Carbonblog’s counter-response to “On Dawkins’s Atheism: A Response” by Gary Gutting

Recently Gary Gutting took issue with some of Richard Dawkins's arguments as advanced in The God Delusion.

I applaud Dr Gutting’s advice that religious faith be questioned, seriously and rationally, by its adherents. I note also that he welcomes impassioned comment, so I’ll try some.

Dr Gutting claims that ‘popular atheistic arguments’ do not establish their conclusions. Specifically he claims that the atheistic arguments of Richard Dawkins are demonstrably faulty.

Dr Gutting provides two so-called summaries of Professor Dawkins’s arguments, supporting these with page references to the paperback edition of The God Delusion. Both ‘summaries’ have numbered steps, and the first ends with the conclusion that […]God almost certainly does not exist. The second ends with the conclusion that God does not exist, with no ‘almost certainly’. That is a misrepresentation – Dawkins states clearly that on a 1 to 7 scale of unbelief he places himself somewhere around 6 – but let’s not dwell on that.

I am not a philosopher (more on that later) but I suspect Dr Gutting of drawing a distinction between the ‘creator’ of the universe and the ‘explanation’ of the universe. To quote Dr Gutting: “…he must be both the intelligent designer of the universe and a being that explains the universe…” Dawkins makes no such distinction. The traditional Argument from Design posits God as creator. That, per se, is the explanation offered by the Argument from Design, and the Argument itself arises from the wholly understandable human desire for explanation. God is not, surely, both a creator and an explanation in separate senses. Having established that, we can (I hope) clearly see that we must immediately question God’s origin, or we have failed to explain anything at all. If we try to sidestep the issue, by defining God as ‘outside our knowledge’ or as ‘eternal and inexplicable’ then we forfeit the right to make any claim at all about God, including whether or not he exists. As such, God’s status is no more interesting than that of fairies, goblins, djinns or an infinite morass of other imaginable and non-disprovable entities, all of whom share one sharply relevant quality: their utter insignificance to the daily reality of our lives.

Following the example of (and citing) Richard Swinburne, Dr Gutting proceeds to posture and stretch in a bone-bending feat of verbal yoga, attempting to reconcile God’s ‘simplicity’ with his ability to answer prayers, forgive sins, monitor and control the behaviour of every particle in the universe, etc. Convinced that he has had his cake as well as eaten it, he refers to other esoteric works that make similar claims. But, Dr Gutting, you, and Swinburne, and Hughes, and Aquinas, and the rest of them, have missed the point by a margin wide enough to handbrake-turn a London bus in complete safety. If you don’t like the words ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ as Dawkins uses them in his argument, then substitute, respectively, ‘pretty much inert’ and ‘capable of making things happen through intention’. Any entity that is capable of making things happen through intention deserves an explanation of how it came to possess its impressive qualities.

And now’s a good time to make another point, against an ongoing theme, lurking weed-like in the undergrowth of Dr Gutting’s article, as well as those of William Lane Craig’s henchmen with whom I’ve had the pleasure of online exchanges. That theme is the patronizing and smug assumption that a layman such as myself has no grounds to question assertions about the nature of God until he has first become acquainted with ‘where the discussion is’ or something equally vague. In every case the intention is to assert, by implication, that high-powered philosophers have demonstrated God’s probable existence in a way that cannot be challenged by anyone except another philosopher of equally learned status. A further assertion is implied, i.e. that the uninitiated cannot really understand such erudite arguments without a good deal of training and study.

Well all of that is utter hogwash. Be assured of this: if anyone, be they philosopher, scientist, saint or knave, really had formulated a robust (although highbrow) proof of God’s probable existence, that proof would have been seized upon by theists the world over and trumpeted to the skies in a triumphantly self-congratulating fanfare of we-told-you-so. Like Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, and Einstein’s mathematical demonstration of General Relativity, this theistic proof would have been dissected, popularized and published in so many layman-digestible forms that it might even outsell the Bible.

Dr Gutting attempts to bring in the ontological argument, suggesting that God’s existence may be ‘necessary’. Again he tries to impress by invoking authority, waving ‘formidable’ writings and criticizing Dawkins for failing to acknowledge them. Unfortunately for all those writers, however, it matters little whether or not the rest of us wade through the minutiae of myriad attributes boasted by the products of their imaginations. Until they can provide (even the slightest) verifiable evidence to support their intellectually elevated claims, there is no need at all to waste time taking those claims seriously. That which can be asserted without evidence may also be dismissed without evidence. And if there be real evidence, bring it on.

Dr Gutting completely misunderstands Bertrand Russell’s teapot analogy. He assumes that Russell was arguing, by analogy, that we should not profess belief in that for which there is no evidence, and that we should therefore disbelieve in the orbiting teapot. But that’s not the point at all. Rather, Russell showed that there is no point in imaginatively contriving – and then believing in the actual existence of – a specific entity, about which a great deal is assumed (e.g. spout, handle, lid, space inside for tea, etc.) when there is no reason to suppose the existence of that entity in the first place. Basic common sense requires a-teapotism, as indeed it requires a similar attitude to most other imaginable, describable distant orbiting household objects. Dr Gutting compounds his misunderstanding by claiming that, if a small amount of hard evidence were to become available, then “we should just remain agnostic about it.” This is quite revealing, I think. Surely, remaining agnostic would be the last thing we would wish to do. Would we not actively seek further evidence for the existence of the teapot, our appetites whetted by the small amount of evidence we already had?

To reiterate, the point of the teapot analogy is to show that agnosticism is a full-time job. If we are to be agnostic about the teapot, then we must also be agnostic toward an infinite number of things that we can’t disprove. I don’t know about Dr Gutting, but I certainly don’t have time to list all the things I could potentially be agnostic about, and there is no reason to suppose that God deserves to be anywhere near the top of the list.

Before passing on, it’s worth spending a little more time on agnosticism. I detect an air of virtue in Dr Gutting’s professed agnosticism, as though there were something good and noble about declaredly sitting on the fence. Yet, if we truly wish to understand the world and the universe around us, then we need to inquire actively, and to pursue hypotheses based on the evidence we find, wherever they may lead us. Evaluation – and, where necessary, rejection – of hypotheses that lack any evidence at all is a necessary part of this process.

Dr Gutting winds up by leaving the world of reality and flying a few loops among the cloudy heights of non-materialism. Good trick, that. Invent a new kind of universe and call it non-material, which means of course that no-one can know anything about it. Then, having fenced off your territory, make a series of specific claims about what might be in it. I’ve harped on about this kind of thing before. I call it the Fencing Game and most children try it at one point or another (claiming, for example, that their homework fell from their school bag and therefore no-one can possibly know its whereabouts even though it surely exists) but they grow out of it when they realize it isn’t going to get them anywhere. Dr Gutting, the material world is all we have. If God does not reside in, and does not interact with, the material world, then I submit that either he does not exist, or it makes no difference whether he exists or not.

It’s taken me a couple of days to complete this, at odd times here and there, and of course I’m aware that I’ve said nothing new. But then, neither did Dr Gutting.