A Debate on Dawkins (Chantal babin, James Richmond)

A Debate on Dawkins

(1)    Too Easy, Mr Dawkins

By Chantal Babin

In his latest article in The Wall Street Journal, Richard Dawkins answers the question “Where does evolution leave God?” At first he gives the impression of turning his coat. Stating his intention to be kind to God, the self-proclaimed atheist British evolutionary biologist argues that evolution “leaves God with nothing to do”. With this demagogic approach he sends Him to join the ranks of retirees, thus acknowledging God’s existence. Yet in the next paragraph his long-standing hatred for the Divinity resurfaces with vehemence, “God is not dead. He was never alive in the first place.”

It is doubtful that The Wall Street Journal’s editor expected anything different from him. Thank you Mr Dawkins that is all you were asked to do: state your opinion on the matter. Dawkins argues in favour of a Godless universe. Did we not know he was an atheist? What emerges from his article is that scientists try to emulate God!

In an attempt to convince his readership of the infallibility of the laws of physics Dawkins insists that “what is so special about life is that it never violates the laws of physics”. That seems obvious since it is through observing life that scientists have formulated the laws that explain life as we know it to date; how could life then ever violate what it reveals of itself? The statement is an oxymoron.

Furthermore after telling us: “the laws of physics have generated life”, he adds: “if anything violated the laws of physics, physicists would just have to formulate new laws.” Thus Dawkins admits that our scientific knowledge to date is not complete. In other words scientists formulate laws that have “generated” life, but if life behaved unlawfully scientists would formulate new laws to accommodate this new unlawful behaviour. Some scientists have confirmed that we cannot rely permanently on today’s laws of physics since scientific laws have no fixity.

I have a query though: can the laws of physics, or any laws for that matter, have “generated” life as he claims? Are not laws some sort of rules, established from observation as well as experiments as in the case of the laws of physics? Do they not come after the observed phenomenon? Science has long been on an inexorable march; its laws have been established gradually as their needs arose, as new discoveries were made, as scientists were challenged by new complexities. Scientific laws explain phenomena; be they chemical reactions, physiological processes, mutation, nuclear fission etc, etc… but do they “generate” anything?

Dawkins seems to think he holds the Absolute Truth, is there anyone out there who does? The concept of relativity has long replaced the concept of Absolute Truth; this is what is largely taught in universities worldwide. So intent is he to eradicate all concepts of God that he goes astray; he minimizes the notorious impermanence of science and the importance of objectivity. He is a subject and like all human beings his beliefs are subjective.

In order to convince his readers that the laws of physics are all there is, Dawkins puts forward a confusing argument comparing inanimate matter to living creatures; although that “[t]here never was a rock that bounded like a kangaroo, never a pebble that crawled like a beetle seeking a mate, never a sand grain that swam like a water flea” do not affirm the absence of God. He labels physics a “miracle-free zone” - presumably if anyone saw a rock hop like a kangaroo it would be a miracle – of course until something happens that the laws of physics cannot explain and that will force scientists to create a new law. Dawkins affirms that “Darwinian evolution is the only process we know” and should there be other processes we have not discovered yet “they cannot be magic”. This is an assumption. Whilst evolution dispenses with a creationist God – a creationist God being the bath water by the way - it fails to disprove His existence. To date nothing proves it either – this is looking after the baby. This assumption is at its best an hypothesis; but it is no evidence of the absence of God, as US astronomer Carl Sagan once stated, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.

To remain objective scientists must work with a vision. Their duty should be to exercise extreme caution. We were warned some five hundred years ago: “Science without conscience is only the ruin of the soul”; although back then the word “science” was all encompassing, Rabelais’ warning applied to physical and natural sciences is apt. He thus expressed his concern for the use of science without first weighing the consequences of its development. His insightful vision is worthy of attention. Science can be demonic. Its demons unleashed over Hiroshima.

There is a case for science. However scientists like Dawkins dispensing straight out with a supernatural God raises another point of concern: over the centuries the preoccupation with the Divine has created a substantial amount of theological and philosophical knowledge recorded in the annals of mankind; valuable knowledge derived from a need to define moral values and to find meaning to our humble earthly lives. Should we ignore our thinking humanity’s patrimony?

To date we cannot prove that there is nothing supernatural, not even that there are superhuman beings living on other planets in the universe. But we can be certain that as new phenomena are discovered, even if they appear to be magic in the first place, scientists will unravel their mystery and establish new laws to explain them.

As part of his demagogic approach Dawkins lowers his tone throughout his argument. He knows he has overstepped the mark with “The God Delusion”, convinced by his own beliefs, carried away by his arrogance; driven by his anger when he appeared on a television program verbally abusing a believer. He has been rapped over the knuckles. He has been called an amateur by some of his peers. His ego is wounded. His reputation is tarnished. Lacking humbleness to make amends he has a plan. “Sophisticated modern theologians” have attacked him; he wants revenge. What is more convenient than the opportunity of an article in The Wall Street Journal to counter attack? Modern theologians, like philosophers, are not on par with Mr Dawkins: they are above him. They think, for them nothing is black and white, they have a sense of the nuances, and they see God’s existence as relative. Mr Dawkins uses their objective views as their Achilles’ heel.

Short of a convincing argument in his own defence and faithful to his disparaging style Mr Dawkins calls them atheists. Too low Mr Dawkins, too easy!

(2)    Where does evolution leave God? : a response to Chantal Babin

James Richmond is a Melbourne physicist and freelance writer.

Prominent atheist Richard Dawkins was invited to write an article in the Wall Street Journal (12 September) to answer the question ‘Where does evolution leave God?’ His response was that evolution leaves God with nothing to do, with ‘no achievements worthy of our praise or worship’. In November’s SoFiA bulletin, Chantal Babin responded with ‘Too easy Mr Dawkins’ (note: technically, that should be Dr or Prof. Dawkins).

Richard Dawkins is at the forefront of the group of outspoken commentators often referred to as the ‘new atheists’. For that reason he presents a large and obvious target to those who disagree with him. Since Dawkins makes his point so forcefully, it can be tempting to pay more attention to his personal qualities than to refuting the arguments he makes. But believers in God do themselves a disservice when they attack the man rather than his arguments, or when they read into his arguments motives and agendas that he may not possess. Unfortunately, Babin seems to have fallen into this trap to some extent.

It seems to me that Dawkins did no more in his article than to give his honest opinion on the question he was invited to address, but Babin deduces that Dawkins is an angry man with a damaged ego and ‘carried away by his own arrogance’, who wants to take literary revenge on his detractors. Dawkins is undeniably angry about some things, but if I were to guess at his motives I’d say that his is a principled rather than an egotistical anger. He is outspoken about what he regards as the religious indoctrination of children. He is undeniably angry with the ‘history deniers’ who, with the political and financial support of religious fundamentalists, seek to undermine the theory of evolution, in the absence of which biology makes no sense. That particular fight was brought to him by virtue of his being a biologist; he did not go looking for it. But if even if is true that Dawkins is angry at God and at theologians, that does nothing to diminish the force of any arguments he makes. Those must be rebutted on their own terms.

Dawkins is a scientist, and he devotes three quarters of his article to the theory of evolution, taking only three paragraphs to give his opinion on God. His central point is that evolution is an astounding but completely natural process, as opposed to a supernatural one. Whenever religious people talk of God intervening in the development of life (or creating it, as in the Genesis story) they are talking about a supernatural process. Religions tell us emphatically that God is not bound by natural laws. Dawkins reminds us that physics is a ‘miracle-free zone’, as is science in general.

He argues that ‘life is arguably the most surprising and most beautiful production that the laws of physics have ever generated.’ Babin complains that in and of themselves the laws of physics cannot ‘generate anything’, since they are merely a set of rules built up from many lines of evidence. But Dawkins’ anthropomorphising of the laws of nature in this way is common among scientists, who often speak of inanimate entities ‘wanting’ this or that, or ‘trying’ to do something, when really this is a kind of shorthand way of saying that they behave according to laws of nature that have been discovered through observation and experiment. What he is saying is only that it is remarkable that something as complex and intricate as life has arisen through a natural process (evolution) that has no end goal in mind and no need for an intelligence to guide it.

Babin accuses Dawkins of attempting to convince his reader that the laws of physics are infallible, but he does no such thing. On the contrary, he emphasises that natural laws are always susceptible to revision in the light of new evidence. This may make it sound as if scientific laws are unreliable, since they might well be modified at any time. Is this not a weakness of science? Actually, the provisional status of all scientific theories – even our most cherished ones – is one of science’s great strengths, because this is what allows scientific knowledge to progress. In contrast, the dogmas of fundamentalist religion offer certain and immutable answers. When these are shown (often by scientists) to be shallow and unsatisfactory, or in conflict with new data, fundamentalist religion has nowhere to turn, because it contains no apparatus or tolerance for revision or amendment.

Babin seems a little wary of science precisely because ‘scientific laws have no fixity’. But scientific laws are not formulated ad hoc to cope with individual problems as they arise. Natural laws are much more constrained than that. While scientists are constantly led by the evidence to reconsider and develop their understandings of the natural world, most of the time scientific laws and theories tend to develop incrementally – by a process of evolution rather than revolution. When faced with new data that doesn’t fit current theories, scientists are not free to simply toss out the old laws of nature and make up entirely new ones. Any new scientific theory must not only explain the particular observations and experiments it was invented to explain, but also all the prior observations and experiments that were explained by the theory that it seeks to supplant. Ideally, it should also make predictions about facts that have not yet been observed. The most powerful and lasting theories in science – the ones accorded the special label ‘laws of nature’ – are the ones that explain the widest array of apparently disparate phenomena. To say that life is remarkable because it obeys all the known laws of physics is not an empty statement. Those laws place many strict constraints on the natural processes that are possible in our universe, and they are progressively leaving less and less room for the capricious actions of supernatural beings.

Dawkins speculates that there may be non-Darwinian processes at work in evolution that we have not yet discovered, but he asserts that whatever they are they cannot be magic. Babin tells us, correctly, that science cannot prove that there is nothing supernatural. However, it is important to remember that science is the study of the natural world. The starting point for all science is that there is a natural explanation for all observed phenomena. Supernatural explanations are ruled out from the start because they take us nowhere. Why is the sky blue? God made it that way. End of discussion. Even scientists who believe in God recognise that supernatural explanations are useless in science because they are ad hoc. Those scientists want to know how God made the sky blue – what particular processes (explainable in terms of natural laws) did God put in place that led to the colour we see? God can be invoked to ‘explain’ anything and everything, but this kind of explanation never makes useful predictions and never leads to real advances in our understanding of the natural world. Evolution explains how complex forms of life have arisen from simple constituents. Dawkins points to the paucity of the Creationist ‘explanation’ of life, saying ‘a divine designer is all but ruled out by the consideration that he must be at least as complex as the entities he was wheeled out to explain’.

As a scientist myself, I am a little confused by Babin’s praise of the ‘objectivity’ of ‘sophisticated modern theologians’ who ‘see God’s existence as relative’. I don’t know what it means to see God’s existence as relative. If the argument is that God’s existence in a scientific sense is irrelevant as long as he exists for you (i.e. as long as you have a personal relationship with him), then I can only agree with Dawkins when he points out that such a position is a radical departure from the mainstream religious teaching that God exists in objective reality just as surely as the Rock of Gibraltar exists.

While some theologians (a minority, I’d guess) might promote the idea of God’s subjective or ‘relative’ existence, many seem to be equally concerned that disbelief in God threatens to deprive humanity of the kind of absolute moral guidance that religion provides. Babin writes that ‘centuries of preoccupation with the Divine has created a substantial amount of theological and philosophical knowledge … valuable knowledge derived from a need to define moral values and to find meaning to our humble earthly lives’. But in doing so she ignores a rich nonreligious philosophical tradition stretching from Socrates to Peter Singer, that any secular humanist would argue has done more to advance ideas about morals than any preoccupation with the divine ever did. This is an argument that deserves more space than is available here. Suffice it to say that the assumption that human beings need God or religion to be moral is a contentious one that warrants careful investigation.

In saying that evolution leaves God with nothing to do, Dawkins is telling us that the development of life on Earth can be entirely explained by the scientific theory of evolution, without any need to invoke God. In the absence of miracles or evidence that goes against the theory of evolution (it isn’t hard to imagine the kind of evidence that would be needed), it seems that Dawkins is on solid ground. As things stand, though, the door is still open for God to set the process of evolution in motion, and even perhaps to subtly push things in the ‘right’ direction now and then. But any pushing of this kind would need to done in such a way that it appeared to work in accordance with known natural processes, which places scientific constraints on God’s freedom of action. As our scientific knowledge grows these constraints can only become stricter, leaving less and less room for God in the natural world. If Dawkins is right and God is not needed to explain life, not needed to explain the laws of physics, not needed to explain morality, and not needed for people to find meaning in their lives, where does that leave God?

1 comments

Chantal, well, really: "disparaging"? Is this not a case of the pot calling the kettle black???

Posted by anjigillingham