For Further Reading
1
Richard Dawkins on Arguments for God
William Lane Craig
I was fascinated to read the reactions in the blogosphere to my Christianity Today cover story on the revival of arguments for the existence of God among philosophers today.[1] Along with expressions of appreciation, there were comments like these:
It’s not surprising that nonbelievers should turn to Richard Dawkins for refutations of arguments for God’s existence, since none of the other New Atheists has much to say on the subject. Still, what’s remarkable about these comments is the confidence placed in Dawkins’s supposed refutation. Are they right? Has Dawkins dealt the death blow to the arguments I discussed?
Well, let’s look at those arguments and see what Dawkins has to say about each one.[3] But before we look at specific arguments, we need to be clear what makes for a good argument.
By an argument I mean a series of statements (called premises) leading to a conclusion. To be a good argument, an argument must meet three conditions: (1) it obeys the rules of logic; (2) its premises are true; (3) its premises are more plausible than their opposites. So defined, are there good arguments for God’s existence?
The Cosmological Argument
The first argument I discussed in my article in Christianity Today was a form of the cosmological argument known as the argument from contingency. Dawkins doesn’t even mention this form of the argument—a remarkable oversight, since it’s the most famous version of the argument. So obviously he hasn’t refuted it.
But Dawkins does discuss a different form of the cosmological argument, which may be formulated as follows:
(1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
(2) The universe began to exist.
(3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.
Once we reach the conclusion that the universe has a cause, we can analyze what properties such a cause must have.
Premise (1) seems obviously true—at the least, more so than its negation. First and foremost, it’s rooted in the necessary truth that something cannot come into being from nothing. To suggest that things could just pop into being uncaused out of nothing is to quit doing serious philosophy and to resort to magic. Second, if things really could come into being uncaused out of nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything and everything does not come into existence uncaused from nothing. Finally, premise (1) is constantly confirmed in our experience. We thus have the strongest of motivations to accept it.
Premise (2) can be supported by both philosophical argument and scientific evidence. The philosophical arguments aim to show that there cannot have been an infinite regress of past events—in other words, that the series of past events must have had a beginning. The philosophical arguments against an infinite regress of events are fascinating and mind-expanding,[4] but fortunately we needn’t consider them here, since Dawkins doesn’t object to any of the premises of these arguments.
The scientific evidence for the beginning of the universe is based on the expansion of the universe. According to the big bang model of the origin of the universe, physical space and time themselves, along with all the matter and energy in the universe, came into being at a point in the past about 13.7 billion years ago (see figure 1.1).
Figure 1.1. Geometrical representation of standard model space-time. Space and time begin at the initial cosmological singularity, before which literally nothing exists.
What makes the big bang so startling is that it represents the origin of the universe from literally nothing. As the physicist P. C. W. Davies explains,
The coming into being of the universe, as discussed in modern science . . . is not just a matter of imposing some sort of organization . . . upon a previous incoherent state, but literally the coming-into-being of all physical things from nothing.[5]
Of course, alternative theories have been crafted over the years to try to avoid this absolute beginning, but none of these theories has commended itself to the scientific community as more plausible than the big bang theory. In fact, in 2003 Arvind Borde, Alan Guth and Alexander Vilenkin were able to prove that any universe which is, on average, in a state of cosmic expansion cannot be eternal in the past but must have an absolute beginning. Vilenkin pulls no punches:
It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.[6]
It follows from the two premises that the universe has a cause.
What properties must such a cause of the universe possess? By the very nature of the case, the cause of space and time must transcend space and time and therefore exist timelessly and nonspatially (at least without the universe). This transcendent cause must therefore be changeless and immaterial, since anything that is timeless must also be unchanging, and anything that is changeless must be nonphysical and immaterial (since material things are constantly changing at the molecular and atomic levels). Such an entity must be beginningless and uncaused, at least in the sense of lacking any prior causal conditions, since there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. Ockham’s razor—the principle which states that we should not multiply causes beyond necessity—will shave away any other causes, since only one cause is required to explain the effect. This entity must be unimaginably powerful, if not omnipotent, since it created the universe without any material cause.
Finally, and most remarkably, such a transcendent first cause is plausibly personal. Two reasons can be given for this conclusion. First, the personhood of the first cause of the universe is implied by its timelessness and immateriality. The only entities which can possess such properties are either minds or abstract objects, like numbers. But abstract objects don’t stand in causal relations. The number 7, for example, can’t cause anything. Therefore, the transcendent cause of the origin of the universe must be an unembodied mind.
Second, this same conclusion is implied by the origin of an effect with a beginning from a beginningless cause. We’ve concluded that the beginning of the universe was the effect of a first cause. By the nature of the case, that cause cannot have either a beginning of its existence or any prior cause. It just exists changelessly without beginning, and a finite time ago it brought the universe into existence. Now this is exceedingly odd. The cause is in some sense eternal and yet the effect which it produced is not eternal but began to exist a finite time ago. How can this be? If the necessary and sufficient conditions for the effect are eternal, then why isn’t the effect also eternal? How can the cause exist without the effect?
There seems to be only one way out of this dilemma, and that is to say that the cause of the universe’s beginning is a personal agent who freely chooses to create a universe in time. Philosophers call this type of causation “agent causation,” and because the agent is free, he can initiate new effects by freely bringing about conditions which were not previously present. Thus, a finite time ago a Creator endowed with free will could have freely brought the world into being at that moment. In this way, the Creator could exist changelessly and eternally but freely create the world in time. By exercising his causal power, he brings it about that a world with a beginning comes to exist.[7] So the cause is eternal, but the effect is not. In this way, then, it is possible for the temporal universe to have come to exist from an eternal cause: through the free will of a personal Creator.
We may therefore conclude that a personal Creator of the universe exists, who is uncaused, beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and unimaginably powerful.
Dawkins does, as I said, address this version of the cosmological argument. Remarkably, however, he doesn’t dispute either premise! Instead, he questions the theological significance of the argument’s conclusion:
Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts.[8]
Apart from the opening slur, this is an amazingly concessionary statement. Dawkins doesn’t dispute that the argument proves the existence of an uncaused, beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and unimaginably powerful personal Creator of the universe. He merely complains that this cause hasn’t been shown to be omnipotent, omniscient, good, creative of design, listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts. So what? The argument doesn’t aspire to prove such things. It would be a bizarre form of atheism—indeed, one not worth the name—which admitted that there exists an uncaused, beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and unimaginably powerful personal Creator of the universe who may, for all we know, also possess the further properties listed by Dawkins!
We needn’t call the personal Creator of the universe “God” if Dawkins finds this unhelpful or misleading; the point remains that a being such as described above must exist.
The Moral Argument
Here’s a simple moral argument for God’s existence:
(1) If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
(2) Objective moral values and duties do exist.
(3) Therefore, God exists.
What makes this little argument so powerful is not only that it is logically ironclad but also that people generally believe both premises. In fact, Dawkins himself seems to be committed to both premises.
With respect to premise (1) Dawkins informs us, “There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference. . . . We are machines for propagating DNA. . . . It is every living object’s sole reason for being.”[9] But although he says that there is no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference, the fact is that Dawkins is a stubborn moralist. He declares himself “mortified” that Enron executive Jeff Skilling regards Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene as his favorite book because of its perceived Social Darwinism.[10] He calls compassion and generosity “noble emotions.”[11] He denounces the doctrine of original sin as “morally obnoxious.”[12] He vigorously condemns such actions as the harassment and abuse of homosexuals, the religious indoctrination of children, the Incan practice of human sacrifice, and people’s prizing cultural diversity over the interests of Amish children. He even goes so far as to offer his own amended Ten Commandments for guiding moral behavior, all the while marvelously oblivious to the contradiction with his ethical subjectivism.[13]
In his survey of arguments for God’s existence, Dawkins touches on a sort of moral argument which he calls “the argument from degree,”[14] but it bears little resemblance to the argument presented above. We’re arguing not from degrees of goodness to a greatest good but from the objective reality of moral values and duties to their foundation in reality. It’s hard to believe that all of Dawkins’s heated moral denunciations and affirmations are really intended to be no more than his subjective opinion, as if to whisper an aside, “Of course, I don’t think that child abuse and homophobia and religious intolerance are really wrong! Do whatever you want—there’s no moral difference!” But the affirmation of objective values and duties is incompatible with his atheism, for under naturalism we are just animals, relatively advanced primates, and animals are not moral agents. Affirming both of the premises of the moral argument, Dawkins is thus, on pain of irrationality, committed to the argument’s conclusion, namely, that God exists.[15]
The Teleological Argument
Dawkins is 0 for 2 so far on the arguments for God’s existence. Surely he’ll not strike out on the teleological argument, or the argument for design. Sorry to disappoint, but Dawkins’s response to the most discussed form of the argument for design today—namely, the argument from the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life—turns out to be very weak. Although advocates of the so-called Intelligent Design movement have continued the tradition of focusing on examples of design in biological systems, the cutting edge of the contemporary discussion concerns the remarkable fine-tuning of the cosmos for life. Dawkins responds to this form of the argument in chapter four of The God Delusion under the heading “The Anthropic Principle: Cosmological Version.”
Here’s a simple formulation of a teleological argument based on fine-tuning:
(1) The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance or design.
(2) It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
(3) Therefore, it is due to design.
With respect to premise (1), it’s important to understand what is meant by “fine-tuning.” This expression does not mean “designed” (otherwise the argument would be obviously circular). Rather, during the last forty years or so, scientists have discovered that the existence of intelligent life depends on a complex and delicate balance of initial conditions given in the big bang itself. This is known as the fine-tuning of the universe.
This fine-tuning is of two sorts. First, when the laws of nature are expressed as mathematical equations, you find appearing in them certain constants, such as the constant representing the force of gravity. These constants are not determined by the laws of nature. The laws of nature are consistent with a wide range of values for these constants. For example, Newton’s law of gravity states F = Gm1m2/d2, where F is the force of gravity between two masses, m1 and m2, separated by a distance d, and G is the gravitational constant. This equation for calculating F would hold even if G had a different value than it does. The world would look very different if G had a different value—if it were much stronger everything would collapse, and if it were much weaker everything would drift apart—but the law for how you calculate F would still be the same in such worlds. The value of G is independent of the law itself.
Second, in addition to these constants there are certain arbitrary quantities which are just put in as initial conditions on which the laws of nature operate—for example, the amount of entropy or the balance between matter and antimatter in the universe. These constants and quantities fall into an incomprehensibly narrow range of life-permitting values. Were these constants or quantities to be altered by less than a hair’s breadth, the life-permitting balance would be destroyed and no living organisms of any kind could exist. Dawkins himself, citing the work of the Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees, acknowledges that the universe does exhibit this remarkable fine-tuning.
So how do you explain this fine-tuning of the universe? Premise (1) of our argument simply lists the alternatives: physical necessity, chance or design. The question is which of these alternatives is the most plausible?
Premise (2) addresses that question. The first alternative for explaining the fine-tuning of the universe, physical necessity, is extraordinarily implausible because, as we’ve seen, the constants and quantities are independent of the laws of nature. So, for example, the most promising candidate for a “theory of everything” to date, super-string theory or M-Theory, allows a “cosmic landscape” of around 10500 different possible universes governed by the present laws of nature. Dawkins notes that Sir Martin Rees rejects this first alternative, and Dawkins adds, “I think I agree.”[16]
So what about the second alternative, that the fine-tuning of the universe is due to chance? The problem with this alternative is that the odds against the universe’s being life-permitting are so incomprehensibly great that they cannot be reasonably faced. In order to rescue the alternative of chance, its proponents have therefore been forced to adopt the hypothesis that there exists an infinite number of randomly ordered universes composing a sort of world ensemble or multiverse, of which our universe is but a part. Somewhere in this infinite world ensemble, finely tuned universes will appear by chance alone, and we happen to be one such world. This is the explanation that Dawkins finds most plausible.[17]
Dawkins is acutely sensitive to the charge that postulating a world ensemble of randomly ordered universes seems to be an unparsimonious extravagance. But he retorts, “The multiverse may seem extravagant in sheer number of universes. But if each one of those universes is simple in its fundamental laws, we are still not postulating anything highly improbable.”[18]
This response is just confused. First, each universe in the ensemble is not simple; it is characterized by a multiplicity of constants and quantities. If each universe were simple, then why did Dawkins feel the need to resort to the hypothesis of a world ensemble in the first place?
Second, Dawkins assumes that the simplicity of the whole is a function of the simplicity of the parts. This is an obvious mistake. A complex mosaic is made up of a great number of individually simple parts. In the same way, an ensemble of simple universes will still be complex if those universes are randomly ordered in the values of their fundamental constants and quantities, rather than all sharing the same values.
Third, Ockham’s razor tells us not to multiply entities beyond necessity, so that the number of universes being postulated simply to explain fine-tuning is at face value extravagant. Appealing to a world ensemble is like using a sledge hammer to crack a peanut.
Fourth, Dawkins tries to minimize the extravagance of the postulate of a world ensemble by claiming that despite its extravagant number of entities, nevertheless such a postulate is not highly improbable. It’s not clear why this is relevant or what this even means. The objection under consideration is not that the postulate of a world ensemble is improbable but that it is extravagant and unparsimonious. To say that the postulate isn’t also highly improbable is to fail to address the objection. Indeed, it’s hard to know what probability Dawkins is talking about here. He seems to mean the intrinsic probability of the postulate of a world ensemble, considered apart from the evidence of fine-tuning. But how is such a probability to be determined? By simplicity? But then Dawkins hasn’t shown the world-ensemble hypothesis to be simple.
What Dawkins needs to say, it seems to me, is that the postulate of an ensemble of universes may still be simple if there is a simple mechanism which, through a repetitive process, generates the many worlds. In that way the huge number of entities postulated is not a deficit of the theory; the entities all issue from a very simple fundamental mechanism. So what mechanisms does Dawkins suggest for generating such an infinite, randomly ordered world ensemble?
First, he suggests an oscillating model of the universe, according to which the universe has gone through an infinite series of expansions and contractions. Dawkins is apparently unaware of the many difficulties of oscillatory models of the universe, which have made contemporary cosmologists skeptical of them. In the 1960s and 1970s some theorists proposed oscillating models of the universe in an attempt to avert the initial singularity predicted by the standard model. The prospects of such models were severely dimmed in 1970, however, by Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking’s formulation of the singularity theorems which bear their names. The theorems disclosed that under very generalized conditions an initial cosmological singularity is inevitable. Since it’s impossible to extend space-time through a singularity to a prior state, the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems implied the absolute beginning of the universe. Reflecting on the impact of this discovery, Hawking notes that the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems “led to the abandonment of attempts (mainly by the Russians) to argue that there was a previous contracting phase and a non-singular bounce into expansion. Instead almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the big bang.”[19] Dawkins apparently labors under the delusion that a singularity does not form a boundary to space and time.
Moreover, the evidence of observational astronomy has been consistently against the hypothesis that the universe will someday recontract into a big crunch. Attempts to discover the mass density sufficient to generate the gravitational attraction required to halt and reverse the expansion continually came up short. In fact, recent observations of distant supernovae indicate that, far from slowing down, the cosmic expansion is actually speeding up! There is some sort of mysterious “dark energy” in the form of either a variable energy field (called “quintessence”) or, more probably, a positive cosmological constant or vacuum energy causing the expansion to proceed more rapidly. If the dark energy does indicate the existence of a positive cosmological constant, as the evidence increasingly suggests, “the Universe will expand forever.”[20]
Furthermore, wholly apart from the physical and observational difficulties confronting oscillatory models, the thermodynamic properties of such models imply the very beginning of the universe that their proponents sought to avoid. For entropy is conserved from cycle to cycle in such models, which has the effect of generating larger and longer oscillations with each successive cycle. Thus, as one traces the oscillations back in time, they become progressively smaller until one reaches a first and smallest oscillation. Ya. B. Zeldovich and I. D. Novikov therefore conclude, “The multicycle model has an infinite future, but only a finite past.”[21] In fact, astronomer Joseph Silk estimates on the basis of current entropy levels that the universe cannot have gone through more than one hundred previous oscillations.[22] This is far from sufficient to generate the sort of serial world ensemble imagined by Dawkins.
Finally, even if the universe could oscillate from eternity past, such a universe would require an infinitely precise fine-tuning of initial conditions in order to persist through an infinite number of successive bounces, so that the mechanism Dawkins envisions for generating his many worlds is not simple—in fact, quite the opposite! Moreover, such a universe involves fine-tuning of a very bizarre sort, since the initial conditions have to be set at minus infinity in the past. But how could that be done if there was no beginning?
Dawkins’s second suggested mechanism for generating a world ensemble is Lee Smolin’s evolutionary cosmology, according to which black holes are portals to baby universes being birthed by ours. Universes which produce lots of black holes therefore have an evolutionary advantage in producing more offspring. Since black holes are the result of star formation, and stars promote planets where life can evolve, the unintended effect of evolutionary cosmology is to make life-permitting universes more probable.
Dawkins acknowledges that “not all physicists” are enthusiastic about Smolin’s scenario. Talk about an understatement! For Smolin’s scenario, wholly apart from its ad hoc and even disconfirmed conjectures, encountered insuperable difficulties.
First, a fatal flaw in Smolin’s scenario was his assumption that universes which produce lots of black holes would also produce lots of stable stars. In fact, the exact opposite is true: the most proficient producers of black holes would be universes which generate primordial black holes prior to star formation, so that life-permitting universes would actually be weeded out by Smolin’s cosmic evolutionary scenario. Thus, it turns out that Smolin’s scenario would actually make the existence of a life-permitting universe even more improbable.
Second, speculations about the universe’s begetting “baby universes” via black holes have been shown to contradict quantum physics. The conjecture that black holes may be portals of wormholes through which bubbles of false vacuum energy can tunnel to spawn new expanding baby universes was the subject of a bet between Stephen Hawking and James Preskill, which Hawking in 2004 finally admitted, in an event much publicized in the press, that he had lost. The conjecture would require that information locked up in a black hole could be utterly lost forever by escaping to another universe. One of the last holdouts, Hawking finally came to agree that quantum theory requires that information is preserved in black hole formation and evaporation. The implications? “There is no baby universe branching off, as I once thought. The information remains firmly in our universe. I’m sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes.”[23] That means that Smolin’s scenario is physically impossible.
Even if Hawking had won the bet, the question would remain whether such a scenario could be in any case successfully extrapolated into the past, such that our universe is one of the baby universes spawned by the mother universe or by an infinite series of ancestors. It seems not, for while such baby universes appear as black holes to observers in the mother universe, an observer in the baby universe itself will see the big bang as a white hole spewing out energy. But this is in sharp contrast to our observation of the big bang as a low-entropy event with a highly constrained geometrical structure. Thus, Smolin’s scenario is also invalidated by the data of observational astronomy.
These are the only mechanisms Dawkins suggests for generating an ensemble of randomly ordered universes. Neither of them is even tenable, much less simple. Dawkins has therefore failed to turn back the objection that his postulation of a randomly ordered world ensemble is an unparsimonious extravagance.
But there are even more formidable objections to the postulate of a world ensemble of which Dawkins is apparently unaware. First, there’s no independent evidence that such a world ensemble exists. Recall, moreover, Borde, Guth and Vilenkin proved that any universe in a state of overall cosmic expansion cannot be infinite in the past. Their theorem applies to the multiverse too. Since the multiverse’s past is finite, only a finite number of other worlds may have been generated by now, so that there’s no guarantee that a finely tuned world will have appeared in the ensemble.
Second, if our universe is just a random member of an infinite world ensemble, then it is overwhelmingly more probable that we should be observing a much different universe than what we in fact observe. Roger Penrose has calculated that it is inconceivably more probable that our solar system should suddenly form by the random collision of particles than that a finely tuned universe should exist. (Penrose calls it “utter chicken feed” by comparison.)[24] So if our universe were just a random member of a world ensemble, it is inconceivably more probable that we should be observing an orderly universe no larger than our solar system. Observable universes like that are simply much more plenteous in the world ensemble than worlds like ours and, therefore, ought to be observed by us. Since we do not have such observations, that fact strongly disconfirms the multiverse hypothesis. From a naturalistic point of view, according to which there is no designer, it is therefore highly probable that there is no world ensemble.
The fine-tuning of the universe is therefore plausibly due neither to physical necessity nor to chance. It follows that the fine-tuning is therefore due to design, unless the design hypothesis can be shown to be even more implausible than its competitors.
Dawkins contends that the alternative of design is, indeed, inferior to the many worlds hypothesis. Summarizing what he calls “the central argument of my book,” Dawkins insists that even in the admitted absence of a “strongly satisfying” explanation for the fine-tuning in physics, still the “relatively weak” explanations we have at present are “self-evidently better than the self-defeating . . . hypothesis of an intelligent designer.”[25] Really? What is this powerful objection to the design hypothesis?
Here it is: we’re not justified in inferring design as the best explanation of the complex order of the universe because doing so gives rise to a new problem: who designed the designer? This question is apparently supposed to be so crushing that it outweighs all the problems with the world ensemble hypothesis.[26]
Dawkins’s objection, however, has no weight for at least two reasons. First, in order to recognize an explanation as the best, you don’t need to have an explanation of the explanation. This is an elementary point in the philosophy of science. If archaeologists digging in the earth were to discover things looking like arrowheads and pottery shards, they would be justified in inferring that these artifacts are not the chance result of sedimentation and metamorphosis but products of some unknown group of people—even if they had no explanation of who these people were or where they came from. Similarly, if astronauts were to come upon a pile of machinery on the back side of the moon, they would be justified in inferring that it was the product of intelligent agents—even if they had no idea whatsoever who these agents were or how they got there. To repeat: in order to recognize an explanation as the best, you don’t need to be able to explain the explanation. In fact, such a requirement would lead to an infinite regress of explanations, so that nothing could ever be explained and science would be destroyed. For before any explanation could be acceptable, you’d need an explanation of it, and then an explanation of the explanation of the explanation, and then . . . Nothing could ever be explained!
So in order to recognize that intelligent design is the best explanation of the appearance of design in the universe, you don’t need to be able to explain the designer. Whether the designer has an explanation can simply be left an open question for future inquiry.
Second, Dawkins thinks that a divine designer of the universe would be just as complex as the thing to be explained, so that no explanatory advance is made. This objection raises all sorts of questions about the role played by simplicity in assessing competing explanations. There are many factors besides simplicity that scientists weigh in determining which explanation is the best: explanatory power, explanatory scope and so forth. An explanation which has broader explanatory scope may be less simple than a rival explanation but still preferred because it explains more things. Simplicity is not the only, or even most important, criterion for assessing theories.
But leave those questions aside. Dawkins’s fundamental mistake lies in his assumption that a divine designer is just as complex as the universe. That is plainly false. In contrast to the contingent and variegated universe with all its inexplicable constants and quantities, a divine mind, being an immaterial entity not composed of parts, is startlingly simple.
Dawkins protests, “A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple.”[27] Dawkins has evidently confused a mind’s ideas and effects, which may indeed be complex, with a mind itself, which—having no parts—is an incredibly simple entity. Certainly a mind may have complex ideas—it may be thinking, for example, of the infinitesimal calculus—and may be capable of doing complex tasks—such as controlling the trajectory of every particle in the universe—but the mind itself remains a remarkably simple, nonphysical entity. Therefore, postulating a divine mind behind the universe most definitely does represent an advance in simplicity, for whatever that’s worth.
Dawkins’s central argument thus fails to show that the alternative of design is in any way inferior to the many worlds hypothesis. Indeed, his smug and self-congratulatory attitude for this pitiful argument, sustained even in the face of repeated correction by prominent philosophers and theologians like Richard Swinburne and Keith Ward, is marvelous.
Therefore, of the three alternatives before us—physical necessity, chance or design—the most plausible explanation of cosmic fine-tuning is design.
Ontological Argument
The next argument to be discussed by Dawkins, and the last I have space to review, is the famous ontological argument. The version below comes from Alvin Plantinga and is formulated in terms of possible-worlds semantics. By “a possible world” I don’t mean a planet or even a universe, but rather a complete description of reality, or a way reality might be. To say that God exists in some possible world is just to say that there is a possible description of reality which includes the statement “God exists” as part of that description.
In his version of the argument, Plantinga conceives of God as a being which is “maximally excellent” in every possible world. Plantinga takes maximal excellence to include such properties as omniscience, omnipotence and moral perfection. A being which has maximal excellence in every possible world would have what Plantinga calls “maximal greatness.” Now Plantinga argues:
(1) It is possible that a maximally great being exists.
(2) If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.
(3) If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.
(4) If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.
(5) If a maximally great being exists in the actual world, then a maximally great being exists.
(6) Therefore, a maximally great being exists.
It might surprise you to learn that premises (2-5) of this argument are relatively uncontroversial. Most philosophers would agree that if God’s existence is even possible, then he must exist. The principal issue to be settled with respect to Plantinga’s ontological argument is what warrant exists for thinking the premise “It is possible that a maximally great being exists” is true.
In order for the ontological argument to fail, the concept of a maximally great being must be incoherent, like the concept of a married bachelor. But the concept of a maximally great being doesn’t seem even remotely incoherent. The idea of a maximally great being is intuitively a coherent idea, and so there is some prima facie warrant for thinking that it is possible that a maximally great being exists.
Dawkins devotes six full pages, brimming with ridicule and invective, to the ontological argument without raising any serious objection to Plantinga’s argument. He notes in passing Immanuel Kant’s objection that existence is not a perfection; but since Plantinga’s argument doesn’t presuppose that it is, we can leave that irrelevance aside. Dawkins also reiterates a parody of the argument designed to show that God does not exist: a God “who created everything while not existing” is greater than one who created everything and exists.[28] Ironically, however, far from undermining the ontological argument, this parody reinforces it. For a being who creates everything while not existing is a logical incoherence and is therefore impossible: there is no possible world which includes a nonexistent being which creates the world. If the atheist is to maintain—as he must—that God’s existence is impossible, the concept of God would have to be similarly incoherent. But it’s not. That supports the plausibility of premise (1).
Dawkins also chortles, “I’ve forgotten the details, but I once piqued a gathering of theologians and philosophers by adapting the ontological argument to prove that pigs can fly. They felt the need to resort to Modal Logic to prove that I was wrong.”[29] But this is just embarrassing. The ontological argument is an exercise in modal logic—the logic of the possible and the necessary. I can just imagine Dawkins making a silly ass of himself at this professional conference with his spurious parody, just as he similarly embarrassed himself at the Templeton Foundation conference in Cambridge with his flyweight objection to the teleological argument.
I’m out of space. There are other arguments to be discussed. Doubtless you can think of substantive objections to the arguments I have presented here. But at least I hope to have shown that the objections raised by Richard Dawkins to these arguments are not even injurious, much less deadly.
For Further Reading
Introductory Works
Craig, William Lane, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Strobel, Lee. The Case for a Creator. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004.
Advanced Works
Craig, William Lane, ed. Philosophy of Religion: A Reader and Guide. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002.
Craig, William Lane, and Antony Flew. Does God Exist? Edited by Stan Wallace. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2003.
Davis, Stephen T. God, Reason, and Theistic Proofs. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997.
King, Nathan, and Robert Garcia, eds. God and Ethics: A Contemporary Debate. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.
Leslie, John. Universes. London: Routledge, 1989.
O’Connor, Timothy. Theism and Ultimate Explanation: The Necessary Shape of Contingency. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.
Plantinga, Alvin. The Nature of Necessity. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974.
Pruss, Alexander. The Principle of Sufficient Reason: A Reassessment. Cambridge Studies in Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Stewart, Robert, ed. The Future of Atheism: Alister McGrath and Daniel Dennett in Dialogue. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008.