Notes on my delusion
Not deluded, apparently: Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, 1800. Jefferson is quoted by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion thus: “Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.” I wonder if Jefferson knew that orthodox Christian theologians had been questioning (with boldness, even) the existence of God centuries before the Enlightenment. He just may have; he was an awfully well-read fellow. Image source: Wikimedia Commons
As I prepare to start the manuscript of my book I am re-reading Richard Dawkins‘s The God Delusion. It’s much more enjoyable the second time around. This morning I made it through the first few chapters. Here are some of my thoughts, in no particular order.
1. On page 14 of the paperback edition, Dawkins writes that, in rebutting arguments for God’s existence, he “need consider only those theologians who take seriously the possibility that God does not exist and argue that he does.” In Chapter three we find out who these theologians are: Thomas Aquinas and Anselm of Canterbury. That’s it, really. He addresses other arguments in that chapter but engages no other theologians. He could have dug a bit deeper. Plenty of other theologians, Christian and otherwise, have questioned God’s existence: The Cappadocian Fathers, St. Augustine, Maximus the Confessor, Moses Maimonides, and Meister Eckhart all come to mind. This brings us up only to the 14th century; there are many others. Dawkins doesn’t even bother with them, but why should he? He has already concluded that theology is a non-discipline.
2. Part of the reason he writes his book, he tells us, is to encourage atheists to come out of the closet. An admirable goal. One that I can get behind. People should be free to say what they think is true.
3. Dawkins writes, “If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down. What presumptuous optimism! Of course, dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument, their resistance built up over years of childhood indoctrination using methods that took centuries to mature.” So if I disagree with him, it’s because I’ve been indoctrinated. Not because I may actually have thought about it. Good grief.
4. Dawkins is right to distinguish between the word “God” as used by folks like Einstein and Stephen Hawking and as used by dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads like myself, my family, and my fellow believers. Einstein’s God is nothing like the God of Jesus, and the conflation of the two has caused some misunderstandings. I just wish that Dawkins could understand that “God” is not the only word that has multiple meanings. More on this later.
5. On this same point, Dawkins writes, “I wish that physicists would refrain from using the word God in their special metaphorical sense.” What? In what other sense than metaphorical has the word “God” ever been used?
6. Dawkins quoting Thomas Jefferson: “The talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings.” Exactly right. God is no thing.
7. Page 72: “The existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other.” No, it’s not, and this is precisely where I part ways with Dawkins, who can’t imagine anything not being subject to our awe-inspiring science.
8. I like the way Dawkins treats Gould’s notion of NOMA. Such a radical division of the spiritual and material is profoundly non-Christian. There is the Incarnation, you know.
For my money, the most significant aspect of Dawkins’s presentation is found in number 7 above. Why must God, who, according to orthodox theology, is the one who created time and space and everything subject to time and space, himself be a thing within time and space? I just don’t get it.
There are 4 Comments to "Notes on my delusion"
Paul, I totally agree that Dawkins has no basis for assuming that God must be proved “within” the universe through materialistic scientific methodology, as he is “above” it (metaphorically speaking). God’s existence depends on nothing that does or does not exist in the physical universe–God would exist (and did exist) even were there no physical universe at all.
However, to the extent that Dawkins does much other than rant and rave against religious people and “call them names” related to idiocy, I think he would suggest that nothing in the universe SUPPORTS the existence of God. I would like to argue with him even USING his own “scientific methodology,” not merely point out to him that it is unnecessary to do so. In other words, I believe that properly considered, science REINFORCES the conclusion that God exists, rather than the reverse. Thus, science is not necessary to sustain a belief in God, but it is also not antithetical to such a belief; indeed, it even supports it. Faith is not ‘blind,” but instead quite rational, IMO.
I won’t go into a long litany of arguments because I’ve done that before and in any event I know perhaps you and certainly others may disagree with me on certain points of contention. In the shortest of summaries, I believe orderliness and structured complexity sustain a rational creation of the universe as opposed to “chance” encounters of mass/energy. Even the scientific laws themselves which are applied to the observations and explanations of nature and its activities are virtually inexplicable without “rational” origin. And where did the “mass/energy” and natural laws “come from”? To argue that they merely “came into being” attributes an astounding capacity to “nothingness,” the “alternative” source of such things, that rivals that which at least traditional theology attributes to God himself.
Well, enough said. My main point is that not only does Dawkins start from the wrong premise that scientific proof of God is necessary to his existence, as you point out, Paul, but that, for that matter, even applying “science” rather supports God’s existence than the contrary. So Dawkins loses on both fronts.
Paul,
#8 What does Dawkins say about NOMA? You say you like it.
In this post and in other places you express frustration with NOMA, and here you call it unChristian.
I’m not there yet. I think NOMA does more good than harm. When I work with teachers I encourage them to get students to break free from their religious perspectives that may cause them scientific short-sightedness. It is easy for me to say that a fundy isn’t a true Christian, but the Biblical literalist certainly wouldn’t agree with me, nor could I ever convince him that he is off the mark.
It is way easier to introduce NOMA and the freedom it gives young minds to explore without being persecuted by the authorities of their God or their own guilt. They get liberated from their bad dogma and can learn science and how science is a very different way of gaining information. So they can still hold onto their view of God, no matter what it may be Pentecostal, Lutheran or Rastafarian, Confucian, atheist or even Baptist. Science doesn’t give a rat’s arse about your religion and you can do good science no matter your beliefs. This is an important message.
NOMA works well for our secular society too. We have a hard enough understanding and analyzing data and making policy without being muddied by 10 million interpretations of God.
NOMA like so many other things we (as scientists and educators) tell learners is mostly true. Is the Earth round? Sure it is close enough; Newtonian physics (works on Earth); squirrels are herbivores (except for the occasional baby bird). As we dig deeper we often finds details need tweaking of information.
The metaphor that NOMA makes is that Science is one plane of knowledge and that religion is another plane and that they are parallel. Each can expand infinitely on their own plane, but there is no intersection. There are only a few people that have explored both planes to find out that they are not parallel but do in fact intersect. You have done that Paul. Myself, I think I’m still looking, though not doubting it could be out there somewhere.
And a question…
Does rejection of NOMA work without negative theology?
Brice,
As ever I value your viewpoint as a science educator. And I think that for your purposes NOMA is both sufficient and effective. As a first-order approximation, NOMA works very well and is perfectly appropriate to use as an educational approach. Science can operate quite freely without religion, and the results of science can be interpreted in a zillion different ways, depending on your (a)thelogical tendencies.
But I just can’t believe that it is Christian to say that God (as creator) has no relationship to nature (as creation). Using your analogy of two planes, it may be that they do not intersect in any direct or explicit way, but I believe there is some kind of “information transfer” between them (I need to think of better words for this). What I come to believe about God cannot be wholly independent from what I come to learn about God’s creation.
So as a first-order approximation, I think NOMA is fine. But it’s in the higher-order terms that all the good stuff happens. See this post for a similar (sky-inspired) statement about NOMA.
And yes, I do think that NOMA is ultimately un-Christian. This is true not only from the creator-creation point of view, but even more pointedly from the doctrine of the Incarnation, which in my own way I do believe. I think the connection between the so-called “divine” and the so-called “human” is very thin indeed. Or, in the analogy, there is only the tiniest of spaces between the two planes. But that’s a larger topic.
On your final question, yes, I think one can reject NOMA without holding a strongly apophatic theology. But that’s just a reflex; I need to chew on it some more.
Hope you’re well, Brice.
Oh — I never said what I liked about Dawkins’s treatment of NOMA. Now that I re-read what he wrote, I myself can’t remember what I was thinking. Comparing those scientists who like NOMA — esp. Stephen Jay Gould — to Neville Chamberlain is not only wrong; it’s offensive and not at all clever. (Maybe that particular reference works better on the other side of the pond; I don’t know.) Anyway, it may be that what I was thinking when I wrote #8 above is simply that I agree with his bottom line: NOMA is in the end untenable.
It’s always interesting when people arrive at the same conclusion from completely different starting places. I always think of the case where religious people join forces with a certain stripe of feminist against pornography. Not that these two things — religious faith and feminism — are necessarily opposed; it’s just that there are certainly members of both groups who would share very few assumptions about the world with others, yet there they are.
Hello, this is one of your original students (Danny) from Berry. One thought that I have long had about God creating space and time, is that he (as you have already discussed) must obviously have an independent existence of these things. But of course, if one is thinking strictly in physical objects, one cannot identify how that would be possible. However, once one broadens one’s search, it becomes clear that any truth (such as mathematical theorems) exists independently of spacetime. So, in my opinion, God is truth or something else related to truth which necessarily exists independently of time.