"The Dawkins Confusion"
The God of the Old Testament

But why does Dawkins think God is complex?

And why does he think that the
more complex something is, the less probable it is? Before looking more
closely into his reasoning, I'd like to digress for a moment; this claim of
improbability can help us understand something otherwise very perplexing
about Dawkins' argument in his earlier and influential book, The Blind
Watchmaker. There he argues that the scientific theory of evolution shows
that our world has not been designed-by God or anyone else. This thought is
trumpeted by the subtitle of the book: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals
a Universe without Design.

How so? Suppose the evidence of evolution suggests that all living creatures
have evolved from some elementary form of life: how does that show that the
universe is without design?

Well, if the universe has not been designed,
then the process of evolution is unguided, unorchestrated, by any
intelligent being; it is, as Dawkins suggests, blind. So his claim is that
the evidence of evolution reveals that evolution is unplanned, unguided,
unorchestrated by any intelligent being.

But how could the evidence of evolution reveal a thing like that? After all,
couldn't it be that God has directed and overseen the process of evolution?

What makes Dawkins think evolution is unguided?

What he does in The Blind
Watchmaker, fundamentally, is three things. First, he recounts in vivid and
arresting detail some of the fascinating anatomical details of certain
living creatures and their incredibly complex and ingenious ways of making a
living; this is the sort of thing Dawkins does best.

The God Delusion is an extended diatribe against religion in general and
belief in God in particular;

"The Dawkins Confusion"

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in
all of fiction. Jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust unforgiving
control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic-cleanser; a misogynistic
homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential,
megalomaniacal..
Well, no need to finish the quotation; you get the idea. Dawkins seems to
have chosen God as his sworn enemy. (Let's hope for Dawkins' sake God
doesn't return the compliment.)

The God Delusion is an extended diatribe against religion in general and
belief in God in particular; Dawkins and Daniel Dennett (whose recent
Breaking the Spell is his contribution to this genre) are the touchdown
twins of current academic atheism.1 Dawkins has written his book, he says,
partly to encourage timorous atheists to come out of the closet. He and
Dennett both appear to think it requires considerable courage to attack
religion these days; says Dennett, "I risk a fist to the face or worse. Yet
I persist." Apparently atheism has its own heroes of the faith-at any rate
its own self-styled heroes. Here it's not easy to take them seriously;
religion-bashing in the current Western academy is about as dangerous as
endorsing the party's candidate at a Republican rally.

Dawkins is perhaps the world's most popular science writer; he is also an
extremely gifted science writer. (For example, his account of bats and their
ways in his earlier book The Blind Watchmaker is a brilliant and fascinating
tour de force.) The God Delusion, however, contains little science; it is
mainly philosophy and theology (perhaps "atheology" would be a better term)
and evolutionary psychology, along with a substantial dash of social
commentary decrying religion and its allegedly baneful effects. As the above
quotation suggests, one shouldn't look to this book for evenhanded and
thoughtful commentary. In fact the proportion of insult, ridicule, mockery,
spleen, and vitriol is astounding. (Could it be that his mother, while
carrying him, was frightened by an Anglican clergyman on the rampage?) If
Dawkins ever gets tired of his day job, a promising future awaits him as a
writer of political attack ads.

Now despite the fact that this book is mainly philosophy, Dawkins is not a
philosopher (he's a biologist). Even taking this into account, however, much
of the philosophy he purveys is at best jejune. You might say that some of
his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair
to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments
would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class. This,
combined with the arrogant, smarter-than-thou tone of the book, can be
annoying. I shall put irritation aside, however and do my best to take
Dawkins' main argument seriously.

Chapter 3, "Why There Almost Certainly is No God," is the heart of the book.
Well, why does Dawkins think there almost certainly isn't any such person as
God? It's because, he says, the existence of God is monumentally improbable.
How improbable? The astronomer Fred Hoyle famously claimed that the
probability of life arising on earth (by purely natural means, without
special divine aid) is less than the probability that a flight-worthy Boeing
747 should be assembled by a hurricane roaring through a junkyard. Dawkins
appears to think the probability of the existence of God is in that same
neighborhood-so small as to be negligible for all practical (and most
impractical) purposes. Why does he think so?

Here Dawkins doesn't appeal to the usual anti-theistic arguments-the
argument from evil, for example, or the claim that it's impossible that
there be a being with the attributes believers ascribe to God.2 So why does
he think theism is enormously improbable? The answer: if there were such a
person as God, he would have to be enormously complex, and the more complex
something is, the less probable it is: "However statistically improbable the
entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has
got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747." 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? Before looking more
closely into his reasoning, I'd like to digress for a moment; this claim of
improbability can help us understand something otherwise very perplexing
about Dawkins' argument in his earlier and influential book, The Blind
Watchmaker. There he argues that the scientific theory of evolution shows
that our world has not been designed-by God or anyone else. This thought is
trumpeted by the subtitle of the book: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals
a Universe without Design.

How so? Suppose the evidence of evolution suggests that all living creatures
have evolved from some elementary form of life: how does that show that the
universe is without design? Well, if the universe has not been designed,
then the process of evolution is unguided, unorchestrated, by any
intelligent being; it is, as Dawkins suggests, blind. So his claim is that
the evidence of evolution reveals that evolution is unplanned, unguided,
unorchestrated by any intelligent being.

But how could the evidence of evolution reveal a thing like that? After all,
couldn't it be that God has directed and overseen the process of evolution?

What makes Dawkins think evolution is unguided? What he does in The Blind

Watchmaker, fundamentally, is three things. First, he recounts in vivid and
arresting detail some of the fascinating anatomical details of certain
living creatures and their incredibly complex and ingenious ways of making a
living; this is the sort of thing Dawkins does best. Second, he tries to
refute arguments for the conclusion that blind, unguided evolution could not
have produced certain of these wonders of the living world-the mammalian
eye, for example, or the wing. Third, he makes suggestions as to how these
and other organic systems could have developed by unguided evolution.

Suppose he's successful with these three things: how would that show that
the universe is without design? How does the main argument go from there?
His detailed arguments are all for the conclusion that it is biologically
possible that these various organs and systems should have come to be by
unguided Darwinian mechanisms (and some of what he says here is of
considerable interest). What is truly remarkable, however, is the form of
what seems to be the main argument. 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.

Here is where that alleged massive improbability of theism is relevant. If
theism is false, then (apart from certain weird suggestions we can safely
ignore) evolution is unguided. But it is extremely likely, Dawkins thinks,
that theism is false. Hence it is extremely likely that evolution is
unguided-in which case to establish it as true, he seems to think, all that
is needed is to refute those claims that it is impossible. So perhaps we can
think about his Blind Watchmaker argument as follows: he is really employing
as an additional if unexpressed premise his idea that the existence of God
is enormously unlikely. If so, then the argument doesn't seem quite so
magnificently invalid. (It is still invalid, however, even if not quite so
magnificently-you can't establish something as a fact by showing that
objections to its possibility fail, and adding that it is very probable.)

Now suppose we return to Dawkins' argument for the claim that theism is
monumentally improbable. As you recall, the reason Dawkins gives is that God
would have to be enormously complex, and hence enormously improbable ("God,
or any intelligent, decision-making calculating agent, is complex, which is
another way of saying improbable"). What can be said for this argument?

Not much. First, is God complex? According to much classical theology
(Thomas Aquinas, for example) God is simple, and simple in a very strong

sense, so that in him there is no distinction of thing and property,
actuality and potentiality, essence and existence, and the like. Some of the
discussions of divine simplicity get pretty complicated, not to say arcane.3
(It isn't only Catholic theology that declares God simple; according to the

Belgic Confession, a splendid expression of Reformed Christianity, God is "a
single and simple spiritual being.") So first, according to classical
theology, God is simple, not complex.4 More remarkable, perhaps, is that
according to Dawkins' own definition of complexity, God is not complex.
According to his definition (set out in The Blind Watchmaker), something is
complex if it has parts that are "arranged in a way that is unlikely to have
arisen by chance alone." But of course God is a spirit, not a material
object at all, and hence has no parts.5 A fortiori (as philosophers like to
say) God doesn't have parts arranged in ways unlikely to have arisen by
chance. Therefore, given the definition of complexity Dawkins himself
proposes, God is not complex.

So first, it is far from obvious that God is complex. But second, suppose we
concede, at least for purposes of argument, that God is complex. Perhaps we
think the more a being knows, the more complex it is; God, being omniscient,
would then be highly complex. Perhaps so; still, why does Dawkins think it
follows that God would be improbable? Given materialism and the idea that
the ultimate objects in our universe are the elementary particles of
physics, perhaps a being that knew a great deal would be improbable-how
could those particles get arranged in such a way as to constitute a being
with all that knowledge? Of course we aren't given materialism. Dawkins is
arguing that theism is improbable; it would be dialectically deficient in
excelsis to argue this by appealing to materialism as a premise. Of course
it is unlikely that there is such a person as God if materialism is true; in
fact materialism logically entails that there is no such person as God; but
it would be obviously question-begging to argue that theism is improbable
because materialism is true.

So why think God must be improbable? According to classical theism, God is a
necessary being; it is not so much as possible that there should be no such
person as God; he exists in all possible worlds. But if God is a necessary
being, if he exists in all possible worlds, then the probability that he

exists, of course, is 1, and the probability that he does not exist is 0.
Far from its being improbable that he exists, his existence is maximally
probable. So if Dawkins proposes that God's existence is improbable, he owes
us an argument for the conclusion that there is no necessary being with the
attributes of God-an argument that doesn't just start from the premise that
materialism is true. Neither he nor anyone else has provided even a decent
argument along these lines; Dawkins doesn't even seem to be aware that he
needs an argument of that sort.

A second example of Dawkinsian-style argument. Recently a number of thinkers
have proposed a new version of the argument from design, the so-called
"Fine-Tuning Argument." Starting in the late Sixties and early Seventies,
astrophysicists and others noted that several of the basic physical
constants must fall within very narrow limits if there is to be the
development of intelligent life-at any rate in a way anything like the way
in which we think it actually happened. For example, if the force of gravity
were even slightly stronger, all stars would be blue giants; if even
slightly weaker, all would be red dwarfs; in neither case could life have
developed. The same goes for the weak and strong nuclear forces; if either
had been even slightly different, life, at any rate life of the sort we
have, could probably not have developed. Equally interesting in this
connection is the so-called flatness problem: the existence of life also
seems to depend very delicately upon the rate at which the universe is
expanding. Thus Stephen Hawking:

reduction of the rate of expansion by one part in 1012 at the time when
the temperature of the Universe was 1010 K would have resulted in the
Universe's starting to recollapse when its radius was only 1/3000 of the
present value and the temperature was still 10,000 K.6
That would be much too warm for comfort. Hawking concludes that life is
possible only because the universe is expanding at just the rate required to
avoid recollapse. At an earlier time, he observes, the fine-tuning had to be
even more remarkable:

we know that there has to have been a very close balance between the
competing effect of explosive expansion and gravitational contraction which,
at the very earliest epoch about which we can even pretend to speak (called
the Planck time, 10-43 sec. after the big bang), would have corresponded to
the incredible degree of accuracy represented by a deviation in their ratio
from unity by only one part in 10 to the sixtieth.7

One reaction to these apparent enormous coincidences is to see them as
substantiating the theistic claim that the universe has been created by a
personal God and as offering the material for a properly restrained theistic

argument-hence the fine-tuning argument.8 It's as if there are a large
number of dials that have to be tuned to within extremely narrow limits for
life to be possible in our universe. It is extremely unlikely that this

should happen by chance, but much more likely that this should happen if
there is such a person as God.

Now in response to this kind of theistic argument, Dawkins, along with
others, proposes that possibly there are very many (perhaps even infinitely
many) universes, with very many different distributions of values over the
physical constants. Given that there are so many, it is likely that some of
them would display values that are life-friendly. So if there are an
enormous number of universes displaying different sets of values of the
fundamental constants, it's not at all improbable that some of them should
be "fine-tuned." We might wonder how likely it is that there are all these
other universes, and whether there is any real reason (apart from wanting to
blunt the fine-tuning arguments) for supposing there are any such things.9
But concede for the moment that indeed there are many universes and that it
is likely that some are fine-tuned and life-friendly. That still leaves
Dawkins with the following problem: even if it's likely that some universes
should be fine-tuned, it is still improbable that this universe should be
fine-tuned. Name our universe alpha: the odds that alpha should be
fine-tuned are exceedingly, astronomically low, even if it's likely that
some universe or other is fine-tuned.

What is Dawkins' reply? He appeals to "the anthropic principle," the thought
that the only sort of universe in which we could be discussing this question
is one which is fine-tuned for life:

the anthropic answer, in its most general form, is that we could only be
discussing the question in the kind of universe that was capable of
producing us. Our existence therefore determines that the fundamental
constants of physics had to be in their respective Goldilocks
[life-friendly] zones.

Well, of course our universe would have to be fine-tuned, given that we live
in it. But how does that so much as begin to explain why it is that alpha is
fine-tuned? One can't explain this by pointing out that we are indeed
here-anymore than I can "explain" the fact that God decided to create me

(instead of passing me over in favor of someone else) by pointing out that
if God had not thus decided, I wouldn't be here to raise that question. It

still seems striking that these constants should have just the values they
do have; it is still monumentally improbable, given chance, that they should
have just those values; and it is still much less improbable that they
should have those values, if there is a God who wanted a life-friendly
universe.

One more example of Dawkinsian thought. In The Blind Watchmaker, he
considers the claim that since the self-replicating machinery of life is
required for natural selection to work, God must have jumpstarted the whole
evolutionary process by specially creating life in the first place-by
specially creating the original replicating machinery of DNA and protein
that makes natural selection possible. Dawkins retorts as follows:

This is a transparently feeble argument, indeed it is obviously
self-defeating. Organized complexity is the thing that we are having
difficulty in explaining. Once we are allowed simply to postulate organized
complexity, if only the organized complexity of the DNA/protein replicating
machine, it is relatively easy to invoke it as a generator of yet more
organized complexity. . But of course any God capable of intelligently
designing something as complex as the DNA/protein machine must have been at
least as complex and organized as that machine itself. . To explain the
origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to
explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the
Designer.
In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett approvingly quotes this passage
from Dawkins and declares it an "unrebuttable refutation, as devastating
today as when Philo used it to trounce Cleanthes in Hume's Dialogues two
centuries earlier." Now here in The God Delusion Dawkins approvingly quotes
Dennett approvingly quoting Dawkins, and adds that Dennett (i.e., Dawkins)
is entirely correct.

Here there is much to say, but I'll say only a bit of it. First, suppose we
land on an alien planet orbiting a distant star and discover machine-like
objects that look and work just like tractors; our leader says "there must
be intelligent beings on this planet who built those tractors." A first-year
philosophy student on our expedition objects: "Hey, hold on a minute! You
have explained nothing at all! Any intelligent life that designed those
tractors would have to be at least as complex as they are." No doubt we'd
tell him that a little learning is a dangerous thing and advise him to take
the next rocket ship home and enroll in another philosophy course or two.
For of course it is perfectly sensible, in that context, to explain the
existence of those tractors in terms of intelligent life, even though (as we
can concede for the moment) that intelligent life would have to be at least
as complex as the tractors. The point is we aren't trying to give an
ultimate explanation of organized complexity, and we aren't trying to
explain organized complexity in general; we are only trying to explain one
particular manifestation of it (those tractors). And (unless you are trying
to give an ultimate explanation of organized complexity) it is perfectly
proper to explain one manifestation of organized complexity in terms of
another. Similarly, in invoking God as the original creator of life, we
aren't trying to explain organized complexity in general, but only a
particular kind of it, i.e., terrestrial life. So even if (contrary to fact,
as I see it) God himself displays organized complexity, we would be
perfectly sensible in explaining the existence of terrestrial life in terms
of divine activity.

A second point: Dawkins (and again Dennett echoes him) argues that "the main
thing we want to explain" is "organized complexity." He goes on to say that
"The one thing that makes evolution such a neat theory is that it explains
how organized complexity can arise out of primeval simplicity," and he
faults theism for being unable to explain organized complexity. Now mind
would be an outstanding example of organized complexity, according to
Dawkins, and of course (unlike with organized complexity) it is
uncontroversial that God is a being who thinks and knows; so suppose we take
Dawkins to be complaining that theism doesn't offer an explanation of mind.
It is obvious that theists won't be able to give an ultimate explanation of
mind, because, naturally enough, there isn't any explanation of the
existence of God. Still, how is that a point against theism? Explanations
come to an end; for theism they come to an end in God. Of course the same
goes for any other view; on any view explanations come to an end. The
materialist or physicalist, for example, doesn't have an explanation for the
existence of elementary particles: they just are. So to claim that what we
want or what we need is an ultimate explanation of mind is, once more, just
to beg the question against theism; the theist neither wants nor needs an
ultimate explanation of personhood, or thinking, or mind.

Toward the end of the book, Dawkins endorses a certain limited skepticism.
Since we have been cobbled together by (unguided) evolution, it is unlikely,
he thinks, that our view of the world is overall accurate; natural selection
is interested in adaptive behavior, not in true belief. But Dawkins fails to
plumb the real depths of the skeptical implications of the view that we have
come to be by way of unguided evolution. We can see this as follows. 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.

The real problem here, obviously, is Dawkins' naturalism, his belief that

there is no such person as God or anyone like God. That is because

naturalism implies that evolution is unguided. So a broader conclusion is

that one can't rationally accept both naturalism and evolution; naturalism,
therefore, is in conflict with a premier doctrine of contemporary science.
People like Dawkins hold that there is a conflict between science and
religion because they think there is a conflict between evolution and
theism; the truth of the matter, however, is that the conflict is between
science and naturalism, not between science and belief in God.

The God Delusion is full of bluster and bombast, but it really doesn't give
even the slightest reason for thinking belief in God mistaken, let alone a
"delusion."

The naturalism that Dawkins embraces, furthermore, in addition to its

intrinsic unloveliness and its dispiriting conclusions about human beings
and their place in the universe, is in deep self-referential trouble. There
is no reason to believe it; and there is excellent reason to reject it.

Alvin Plantinga is John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University
of Notre Dame.
1. A third book along these lines, The End of Faith, has recently been
written by Sam Harris, and more recently still a sequel, Letter to a
Christian Nation, so perhaps we should speak of the touchdown triplets-or,
given that Harris is very much the junior partner in this enterprise (he's a
grad student) maybe the "Three Bears of Atheism"?

2. Although Dawkins does bring up (p. 54), apparently approvingly, the
argument that God can't be both omniscient and omnipotent: if he is
omniscient, then he can't change his mind, in which case there is something
he can't do, so that he isn't omnipotent(!).

3. See my Does God Have a Nature? Aquinas Lecture 44 (Marquette Univ. Press,
1980).

4. The distinguished Oxford philosopher (Dawkins calls him a theologian)
Richard Swinburne has proposed some sophisticated arguments for the claim
that God is simple. Dawkins mentions Swinburne's argument, but doesn't deign
to come to grips with it; instead he resorts to ridicule (pp. 110-111).

5. What about the Trinity? Just how we are to think of the Trinity is of
course not wholly clear; it is clear, however, that it is false that in
addition to each of the three persons of the Trinity, there is also another
being of which each of those persons is a part.

6. "The Anisotropy of the Universe at Large Times," in M. S. Longair, ed.,
Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data (Springer,
2002), p. 285.

7. John Polkinghorne, Science and Creation: The Search for Understanding
(Random House, 1989), p. 22.

8. One of the best versions of the fine-tuning argument is proposed by Robin
Collins in "A Scientific Argument for the Existence of God: The Fine-Tuning
Design Argument," in Michael J. Murray, ed., Reason for the Hope Within
(Eerdmans, 1999), pp. 47-75.

9. See my review of Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea in Books &
Culture, May/June 1996.