A Response to Dawkins's Argument
A Response to Dawkins's Argument
That natural selection lends evidence to the claim that the universe is naturalistic is part of what makes this argument the best one Dawkins offers. If all we look at is the development of complex biological life, his case would appear to be strong. Other aspects of the universe as we find it, however, point in the opposite direction. At least four major elements of our universe fit significantly better with a universe in which God exists than in the atheistic universe. These elements are: (1) the universe is ordered and susceptible to rational investigation; (2) it is a world with consciousness; (3) it is a world with significant free agency; and (4) it is a world with objective moral obligations. Each of these aspects fits neatly into a theistic world but is not at home in a naturalistic world. It is not that they are incompatible with naturalism, but they do not fit neatly into the naturalistic world.
I want to be clear about the structure of the argument I am developing here. I do not mean to argue directly from these four features of the world to the claim that God exists. I am trying to put forward an argument structured in a way that is strongly analogous to Dawkins's argument. Gradual development of complex life through natural selection is something that fits better with naturalism than with theism. This fact, as a result, supports the claim that God does not exist. Features of the world that fit better with theism than with naturalism will support the claim that God does exist. If the arguments are strongly analogous, and I am right about how these features fit with theism, then either Dawkins's argument is not very strong after all, or the universe as we find it points more clearly in the direction of theism than it does atheism. I am not going to commit myself to the latter claim here.
1. A world that is ordered and susceptible to rational investigation fits better in a theistic universe. If God exists, the universe is the product of purposeful action. It is made by an intelligent mind for reasons. The fact that the universe is made by a mind for reasons leads us to expect that it can be grasped rationally. It makes sense that stable laws would allow predictions to be made and inferences to be drawn. It is not merely the case that an ordered universe fits better with theism; the level of connectedness is stronger than that. An ordered universe is what we would expect if God exists. If God exists and made the universe for reasons, it would be surprising if that universe exhibited none of the order that would make it susceptible to rational investigation. If it would be surprising that it would not be ordered, then its being ordered is something we would expect on the view that God exists.
A naturalistic universe, however, would not have to be susceptible to rational investigation. It fits perfectly well with a naturalistic universe that it be wildly chaotic. Of course, being susceptible to rational investigation is not incompatible with a universe without God, but the theory that God does not exist allows the universe to exhibit any one of a wide variety of descriptions as far as order is concerned. The fact that our universe is in fact ordered and susceptible to investigation fits better with the claim that God does exist.
2. A world with consciousness fits better in a theistic universe. Human consciousness involves several features that are difficult to fit with naturalism. Two of these features are the first-person experience and the intentionality of some of our mental states.6 The first-person experience is illustrated by the fact that we have a special kind of access to our own mental states. I know that I am thinking about coffee at a particular time. I may not know what you are thinking. My access to your thoughts is indirect. You can tell me you are thinking about coffee, or I can deduce it from your behavior or your habits, but I can know my own thoughts directly.7 I have ownership of my own first-person perspective.
The intentionality of mental states involves the feature that our thoughts represent or are about things in the world. Right now we can think about Niagara Falls, even though it may be hundreds of miles from where we are. How is it that something inside me, my mental states, can be about something outside of me? This is the puzzle of intentionality. Intentionality sometimes does not seem mysterious to us because we are language users. Noises articulated by a person or marks on a paper also can be about things in the world. That a string of marks such as, “There is a hot cup of coffee in the kitchen” can express (truly or falsely) a fact about the world is due, however, to the prior activity of conscious minds. We assign meaning to language. Its meaning is, then, derivative. Both the first-person perspective and the intentionality of mental states are some of the challenges for contemporary philosophy of mind.
If God exists, then the primary thing that exists is itself a conscious mind of unlimited power and intellect. This mind has its own first-person perspective, and it can think about things. The notion that such a mind, if it creates anything, would create other conscious minds that have their own first-person perspectives and can think about things is not a great mystery. Is the existence of created conscious beings something we ought to expect if theism is true? I want to be cautious here.8 We could develop an argument that consciousness is good and a God who is good would have reason to create other conscious beings. If this line of thought is strong, then we would have reason to expect other conscious beings to exist if God does. I do not want to press this line because I do not need to pursue it. All I need is to argue that the existence of conscious minds fits better with theism than with the view that the universe is naturalistic.
The view that there is no God, especially on Dawkins's version, includes the claim that any complicated living things that exist are the product of a long natural process of development from simpler living things. Any species of animals that have conscious minds originates ultimately from species that have no conscious minds by processes that are not executed by any conscious mind. If atheism is true, it is somewhat unusual that there would be any conscious minds.
I am not arguing that any naturalistic theory of consciousness will be less than plausible.9 Rather, I am arguing that the phenomena itself is not something that fits easily into a naturalistic world. The attempt to explain consciousness within the parameters of naturalism has been designated the hard problem of consciousness.10 The difficulty is indicative of, among other things, the lack of fit between atheism and the existence of conscious beings. The existence of conscious beings, like the order of the universe, is a detectable feature of the universe that confirms theism as contrasted with atheism.
3. A world with significant free agency fits better in a theistic universe. Many philosophers believe two things about human freedom. They believe that if an act is determined in any way it cannot be free, and they believe that human beings have a significant degree of freedom. They are incompatibilists and libertarians. Freedom is not compatible with determinism, and we do have some significant freedom. Other philosophers are incompatibilists but not libertarians. They believe that freedom and determinism are not compatible but that we are not free in the relevant sense. Such philosophers are often called hard determinists.11 Still others are compatibilists of one sort or another. They believe that an action can be both determined and free. Determinism, on their view, does not preclude the kind of freedom necessary to ground moral responsibility.12 If the libertarians are right, then not everything about human beings is causally determined. Thus the world of people is not a causally closed world.
If human beings are free in the sense that I am describing, then this fact is another feature of the universe that fits much better with theism than with atheism. In a naturalistic universe that is ordered enough to have complex life, we would expect events to proceed from previous events. Whether this universe would be determined, we would not expect the sort of beings that can purposely initiate actions that result in new chains of events. Yet this is the sort of agency we may have. That there are persons with libertarian agency does not seem to fit if the universe is naturalistic.13
If God exists, however, He acts for reasons. He chooses, among other things, to create the universe, the stars and planets, and to create other minds, plants, and animals. He creates these things because He wants to do so. He did not have to do so. He causes them to come into existence. He is not constrained to do so by factors outside Himself. God Himself is free in a libertarian sense. It is not mysterious that God would create beings that are free in the same sense. In a way similar to our discussion of consciousness, we see that the primary thing that exists in the theistic universe is a being with libertarian agency. That we find ourselves with this sort of freedom, then, is something that fits well into the theistic story. The connection between a theistic universe and the existence of other agents who are free in a libertarian sense may even be stronger. If God's reasons to create human beings include His purposes for their moral and spiritual development, the existence of libertarian freedom is even more to be expected. To be sure, many do not think we have this sort of freedom. They may be right, but the case for libertarian freedom is strong enough that it lends support to the sort of argument I am presenting.
4. A world with objective moral obligations fits better with a theistic universe. Moral obligations are objective in the sense that they hold whether one wants them to hold or one wants to fulfill them. A claim such as “It is wrong to torture a person to death just for fun” seems to be true, and the obligation it prescribes seems to be binding on all human beings. It is hard, after all, to imagine that such an obligation is binding only because of the desires or goals of some individual person or of some society. To think that objective moral obligations exist is reasonable.14
If there are such obligations, they make up another detectable feature of the universe that does not fit well within a naturalistic world-view. Philosopher John Mackie, in his rigorous defense of atheism, admits that such values would ground a strong argument for God:
[Objective moral values] constitute so odd a cluster of qualities and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events, without an all-powerful god to create them. If, then, there are such intrinsically prescriptive objective values, they make the existence of a god more probable than it would have been without them.15
Philosophers who might be concerned about the theistic implications of objective moral obligations can go in one of two directions. The first direction is to argue that there are no moral obligations that are objective in the way described. This view is held by Mackie and others.16 Attempts to develop such arguments have to overcome a significant challenge. It is difficult to make plausible that our fundamental moral claims are either simply mistaken or just a matter of preferences.
The second direction is to try to ground the objectivity of morality apart from God.17 This direction might be fruitful. The important point here is that even if objective moral obligations are not incompatible with a naturalistic worldview, they can be shown to be more fitting with a theistic position.
If God created human beings, He did so for a reason or reasons. Some of these reasons may ground moral obligations. For example, if God made us with moral ends in mind—if He made us so that we would embody certain virtues, for example—His setting up moral reality the way He did makes a good deal of sense. If God has spiritual purposes for us—that we would find a relationship with Him and experience Him as our highest good—He may set up moral rules as guidelines for how best to do that. Whatever God's purposes are, He would make us the kinds of beings that are subject to moral truths and that can understand and act on them.
Paul Draper is an agnostic philosopher who made a similar point to me in the context of another paper I published. He wrote, “A moral world is, however, very probable on theism.”18 In other words, if theism is true, we ought to expect a moral world, that is, a world with objective moral obligations. In contrast, such obligations do not fit as well in an atheistic world.