[Note: This is the second in a series of posts evaluating Alister McGrath's book The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine. The first part is available here.]
McGrath’s book has been sitting on my desk for a couple weeks, since the last time I wrote about it, waiting for me to find time to continue my review. The other day, when I happened to glance down at it while getting ready for work, the last five words in the subtitle suddenly struck me as a little odd: “the Denial of the Divine.” How do you deny something that has never been proved anyway? That’s like saying, “I deny that my mother doesn’t exist!” Nobody has ever seriously claimed that another person exists without the benefit of a mother who birthed him or her and I doubt anyone has bothered to “prove” that everyone has a mother. Not even the alleged virgin birth of Jesus could do without a mother (which perhaps indicates a failure of imagination on the part of the original myth-makers).
But I think McGrath wants “the denial of the divine” to mean something more like saying, “I deny that my mother exists!” Nobody seriously questions the existence of a mother for each and every individual who lives now or has ever lived. If you question that, you must be insane. McGrath, I think, is trying to gain the upper hand rhetorically, though perhaps unconsciously, by presenting belief in the divine as something like belief in mothers: it is obvious to everyone, so deniers are the odd ones.
As I have thought it through, that’s the only way I can imagine that “the denial of the divine”—or the denial of anything, really—could ever be scandalous. No one really minds if you deny that a particular political party has a viable agenda for improving the nation or the world, or that chocolate is the best flavor of ice cream, because those things are opinions. There is no objective fact to be observed that one political party is Truly Correct in its views, or that one flavor of ice cream is Truly Best, so denying assertions about those things is ordinary and not at all remarkable (unless you are appearing on a political talk show).
The way to make the denial of something scandalous is to first establish that there is an objective fact that makes deniers look like fools. But there are no objective facts that make the divine obvious to everyone, so it is difficult to say that deniers of the divine are fools. Rather, denial of the divine—or, more accurately, failure to recognize the divine—has traditionally been made scandalous by believers who, by force of collective will, are able to make disbelievers of the divine feel like they really are not seeing something that actually exists. It is not at all difficult to find groups of people who believe in the divine so strongly that they speak of it the same way they speak of physical objects with which they interact daily.
Just two nights ago, while sitting in Starbucks, I encountered a group of young men whose entire conversation was predicated on the assertion that “Jesus is right here with us.” It is difficult to face that sort of thing, where a group of people have declared their collective sense of reality, and not feel some pull toward their assertions. That pull has nothing to do with observable extrinsic facts relating to their assertions and likely has everything to do with the natural inclination of people to want acceptance. Those people could point to no evidence that Jesus was actually present in the Starbucks, but their group cohesion under the statement made it difficult to maintain a rational grip on the situation and remember that they could point to no evidence of Jesus’ actual presence.
Objective reality cannot be created by mental consensus manifested in verbal affirmations, so consensus via such affirmations cannot be evidence of the existence or nonexistence of some element of objective reality. One is tempted here to compare belief in the divine with the story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
At any rate, I find nothing particularly scandalous about “the denial of the divine,” so I am annoyed that the phrase is so prominent in the subtitle of the book. Maybe I will give him the benefit of a doubt and assume that the publisher, and not the author, made that decision. Regardless, the phrase is there and most readers will attribute it to McGrath, even if incorrectly, and most religious readers will probably agree with it without having thought about it in the way I have just described, so I think it was useful to address it.
At the beginning of chapter 2, McGrath writes: “Underlying the agenda of The God Delusion is a pervasive belief that science has disproved God.” (McGrath 33.)
First, that’s directly contradicted by Dawkins in the second chapter of his book, “The God Hypothesis.” First he writes:
I am not attacking the particular qualities of Yahweh, or Jesus, or Allah, or any other specific god such as Baal, Zeus or Wotan. Instead I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensibly: there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences, being evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. God, in the sense defined, is a delusion; and, as later chapters will show, a pernicious delusion. (Dawkins 31)
Dawkins does not claim “that science has disproved God.” Instead, he “advocate[s] an alternative view,” which is based not on the fundamentally irrational inquiry of a divine-believer perspective, but on the rational inquiry of a scientific method.
The divine-believer inquiry is irrational because does not stand or fall on an evaluation of evidence and one cannot exercise rational evaluation in the absence of something to evaluate. Despite what people like Lee Strobel and before him Josh McDowell have claimed, that examination of the “evidence” leads inexorably to the conclusion that their claims about the divine are true, people have found no phenomena that are not susceptible to non-divine hypotheses. In other words, there exists no real evidence anywhere that can only be explained in terms of the divine. So long as the evidence remains susceptible of non-divine methods, like the scientific one, there is no reason to adopt “divine” methods, such as contemplating things with one’s eyes closed, or while sitting at one’s desk, or hiding in a cave somewhere, or sitting by the fire, like Descartes.
Anybody can compile a data set, without checking the accuracy of each datum, and then process that set through some perfectly logical method. But so long as the accuracy of the data remains unexamined, there has hardly been a rational evaluation of evidence.
Thus, Dawkins adopts the non-divine method of science, which, despite the claims of some (who periodically haunt this blog) that the scientific method requires a religious belief in observability and causation, is as rigorously rational as anything humans have ever managed to do.
(Try suspending your “belief” in your ability to observe things and your “belief” that some things cause other things to happen. Really, try. Then try explaining all your actions. For instance, why do you eat? Good luck. Never mind, though, because, according to my specters of sophistry, that little experiment is hopelessly mired in religious discourse by the fact that you cannot derive any conclusions from it, as they would require your religious belief in your ability to observe results and derive explanations, which are inherently causal.)
Dawkins explains why he is merely advocating an alternative view. First, he distinguishes between two kinds of agnosticism: “Temporary Agnosticism in Practice,” or “TAP,” and “Permanent Agnosticism in Principle,” or “PAP”:
TAP, or Temporary Agnosticism in Practice, is the legitimate fence-sitting where there really is a definite answer, one way or the other, but we so far lack the evidence to reach it (or don’t understand the evidence, or haven’t had time to read the evidence, etc.). TAP would be a reasonable stance toward the Permian extinction. There is a truth out there and one day we hope to know it, though for the moment we don’t.
But there is also a deeply inescapable kind of fence-sitting, which I shall call PAP (Permanent Agnosticism in Principle). . . . The PAP style of agnosticism is appropriate for questions that can never be answered, no matter how much evidence we gather, because the very idea of evidence is not applicable. The question exists on a different plane, or in a different dimension, beyond the zones where evidence can reach. . . . And some scientists and other intellectuals are convinced—too eagerly in my view—that the question of God’s existence belongs in the forever inaccessible PAP category. . . . The view that I shall defend is very different: agnosticism about the existence of God belongs firmly in the temporary or TAP category. Either he exists or he doesn’t. It is a scientific question; one day we may know the answer, and meanwhile we can say something pretty strong about the probability. (Dawkins 47-48)
Dawkins then goes on to discuss the question of God’s existence in terms of probability, which I have a hard time finding as anything but imminently reasonable. As well, it is a far cry from McGrath’s claim that Dawkins entertains “a pervasive belief that science has disproved God.” Science has not disproved God; people have used the scientific method to evaluate claims of God’s existence and found them sufficient to raise only a small probability that God exists. (And I would guess that, like my recent experience in Starbucks, which I described above, the most persuasive evidence in favor of God’s existence is the fact that people keep claiming that God exists. Unfortunately, that evidence only demonstrates that people believe in God’s existence; direct evidence for God remains undiscovered. Thus, the evaluation of those who utilize the scientific method is that the probability for God’s existence is vanishingly small.)
That is probably why chapter 4 of Dawkins’ book is called “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God” instead of “Why There Is No God.” That McGrath fails to notice such obvious features of Dawkins’ book is puzzling. Did he simply not read it, or is he deliberately misrepresenting it with the hope that most of his readers will be believers who are not interested in reading The God Delusion?
However, pressing on, McGrath next claims that “there are limits to science” and “some ultimate questions lie beyond science.” (McGrath 34, internal quotation marks omitted.)
The fundamental issue confronting the sciences is how to make sense of a highly complex, multifaceted, multilayered reality. This fundamental question in human knowledge has been much discussed by philosophers of science, and often ignored by those who, for their own reasons, want to portray science as the only viable route to genuine knowledge. Above all, it pulls the rug out from under those who want to talk simplistically about scientific “proof” or “disproof” of such things as the meaning of life or the existence of God. The natural sciences depend on inductive inference, which is a matter of weighing evidence and judging probability, not of proof. (McGrath 34-35)
Hey! It sounds like he’s criticizing me (or people like me). Nifty. (Notice, as well, that he is still harping on probability versus proof, even though Dawkins specifically addressed that issue in favor of probability—in apparent agreement with McGrath. However, this fits with his misrepresentation of Dawkins at the beginning of the chapter as one who believes science is a matter of proof, rather than probability. If he had not presented Dawkins as someone enamored of a nonexistent proof, then he could not write this paragraph that purports to “pull the rug out” from under him, and he probably couldn’t call him an “atheist fundamentalist,” either.)
So how does McGrath demonstrate that there are other viable routes to genuine knowledge? First he claims that “[e]very intellectual tool that we possess needs to be calibrated—in other words, to be examined to identify the conditions under which it is reliable.” (McGrath 36) The first time I read that sentence, I honestly had no idea what McGrath was trying to say. I hoped that he would explain himself in the following pages. He did not.
The first thing McGrath did in the way of explanation was to present a passage from Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and then another version of the same passage as re-written by “the celebrated Oxford physiologist and systems biologist” Denis Noble. (I included McGrath’s introduction of Noble because I am not sure why he had to use the word “celebrated.” Does it matter?) Then McGrath claimed that, even though the two versions were “empirically equivalent,” each “hav[ing] equally good grounding in observation and experimental evidence,” they nevertheless demonstrate “quite different value judgments and metaphysical statements.” (McGrath 37)
Um, okay. So do “value judgments” and “metaphysical statements” amount to “genuine knowledge”? Maybe I should share the two versions of the paragraph. First, Dawkins’ version:
[Genes] swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence.
And Noble’s version:
[Genes] are trapped in huge colonies, locked inside highly intelligent beings, moulded by the outside world, communicating with it by complex processes, through which, blindly, as if by magic, function emerges. They are in you and me; we are the system that allows their code to be read; and their preservation is totally dependent on the joy that we experience in reproducing ourselves. We are the ultimate rationale for their existence.
So are genes trapped or do they swarm in huge colonies?
Are they safe inside or locked inside?
Are they in robots or highly intelligent beings?
Do they communicate with the outside world by tortuous indirect routes or by complex processes?
Do they manipulate by remote control or does function emerge blindly as if by magic?
Did they create us body and mind or are we the system that allows their code to be read?
Is their preservation merely the ultimate rationale for our existence, or does it matter that their preservation is also totally dependent on the joy that we experience in reproducing ourselves?
The real issue here is whether the answer to any of those questions results in “genuine knowledge.” If it does, then McGrath may have a point: two “empirically equivalent” statements with different rhetorical styles, which demonstrate different “value judgments” and “metaphysical statements,” might yield distinct “genuine knowledge.” But I don’t think there are any differences between those two paragraphs that would give us any “genuine knowledge” about anything other than the authors who wrote them. Is that what McGrath was talking about? I doubt it.
Furthermore, McGrath never bothers to explain how “value judgments” and “metaphysical statements” can ever be “genuine knowledge,” even though it is the assertion upon which his entire point rests. If Dawkins and Noble can say essentially the same thing, which McGrath admits, but their rhetorical decisions nevertheless reveal different “value judgments” and “metaphysical statements,” the only “genuine knowledge” that I see emerging from the difference is genuine knowledge about the writing styles of the two men, at least, and their personal values, at best.
Except maybe McGrath didn’t notice this, but his method of demonstrating that there are other routes to genuine knowledge besides science, “which is a matter of weighing evidence and judging probability, not of proof,” involved presenting evidence and inviting evaluation. He does not even make a statement of proof. Like I said, the two versions of the same paragraph allow a judgment of probability regarding, perhaps, the personal values of their authors—which we could test by gathering more data! Gosh, that sure sounds like scientific method to me.
And speaking of deriving the author’s personal values from his text, it seems that McGrath is saying nothing more than this: So long as there is enough linguistic variety that people can convey the same objective information in different ways, there will be viable routes to genuine knowledge other than science.
Or, to say it another way, linguistic variation provides knowledge that is inaccessible to science.
Which, I have to say, is just silly because, like I already pointed out, we can only note the linguistic variation by observing it and then we can test any hypotheses about what it might mean by collecting more data, which might include polling the authors themselves. In other words, linguistic variation provides knowledge only when examined according to the scientific method.
But McGrath seems to think that the two different versions of the paragraph are somehow providing knowledge about their subject—genes and their relation to animals—because the sentence that closes his brief and insubstantial discussion is: “As Noble observes—and Dawkins concurs—’no-one seems to be able to think of an experiment that would detect an empirical difference between them.’” (McGrath 37) Yes, no one can detect an empirical difference between them because they really are “empirically equivalent” and because any experiment that tests their differences would not go to knowledge about the content, but knowledge about the authors—Dawkins and Noble.
So McGrath has failed to explain his first statement about evaluating the reliability of intellectual tools, whatever that means, has failed to explain how value judgments and metaphysical statements are genuine knowledge, and has either failed to understand the scientific method or obstinately refused to use it correctly. Does this indicate that “the denial of the divine” is unwarranted? Or does it demonstrate what I pointed out at the beginning of this post, which is that the divine is not obvious enough to make its denial at all remarkable? In my opinion, the only thing that is obvious here is McGrath’s failure to show that there is any “genuine knowledge” that cannot be discovered by scientific method. He has not presented any evidence that can only be explained in terms of the divine.
I remain unimpressed and I hope that McGrath’s readers are either careful enough to discover these deficiencies on their own or curious enough to discover my blog.
Posted by Peter 
Posted by Peter 
Posted by Peter 
