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1 R. Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 5.
2 Ibid., 157. Indeed, he fancies himself to have offered a “devastating” and “unrebuttable refutation” of God's existence.
3 Otherwise known as the fine-tuning of the universe for life. The optimism expressed in step 6 of Dawkins's argument with respect to finding a physical explanation for the cosmic fine-tuning is baseless and represents little more than the faith of a naturalist. For discussion of the design argument from the fine-tuning of nature's constants and quantities, see W. L. Craig, Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 157–79.
4 His confusion is evident when he complains, “A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple.…Worse (from the point of view of simplicity), other corners of God's giant consciousness are simultaneously preoccupied with the doings and emotions and prayers of every single human being—and whatever intelligent aliens there might be on other planets in this and 100 billion other galaxies” (God Delusion, 149). This conflates God with what God is thinking about. To say that God, as an immaterial entity, is extraordinarily simple is not to endorse Aquinas's doctrine that God is logically simple (rejected by Dawkins on 150). God may have diverse properties without having the sort of complexity Dawkins is talking about, namely “heterogeneity of parts” (ibid., 150).
5 Q. Smith, “The Wave Function of a Godless Universe,” in Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 322.
