Dear Joe,

You asked about Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion. Well, I haven’t had a chance to read it all yet, but it so happened that The Times printed a long extract from the book which I did read and have been thinking about. Since Dr Dawkins has also been on the TV a lot, I’ve now got a better idea of the points he is trying to make.

I’ll go through the extract that I read in a moment, but first a general point that’s struck me: if Christianity should be what Dr Dawkins believes it to be, then I would agree with his condemnation of it. (Of course, Dr Dawkins doesn’t hold with any form of religion, but most of his examples seem to be drawn from Christianity and that seems to be the religion that most draws his animus.)

However, it seems to me that Dr Dawkins’ idea of Christianity is one of his own invention, or rather the amalgam of various strands of ideas that don’t actually bear that much relation to the real thing. And, following on from that, he seems to be in some danger of espousing a form of ‘scientific fundamentalism’ that is actually as irrational as the religion he believes he is contending with.

Now, onto the specific passages I read. There were two extracts: a longer one dealing with religious experience as proof of God, and a shorter one looking at the classic philosophical arguments for the existence of God formulated by St Thomas Aquinas.

Both of his arguments are poor, revealing a lack of knowledge of the source material and, in the first case, a form of argumentation that is, quite simply, invalid. His disproof of religious experience takes the following form:

1. Some people have religious experiences.
2. But some people suffer from mental delusions.
3. Not all sensory experience is accurate (optical illusions, etc).
4. Some of these religious experience are supposedly miraculous.
5. But we know miracles don’t happen (quoting the philosopher David Hume).
6. Therefore religious experiences are not evidence for the existence of God.

I think it’s fairly clear why the argument doesn’t work. It’s a classic example of begging the question. Steps 2 and 3 are generally applicable to all human experience, but don’t thereby invalidate any particular part of it. And step 5 is an a priori philosophical commitment that he does not seek to prove but merely asserts.

To put it in a nutshell, the argument takes the form: some people have experiences of God, but we know God doesn’t exist, therefore these experiences are not of God. QED.

Dr Dawkins here appears unaware that all religious traditions, but Christianity in particular, know perfectly well that not all religious experiences are genuine. There’s a vast literature, plus an even larger amount of lived experience, that examines supposedly religious experiences to determine whether they are purely psychological, whether they result from some physical condition, or if they result from some stratagem of the Adversary. Only when those possibilities are exhausted would a spiritual director even begin to consider that a particular religious experience might genuinely be a result of divine grace.

Secondly, there is generally a clear distinction between those people who have been touched by God and those whose experiences are a result of psychological or demonic factors: what they do. For example, I’ve known people who have had all sorts of religious experiences, but these have been due to various psychological factors in them: the key point is that they, like most everyone suffering from forms of mental illness, are debilitated by their experiences. They crack up.

Contrast and compare this with those who have genuine experiences of God: they are energised, doing things that would seem impossible. An obvious example is Mother Theresa of Calcutta. The basic rule to apply where religious experience is concerned is that old favourite: by their fruit shall ye know them.

Next we have Dr Dawkins on Aquinas, which conclusively proves that while he may be a fine scientist, he’s no philosopher. I don’t have the time to go into everything that he gets wrong, but let’s just say that pretty well every statement he makes in this section either misunderstands Aquinas or does not prove what Dr Dawkins thinks it proves. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever come across a poorer piece of writing on the subject.

First, a preliminary remark. St Thomas was working on the assumption that, philosophically, it could not be proved that the universe had a beginning – of course, he believed it was created because of revelation, but since this could not be proved by reason alone he assumed for the sake of argument that it was eternal, in line with the thought of Aristotle and the classical authors. In fact, if Aquinas knew, as we do now, that the universe had a beginning, he would have thought the argument over: characteristically, Dr Dawkins misunderstands him completely.

All right, let’s go through this in a more systematic fashion. Dr Dawkins manages to state Aquinas’s first two arguments for God relatively accurately, but gets number 3 completely wrong. He states it thus: ‘There must have been a time when no physical things existed.’ But of course, Aquinas was working from the assumption that the universe was eternal. Thomas’s argument is to do with contingent and necessary beings, ie that the universe and everything in it need not exist, so therefore a necessary being is required that anything else might exist. Maybe Dr Dawkins has a convincing argument against this, but since he doesn’t even understand what Aquinas was saying I remain, shall we say, to be convinced.

He is correct to say that the first three arguments turn on the impossibility of an infinite regress and that therefore an end to the regress must be found. He seems to regard it as an unwarranted assumption – apparently he is again unfamiliar with philosophical thinking on the subject – but then goes on to get things even more wrong when he says that even if we allow an end to the infinite regress there’s no reason to think that that end is like God. Er, Dr Dawkins, the argument was never supposed to prove the Christian God. No one suggests that these three arguments do that – they indicate the outline of a ‘being’ that is necessary, the first cause of Aristotle, the unmoved mover of antiquity, nothing more than that. As usual Dr Dawkins appears unaware of this.

As for Aquinas’s fourth way, he misunderstands that even more completely than the one before. Aquinas was using Aristotelian terms, so that degrees of goodness or perfection relate to how perfectly something manifests its nature – thus a ‘good’ flu virus will be particularly adept at infecting people.

Finally, the fifth way, or the argument from design, is now standing in better shape than it has for the last five centuries. Dr Dawkins carefully ignores the evidence of extraordinary fine tuning in the physical parameters of the universe that the physicists and chemists have been steadily accumulating for the last 50 years. To put it simply, it seems that if any of the constants that make the universe what it is and thus a place where we can live were even very slightly different from their value, then the universe would be incapable of life and, most likely, incapable of anything more than a fleeting existence before vanishing into the void.

I could go on about just how poor a philosopher Dr Dawkins is, but I think you get the picture. At the very least, if you’re going to argue against a view it’s incumbent upon you to try and understand what that viewpoint is. In pretty well every part of what I read Dr Dawkins reveals himself to be ignorant of religion in general and Christianity in particular. Frankly, it’s pretty pathetic.

Anyway, I’ll try to get around to reading the rest of the book at some stage, but I can’t say I’m terribly confident that it would be worth it. Since The Times printed an extract from his book, I suppose Dr Dawkins was consulted on what to highlight: the inference is that he thinks this is one of his strongest arguments!

Still, I’d like to hear what you think of the argument. Let me know when you get the chance,

All the best,

Eddie