Power Point: A response to The God Delusion by Dawkins

Posted on June 25, 2007 by Dr. John Oakes wrote in Apologetics, Philosophy, PowerPoints, The Existence of God.

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The God Delusion: A Response

A Response to Scientific Materialism and The God Delusion

Richard Dawkins, author of A River out of Eden, The Blind Watchmaker, The Selfish
Gene and Unweaving the Rainbow.

Main points in this book:

Evolution by a completely random process of mutation and natural selection from
bacteria to humans is a proven fact.

Therefore it is proven that the Universe has the ability to spontaneously create
more complex systems from less complex systems.

Therefore, by analogy, there must be some sort of natural selection-like process
which produces a universe like ours (although he does not even propose this
theory, never mind providing any evidence for it).

(It is essentially a known fact that there are multiple universes).

Completely ignoring the insolvable problem of the generation of life from prebiotic
material, he then concludes that science is the only legitimate means by which
we can acquire useful knowledge of our world.

Therefore, all belief in moral absolutes, in infallible ethical principles is
sheer nonsense.

Belief in some sort of supernatural force which exists as creator of our universe
is therefore a delusion.

(The name for this philosophy is scientism or materialism or naturalism)

The idea that certain behaviors (stealing, homosexuality, adultery, lying, stealing,
etc) are inherently wrong is an artifact, and a harmful one at that, of human
brain evolution.

He offers only blatantly pseudoscientific ideas of a ?religion virus? brain
evolution and ?memes?

He concludes that the greatest enemy of knowledge, of human progress, of scientific
discovery is religion, in all its forms.

Nothing good has ever come from religious belief, but only delusional distraction
from the pure pursuit of the only truth there is, which is found through naturalistic
science.

. ?As a child, my wife hated her school and wished she could leave.?

On page one, he mentions the BBC documentary about religion, The Root of All
Evil? Dawkins says he does not believe religion is the root of all evil, but he then
proceeds to undermine that statement in the book by basically stating that it
is in fact the root of all evil?at least all the evil he can think of.

?When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer
from a delusion, it is called Religion.?

He calls religion a vice (p. 6)

?The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all
fiction.? (p. 31

He calls belief in God silly (p. 36).

He calls the Christian God a psychotic delinquent (p. 38) and a monster (p.
46)

He calls believers weird (p. 53)

He is ?amused? by the things ?religionists? do. Ridiculing and laughing at his
enemies.

We should reject Deuteronomy ?as all enlightened moderns do? (p. 57). Well, by
definition, anyone who accepts the historical accuracy of Deuteronomy is not
enlightened or modern. The list of those who do accept Deuteronomy will show the bias
of this statement.

He calls his opponents (i.e. all believers) unworthy (p. 57)

He calls attempts to test the viability of prayer pathetic (p. 61)

He calls those who believe in evolution but also believe in God members of ?The
Neville Chamberlain School of Evolutionists.? (p. 66).

This is a sampling from the first 20% of the book.

on p. 321 he says that he regrets the doctrine of hell is not true, because
part of him wishes the nuns he knew when he grew up could go there.

He argues (p. 317) that being influenced by the Catholic Church is more harmful
than being sexually abused. I am not kidding!

To summarize the book, the title should have been, ?Why I hate religion and
all religious people.?

Logical Fallacies

1. Ad Hominum.

The use of personal attacks against your opponent, rather than arguing against
their position.

He calls Mother Theresa a sanctimonious hypocrite (p. 292).

Dawkins uses words such as "barking mad" (p. 253), "sado-masochistic" (p. 253),
"viciously unpleasant" (p. 253), and "infantile" (363) to describe Christians?
belief in God in general.

Theistic Evolutionists are part of the ?Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists.?

This is not the sort of technique used by people who have a solid, convincing
argument to make.

2. No True Scotsman.

Dawkins repeatedly states that no true scientist will accept even the possibility
that God?s finger somehow has intervened in the course of nature.

Then Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lord Kelvin and an almost unlimited list of
the most eminent scientists are not good scientists.

3. Begging the Question. Assuming the answer to a question as a precondition to asking
the question.

Dawkins reasons that anyone who believes in a supernatural force is, by definition,
not scientific, and therefore, science proves that there is no supernatural
force.

4. Straw Man Argument.

Any religionist is part and parcel with the Taliban and Al Quaeda or one slippery
slope step away from being a violent, hateful fundamentalist.

He does not concede a single positive contribution to human society or culture
from religious people.

Marks of Pseudoscience:

1. Argument by analogy.

Darwinian evolution is a proven mechanism by which nature produces increased
complexity.

By analogy there must be some sort of complexity-causing mechanism which can
explain why we live in a fine-tuned universe.

Where is the evidence for this?

Religious belief is ?like a virus of the mind.?

2. Claims of suppression.

3. Quoting others out of context.

He quotes Hitler, ?We were convinced that the people need and require this faith.?
in an attempt to prove that he was a Christian (p. 274).

Misquotes Tertullian ?It is by all means to be believed because it is absurd.?

Quotes Luther dramatically out of context.

4. Bogus use of statistics to create a false case for an argument.

(mistake correlation with cause and effect)

He states (p. 229) that the more religious states in the United Stateshave higher
crime rates, implying that the greater amount of religion in those states is
what leads to their higher rate of violence.

Bogus use of statistics is found in several places in The God Delusion (p. 237, 255,
257 and others).

5. Appeals to mysteries and myths.

He tries to argue by analogy to the work of Julian Jayne, The Bicameral Mind. Int
erestingly, this is one of the case studies I use in my section on pseudoscience.

The bicameral mind is a completely unsupported effort to explain the (supposedly)
sudden increase in human knowledge about 2000 BC as being due to some sort of
sudden change in human brain chemistry.

Dawkins uses this to explain how human beings acquired the universal tendency
toward believing in absolute moral truth and in a spiritual dimension to life.

Ethical Answers in an Unethical World

What is Truth?

Subtitle: World View Apologetics

John 18:37-38 Jesus: ?I came to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens
to me.?

Pilate: ?What is truth??

Now that is a good question. This is the question of epistemology: How do we know things are true?

The problem as I see it:

1. The secularization of culture?the banishment of religious thought and of
ideas of absolute truth and morality from public discourse.

2. The loss of morality?the relativization of moral truth. The loss of a public and
private sense that certain things are just plain wrong or right.

3. The loss of God. We are at risk of becoming a people for whom God is somewhere
in with the ranks of fairies and lepruchans.

4. The loss of the intellectual high ground at the University for belief in
God and an ethically-centered point of view.

Example of that Lady in Phoenix

The ?enemy:?

1. Naturalism/scientism/materialism. The only ?truth? is that discovered by scientific

method.

Define Scientism: The belief that the only reliable or valid instrument to deciding
the truth or even the value of any proposition is the scientific method.

No ethics, no morality, no supernatural, no God, no truth except that found
by science, no consciousness, no ?I.? Justice is a figment of our imagination.

None of us can accept this.

This is a (false) religious assumption, as I will show.

A sample statement:

Richard Dawkins:

In the universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people
are going to get hurt and other people are going to get lucky: and you won?t
find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely
the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose,
no evil and no good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just
is, and we dance to its music.

Thomas Huxley:

We are as much the product of blind forces as is the falling of a stone to earth,
or the ebb and flow of the tides. We have just happened, and man was made flesh by
a long series of singularly beneficial accidents.

A little intellectual history.

Aristotle: We can apply logic and human reasoning to determine the truth about
the nature of the world in which we live.

Fact: Despite amazing progress brought about by the application of reason to
questions, the Greek model made virtually no progress in describing nature. Aris
totle?s 7 laws were all wrong. Nature does not behave rationally (according to human
ideas)

Augustine

A Manichaean who held to the teaching of Manes. But Manes made overconfident statements
about the cosmos which were proven wrong by science. Augustine: ?All he achieved by
his numerous statements on these matters was this: he was shown up by people
who had an accurate knowledge of them, and it was thus made perfectly plain
how much reliance could be placed on his understanding of other more abstruse
matters. When he was caught out making false statements about the heaven and the
stars and the movements of the sun and moon, even though these things are not
an integral part of his religious doctrine, yet it was clear enough that his
presumption was sacrilegious: he was talking about things he did not know.

Thus, Augustine left Manichaeism and eventually became a Christian.

Example: Hebrews 11:3 By faith we understand that the universe was formed at
God?s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what is visible. Creation
ex nihilo.

Thomas Aquinas

If something is true, it must be reasonable. Used Aristotle to analyze Christianity.

Roger Bacon, William of Ockham, Copernicus, etc.

These men began with an assumption: The universe was created by a single, all-powerful,
loving unchanging God with the single purpose so that we can live in it and
experience a relationship with him.

And thus, science was created. The Greeks could not discover the laws of Nature because
they had an incorrect understanding of Nature. The physical world is bad.

It is an undeniable fact that belief in the Christian God is the historical
and logical foundation for what we now call science.

These are the religious, philosophical underpinning of science.

1. The universe is ordered and essentially unchanging.

2. The universe is observable and understandable. There is a 1:1 match between how the human
mind works and how the universe in which live funcitons.

3. The universe is governed by mathematically precise laws.

Roger Bacon; To acquire truth about nature, use ?External experience, aided by instruments,
made precise by mathematics?

William of Ockham: Nothing is true unless it is known per se, is evident by experience,
or is proved by authority of scripture.

Galieo:

For the Holy Scripture and the phenomena of nature proceed alike from the divine
Word, the former as the dictate of the Holy Spirit and the latter as the observant
executor of God?s commands.?

Isaac Newton:

Universal Law of Gravity. The idea that we live in a mechanical universe.

This is no surprise to Bacon et al.

In fact that seems to be how God works in everything. He sets up physical and moral laws.
He sets into a world operating by those laws. It is (apparently) the nature of
God to only intervene in the workings of those laws very rarely and for very
definite purposes, yet God?s hand is the power behind everything and he is always
upholding and sustaining the system. (Colossians 1:17 In him all things hold together. Hebre
ws 1:3 ?sustaining all things by his powerful word.?)

Evolution falls into this category, but I digress.

18th century: Naturalism/The Mechanical Universe naturally leads to skepticism. How can
we know anything about morality, religion, truth. Voltaire, Hume and others and the
rise of skepticism. (Was bad Christianity to blame for this?)

19th century. LaPlace, Darwin. Materialism/Modernism appeared triumphant.

20th Century. Quantum Mechanics questioned the deterministic nature of Nature.

Reason and Logic cannot explain WWI WWII Hiroshima.

The idea of the completely independent, individualistic person, outside a community
looked down upon.

Scientism appears to be hubris. Scientism cannot do justice to beauty, art.

The very idea of the rightness of Western culture came into question

(All this was good!!!)

But, intellectuals overreacted (typical)

We got postmodernism.

Postmodernism. Cultural Relativism.

Reality is a social construction. Is it? If so, science is wrong. But we cannot accept that.

One major reason we know postmodernism is wrong is that science is right.

Response to Scientism.

The Theorist who maintains that science is the be-all and the end-all?that what
is not in science textbooks is not worth knowing?is an ideologist with a peculiar
and distorted doctrine of his own. For him, science is no longer a sector of the
cognitive enterprise, but an all-inclusive world-view. This is the doctrine not of science
but of scientism. To take this stance is not to celebrate science but to distort it.

This is the dominant (not necessarily the majority) view of scientists.

Problems with scientism

1. It is self-defeating

Science pre-supposes:

1. The universe is ordered and essentially unchanging.

2. The universe is observable and understandable. There is a 1:1 match between how the human
mind works and how the universe in which live funcitons.

3. The universe is governed by mathematically precise laws.

4. Language is adequate to describe the natural realm.

None of these assumptions can be proved by experiment. In a sense, science is not scientific.

2. It is wrong.

If materialism/naturalism/scientism is right then

?I? do not exist. Consciousness is just a word. Love is just chemicals.

Belief in God is just a ?meme? an unfortunate accidental result of random evolutionary
processes.

No soul, no spirit.

Religious thought is total nonsense. Prayer is my chemicals talking to my chemicals.

Life is completely and fundamentally without purpose.

Nothing has value. There is no reason to say that the works of Shakespeare are better
or more valuable than anything else.

Beauty is a mathematical formula.

Why do materialists/naturalists believe all these things? Because they assume they
are true. They have no evidence against any of these things. None.

Circular reasoning.

Why is this wrong?

The universe was created.

Life was created.

Anthropic Principle

Virtually no one can accept that sex with anyone is OK, that consciousness is
a simply a complex chemical phenomenon, that art and beauty and love and inspiration
and a purposeful life are just epiphenomena.

3. It is dangerous.

There is no good and evil.

There is no reason to believe that stealing is bad.

Any kind of sexual relationship is only ?right? or ?wrong? depending on whether
it helps the human race to survive.

Violence, genocide, hatred are neither good nor evil.

Justice is a meaningless word. There is no logical argument to defend the claim
that one must act justly.

Human rights have no basis.

Racism is justifiable. Make no mistake about it?

Avowedly God-free societies have been tried: USSR, Red China, Pol Pot, North Korea.

A way forward.

God needs to make a comeback. I do not mean prayer in schools and the Ten Commandments
in the courthouse.

Why are postmodernism and naturalism wrong as philosophies?