C DeSalvo

"The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins gives two arguments against God's existence. They are paraphrased below:

1. There is no answer for the question: What caused or created God?

2. By definition, God is fantastically powerful and able to create extremely complex things like the universe and humans. This ability requires that God must be very, very complex. And very, very complex things are horrendously improbable to the point of being impossible. Therefore God does not exist.

[References to the pages in "The God Delusion" that use the above two arguments are given at the end of this note.]

Both of the above two arguments are wrong. Both require that time exist in the environment pertinent to the argument. Causes require that time exists. Complexity requires that time exists. But the environment where God exists is outside the universe, where there is no reason to believe that time exists. So where God exists there is no time, and therefore no causes and no complexity as we understand them. Consequently the inherent assumption (that time exists in the environment pertinent to the arguments) is false, and it follows that the two arguments are false. The book's mistake is to not realize that reasoning from human experience inside the universe is valid only inside the universe where time exists. But God exists outside the universe where there is no reason to believe time exists.

Human experience inside the universe suggests that a designer who creates things that are very, very complex must himself be so complex that the existence of such a designer is essentially impossible. That reasoning is not valid at any place where time does not exist. In a similar way, human experiences are not valid in the sub-microscopic enviroment where quantum mechanics applies, where tiny, fundamental particles behave in ways that are not sensible to human experience.

Dawkins understands that experiences in one environment are not necessarily valid in another environment that differs from the first. On page 130 of "The God Delusion," Dawkins writes:

"The flagellum is a thread-like propeller, with which the bacterium burrows its way through the water. I say 'burrows' rather than 'swims' because, on the bacterial scale of existence, a liquid such as water would not feel as a liquid feels to us. It would feel more like treacle, or jelly, or even sand, and the bacterium would seem to burrow or screw its way through the water rather than swim."

But Dawkins appears to forget that observation when he uses experience inside the universe concerning complexity and the improbability of existence, and then applies that experience to God, who is outside the universe, where we cannot assume time exists.

The God Delusion's major arguments against God are themselves delusions.

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References of "The God Delusion" that support arguments 1 and 2 at the beginning of this note are in pages, 113, 114, 120, 125, 149, 153-4, 157-8. The pertinent quotes from these pages are shown below. Bolding is added.

P 113 "The argument from improbability is the big one. In the traditional guise of the argument from design, it is easily today's most popular argument offered in favour of the existence of God and it is seen, by an amazingly large number of theists, as completely and utterly convincing. It is indeed a very strong and, I suspect, unanswerable argument -- but in precisely the opposite direction from the theist's intention. The argument from improbability, properly deployed, comes close to proving that God does not exist. My name for the statistical demonstration that God almost certainly does not exist is the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit."

[The first section of Chapter 4 of "The God Delusion" is titled: "The Ultimate Boeing 747." That title is derived (page 113) from Fred Hoyle's analogy where he compared the unlikelihood that natural means created the first cell of life with the unlikelihood that a tornado tearing through a junkyard would leave in its wake a functional Boeing 747 airplane.]

P 114 "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."

P 120 "Intelligent design suffers from exactly the same objection as chance. It is simply not a plausible solution to the riddle of statistical improbability. And the higher the improbability, the more implausible intelligent design becomes. Seen clearly, intelligent design will turn out to be a redoubling of the problem. Once again, this is because the designer himself (/herself/itself) immediately raises the bigger problem of his own origin. Any entity capable of intelligently designing something as improbable as a Dutchman's Pipe (or a universe) would have to be even more improbable than a Dutchman's Pipe [a complex plant]. Far from terminating the vicious regress, God aggravates it with a vengeance."

P 125 "In any case, even though genuinely irreducible complexity would wreck Darwin's theory if it were ever found, who is to say that it wouldn't wreck the intelligent design theory as well? Indeed, it already has wrecked the intelligent design theory, for, as I keep saying and will say again, however little we know about God, the one thing we can be sure of is that he would have to be very very complex and presumably irreducibly so!"

P 149 "A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple. His existence is going to need a mammoth explanation in its own right."

P 153-4 "I challenged the theologians to answer the point that a God capable of designing a universe, or anything else, would have to be complex and statistically improbable. The strongest response I heard was that I was brutally foisting a scientific epistemology upon an unwilling theology. Theologians had always defined God as simple. Who was I, a scientist, to dictate to theologians that their God had to be complex? Scientific arguments, such as those I was accustomed to deploying in my own field, were inappropriate since theologians had always maintained that God lay outside science.

P 157 "I left the conference stimulated and invigorated, and reinforced in my conviction that the argument from improbability -- the 'Ultimate 747' gambit -- is a very serious argument against the existence of God, and one to which I have yet to hear a theologian give a convincing answer despite numerous opportunities and invitations to do so. Dan Dennett rightly describes it as 'an un-rebuttable refutation, as devastating today as when Philo used it to trounce Cleanthes in Hume's Dialogues two centuries earlier.'"

P 157-8 "2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person."

"3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable."