New Atheism_A Survival Guide

by Graham Veale

  God may not have a brain made of neurones, or a CPU made of silicon, but if he has the powers attributed to him he must have something far more elaborately and non-randomly constructed than the largest brain or the largest computer we know.

  Here Dawkins makes a humiliating blunder. He assumes that God must be made of something. Now that’s an astonishing error. By definition God would not be made of anything. God is defined as the creator. That’s what the term ‘God’ means! By hypothesis God cannot be an arrangement of parts. If God were made of parts then those parts would be more fundamental than God, and God would not be the creator. So once you start asking what God is made of you just sound silly. You clearly have not understood the hypothesis that you are criticising.

  Why on earth should we think that God is like a computer or a brain in any sense at all? Dawkins’ doesn’t say. Perhaps Dawkins could argue that every intelligent being we have ever encountered has a brain. Brains presumably have the moving parts, internal linkages, and changing states required for computation. So if God is intelligent he must have the ‘spiritual equivalent’ of moving parts, internal linkages, and changing states.

  This would be what philosophers call a weak inductive argument—all observed As have been B, so all As are probably B. Every intelligent being that we have encountered has a complex brain. Therefore, God is likely to have a complex brain. Every swan I have encountered is white. Therefore, I will never encounter a black swan. Our economic policy has not failed us in the past; therefore it will not fail us in the future. When used carelessly, simple inductive generalisations easily lead us into silly and dangerous errors.

  In any case, the constant conjunction of terrestrial intelligence and brains would not establish that God would be like a ‘Big Brain’. At the very most, it only follows that every ‘physical intelligence’ (or ‘embodied intelligence’) has parts, links and changing states. However, we established in the first chapter that God would exist outside the physical universe. God would be transcendent. He could not be made of physical parts, and he would not be limited by space, time, or the laws of nature. This would mean that God is rather unlike anything that we have directly experienced on earth.

  If we limit our ideas of what is possible to what we have experienced, we can make dangerous errors. Furthermore, physics teaches us not to limit our beliefs to what we have experienced, or even to what we can picture in our imaginations. We can give detailed descriptions of states of affairs that our minds cannot even visualise. We all remember the picture of the atom that we learned in High School. Tiny electrons orbited around a larger nucleus, in a manner similar to moons orbiting a planet. The only problem with this elegant little model of the atom is that it is completely inaccurate. Electrons, protons and neutrons behave like particles and waves.

  These ‘particles’ do not have definite locations and momentums like moons orbiting planets. We are forced to think of the electron as extended throughout the volume of the atom; its influence is spread out, like a wave. By calculating how this ‘wave-function’ develops, and how it interacts with other ‘wave-functions’ we can predict the probability of finding the electron in a certain state when we make a measurement. However, when we measure the electron we find that it is in a certain state just as if it was a tiny localised particle after all.

  Quantum Mechanics has been thoroughly and rigorously tested over many years, and it is a ridiculously successful theory. It is the foundation of modern chemistry and much of modern physics. Different interpretations of Quantum Mechanics emerged as physicists and philosophers tried to explain what on earth is going on. But every interpretation agreed on one point: we cannot use familiar images or experiences to ‘picture’ the quantum world. The concept is coherent and it explains the evidence; so the theory is accepted as true. So, the moral of the story is we should not let our experiences, or even our imaginations, limit our idea of what is possible.

  Aquinas Shows that God Does Not Compute…

  Dawkins’ conception of God is limited by what we have experienced and what he can imagine. He assumes that a divine intelligence would require a structure similar to a brain’s or a computer’s. Dawkins’ God would be a ‘calculating agent’, consciously monitoring every particle and taking note of every prayer. It is as if God has to peek at his universe to observe what is happening there and that God’s knowledge would amount to an infinitely long list of facts stored up in the divine mind.

  If Dawkins had peered into the writings of the great Christian theologians he would have discovered that theists have discussed what God’s knowledge could be like, and have concluded that it would be nothing like ours. God would not scrutinize the universe to see what is happening there. God does not go through the processes of making computations and calculations to discover answers. God is not physical, and he already knows everything that is true.

  But how can this be? How can God know anything, nevermind everything, if God does not have a brain? The theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas 27 gave a detailed answer. Aquinas knew that human knowledge depends on our brains; we are embodied knowers. Yet God’s knowledge cannot be the result of any physical process as God is not physical in any way. So what, Aquinas wondered, explained God’s knowledge?

  To Aquinas, God’s knowledge would be like our knowledge of our own feelings and our own state of mind. We have self-awareness. If I drop a bowling ball on your toe, you will not need to ‘work out’ that it hurts. You will be directly aware that you are in pain, simply because you are conscious. You simply know what you’re feeling and thinking because you are self-aware. You don’t infer that you are feeling pain by observing the fact that you are leaping up and down, holding your left foot and shouting ‘ouch!’

  Be careful not to identify your consciousness with your brain states. 28 If I measured everything that happened in your brain after I dropped the bowling ball, and then described the effect this had on your nervous system, I would not have given a good description of your pain. I would have left something important out: what it felt like for you to be in pain. I would not have described your conscious experience. At most conscious experience is something that is produced by the brain; it is not identical with the brain.

  As it happens, you might not be able to give this feeling of pain a precise definition. It might prove impossible to explain in words how this particular ache differs from the feeling you get when you stub your toe on a doorstep. You will still know the difference. You might not be able to find the exact words to express your anger. Most likely, you will be content to scream and kick me. Sometimes we can put what we experience into words or propositions. On many other occasions, we have difficulty describing what we have felt, even in art and poetry.

  We also have ‘know-how’—things we can do without thinking about it. Know-how includes skills like the ability to run, or to throw a ball. And this is important—we quite often cannot put our know-how into words. It would be difficult to write out a list of specific step-by-step instructions that could tell someone how to balance on one leg, never-mind how to kiss. There are some things that cannot be learned from a book.

  Now, God would know what he is capable of doing, and his ‘know how’ would include his ability to create anything that can be sensibly described. By having self-awareness God would be immediately conscious of everything that is possible. Moreover, we shouldn’t picture God’s ‘know-how’ as an infinite list of ‘things I can do’ stored somewhere in God’s mind. It would be like our immediate and intuitive knowledge of how we are feeling. We can put some of this knowledge into words and propositions. But we’d never be able to put it all in a list.

  God’s knowledge would also include knowledge of everything that he has decided to create and keep in existence. And, as Aquinas reminds us, everything that isn’t God has been created by God. God would know everything about this universe because he created it and sustains everything in it. He would not know anything by working out a solution or taking a look at the
world. Once we remember that God is maximally powerful, we can see that God would know everything that is true, all at once, just by knowing himself and what he has created.

  Aquinas does not provide us with a definitive proof of what God must be like. He only presents one possibility. However, he does show that God’s knowledge would be greater and more wonderful than we can fully imagine. He also demonstrates why we should dismiss Dawkins’ crude caricature of the divine mind. Aquinas reminds us that we are in God’s image, but he is not in ours. Richard Dawkins doesn’t believe in a god made in the image of a 21st century technician. Neither did Aquinas; neither did Luther, Wesley, Lewis or Chesterton. The Church Fathers would have been horrified at any attempt to picture God as a ‘Big Brain’. It seems that Dawkins is suffering from his own ‘God Delusion’ for the God he has rejected is a product of his own imagination.

  * * *

  18 Myers’ infamous ‘parable’ can be read at scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/the_courtiers_reply.php (retrieved 30th Dec 2011).

  19 Greta Christina’s attack on the design argument can be found gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/2010/05/argument-from-design.html (retrieved 19th Nov 2012).

  20 For a survey of different conceptions of evolution read Kim Sterelny, ‘Dawkins v Gould: Survival of the Fittest’ (Icon: 2007). For a discussion of the role of chance in evolution see Elliott Sober’s ‘Evidence and Evolution’ (Cambridge:2008).

  21 Read his thoughts online shouldchristiansembraceevolution.com/foreword.

  22 Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies (Oxford: 2012), 198.

  23 Sober’s comments on dwindling probabilities are from his review of Simon Conway Morris’s ‘Life’s Solution’ philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/morris%20review%20for%20NYT.pdf. Sober is not a theist, and is one of the design argument’s most articulate and penetrating critics.

  24 Dawkins argues that ‘sheer luck’ bridges major gaps in the evolutionary story in The God Delusion 168–9. ‘Our planet must be one of the intensely rare planets that has bridged all three gaps.’ (He means the origin of life, the origin of eukaryotic cells and the origin of consciousness.) But the universe might not have the ‘billions and billions’ of life-supporting planets that Dawkins requires. See John Gribbin ‘The Reason Why: The Miracle of Life on Earth’ (Allen Lane:2011).

  25 The quotation of Hume is taken from ‘Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion’.

  26 The full Huxley quotation can be read in context at aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE2/GeNan.html

  27 The discussion of Aquinas draws on Brian Davies ‘An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion’ (Oxford:2004), 191–7.

  28 Many thinkers argue that there must be more to the human mind than the brain and its functions. Recently the case has been advanced by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro in ‘Naturalism’ (Eerdmans:2008) and ‘A Brief History of the Soul’ (Wiley-Blackwell:2011); and in the collection of essays edited by Mark Baker and Stewart Goetz ‘The Soul Hypothesis’ (Continuum:2011).

  4

  Hey—Where’s the Evidence?

  ‘On the contrary, Watson, you can see everything. You fail, however, to reason from what you see. You are too timid in drawing your inferences.’

  Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’

  For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse

  ‘Hey, Religious Believers, Where’s the Evidence?’

  New Atheist blogger Greta Christina posed this question in a popular blog post in 2009, confident that believers would not be able to provide an answer. Greta was concerned that many religious believers thought that their beliefs were justified if no one could disprove them. ‘Almost nothing can be proved or disproved with 100 per cent certainty. And proving with 100 per cent certainty that something doesn’t exist is virtually impossible’. She helpfully continued

  We don’t say, ‘Well, you can’t prove with 100 per cent certainty that the Earth orbits the Sun—it could be a mass hallucination caused by a mischievous imp—so we should give up on deciding whether it’s probably true, and call it a matter of personal belief.’ With every other kind of claim, we accept a standard of reasonable plausibility. 29

  Well, amen to that Greta! It follows that we should not require the arguments for theism to give us 100% certainty that God exists. So in the spirit of Greta Christina’s criterion of reasonable plausibility, we will evaluate the evidence for God. If theism is free from inconsistencies and logical flaws, if there is good evidence supporting it and no strong evidence undermining it, we should believe that it is true.

  But before we get our teeth into the arguments, we should pause, just to clarify what we mean by ‘God’. After all, we argued in Chapter Two that theism is an ‘agent explanation’. So we need to say a little more about this agent’s ability to bring about the events that we are trying to explain.

  Is Theism Fit for Purpose?

  Theists define God as the Creator, and therefore the explan-ation of everything else that exists. However, to believers ‘God’ is also a title that is meant to refer to ‘the Perfect Being’ 30. Why do Christians say that God is a ‘Perfect being’? They mean that only God is worthy of worship. If there was a being greater than God, it would be worthy of worship. So, because God is creator and the Perfect Being, by definition God is as good as it gets.

  Theists argue that it doesn’t make sense to worship a being who is less than personal; so they believe in a perfect personal being. Of course this description is often inspired by the theists’ religious experiences and traditions. Christians, naturally, turn to the Bible. There God is consistently described as the greatest thing that we can imagine. The book of Ephesians claims that God’s love ‘surpasses knowledge’ and that God can do immeasurably more than we can ‘ask or imagine.’ So is our idea of God suspect because it is derived from sacred texts?

  In 1865 the chemist Friedrich Kekule had a dream; he was beguiled by an image of a snake swallowing its own tail. Kekule was inspired by this idle fancy to propose that the chemical Benzenes had a circular molecular structure. Despite the strange source of inspiration, his model was accepted because it explained the evidence. What inspires a hypothesis is irrelevant. What matters is the hypothesis’s capacity to explain the evidence. It does not matter that Christians derive their idea of God from their Scriptures. If this idea is simple, coherent, and if it explains the evidence, it should be taken very seriously indeed.

  Theists believe that a perfect being has five characteristics: (i) Perfect Power (ii) Perfect Knowledge (iii) Freedom (iv) Total Independence and (v) Perfect Love. ‘Perfect power’ means that God has the power to bring about any state of affairs that can be sensibly described. This ‘perfect power’ does not include the ability to make illogical actual. The point, rather, is that God’s power is as good as it gets; nothing is more powerful than God. ‘Perfect knowledge’ simply means that God knows everything that is true of himself and of his creation.

  ‘Freedom’ means that God is free to make plans, and that he can act on those plans. That’s all it takes to be personal. ‘Total independence’ just means that God depends on nothing else for his existence. Nothing else made God, and everything else that exists depends on him. That is to say, nothing made God, and God made everything else. ‘Perfect love’ describes God’s moral perfection. It is found in God’s character.

  The greater my freedom, the greater my power, and true freedom requires choices, knowledge and rationality. The more I know, the greater my options; so perfect power requires perfect knowledge. The point is that God’s greatness is unsurpassable; if ‘all-powerful’ just means that God has the power to do any action that can be sensibly described then it does not mean that God can defy the rules of logic.

  God cannot make the three angles of a square circle equal 232, or an ellipse with four sides
of equal length. These are meaningless statements; they don’t describe things that God cannot do because they do not describe anything. They’re just a jangle of words. However, because no external force or power can prevent God doing what he chooses, God’s power is perfect.

  An unlimited, perfect power would not depend on anything else for its existence; in fact everything else would rely on that power. The unique and unparalleled power of the creator is so great that everything other than God needs God. Evil is irrational and chaotic and needlessly destructive. It opposes creation and it is inimical to rationality. A being with perfect power and perfect knowledge could not desire or do evil; God’s love and goodness follow from his perfect power and perfect knowledge.

  This gives us a very simple description of God: his power is limitless and loving. Of course, our description does not give us a thorough understanding of God’s nature. It does not tell us everything about God. It says little about who God is and what God has done; but it does tell us something about what God is. Our brief description of God’s nature is all we need for an astonishingly simple and powerful hypothesis. One being who can be described very simply can explain a vast amount of evidence.

  PZ Myer’s objects that theism’s unscientific nature makes it a meaningless hypothesis: