Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion - Part 2

Dawkins covers a lot of ground in chapter 2, entitled “The God Hypothesis”, so this section of my review will also be relatively long.

In chapter 2, Dawkins lays out exactly what it is he is arguing against, what he refers to as the God Hypothesis (italics in the original): “there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us”. It's important to note that this includes various forms of deism, but not any sort of pantheism. In particular, this clearly means that he is not arguing against conceptions of god such as the one Deepak Chopra advances in the same response to The God Delusion I quoted in part 1:

“This assumption is false on several grounds. The most basic one is that God isn't a person. In a certain strain of fundamentalist Christianity God looks and acts human...But God isn't a person in any strain of Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Confucianism, the branch of Hinduism known as Vedanta, and many denominations of Christianity--he's not a person in the Gospel of John in the New Testament.”

Leaving aside the questionable assertion that god is not a person in most modern religions (to whom, then, are the faithful praying?), quite plainly, if the god conception in question isn't a person (which, presumably, implies that this hypothetical god is not an “intelligence”, to use Dawkins' term), then Dawkins is not addressing this particular conception of god.

After introducing the hypothesis he intends to argue against, Dawkins spends a brief, sarcastic, handful of pages recounting various versions of that hypothesis. The tone he takes here is typical of his writing on religion: derisive, dismissive, and seemingly flabbergasted at the thought that anyone actually puts any stock in the fanciful beliefs he catalogs. While he has been subject to quite a bit of criticism over the years for his tone, it does arguably serve the purpose he declared back in chapter 1, puncturing the bubble of automatic unconscious respect accorded to religious ideas. It's effective because, let's face it, many religious beliefs are, on their face, quite silly, and recounting them outside their normal context of hushed awe and reverent mystery makes this more evident. The Trinity is a holy mystery when described as part of a Catholic Mass, but it's sci-fi gibberish when laid out in plain text on the pages of a skeptical book. He also pauses at this point to reiterate that he is quite aware that his readers do not believe in a literal old man with a white beard sitting on a cloud, which serves the dual purpose of insulating him from the criticism that he is arguing against childish religion, not sophisticated adult religion, and allowing him another chance to portray religious belief in a silly light.

After a foray into the beliefs of the American founding fathers (which struck me both as irrelevant to the question of the existence of god and a strange diversion for a British author, but which is perhaps understandable if, as many assume, the recent glut of anti-religious books of which The God Delusion is a part is a reaction to the religious assault on rationalism currently underway in American politics), Dawkins moves on to addressing, and dismissing, the agnostic position. His criticism of agnosticism, while accurate in many respects, suffers from two key flaws.

First, as many do, he treats agnosticism as a mere middle ground between belief and non-belief, without acknowledging a second, richer, sense of the word. While agnosticism is commonly used to refer to a simple lack of choosing sides, it can also mean a principled stance regarding whether or not reliable knowledge of a subject is possible. Agnosticism, in this sense, is not a center point between the two poles of theism and atheism, but one end of its own continuum with gnosticism at the other end. For example, as regards conceptions of god as generic as the one Dawkins is addressing, I consider myself, as noted in part 1, an in-principle agnostic and a functional atheist. That is to say, I don't think it's possible to have any reliable knowledge regarding the existence of god, and I adopt a default position of non-belief toward concepts about which knowledge is impossible. Oddly, he acknowledges the principle behind this form of agnosticism in his account of Bertrand Russel's famous orbiting teacup, but fails to explicitly distinguish it from the sort of agnosticism he is arguing against. While this is a fairly minor definitional quibble, and Dawkins spends the remainder of the chapter attacking the more common agnosticism-as-a-middle-ground position, it would have been more thorough of him, in writing a subsection entitled 'The Poverty of Agnosticism', to acknowledge the existence of forms of agnosticism other than the one he savages. In particular, given his belabored stance that agnosticism does not imply that the probably of god's existence and non-existence is even, the distinction between agnosticism as a belief about knowledge and atheism as a belief about existence (and specifically the existence of agnostic atheists) might have been a useful addition to the rhetorical toolkit he employs.

Second, although he separates agnosticism into two varieties, which he refers to as TAP (Temporary Agnosticism in Practice) and PAP (Permanent Agnosticism in Principle and, yes, he does half admit to the goading name), he doesn't give the latter type the full examination it deserves. When he claims that the existence of god is a scientific hypothesis like any other, he fails to even acknowledge, much less address, the problems inherent in assuming that an unpredictable supernatural intelligence should be something that we would reasonably expect to be able to detect. For example, how could we expect to gather evidence for or against the (absurd) creationist suggestion that the apparent age of the earth, evidence for biological evolution, etc., are simply divine deceptions intended as a test of faith? Whatever evidence turns up is consistent with both an old earth and a young earth created by a deceptive god so evidence is, in principle, useless for deciding the question. While the example is silly (although, frighteningly, real), it illustrates the point that, if we're positing an intelligent being with arbitrary intentions and supernatural powers, it's not possible to say what would count as evidence against its intervention in the physical world, because any observable data point X would be consistent both with the hypothesis that the entity does not exist and the hypothesis that the entity wanted us to see X, for whatever reason. Outside Occam's Razor, we have no way to differentiate between the the two hypotheses.

Dawkins then turns to the popular idea that science and religion occupy what Stephen Jay Gould called Non-Overlapping Magisteria, or NOMA. He makes the accurate observation that, despite the reconciliatory terms adopted by those by those in favor the idea that religion and science address different spheres of knowledge and do not affect each other, very few believers actually act as though the idea were true. Rather, most believers act as though religion does, indeed, have quite a bit to do with the supposed magisterium of science. Although it is strictly not required for the narrow God Hypothesis at which Dawkins is ostensibly aiming his criticism, he notes that most real world versions of the hypothesis do, in fact, assume a god who is active in the physical world and, thus, involved in the how and why of physical events that have been declared the realm of science. Further, Dawkins makes the scathing point that, although evidence that no God Hypothesis is needed to explain the natural world is frequently written off as having no bearing on religious belief, it's unimaginable to think that that, were irrefutable evidence to somehow be produced showing that, say, Jesus really did have no biological father, theists would shrug their shoulders and invoke NOMA, claiming that evidence belongs to the magisterium of science, and has no bearing on the magisterium of religion.

Dawkins wraps up the chapter with an account of Russel Stannard's famous medical experiment to test the efficacy of prayer (predictably, no results were attributable to prayer and, equally predictably, this failed to change the opinions of the faithful regarding the efficacy of prayer) and a quick discussion of the difference between the merely superhuman and the actually supernatural.

Part 3 coming when I have time to write it.