Why There Almost Certainly Is a God

Doubting Dawkins

Keith Ward

• Publisher: Lion Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780745959214
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théologie chrétienne

Richard Dawkins recently claimed that 'no theologian has ever produced a satisfactory response to his arguments'. Well-known broadcaster and author Keith Ward is one of Britain's foremost philosopher-theologians. This is his response. Ward welcomes all comers into philosophy's world of clear definitions, sharp arguments, and diverse conclusions. But when Dawkins enters this world, his passion tends to get the better of him, and he descends into stereotyping, pastiche, and mockery. In this stimulating and thought-provoking philosophical challenge, Ward demonstrates not only how Dawkins' arguments are flawed, but that a perfectly rational case can be made that there, almost certainly, is a God.

Part 1

On Chapter Two of The God Delusion

1

The God Hypothesis

A Philosophical Challenge Accepted

The title of this book is the title of Chapter 4 of Professor Richard Dawkins’ best-selling The God Delusion, with one little difference. I have changed the word ‘no’ to the word ‘a’, because I think that change reflects the situation more accurately.

So yes, this is yet another reply to Dawkins by one of those believers in a God whom Dawkins describes as ‘arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction’.¹ My reply will concentrate on Chapters 2 to 4 of Dawkins’ book, because those are the chapters in which he enters into the territory of philosophy, of arguments about God and the ultimate nature of reality.

That is my territory. I have taught philosophy in British universities all my working life, and I welcome all comers into that world of clear definitions, sharp arguments and diverse conclusions. Professor Dawkins (I will call him simply Dawkins, for short, and hope it will be taken as a mark of respect and of acknowledgment of his status as a household name) is one of the most exciting and informative writers on science, especially on evolutionary biology. I own all his books. I have learned much from them, and have always been greatly impressed by his capacity to convey the awesomeness of modern science and of the universe it explores.

But when he enters into the world of philosophy, his passion tends to get the better of him, and he sometimes descends into stereotyping, pastiche and mockery, no longer approaching the arguments with his usual seriousness and care. I suspect that he dislikes philosophers, and thinks they are wasting their time sitting around in armchairs instead of carrying out some worthwhile experiments. I often sympathize with him, and regret the fact that I will never make even a half-way decent scientific discovery.

Every now and then, however, I recover my self-respect, and remember that it is important to be critical of all our beliefs – to ask what we mean by them and what reasons there are for accepting them. Philosophy is a systematic attempt to carry out such a process of informed critical enquiry on all our beliefs. In our world, that will involve an enquiry into the nature of science and the nature of religious belief. Whether he likes philosophy or not, Dawkins is doing philosophy in Chapters 2 to 4 of The God Delusion. He has come into my world, a world in which I welcome a good argument. In this short book I want to challenge his arguments, to show that they are not at all strong, and to show that there are much stronger arguments in favour of believing in a God – in fact, that it is almost certain that there is a God.

The Spectrum of Philosophical Views of Reality

Dawkins begins by stating the God hypothesis: ‘there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us’.² This is one of the few statements he makes about God that I entirely agree with. The question for discussion, then, is whether the God hypothesis is reasonable and true.

Dawkins advocates an alternative: ‘any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution’.³ That is a nicely provocative argument that is well worth defending. Oxford is, after all, the home of lost causes, and it is nice to see a cause as lost as this defended.

He has put his finger at once on the central point at issue. Is intelligent mind an ultimate and irreducible feature of reality? Indeed, is it the ultimate nature of reality? Or is mind and consciousness an unforeseen and unintended product of basically material processes of evolution?

If you look at the history of philosophy, it soon becomes clear that almost all the great classical philosophers took the first of these views. Plato, Aristotle, Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel – they all argued that the ultimate reality, often hidden under the appearances of the material world of time and space, is mind or Spirit.

Even the great philosophical dissenters – most notably David Hume, whose arguments Dawkins often uses, and A. J. Ayer, another great atheist from New College, Oxford – were not materialists. Hume and Ayer thought that the ultimate realities were what they called ‘impressions and ideas’ or ‘sense-data’, respectively. These included such things as patches of colour, sounds, touches, smells and tastes. These, they thought, were the primary data, and the world of physical objects and other minds were logical constructs out of them.

This is such a peculiar theory that they often did not believe it themselves, and instead fell back on ‘common sense’ about what is real. Of course there is a world of enduring physical objects, of course the future will be like the past, of course there are universal laws of nature, of course we are continuing selves who are aware of sense-data, and of course there are other sets of sense-data, in other minds. But none of these things can be proved by argument. They are just common sense beliefs, and we accept them largely because they enable us to navigate our way in a confusing world, because in some sense they ‘work’.

Most philosophers in the world have been in some sense idealists – that is, they have thought the ultimate reality is mind. Theists are philosophers who accept this, but add that the physical world does have its own proper reality, which originates from but is different from God, the ultimate mind. An important minority have been phenomenalists, who think that the ultimate reality is the flowing succession of perceptions, thoughts and feelings of which we are aware in immediate experience. From that succession we may construct a world of external physical objects or we may construct the idea of a continuing Self that observes the succession. But in fact there is ultimately only the succession itself. Some forms of Buddhist thought are outstanding examples of this view.

Then there have been common sense philosophers – like Thomas Reid, Hume’s contemporary, who was much better known than Hume in his day – who tend to think that human reason is not competent to tell us the truth about ultimate reality. So we must rely on common sense beliefs, a sort of consensus that we accept because it works, or is conducive to survival, health and happiness. Most common sense philosophers have assumed that belief in God is a common sense belief, as it happens.

There have also been scientific realists, like John Locke, who think that there are good arguments for the view that the world consists of colourless clouds of particles in mostly empty space, though we perceive it as a set of coloured solid objects. And there have been sceptics, who do not think that we know anything about the ultimate nature of reality at all, and that even common sense is suspect. But they rarely appear in public, since they are never sure there is any public to whom to appear.

The world of philosophy, of resolute thought about the ultimate nature of things, is a very varied one, and there is no one philosophical view that has the agreement of all competent philosophers. But in this world there are very few materialists, who think we can know that mind is reducible to electrochemical activity in the brain, or is a surprising and unexpected product of purely material processes.

In the world of modern philosophy, there are idealists, theists, phenomenalists, common sense pragmatists, scientific realists, sceptics and materialists. These are all going concerns, living philosophical theories of what is ultimately real. This observation does not settle any arguments. But it puts Dawkins’ ‘alternative hypothesis’ in perspective. He is setting out to defend a very recent, highly contentious, minority philosophical world-view. Good. That is the sort of thing we like to see in philosophy! But it will take a lot of sophisticated argument to make it convincing. It is not at all obvious.

Why Materialism Is Dubious

To most philosophers, materialism has looked like a non-starter. Most of us do not want to deny that material things exist. But we are no longer very sure of what ‘matter’ is. Is it quarks, or superstrings, or dark energy, or the result of quantum fluctuations in a vacuum? It is certainly not, as the ancient Greek materialist Democritus thought, lumps of hard solid stuff – indivisible atoms – bumping into one another and forming complicated conglomerations that we call people. Some physicists, such as John Gribbin and Paul Davies, in their book The Matter Myth,⁴ argue that matter is a sort of illusion or appearance produced by some mysterious and unknown substratum in interaction with the human mind.

Quantum physicists such as Bernard d’Espagnat talk about a ‘veiled reality’ that we can hardly even imagine, which appears as solid physical objects only when observed.⁵ And when quantum physicists talk about ‘imaginary time’ as being more real than ‘real time’, about the cosmos being a ten-or eleven-dimensional curved space-time, or collection of space-times, and about electrons being probability-waves in Hilbert space, we may well wonder whether matter is a solid foundation for reality after all, or whether we really know what it is.

There is something out there, and it appears to us as a world of fairly solid objects. But modern physics suggests that the nature of reality is very different from what we see, and that it is possibly unimaginable. Roger Penrose, the Oxford mathematician, even thinks that the laws of physics may need to be radically revised, so that they take account of the important role of consciousness in the nature of the world.⁶

What is the point of being a materialist when we are not sure exactly what matter is? It no longer seems to be a set of simple elementary particles. Instead, we have a ‘particle zoo’ of flickering, insubstantial, virtual wave-particles, most of which (like the elements of dark matter) are probably not detectable by us at all. And it no longer seems that just a few simple laws will account for their behaviour. Instead, we have a very complex mathematics of Hamiltonians, differential equations and Hilbert spaces, which may be elegant and beautiful, but is far from being simple (in the sense of being easy to state and reducible to just one or two basic rules).

What this means is that materialism no longer has the advantage of giving us a simple explanation of reality. Explanations in physics get more and more complicated and counter-intuitive every year. Any plausible form of materialism will be exceedingly complex and mysterious. It no longer has the alleged benefit of being the simplest explanation of the world.

The Problem of Consciousness

When we come to consciousness, things get much worse. The problem of consciousness is so difficult that no one has any idea of how to begin to tackle it, scientifically. What is that problem? It is basically the problem of how conscious states – thoughts, feelings, sensations and perceptions – can arise from complex physical brain-states. Even if we are sure that they do arise from brains, we do not know the sorts of connections that conscious states (such as ‘seeing a train’) have with brain-states (such as ‘there is electrical activity at point A in the brain’). We do not know if conscious states can have a causal effect on brain-states, or if they are somehow reducible to brain-states in some way we cannot yet explain.

If Dawkins was a radical materialist, he would state, like his philosophical friend and ally Daniel Dennett, that conscious states are ‘nothing more than’ brain-states and brain-behaviour. Dennett wrote a book called Consciousness Explained,⁷ in which he defended this radical theory. Most competent philosophers were unconvinced, and privately referred to his book as ‘Consciousness Explained Away’.

The main reason they were unconvinced is that you could very easily have brain-states and behaviour without any conscious states at all. Nobody can observe anyone else’s conscious states, and we cannot really be sure that anyone else has any conscious states at all.

The philosopher A. J. Ayer, who was one of the people who tried to teach me philosophy, used to say in seminars that he could not be sure that other people around him had any minds with thoughts in them at all. We did our best to confirm his suspicions. Most of us, however, accept that other people are often thinking, even though we can have no idea of what is going through their minds.

We could attach them to a brain-scanner or put electrodes in their skulls, and record electrical activity and chemical interactions in the brain. But to find out what they are thinking when we do this, we have to ask them. We have not yet got to the stage where we can just attach someone’s brain to a recording device and examine their thoughts without asking them to write examination papers, just by measuring electrical activity in their brains.

For many reasons like this, consciousness remains a problem. Few scientifically literate people doubt that human consciousness somehow emerges (we do not know how) from a long, complex evolutionary process. But do we know that no consciousness could exist without being tied to such a physical process? Dawkins’ hypothesis says that consciousness ‘comes into existence ONLY as the end product’ of a long physical process. Further, ‘creative intelligences… NECESSARILY arrive late in the universe’.⁸ How does he know that? What sort of evidence could there be for thinking that it is absolutely impossible for any form of consciousness to exist except the sort of consciousness that humans have? The most we could say is that we have not come across such a consciousness. All the same, we cannot deny that there might be one. There might be a consciousness that came into existence in some other way. Since we have very little understanding of the ultimate causes of things, it would be hard to rule that possibility out.

The God Hypothesis

The God hypothesis says that there is a consciousness that does not come into being at the end of a long physical process. In fact it does not come into being at all. It did not just spontaneously appear out of nothing. It has always existed, and it always will. There is something that has thoughts, feelings and perceptions, but no physical body or brain. Such thoughts and perceptions will be very different from human thoughts.

To be fair to the God hypothesis, the reality of God is usually said to be infinitely greater than that of any human-like mind that we can imagine. God is not just a projection of a human mind onto the sky. What theistic philosophers usually say is that God is not less than a mind, with consciousness, knowledge and will. The divine reality may be infinitely greater than that, but if we are going to think of it at all, we will not be seriously misled if we think of it as a mind – recognizing that we are using a model suitable for us, but one that does not literally apply to God.

Could there be an unembodied mind, a pure Spirit, that has knowledge and awareness? I can see no reason why not. The God hypothesis has at least as much plausibility as the materialist hypothesis. Both are hard to imagine, but neither seems to be incoherent or self-contradictory. Either might be true.

The existence of consciousness refutes radical materialism, the theory that nothing exists except physical things in space and time. But emergent materialism, the theory that minds arise from matter, even though they are not just material, is more plausible. However, if you are an emergent materialist, you have already taken the first step towards forming some idea of God. You have said that not everything is a physical object in space. There are non-physical, non-spatial entities – minds, perceptions, thoughts and feelings – that really exist, even if they are, as Dawkins claims, causally dependent on physical brains.

Causal dependence is, after all, a contingent matter. It could have been otherwise. Causes could have had quite different effects (the causal laws could have been different), and events could have had quite different causes. Events that are in fact caused might have existed without those causes. So even if minds are in fact caused by a long process of physical development, minds could have existed with a different process of development, or perhaps they could exist without any process of development at all.

This may seem rather odd, but it seems to be a possibility. There could be minds without matter, even if in our actual world finite minds are all causally dependent on specific material causes in our brains. If it is possible for minds to exist without matter, and if God is no less than such an immaterial m...