A Case of Theism vs Atheism

A Case of Theism vs. Atheism

Alan Jacobs: Thus the opening line of Terry Eagleton's response, in the London Review of Books, to Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology."

Caveat from Alan Jacobs
… The first notable atheists and agnostics, the nineteenth-century critics of Christianity in England and America, were raised in largely Christian cultures and knew, often in considerable detail, the contours of the faith they were opposing. This made them more forceful arguers and more effective debaters, even if it also made them more vulnerable to the power and beauty of the Christian message…
But today's polemical skeptics not only lack adequate knowledge of Christianity or of other religions, they're apparently unaware that such knowledge would be to their advantage.

So, how do we respond to such terminal silliness?
Carefully:
Da Vinci Code is long forgotten.
The Jesus Family Tomb special on Discovery Channel last weekend brought guffaws from secular archaeologists: “bad archaeology, good TV.”
Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion will soon be forgotten as an angry polemic.
However, it can serve us an learning device for dealing with secular claims about the existence of God and the story of Jesus.
Remember…
I. “Taking Every Thought Captive.”

II. Dawkins’ God, March 11th
a. Richard Dawkins, atheist.
i. Position at Oxford University.
Professor of the Public Understanding of Science
ii. Background and reputation.
1. Ethologist, zoology: animal behaviour
2. Evolutionary biologist
3. Memes: made popular the notion of transferred behaviours, following the model of transferred genetic material.
4. Wikipedia: In a play on Thomas Huxley's epithet "Darwin's bulldog", Dawkins' impassioned defence of evolution has earned him the appellation "Darwin's rottweiler".
5. In February 2007, Dawkins admitted that the term "delusional" does not fairly characterise this category of belief.
iii. Best known books.
1. The Selfish Gene
2. The Blind Watchmaker
iv. Dawkins’ most recent work: The God Delusion
1. Argument of the book.
a. The Sunday Times, 19 Nov 06: “The enlightenment is under threat,” Dawkins said. “So is reason. So is truth. We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organised ignorance. We even have to go out on the attack ourselves, for the sake of reason and sanity.”
2. Reaction:
a. Some believers just ignore what’s going on in works like this.
b. Some Christians seem fearful, too fearful to read.
Psalm 14:1 The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’
c. Some scientists: he’s a fundamentalist.
The Sunday Times, November 19, 2006
Dawkins’s approach has also offended fellow scientists. Steven Rose, emeritus professor of biology at the Open University, said: “I worry that Richard’s view about belief is too simplistic, and so hostile that as a committed secularist myself I am uneasy about it. We need to recognise that our own science also depends on certain assumptions about the way the world is — assumptions that he and I of course share.”

d. Alister McGrath: point by point refutation; fuller treatment of atheism generally.
i. Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes, and the Meaning of Life
ii. The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World
Convinced that the scientific discoveries of their day could be harnessed to serve the needs of the church, Descartes and his colleagues abandoned any appeal to religious experience in their defense of their faith. The secure proofs of religion lay in philosophy and the natural sciences—in the reasoning of this world rather than the intrusion of the next. Philosophy alone could establish the necessity and plausibility of the Christian faith.
With the benefit of hindsight, this was not a particularly wise strategy. The English experience suggested that nobody really doubted the existence of God until theologians tried to prove it. The very modest success of these proofs led many to wonder if God[‘s existence was quite as self-evident as they had once thought.
…Historically, it can be shown that arguments used by French atheists against religion in the late eighteenth century were borrowed from religious writers who had previously sought to eliminate atheism.
This hitherto unprecedented denial of God developed out of the very strategies employed to defend Christianity a century earlier. Descartes and his colleagues prposed that a perfect divine being was the best explanation of the universe. Yet by doing so, they opened the way to the response that the universe was perfectly capable of explaining itself, and they also heightened awareness of one of the Christian faith’s greatest vulnerabilities—the problem of evil. If God is supremely perfect, who do suffering and pain exist, causing such distress to humanity? One of Descartes’ most significant achievements was to make what had hitherto been a practical issue of Christian spirituality (how can I cope with suffering?) into a disconfirmation of the faith. How could anyone believe in a perfect divine being, when the world was so clearly imperfect?

3. Terry Eagleton’s response.
Times Literary Supplement: a review of The God Delusion
… Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake:…It is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it.
…Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human history – and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry. He is like a man who equates socialism with the Gulag.
… There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from, among other places, that particular stable.
Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at Manchester University. His latest book is How to Read a Poem.

4. Alvin Plantinga’s refutation.
a. Dawkins’ argument
Alvin Plantinga, John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, in Books & Culture, March/April 2007.
The basic idea is that anything that knows and can do what God knows and can do would have to be incredibly complex. In particular, anything that can create or design something must be at least as complex as the thing it can design or create. Putting it another way, Dawkins says a designer must contain at least as much information as what it creates or designs, and information is inversely related to probability. Therefore, he thinks, God would have to be monumentally complex, hence astronomically improbable; thus it is almost certain that God does not exist.
But why does Dawkins think God is complex? And why does he think that the more complex something is, the less probable it is?
The premise he argues for is something like this:
1. We know of no irrefutable objections to its being biologically possible that all of life has come to be by way of unguided Darwinian processes;
and Dawkins supports that premise by trying to refute objections to its being biologically possible that life has come to be that way. His conclusion, however, is
2. All of life has come to be by way of unguided Darwinian processes.
It's worth meditating, if only for a moment, on the striking distance, here, between premise and conclusion. The premise tells us, substantially, that there are no irrefutable objections to its being possible that unguided evolution has produced all of the wonders of the living world; the conclusion is that it is true that unguided evolution has indeed produced all of those wonders. The argument form seems to be something like
We know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that p;
Therefore
p is true.
Philosophers sometimes propound invalid arguments (I've propounded a few myself); few of those arguments display the truly colossal distance between premise and conclusion sported by this one. I come into the departmental office and announce to the chairman that the dean has just authorized a $50,000 raise for me; naturally he wants to know why I think so. I tell him that we know of no irrefutable objections to its being possible that the dean has done that. My guess is he'd gently suggest that it is high time for me to retire.
you can't establish something as a fact by showing that objections to its possibility fail, and adding that it is very probable.)
b. The “defeater” in the argument
Like most naturalists, Dawkins is a materialist about human beings: human persons are material objects; they are not immaterial selves or souls or substances joined to a body, and they don't contain any immaterial substance as a part. From this point of view, our beliefs would be dependent on neurophysiology, and (no doubt) a belief would just be a neurological structure of some complex kind. Now the neurophysiology on which our beliefs depend will doubtless be adaptive; but why think for a moment that the beliefs dependent on or caused by that neurophysiology will be mostly true? Why think our cognitive faculties are reliable?
From a theistic point of view, we'd expect that our cognitive faculties would be (for the most part, and given certain qualifications and caveats) reliable. God has created us in his image, and an important part of our image bearing is our resembling him in being able to form true beliefs and achieve knowledge. But from a naturalist point of view the thought that our cognitive faculties are reliable (produce a preponderance of true beliefs) would be at best a naïve hope. The naturalist can be reasonably sure that the neurophysiology underlying belief formation is adaptive, but nothing follows about the truth of the beliefs depending on that neurophysiology. In fact he'd have to hold that it is unlikely, given unguided evolution, that our cognitive faculties are reliable. It's as likely, given unguided evolution, that we live in a sort of dream world as that we actually know something about ourselves and our world.
If this is so, the naturalist has a defeater for the natural assumption that his cognitive faculties are reliable—a reason for rejecting that belief, for no longer holding it. (Example of a defeater: suppose someone once told me that you were born in Michigan and I believed her; but now I ask you, and you tell me you were born in Brazil. That gives me a defeater for my belief that you were born in Michigan.) And if he has a defeater for that belief, he also has a defeater for any belief that is a product of his cognitive faculties. But of course that would be all of his beliefs—including naturalism itself. So the naturalist has a defeater for naturalism; natural- ism, therefore, is self-defeating and cannot be rationally believed.

c. Good science
Considers its’ evidence, tests to support and extend its’ proposals or hypotheses, and settles for limited results.
Considers it’s unexplained analomies, rethinks the paradigm, and searches for a new paradigm that will include all known phenomena. We know the names of those few who are able to make those conceptual leaps: Newton, Copernicus, Einstein.

b. Application: II Corinthians 10:5
i. We hope we have understood Scripture.
ii. We have thought carefully about our world, rather than avoiding the point of attack.
Martin Luther: if we have not responded at the point of attack, we are not in the war.

iii. We have taken thoughts captive, NOT PEOPLE
1. Godly impulse: deal with strongholds.
2. Fallen impulse: love things/use people, control people/manage ideas.


III. Evolution vs. Creation, March 18th, followed by panel discussion over lunch