"The God Delusion" discussion thread

Great Debates
61

I think Dawkins is too all-or-nothing with regard to evolution: it can’t just explain some things; it has to explain everything.

Back in Chapter 4, he said, “The creationists are right that, if genuinely irreducible complexity could be properly demonstrated, it would wreck Darwin’s theory.” My reaction: Wreck it? Or merely render it incomplete? Isn’t it possible that it would have to be supplemented by some other, perhaps as-yet-undreamt of theory or theories (not necessarily having anything to do with a Creator), the way Newtonian physics had to be supplemented by relativity theory and quantum mechanics?

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[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
I think Dawkins is too all-or-nothing with regard to evolution: it can’t just explain some things; it has to explain everything.

Back in Chapter 4, he said, “The creationists are right that, if genuinely irreducible complexity could be properly demonstrated, it would wreck Darwin’s theory.” My reaction: Wreck it? Or merely render it incomplete? Isn’t it possible that it would have to be supplemented by some other, perhaps as-yet-undreamt of theory or theories (not necessarily having anything to do with a Creator), the way Newtonian physics had to be supplemented by relativity theory and quantum mechanics?
[/QUOTE]

But if he put in the caveat that 'if this theory encounters circumstances it can’t explain, then we’ll wave our hands and invoke some other supporting explanation", then he’d be guilty of the same thing as the creationists.

Good science acknowledges its limitations up-front. Darwin did this in The Origin of Species, outlining a wide sample of evidence that would contradict his theory. 149 years later, no such evidence has been found.

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Chapter 3 - Arguments for God’s existence

I pretty much agree with everything here. Obviously I wouldn’t think any of these arguments are convincing, or i’d be an believer. But I think these are the argument that can be swept aside; these are the ones we can say “No, this is a poor argument” to, rather than just “I doubt it”. I would say to Thudlow Boink that he only doesn’t talk about natural beauty if you consider man outside of nature. :wink: But I do see your point if you mean to suggest that manmade beauty is manmade beauty, whilst natural beauty is that made by God and so the best measuring tape.

The argument from personal experience; i’m alright with this one, actually. I’m perfectly willing to accept “I believe in God because of some personal experience of mine” as a reason for believing. We don’t get to choose what to believe, and something happening to you like that would be pretty effective at getting you to believe. What I dislike about it is that it appears often (and i’m going to generalise horribly here) to be the basis of most if not all religious belief. I have heard people say they had an experience, gained belief, and that motivated them to study more on the subject, and that’s great. Sometimes I hear people say they had such experiences and they’re fine to entirely go with that alone, and that’s considerably less great. But i’ve never heard the reverse of that; i’ve never heard of someone who believes they have proved the existence of God rationally, but has never felt his existence personally. I’m not sure if that means anything (and besides, to take my personal lack of experience of such people as evidence is pretty much the same as religious people taking their personal experience as truth without argument). But it is interesting.

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Chapter 4 - Why there almost certainly is no God

Well, for a start, the title’s misleading. This section doesn’t say anything about disproving God. It’s just providing alternate explanations. If the sole reason for religious belief was the honest idea that there was no possible way for things to occur otherwise, then this might be accurate. But it isn’t.

Dawkins is right that irreducible complexity is the perfect argument to use against natural selection. Genuine examples of it would mean a serious re-looking at the whole theory. The problem is whether there are such genuine examples. And he’s correct in that the assumption seems to be that, should natural selection prove to be wrong, intelligent design or creationism is the right answer; proving natural selection wrong seems to be one and the same as proving ID right for some people. The problem with that of course is that the failure of one would not mean the automatic acceptance or victory of the other. As Dawkins points out, it’s much the same thing with any gaps in the fossil record.

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Chapter 5 - The roots of religion

For once, i’m sort of with ITR Champion. I’ll turn in my atheist card after the post. :wink:
I don’t think Dawkins assumes natural selection to be the only way religion could have come up, mainly because i’ve read ahead to the chapter where he starts talking about memes. Dawkins is assuming that the initial stages of religion are those which are guided by natural selection, which seems a bit more reasonable if still an assumption. I think he does do a good job of showing how religion could fit into a benefit-to-people system, and one of showing it could be a by-product (although there he mostly leans on other’s work).

As I understand it, anyway, he’s suggesting that we get some kind of genetic predisposition to religious belief, which I don’t find all that unlikely (and not as unlikely as a “gene for religion”), which (in his words) primes us for religion. The specifics of the religion themselves then work according to his meme theory; social and behavioural aspects rather than genetic. Seems reasonable to me.

Chapter 6 - The roots of morality

Because it’s a short chapter. Eh. I’m also a believer in how morality can come from animal behaviour up to us, but I would have liked more of an explanation of what moral systems atheists use. Dawkins is writing for believers; he points out that thiests could be said to be immoral if they’re only acting because of God’s will, and that if they were good anyway there’s no reason why we can’t be. But I would have liked a bit more explanation as to the kind of moral systems we have, to compare.

Dawkins also assumes that athiests could be, in fact, significantly more moral than theists. To an extent, I agree, and i’m going to explain before **Siege ** or someone comes in and shows me up on that. :wink:

For a theist, morality isn’t just about this life, it’s often about the next. And sometimes, there is a conflict between what would be a moral thing to do now, and what would be a moral thing if both lives are taken into account. Sometimes, that which is moral if both lives are taken into account is less so, or even immoral, if only this life is. People who only think of this life will tend to be more moral (if they’re trying to be) in that they don’t have to worry about being trumped by another life. For me as a person who only believes in one life, I can see how atheists might be more moral; but of course for a theist who believes in two, I am the immoral one. So really it depends on if there is an afterlife or not on that one.

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[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
Another way is to claim that notions of space or time or location, “when” or “where,” are meaningless when applied to God. If you don’t understand how that’s possible, I sympathize, but if you claim that therefore it can’t be possible, you’re making an Argument from Personal Incredulity, which Dawkins denounces in a different context.
[/QUOTE]

I don’t believe that this is possible. Or, rather, I don’t believe that the true concept and meaning of “no place” and “no time” are within the realm of human comprehension. How does one think about something being not bound by time and space without relying completely on knowledge about time and space? All one can do is refer to the framework in which we exist.

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[QUOTE=Eonwe]
I don’t believe that this is possible. Or, rather, I don’t believe that the true concept and meaning of “no place” and “no time” are within the realm of human comprehension. How does one think about something being not bound by time and space without relying completely on knowledge about time and space? All one can do is refer to the framework in which we exist.
[/QUOTE]
I could say, Yeah, it’s really hard to think about, but then so are other things, like relativity or quantum mechanics, at least until you get used to the ideas.

Or I could repeat my earlier comment: “If you don’t understand how that’s possible, I sympathize, but if you claim that therefore it can’t be possible, you’re making an Argument from Personal Incredulity.”

Dawkins, and many others of a scientific turn of mind, seem to get offended at the idea that there are some things (and specifically, God, or some things about God) that are beyond human comprehension. But why is it impossible that there are some true things that we are incapable of fully understanding? I can easily believe that there are some things that are beyond canine comprehension, or beyond bovine comprehension—why not things that are beyond human comprehension?

I’m not saying that there are things we shouldn’t try to understand as much as possible, or that you should never question. “We can’t understand” is sometimes used as a cop-out, and I admit and deplore that.

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A lot of what Dawkins has to say about morality that I want to comment on is in Chapter 7, so I’ll wait until I talk about that chapter to bring it up. Here’ he’s trying to claim that religion and morality are pretty much independent of one another, and to explain how a common sense of morality could have arisen if not from religion. He claims (p. 223) that people tend to agree on moral questions, even when they don’t agree on religion. (I wonder if that agreement about morality is the same sort of thing we’re talking about as “the Tao” over in the Abolition of Man discussion thread.)

There is ample evidence that atheists can be good, and that believers in God (and, probably, those who claim to follow any particular religion you’d care to name) can act evilly, so apparently Dawkins has refuted the claim (made occasionally by believers, and which has been discussed here on the SDMB though I don’t remember anyone strongly supporting it here) that you can’t be good without God. A key quote:
[QUOTE=Richard Dawkins]
If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would ‘commit robbery, rape, and murder’, you reveal yourself as an immoral person, ‘and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you’. If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good.
[/QUOTE]
A couple of objections to this partially valid point.

First, one of the reasons I would continue to be good even if I stopped believing in God is out of habit. My conscience, inhibitions, moral sense, etc., which were formed in the context of my own religious beliefs and those of my family and my community, would not disappear along with the religious beliefs that engendered them. I have encountered the theory—and I don’t know how plausible it is—that, if religious belief were to die out, morality would decline, not overnight, but over the course of several generations, as the habits that society had learned die off.

Second, Dawkins’s examples of “being a good person” listed here involve avoiding evil rather than actively doing good. Does that make a difference? What about people who do good works from religious motivations? Personally, if I were on the fence about doing a particular good act, the idea that God would see it and be pleased by it, and possibly reward me somehow, and/or bless the act so that it would actually have its intended good effect, might be the extra motivation I need to push me over the edge into doing it.

And personally, my own notions of morality, of what I should and should not do, while not solely determined by my religious beliefs nor solely motivated by them, are closely enough entwined with them that it would be hard to isolate one from the other.

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[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
First, one of the reasons I would continue to be good even if I stopped believing in God is out of habit. My conscience, inhibitions, moral sense, etc., which were formed in the context of my own religious beliefs and those of my family and my community, would not disappear along with the religious beliefs that engendered them. I have encountered the theory—and I don’t know how plausible it is—that, if religious belief were to die out, morality would decline, not overnight, but over the course of several generations, as the habits that society had learned die off.
[/quote]
How does that undermine Dawkins point? If you continue to be good in the absence of god, that is all that is necessary to demonstrate the point. God is not necessary to do good things or behave in a “moral” fashion. Atheists engage in good/desirable/moral behavior because of their conscience, inhibitions, moral sense. You seem to be implying that these things arose from your initial religiosity, rather than contemporaneously with (or even in spite of) it. I feel I must be missing something from your “objection” here.

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[QUOTE=Hentor the Barbarian]
How does that undermine Dawkins point? If you continue to be good in the absence of god, that is all that is necessary to demonstrate the point. God is not necessary to do good things or behave in a “moral” fashion. Atheists engage in good/desirable/moral behavior because of their conscience, inhibitions, moral sense. You seem to be implying that these things arose from your initial religiosity, rather than contemporaneously with (or even in spite of) it. I feel I must be missing something from your “objection” here.
[/QUOTE]
As I understand Thudlow’s point, it’s the habit that is important; that he’d probably do all those things and even perhaps find himself praying or avoiding taking God’s name in vain, because that’s what he normally does. In that respect, the idea of God is required, not in a continual sense but in the sense of if he had never had that idea, he would not have developed those habits.

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[QUOTE=Revenant Threshold]
As I understand Thudlow’s point, it’s the habit that is important; that he’d probably do all those things and even perhaps find himself praying or avoiding taking God’s name in vain, because that’s what he normally does. In that respect, the idea of God is required, not in a continual sense but in the sense of if he had never had that idea, he would not have developed those habits.
[/QUOTE]
I guess I’ll have to go back and re-read the chapter to see if Dawkins’ point is more subtle than I recall, but that still seems irrelevant to me. Continuing to be good out of habit demonstrates an ability to do so absent god. It answers the question “Is god necessary for people to act morally or good?” with a solid no. In this case, habit is all that is required.

Furthermore, if one stopped believing in god, would it be the case that they still believed that god existed prior to their change of mind? Would they be likely to say “I behaved morally back then because god used to exist, and continue to do so now just because it is my habit to do so?”

Obviously, IMHO, part of this whole issue is a bit of rhetorical trickery: nobody is going to say of themselves that they would in the future rape, rob and murder, unless they are hard-core dedicated to being contrary to the idea that morality may have an alternate source, or may be possible in the absence of religion. Nevertheless, it does not run counter to Dawkins’ point, as I recall it, to say that one would behave morally out of habit instead of due to god’s scrutiny.

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[QUOTE=Hentor the Barbarian]
Continuing to be good out of habit demonstrates an ability to do so absent god. It answers the question “Is god necessary for people to act morally or good?” with a solid no. In this case, habit is all that is required.
[/QUOTE]
But it could be the case (I’m not arguing that it is, just that it hasn’t been ruled out) that habit is necessary for people to act morally and belief in God is necessary for the habit to be developed.

It’s one question to ask whether a person can be good without believing in God (and the answer is obviously yes). It’s a different question to ask whether a society can be good without widespread belief in God, or a religious basis. (And the answer to that question might also be yes, but it is a different question.)

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[QUOTE=Hentor the Barbarian]
I guess I’ll have to go back and re-read the chapter to see if Dawkins’ point is more subtle than I recall, but that still seems irrelevant to me. Continuing to be good out of habit demonstrates an ability to do so absent god. It answers the question “Is god necessary for people to act morally or good?” with a solid no. In this case, habit is all that is required.
[/quote]
It answers the question “Is *current * belief in god necessary for people to act morally or good?” with a solid no. It does not answer the question on whether people acting morally or good is possible without any belief in god at any point. I could certainly be wrong, but I believe Dawkins’ point is not that people can be moral just so long as at some point they believe in God, so that they keep the habit. Dawkins is attempting to show that people can be moral without ever having believed in God.

Put another way, you are correct, it does show an ability to be good absent god. But that’s a much wimpier version of what Dawkins is attempting to say, which is that people can be good absent god at any point. That lifelong atheists can be good people. That formerly religious people retain the habits of belief certainly requires that belief existed at some point. I suppose it depends which it is you believe Dawkins is trying to say.

No, I would imagine it would be “I behaved morally back then because I thought god used to exist, and continue to do so now because it is my habit to do so”. God’s existence is not that which has changed. It is the belief that has changed.

It does if Dawkins is claiming that lifelong atheists can be good. That not only is current belief in god not required, but that former belief is not required. That in fact belief in God is not required whatsoever, rather than just not required at that particular point in time.

I believe that that is what he is claiming. But I could be wrong.

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I come up with all kinds of brilliant arguments to make in this thread and then I find that Thudlow boink has made them already. That’s the story of my life.

[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
I could say, Yeah, it’s really hard to think about, but then so are other things, like relativity or quantum mechanics, at least until you get used to the ideas.
[/QUOTE]

This is a great point, and it’s one that Dawkins himself should have been aware of since he wrote in the “Mother of all Burqas” section that ordinary human perception is limited in many ways. On the face of it, there’s no reason why the things that exist must coincide with things that humans can perceive. Humans cannot perceive electrons, or microwave radiation, or distant galaxies by our senses alone. For those things, we needed technology. Thus it’s entirely reasonable to speculate that there are other things ‘out there’ beyond human perception.

But moreover, the examples Thudlow cited also demonstrate how the rules of our universe might not be rules in all realms of existence. Until recently, any reasonable person would have agreed that every object has a specific location at a specific time or that nothing can travel from one point to another without crossing the space in between. Thanks to quantum theory, we now know those things aren’t true in the quantum realm, even if they are true in daily experience. Hence we must acknowledge the possibility that other realms could have rules that entirely defy our logical understanding.

For instance, way back at the start of the thread Pochacco responded to my question about the complexity of God by saying that complexity can be defined by the number of parts, and that a certain number of parts is needed to hold certain amounts of information. Well, that may be the case in our universe, but I wouldn’t lay it down as a law in all realms. (In fact, quantum theory is already challenging some cherished conclusions about computation and information.)

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[QUOTE=ITR champion]
This is a great point, and it’s one that Dawkins himself should have been aware of since he wrote in the “Mother of all Burqas” section that ordinary human perception is limited in many ways. On the face of it, there’s no reason why the things that exist must coincide with things that humans can perceive. Humans cannot perceive electrons, or microwave radiation, or distant galaxies by our senses alone. For those things, we needed technology. Thus it’s entirely reasonable to speculate that there are other things ‘out there’ beyond human perception.
[/QUOTE]

I don’t think anyone is disputing the idea that there may be things that are beyond human perception or understanding. I have a big problem, however, with someone who says “There are things humans cannot perceive or understand–things undetectable to science, things outside the laws of reason and logic. Now let me tell you what they are!”

Quantum physics is truly weird and hard to understand. But we didn’t start believing in it because someone made up some ideas or had a personal epiphany. We believe it because the theory made lots of very specific predictions about reality which turned out to be very, very accurate (akin to predicting the width of North America to within a human hair’s breadth). Far from being an exception to the rules of logic and science, quantum theory shows how science and logic (math) can produce startling new knowledge even about the very nature of reality. Quantum theory is the first best hint we have, in fact, that everything may actually be comprehensible to humanity (a fact which would, perhaps, be a point for theism!).

Of course, some things clearly aren’t comprehensible to us yet, just like quantum physics wasn’t comprehensible before 1900. But like I said, quantum physics wasn’t just made up without evidence. At no time in history have the beliefs of people without evidence EVER been a reliable predictor of what it was then unknown. Never. Not once. But theists still keep hoping they’ll be right about this. Why?

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Couldn’t one argue that a religion defines what is good, and what is evil? Without that, who can tell an evil act from a good act? The presumption that religion has often done a bad or (or more to the point) inconsistent job of properly identifying the good and the bad would be beside the point.

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Well, the religious are free to say that, and the rest of us can still think genocide is wrong. Guess we’ll have to agree to disagree!

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I realized too late to re-edit that my edit tag message might seem like an insult to Der Trihs. I should have said I’m thinking more like him every day. (Though why that seems more clearly not insulting, I’m not sure.)

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This is where Dawkins discusses the Bible as a source of morality, and I think he seriously misreads it.

He starts out the chapter by saying something that at first sounds right, but the more I think about it, the more problems I have with it:
[QUOTE=Richard Dawkins]
There are two ways in which scripture might be a source of morals or rules for living. One is by direct instruction, for example through the Ten Commandments… The other is by example: God, or some other biblical character, might serve as - to use the contemporary jargon - a role model.
[/QUOTE]
First, it sounds as though he may be equating morailty with “rules for living,” which I find highly problematic. (A person who is rich in both love and wisdom could be a highly moral person without knowing or obeying any rules at all, except inadvertently.)

Second, depending on how you categorize things, the Bible may well contain moral instruction which is neither direct instruction (at least in the form of commandments, or “dos and don’ts”) nor examples. I’m thinking of things like some of the words of the prophets (as found in the often overlooked prophetic books of the Old Testament) or Jesus’s Beatitudes (“Blessed are the peacemakers” et al).

Third, and most important, it is a huge mistake to assume that everything, or even most things, in scripture are intended to serve as this sort of moral instruction. This is a mistake I’ve seen Bible critics and Bible thumpers make. Not every commandment found in the Bible is a moral rule, and not every story is a moral story.

The Old Testament is full of laws, rules, commandments, that, though they may well have been grounded in the values of that society (or its lawmaker(s), or its God), are no more moral rules per se than is the U.S. Constitution or the federal or state criminal or civil codes. If some behavior is condemned (perhaps even forbidden upon pain of death), that need not mean that they believed it to violate some universal moral principle, only that they believed it would have disastrous consequences within the context of that society if people were free to do it. One place Dawkins makes this mistake is at the bottom of p. 249 (through the top of p.250): he confuses getting our morals from scripture with adopting the Hebrews’ laws as our own.

To read the stories in the Bible as if they were intended to teach moral lessons is, in some if not all cases, to misread them—especially if you’re expecting the moral simplicity of an Aesop’s fable rather than the complexity of a Shakesperean play. Is there any indication that any of the Biblical characters were intended to be role models, or is that a modern misreading? In particular, I suspect (though I lack the expertise to back it up) that the idea of God as a role model, or example to emulate, would have been utterly foreign to the ancient Hebrews. (Note: I take some issue with Dawkins’s overwhelmingly negative characterization of “the Old Testament God,” but that was the subject of a whole long thread of its own not too long ago, so I won’t raise it here.)

80

Here’s a quote that stuck out at me:
[QUOTE=Richard Dawkins]
With notable exceptions such as the Afghan Taliban and the American Christian equivalent [I can’t decide whether that’s a cheap shot or not], most people pay lip service to the same broad liberal consensus of ethical principles. The majority of us don’t cause needless suffering; we believe in free speech and protect it even if we disagree with what is being said; we pay our taxes; we don’t cheat, don’t kill, don’t commit incest, don’t do things to others that we would not wish done to us.
[/QUOTE]
That’s a rosy view of human nature (except for that of “the Afghan Taliban and the American Christian equivalent”). Do the majority of us really believe in all those things and act in those ways? Would they if they hadn’t been taught to?

Anyway, Dawkins’s point about the moral Zeitgeist is that (he claims) human moral standards have been steadily improving over the course of time.
[QUOTE=Richard Dawkins]
There seems to be a steadily shifting standard of what is morally acceptable. … The shift is in a recognizably consistent direction, which most of us would judge as improvement.
[/QUOTE]
While I am tempted to agree, I am also tempted to ask, “Acceptable to whom? Whose standard? That of the entire current population of earth, or just your neighbors?” And to ask, “How do we know that today’s standards are a genuine improvement, and don’t just look that way to us because we are modern and have a modern point of view?”

But my big question for Dawkins here would be whether he believes in an objective Good. When he says things are improving, does he mean things are getting better in some objective sense (as opposed to just more to his liking)? This ties in with the Abolition of Man discussion thread, where several posters are unequivocably denying that there is such a thing as objective good. If there are objective standards of Good, where do they come from in a strictly material universe? And if not, in what sense can the moral Zeitgeist be said to be improving?
One of Dawkins’s major beefs with religion is that he thinks it makes people worse, not better. (Worse in what sense? I might ask, again raising the issue of absolute standards. But aside from that…) He quotes Steven Weinberg as saying “With or without [religion], you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes relgion.” Couldn’t religion also get evil people to do good things, though? Can it help make evil people good?

What’s wrong with this hypothesis: There’s good religion, and there’s bad religion. Good religion makes people better, and inspires them to do good things. Bad religion makes people worse, and inspires people to do evil things. It is not religion you should be denouncing, but bad religion.