The Silly Science of Richard Dawkins

Does Richard Dawkins, professor of evolutionary biology at Oxford University, know what a hypothesis is?

Apparently not.

Dawkins, author of the new book The God Delusion, is featured in last week’s Time Magazine cover story, “God vs. Science.” It’s great that Time has been taking on important religious issues, and even better that for this particular article, they avoided the temptation of finding Dawkins’ ideological opposite for a debate, but instead paired him up with Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute. Still, like Time’s previous exploration of the “Prosperity Gospel” phenomenon of American Evangelicalism, the article fails to be fully illuminating because the author appears not to understand Christian theology well enough to ask the right questions.

There is a difference between faith and science, and here Dr. Collins’ expertise could have been very useful; instead, he is left to repeat variations on a theme of, “Evolution doesn’t disprove the existence of God.”

He does, however, get a chance to cut right to the heart of Dawkins’ misunderstanding of faith – and science.

“The question of whether there exists a supernatural creator, a God, is one of the most important questions we have to answer,” says Dawkins. “I think that it is a scientific question. My answer is no.”

I guess Dawkins wasn’t paying attention to last year’s national debate over “intelligent design.” If the existence of God were, in fact, a scientific question, then it should be part of the science curriculum, no? Especially if, as Dawkins argues, it is “one of the most important questions.” But it’s not, because the existence of God cannot be proved or disproved through scientific methods.

Furthermore, as many Christians will tell you, there is no “proof” of God, nor will there ever be, because the freedom to choose belief is the essential component of salvation. We are asked to believe in spite of an absence of hard evidence; that is the core proposition. If we could find God in a laboratory, that would be a fundamental challenge to Christian thinking that would dwarf evolution. What would happen to ideas about free will? Who would willfully choose not to worship a God who’d been scientifically proven to exist?

Dawkins’ hypothesis is that God does not exist. But how is this a scientifically testable assertion? As a tool for evaluating the merits of faith, it’s irrelevant, because faith specifically means belief in the unprovable.

Dawkins would call this response a “cop-out,” as he frequently describes Collins’ answers (one reply is even labeled “the mother and father of all cop-outs”). But the cop-out is Dawkins’ own attempt to define God using methods that simply don’t apply. He has reached a predetermined conclusion, and then selected methods which are guaranteed to be non-responsive to his inquiry. The resulting lack of evidence Dawkins interprets as proof of his non-scientific assumption.

“The difference,” explains Collins, “is that my presumption of the possibility of God and therefore the supernatural is not zero, and yours is.”

The Rashomon Effect

In the debate over religion and its place in the modern world, a lot of fuss is made over the “evidence” for God. Skeptics argue there is nothing to prove God’s existence; some, using ideas like intelligent design, say there’s lots of evidence.

Of course, like a typical Episcopalian, I’m going to say both yes and no to this question. As I pointed out in the comments in a recent post, in a court room, for example, there’s evidence like “Exhibit A.” But there’s also testimony, and testimony is considered evidence even in the absence of tangible items. And so while we may not have an Exhibit A for God, we have the testimony of billions of humans across the eons of our existence.

One of the points that Richard Dawkins, high priest of religious skepticism, makes is that if there is a God, it is highly unlikely that it is the God of any of the literally countless religions and faith traditions; statistically speaking, the chance that “God” is the God of Jesus is no more likely, says Dawkins, than the God of the residents of Alpha Centauri.

But what if they’re really all the same God?

Let’s say there’s a two-car collision in the middle of a four-way intersection. There is one witness standing at each corner. (Already this is a bad metaphor, I know. Not only am I letting a car accident represent God (!!!), I have to ignore that in an actual accident, there would be lots of tangible evidence. But stick with me.)

The witnesses on the northwest and southeast corners both saw the entire incident; however, they had opposite perspectives. They might not agree on who is at fault. In important ways, their testimony might be contradictory. But both of them are still telling the truth.

The witness on the northeast corner is prejudiced about women drivers, and one of the drivers involved was a woman. Might such a prejudice affect what the witness thinks he saw? Would it tend to lead him to make certain assumptions? Might such a witness even be willing to deliberately color his testimony because of his personal views?

Still with me? Okay. Now, let’s say for the sake of argument that the witness on the southwest corner is a Hebrew from 1400 BC. What would his reaction to a car accident be? What language might he use to attempt to explain what he saw? His account is likely to be wildly different than any of the other three witnesses, and would perhaps strike us as fanciful or even crazy.

So here we have four people with a shared experience, but all of them describe it in significantly different ways. None of them are lying, but some of them might let bias color their recollections. One could not understand what he was witnessing. Maybe some made assumptions. Maybe not all of them have perfect memories.

Does this mean there wasn't a car accident?

Which Brings Us to Tonight's Word

Audience member.

As part of my "things I have to do before I leave New York" plan, I am going to be in The Colbert Report's studio audience tonight. (Yes, The Daily Show is on the list, too.)

I'm excited, but somewhat dismayed that we are advised to get in line by 4:30 before they "open the doors" at 6:00 for the 7:00 taping. (The show airs at 11:30 and again tomorrow at 8:30). Presently it's 13 degrees, and the forecast calls for snow with a high of 26. Actually, 26 might seem downright mild compared to the last three days. Still, it's not exactly ideal weather for standing around outside for 90 minutes.

According to the website, tonight's guest is Steven Pinker, author of The Humanities and Human Nature. No offense to Mr. Pinker, but I'm going to spend my 90 minutes in line hoping something comes up and he has to cancel and he is replaced at the last minute by Jake Gyllenhaal.

UPDATE: Oh dear. According to Wikipedia, Mr. Pinker is an atheist and an "ally" of Richard Dawkins. Now I'm really wishing it was Jake Gyllenhaal.

UPDATED UPDATE: It was fun! Details tomorrow. I thought the guest was interesting.

*****

I think it's beginning to sink in what "leaving New York" is going to mean. I wouldn't say I'm having second thoughts; I've been wanting this for a long time, and it's clear to me that appreciating all that is wonderful about New York is not the same thing as wanting to live here.

Still, I think that first morning in Portland is going to be something of a shock.

Book Review: The Case for Faith

While I was on vacation in Oregon and perusing my favorite store in the world, I came across a book, The Case For Faith, by Lee Strobel. I was intrigued by the cover: “A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity.”

I bought the book because each chapter dealt directly with objections that I hear on a nearly daily basis, either from the blogosphere or from my friends, or even from myself. I was curious to see if the book addressed these questions with intellectual rigor, and whether it might be useful for future debates.

Yes and no.

The questions Strobel asks are:

1. If God exists, why does he permit suffering in the world?
2. Are there such things as miracles?
3. Does evolution disprove God?
4. Why does God kill innocent children?
5. Is it offensive to say Christianity is the only true religion?
6. If he's truly a loving, forgiving God, how can there be a hell?
7. What does the oppressive and violent history of religion say about God?
8. Can you have faith if you still have doubts?

Admittedly, the book is a Christian apology, and the arguments skew in Christianity’s favor. That’s a perfectly legitimate rhetorical strategy, but it’s not really “journalism.” Pointedly, the experts Strobel interviews are exclusively male, and predominately from the evangelical tradition. A broader diversity of sources would have increased credibility, and, in my opinion, probably the sophistication of the arguments.

Strobel also feels a bizarre compulsion to tell us what each interview subject is wearing. Maybe we are meant to feel more at ease hearing theological arguments from a man “dressed casually in a short-sleeve shirt, shorts and deck shoes without socks” than, say, a man in Prada shoes and a pointy hat.

The strongest and most provocative chapters were on suffering, creation, and doubt.

In the first chapter, I found the following points significant: a) man has free will, therefore even if there is a God, most of the world’s suffering is man’s own fault; b) since we generally believe that adversity builds character, wouldn’t a life without suffering be dull and meaningless? c) God wants to ask how you can permit all the suffering and injustice in the world.

The chapters on creation, evolution and miracles expose the hypocrisy of the secular fundamentalists, as they, just like the proponents of intelligent design, draw non-scientific conclusions from scientific research and automatically discount the possibility of God even as they rely on theories of the origin of the universe that are equally statistically improbable. In a wonderful analogy, Walter Bradley suggests that if we were walking down the street and heard a loud explosion and you said, “Hey, what caused that big bang?” and I said, “Nothing, it just happened,” you would rightly assume I’m crazy. This is the proposition that evangelical atheists like Richard Dawkins ask us to accept.

Another example: “If you took all the carbon in the universe and put it on the face of the earth, allowed it to chemically react at the most rapid rate possible, and left it for a billion years, the odds of creating just one functional protein molecule would be one chance in a 10 with 60 zeroes after it.” Bill Craig cites Stephen Hawking: “If the universe’s expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have collapsed into a fireball.” Does this prove that there’s a God? Certainly not. But it reveals that atheists are clinging to a possibility (random chance) no less remote than the possibility of God.

Overall, it’s a thought-provoking read, if not wholly convincing. There was one chapter in particular, on the accuracy and reliability of the Bible, that was so weak and ludicrous it will receive its own subsequent post.

Book Review: The Case for Christ

A few weeks ago I picked up a copy of Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus. Though I found his other book, The Case for Faith, inconsistently persuasive (both because of the difficulty of making a rational case for super-rational beliefs and also because of the weakness of some of the arguments), I figured a study of the textual, historical and archaeological evidence from the time of Jesus was a worthier, more interesting goal.

Alas, Strobel’s “case” is porous and badly argued. He makes much of his decades-long career as a reporter for The Chicago Tribune, which lends a veneer of objectivity and academic rigor to transparently agenda-driven and poorly supported claims masquerading as “research.”

Much of the problem lies with the book’s format. As with Case for Faith, Strobel selects a series of questions or objections skeptics raise about Christianity, and then assigns an expert of his choosing (always male, always an Evangelical) to form an argument in rebuttal; one question, one expert. For example, he queries a coroner to determine if Jesus could possibly have survived the crucifixion. (The answer is, “No.”)

Strobel pretends doubters have only inane questions (“Could Jesus have faked his death?”), not well-formed arguments. He fails to note that they aren’t just ill-informed atheist strawmen, but intellectuals who have been alienated from faith by patronizing, simplistic “answers” such as these.

Chapter 1 is, “Can the Biographies of Jesus Be Trusted?” Whole books have been written on the chronological and geographical inconsistencies of the Gospels, as well as the inherent difficulties created by translation, concerns that are not easily dismissed by merely insisting on the their general agreement. His argument misrepresents the aims of the Gospel authors; these are not “biographies,” in the modern sense. The concept of writing down a purely fact-based, “this happened, then this happened” summary of a historical personage’s existence was unknown in the ancient world. Each individual Gospel is a portrait of Christ that grew out of the traditions of a specific community in a specific time and place in the first decades after the crucifixion, and it is those historical and literary variations that best account for what read like inconsistencies when you try to line each Gospel up side by side for comparison.

Strobel notes that there is no comparable literary work from the ancient world in which modern scholars have so much confidence in the accuracy of their translations. There is significant evidence (in the form of thousands of corroborating manuscripts from different parts of the Levant in different languages) that modern renderings are faithful to the lost originals. But this testifies only to textual, not historical, reliability.

He points out that much of what researchers have pieced together about ancient history comes from single, often fragmentary sources, whereas we have an enormous body of contemporary literature concerning the existence of Jesus; for example, much of what is known about Alexander the Great is single-sourced. What Strobel chooses to leave out, however, is that historians tend to discount the sources that are implausible or fantastical: notably, one of the pervasive, contemporary legends about Alexander was that his was a virgin birth. The ruins of Troy don’t point to the existence of Zeus.

Similarly, it does not seem particularly controversial among historians to assume that there really was a radical Jewish preacher in first-century Palestine who hailed from Nazareth and was crucified by the Romans, whose teachings inspired a cult that grew into the world’s largest religion. It’s not even controversial to attribute many of the sayings in the Gospels to this man. Making the leap, however, to saying that what seems unlikely or impossible (immaculate conception, miracles, resurrection) must be true because portions of the Gospels are plausible is specious. One could well argue that based on the astonishingly accurate depictions of real locations and the proven existence of antimatter technology and some guy called “the Pope” that Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons is a true story.

Strobel is preaching to the choir; there is nothing in this book to help a Christian seriously engaged with his doubts, let alone anything an atheist would find satisfactorily conclusive. The truth is, there is only a smattering of circumstantial evidence that Jesus actually lived, and it would take a genuine historian and researcher to even begin to make that case. Strobel is too easily won over by infuriatingly facile dismissals of difficult questions to take on that job.

*****

The promised new Richard Dawkins post is on hiatus for re-tooling. I think I want to take it in a different direction.