can anyone not enjoy Michael Martin's clear, no-nonsense prose?
It's a question about taste, really. Martin's argumentation was certainly cogent in my view, but I'm not one for philosophy. Excessive verbiage is something that always irritates me about math and comp-sci books, but is wholly necessary for philosophical reasoning. Academic philosophers are a different animal from scientists and mathematicians, I guess.
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | December 23, 2006 8:08 PM
Since I know this issue will inevitably come up, allow to provide preemptive clarification:
My Goedel-ing of the central IDCist argument is not meant to be a catch all refutation of any and all possible design. I agree with Jason that in principle we could be forced by evidence into such a conclusion, despite the inherent conceptual problems with such. However, it is meant to show that the argument, taken as an abstract analytic deduction, is self-refuting.
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | December 23, 2006 9:13 PM
It is neither special pleading nor question begging. I am simply describing the claim that the argument is putting forth as well as one of its (false) premises, and what the claim would and would not entail if true. I leave attempts to prove the claim to the IDiots.
The only way this refutation works is if you gloss over the details of the actual argument being made. If one is saying that features in a carbon-based lifeform cannot be produced by unguided processes of mutation and natural selection because of the specifics of said lifeform and the specifics of mutation and natural selection, and none of those specifics apply to the designer god, which is not even remotely carbon-based and doesn't even have genetic material to mutate, then there is no recursive refutation.
Posted by: J. J. Ramsey | December 23, 2006 9:29 PM
J.J. Ramsey,
If one is saying that features in a carbon-based lifeform cannot be produced by unguided processes of mutation and natural selection because of the specifics of said lifeform and the specifics of mutation and natural selection, and none of those specifics apply to the designer god, which is not even remotely carbon-based and doesn't even have genetic material to mutate, then there is no recursive refutation.
Two problems:
1.) No specifics apply to the designer in this case, a major deficiency in the entire basis of ID. As far as I know, there has never been an operational definition of the "designer" on the part of IDCists. Since there are no proposed specifics on the nature of the designer, it's essentially an appeal to magic. Such is logically pernicious and, as I've explained, can be done with anything, even demonstrated theories (witness YEC rationalizations of the vast evidence for a 4.6 billion y/o earth).
2.) The explanation you provide for the "specifics" of certain design arguments overlooks the most basic specific attribute of all: they claim that such is impossible because the object in question is too complex. The appeal to "complexity" is necessarily meant to conclude with the necessity of a "designer". Thus, even given that the argument isn't entirely recursively-refuted in every instance, what it presents is at the very least a false dichotomy. If explanation X is (hypothetically) false, you need to have a designer. The argument carried to a universal (complexity implies design) is recursively-refuted.
Posted by: Tyler DiPietro | December 23, 2006 11:07 PM
Jason, I didn't have time to read the entire thread so if this has already been addressed please just point my attention to it. You did a good job of responding to most of Orr's points, but you didn't address Orr's observation that science owes a debt not just to religion in general, but to Western religion, a debt that Orr thinks (rather tellingly) Dawkins fails to acknowledge.
What do you and others here think?....SH
Posted by: Scott Hatfield | December 24, 2006 12:09 AM
J.J. Ramsey:
(in a playful tone) Greetings, 'fellow apologist'! Mr. C sends his disregards....SH
Posted by: Scott Hatfield | December 24, 2006 12:16 AM
fellow apologist? Who is Mr.C?
late and confused:-)
Posted by: JimC | December 24, 2006 1:40 AM
Again, it comes down to an aesthetic opinion. I feel serious or good or beautiful inquiry into nature requires the use of the tools of science. They don't. Who am I to say I'm right and they're wrong?
Science gives us accurate prediction, religion doesn't. That makes you right and them wrong.
Posted by: truth machine | December 24, 2006 2:04 AM
This, alas, is correct
No, it isn't. Stalin's persecution of priests had nothing to do with his atheism, it had to do with power struggles.
Posted by: truth machine | December 24, 2006 2:06 AM
I think it's a mistake to treat Orr's review as an attempt at rebuttal to Dawkins.
That's ridiculous. The quoted text consists of attempts to rebut Dawkins's arguments.
He finds Dawkins' book as sloppily written and sloppily argued. So did I, so did Lawrence Krauss, so did many other ScienceBloggers. This is not to say that Dawkins is wrong
You clearly don't understand the concept of "rebuttal".
Posted by: truth machine | December 24, 2006 2:11 AM
It's not that Dawkins is wrong (he may be, or he may not) but that he fails to convince those that don't already share his viewpoint (and rhetorical strategy).
That's not because his arguments are poor, it's because those people are in the grips of an ideology (which is the whole point of the book).
Posted by: truth machine | December 24, 2006 2:12 AM
it would seem incorrect to say, "There is nothing in Dawkins' argument that tries to rule out design by philosophical gymnastics." He appears to be saying not that "if you are going to go the design route, you had better have an awfully good argument for doing so," but rather that there is no way to go the design route.
That's not "philosophical gymnastics", it's true, because the argument from design is fallacious.
Still, I think Dawkins tries to make his argument do too much work, almost turning it into a silver-bullet argument against God, a sort of metaphysical disproof
Uh, no ... that the design argument is fallacious special pleading does not disprove God, it only fails to provide any valid reason to believe in God.
One of the basic problems, and a major limitation on the effectiveness of a book like Dawkins', is that most people, even scientists, are atrociously bad reasoners.
Posted by: truth machine | December 24, 2006 2:23 AM
Whether Dawkins' argument works depends on the details of the argument from design being made. Say that the particular argument from design in question claims that blind, natural processes are insufficient to create the functional complexity we see in nature, and that therefore something non-blind and supernatural must have made them.
Surely you're joking? A claim is not an argument. All you have done here is substituted the argument from design with a blatant case of argumentum ad ignorantiam. So, gee, yeah, whether Dawkin's argument against the design argument works depends on whether the particular argument given actually is a design argument.
Sheesh.
Posted by: truth machine | December 24, 2006 2:30 AM
One or more things can just be, and the argument is phrased such that whatever complexity the designer has is no impediment to it always having been there.
You really have no idea what special pleading is, do you?
Posted by: truth machine | December 24, 2006 2:37 AM
The quote from Dawkins, plus the reactions of Edis and Orr, would suggest that he is trying to do more than that with the "who designed the designer" argument.
Plus the reactions of Edis and Orr? So their reactions to what Dawkins wrote adds to our understanding of what it implies? That's quite a bizarre argument from authority, and is yet again special pleading, since Orr's response is the very thing being criticized here.
Posted by: truth machine | December 24, 2006 2:41 AM
Say that the particular argument from design in question claims that blind, natural processes are insufficient to create the functional complexity we see in nature, and that therefore something non-blind and supernatural must have made them.
It is neither special pleading nor question begging.
How is "X isn't sufficient for P" not equivalent to "non X is necessary for P"?
Greetings, 'fellow apologist'!
perhaps that explains why Mr. Ramsey is such a poor reasoner.
Posted by: truth machine | December 24, 2006 2:49 AM
Orr's observation that science owes a debt not just to religion in general, but to Western religion, a debt that Orr thinks (rather tellingly) Dawkins fails to acknowledge.
Since science doesn't owe a debt to religion, then it doesn't owe one to Western religion. If your point is that Orr is a cultural chauvinist, that's neither surprising nor relevant.
Posted by: truth machine | December 24, 2006 2:54 AM
But atheism good / theism bad is not born out by the evidence.
Uh, yeah, ok, atheism good, theism, astrology, psychic healing, UFO abductionism, superstition, etc. bad. "atheism good" does not mean that any particular atheist is good, which is the thrust of Orr's idiotic argument about Stalin and Mao that you endorsed; it simply means that it's good to not believe in dieties, given that there's no reason to.
Posted by: truth machine | December 24, 2006 3:12 AM
fellow apologist?
Yes, they both go around pretending like everybody owes their favorite organized "pretend fest" thingy a "debt".
Who is Mr.C?
Why, Mr. Santa Claus of course!
Posted by: 386sx | December 24, 2006 4:32 AM
Me: "Whether Dawkins' argument works depends on the details of the argument from design being made. Say that the particular argument from design in question claims that blind, natural processes are insufficient to create the functional complexity we see in nature, and that therefore something non-blind and supernatural must have made them."
truth machine: "Surely you're joking? A claim is not an argument. All you have done here is substituted the argument from design with a blatant case of argumentum ad ignorantiam."
As noted above, I'm describing the argument in brief, not attempting to defend it. Heck, I pointed out that it has a false premise, at which you yourself hinted when you described the argument as an argumentum ad ignorantiam. Whoever would actually defend the argument would be ignorant of the power of the particular argument from design in question claims that blind, natural processes being derided. That, though, is not a problem that can be addressed with a "who designed the designer" argument, but rather by an appeal to the data.
Tyler DiPietro: "The explanation you provide for the "specifics" of certain design arguments overlooks the most basic specific attribute of all: they claim that such is impossible because the object in question is too complex."
It doesn't overlook anything. Rather, it points out that design arguments have various justifications for why lifeforms are too complex, and these justifications don't necessarily apply to the designer. Take Behe's irreducible complexity argument (please). He argues wrongly that the flagellum and other biological mechanisms couldn't have evolved because if one takes one part of the mechanism away, the whole thing doesn't work. Notice that this argument depends on the idea of these mechanisms having discrete parts, so it can't scale up to apply to a designer that doesn't have discrete parts or anything analogous to a flagellum, clotting cascade, etc.
Tyler DiPietro: "even given that the argument isn't entirely recursively-refuted in every instance, what it presents is at the very least a false dichotomy."
Careful here. Let's see. Suppose that we take as given that some life form could not have been made by blind, natural processes (which turns out to be a false premise, of course). Biological beings don't just pop into being by themselves, and one cannot argue that the beings were always just there. There aren't a lot of choices left here. In practice, of course, it is a false dichotomy, but that's because one of the choices that is really available, namely that blind, natural processes are capable of generating the lifeforms in question, is being wrongfully discarded. Again, this is not a problem that can be addressed with a "who designed the designer" argument, but rather by an appeal to the data.
Tyler DiPietro: "The argument carried to a universal (complexity implies design) is recursively-refuted."
The problem is that the argument in question cannot necessarily be carried to a universal. Behe's argument is a case in point.
Posted by: J. J. Ramsey | December 24, 2006 8:13 AM
Me: "Whoever would actually defend the argument would be ignorant of the power of the particular argument from design in question claims that blind, natural processes being derided."
Man, I must have done a mangled cut-and-paste or something. Or I didn't get enough caffeine. :-p That should read:
"Whoever would actually defend the particular argument from design in question would be ignorant of the power of the blind, natural processes being derided."
Posted by: J. J. Ramsey | December 24, 2006 8:33 AM
I agree with truth machine regarding the statements about Stalin and Mao. Their crimes were motivated by power lust, the need to eliminate any and all possible challengers to their authority. Churches were purged, not because of their religion, but because they were challengers to the almighty authority of the state. Stalin, Mao, et al. would have just as cruelly crushed atheist opponents (and they probably did) as they did religious ones.
Of course, this consideration probably requires some of us to re-think the reflexive urge to attribute to religion the crimes against humanity that have been perpetrated by churches and cults of all stripe. There's a least common denominator and it swallows up even things as seemingly "deep" as religion and atheism.
Posted by: Art | December 24, 2006 11:26 AM
...you didn't address Orr's observation that science owes a debt not just to religion in general, but to Western religion, a debt that Orr thinks (rather tellingly) Dawkins fails to acknowledge.
Does science owe a special debt to the male sex or Europeans, as well?
Posted by: windy | December 24, 2006 11:49 AM
Windy, truth machine:
Oh, please, spare all of us the vacuous invocation of chauvinism. Even if the charge was true with respect to Orr, that would have no bearing on whether or not he is making a good argument. Surely you don't believe that the values that Dawkins and others invoke against theism somehow emerged independent of their culture? Even Dr. Dawkins describes himeself as a 'post-Christian theist.' Does that make Dawkins a cultural chauvinist, or simply a realist about the world he lives in?
At any rate, read Orr's review. Nowhere does he assert that males, Europeans or Judeo-Christianity is superior or favored in any absolute sense. There are very good reasons to believe that science required something like the last to nurture it, however, not the least being the very lawfulness of the universe taken as axiomatic for the conduct of science. Distasteful as this might be to some, either acknowledge this or else explain why Orr's observation is flawed....SH
Posted by: Scott Hatfield | December 24, 2006 12:09 PM
JJ: the problem with your approach is that irreducible complexity, the "details of the argument being made", is not the design hypothesis. It's just one anti-evolutionary stratagem of the design movement. It doesn't follow logically from the design hypothesis nor does it stand up to any serious scrutiny as an anti-evolutionary argument. The central design hypothesis is that life on earth is too complex to be the result of unguided processes, whatever they are. Again, at this level you could argue that "well, the designer could be unlike life on earth". But it doesn't work as an argument, because without the details of the argument it's not an argument, it's an assertion.
Dembski's specified complexity is much closer to a hypothesis derived directly from the central design assertion, and it says absolutely nothing about the mechanisms or the instantiation. The designer in ID "theory" most definitely does exhibit specified complexity, and any ID theorist who buys the specified complexity argument will say that no unguided, natural process, no matter what form it takes can produce specified complexity ex nihilo.
The point I'm trying to make is that while the fundamental design assertion isn't logically disprovable because it's so vague, as soon as you put any bones on it whatsoever, you run up against insurmountable problems. Any argument against natural design on earth will either fail as an argument against evolution (like IC) or will fall under its own logical wheels (like specified complexity). Consequently the design assertion is no use as an argument for the existence of God. Which is all that Dawkins is saying.
Posted by: Ginger Yellow | December 24, 2006 12:09 PM
So a designer without parts is equivalent to, say, nothing?
Scott are you seriously saying that Christianity was necessary to understand the lawfulness of the universe? I think that is a rather weak claim. Islam carried alot of science and I think a good case could be made that it is much more involved with the history of science that what your claiming here. I don't state religion had nothing to do with science. They had the money but I thin